ire; how very pretty it
is!"

"And this?"

"Oh! that is the old church, and there is Mr. Gray's face at the window.
How good they are! You draw very well, Mr. Newt."

"Do you draw, Miss Wayne?"

"I've had plenty of lessons," replied Hope, smiling; "but I can't draw
from nature very well."

"What do you sketch, then?"

"Well, scenes and figures out of books."

"How very pleasant that must be! That's a better style than mine."

"Why so?"

"Because we can never draw any thing as handsome as it seems to us. You
can go and see the pond with your own eyes, and then no picture will seem
worth having." He paused. "There is another reason, too, I suppose."

"What is that?" asked Hope, looking at her companion.

"Well," he answered, smiling, "because life in books is always so much
better than real life!"

"Is it so?" said Hope, musingly.

"Yes, certainly. People are always brave, and beautiful, and good, in
books. An author may make them do and say just what he and all the world
want them to, and it all seems right. And then they do such splendidly
impossible things!"

"How do they?"

"Why, now, if you and I were in a book at this moment, instead of
standing on this lawn, I might be a knight slaying a great dragon that
was just coming to destroy you, and you--"

"Hope, Hope!" rang the voice from the garden, nearer and more
imperiously.

"And I--might be saved by another knight dashing in upon you, like that
voice upon your sentence," said Hope, smiling.

"No, no," answered Abel, laughing, "that shouldn't be in the book. I
should slay the great dragon who would desolate all Delafield with the
swishing of his scaly tail; then you would place a wreath upon my head,
and all the people would come out and salute me for saving the Princess
whom they loved, and I"--said Abel, after a momentary pause, a shade more
gravely, and in a tone a little lower--"and I, as I rode away, should not
wonder that they loved her."

He looked across the lawn under the pine-trees as if he were thinking of
some story that he had been actually reading. Hope smiled no longer, but
said, quietly,

"Mr. Newt, I am wanted. I must go in. Good-morning!" And she moved away.

"Perhaps your cousin Alfred Dinks has arrived," said Abel, carelessly, as
he closed his port-folio.

Hope Wayne stopped, and, standing very erect, turned and looked at him.

"Do you know my cousin, Mr. Dinks?"

"Not at all."

"How did you know that I had such