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herself to the lot—nay, had she not willfully chosen it—of a self-constituted grass widow for years unnumbered? Her child, however, she had kept by her side, and, as far as could be seen, he had satisfied all the needs of her heart, for Jacynth was of those who believed that the train-attendant of Fenella's adorers had had nothing to say to her heart, thought they might have amused her vanity. Could she belong, he asked himself, to the order of women of whom Dumas, fils, speaks, when he says that in certain natures the instinct of maternity overcomes the instinct of wifehood, and that the woman ceases to be wife and mother, and becomes mother and wife, or possibly mother only? In that case any man who should prove himself a true friend and protector of her little boy might be sure of having a warm second place in her heart. It was certainly to be deplored that Ronny's natural protector was not better fitted for his responsible office. Though Lord Onslow had shown spasmodic bursts of affection for the lad and had undergone in New York a useless martyrdom in his behalf, which a man who, to speak familiarly, had kept his head upon his shoulders, would have known how to avoid, he had not been a father to him in the true sense of the word. He had not once essayed to reach the mother's heart through the child's during all the years that he had been separated from her. How differently Jacynth would