ver taken the trouble to convert them to another faith."

"I wish you would not say these things to me," cried she with much
emotion. "You have a way of throwing doubts upon everything and
everybody, that always makes me miserable, and I ask myself afterwards,
'Is there nothing to be believed?' Is no one to to be trusted?"

"Not a great many, I am sorry to say," sighed he. "It's no bright
testimony to the goodness of the world, that the longer a man lives the
worse he thinks of it. I surely saw the flutter of white muslin through
the trees yonder. Oh dear, how much softer my heart is than I knew of! I
feel a sort of choking in the throat as I draw near this dear old place.
Yes, there she is--Florence herself. I remember her way of waving a
handkerchief. I'll answer it as I used to do." And he stood up in the
boat and waved his handkerchief over his head with a wide and circling
motion. "Look! She sees it, and she's away to the house at speed. How
she runs! She could not have mustered such speed as that when I last say
her."

"She has gone to tell Milly, I'm certain."

He made no reply, but covered his face with his hands, and sat silent
and motionless. Meanwhile the boat glided up to the landing-place, and
they disembarked.

"I thought the girls would have been here to meet us," said Miss
Grainger, with a pique she could not repress; but Calvert walked along
at her side, and made no answer.

"I think you know your way here," said she with a smile, as she motioned
him towards the drawing-room.

CHAPTER XXI. THE RETURN.

WHEN Calvert found himself alone in the drawing-room, he felt as if he
had never been away. Everything was so exactly as he left it There was
the sofa drawn close to the window of the flower-garden where Florence
used to recline; there the little work-table with the tall glass that
held her hyacinths, the flowers she was so fond of; there the rug for
her terrier to lie on. Yonder, under the fig-tree, hung the cage with
her favourite canary; and here were the very books she used to read
long ago--Petrarch and Tennyson and Uhland. There was a flower to mark
a place in the volume of Uhland, and it was at a little poem they had
once read together. How full of memories are these old rooms, where we
have dreamed away some weeks of life, if not in love, in something
akin to it, and thus more alive to the influences of externals than if
further gone in the passion! There was not a spot, not a chai