"Your affectionate Niece, "DOLLABELLA MORTOMLEY."

Which signature was adding insult to injury. 'Dollabella' had always been an offence in the nostrils of Miss Gerace. 'Dolly' was absurd; still, between the name and the owner, there was a certain fitness and unity.

With 'Dollabella' there was none. The "Minerva Press" twang about it had ever seemed intolerable to the practical spinster, nor did the fact of Mrs. Mortomley having been left the best part of her Godmother's money, tend to reconcile Miss Gerace to the polysyllabic appellation, all of which Mrs. Mortomley knew, and for that very reason she signed it in full.

"There," she thought to herself as she directed, sealed, and stamped the letter. "I hope Miss Gerace will like that."

For after the manner of her sex, she was petulant and little in unimportant matters.

It is the most purely womanly women who are given to similar outbursts.

Mrs. Werner could never so far have forgotten her own dignity as to indite such an epistle; but then, on the other hand, neither could she have repented for having done so, as Dolly did.

Barely was the letter posted before that repentance began. First, Mrs.

Mortomley, her anger not yet assuaged, mentally pictured her aunt's horror and astonishment when she read. She saw the postman come up to the door. She saw the prim servant receive the letter. She saw her carry it into the breakfast-parlour. She saw Miss Gerace put on her spectacles. And at that point Dolly's anger began to ebb, and her regret to flow; after all, her aunt's innings out of life had been few and her own many; and she had her opinions just as Dolly had hers; and she had taken her nephew's child home when he died, and shared her small income with her, and done her duty faithfully, if not always pleasantly, and by way of return, Mrs. Mortomley had penned that letter, which by this time she herself styled nasty and detestable.

She could not send the antidote with the bane, for the early post had already gone out, taking her letter with it. But she could write by the night mail, and Miss Gerace would then receive her apology on the afternoon of the same day, which witnessed her offence.

One of the servants from the Court always went over for the letter bag twice a day, and it was understood Miss Gerace's correspondence went and came at the same time.

She need not therefore sleep upon the first letter; Dolly decided she would not sleep either till the second was written.

"DEAR AUNT,--(so began number two of the same date)--I am so sorry for the ill-tempered things I said this morning. I did not really mean one of them. Your letter made me angry for the minute, and I wrote without stopping to think, indeed I did.

"Dear auntie, forgive me. When I remember all the years during which you stinted yourself to provide for me, I feel a monster of ingratitude. I will go to you now if you will have me, and take Lenore; but _no servant_; and Archie shall fetch me back when I have made my peace, and you are quite tired of me. I love you better than a thousand Edward Geraces, and their wives into the bargain, and their is not a stone in your house, or a plant in your garden that is not dear to me.

"Your ever affectionate, "DOLLY."

After which came a postscript.

"A message from home has just arrived. My husband is ill, so I cannot go to Dassell. Direct to Homewood."

Which Miss Gerace did.

With a good grace she said she was sorry to hear of Mr. Mortomley's illness and trusted he would soon be restored to health. With a bad grace she sent Mrs. Mortomley her forgiveness, and regretted Dolly's tendency to ill-temper was the besetting sin even her course of education had been unable to rectify. The one thing--she added with her own peculiar grace--she lamented to find was so strong a taint of vulgarity in her brother's child. The letter for which she so properly apologized would not have disgraced a Billingsgate fishwife. For that trait in her character she must have gone back to some alien blood.

"Poor aunt!" remarked Dolly, putting the letter aside, "she will never be good friends with me again. If she knew how ill Archie is, I do not think she would be so hard upon me."

Certainly Mr. Mortomley was very ill. For no light cause would Antonia Halling have summoned Mrs. Mortomley back as she did, but when she sent her telegram she really was afraid of the owner of Homewood dying in her hands.

To Dolly sickness was nothing new. As a clergyman's daughter she had been with it more or less all her life; less certainly since her marriage than before that event.

But one strong experience is perhaps enough. She had helped nurse her father; nay, she had tended him more unweariedly than any one else, and by reason of those vigils knew how to watch by the sick.

Beside her husband she took her post, and through the valley of the shadow brought him back to health, or at least what the doctors were pleased to call health.

They did not understand, though perhaps Dolly might instinctively, that the man who has once sickened through mental distress will never really even begin to recover until the mental pressure be removed.

Hot and fast Richard Halling's bills were pouring in. Mr. Mortomley was beginning fully to understand what "lending a name" means. Unfortunately he believed he could, as he said to Dolly, "win through"; and in that belief he was encouraged by the holders of every bill which had his name on the back of it.

"We will renew, of course," they said, and Mortomley instead of facing the question put it off; just as you would do, reader, were you similarly situated and had a great deal to lose.

So Mr. Mortomley, according to the doctors, was once again strong and able to attend to business. Nevertheless, his wife noticed he stayed a good deal in his laboratory after his attack, whilst his nephew went to town to look after affairs there. Indeed, the man's nerves were so shaken, his organization being delicate, that Dolly felt very glad to see any one, even Rupert, take his place in the City.

The doctors had their own way at last, and Homewood was quiet. In the face of her husband's illness, Dolly could not prove a gadabout. With unusual embarrassments surrounding him, Mortomley could not entertain as his fathers had done before he was thought of.

Nevertheless, there were occasional dinner-parties, and at one of these Dolly first saw Mr. Forde.

In deference to a suggestion of Mr. Werner's, who now interested and busied himself not a little with the concerns of his old friend, he had been asked to the house.

When he came no one knew exactly what to do with him. A stranger amongst strange people is rarely to be envied his lot; but perhaps the position of strange people when a stranger ventures amongst them is more unenviable still.

Mrs. Mortomley felt their modest establishment must seem poor in the eyes of a man who talked so glibly of the fine seats possessed by this alderman and that retired tallow-chandler. Although affably anxious to descend to the position, Mr. Forde lost no opportunity of letting the Mortomleys know Homewood seemed a mere doll's-house in comparison with the mansions to which he was daily invited. He and Mr. Werner had the bulk of the talk to themselves, and it related principally to City incidents and City men, to the fortune left by this merchant and the _fiasco_ made by his neighbour, with other pleasing incidents of a like nature interspersed with political observations that made Dolly yawn frightfully behind her handkerchief.

Notwithstanding which pretences of under-rating Homewood and its occupiers, Mr. Forde was impressed by both. The unities of decent society always do impress men who have lived during the whole of their earlier years on the edge of society or below it.

After that first visit Mr. Forde came frequently to Homewood, but of this Mrs. Mortomley took little notice until one day when having, for reasons of her own, suggested putting off his proposed visit, Rupert remarked,

"I am afraid that would scarcely be a safe move. At any inconvenience to ourselves, we must be civil to him."

"Why?" asked Dolly.

"Well; for various reasons. If a man gets into Queer Street, he can scarcely afford to quarrel with the people who live there."

"Do you mean that Archie is in Queer Street?" Mrs. Mortomley inquired.

"In something very like it, at any rate," was the reply.

"How does it happen?"

"I cannot tell," he answered in all sincerity.

"When will he be out of it?"

"That is what puzzles me. We ought to have been out of it long ago."

Misfortune, like age, comes differently upon different people. There are those whose hair turns white in a single night, and those again to whom grey hairs come almost one by one, and in similar fashion ruin overwhelms some in an hour, whilst others are reduced to beggary by a slow and almost imperceptible process, the beginning and progress of which it seems impossible to trace.

The end every one understands, the commencement is usually unintelligible to those who ought to know most about it.

In the February of that year in which this story opens, came the first thunderclap heralding very bad weather to come.

For reasons best known to himself, Rupert had neglected to meet a somewhat important acceptance and had failed to take sufficient notice of a writ of which he, in Mr. Mortomley's absence, accepted service. The option had lain with the holder of proceeding against his debtor in Essex, or The City, and he selected the former as being likely to give the greatest annoyance.

To do him justice, Rupert was only vaguely acquainted with the nature of writs, and the spectacle of a sheriff's officer appearing at Homewood, proved as great a shock to him as it did to Miss Halling and Mortomley and Dolly and the servants.

They were all so perfectly new to business of the kind that they did not even try to keep the matter secret. From the cook to the page boy, from the lady's-maid to the groom, from the foreman manager in the works to the youngest lad employed about the place, every creature knew that a "man in possession" had taken up his residence in Homewood.

It was then the principal of Dolly's fortune proved of service. Within twenty-four hours the money was raised, the debt paid, and the man despatched to herald ruin to some other family, but the evil was wrought. Mortomley's credit had gone; and not all the sops thrown to fate out of Mrs. Mortomley's _dot_ could pacify the wolves which now came howling round that doomed estate.