When Ethel had read Matthew Thursby\'s letter to the last word she quietly refolded the paper and laid it on the table. The sisters were watching her every movement intently. She wished they would speak--that they would say something--anything. But it seemed as if they were waiting for her to break the silence. Her eyes turned from one to the other. In their faces she read nothing save love and compassion. Then, with a sob in her throat, she spoke.

"And I--the child of a stranger--a nobody\'s child, owe everything to you! But for you I might have starved, or found my only home in the workhouse! Oh! how can I ever love you half enough? But now I have learnt this, I feel that I have no longer a right to call this place my home. I must go out into the world and earn my living. I must strive to----"

"Ethel!" exclaimed an austere voice, that of Miss Matilda.

There was an inflection in it which the girl had not heard for years--not since some juvenile peccadillo had momentarily excited the spinster\'s ire. "Nothing which has occurred this morning justifies you in adopting such a tone towards my sister and myself. You seem to forget that what comes as news to you has been known to us from the first. Why, then, should you assume that the mere fact of your having learnt certain things to-day for the first time should have the effect of abrogating arrangements which have been in existence for a longer period than you can remember?" Miss Matilda\'s style in her more didactic moments was unconsciously modelled to some extent on that of her favourite authors, the English essayists of the eighteenth century.

"Forgive me for speaking as I did," pleaded Ethel, with eyes that were blinded with tears. "But, indeed, I am so overcome by what you have told me, and what I have just read, that I know not either what to say or what to do."

"There is nothing for you to do--nothing whatever," said Miss Matilda, still with a touch of peremptoriness.

"And perhaps, my dear, if you were to say as little as possible just now, it might be as well," interposed Miss Jane for the first time. Then turning to her sister, she added: "The poor child needs a little time to recover herself."

"There I agree with you, and I think the best thing she can do is to go and lie down for an hour." Then to Ethel, with a sudden softening of the voice, she said: "Child, child, cannot you understand that, despite all you have learnt to-day, nothing is to be changed--that you are still to be our niece, and we are still to be your aunts, and that everything is to go on precisely as before? Vale View will continue to be your home, as it has been for as long as you can remember, and you must never again hint at such a thing as going out into the world to earn your living, unless you wish your aunts to believe that you have ceased to care for them."

"And," added Miss Jane, with one of her sweetest smiles, "that you are tired of living under the same roof with two humdrum old women."

What reply Ethel would have made will never be known, because at this juncture there came a tap at the door, which was followed by the appearance of Charlotte, the parlourmaid, carrying a salver with a card on it. "If you please, ma\'am," said the girl, "I\'ve shown the lady into the morning-room."

"Tell Mrs. Lucas Dexter that I and my sister will be with her almost immediately," answered Miss Matilda, after a glance at the card.

As the girl left the room by one door, Ethel stole softly out by another.

The sisters looked at each other. It was a look which said, as plainly as words could have done, "How very fortunate that we happen to be wearing our puce lutestrings and our best caps this afternoon!"

The Hon. Mrs. Lucas Dexter was one of the great ladies of the neighbourhood, and had never condescended to call at Vale View but twice before, on both of which occasions she had contrived to extract a small cheque from the sisters. Indeed, it was a peculiarity of hers never to call upon anyone who was not quite in her own set, or whose position in the social scale, which in small provincial centres is marked by so many gradations, was admittedly below her own, without making them pay for the privilege in the shape of a subscription to one or other of the benevolent schemes in which she professed to be interested. Those among the small gentry of St. Oswyth\'s, and such of the professional people as were tolerably well-to-do, would have been pleased to have the Hon. Mrs. Lucas Dexter call upon them twice as often as she did, and would have looked upon the two or three guineas of which each of her visits depleted them as money well laid out, in so far as it had been the means of securing her presence for a quarter of an hour in their drawing-rooms. But there were others, to whom every guinea was an object, who would have been glad if she had passed them by altogether, and who groaned in spirit, while smiling a sickly smile, when the inevitable tablets and pencil were produced, and Mrs. Dexter, fixing her victim through her pince-nez, said, with that stand-and-deliver air which few people were found bold enough to resist: "And pray, what sum shall I have the pleasure of putting down opposite your name?"

Although Miss Matilda had advised Ethel to go and lie down awhile, the latter had no inclination for anything of the sort. Instead, she went in search of Tamsin, and found her in her own room, an apartment situated between the dressing-rooms of the sisters, and having a door which opened into each of them. Tamsin had been on board the Pandora, when Ethel\'s supposed mother had lost her life, and had a knowledge of all the events connected with that far-off time. Ethel could talk to her and question her, as she could not talk to or question her "aunts," and there were half-a-score things she was burning to hear about.

Tamsin was sitting in her favourite spot, on the broad, low, cushioned window-seat of her room. She was crooning to herself one of the quaint hymns she had learnt at her mother\'s knee half a century before. She had a short, rather dumpy figure, and very homely features. Her eyes were at once shrewd and good-humoured, and she had a very pleasant smile. Her still plentiful grey hair was crowned by a plain net cap, with goffered frills, bound over the crown of the head with a broad black ribbon. In age she was some three or four years older than her mistresses, whose service she had entered soon after they left school, and with whom she had remained ever since. Tamsin was famed for her skill as a needlewoman, and this afternoon she was engaged on some fine sewing, which it was her pride to be still able to see to do without the aid of spectacles.

Ethel burst into the room, and before Tamsin knew what had happened, she found herself being violently hugged.

"I know all!" exclaimed the girl. Next moment she corrected herself. "No, not quite all, but much--a great deal. I have just been reading Uncle Matthew\'s letter, written a little while before he died, with directions that it should be opened by me on my nineteenth birthday. And to think that you--you dear, but artful old thing--have known all these years everything there is in the letter, and yet have never breathed the least hint that I was somebody altogether different from the Ethel Thursby I have always believed myself to be!"

"The secret was not mine, dearie," replied Tamsin, as she pulled her cap into shape. "What would my mistresses have thought, if by as much as a single word, I had betrayed their trust in me? No, no, it was far better for you in every way, that you should be told nothing about these things till you were grown up. You would only have kept on bothering your child\'s brain to no good purpose."

"But, oh! Tamsin, to think that my aunts are not my aunts, and that I have no more right to bear their name than the veriest beggar that walks the streets!" There was that in her voice which told the elder woman that her tears were very close to the surface.

"Listen, honey," said Tamsin, as she stroked the girl\'s brown hair fondly. And thereupon, only in differen............