children's minds are perverted by their copy-book moralities!'

"Yes, but you omit the two important words, in time. You omit the patience. We can all wish, but Miss Fleming stopped, rather abruptly, and recollected by how many hours her acquaintance with Mr. Carew could be reckoned.

But few have the endurance to attain?' he finished for her. Well, if I was to wish at this moment it would be to be the possessor of this valley, and to spend my life in a perpetual summer morning beneath its shades.'

'How fortunate it is for us our desires are not brought to pass!' cried Esther. You were tired of fishing in two hours, and now wish to spend all your life beside a troutstream.'

'But not fishing.' 'Oh!'

Miss Fleming grew interested in ferns again; Mr. Carew first looked into the water, and then began to take his rod to pieces. He was dreadfully afraid of his new acquaintance going away, but not experienced enough, himself, to know exactly how to set her at ease. Would a commonplace about the scenery be the right kind of thing to begin next? or, like other rustics, would the young person be supremely indifferent to the things she lived amongst? He remembered her saying something about effects, and heather in August, and hazarded it. This is a very beautiful place, really, for England. It reminds me of Switzerland.'

Esther looked up full in his face. 'What! you have been to Switzerland, then?'

'Dozens of times.'
'Really?'

'Well, not quite-let me see, four, five, yes, I have been there five times. I have done it thoroughly, now.'

'How strange!' remarked Miss Fleming, musing.

'What! to have been in Switzerland?'

'No, I mean-I mean-that Jane must have been wrong in what she thought.' And then she coloured again - an honest, ruddy colour,

crimsoning checks and brow and neck; and Oliver thought her lovely. She was not shy, and yet so marvellously prone to blush (he was accustomed, remember, to young ladies of the world): she was dignified and yet so thoroughly frank, so charmingly simple. He came a step nearer; her eyes sank beneath his.

And who is Jane?' He felt his own self-possession returning fast, as hers ebbed away.

Jane is my friend Millicent's sister. You saw Milly with me at Swindon ?'

'I did not know you remarked me there at all.'

'I remember you quite well. You were good enough to help me through the crowd, and when wo went back to the carriage we told Jane, who remarked-I do not like to say any more, Mr. Carew.'

Esther intended this mention of his name to put their acquaintance upon the most formal and frigid footing; but, having said it, she knew in a moment that it had taken precisely the opposite effect, and felt rather frightened at the result. 'I think my cousin will be waiting for me, sir,' and she half turned to

go away.

'But you have dropped your flower in the river. See, shall I get it for you?'

The damask rose, the gaudy object of Joan's animadversion, had fallen from her hat into the water, and was eddying fast away toward the little fall just beneath the rocks. 'It does not signify in the least, we have plenty more in our garden,' cried Esther. 'Please take no trouble about it.'

But Oliver persevered in his attempts at rescuing the flower, and after some difficulty succeeded. 'I will not return it to you,' he remarked. It would spoil your hat

now.'

shame, no doubt, over her own foolish vanity in having worn it.

'I am thinking of making a collection of dried plants,' went on Mr. Carew; they are interesting memoranda of one's travels. If you will allow me, I will keep this for my first specimen;' and he stuck the rose in his button-hole. :

Esther's breath came faster. This man was a stranger, was half-presumptuous, yet she could not put him down, and, which was worse, she could not feel displeased. He looked so handsome standing there in audacious possession of her flower; there was such thorough, boyish good-humour in his audacity; how could she feel displeased? That it was thoroughly unprincipled, however, to prolong the acquaintance a single minute more was beyond all question; and so she made another allusion to her cousin, and, turning round at once, began to walk away.

Mr. Carew walked beside her. "I suppose your cousin would not condescend to impart any of his fishing knowledge to me,' he remarked, quite quietly, and as though he had not for a moment imagined that Miss Fleming had intended to take leave of him. It would be too much to expect that one of the great high-priests would condescend to initiate a neophyte into the mysteries of the stream.'

'I am sure David would show you his flies, sir' (she could not feel angry, being glad herself that he had not taken her at her word): 'very likely you have not got the right sort. We find the fish rise better to green-drakes and stoneflies than any other at this season of the year.'

'What! you understand some of the mysteries, then?'

'David and I tie our flies ourselves, generally. He had a present of some from London once, and they were really beautiful to look at; but the fish didn't seem to see it, and never rose to them as they do to the ones we copy from nature. Shall I look at yours? Perhaps, like those of David's, they are too fine for the country fish to understand.'

Nothing, I am persuaded, ripens intimacy between two young persons, respectively aged eighteen and twenty-two, more than the juxtaposition necessarily caused by one of them looking over any kind of book that happens to be held in the other's hand. It took Miss Fleming several minutes to inspect the different varieties of flies, to give grave opinions on their merits, to admire, to detract, to advise. When she had finished some occult influence made her feel as though she had known Mr. Carew half her life at least, and that it would be sheer affectation for her to pretend any longer that her cousin David wanted her to return.

So when Carew asked her if they were not near the junction of the Lynn waters, and whether this would be the best time in the morning to see it to advantage, she answered, quite composedly, that they were within a quarter of an hour's walk from Waters-meet, and it would be very little out of her way to go there before she returned to her cousin, and, if Mr. Carew pleased, she would be glad to show him the path. It is not the first time I have led strangers through the woods' (her conscience pleaded against its own misgivings). 'Only last summer I showed that dear old clergyman all the way along the Valley of Rocks, and even Joan did not blame me. There can be no harm!' And as Miss Fleming's mind never took into account that the dear old clergyman was fifty-five and gouty-footed and paternal, Mr. Oliver Carew handsome and twentytwo, and wearing a damask rose (of hers) in his button-hole, we may presume that extreme simplicity really prevented her from discerning these somewhat material differences in the condition of the two strangers.

'This is Waters-meet, Mr. Carew. Please don't say you are disappointed, even if you feel so.'

Mr. Carew was not disposed to be disappointed with anything that Esther's handsome face asked him to admire. He already thought Lynmouth the least slow place, for the country, that he had ever been in. The valley was fresher than

Switzerland, the streams were more brown and transparent than any in the highlands, everything was goldcoloured (so he averred, and very probably thought, in the first brannew emotion of this rustic flirtation); and in a few more moments Esther had quite forgotten that their acquaintance dated from yesterday, and was sitting on her favourite rock, close to the water, with Mr. Carew leaning over her, as he animadverted, with great warmth and eloquence, upon the varied beauties of the scene.

Was it not necessary for him to bend down, if he would make his voice heard at all above the rush of water? And had she not rested in precisely the same manner when accompanying that dear old parson through the Valley of the Rocks last summer?

CHAPTER VII.

CONCERNING FLY-FISHING.

Falling in love, after a day's acquaintance, with a face like Esther Fleming's, is not a thing of extreme difficulty to a very young lad under any circumstances. To Oliver Carew it came with remarkable facility upon this summer morning and among the dangerous loneliness of these silent woods.

Esther had chosen her restingplace at the spot where the meeting of the two moorland streams is first visible among the woods; a spot which, shut in amidst abrupt and verdured hills on all sides save that of the waters, forms one of the most charming Ruysdael-like woodland pictures in the world. The single flash of the two streams just at the moment when, parted still by a ravine of foam, they break, a liquid glass of delicate grey and silvergreen, across the bed of black projecting rock; the glimpses on the left of the Lynn valley, hung with masses of densely-shadowed foliage to the summit, and with only its topmost crags exposed to the yellow light of the noonday sun; the precipitous granite cliff upon the right, its ravine and fissures filled with

glossy wreaths of ivy, whose weather-blanched roots are knotted in fantastic distortions amidst the rifts of iron-grey stone; the masses of fallen rock which lie, moss-covered and overturned with the luxuriant leafage of a thousand trailing plants; -reader, if you have stood on a June morning in that fairest valley in England, do you not remember all these details of the picture? Seen in the cool green light of noonthat shaded and most exquisite green, deepened here and there by the rich brown of hoary pine-stems, or broken, at rare intervals, by quivering shafts of ruddy goldwas it not a dangerously lovely background to a lovely face of scarce eighteen? Do you wonder that, then and there, Mr. Carew thought how pleasant it would be to begin rehearsing the first act in that pleasantest drama of all our lives, that he forgot the horrible dangers which await young lads of fortune when they admire anything between an heiress and a milkmaid, and only remembered the noble lines of Esther's glowing face, the gentle, honest eyes that looked so frankly up to his.

Well, he had been better trained than to do such foolish things: he had been duly taught how to regulate both his fancies and affections. But lads of fortune will, occasionally, have eyes of their own wherewith to see, and, which is a vast deal more perilous, boyish, honest impulses of their own to follow. Oliver had tried hard, under the family direction, to fall in love with an unexceptionably plain heiress for some months past, and had not succeeded. Without knowing one word of Esther's family or estate, save that she lived at a farm and wore a shepherd's-plaid gown, he was ready, as far as inclination went, to ask her to accept him, and all he possessed or was heir to, at that moment. Oh, desperate perversion! Oh, headlong blindness of the natural man!

And so Jane thought me farmer's son. She must be extraordinarily sharp-sighted.' They had got, as you must perceive, whole cycles away from scenery and com

monplace. 'What data did she go upon, do you suppose?'

Milly's 'description of you, perhaps. Milly laughs at my heroes--I mean at the heroes I like to read of-I mean,' Esther stammered furiously, at persons of large size and sunburnt complexions.'

Thank you: I quite understand the description Jane received. A large-sized, sunburnt person. It exactly enabled her to form a true estimate of my calling.'

True?' said Esther, hastily, and with a quick glance at his face. 'Oh! I beg your pardon. I thought Jane had been mistaken.'

The visible disappointment in her voice pleased Mr. Carew not a little. In a moment-in one of those moments, which, trivial as they seem, do so much to turn aside all the after-currents of a man's life, he resolved to play upon it. Whatever happened and already he scarcely dared to ask himself what he desired should happen-it would be amusing to himself to act for a time under a false character; amusing, some day, perhaps, to see the girl's surprise when she should know the truth, and discover with what new Lord of Burleigh she had had the presumption to fall in love. 'I really cannot see anything in the profession of farming to be ashamed of,' he remarked; but, of course, everyone has his own ideas upon the subject of social disgrace.'

'I see no disgrace in any employment whatever. I think a farmer's must be a very happy life,' cried Esther, hastily. If I were a man, I would rather follow anything else in the world than a profession that should keep me chained to a close London counting-house-but then

'Oh! you are trying to make what amends you can to me-trying to apply what salve you can to my pride-you are very good. I thank you.'

His solemn tone made Esther believe that she had really said something exceedingly wounding to the young man's feelings, and very kind and earnest did her great dark eyes look up into his face. 'Surely you don't think that I meant any

thing to hurt you, sir? Why, I have lived, myself, in a farm-house since I was four years old, and the few friends and acquaintance that we have are quite plain country people like ourselves. I only mean that you look very unlike a farmer's son, and I think so still, but I know a farmer may be as much a gentleman as a prince, and -Oh! Mr. Carew, I would not have said anything to hurt your feelings for the world.'

Long afterwards did Oliver Carew remember Esther Fleming as she then looked. The expression of her eyes, lighting up with earnest kindness, the trembling smile of her rich scarlet lips, even the ray of sunlight that lingered, golden, with such vividly-bright distinctness in her dark hair, he remembered them all. What he did in the present emergency was to take her hand and hold it for a moment in his, then assure her that, so far from feeling offended, he had never been moro flattered in his life. And I am not a farmer, myself,' he added, although most of my family have followed that occupation for generations past. I am a soldier. Rather a different craft.'

Now Esther had a distinct idea that all men in the army were irresistible but unprincipled; one or two legends of Miss Millicent Dashwood's supplying the first clause in this belief, Joan's stories of her own grandfather, Garratt Fleming, the other. But still, even with the knowledge of Mr. Carew's dangerous attributes, she did not take to immediate flight. It was so tempting here in the cool delicious shade; this stranger, whom she would certainly never see again in her whole life, was so unlike anyone she had ever talked to before; such an unwonted, flattering sensation of gratified vanity throbbed at her own heart;-and then, David could not want her! And so they talked on and on until at length a sudden gleam of western sunshine fell broad upon the boulders at her feet, and then Esther, with a guilty start, remembered that it was already afternoon. She had been passing hours, not minutes as they