papa's consent,' said Miss Dashwood, with emphasis; 'I am looked upon for the time being as settled, and am accorded leave to be at peace, sometimes even to refuse a ball if I like it. Oh, Milly, it gives the whole house such a strange air of repose, this little dream about Mr. Chichester. Papa actually allowed himself an attack of the gout last winter. Fancy his succumbing to such a weakness if he had had a disengaged daughter upon his hands!'

'As he will have now, Jane,' said Milly, after some consideration. 'I believe-only I don't like to think even you so cruel-that you are letting this engagement go on simply to mystify papa, and be at rest yourself.'

Jane Dashwood laughed. 'It is a good piece of strategy, is it not, Milly? Peace and freedom for the present, relief for the parental mind, and if everything else fails, Paul to fall back upon at the last. I don't believe he has a farthing in the world, but as soon as it entered into my head to be engaged to himMrs. Strangways was trying to take him up, and it amused me to assist her-I got one or two obedient little birds of mine to whisper into papa's ear that he is to have eight hundred a year when some fabulously old person shall die. And so, nous voilà!'

'And Mr. Chichester?' cried Esther, aghast with horror at hearing things which she held so sacred desecrated in such fashion. Mr. Chichester -what of him?'

'Oh, he is not ill-looking,' said Jane, calmly, and yet not strictly handsome. Dark, slight, rather grizzled hair, eyes that see a great deal farther into one's thoughts than is agreeable, and a by no means good-tempered mouth. For the rest, one could wish of course that he had a large prospective income; still, eight hundred a year, with management, is not so bad.'

'But his feelings!' cried Esther, who could not hide her indignation at such alarming levity. His feelings; do they go quite for nothing?'

'Most entirely and absolutely for nothing,' said Jane. 'I see you are

not of the world, Miss Fleming. You believe that men die, as young ladies are represented to do in novels, from blighted affection. It is an exploded belief, I assure you. Nobody dies from any other than strictly material causes in these days. If Mr. Chichester were here I should talk in the same way that I am doing now, and he wouldn't mind it in the least.'

'He must have strange ideas of honour, then,' thought Esther; 'a strange kind of reverence for the woman he means to make his wife.' Then aloud, 'You must make allowance for the ignorance of my questions, Miss Dashwood. I begin to see that I belong to a generation gone by. I have never lived out of a country village till the last six months. I know nothing of love matters. I know nothing of the world.'

'Nor need you wish to do so, Miss Fleming,' said Jane, quickly. 'Nor, if you were thrown on the world, would you ever be what Milly and I are now. We have had unusual advantages from our cradles, and, with great natural aptitude, have improved them to the uttermost. I am twenty-one, Milly is seventeen, and we are both as entirely free from all youthful foolish extravagances in the way of sentiment as though we were middleaged women. Are we not, Milly?'

I know that I have got a most youthful desire for food, at all events,' replied Miss Millicent; and also that I am delighted to look forward to the prospect of Swindon. What shall we have, Jenny ?-sausage-rolls or Bath buns, or both?'

'I never eat in the morning,' said Miss Dashwood, languidly. " What a school-girl you are, Milly.'

'But it will be one o'clock when we get to Swindon,' remarked Esther, apologetically. One o'clock-dinner time-and Milly and I have had nothing since eight.'

"And then only a Bates' breakfast,' added Milly. 'It's all very well for you, a come-out young lady, to be so grand, Jenny. Esther and I are not at all above being hungry.'

Accordingly, when the train stopped at Swindon, these two

young persons got out, and with the eagerness of veritable school-girls made their way to the pastry, Miss Dashwood remaining alone in a dignified manner in the carriage. She was a great deal too blasé to care for eating at one o'clock; perhaps the admiring looks her pretty face attracted from the crowded platfrom formed sustenance of a more easily assimilated nature than Bath buns. At all events she bore all scrutiny with the most perfectly unruffled coolness, leaning her head back so that her brown hair and delicate profile came out in excellent relief against the dark cushions of the carriage, and seemed unusually well satisfied and complacent when the two other girls returned.

One sausage-roll, two Bath buns, a raspberry-tart, and a pint of strawberries,' Milly enumerated, taking these little refreshments one by one out of her bag, 'that is my lunch. Esther the same; but sandwiches instead of saucissons. Oh, Jenny, how dreadful it must be to be a used-up victim of society like you, or a heroine in a novel, in neither of which capacities is hearty eating allowed. Then we have had an adventure, too; haven't we, Esther? Jenny missed more than Bath buns by insisting on being grand.'

'An adventure at Swindon must be so thrilling,' remarked Miss Dashwood. The accessories are all of such a romantic nature; fat old gentlemen swearing at their boiling soup, fast young Oxonians calling for their morning beer, nurses wildly entreating the pert waiting-girls for bottles of milk, frenzied single women imploring the guard to listen to them, or choking themselves on bad pastry in their fear of being left behind.'

"To neither of which class did he belong,' interrupted Milly. Did he, Esther?'

Miss Fleming thought 'he'might have been an Oxonian; but he certainly was not drinking beer, at least not then.

'And pray who is "he?" asked Jane, with sovereign contempt. 'Which of your numerous acquaintance have you met with, Milly?'

'No acquaintance at all, Jane, but

an exceedingly gentlemanly interesting-looking person. You shall not put down our adventure in that envious and malignant way.'

And what did the interesting gentleman with whom you are not acquainted say to you, Milly?'

'It was to Esther.'

'I was trying to make my way to the counter, and the people pushed me back,' said Miss Fleming, with a decided accession of colouring in her face, and a tall man who stood near us asked me if he could help me.'

'And Esther said "yes," in her simple way, Jenny, and he made room for us. Wasn't it thoughtful of him?'

'And is that all?'

'All! why, would you have a stranger do more, Jane? I say it was most attentive. And then he was so thoroughly gentlemanly in his manner.'

'So interesting!' cried Miss Dashwood, with her little mocking laugh. 'How angry I am with myself for having missed this Swindon Bayard.'

'Interesting is a dreadful word to apply to any man,' Esther remarked with deliberation. It makes one think of white hands, and hair parted like a girl's, and a lisp.'

'None of which our stranger possessed,' cried Millicent. He was a great broad-shouldered man, with a sunburnt face and hands. Much too manly-looking for your style, Jenny; you like——

'Eat another of those saffron lumps of indigestion, Milly dear,' interrupted Miss Dashwood, and don't chatter. I shall have to chaperon you with more care if you take up these sudden fancies for attentive strangers.'

'Don't be frightened, Jane; he never thought of me at all-never looked at me, I believe. The whole of the attention was to Esther, who received it just as coolly as she is now eating her strawberries. never saw any one with undeniable teeth smile so rarely as Esther does.'

I

'Smile! why, Milly, you would not have had me smile at a strange young man for an act of common civility! I thanked him sufficiently, I believe.'

'Quite sufficiently, I am sure,' remarked Miss Dashwood, looking closely at Esther. 'He was, no doubt, some excellent young Wiltshire farmer going down to a pigfair, if there are such things, and -' 'No,' interrupted Miss Fleming, quite firmly, although she smiled. The stranger was a gentleman, Miss Dashwood.'

"With black hands and high shoulders.'

With brown hands and broad shoulders. A manly-looking young Englishman.'

A true descendant of the Vikings,' interrupted Milly.

'Say it out, Esther. One of your favourite muscular heroes, all sinews and high principles.'

'Of which I could form such admirable judgment while I waited for my change,' said Esther, with a hearty laugh. I think we had better give up our adventure, hero and all, Milly. Your sister is only drawing us out in order to make us feel how thoroughly ridiculous we have been afterwards.'

'No,' said Jane, quite gravely, ‘I was thinking-thinking how oddly such chance meetings do sometimes turn out. You may meet this stranger some day, and know him, Miss Fleming.'

'As you met Arthur Peel,' interrupted Milly. 'It was in a railway carriage you first saw each other, wasn't it? And then you stayed with him in the same house, and then it all came on

'Milly!'

Millicent Dashwood was never conspicuously watchful of any feelings or sufferings save her own; but the moment she caught sight of her sister's face now, she became sensible that her last light words had taken effect too deep. Miss Dashwood's cheeks were burning red, her lips quivering.

'Do think of what you say, Milly,' she remarked, very low. You are so heedless.'

'But Esther knows nothing about Arthur Peel, Jenny. I never mentioned it before; and besides, it's all off now.'

'Milly,' cried Miss Dashwood, passionately, 'I beg you will be

silent. I do not choose these jeststhey are in bad taste.' And moving abruptly to the other side of the carriage, she leaned her hot face towards the open window and quite away from her two companions' scrutiny.

Millicent went on silently with her luncheon: Esther mused.

'It is good fun to laugh at the man to whom one is engaged,' she thought; but bad taste even to speak of some love affair that is "all off," and about which one blushes crimson. How glad I am that I know nothing of the world!'

'It came to grief about money, and papa would not hear of it,' whispered Milly; and Jane liked him awfully-that's all. Don't look so solemn, Esther.'

'Milly, I am sorry for your sister.' 'Sorry for her? sorry for our proud, handsome Jane? She would not thank you for pitying her.'

But Millicent was mistaken. Miss Dashwood caught the meaning of Esther's low, kind words, and she turned round quickly with an altered and a softened expression on her flushed face.

'You pity me, Miss Fleming,' she said. 'You are right-I need it. How glad I should be to meet you again!' she went on, after waiting a minute or two, during which Esther made no response. I am sure we should get on together in time. You don't think so, Miss Fleming: your face speaks for you. You don't think you would care for any further acquaintance with such an unprincipled heartless character as mine?'

'I never thought anything like that,' said Esther shyly, for the girl, in truth, was quite unused to any sudden demonstrations of violent attachment. I think it is impossible for pople who have only just met to say whether they will get on together or not on further acquaintance.'

'So like our dear, wise, old Esther!' cried Milly. You see you can't steal her from me, Jane. She is my own particular friend, and means to continue so. We shall write each other two long, crossed letters a week all the summer, and

in the winter meet in Bath, and be Damon and Pythias again, as we were at school."

'Young ladies' friendships being famed for their powers of endurance,' remarked Miss Dashwood, who had quickly rallied from her passing touch of sentiment, I prophesy that in six weeks the letters will have died a natural death, and that by the winter you will have forgotten each other.'

'Not so bad as that, I think,' said Esther; 'I never forget any one.'

'What a disagreeable faculty,' remarked Jane, carelessly. The great secret of happiness in life is to forget everybody, except those who happen to be amusing one for the moment. Milly, dear, it is time to begin hunting out our thousand and one parcels. That wretched Bates stuffed them with her own hands into every impossible place she could

think of.'

And nothing makes papa so cross as to see heaps of things being showered upon him out of a railway carriage,' said Milly. 'It spoils the tableau of re-union. Esther, by the way, I predict that you will fall desperately in love with Colonel Dashwood the moment you see him: all young ladies do.'

And Milly was right. When Colonel Dashwood came up to meet his daughters at the Bath Station, Miss Fleming thought him the most perfectly charming old man she had ever seen in her life. It was quite impossible that a père noble with such a benevolent, silvery head, and who exclaimed, 'My children!' in a voice of such honest, heartfelt emotion, could have a single mean, false, or worldly attribute in his whole composition.

woods was, for the most part, unintelligible to her; and what she did understand of it was little to her taste. Nearly all the eighteen years of her life had been passed in a remote village in one of the wildest parts of North Devonshire; and, until the last six months, she had been profoundly ignorant even of the rudiments of ordinary younglady knowledge. I don't by this mean that she was uneducated: she had, on the contrary, read fewer, and understood more, books than ninety-nine finished' young women out of a hundred. She was thoroughly competent in household work; she could use her needle; she had learnt facts, at first hand, concerning all the common things of nature. She was well-educated, if by education one means the process that is to fit, not unfit, young persons for the life that lies before them. But in showy, superficial accomplishments - in knowledge, so called, of the worldshe was, as Milly Dashwood often declared, deplorably, heathenishly deficient. She had never been to a ball; she did not know the financial difference between elder and younger sons; she had honest, romantic, oldfashioned notions (poor Esther!) about people always being in love with the people they married; she had never read any French book but 'Telamache;' she held that old persons ought to be respected; she could blush-she could feel shy. Her six months' incarceration in a Kensington boarding-school had, of course, shown her what a great number of prejudices there were for her to overcome, how much information to be acquired, if she ever hoped to come up at all to the standard of her young companions. But here the evil of these six months' probation ended. Strong, healthy natures do not take infection very readily from weaker ones. And in spite of her close friendship with Milly Dashwood, and the companionship of a dozen other girls, all more or less well up in mundane experience, Esther Fleming was bringing back just the same honest simple heart to her Devonshire home, this bright June day, as she had carried with her when she

quitted it last in the month of January.

'Be sure you write to me to-morrow,' were Millicent Dashwood's last words to her, after an indefinite number of parting kisses; 'and pray give my love to cousin David; and mind you don't think any more of that fair-haired Viking, Esther, dear. It would be so dreadful if he was only a Wiltshire farmer after all!'

Millicent, like many other very lively, good-tempered people, had a knack of saying something not perfectly agreeable at parting from her friends; something that, childish and unpremeditated though it might seein, contained a lurking bitterness at bottom. Jane, on the other hand, after being far from amiable in her manner to Esther during the last half-hour of the journey, took leave of her with a really warm handpressure, and with a few words about her having been kind to Milly at school, which went straight to Esther's heart.

Poor Jane Dashwood! I believe hers is the best character of the two,' she thought, when she had seen the last of their two bright faces on the Bath platform. 'And yet, Jane's will be the most ruined by such a life as they seem to lead. Milly hasn't depth enough to be thoroughly spoilt. She will never do anything very good or very bad while she lives. Poor Jane! I should like to know more about her and this Arthur Peel; and I do hope she will marry him, and not Mr. Chichester. That was not a nice allusion of Miss Milly's to Wiltshire farmers. I am quite sure none but a gentleman could speak as that young man spoke.'

From which soliloquy you have, I hope, gathered, reader, that Esther is not to be a model heroine in spite of all the good things I have been saying of her. What model heroine would be annoyed at a little friendly playful spite? What model heroine would have the impropriety to vindicate, even to herself, a good-looking member of the other sex, of whose name, hot to say station in life, she was wholly ignorant?

'I wish I could find out the truth VOL. V.-NO. XXVI.

of this subject,' pursued Miss Fleming, in thought, if it were only for the sake of having a small triumph over Milly. What a school-girl I have become, though, to care about such nonsense; as if it can matter in the least to me whether that fairhaired, broad-shouldered, young gentleman, whom I shall never see again, is the son of a farmer or of a bishop.'

Esther drew herself up in imagination at the bare supposition her own brain had hazarded; and, I have no doubt, would have forgotten the stranger's existence long before she reached her own home had fate and the exigencies of railway travelling so willed it; but at Exeter she happened to pass and repass him on the platform about twenty-eight times while waiting for the North Devon train; and at Barnstable she had scarcely taken her place outside the Lynton coach before the Viking himself was scated opposite her. If these were not inexorable workings of fate what else were they? Esther took no trouble to contend against a destiny so obviously forced upon her; and answered in a very cheerful and unforbidding manner when the young stranger began some of those meteorological remarks with which all Englishmen find it easiest to get over the first or inaugural difficulties of chance made acquaintanceship.

Never having myself had personal intercourse with a Viking, I am, of course, unable to say whether the stranger bore, or did not bear, upon his face that marked hereditary resemblance which Milly Dashwood had made out for him. He was, at all events, a fine, handsome-looking, English lad-well-grown, sunburnt, fair-haired, with more perhaps of vigorous strength and health than of intellect upon his face; but with an open smile upon his rather large mouth, and a keen slightly-audacious hardihood in his blue eyes, which were not at all displeasing in Miss Fleming's sight.

'I am sure my fishing-rod is in your way, he remarked, when as much had been got out of the weather and the immediate neighbourhood of Barnstable as was possible.

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