could not account, Alicia advanced a step towards the table; her eye fell on the inscription plate.

"Papa is gone to Heaven! and my 'other papa' that's there, will go to him ;" said the little girl, as she looked timidly into the statue-like face of Alicia. "And that's his name," continued she, as she glanced on the coffin. "Oh! such a pretty name-Frederick Dudley--but he let me call him, 'Old Freddy.""

"Dudley! thou art avenged," murmured Alicia, as she sank senseless on the floor.

CHAPTER XXIV.

"Faults in the life breed errors in the brain,

And these reciprocally, those again ;

The mind and conduct mutually imprint,

And stamp their image in each other's mint."

Cowper.

THE youthful Kate had been kept at school until she was far advanced in her teens, and beyond the period at which her mother had been emancipated from stocks and backboards.

A fear of the awfully-sounding name of mother, and having her daughter for a rival-though almost unacknowledged to her own bosom-had acted on the mind of the widow, and induced

her to keep little Minetta (as she always called her daughter) thus long from home.

She could now no longer offer the excuse of her being spoiled by the indulgences of a child, or having her manners contaminated by associating with servants, before she was of an age to be the companion of her mother in the intercourse with society. Of course that mother never thought of remaining at home with the object of her solicitude, and thereby doing away with those objections; and so, from the Midsummer holidays, after she had passed her seventeenth birthday, "Little Minetta," alias Kate Chesster, returned to school no more.

She was a lovely, gentle girl-partaking more of her father's quiet and retiring disposition than her mother's dash and vivacity; yet Kate lacked not for spirit when occasion required it.

The widow had refused many offers, and yet the good-natured world said she was angling for a husband. Captain O'Grady, a handsome-looking Irish officer, with more assurance in his manners

than a modern fire-office company on their books, and about the same amount of capital as a selfconstituted joint-stock establishment at their bankers, was set down as the lucky man who was to share the smiles and assist in taking care of the fortune of the widow!

To be sure, some young ladies of their acquaintance did whisper that the captain would have preferred Kate junior to Kate senior; but this was all conjecture, as the son of Mars was both too wise and too gallant a man to have let such an idea, if he had even entertained it, pass beyond the entrenchments of his own bosom.

The mother of Kate Chesster was still what the world calls an extremely fine woman-that is, she dressed well, had fine eyes, good teeth, and "lighted up splendidly," as her maid expressed it, "with the leetelest dash of rouge in the world!" Such was the mother, and the home to which Katherine returned.

Among the numerous visitors that frequented the widow's parties, and was allowed to act with others

as her occasional escort to some place of public amusement, was Edward Robinson, a gentlemanly youth for a youth he was, having only just attained his twenty-first year. The widow treated him almost as a boy, and sometimes petted and sometimes chid him, as her humour served. If she went to church, he carried her prayer-book; if to the theatre, her opera-glass. Was any difficulty to be surmounted in the way of obtaining places for some favourite performance, or procuring tickets for any especial fête, the services of Edward were sure to be called into requisition. And, although Captain O'Grady looked upon him as a child, he had occasionally, though he disdained to acknowledge it, contemplated him as a rival.

Kate had been so little at home during her school days (for the widow generally found an excuse to send her to some quiet and hume friend's to pass the period of the holidays), that she was almost unknown to most of the frequenters of her mother's establishment. Consequently,