flight from, the Tom cat; all her four legs are quivering and kicking in a mimic gallop.

"Do you remember," say I, again speaking, and again prefacing my words by an uneasy laugh, "how the boys at home used always to laugh at me, because I never knew how to flirt, nor had any pretty ways? Do you think"-(speaking slowly and hesitatingly)—" that boys-one's brothers, I mean would be good judges of that sort of thing?"

"As good as any one else's brothers, I suppose," she says, with a low laugh, but still looking puzzled; "but why do you ask ?"

"I do not know," reply I, trying to speak carelessly; "it came into my head."

"Has any one been accusing you?" she says, a little curiously. "But no! who could? You have seen no one, not

"No, no!" interrupt I, shrinking from the sound of the name that I know is

coming; "of course not; no one!"

The clock strikes eleven, and wakes Vick. her knitting, and going over to the fire-place, stands with one white elbow resting on the chimney piece, and slender neck drooped, pensively gazing at the low fire.

Barbara rises, rolls up

"Do you know," she says, with a halfconfused smile, that is also tinged with a little anxiety, "I have been thinking—it is the first time for three months that he has not been here at all, either in the morning, the afternoon, or the evening!"

"Is it?" say I, slightly shivering.

"I think," she says, with a rather embarrassed laugh, "that he must have heard you were out, and that that was why he

did not come. you that he likes

VOL. II.

You know I always tell

you best."

15

She says it as a joke, and yet her great eyes are looking at me with a sort of wistfulness, but neither to them nor to her words can I make any answer.

N

CHAPTER XIV.

EXT morning I am sitting before my looking-glass-never to me

a pleasant article of furniture— having my hair dressed. I am hardly awake yet, and have not quite finished disentangling the real live disagreeables which I have to face, from the imaginary ones from which my waking has freed me. At least, in real life, I am not perpetually pursued, through dull abysses, by a man in a crape mask, from whom I am madly struggling to escape, and who is perpetually on the point of overtaking and seizing me. It was a mistake going to sleep at all last

night. It would have been far wiser and better to have kept awake. The real evils are bad enough, but the dream ones in their vivid life make me shiver even now, though the morning sun is lying in companionable patches on the floor, and the birds are loudly talking all together. Do no birds ever listen?

Distracted for a moment from my own miseries, by the noise of their soft yet. sharp hubbub, I am thinking this, when a knock comes at the door, and the next moment Barbara enters. Her blonde hair is tumbled about her shoulders; no white rose's cheeks are paler than hers; in her hand she has a note. In a moment I have dismissed the maid, and we are alone.

"I want you to read this!" she says, in . an even and monotonous voice, from which by an effort whose greatness I can dimly guess, she keeps all sound of trembling.

I have risen and turned from the glass;