"You have been busy, I suppose, all this
week past?" continued Mr. Carlay. "Your
time has been taken up, I presume?"

"I generally contrive that it shall be," said
Fermor, carelessly. "I have generally to
compress two days' work into one. I like to be
busy." This was the idea in his mind, but in
reality he never had any of that trouble of
compression. "Well," he continued, with a smile,
"assuming this as a basis—that I have sufficient
to keep me employed?"

The other looked at him steadfastly. "I
think," he said, "what has once been begun
should go on. There should be no interruption
without cause. If one man cares to see another,
and has been seeing another for a time, it seems
unmeaning that he should suddenly break off
without, reason. Life is not to be a series of
spasms."

Fermor followed him perfectly. "Of course
not," he said. "I hope Miss Carlay is better
to-day?"

Mr. Carlay rose less hastily. "I don't know,"
he said, with really something like agitation;
"she was better, and I thought she was mending.
Sometimes I think it her spirits. I am
too gloomy company. But what can I do? No
one naturally cares to come to our gloomy house,
and I have not the knack of giving a cheerful
welcome."

"You should cheer her up," said Fermor,
gaily.

"I!" said Mr. Carlay, grimly showing his
teeth; then, with an almost painful effort to
give flexibility to the iron about his face, "If
you would be kind enough to look in at some
spare time, and talk a little to her as people of
the world do. She likes it, I think, and I have
lost the trick."

Fermor smiled; first at the notion of his calling
genius a trick; secondly, at the notion of
his ever having had it. But the flavour of the
homage in the whole transaction was so
welcome, that the message from the throne came
couched in the most gracious terms.

"Would Miss Carlay be able to see people
to-morrow?" he said, as if a new idea had
occurred suddenly to him. "Any rate, I will
take my chance. I have just got some of
Hachette's new things I should like to show
her" (i.e. lecture on).

Then Mr. Carlay went his way grimly. And
Fermor, stretching himself like a minister who
had just given an audience, began to open his
mail of letters. There were the usual elements
—a circular, a bill, an application to be steward
at; the dinner for Charwomen's Orphans, and
the domestic letter. They all received speedy
and decent burial in a waste-paper basket under
the table, with the exception of Lady Laura's.
It was headed "London, Duke's Hotel, Dover-street,"
which startled him a little, and ran:

"My dear Charles,—We are all arrived here
safely, after a dreadful journey which has turned
Alicia and Blanche into perfect wrecks." (It
was a little unjust laying this to the door of the
journey.) "We shall rest here until to-morrow,
when we shall set off for Eastport.

"We are all in a fever of curiosity to see the
girl you have chosen. At least, the girls are;
for I, at this very moment, have a perfect idea
of her before me. I always agreed with you in
liking those high-bred tall classical creatures,
almost cold in their manner, and as well trained
in society as soldiers. You are a little cold
yourself, my dear Charles, and run a little into
the extreme. But it is de rigueur in a woman.

"Our relative, Pocock, is coming with us,
and in his way is, I suspect, as curious as the
girls. She must be careful before him, my dear
Charles, for, entre nous, he knows men and
women like his spelling-book.

"You will have apartments looked out for us
in a genteel situation; three bedrooms, a
sitting-room, and a parlour.

"Believe me, your affectionate mother,

"LAURA FERMOR."

He was chafed and "put out" by this letter.
"Why should she take that into her head?" he
said. "Does she suppose I am to marry a
stalactite? Not one of them ever understood
me. Women always take you literally in everything
you say. Now, we shall have a regular
exhibition, and I shall have them all staring
with eye-glasses at my show." He got up
disgusted and walked about. "I knew they would
be making a fuss. I had an instinct of it.
Coming this way in a mob! Really intolerable!"
And he walked round and round with disgusted
protest. "And she" he said, with a stamp, "to
be 'cold' forsooth, and exhibit training indeed!"
He was now at the very pinnacle of disgust,
but at the same time he felt a sudden
uncomfortable chill as he thought of how "the girl he
had chosen" would behave among these cold
inquirers.

WORKMEN'S DISEASES.

OUR recent account of the substance of the
health officer's report upon the lives and deaths
of the people, left a few points lightly touched
upon, which are worth fuller detail. Scurvy, for
example, a disease wholly preventable, on which
Dr. Robert Barnes, physician to the Dreadnought,
is reporter. The vegetarian, says Dr.
Barnes, is not so irrationally fed as the man
living upon salt meat and flour. Scurvy, a
partial death of the blood, is the inevitable
consequence of the privation of vegetable food. It is a
consequence equally sure by land or sea, and the
disease is known as sea-scurvy only, because landsmen
now seldom omit vegetables irom their diet.
Before there were long sea voyages, scurvy was
a land disease, and in the north of Europe it
used to be common, even in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, during winter and early
spring. It never was common in the south,
where winter is short and vegetable food abounds.
The Dutchmen, who in the last century lived
chiefly upon salt pork and beef, were much