WRECKED IN PORT.
A SERIAL STORY BY THE AUTHOR OF "BLACK SHEEP."

CHAPTER VIII. FLITTING.

MARIAN ASHURST dearly loved her home.
To her concentrative and self-contained
nature, local associations were peculiarly
precious; the place in which she had lived
the life so essentially her own was very
dear. The shabby old house, though she
perfectly understood its shabbiness, and
would have prized the power of renovating
and adorning it as thoroughly as any petite
maîtresse would have prized the power of
adorning her bijou residence with all the
prettiness of modern upholstery, was a
shrine in her eyes. Base and unbeautiful,
but sacred, the place in which her father
had dutifully and patiently passed his laborious
life—had it not been wasted? the
proud discontented spirit asked itself many
a time, but found no voice to answer
"no." She had often pictured to her
fancy what the house might have been made,
if there had but been money to make it
anything with, money to do anything with;
if only they had not always been so helpless,
so burthened with the especially painful
load of genteel poverty. She had exercised
her womanly ingenuity, put forth
her womanly tastes, so far as she could,
and the house was better than might have
been expected under all the circumstances;
but ingenuity and taste, which double the
effect of money when united to that useful
agency, are not of much avail without it,
and will not supply curtains and carpet,
paint, varnishing, and general upholstery.
There was not a superfluous ornament, and
there were many in the drawing-rooms at
Woolgreaves, very offensive to her instinctively
correct taste,—whose price would
not have materially altered the aspect
of Marian Ashurst's home, as she had
recognised with much secret bitterness
of spirit, on her first visit to the
Creswells. She would have made the
old house pretty and pleasant, if she
could, especially while he lived, to whom
its prettiness and pleasantness might have
brought refreshment of spirit, and a little
cheerfulness in the surroundings of his toilsome
life; but she loved it, notwithstanding
its dulness and its frigid shabbiness,
and the prospect of being obliged to leave
it gave her exquisite pain. Marian was
surprised when she discovered that her
feelings on this point were keener than
those of her mother. She had anticipated,
with shrinking and reluctance of whose
intensity she felt ashamed, the difficulty
she should experience when that last worst
necessity must arise, when her mother
must leave the home of so many years, and
the scene of her tranquil happiness. Mrs.
Ashurst had been a very happy woman,
notwithstanding her delicate health, and the
difficulties it had brought upon the little
household. In the first place, she was
naturally of a placid temperament. In the
second, her husband told her as little as
possible of the constantly pressing, hopelessly
inextricable, trouble of his life. And
lastly, Mrs. Ashurst's inexperience prevented
her realising danger in the future,
from any source except that one whence it
had actually come, fallen in its fullest,
most fatal might—the sickness and death of
her husband. When that tremendous blow
fell upon her, it stunned the widow. She
could not grieve, she could not care about
anything else. She was not a woman of
an imaginative turn of mind; feeling had
always been powerful and deep in her, but