we'll have to give up that idea." But Mrs. Dunlop was not the sort of person to give up an idea without good cause. "The mountain must then go to Mahomet," said she, and wheeling the couch close to the sick-bed, she arranged the invalid cosily among the cushions, and pushed her slowly into her own apartment. "If I were twice as large as you are," she added, "instead of being just your size, I should have carried you in half the time." But another and more serious consequence followed that same evening upon the striking similarity in figure between Mrs. Dunlop and Miss Macleod. Golden twilight had changed to dim dusk, but Rose still lay with her fair head almost buried among the cushions. She expected a visit from her father that evening, and the temptation to show him what she could do and dare was irresistible. All her hostess's hints that bed-time had arrived were wasted upon deaf ears. At last, in a little anxiety as to the result of her experiment, if the Commodore did not arrive, Mrs. Dunlop went out to the front gate to see if there were signs of his approach. At the same moment Allan entered the house by the back door, and looked about for his mother. Impelled by a "fatalistic necessity" he went up to her room, the sound of his carefully modulated tread upon the stairway filling the heart of Rose with delight, for was not that her own father, who had probably been informed at the gate of the change in her condition and surroundings, and who was coming up so softly in order to surprise her. Allan, meanwhile, glancing in, saw nothing in the gray gloom but a small figure in a well-known wrapper, stretched wearily upon the couch. "Poor little mother," he thought. "She is quite tired out." He went up to her intending to bestow a filial caress upon her cheek, but before his design could be accomplished he was drawn close by a single arm around his neck, and repeatedly kissed. "You blessed darling!" she softly exclaimed, "here I've been waiting for you, and _waiting_ for you and longing--_Oh_!" That silky moustache and that chin, that was _not_ stubby, could they belong to a gentleman of sixty years? Her right arm fell limp and useless as the other. "I thought you were my father," she said in a weak voice of mingled disappointment, anger and shame. "And I thought you were my mother," was all the guilty wretch could offer in extenuation of his conduct. The people whose parts this unfortunate pair had been playing with such ill success were now heard at the door below. Allan felt like a criminal as he stole into the hall, and thence into his own room; but the Commodore could scarcely understand the propriety of a strange and otherwise objectionable young man holding a moonless _tete-a-tete_ with his daughter. In any case his presence would involve disagreeable explanations. If her cheeks were as flushed as his own no doubt her doting parent would ascribe it to renewed health and strength. But the young man, sitting alone in the perfumed darkness of that