“This is the place; that is Stoneleigh Cottage,” Bessie said, pointing to the house where Grey was waiting for them, with the boy Neil at his side.

“And this is Neil, my eldest; we think he is like you,” Bessie continued, as she alighted from the carriage and presented the child to her cousin.

“Phoo!  I ain’t a bit like him,” was the boy’s mental comment, while Neil, the elder said, quickly: 

“Heaven forbid that he should be like me.”

They took him to his room at once—­the pleasant south room, whose windows overlooked the plateau, now all ablaze with flowers.

“You must lie down and rest till dinner.  I ordered it at seven to-night, I will send you up some tea at once.  I hope you will be comfortable and ask for what you want,” Bessie said, as she flitted about the room, anxious to make her guest feel at home.

He was very tired, and sank down upon the inviting looking lounge, saying as he did so: 

“Oh, Bessie, you do not know how glad I am to be here with you and Grey; nor yet how it affects me.  I am not always as bad as this.  I shall be better by and by.  God bless you.”

He drew her face down to his and kissed it fervently; then she went softly out and left him there alone.

Poor Neil! he was greatly to be pitied.  His life in India had been a failure from first to last.  He had no talent for business, and as he thoroughly disliked the business he was in, it was not strange that he was dismissed by his employers within six months after his arrival in Calcutta.  Then he tried something else, and still something else, and was just beginning to feel some interest in his work and to hope for success, when a malarial fever seized upon him and reduced him to a mere wreck of his former self.

Then it was that his father died suddenly at Stoneleigh, and as it seemed desirable that some one should attend to what little there was left to him, Neil returned to England, going first to Wales and then to London, where he took the very lodgings which Bessie had occupied years before, and at which he had rebelled as dingy and second-class.  How sorry he was now that he had wounded Bessie so unnecessarily, and how well he understood from actual experience the poverty which could only afford such apartments as Mrs. Buncher’s!  Except the little his father had left him he had scarcely a shilling in the world, and the future looked very dreary and desolate on that first evening in April, when the once fashionable and fastidious Neil McPherson took possession of his cheerless rooms on Abingdon Road, and threw himself down upon the hair-cloth sofa with an ache in his head and an ache in his heart as he thought of all the past, and remembered the sweet-faced girl who had once been there, and who had left there an atmosphere of peace and quiet, which reconciled him at last to his surroundings.