Grandfather was distressed by my words. And he was all kindness and affection to me. But he was unable to deny that Donald was treating me badly. He was grieved, surprised, puzzled, he said; but he could not deny the fact. "And what, after all, have I done to merit such treatment, grandfather?" I said. "If Donald had ever-had ever-felt for me as he once professed to feel, surely he could not have grown thus rancorous. It is unreasonable cruel!"

I broke down, and cried bitterly. My womanly pride would have prevented me from yielding to this weakness in Donald's presence; but I was so sure of grandfather's sympathy, so confident that he would not misinterpret my emotion, that I gave way to it, after a momentary struggle, unrestrainedly.

At other times my pride rose, and my sense of justice was outraged by his frigid demeanor. What had I done, after all? How had I merited to be so treated? I had never willingly deceived him by word or deed. It was too harsh, too unreasonable. I would shake off my depression, and care no more for one who evidently had ceased to care for me.

But whatever other phase of feeling I passed through, I never attained to that of not caring. Mother expressed a little surprise at my determination to go to Woolling. Would they behave kindly and considerately to me there? She was afraid they would be rough, and that I should find myself in an uncongenial atmosphere. But she did not seriously oppose my going from the first; and when grandfather told ' her that I was running the risk of growing morbidly sensitive and depressed, and that a change

pathetic persons-would do me good in mind and body, she even urged me to depart.

"Have no fear, my Nancy, that I shall compromise your feminine dignity. Donald shall fancy nothing but the simple truth, so far as I am able to set it before him."

However, I still persisted in my project of going to Woolling for a little time. I wrote to Aunt Cudberry, who returned a cordial invitation to me to come and stay for as long a time as I could. Grandfather, after a little opposition, came round to my plan. In truth, I felt that some change was becoming absolutely necessary for me. I was nervous, and wretched. I had now no special active duties to perform for my mother. I could be well spared for a week or two. Even grandfather would miss me less, now that he had Donald. The daily meeting with Donald-hoping each morning to find in him some semblance of his old self, some beam of the former frank kindness toward me in his eyes-and the daily disappointment of his cold and distant greeting, was almost more than I could bear. I felt so helpless, so unable to appeal to our old affectionate friendship. My tongue was tied, my spirit was fettered, by the remembrance of Donald's declaration at Water-Eardley. How could I go to him and beg him to take me back into his heart? How could I do so-now? My feeling toward him fluctuated. Sometimes I thought that, but for the remembrance of that day when he had asked me to be his wife, I could have knelt down before him and taken his hand, and cried, “Donald, let us love each

Accordingly one day I had my clothes packed in a little black box, and quietly mounted in a fly from Horsingham, to be driven to Woolling. Mr. Cudberry had offered to send for me; but I preferred to go in my own fashion.

As the fly left Mortlands garden gate Donald appeared, on his way home to dinner, and the driver of the fly knowing him, and seeing him glance curiously to discover the occupant of the vehicle, touched his hat and pulled up to give Donald an opportunity of speaking to me. I was heartily vexed at the man's proceeding; but there was no help for it.

"Oh, Anne!

Is it you?" stammered Donald, in considerable surprise, when he saw me. "Yes; I-I-am going-"

"Going! You are not going away?"

There was more impulse and warmth in his manner as he leaned forward into the coach to look at me than I had encountered from him for many a long day. For once his cold manner would have been the best for me. It would have given me courage. The little gleam of sunshine melted me. I could scarcely speak, and made a desperate and not wholly successful struggle to keep back my tears.

"I am going on a visit. I-I have not been quite well, and the-the-change is thought good for me. Good-by."

I signed to the driver to go on. As he drove away I leaned back in a corner of the coach and covered my face with my handkerchief; not, however, before I had seen Donald's face for one brief moment as he stood, hat in hand, beside the garden gate and looked after me. He looked very sad. There was a wistful, tender expression in his eyes, and his forehead was knitted into painful lines. It seemed as if-almost as if he was sorry to see me depart.

And yet how could that be? me that my presence irked him he could not regret me. Besides

CHAPTER XLVI.

I OCCUPIED a rambling, sloping-floored chamber in the old part of the house at Woolling. I had chosen it myself. A long occupation of the guest-chamber at Woolling was dreadful to my imagination. It had been prepared for me by Uncle Cudberry's express order. He never interfered in the household arrangements save when his wife or daughters sought to relax his tight grip of the purse-strings. But on this occasion he had, as he told me, explicitly commanded that the best spare room in his house should be prepared for me. However, I persuaded him (after having tenanted it for one night) to allow me to change my quarters.

The best room was stuffy, low-pitched, smallwindowed, carpeted, curtained, dreary beyond description. Drab hangings of some thick woolen stuff excluded all air from the bed, whereon were piled feather-stuffed pillows and a great mass of down covered with blankets and counterpanes, which it made one gasp to look upon in the hot summer weather. My new chamber was bare and poorly furnished enough; but one breathed there, and could get a pleasant peep at the landscape behind the house from the oldfashioned lattice windows in the thickness of the wall. These reasons I alleged for wishing to occupy it; but there was, besides, another reason, which I could scarcely avow, but which was a powerful one with me. In the "best" room I should have been exposed to frequent incursions from my cousins, whereas in the old part of the house I was much more secluded and inaccessible.

I think that I rather conciliated the girlsunconsciously I am bound to confess-by removing from the best room. My occupying it at all had been contrary to those mysterious traditional laws which governed the home life of the Cudberry family. That sacred apartment was for elder guests. I was too young and altogether too insignificant to have any right to the dignity which was conferred by sleeping therein.

No limit had been fixed for my stay. I was to remain, Uncle Cudberry said, as long as I liked, and the longer the better. In my own mind I had resolved not to return to Mortlands until Donald should be gone, unless any unexpected circumstance should meanwhile make my presence desirable to my mother or grandfather. But I said nothing about my resolution at Woolling.

The days passed away monotonously, but peacefully on the whole. Little sharp speeches and the general angularity of character which distinguished my cousins hurt me no more as they had once done. My mind and heart were

But, on the whole, as I have said, the days went by peacefully. I was able to spend a good many hours by myself. The inclination for solitude had grown on me of late. The Cudberrys considered it part of my general "mopishness," and, luckily, did not take it as a personal affront to the family. I used to sit up in the slopingfloored room I had chosen and stare out over the landscape for hours at a time. The house would be quite silent-that part of it at all eventsand the summer sunlight would quiver on the floor, and cast there the shadows of the diamondpaned lattice; and the flies would buzz around me with a sleepy sound, and the whole air would seem to be the quintessence of dreamy indolence, which entered into one's very blood.

Once Uncle Cudberry asked me what I did. up there in my room all the morning; and when Imost truthfully answered, "Nothing," he shook his head, and gave me a lecture against listless idleness.

"Oh, Uncle Cudberry," said I, "we are born not only to do, but to be and to suffer. Let me 'be' and 'suffer.' I feel a sort of vegetable life in me when I sit at the open window with the air breathing on my forehead. I don't know that I am altogether idle; I am ‘being.'”

Neither the girls nor poor dear Aunt Cudberry in the least understood this speech; but I think Uncle Cudberry did, for he snubbed Tilly when she screamed out in hilarious disdain of my stupidity, "Good gracious, Anne! A vegetable life! What will you say next? And comparing yourself to a verb-'to be,' 'to do,' or 'to suffer!' Well, for my part, I should be very sorry to get into that condition. I always had an active mind, and always shall have."

Upon which her father told her that an active mind and an active tongue were by no means the same or even similar things. And he took care that I was not molested in my solitary hours after that.

Sam Cudberry was not very frequently at home during the day. To use his own phrase, he "fought shy" of me. I reminded him of unpleasant topics. Indeed, he frankly said that he couldn't bear being made to remember any thing disagreeable; and that he couldn't look at me without remembering how he had been "let in" by Lacer; and he should think that that was disagreeable enough for a fellow, wasn't it? By Jove! In answer to some inquiries of

mine he admitted that the extent to which Gervase Lacer had cheated him was only by defrauding him of the amount he (Sam) was to have received as a bribe for holding his tongue about the fatal race-horse whose failure had ruined us all. "He did want to borrow some ready tin," said Sam, with a cunning grin; "but I wasn't quite so green as all that comes to !-not if S. Cudberry, Junior, was aware of it. But he did me all the same, because I stumped up something to make my sister Tilly hold her tongue. And she got a sort of hold upon me; and she got the money, and I got-nothing! And you catch Tilly giving up a dump when she's once grabbed it! And once, when soft sawder didn't do when I tried to coax her out of what she'd had of me on false pretenses, and I tried to bully her, she threatened to go to the governor and split upon the whole thing then and there. That's a nice kind of sister for a fellow to have, | isn't it? So you see, Anne, you can't wonder at my not particularly enjoying the sight of your countenance at the family dinner-table." I very coolly assured him that our distaste for each other's society was quite mutual, but that so long as I remained the guest of his father and mother I should take care to treat him with civility. And so we remained on perfectly peaceable terms.

dress a rejected wooer. But Tilly did not regard it merely in that light, for she proceeded: "Oh, it's all nonsense never minding! But you would see the family trampled in the mire, for all you'd care, ma. But Bunnys are not going to gallop quite over us, I hope! Not Bunnys!" "This is your friend, Miss Anne," said Sam, suddenly turning to me. "What do you think of this ?"

"Really, Sam, my predominant feeling is surprise. I had no idea that you intended to propose to Barbara."

"Well, p'raps not; but she had, I can tell you."

"I have never, to speak honestly, seen any thing in Barbara's manner toward you which could be taken for encouragement."

Here Henny observed in an audible "aside" that people's notions differed, and that Anne's idea of what was encouragement to a gentleman and what wasn't might possibly vary very widely from the standard of demeanor which was expected in Sir Peter Bunny's daughter. Henrietta was always peculiarly venomous toward me; but I had not the smallest intention of allowing myself to be tempted into a quarrel with her; so I proceeded, addressing Sam

"But though I must render this justice to Barbara, I am very sorry, Sam, for your disappointment. And if your feelings were engaged-"

"Oh, feelings be blowed! You don't fancy I'm a-going to fret myself about her, do you? And as to disappointment, I know whose the loss is, I flatter myself."

garding me sideways sulkily, said, "Well?"

"Well-I-well, then, since you are neither heart-broken nor even greatly disappointed, I confess I don't see what you complain of."

Here I was fallen foul of by the whole party. Even Aunt Cudberry shook her lopsided cap at me, and said,

"Why, deary me, Anne, think what they sprung from, poor things, you know!"

"La, my! Well, there now, never mind, poor dear thing!" said Aunt Cudberry, with an agitated voice, and her most gutta-perchian changes of countenance. A stranger would have supposed her to be smiling affably had he looked merely at her mouth, and to be on the point of crying had he confined his attention to the upper part of her face.

"Never mind, ma!" echoed Tilly. And certainly it was a singular phrase wherewith to ad

The girls were furiously indignant, and Tilly was impelled by the excitement of her wrath to rise to quite lofty regions of eloquence. If Bunnys were to trample on Cudberrys of Woolling, what hold-fast and security remained in the world for law and order? Even Virtue's

rate. And could I-I who had the honor to be, however distantly, connected with that family-excuse and condone the presumptuous temerity of a Bunny? Tilly was sorry for my state of mind if I could do so.

"Why, come," said I, in a momentary lull of the storm I had raised, "after all, the whole matter amounts to this: Miss Bunny and Lady Bunny and Sir Peter may all entertain the highest respect for your family, only Barbara does not like Sam well enough to marry him. You

can't pretend that she is bound to fall in love | with him merely because his name happens to be Cudberry! Suppose a similar thing to take place here, would any of you think yourselves obliged to marry the first man that asked you, whether you liked him or not, just because he had a longer genealogy than you have?"

"One of us!" cried the three sisters in shrill scorn. And then Tilly added, with extraordinary emphasis, "Oh, that's a very different thing!"

And, what is strange, but true, she really thought so.

When Uncle Cudberry came to be told of Sam's unsuccessful suit he displayed no such violent indignation as his children had done; but he was obviously displeased. He vented his displeasure, however, chiefly on the head of Sam for having ever entertained the idea of allying himself with what Uncle Cudberry called "them sort of breed."

"And pray what was you a-going to live on, S. Cudberry, Junior, if I may take the liberty of inquiring?" said he, at supper that evening, in his dryest manner.

Her

"Why, Barbara 'll have something. governor means to shell out pretty handsome for her. Of course I found that out beforehand; and you've been telling me for two or three years past that when I married you'd make some suitable arrangement for me. You know you've said so."

“Ay, ay, if so be you'd ha' married to please me, son Samuel. And as to two or three years, my lad, it's a sight longer ago than that! For you are let me see-how old is our son, Mrs. Cudberry?"

room at about half past ten o'clock that night, when I was startled by a very gentle tap at the door. At that time all was quiet. The household kept early hours, and there was no sound of voice or footstep to be heard. I had put out my candle, and there was no light in my room save a faint glimmer near the window from the starry sky.

I listened nervously, and in about a minute the tap was repeated. By this time my intellect had arrived at the conclusion-doubtless obvious already to the reader-that any person coming to my room with a felonious intention would undoubtedly omit the ceremony of knocking at the door. So I called out softly, "Who is there?"

"Me!" was the ungrammatical but re-assuring response; for I recognized Clementina's voice in the utterance of the monosyllable.

I immediately opened the door and admitted her. She must have groped her way up in the dark, for she held no light in her hand. And, indeed, the regulations as to the quantity of candle allowed per week to each bed-chamber were very stringent at Woolling, and necessitated the greatest care if one desired not to be obliged to go to bed in the dark.

"Why, Clemmy," said I, "is it you? Come in. Is there any thing the matter?" "Oh, nothing particular. It's only-only about me."

I made her come and sit down near me by the window; and, though the night was warm, I threw a shawl over her shoulders, for she had come from her own room in her petticoat and a little thin white jacket, and had removed her shoes in order to tread noiselessly. Her hair

"You're a old bachelor, you know, that's what you are. In fact," looking round on his discomfited offspring, "you're every one of you getting on in life. I don't see much chance for you. Even Sam here, as can do, as you girls can't, go and ask some 'un to have him, it's no go. The lass sends him off with a flea in his ear! Maybe that when I'm under the turf, and Sam Cudberry the younger reigns in my stead, some woman or other 'll marry him to be mistress of Woolling. But on his own merits-dash me if I don't begin to think it's a poor look-out altogether!"

It was in this way that Mr. Cudberry displayed the mortification and ill-humor which Sam's rejection had evidently caused him. His three daughters retired from the table in a quiver of speechless anger, and his wife shed abundant tears. Sam was the most unconcerned of the party.

I really pitied the girls, and would have said some kind or soothing word to them if I had been permitted to do so; but at my first attempt they flounced off to their own rooms, and for once I could sympathize with their irritated feelings.

I was sitting at the open window in my bed

carelessly tucked up with a comb on the other. All this I saw by the starlight, my eyes being accustomed to the dimness. And as Clementina sat down, and, leaning her arm on the window-sill, looked up at the sky, I was struck by something graceful in the outline of her face and figure which I had never noticed there before.

"Oh, Clemmy," said I, impulsively, "why don't you always wear your hair loose? You look so much better."

"What, like this ?"

"Do I disturb you?"

"No; as you see, I was not thinking of going to bed yet a while."

After a good deal of hesitation, and in the peculiar phraseology of the family, which by this time I had learned to comprehend very

fairly, Clemmy at length confided to me that she had a suitor whom she "liked very well" (in non-Cudberry English, was very fond of), and who wished to ask her parents' permission to marry her. But she had always hitherto dissuaded him, on one pretext or another, from speaking to her father. And now the suitor was getting out of patience, and poor Clemmy did not know what to do, and had come to me for advice.

"But, good gracious, Clementina, if you like him, and are willing to marry him, why should you not let him speak to your father?" I exclaimed.

She was silent.

"Is he very poor, or is there any thing in his circumstances which would be likely to make Uncle Cudberry refuse his consent?"

"Oh no! He's-if you'll promise not to tell again without my leave, I'll tell you who it is. It's Mrs. Hodgekinson's son."

So far as I knew, there could be no possible objection to this young man. He was an only son, and his parents were rich farmers, who were much respected in the county.

"Why, Clemmy," I cried, giving her a kiss, "I congratulate you! It seems to me to be a most suitable match in every way."

It was curious to see Clemmy's newly-awakened feelings struggling with the habitual stiffness and hardness of the family manner. She first drew back quite abruptly from my proffered caress, and then returned my kiss timidly, and said, "Oh, thank you, Anne!"

"I remember that-that young Mr. Hodgekinson." I had been on the point of calling him "Mrs. Hodgekinson's son," from the sheer force of example. "I remember that he seemed very gentle and good-tempered."

"Yes; he's very good-tempered."
"And well-looking, I think?"

"I-we all think him quite nice-looking," said Clementina, demurely.

"And his parents are on friendly terms with yours, and you are neighbors; and, upon my word, it seems to me that you could not have made a better choice!"

"Oh, but-" "But what?"

"Why, they thought-we thought-or at least she thought-that he was going to propose to Tilly."

Then it all came out. William Hodgekinson's visits to Woolling had been interpreted by the whole family as having for their object to pay court to "Miss Cudberry." Miss Cudberry came first; that was the rule of the family. Any marrying or givings in marriage which might take place among the Cudberrys ought, in right and justice and propriety, to commence with Miss Cudberry, and the rest might follow in due succession. But perversely to select the youngest of the three sisters, and to pass by the prior claims of the two elder ones, was a high crime and misdemeanor, whose enormity weighed poor Clemmy down, and made her

tremble at the prospect of revealing the proposal that had been made to her.

I consoled her and re-assured her as well as I could. "Your lover"-Clemmy nearly jumped off her chair at the word "did not deceive Tilly by paying her any marked attention, did he?"

"Oh no! At least The fact is, he is afraid of Tilly-awfully afraid of her! But then, of course, you know, we all thought-at least they all thought-naturally, that she was the object of William's coming-Miss Cudberry, you know!"

“Well, well, my dear Clemmy, that can't be helped," I rejoined, rather impatiently. "They were all mistaken, and nobody can be blamed. People don't fall in love by the table of precedence, and I am sure it would be very unreasonable to expect that they should."

In my own mind I had little doubt that Uncle Cudberry would look on the proposed alliance very favorably, and would in no wise resent the fact that it was his youngest, and not his eldest daughter, who was thus sought in marriage; and I tried to convince Clemmy of this, and to point out to her, as delicately as I could, that if she had her father on her side she need not fear any other member of the family.

But Clemmy was in mortal terror of her father; and before she left me she had gained from me a promise, which I suppose was the main object of her coming to me, that I would take upon myself the task of breaking this mighty matter to Uncle Cudberry the next morning.

ΜΟΝΑ.

FROM THE BRETON.

AT even-tide sits Mona, still
In reverie, by the spring;
Her little head is thinking not
Of any happy thing.

For, like a broken string of pearls,
Her silent tears run down;
And in the clear pool absently

Play her bare feet and brown.
A little bird sits on a branch,
And, singing, thus doth say:
"O maiden, with uneasy feet

Stir not the water, pray;
"For when you the water trouble
With restless feet so small,

I can not my likeness see therein,
Nor the little stars at all."
The maiden says: "Oh, fear you not,
Nor, little bird, complain;
The troubled water will soon be 'pure
And mirror-like again.

"But, ah! when oft I wandered here,
Happy, at twilight dim,
With Jannik in the olden time,

Why saidst thou not to him, "Oh, Jannik! Jannik! trouble not The maiden's heart so clear, Lest heaven be mirrored there no more, Lest there no stars appear?'