speak as you did? If you have thought me extravagant about money, why not tell me so?"

Mr. Roberts had not the courage to be true to himself and to his wife, and tell her all he had thought and felt. He answered in a hurried and evasive manner.

"I don't know what made me so irritable, my dear Fanny. Spend money as you please, only forgive and love me. I cannot forgive myself for having caused you so much pain, you must think me so very unkind."

"Let it all be forgotten," said Fanny. "I knew that you could not be really unkind. I was wrong for feeling so much about it."

They both agreed that they would avoid such painful subjects for the future.

Amy was rejoiced, when her friends came to fulfil their engagement the next morning, to see that harmony was restored between them. They seemed, she thought, even more than usually attentive and affectionate in their manner towards each other. When Amy was exhibiting her school to Mr. Roberts, she called his attention to her nice wash room for the children. There were tubs, and basins, and all proper washing apparatus, nicely arranged; and the appearance of the

children testified to their proper application. Mr. Roberts expressed his particular approbation of this part of the establishment.

"Come here, Fanny," he said to his wife; "come and praise Amy for her faithful attention to this most essential means of elevating and improving the poor. See what a complete washing apparatus she has for them."

"This is your wife's doings," said Amy. "She stipulated that the money she gave should be used for this purpose. It is her good judgment you must praise.”

Roberts looked pleased, and Fanny was touched by Amy's thoughtful kindness. They saw the children go through all their various exercises; then the babies put to bed, to take their morning nap, and the larger children let out into the play-ground, and heard their merry voices at play.

"Every morning," said Amy, "the teacher gives them a short lesson in religion and morals, by means of familiar anecdotes and simple stories. Our great object is to teach the children to speak their own thoughts, and lay open their own minds, in order that, knowing their peculiarities and wants, the right instruction may be given them. We never allow any spectators at that time; for

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we consider their religious sentiments and their childish confidence as sacred, and that it would be a breach of faith to exhibit them; to say nothing of the danger of making them hypocrites or egotists."

"The only objection I have to make to your school, Amy," said Fanny, as they were walking home, "is, that the schoolmistress has in her hand no birch rod, held up perpendicularly before her face, as a wholesome terror to the little evil-doers. How came you not to bring them up in the good old way in which the wisest and best were educated? Besides, you have not taught them to make their manners to you every time you speak to them, as aunt Hetty used to tell me I ought to. You are a radical, after all."

CHAPTER VIII.

"And forward though I canna see,
I guess an fear."

BURNS.

THUS did Amy pass the first year of her lover's absence, exacting from the hours, as they passed, a tribute of happy recollections. She performed all her duties to her father with such cheerful exactness, that he could find no fault with her. She did not neglect any of the just claims of society. She read, she studied, she thought, more than she ever had before. All her faculties seemed to be ripening under the influence of the pure and elevated love which had awakened her soul to its highest freedom. In her visits to the poor, while entering into their trials and feelings, she acquired a deeper and juster knowledge of human nature, and therefore a truer reverence for it. To Fanny, she was as she ever had been-a faithful friend always speaking the truth in love to her-ever guarding her against those faults which she

feared, if indulged in, would eventually prove fatal to her peace.

There was another source of anxiety in Amy's heart, with regard to Fanny and her husband. She feared they wanted the habit, founded on principle, of an entire and unreserved expression of all their feelings, whatever they might be, to each other; they had not a determined purpose, that their thoughts, their every action and desire, their most trifling joys and sorrows- their whole souls, should stand all undisguised before the other, in the simplicity of truth. Amy also apprehended that they neither of them possessed that faith in the reality of their spiritual nature, which can alone secure the happiness of married life from that slow and gradual but certain decay, brought on by the little collisions, the every day trials of temper, the personal dislikes, which sometimes spring up when the charm which belongs to a less intimate and more imaginative connexion is dissolved. Without an implicit reliance on that spiritual foundation of all true love, how could they possess an abiding faith in the immortality of their union, dependent only on their remaining worthy of each other's affection by a continual growth in excellence ?