THE
           SECOND MRS. TILLOTSON.
BY THE AUTHOR OF "NEVER FORGOTTEN."

                            BOOK III.

CHAPTER II. SUDDEN LIGHT AND HAPPINESS.

THAT visit seemed to let in a thin ray of
sunlight into the bank. Tillotson was eager to have
done with his work, to get home and think.
Then came back on him a hundred questions
which he should have asked, and might have
learned. What was this illness?  Was it gone
altogether?  And what was this mysterious
relation to that half-frantic Ross?  things which Mr.
Tilney would have been glad to relate at length,
and which he bad been too stupid not to ask.

And yet some instinct—a reluctance to taking
up the old coil—kept him from going near the
place. Every day he had a fresh struggle, and
every day it seemed better to him not to thaw
the old insensibility to human interests, which
when dissolved seemed only destined to bring
misery on him. At last, one Sunday evening,
a day when he used to take long straggling
wanderings outside of town into lonely
fields where building had not yet begun, he
went towards the old-fashioned part of
Hampton, gradually advancing further and further
until he came to the old-fashioned lane in which
he knew Mr.Tilney's house was. Here were
the old dampish-looking villas, where the persons
of quality who wished to be near the court lived,
and the mothers of maids of honour, the right
honourables, who walked in the gardens, and
for whom the cheerful old red brick of Queen
Anne's day made a warm background. One of
these ancient tenements Mr.Tilney, prompted
by a natural sympathy, had chosen, having
gone back, as he himself said, " like the hare,
sir," to the old scenes. It was called " The
Recess," was very small and damp-looking, was
surrounded by a high wall, and had an old pale
green gate with green wooden rails, through
which " The Recess" could be seen. He got it
very cheap, and found great comfort in the old
associations it brought back, and in walking in
the palace gardens close by, and in also
repeating that he had come back there " like the hare,
sir." But it must be said that his family did
not at all share in this romantic view; and Mrs.
Tilney, when she heard the allusion, often
contemptuously coupled it with the bow of the
violin, making the strange combination of
"Hare fiddlestick! cocking us down here, in
this wretched, battered old place, that any
gentleman would be ashamed to be seen in. You
have destroyed your family, and given them no
advantages, sticking them for the best years of
their life in that miserable country town, where
there wasn't a gentleman known. As if a lot of
old singing parsons, indeed! And here, now, we
are fixed in this wretched hole, where the smells
really at times are enough to breed a fever."

Alas! a series of disappointments, that arose
out of successes that seemed assured, had
sharpened Mrs.Tilney's voice, and had latterly made
her speak, when she was at all excited, as if she
were calling to Mr.Tilney from the top of the
house. That poor gentleman—to say the truth,
in very poor health indeed, and, as his friends
said, often much " shaken" by that seizure—had
not the attention paid to him which his years
and almost infirmities seemed to require. His
family, eagerly pursuing their own schemes,
always much pressed for time, being engaged
with gentlemen who had come, or were to come,
and whose life thus became disorderly and
irregular, could not reasonably be expected to give
up much time to an old-fashioned man of the
world, who, as Mrs.Tilney had often instructed
her children, was " a positive disadvantage" to
them. "You might as well, now," she said,
"have that old walking-stick at the head of a
family, for all the good he is. He hasn't the
art of winning people or attracting them;
and no wonder. I am sure Mr. McKerchier
would fly a hundred miles from his
long stories. What made you stick that
cabbage in your hair, Augusta, and your face
just as if you had been scrubbing it with a
Turkish towel? I give it up. You'll never
learn to look decent. Where's that girl? Up
in her room wirh her megrims again. Then
she'll come down to Mr. McKerchier languishing
and sighing, and looking persecuted. I
tell you what, she must troop out of this: it is
getting past bearing."

The young ladies heartily concurred.

"She knows very well she will be missed,
mamma, and will have to come down. I
know I shan't appear if she does. I believe
her illness is all put on, every bit of it—I do,
indeed. Of course she'll want to be going to
evening service with us."