the
creature loved me."

"Crisp is no more a beauty than his master," observed Robin, patting the
dog, who leaped to the caress: "but you cannot like him as well as black
Blanche, or Bright-eye, your mistress's silken favourites, who show
their teeth at the poor fellow whenever he approaches the entrance?"

"Bright-eye is a trifle conceited, I grant; but Blanche is like a lamb,
only what can she do? Crisp comes gammocking up, wagging his tail,
seeming in the best of good humours; poor Blanche receives him kindly,
and sometimes walks before him to the buttery; then, all of a sudden,
just as she is thinking how very glad she is to meet Crisp--thinking,
too, that notwithstanding his shaggy coat and crooked legs, he is a
thousand times more to be esteemed and liked than the fine and conceited
Bright-eye--at that very time, and just as suddenly as you fly into your
passions, Crisp stops, grins, twirls his tail, and will neither return
her civility nor accept her invitation. What can poor Blanche do,
Robin?"

This statement was made by the pretty Puritan with a mingling of
simplicity and shrewdness, for which, to have looked in her innocent
face, one would scarcely have given her credit. The tears of youth dry
as quickly as the dews in summer; and the young heart rebounds from
grief as swiftly as the arrow from the bow. Robin looked upon her with
doubting, but with strong affection. He knew, though he struggled with
hope against the conviction, that Dalton's friendship would hardly
induce him to bestow his daughter upon such an unpropitious personage as
himself; and he felt assured--or, at least, believed, in his more gloomy
moments, that so it must be--no woman could, by any possibility, feel
affection for him. He was also, at times, under the full assurance that
Barbara only laughed at his addresses; and though she had more than once
given him all reasonable encouragement, he most industriously placed it
to the account of the universality of female coquetry, a theory in which
he most conscientiously believed.

Without, therefore, any notice of her little fable, or the visible
inference so easily drawn from the comparison between Crisp and himself,
he started off from the subject nearest his heart, with an abrupt
inquiry as to whether her mistress would be likely to go abroad that
evening.

"I dare say she will come out in the twilight," replied Barbara, who had
sufficient of the sensitiveness of her sex to feel deepl