ed up hot and scalding into Ursula's eyes. Oh, how she
wished she could be dismissed like Betsy! She turned those two little
oceans of trouble piteously, without knowing it, upon Northcote, who had
said something to her, without being able to reply to him. And
Northcote, who was but a young man, though he was a fiery political
Dissenter, and who had come to the Parsonage with a curious mixture of
pleasure and reluctance, immediately threw down any arms that nature
might have provided him with, and fell in love with her there and then
on the spot! to his own absolute consternation. This was how it
happened. The moment was not romantic, the situation was not sublime. A
little motherless housekeeper crying because her father scolded her in
public for a piece of bad cookery. There is nothing in this to make an
idyll out of; but such as it was, it proved enough for Horace Northcote;
he yielded himself on the spot. Not a word was said, for Ursula felt
that if she tried to talk she must cry, and anything further from her
troubled thoughts than love it would be impossible to imagine; but then
and there, so far as the young man was concerned, the story began. He
talked very little for the rest of the meal, and Ursula did not exert
herself, though she recovered slightly when the mutton turned out to be
very good, and was commended; but what was the mutton in comparison with
her _entrees_, which she had made with her own hands, and which were a
failure? She was reduced to silence, and she thought that the stranger
at her left hand was nice, because he did not bother her, and was
content with a very little talk.

"Oh, Phoebe, did you hear papa about those _entrees_?" she cried, when
they reached the drawing-room; and sitting down on the stool by the fire
which Janey usually appropriated, she cried, poor child, with
undisguised passion. "I had made them myself; I had been busy about them
all day; I read the cookery-book till my head ached, and took such
pains! and you heard what he said."

"Yes, dear, I heard him; but he did not think what he was saying, it
never occurred to him that it was you. Don't shake your little head, I
am sure of it; you know, Ursula, your papa is very agreeable and very
clever."

"Yes, I know he is clever; and he can be nice when he likes--"

"Did you like it?" cried Janey, bursting in, red-eyed and dishevelled in
her morning frock. "Oh, no, I am not dressed, I don't mean to, to let
him get the better o