morning came a letter from Mr. Turner. Dear old chap, you won't bother about me any more, for I mean to stick to my work like a galley slave. Give my love to Susan, and kiss the little one-couldn't you have found a better name than that Puritan Priscilla, you foolish Tom?" and so on. Audrey once read that letter, and a dozen more of the same type; she thought them very affectionate and clever. Every now and then there were graphic descriptions of a day's amusement or sight-seeing. What was it they lacked? Audrey could never answer that question, but she laid them down with a dim feeling of dissatisfaction.

Mat used to run down for a day or two when business permitted, and take possession of his shabby little room under the roof. How happy honest Tom would be on these occasions! how he would chuckle to himself as he saw his customers-female customers especially-cast sidelong glances at the handsome dark-haired youth who lounged by the door!

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"Old Mr. Stephenson took him for a gentleman," Tom remarked to Susan once, rubbing his hands over the joke. Mat is so well set up, and wears such a good coat; just look at his boots!-and his shirts are ever so much finer than mine; he looks like a young lord in his Sunday best," went on Tom, who admired his young brother with every fiber of his heart.

Mat was quite aware of the sensation he made among his old friends and neighbors; he liked to feel his own importance. He came pretty frequently at first; he was tolerant of Susan's homeliness and sisterly advice, he took kindly to Prissy, and brought her a fine coral necklace to wear on her fat dimpled neck; but after a year or two he came less often.

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Leave him alone," Susan would say when Tom grumbled to her over his pipe of an evening; "Mat has grown too fine for the shop; nothing pleased him last time. He wanted napkins with his food because of his mustache, and he complained that his bed was so hard he could not sleep on it. It is easy, to see that our homely ways do not suit him. I wish your heart were not set on him so much, Tom; it is thankless work to cling to a person who wants to get rid of his belongings!" Nay, Susan, you are too hard on the lad," her husband remonstrated; Mat will never cut us- -he has an affectionate heart. He is only having his fling, as lads, even the best of them, will at times. By and by he will settle down, and then

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we shall see more of him."

But in spite of Tom's faith, that time never came. by Mat wrote with a greater flourish than ever.

By and

"Wish me joy, my dear Susan and Tom," he wrote, "for

เ

I am going to be married, and to the prettiest and the dearest girl in the world. Just fancy, Tom, her uncle is a dean! what do you think of your brother Mat now? Turn again, turn again, Mat O'Brien '-that is what the bells said to me, and by Jove! they were right. Haven't I had a rise this Christmas?-and now my dear little Olive has promised to take me for better or worse. Oh, Tom, you should just see her-she is such a darling! and I am the luckiest fellow in the world to get her! I can see Susan shaking her head and saying in her wise way that I am young to take the cares of life on my shoulders; but when a fellow is head over heels in love, he can not stop to balance arguments. And after all, we are not so imprudent, for when the dean dies, and he is an old man, Olive will have a pretty penny of her own. So wish me joy, dear Tom, and send me your blessing.

Tom fairly wept over this letter; he carried it about with him and read it in intervals during the day.

"If only she makes the lad happy!" he said to Susan. "To think of our Mat marrying a gentlewoman, for of course a dean's niece is that;" and Susan, whose knowledge of the world was small, supposed so too.

Tom was hoping that Mat would bring his young wife down to receive his brotherly congratulations in person; but there was always some excuse for the delay. Olive was delicate; she could not travel; Mat could not leave her to come himself, and so on. Tom never doubted these excuses; he even made his little joke about the lad becoming a family man; but Susan, who was sharper than her husband, read between the lines. Mat was ashamed of bringing the dean's niece down to see the shop, it was possible; but here Susan almost shuddered at the awfulness of the thought that he might not have told his wife that he had a brother.

"Mat is as weak as water, with all his cleverness,' she said to herself; "if he has not told her yet, he will put it off from day to day. There is nothing easier than procrastination if you once give in to it. Few people speak the truth like my Tom, bless him!"

Susan would not grieve her husband by hinting at these suspicions, though they grew stronger as time went on. Mat never brought his wife to see them; he seldom wrote, unless to tell them of the birth of a child, and then his letters were brief and unsatisfactory. Tom once wrote and asked him if he were happy, for somehow Susan and I have got it into our heads that things are not quite square," wrote the simple fellow. 'Do come and let us have a chat together over our pipes.

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Prissy is getting quite a big girl; you would hardly know her

now.

Perhaps Mat was touched by this persistent kindness on his brother's part, for he answered that letter by return of post.

"One must not expect too much happiness in this crooked old world," he wrote; "but you and Susan are such old-fashioned people. Olive and I have as much enjoyment of life as ordinary folk. We quarrel sometimes and make it up again. I was never a very patient mortal-eh, old chap?-and one's temper does not improve with age." And then after a little talk about the children who had been ill with scarlatina, the letter wound up by begging the loan of a five-pound note.

Tom did not show this letter to Susan. For the first time in his life he kept a secret from the wife of his bosom. He put two five-pound notes in an envelope, and sent them with his love to Olive and the children. A pang of remorse must have crossed Mat's heart at this fresh act of kindness; but though he acknowledged the gift with the utmost gratitude, he neither came nor wrote again for a long time.

Some time after that Tom took an odd notion in his head: he would go up to London and see Mat and his wife and children; he was just hankering for a sight of the lad, as he told Susan. To be sure, Mat had never invited him-never hinted at such a thing in his letters; he could not be sure of his welcome. Susan tried to dissuade him, but to no purpose; for once Tom was deaf to his little woman's advice. He left her in charge of the shop one fine spring morning and started for London and Bayswater, where Mat lived.

He came back earlier than Susan expected, and there was a sad look in his eyes as he sat down and filled his pipe. Susan forbore to question him at first; she got him some supper and a jug of the best ale, and presently he began to talk of his own accord:

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'There were other people living in No. 23 Mortimer Terrace. The O'Briens had left more than a year ago, and no one knew where they were. Fancy Mat leaving and never giving me his address!" finished Tom with an air of deep depression.

He was evidently much wounded at this want of brotherly confidence.

"But surely you know his business address, dear?" Susan asked, quietly.

No; Tom did not know even that. He reminded her that Mat had long ago left his old employers, and had set up for himself; but Tom did not know where his office was.

"I always wrote to his private address, you know, Susan, he went on. "Mat told me that no one ever opened his letters but himself; but how am I to find him out now if he chooses to hide himself from his only brother?"

And though Tom said no more, he moped for many a day after that fruitless expedition.

By and by the truth leaked out-Mat was in trouble, and in such trouble that no fraternal help could avail him. One awful day, a day that turned Tom's hair gray with horror and anguish, he heard that Mat-handsome, brilliant Mat—was in a felon's cell, condemned to penal servitude for a long term of years. In a moment of despair he had forged the name of one of his so-called friends, and by this terrible act was in possession of a large sum of money.

Tom's anguish at this news was not to be described; he cried like a child, and Susan vainly tried to comfort him.

"My father's name," he kept repeating-" he has disgraced our honest name! I will never forgive him; I will have nothing more to do with him-he has covered us all with shame!" And then the next moment he relented at the thought of Mat, beaten down and miserable, and perhaps repentant, in his wretched cell.

CHAPTER X.

PRISCILLA BAXTER.

How many people are busy in this world in gathering together a handful of thorns to sit upon!--JEREMY TAYLOR.

AUDREY never forgot the day when she first heard this sad story. It was on a winter's afternoon, and she had Mr. O'Brien were alone in the cottage. She remembered how the setting sun threw ruddy streaks across the snow, and how the light of the fire beside which they sat later on in the twilight illumined the low room and flashed out on the privet hedge, now a mass of sparkling icicles. She and Geraldine had driven into Brail, and by and by the carriage was coming back to fetch her.

They had been talking of Mat, and Mr. O'Brien had shown her some of his letters; and then, all at once, his face had grown very white and troubled, and in a few husky sentences he had told her the rest of the story; and as Audrey listened there was a gleam of a tear-drop on her long lashes.

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'But you went to see him surely you went to see him?" she asked, tremulously, as he came to a sudden pause; but he hook his gray head very sorrowfully.

"I would have gone, ay, willingly, when my anger had burned out a bit. I just hungered to see the poor lad-he was still a lad to me-and to shake him by the hand; for all he had done, he was still Mat, you see; but he would not let ́ he begged and prayed of me not to come. Ah, that was cruel!"

me;

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Nay, he meant no unkindness; but he was pretty nearly crazed, poor chap! I have the letter now that he wrote to me; the chaplain sent it, but no eye but mine must ever see it. I have written it down in my will that it is to be buried with me: Don't come unless you wish me to do something desperate, Tom; I think if I saw your honest face in my cell Ĭ should just make away with myself. No, no, dear old chap; let me dree my weird, as Susan used to say. I have shamed you all, and my heart is broken; try to forget that you ever had a brother Mat. Eh, they were desperate words for a man

to write, but I do not doubt that he meant them. 66 Did he mention his wife and children?"

"No, never a word of them. I wrote to him more than once, but he never answered me. He was such a long way off, you see; they send them to Dartmoor now. As far as I know, Mat may be dead and buried. Well, it is hard lines, and Í have known a peck of troubles in my time. There, you know it all, Miss Ross; it beats me why I've told you, for no one in the world knows it but Prissy--you have drawn it out of me somehow; you've got a hearty way with you that reminds me of my Susan, and I never had but that one secret from herwhen I sent Mat the two five-pound notes."

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I

Your story is safe with me, my dear old friend," returned Audrey, laying her hand on his arm; "you must never regret telling me. I have heard so many sad histories-people always tell me their troubles; they know they can trust me. am fond of talking," went on Audrey, in her earnest way, "but I have never betrayed a person's confidence; I have never once repeated anything that my friends have told metheir troubles are as sacred to me as my own would be."

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"I am bound to believe you," returned Mr. O'Brien, looking thoughtfully at the girlish face and steadfast eyes; Prissy says it always gives her a comfortable feeling to talk out her troubles to you. It is a gift, I am thinking; but you are young to have it. Did I ever tell you, Miss Ross, what Susan said to me when she was dying?"

"No, I am sure you never told me that.

"Well, Prissy had gone to lie down, and I was alone with Susan. It was the room above us where she died. I was sit