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been too old at forty-five for the Ladies' College to which she had given her youth, and now she was quite willing to subordinate her learning to looking after Lady Anne in a general way, as much as the young lady would allow her. And having made the sacrifice of her learning, it was an amazing and unexpected delight to find that after all the refractory pupil was ready to meet her in the studies her soul loved. She almost wept as she told Mr. Osborne how she and Lady Anne were reading Euripides together. "She learns for love,"

she said; "and there is a world of difference between that and learning for any other reason."

In an unobtrusive way she did a good deal for Lady Anne, which might not have been done if the young lady were left to those who had not the sense of honor to stimulate them to a diligence, the absence of which would not have been discovered. For the rest she was certainly happy, except for the ever-present fear that Lady Anne, grown to womanhood, might find her too old as the College had found her.

"Miss Graham is all very well," said the Colonel disconsolately. "An excellent creature, although a trifle melancholy. But what is to be done, I ask you, Nell, when Anne is grown up? She can't live in that big house all alone. She will need a chaperon. There must be some relative of the family who would come and stay with her. There was Lady Fyfield's daughter—she seemed discreet enough-she might do."

He loooked at his wife with a hopeful air as he concluded the speech, and found his Nell laughing softly to herself.

"Lady Fyfield's daughter!" she said, "Miss Madge Winterton! I can't see Anne accepting Miss Winterton for a chaperon."

Indeed as soon as the matter was broached to Lady Anne she put her foot upon the proposal. She was at this time eighteen.

"Papa left me absolutely free and my own mistress at twenty-one?" she said.

"Quite so," assented the Colonel. "But even when you are twenty-one you will still require advice and assistance. It is not as if you were a boy."

"No; it is not as if I were a boy," she said enigmatically. "And I don't propose to have Cousin Madge here. Miss Graham will do very well. I shall not want to go out much

before I am twenty-one. Odd, isn't it, Uncle Hugh "-she always called Colonel Leonard, Uncle, although he was no kin of hers" that there is no medium in our family between extreme seriousness and extreme frivolity?"

She had just returned from a round of visiting among her English relatives, with a scornful and amused wonder over their indefatigable pursuit of amusement. She lived every

hour of her life, and she could not imagine any one having the necessity for killing time. For her the happy days were all too short.

The Colonel smiled.

"I don't ask you to have Lady Sylvia Hilton, Anne," he said; Lady Sylvia was a widowed sister of the late Lady Shandon. "Gad, how she would-wake us up!"

He had been going to say something stronger, but had made the harmless substitution just in time.

Lady Anne went her own way. By this time she knew the needs of the tenants as well as her father before her, and she was more modern than he in her ideas of what the needs demanded. She bided her time, saying nothing. It would be time enough when she was twenty-one to talk about the things she was powerless to do till then.

At last the fateful day arrived. There was to be a dinner to the tenants, a dance for the servants, and many other fine doings. The house was crammed with the English friends and connections, half of whom turned night into day with bridge, while the other half read The Christian and turned up their eyes at the wickedness of the world.

"My dear Anne," Colonel Leonard said, with an affectionate hand on his ward's shoulder. He had done what he called "giving an account of their stewardship" for himself and Mr.

borne, who was a tongue-tied person in matters of busiS. "My dear Anne, you are now free and your own misss by law. But I may say that you may count on Osborne d myself, in the future as in the past, to do all we can to help you in the difficult position in which you find yourself. You have succeeded to a big property and a big responsibility, too big I may say for a girl like yourself to support unaided. But your father's old friends will not fail you. My dear child, u must let us bear this burden for you till, in the most ural way, it devolves on your husband."

The Colonel paused for breath. Before he could go on again Lady Anne spoke quietly.

Hugh," she said. "Of

anything for me. But I years to do what I know

"Thank you very much, Uncle course I know that you would do have been preparing myself all these papa wished, that is to manage the estate myself. I shall not even have an agent. A steward, perhaps, but not an agent. I do not intend that any one shall come between the tenants and myself. To-morrow I will look into those leases-"

"Good Lord!" gasped the Colonel. "Good Lord! You'll come a cropper, young lady, I tell you; you'll come a cropper!"

"You dear!" she said, jumping up and kissing him on top of his bald head. "I can never thank you enough, you and Mr. Osborne, for having taken such care of things for me. If I ever needed advice of course I should come to you, but I warn you frankly that I do not anticipate that I shall need advice."

"Good Lord

"Good Lord!" said the Colonel to himself. If it had been a lad now! If it had been a lad!"

CHAPTER III.

MISS 'STASIA.

There is a certain Dublin street which lies on a hilltop, surrounded by other streets, into which the dry rot has been eating for many a year past. This has not yet suffered the degradation of many of the others, which have fallen into disrepute as streets of tenement houses, but it has a dreadful melancholy by the side of which their squalid over-crowding is cheerful. The houses The houses were houses of the nobility and gentry in the latter half of the eighteenth century. They were built over what once were cherry and apple orchards. The rooms are lofty and spacious, decorated with Italian stuccowork; they have doors of wine-red Spanish mahogany, and fine marble mantel- pieces, although where they have become tenement houses the enterprising builder has in most cases torn out the mantel-pieces, and replaced them by something com

moner.

Wharton Street is off the beaten track, runs away from the main thoroughfare, where the electric trams climb and descend

the hill. It connects two streets with an unnecessary connection, since you may take the high road a few steps further and make the connection more cheerfully. I doubt that anybody ever saves those few steps by turning up Wharton Street. There is something deadly to the spirits in its black housefronts. Its one solitary bit of renown is that a political murder took place some thirty years ago in a low archway in the middle of the street. For the rest the lower windows are screened from the public gaze by short wire blinds which go half-way up. The upper windows have curtains of red mo. reen, with the cheapest Nottingham white ones to indicate the drawing-room. One wonders how in this city of few manufactures, with the fields not half a mile away, the house-fronts could have become so black. The imaginative person passes Wharton Street with a shudder, thinking that a life within its precincts would be a living death.

Every house in the street lets lodgings, and the lodgers are all old ladies. They have seen better days. They hold aloof from each other as a rule in a proud isolation, wrapping themselves about in their memories of past glories. It is a sort of Béguinage for the widows and maiden sisters and maiden aunts of the Irish land-owners, whose provision for these helpless ones, which they thought as solid as the solid earth, went down in the wild storm of the early eighties.

At the very top of the dreariest, grimiest, blackest house of them all lived the Honorable Anastasia de Courcy L'Estrange Chevenix, Lord Shandon's cousin, seven times removed.

She was the greatest hermit of all the old ladies, never went out to tea with any of the others, not even to Mrs. Montmorenzy De Renzy on the drawing-room floor, nor to the Misses Burke Vandaleur on the third floor. For one thing, she could not have afforded to return the hospitality, and that was a thing she could not have borne. The old ladies expected a return of hospitality too. For another thing, she was desperately shy and sensitive. For yet another, she had a gnawing wolf at her vitals in her fear that as she grew older the tiny annuity she had saved out of the debacle would be insufficient to keep her. As it was she starved, inasmuch as she never had enough to eat. She would have literally starved if it had not been for the landlady, Mrs. Cronin, who had been kitchen-maid to Miss Chevenix's brother, Lord Money more, in

the great days, and now reared a large family, somewhere in the basement of the house, of discreet children, who from their earliest months learned to be quiet and demure so as not to disturb the old ladies.

Mrs. Cronin sent up many a little dainty to Miss Chevenix's table which the tiny sum the lady paid for board did not warrant. Sometimes Miss Chevenix had compunction over those

dainties.

"You are feeding me too well, Eliza," she would say. "I don't expect an egg with my tea when new-laid eggs are at famine prices. And that little sole yesterday. A Dublin Bay herring is a very dainty and sweet fish; I should have been. quite content with one."

"Is it Dublin Bays, Miss 'Stasia?" Mrs Cronin would answer. "Sure, they're great commonalty, and besides they're scarce. That little sole now, the fishwoman had her basket full o' them. Take them at your own price,' says she, 'for I'm heart-scalded wid them. There was a terrible take o' them last night,' she says. As for them eggs, my cousin Bridget brought me a present of a dozen. Sure it was a bit o' business dalin' I was doin' wid ye, sendin'

you wan up for your tay." After an interview like this, and there were many such, Mrs. Cronin would descend to her own premises, wiping her brow and hoping the Lord would forgive her.

"I'm after tellin' lies as fast as a dog 'ud trot," she would say to Mr. Cronin, who was a waiter by night, and in the daytime cleaned knives and chopped wood and polished boots and washed dishes. "Sure my tongue runs away wid me. She'd ha' been deceived wid the quarter o' the lies I told her. Indeed she's as aisy deceived as a child; aisier, for childher are sharp as needles-look at our own Mary Anne!"

Both John and Eliza Cronin-for, although John owed none of the special loyalty to the Chevenixes which his wife did as an old servant, he yet thought with Eliza in pretty nearly all matters-both John and Eliza would have been distressed if they could have known of that wolf of fear which was gnawing, gnawing at poor Miss Anastasia's heart.

It would never have occurred to Eliza that Miss 'Stasia could have cause for fear. She was quite content to shoulder the burden of Miss 'Stasia's advancing years. Not that they need be apprehended for a long time. Why, Miss 'Stasia's sixtieth birthday was yet some way off. But when the tim

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