will understand how much I am to be congratulated."

"My dear Emma!" exclaimed Mrs. Maynard, bending forward to embrace the girl, who turned away to hide her blushes. "My dear Cornelius, this is indeed delightful. I saw it all long ago, but hardly dared hope anything would be settled so soon. Nothing in the world could give me such pleasure!"

Emma was too innocently happy not to feel grateful to her cousin for taking so warm an interest in her new joy; and Cornelius, although he did not altogether relish the exultant strain of his sister-in-law's congratulations, accepted them with the best grace that he could.

It was difficult for him to get rid of a degree of awkwardness of which he felt conscious in the whole affair, and he was not sorry to escape even from the company of his newly betrothed bride, and to return to Hazeltree that afternoon.

"I'm going to marry Miss Harding," he said to his father, as he entered the house, in so sudden and abrupt a manner that the old man looked up in perplexity from the table at which he sat adding up one side of his ledger, and asked him to repeat his sentence.

"I'm glad to hear it, my boy," he said kindly, when the news had been made sufficiently clear

to him. "I'm very glad, and I hope she'll make you a good wife. After all, you see the Wyndover gossips weren't so far wrong. And I shan't be sorry to see her in poor Lydia's place in the old house up yonder."

After that, congratulations poured in rapidly on all sides; and in the multitude of affairs which pressed upon him, and the new claims upon his time and attention, he had no leisure to think of Margie or dwell with regret upon the past.

As he looked at Emma's quiet face, beaming with the light of her new pleasure, and listened to the general chorus of rejoicing and good wishes which bubbled up around him during the next few weeks, Cornelius persuaded himself that his happiness was complete, and that he had done the best possible thing, both for himself and his family.

CHAPTER XXX.

"Five months ago, the stream did flow,
The-lilies bloomed within the sedge,

And we were lingering to and fro,
Where none will track thee in this snow,

Along the stream, beside the hedge.

Ah, sweet, be free to love and go!

For if I do not hear thy foot,

The frozen river is as mute

The flowers have dried down to the root;

And why, since these be changed since May,
Shouldst thou change less than they?"

E. B. BROWNING.

T was February again, and the lower branches of the elm-trees were beginning to show signs of life, while the golden buds of the first aconites were already peeping out among the moss and dead leaves of the spinny at the foot of the Lady-ground.

Margie Chaplin was walking there again all by herself. Strange it seemed that she should choose this path, which must remind her so bitterly of all

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she had lost, but sometimes it happens that we are seized with an irresistible longing to recall the past, and to feel again as we have felt in the days that are for ever gone.

It was this yearning which brought Margie here to-day, and which led her to pause once more under the same ash-trees where Cornelius had whispered the first words of love in her ears. Here at least she could be alone, and there was no need to wear a smiling face and pretend to look as cheerful and happy as if her heart were at ease and things were going well with her.

She had been told that morning, for the third time, that Cornelius Maynard was engaged to be married, and after what she had seen at the meet she naturally began to believe the report which was continually reaching her ears. Even her faith in him was failing at length, and she felt that if she did not see him soon, her last hopes would give way under the strain.

He had proved false to her, and was about to marry another for the sake of position and money, and deliberately to throw away the true strong love which her young heart had given him from the days when she first met him and learnt to know

him.

And yet it seemed to her almost an impossible thing to do. How could he change when he had

spoken words of such passionate meaning to her standing here on this spot-when the very leaves which now lay dead and brown under her feet spoke to her of those spring days which now were only full of bitter memories? Was it nothing to him how she was suffering; how he had hurt her life, and left her, crushed and wounded, to turn back to the old ways and creep along as best she could?

Through the trees she could see the houses of the upper village dotted here and there on the hillside, with the sun shining on their red roofs and the thin blue line of smoke curling up to heaven, each happy homestead a little centre of life and joy, where glad hearts met and children's laughter rang. And those pure joys of love and home, of wife and mother's bliss, might not be hers; she must live alone, cast off and forsaken by the man for whose sake she would have died!

Then the thought of her Aunt Rachel and of her brave, uncomplaining fortitude came back to her, and poor Margie tried hard to school herself to lessons of submission and patience.

If this was the law of her life, there must be some meaning, some wise purpose in it all. Aunt Rachel would have said so, she felt sure, although when the sun has all at once dropped out of our lives it is very hard to see anything clearly in the darkness and the fog.