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I TWO WIDOWS.

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(Copyright.) I TWO WIDOWS. The two widows were Mrs. George Knowle: and Mrs. JReginald Loch. Death came to the home of each almoatsimultaneously. On the Monday night Mr. George Knowles died from pneumonia, after a fortnight's illness, and twenty-four hours later. Captain Loch slipped on the icy pathway, struck his head against the kerbstone, was carried insensible to his home in Cromwell-place, and died before the grey streaks of a December morning heralded the advent of another day. Mr. George Knowles was a solicitor in good practice, and sixty-five at the time of his death Captain Reginald Loch was but thirty- five, and had but a paltry sixty pounds a year to leave behind him, to add to his widow's pension. ^rS" "^now^es sat beside her dead in the large bedroom in their house in Blooinsbury-place. I It was solidly nnd comfortably furnished, but contained none of the dainty and rare knick- knacks which made Mrs. Reginald Loch's bed- room like a fairy boudoir. Mrs. Knowles was fifty-six, stout and florid, with a frank, kind face, that had never been considered beautiful by anyone but the man who loved her. There was little in her appearance or manner to indicate the horrible heart-anguish she was enduring and the ser- vants passing noiselessly to and fro remarked to each other that "missus was bearing up wonderful well." Mrs. Knowles's nature had never been an expansive one, and she had neither given nor cared to receive sympathy and confidence from outsiders. Her marriage had been an exception- ally happy one: Ilusband and wife were thoroughly congenial and sufficient the one to the other. Each was a tower of strength to the other, and each turned to the other iu We hour of joy and sorrow, certain of finding com- plete sympathy and consolation. This sympathy and support had never failed either during thirty years of married life. Two children had been born to the Knowles-a son and a daughter. The daughter was well married, and the son was his father's partner, and lived at home. The children had added to the happi- ness and brightness of the home circle, but Mrs. Knowles, sitting with cold, clasped hands, watching the still face that would never more light up with love at her approach, found little comfort in the thought that she had still a son and daughter left to her. She loved them, and they loved her, but, oh, what a different kind of love it was to the love she had lost for ever She got the credit of bearing up well, and—if the truth must be told—of also being slightly devoid of deep feeling. There was no danger of any such accusation being made against the young widow in Cromwell-place. She was not in the room with her dead husband. He lay on a couch in the small morning-room off the hall, I into which he had been carried the previous evening. Mrs. Reginald Loch had been carried from the room when the doctor pronounced the dread sentence that life was extinct, shrieking hysterically, and had been more or less hysterical ever since, getting only such brief natches of sleep as were induced by the opiate given to her. She was surrounded by sympa- thising friends, who saved her from all need of thinking or doing anything. She was too nervous to be left alone, and too terrified to dare to take another look at the rigid, ghastly form that lay below. Her sunny, brown hair was rumed, and her pretty face red and swollen with weeping, but she was young and pretty through it all, and I her late husband's brother-officers and friends I were influenced by the fact, and one and all felt that no sacrifice on their part could be too great, if it saved the young, heart-broken widow one care or one effort. ) She and her husband had got on as well aa most married couples, with occasional tiffs and periods of coldness, followed by demonstrative devotion when they again became reconciled. On the whole, they had got on very well, and as AgneS Loch lay back on the soft cushions of a comfortable easy-chair, before her cosy I bedroom fire, pressing a flimsy handkerchief, steeped with eau-de-Cologne, to her burning I forehead, and enveloped in clouds of billowy lace and clinging white silk, she was the very em- bodiment of correct, inconsolable grief, and a far more attractive and to-be-pitied individual than the stout, elderly widow who, without any great evidence of heart-break, had taken her usual place beside her son at the ordinary dinner-table. Mr. George Knowles had been Captain Reginald Loch's solicitor, and there was some distant connection between the two, which was deemed sufficient by the young widow to entitle Alfred Knowles to assume the of cousin twhen, as his father's successor, he came to talk I' 'over business matters with her. Upon learning how little she had to live upon, Mrs. Reginald Loch bitterly bemoaned I her sad fate. Fortunately, the rent of the house was paid to the middle of the following year, and there was no need for her to leave her pretty home. She declared, between her sobs, that it would break her heart to do so, and that if she had to live on bread and water, and to do all the housework herself, she would try to stay on. The mere idea of the dainty, pretty little woman, either living on hermit'.s fare, or soil- ing her taper fingers with sweeping and dusting, was so awful to all to whom she confided her plan, that they resolved that, come what might, the dear little widow should not suffer. Thus it came about that after a secret con- j fabulation with old Colonel Marshall, the f>arlour-maid—who had been under notice to eave—told her mistress that both she and cook had made up their minds that they could not part from her, and that they were willing to had made up their minds that they could not part from her, and that they were willing to remain on without wages, which Mrs. Loch I repeated to all her visitors, with tears in her eyes, and which was quoted as proof of her kind I and considerate treatment of her servants. Mrs. Loch rather astonished Alfred Knowles and others, who deemed her incapable of aay shrewdness, by suggesting that they should find a good-paying guest to live with her, and lighten expenses but even this suggestion came to be regarded as one which had first originated in somebody else's mind. In the course of a few months a rich Scotch spinster was found, who was willing to pay » hundred and fifty pounds a year in return for I the social advantages promised to her by the widow. Having entered into this agreement, I Mrs. Loch felt bound to carry it out, and therefore brought her paying guest about as much as was compatible with the retirement prescribed by decorum. Meanwhile, Mrs. Knowles, in her large, gloomy house in Bloomsbury, was outwardly pursuing the even tenour of her way, but in reality was incessantly missing and grieving after the husband she had lost. Even the society of her son, which had in a measure lightened her solitude, began to fail her. Alfred Knowles now frequently spent his evenings from home, and accounted for his absence by telling his mother that he had been talking business with poor Agnes, and trying to cheer the poor little woman up. The other woman thought, with a pang, that she too might have been pitied and cheered up. But who cared now ? When she lost her husband she lost her only true and close friend, and it was but natural that she should be left alone. She accepted the situation as part of her heavy cross. Miss McVetch was forty and ill-favoured, but wished to settle herself; and as her fortune was large, she might have dohe so, as Mrs. Reginald Loch sweetly assured her she could ea.sIly do, had she been satisfied to wed either of the two impecunious and uninteresting suitors suggested to her by the widow. But as many charming men came to see her hostess, the Scotch lady saw no reason why she should not find someone more to her taste. Then words were exchanged, when the spinster perceived that the widow was the attraction, and Mrs. Reginald plaintively, but with a twinkle in her eye, implored her admirers to "make them- selves nice with her guest, and they all had a good laugh over Miss Me Vetch's matrimonial aspirations. Matters got worse. The Scotch visitor did not hesitate to call Mrs. Loch "a 81y little flirt," and finally to announce her intention of taking her departure to some more disinterested chaperon. The widow's grief and perplexity brought Alfred Knowles to the point. He was decidedly the beat-off of her admirers; and when he proposed, was accepted very sweetly. r [IjuiEKD.] —

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