was well known. She followed the corpse as the only mourner, Clark having been without relations in this part of the country, and a communication with his regiment having brought none from a distance. She sat in a little shabby brown-black mourning carriage, squeezing herself up in a corner to be as much as possible out of sight during the slow and dramatic march through the town to the tune from Saul. When the interment had taken place, the volleys been fired, and the return journey begun, it was with something like a shock that she found the military escort to be moving at a quick march to the lively strains of "Off she goes," as if all care for the sergeant-major were expected to be ended with the late discharge of the carbines. It was, by chance, the very air to which they had been footing when he died, and unable to bear its notes, she hastily told her driver to drop behind. The band and military party diminished up the High Street, and Selina turned over the bridge and homeward to Mellstock.

Then recommenced for her a life whose incidents were precisely of a suit with those which had preceded the soldier's return; but how different in her appreciation of them! Her narrow miss of the recovered respectability they had hoped for from that tardy event worked upon her parents as an irritant, and after the first week or two of her mourning her life with them grew almost insupportable. She had impulsively taken to wear the weeds of a widow, for such she seemed to herself to be, and clothed little Johnny in sables likewise. This assumption of a moral relationship to the deceased, which she asserted to be only not a legal one through two most unexpected accidents, led the old people to indulge in sarcasm at her expense, whenever they beheld her attire, though all the while it cost them more pain to utter than it gave her to hear it. Having become accustomed by her residence at home to the business carried on by her father, she surprised them one day by going off with the child to Chalk-Newton, in the direction of the town of Ivell-and opening a miniature fruit and vegetable shop, attending Ivell market with her produce. Her business grew somewhat larger, and it was soon sufficient to enable her to VOL. CII.-No. 607.-4

support herself and the boy in comfort. She called herself "Mrs. John Clark " from the day of leaving home, and painted the same on her sign-board.

By degrees the pain of her state was forgotten in her new circumstances; and getting to be generally accepted as the widow of a sergeant-major of dragoons, an assumption which her modest and mournful demeanor seemed to substantiate, her life became a placid one, her mind being nourished by the melancholy luxury of dreaming what might have been her future in New Zealand with John, if he had only lived to take her there. Her only travels now were a journey to Ivell on market-days, and once a fortnight to the churchyard in which Clark lay, there to tend, with Johnny's assistance, as good widows are wont to do, the flowers she had planted upon his grave.

On a day about eighteen months after his unexpected decease Selina was surprised in her lodging over her little shop by a visit from Bartholomew Miller. He had called on her once or twice before, on which occasions he had used without a word of comment the name by which she was known.

"I've come this time," he said, "less because I was in this direction than to ask you, Mrs. Clark, what you mid well guess. I've come o' purpose, in short." She smiled. ""Tis to ask me again to marry you?"

"Yes; of course. You see, his coming back for 'ee proved what I always believed of 'ee, though others didn't. There's nobody but would be glad to welcome 'ee to our parish again, now you've showed your independence, and acted up to your trust in his promise. Well, my dear, will you come?"

"I'd rather bide as Mrs. Clark, I think," she answered. "I am not ashamed of my position at all; for I am John's widow in the eyes of Heaven."

"I quite agree that's why I've come. Still, you won't like to be always straining at this shopkeeping and marketstanding, and 'twould be better for Johnny if you had nothing to do but tend him."

He here touched the only weak spot in Selina's resistance to his proposalthe good of the boy. To promote that

there were other men she might have married off-hand without loving them, if they had asked her to; but though she had known the worthy speaker from her youth, she could not for the moment fancy herself happy as Mrs. Miller.

She said something about there being far better women than she, and other natural commonplaces, but assured him she was most grateful to him for feeling what he felt, as indeed she sincerely was. He went away after taking tea with her, without discerning much hope for him in her good-by.

VI.

"Men are as the time is."-KING LEAR. After that evening she saw and heard nothing of him for a great while. Her fortnightly journeys to the sergeant-major's grave were continued whenever weather did not hinder them; and Mr. Miller must have known, she thought, of this custom of hers. But though the church-yard was not nearly so far from his homestead as was her shop at Chalk-Newton, he never appeared in the accidental way that lovers use.

An explanation was forthcoming in the shape of a letter from her mother, who casually mentioned that Mr. Bartholomew Miller had gone away to the other side of Shottsford - Forum to be married to a thriving dairyman's daughter that he knew there, his chief motive, it was reported, being less one of love than a wish to provide a companion for his aged mother.

Selina was practical enough to know that she had lost a good, and possibly her only, opportunity of settling in life after what had happened, and for a moment she regretted her independence. But she became calm on reflection, and to fortify herself in her course of fidelity started that afternoon to tend the sergeant-major's grave, in which she took the same sober pleasure as at first.

On reaching the church-yard and turning the corner towards the spot as usual, she was surprised to perceive another woman, also apparently a respectable widow, and with a little boy by her side, bending over Clark's turf, and spudding up with the point of her umbrella some ivy roots that Selina had reverently planted there to form an evergreen mantle over the mound.

"Yes. The late Sergeant-major Clark. Anyhow, we were going to be married in a few days-twice over!"

"Indeed. But who may be my husband, if not he? I am the only Mrs. John Clark, widow of the late sergeant-major of dragoons, and this is his only son and heir."

"How can that be?" faltered Selina, her throat seeming to close up as she just began to perceive its possibility. "He had been-going to marry me twice-and we were going to New Zealand."

"Ah-I remember about you," returned the legitimate widow calmly and not unkindly. "You must be Selina; he spoke of you now and then, and said that his relations with you would always be a weight on his conscience. Well, the history of my life with him is soon told. When he came back from the Crimea he became acquainted with me at my home in the north, and we were marred within four weeks of first knowing each other. Unfortunately after living together a few months we could not agree; and after a particularly sharp quarrel, in which perhaps I was most in the wrong as I don't mind owning here by his grave-side, poor man!-he went away from me, declaring he would get his discharge and emigrate to New Zealand, and never come back any more. The next thing I heard was that he had died suddenly at Mellstock at some low carouse; and as he had left me in such anger, to live no more with me, I would not come down to his funeral, or do anything in relation to him. 'Twas temper, I know; but that was the fact.... Even if we had parted friends it would have been a serious expense to travel three hundred miles to get here, for one who wasn't left so very well off.... I am sorry I pulled out your ivy roots; but that common sort of ivy is considered a weed in my part of the country."