possibilities of life, and find her present existence intolerable.

It might have been a presentiment which made her mind so full of this thought on this hot, beautiful summer's day, when she lay on her low couch beside the great window, gazing out at the glowing valley, and watching the shadows change as the sun slowly advanced.

Presently there was a tap at the door, and Elaine came in. She brought fresh roses for the invalid's glasses, and, as she crossed the room, her godmother watched her keenly. The girl shut the door quietly and crossed the carpet, neither stamping nor scuffling. Her manners had been well attended to, but as she advanced it struck Miss Willoughby that her step lacked the elasticity which one associates with youth; she thought at that moment she would have preferred to see Elaine hurl herself into the room, and skip and dance for joy of the beautiful weather.

The niece kissed her aunt in her usual methodical fashion, and then, fetching the vases, began the duty of putting fresh flowers and water, much as she would have begun to fold a hem or stitch a seam. This done, she sat still for some few minutes, thinking apparently of nothing, and with her dull, handsome eyes fixed on the distance.

At last she said:

"Martha's field is being cut to-day, and they say, if we get some rain by-and-by, there ought to be a fine aftermath."

"Dear me! Martha's field being cut already! How the years fly!" said Miss Ellen, with a sigh.

"Oh, do you think so? I think they drag," said Elaine, rather suddenly; and then repeated, as if to herself, "They drag for me."

Miss Willoughby felt for the girl, but her sense of what was fitting compelled her to utter a platitude.

"Time always passes more slowly for the young," she said. "When you are my age—"

"That will be in twenty-two years," said Elaine.

She said no more, but somehow her tone implied that she did not wish to live twenty-two years, and to the elder woman it sounded very sad.

She looked wistfully at her niece, wondering if it would be possible to get her sisters to see that some amusement beyond the annual school-feast and tea at one or two farmhouses was necessary for the young.

She longed to say that youth seemed so long because of the varied emotions and experiences crowded into it—emotions which were lifelong, minutes of revelation which seemed like years, hours in which one lived an age. But she knew Charlotte would feel it most unfitting to talk of emotions to a child, and dimly she began to feel sure that Charlotte must be wrong, or that somebody was wrong, that Elaine's was not a happy nor a normal state of girlhood.

Just then Miss Emily Willoughby entered the room. She was the youngest of the four, and rather handsome, though her style of hair was unbecoming, and her dress an atrocity.

"Is Elaine here? Oh, yes, I see she is. Elaine, Jane is ready for your walk, and I should like you to go along the valley to Poole, and tell Mrs. Battishill to send up twenty pounds of strawberries for preserving, as soon as they are ripe."

Elaine rose, with a face expressing neither displeasure nor distaste. She merely said, "Yes, Aunt Emily;" and, taking up her tray of dead flowers, left the room and closed the door behind her.

Miss Ellen's eyes followed her anxiously, and, as the footsteps died away along the passage, she lay back among her cushions and a slight flush rose in her white face.

"Emily," she said, "I should like to have a little talk with you."

"That is just what I have come up for," said her sister, seating herself in Elaine's vacated chair, and taking out her knitting. "About this work from Helbronner's, isn't it? Well, my dear, we have just been discussing it among ourselves, and have come to the conclusion to send back the design. It will not do, my dear Ellen, as I know you will agree. It would be considered quite Popish by the villagers, and, as Mr. Hill would not like to object to it if it were our work, it would be placing him in a most awkward position."

Miss Ellen fixed her soft, questioning eyes on her sister's face, but soon removed them, with a sigh of resignation. Emily's mind was full of the design for the new altar-cloth, and it would be useless at such a moment to appeal to her on the subject of her niece's future. She could but lie still and hear the pros and cons respecting a design of cross intertwined with lilies, which design Miss Emily, for some inscrutable reason, seemed to consider appropriate only to the Church of Rome. Presently, through the open window could be heard Elaine and the maid setting out for their walk, and again Miss Willoughby caught herself wishing that the girl's footfall had had more of girlish buoyancy about it.

CHAPTER III.

Elaine Brabourne's feelings, as she went up the Combe, along the path which Allonby had trod before her, were about as different from his as anything that could possibly be imagined. She was not thinking much of anything in particular, but her predominant sensation was annoyance and resentment that her aunt should send her all the way to Poole on such a hot afternoon.

It was about a quarter-past four, and the sunbeams were beginning to take that rich golden tinge which tells that the middle day—the "white light" so worshipped by Constable—is past. Tea at six and light supper at nine was the rule at Edge Willoughby, and so Elaine always went for a walk at four o'clock in the summer-time—at which hour her aunts affirmed "the great heat of the day to be past."

The girl had never in her life been for a walk by herself. Jane had been her companion for the last fifteen years, and Jane's legs preferred an equable and leisurely method of progression along a good road, with, if possible, some such goal as Mrs. Battishill's farm, and a prospect of new milk, or perhaps junket. Consequently, country-bred though she was, Elaine was almost a stranger to rambles and scrambles up the cliff, to running races, scaling precipices, bird's-nesting, or any of those pursuits which usually come as naturally to the girl as to the boy who is reared "far from the maddening crowd."

Had she had a companion to suggest such sports, they would have been delightful to her; but hers was eminently an imitative and not an original mind, so she walked along passively at Jane's side, letting the parasol, which had been given her to protect her complexion, drag behind her, its point making a continuous trail in the white dust.

She was walking through a scene of beauty such as might have moved a far less emotional temperament than Allonby's. Behind her back were the waters of the bay, one sheet of flame in the vivid light, while here and there gleamed the sails of some proud ship steaming slowly down the Channel. The road she was treading ran along the western side of the valley; to her right all was deep, mysterious shadow, and beyond it the lofty swell of the more easterly of the two hills which bounded Edge Combe. High on the side of the Copping, as this eastern hill was called, was the long white front of Edge Willoughby, and a full view of the terrace glowing with its crimson and scarlet glory of climbing geraniums.

Every gateway that they passed disclosed a wealth of luxuriant grass, almost as tall as Elaine herself, ready and waiting for the mower's hand. The white butterflies flew here and there, dancing with glee. The sunshine, striking through the larch plantation on the left, flung bars of light and shadow across the road; and under the trees the fern-fronds were rearing their lovely heads,