te cheerfully to their various occupations. I,
seeing the gloaming gently and dim falling over the earth, walked out of
the house into the garden, and took my way toward the river. I passed an
arbor in which Stella and I had loved to sit and watch the stream, and
talk and read Miss Austen's novels. Stella was there now, with a
well-thumbed copy of "Pride and Prejudice" in her hand.

"Come and sit down, May," she apostrophized me. "Do listen to this about
Bingley and Wickham."

"No, thank you," said I, abstractedly, and feeling that Stella was not
the person to whom I could confide my woe. Indeed, on scanning mentally
the list of my acquaintance, I found that there was not one in whom I
could confide. It gave me a strange sense of loneliness and aloofness,
and hardened me more than the reading of a hundred satires on the
meannesses of society.

I went along the terrace by the river-side, and looked up to the
left--traces of Sir Peter again. There was the terrace of Deeplish Hall,
which stood on a height just above a bend in the river. It was a fine
old place. The sheen of the glass houses caught the rays of the sun and
glanced in them. It looked rich, old, and peaceful. I had been many a
time through its gardens, and thought them beautiful, and wished they
belonged to me. Now I felt that they lay in a manner at my feet, and my
strongest feeling respecting them was an earnest wish that I might never
see them again.

Thus agreeably meditating, I insensibly left our own garden and wandered
on in the now quickly falling twilight into a narrow path leading across
a sort of No-Man's-Land into the demesne of Sir Peter Le Marchant. In my
trouble I scarcely remarked where I was going, and with my eyes cast
upon the ground was wishing that I could feel again as I once had felt,
when

"I nothing had, and yet enough;"

and was sadly wondering what I could do to escape from the net in which
I felt myself caught, when a shadow darkened the twilight in which I
stood, and looking up I saw Sir Peter, and heard these words:

"Good-evening, Miss Wedderburn. Are you enjoying a little stroll?"

By, as it seemed to me, some strange miracle all my inward fears and
tremblings vanished. I did not feel afraid of Sir Peter in the least. I
felt that here was a crisis. This meeting would show me whether my fears
had been groundless, and my own vanity and self-consciousness of
unparalleled proportions, or whether I had judged truly, and