you, and could not win you. I look but to my own self-respect in the matter. I know your sex better than you know yourselves. Were I to carry that letter, you would thank me now, but by-and-by despise me. Now, as I mean you to be my wife, I will not risk your contempt. Why not take my horse, put whom you like on him, and so convey the letter to Mr. Gaunt?"

Now this was all the fair mourner wanted; so she said,—

"No, no, she would not be beholden to him for anything; he had spoken harshly to her, and misjudged her cruelly, cruelly,—oh! oh! oh!"

Then he implored her to grant him this small favor; then she cleared up, and said, Well, sooner than bear malice, she would. He thanked her for granting him that favor. She went off with the letter, saying,—

"I will be back anon."

But once she got clear, she opened the door again, and peeped in at him gayly, and said she,—

"Why not ask me who wrote the letter, before you compared me to that French coquette?"—and, with this, made him an arch curtsy, and tripped away.

Mr. George Neville opened his eyes with astonishment. This arch question, and Kate's manner of putting it, convinced him the obnoxious missive was not a love-letter at all. He was sorry now, and vexed with himself, for having called her a coquette, and made her cry. After all, what was the mighty favor she had asked of him? To carry a sealed letter from somebody or other to a person who, to be sure, had been her lover, but was so no longer,—a simple act of charity and civility; and he had refused it in injurious terms.

He was glad he had lent his horse, and almost sorry he had not taken the letter himself.

To these chivalrous self-reproaches succeeded an uneasy feeling that perhaps the lady might retaliate somehow. It struck him, on reflection, that the arch query she had let fly at him was accompanied with a certain sparkle of the laughing eye, such as ere now had, in his experience, preceded a stroke of the feminine claw.

As he walked up and down, uneasy, awaiting the fair one's return, her father came up, and asked him to dine and sleep. What made the invitation more welcome was, that it in reality came from Kate.

"She tells me she has borrowed your horse," said the Squire; "so, says she, I am bound to take care of you till day-light; and, indeed, our ways are perilous at night."

"She is an angel!" cried the lover, all his ardor revived by this unexpected trait. "My horse, my house, my hand, and my heart are all at her service, by night and day."

Mr. Peyton, to wile away the time before dinner, invited him to walk out and see—a hog, deadly fat, as times went. But Neville denied himself that satisfaction, on the plea that he had his orders to await Miss Peyton's return where he was. The Squire was amused at his excessive docility, and winked, as much as to say, "I have been once upon a time in your plight," and so went and gloried in his hog alone.

The lover fell into a delicious reverie. He enjoyed, by anticipation, the novel pleasure of an evening passed all alone with this charming girl. The father, being friendly to his suit, would go to sleep after dinner; and then, by the subdued light of a wood-fire, he would murmur his love into that sweet ear for hours, until the averted head should come round by degrees, and the delicious lips yield a coy assent. He resolved the night should not close till he had surprised, overpowered, and secured his lovely bride.

These soft meditations reconciled him for a while to the prolonged absence of their object.

In the midst of them, he happened to glance through the window; and he saw a sight that took his very breath away, and rooted him in amazement to the spot. About a mile from the house, a lady in a scarlet habit was galloping across country as the crow flies. Hedge, ditch, or brook, nothing stopped her an instant; and as for the pace,—