Today's Stichomancy for J.K. Rowling

felt half envious of such a sad precocity of wisdom.

"I'm so sorry...so sorry..." she murmured.

"Things happen that way. Now I'd better go. I'd like to say good-bye to Effie."

"Oh----" it broke in a cry from Effie's mother. "Not like this--you mustn't! I feel--you make me feel too horribly: as if I were driving you away..." The words had rushed up from the depths of her bewildered pity.

"No one is driving me away: I had to go," she heard the girl reply.

There was another silence, during which passionate impulses

throat, had overheard or guessed the question and its answer. She gave me a glance and vanished, calling in shrill, childish tones:

"Mother, here is a gentleman who wishes to speak to you!"

And, along the winding alleys, I followed the skipping and dancing white frill, a sort of will-o'-the-wisp, that showed me the way among the trees.

I must make a full confession. I stopped behind the last shrub in the avenue, pulled up my collar, rubbed my shabby hat and my trousers with the cuffs of my sleeves, dusted my coat with the sleeves themselves, and gave them a final cleansing rub one against the other. I buttoned my coat carefully so as to exhibit

on which he could fairly economize.

This was the experience which had determined his conversation with Lydgate. But at this time his arrangements had most of them gone no farther than a stage at which he could recall them if they proved to be unnecessary. He continually deferred the final steps; in the midst of his fears, like many a man who is in danger of shipwreck or of being dashed from his carriage by runaway horses, he had a clinging impression that something would happen to hinder the worst, and that to spoil his life by a late transplantation might be over-hasty--especially since it was difficult to account satisfactorily to his wife for the project of their indefinite exile

Middlemarch

a stir at which he seemed strangely surprised at first, and then scared; but his only answer to the wondering questions was that startled and evasive, "For the present."

That sensation had been forgotten, long ago; and Captain Hagberd himself, if not forgotten, had come to be disregarded--the penalty of daili- ness--as the sun itself is disregarded unless it makes its power felt heavily. Captain Hagberd's movements showed no infirmity: he walked stiffly in his suit of canvas, a quaint and remarkable fig-

To-morrow