ow herself away upon this obscure stranger, for you cannot
conceal it from me that you love him?"

"Throw myself away! Obscure stranger! You are unkind William. Love
him! it will be time enough to grant my love when it is asked for. It
does not become me, perhaps, to say it, but Mr. Pownal is not here to
answer for himself, and for that reason I will defend him. There lives
not the woman who might not be proud of the love of so noble and
pure a heart. But you are not in a humor to hear reason," she added,
rising, "and I will leave you until your returning good sense shall
have driven away suspicions equally unfounded and unjust."

"Stay, Anne, stop, sister," cried Bernard, as with a heightened color
she hastened out of the room. "She is too much offended," he said to
himself, "to heed me, and I must wait for a more favorable opportunity
to renew the conversation. I have seen this fancy gradually coming on,
and, fool that I was, was afraid to speak for fear of making things
worse. I thought it might be only a passing whim, like those which
flutter twenty times through girls' silly heads before they are
married, and was unwilling to treat it as of any consequence. But does
Anne mean to deceive me? It is not at all like her. She never did so
before. No, she has courage enough for anything, and is incapable of
deception. But these foolish feelings strangely affect young women
and--young men, too. She must, herself, be deceived. She cannot be
acquainted with the state of her own heart. Yet it may not have gone
so far that it cannot be stopped. I had other plans for her, nor will
I give them up. Father! mother! Pooh! nothing can be done with them.
He would not see her lip quiver or a tear stand in her eye, if it
could be prevented at the expense of half his fortune, and mother
always thinks both perfection. No, if anything is to be done it must
be with Anne herself, or Pownal, perhaps. Yet I would not make the
little minx unhappy. But to be the brother-in-law of the son of an
insane basket-maker! It is too ridiculous."

No two persons could be more unlike in temperament, and in many
respects in the organization of their minds, than William Bernard and
his sister. She, the creature of impulse, arriving at her conclusions
by a process like intuition: he, calm, thoughtful, deliberately
weighing and revising every argument before he made up his mind: she,
destitute of all worldly prudence and trusting to the inspirations
of an