who haven’t a word to say for themselves, nor an accomplishment to their back—­why should they be the superlative concocters of custards, and menders of shirts and stockings?  Do you mean to tell me that a woman must be a fool to have a light hand at pastry?  I believe these libels on clever women have been propagated by designing mothers who had stupid daughters on their hands.  Whenever you see a heavy-eyed, lumpish girl, who hides herself in corners, and reddens to the very roots of the hair when you say a civil thing to her, you are sure to be told that she is the very best house-keeper in the world, and will make a better wife than her pretty sister.  In future I shall treat all such excuses for ugliness and dulness as they deserve.  For I say it boldly beforehand, ere Carrie has tried her first undercrust, she will be a pattern housewife—­although she reads John Stuart Mill.

“‘Tom, darling!’ sounds from the next room, and the music goes to my soul.  Good-bye.  The next from Aready Cottage.  Thine,

“TOM FLOWERDEW.

“P.S.—­We met yesterday a most charming travelling companion; and although, as I think I hinted in my last, I and Carrie intend to suffice for each other, he had so vast a fund of happy anecdote, we could not find it in our hearts to snub him.  Besides, he began by lending me the day’s Galignani.”

“That travelling companion,” remarked shrewd Mr. Mac, “marks the beginning of the end of the honeymoon.  I shall keep him dark when I dine with Papa Cockayne on Sunday.”

CHAPTER XVI.

GATHERING A FEW THREADS.

Is there a more melancholy place than the street in which you have lived; than the house, now curtainless and weather-stained, you knew prim, and full of happy human creatures; than the “banquet-hall deserted:”  than the empty chair; than the bed where Death found the friend you loved?

The Rue Millevoye is all this to me.  I avoid it.  If any cabman wants to make a short cut that way I stop him.  Mrs. Rowe rests at last, in the same churchyard with the Whytes of Battersea:  her faults forgiven; that dark story which troubled all her afterlife and made her son the terror of every hour, ended and forgotten.

If hers was a sad life, even cheered by the consolations of Mr. Mohun given over refreshing rounds of buttered toast; what was the gloom upon the head of Emily Sharp, whom the child of shame (was it in revenge) brought to shame?  I never tread the deck of a Boulogne steamer without thinking of her sweet, loving face; I never wait for my luggage in the chilly morning at the Chemin de Fer du Nord terminus, without seeing her agony as the deserted one.

The Cockayne girls are prospering in all the comfort of maternal dignity in the genteel suburbs; and yet were they a patch upon forlorn Emmy Sharp?  Miss Sophonisba, with her grand airs, in her critical letters from Paris—­what kind of a heart had she?  Miss Theodosia was a flirt of the vulgarest type who would have thrown up John Catt as she would throw away a two-button glove for a three-button pair, had not the Vicomte de Gars given her father to understand that he must have a very substantial dot with her.  Mademoiselle Cockayne without money was not a thing to be desired, according to “his lordship.”