This was a steady and, if you will, unmaidenly aversion, which Maggie conscientiously attempted to conceal.

Maggie was by turns quite silent and very talkative.

Maggie was there because she was a woman and made the necessary fourth.

Arrived at the little house in Upper Brook Street, Maggie and Etta went into the drawing-room, where biscuits and wine were set out.

Maggie was standing with her back to her, with her two hands on the mantel-piece.

"No!" answered Maggie slowly, tracing the veins of the marble across the mantel-piece.

It was rather singular that she did not ask what Maggie did think.

John Corbett came out into the kitchen to see what was burning, for Maggie had forgotten her biscuits.

" She asked the question so impersonally that John Corbett replied without hesitation: "It is never right, Maggie.

"Sure and it was; at a time like that it was right to do anythingbut what are you coming at, Maggie?"

But if he were to lose his money he couldn't travel dead broke, could he, Da?" "Not very far," agreed Da, "but what are you coming at, Maggie?

Oh, Maggie, would a duck swim?" he said, keeping his voice low to avoid being heard in the other room.

"Maggie, when a man learns by patient toil to tell the under side of an ace he does not often forget, but of course there is always the chance, that's the charm of itnobody can be quite sure.

"Maggie, I don't know about the prayin'I was always able to find the card I needed without bein' prayed for.

And now good-bye, Dago at him, and God bless youand play like the divil!" Mr. John Corbett slowly folded up the War Cry and placed it in his pocket, and when Maggie brought down the green box with their earnings in it he emptied its contents in his pocket, and then, softly humming to himself, he went into the other room.

When John Corbett and Rance Belmont went out into the kitchen, Maggie Corbett was chopping up potatoes in the frying-pan with a baking-powder can, looking as fresh and rested as if she had been asleep all night, instead of holding a lonely vigil beside a stovepipe-hole.

When all was complete, he nodded to Maggie to take charge of the proceedings.

Maggie hastily inspected the contents of the green box, and having satisfied herself that it was all there, she laid it up, high and dry, on the clock shelf.

"Rance," said Maggie, slowly, "we don't want a cent that don't belong to us.

Maggie Corbett could not keep a small note of triumph out of her voice.

John Corbett carried the green box upstairs and put it carefully back in its place of safety, while Maggie Corbett carefully peppered and salted the potatoes in the pan. *

"The Blue Alsatian Mountains" or "When You and I Were Young, Maggie" or "Darling Nellie Grey."

Perhaps in that enfranchised day there will be no Katies and Maggies' and the Norahs will know their place no more.

For the Toms and Maggies, the Franks and Rosamonds, of real life, such monitory anecdotes as these may be very good and useful; but it seems to us that they are out of place in a book intended for readers who have got beyond the early domestic schoolroom.

'I was gaun for to say that a Henrietta an' so forth wud be easier traced nor a Maggie, Maggies bein' as common as wulks at Dunoon, whereas' 'D'ye imagine Christinaoh, dinna be silly, man!' 'But, MaggieI mean Lizzie' 'Oh, for ony favour gang to sleep an' rest yer brains.