selves. I am thankful,' she went on, turning to David, 'thankful that the lad is but a farmer's son, and that Esther will have honest plenty instead of starving gentility for her portion.'

'If she marries him, Joan. We do take things so much for granted.'

'We take things as we wish them to be, very often,' answered Miss Engleheart. 'I wish to see Esther happily settled; and you, David, seem to have some unaccountable desire to

'Hush, hush, Joan!' interrupted the poor fellow, quickly, and jumping up from his chair to hide his confusion. Here is Esther herself, come home at last-and alone.'

'Carew having parted from her at the gate, Cousin David. Esther would not walk by herself alone on the moors at such an hour-would you, Esther?' to the girl, who, silent and shy, now stood at the door. You have not been walking abroad with no one with you between nine and ten o'clock at night.'

'Mr. Carew was with me, Joan,' she answered, resolutely, but still with a tremor in her voice; 'he met me far away on the moor andand walked home with me.'

'Come in, child, and lay your hat down. You look tired,' said Joan, not unkindly. 'David, can't you move, and let her pass? She must want her supper.'

'I was going to move,' cried David, very confused and stupid. I was thinking-thinking Esther looked pale.'

'Which is an excellent reason for keeping her standing at the door. Mother, you are asleep in your chair. Come away to bed this moment. Mr. Engleheart'-and Joan turned to David with a smiling pleasantry that made him shudder

I leave you to do the honours of the supper-table to Miss Fleming. She can entertain you with an account of her long ramble with Mr. Carew.' And, seizing Mrs. Engleheart in one hand and the candlestick in the other, Joan strode out of the room, and David and Miss Fleming were left alone.

I suppose there is not one of us but can remember the hideous firm

ness with which, in some great crisis of our life, our own right hand has probed the wound that lay all bare and quivering not an hour before. How we have felt a fierce kind of pleasure in each self-inflicted pang; have called that heroism to ourselves which was, in truth, but the last spasmodic struggle of some hope not utterly dead. Such firmness did David Engleheart, the least heroic of human creatures, feel when he was left alone with Esther, now. He knew, far better than Miss Joan, the state of the girl's heart. At this moment something, not of innocence, not, certainly, of beauty, yet something gone from out her face told him how irrevocably all that he had once so coveted to possess was robbed from him. The broad soft brow, the delicate scarlet lips that he had bowed down before as a poor priest bows down before his image of the Madonna, were his, even for worship, no longer: they were Mr. Carew's. He knew it from her cast-down eyes, her uncertain speech, the hurried way in which her hand trifled amidst some wild flowers that she had laid beside her on the table; all the alphabet out of which jealousy can so quickly spell the miserable truth of its own fears. Carew had spoken to her of love!

As I have said, the strength that comes to many a passion in extremis came to David Engleheart now. He found himself able to jest with Esther upon her late return. He asked what she and Mr. Carew could possibly find to say to each other during so many hours? Had the lad really anything in him on further acquaintance? He seemed not to have too much to say for himself on that evening that he spent at Countisbury. Esther parried these little thrusts as she best might, and with some latent surprise at the quarter from whence they came; for David had never before, of his own free-will, so much as mentioned Oliver's name before her. But the sense of her strange, newfound happiness made her in these early moments shy and embarrassed even with him; and she was conscious, for the first time in her life,