had congratulated them on their transferrence from that ancient tenement to a modern habitation. Diana and this lady got on very well together, but between the Vicaress and Elizabeth there prevailed a quiet antipathy.

It was, doubtless, her own fault that Elizabeth was lonely. Her sisters had their little batches of dear friends, and visited a good deal in a quiet way soon after their father's death, and entertained their acquaintance with afternoon tea; but Elizabeth's soul rebelled against this humdrum sociality; her footsteps refused to tread this beaten track of every-day provincial life. She preferred lonely wanderings in the very teeth of January's north-easters, on the common and in the familiar lanes where she had walked so joyously with her lover in the brief sweet days of courtship.

If she had cherished the faintest hope of his return to her, she might have been patient, she might have endured the weariness of the present, cheered by a fair vision of the future. But she deluded herself with no such hope. She had, on the contrary, a settled conviction that, once having put his hand to the plough, for Malcolm Forde there would be no turning backward. She had lured him for a little while out of his chosen path; but having broken

loose from her feeble snare, he was the very last of men to return to the net.

'He was always sorry that he loved me,' she thought, and there was a look of rapture on his face when he preached his farewell sermon, like the joy of a man who has escaped from a great peril.'

They heard no more of Lord Paulyn's approaching marriage, standing almost alone, so far as Hawleigh proper went, in the proud privilege of the dowager's acquaintance; but Gertrude and Diana were not slow to retail the news in their morning calls and five-o'clock teas. Miss Ramsay and her possessions were enlarged upon-the husbands and brothers referred to as authorities upon the commercial worldevery one having his pet theory as to which Ramsay was the great Ramsay, who had begun by wheeling barrows; one party clinging tenaciously to a certain Peter Ramsay, Son, and Bilge, proprietors of the famous Red Cross steam-packet line; and another pinning its faith to Alexander Ramsay, the great contractor. Fashionable newspapers were watched, but shed no light upon the subject, nor did the local journals give tongue.

'I don't believe there's a syllable of truth in the whole story,' exclaimed the outspoken Blanche during one of these discussions, from which Elizabeth was

absent. I daresay it's all that nasty old woman's invention. Lord Paulyn was desperately in love with my sister Lizzie, and made her ever so many offers. And she, wicked old thing, wants us all to go and bury ourselves in some dead-and-alive Belgian town, where we should be driven mad by the carillon ringing every half-hour from the rickety old church

towers.'

Miss Luttrell reproved her sister severely for the impropriety of these remarks, and the company generally looked incredulous. It was not to be supposed that any reasonable being would believe in Elizabeth's rejection of the Lord of Ashcombe. He might have hung about her a good deal-compromising her by his attentions, to the rupture of that foolish engagement with dear Mr. Forde; but to suppose that he had laid his coronet at her feet-that he had said to her, Be mistress of Ashcombe in Devon, and Harberry Castle in Yorkshire, the Grange near Newmarket, and the old family mansion in St. James'ssquare'-and that she had deliberately rejected him -to believe this was too much for the imaginative power of Hawleigh.

Yet the day came before very long when the eyes of Hawleigh were opened, and the eyebrows of Hawleigh lifted in surpassing wonder.

CHAPTER II.

O, the little more, and how much it is,
And the little less, and what worlds away!'

THE four sisters had inhabited the smart little box on the Boroughbridge-road about four months, when Elizabeth's scanty stock of patience came to an end. Gertrude's small despotism, Diana's languors and affectations and headaches, she could abide no longer. She was brought so much closer to these evils in that circumscribed abode. She had no hillside orchard whither to flee at any hour of the day or evening, even on cold spring nights, when the young moon was sailing through the clouds, and when Hawleigh had shut its shutters and lighted its lamps for the night, and it would have been an outrage of all the proprieties to go out for a walk; no airy turret, half bedchamber and half sitting-room, where she could read or muse in solitude; only a neat little square bedroom, divided from Gertrude's by so fragile a partition that its inmates were wont to whisper like conspirators in their vesper talk.

The Vicar's death, too, had given Gertrude a new
She assumed the re-

position in the home circle.

sponsibility of their future life. She had chosen and taken the house, and selected the furniture they were to keep; and regulated the mode and manner of their new life, which friends and acquaintances of the past they were chiefly to cherish, and which they were gently and graciously to let drop. Gertrude kept the purse and the keys, regulated the expenditure, and held possession of the narrow store closets. The younger sisters could hardly order an extra cup of tea without permission, or breakfast in bed perchance on a bleak winter morning without inventing some ailment as an excuse for that indulgence. Diana submitted from sheer laziness.

'I must live with some one who will order my dinner and pour out my tea for me,' she said; 'and it may as well be Gertrude as any one else. I daresay if I were rich enough to have a confidential maid, she would tyrannise over me.'

One day, towards the end of March, Elizabeth astonished her sisters by declaring her intention of going abroad straightway.

'I shall go over to Dieppe,' she said, ' and wander through Normandy, and then make my way somehow to Belgium-my geographical ideas are the vaguest,