aid Miss Grantley with her grave smile. "I hope, my dear young
friends here are mostly happy with me at school, but there are times
when we don't feel altogether in harmony, and lessons are not learned,
and our tempers get the upper hand, and the sun seems to have gone
behind a cloud and the world turns the wrong way, till the storm lowers
and breaks, and then come regret and forbearance, and the stillness, and
'the gentle shining after rain.' Life is often a rather difficult
school, and our education in this world is not completed without trouble
and the discipline of pain and the finding of strength through weakness
and of truth through error. But come, old lady, I am not to be led into
a lecture, especially to a person of your years and experience, so tell
me what you mean,--where am I to find 'a love story,' as you call it,
that shall be without bitter-sweet, and come to a bright ending without
going through a dark passage?"

"Well, to tell you the truth, my dear, I was first thinking of my own
very happy, but at the same time very commonplace and unromantic married
life with Mr. Parmigan, who, as you know, was in the Bank of England,
and came home as regularly as the clock struck half-past five; but then
I was trying to recall what Mrs. Schwartz the cooper's wife was telling
you that day when we went into her house out of the rain after our long
walk from Fernside."

"What! has that pretty, fair, round rosy-cheeked German woman a romance
in her life?" asked Annie Bowers. "I declare I've often thought there
must have been some kind of sentimental recollection in those great
dreamy blue eyes. What a fine, strong-looking man her husband is too!
Marion and I have often stood looking into the shed while he has been at
work making tubs and casks, and sometimes we have heard him singing some
German song as we walked that way. He speaks English so well too; but
Mrs. Schwartz has a pretty buzzing accent, even the two flaxen-headed
children have caught it, and talk in what seems to be a German idiom."

"Well, would you like me to try and repeat Mrs. Schwartz's story as she
has told it to me?" said our governess. "I must let you know, however,
that she and I are very old friends, for I have been to see her over and
over again, and she and her children have been here to tea several times
in the holidays, her husband fetching them home in the evening. I was
selfish in that, for I wanted to refresh my own ear with the German
a