echy," she whispered, "don't let's bother about
history now. Go on with Mr. Jessup. You'd got to where he called you Amy
for the first time."

Mr. Jessup was the person already alluded to in these pages as the only
man Miss Leech had ever loved, and his history was of absorbing interest
to Letty, who never tired of hearing his first appearance on Miss
Leech's horizon described, with his subsequent advances before the stage
of open courting was reached, the courting itself, and its melancholy
end; for Mr. Jessup, a clergyman of the Church of England, with a
vicarage all ready to receive his wife, had suddenly become a prey to
new convictions, and had gone over to the Church of Rome; whereupon Miss
Leech's father, also a clergyman of the Church of England, had talked a
great deal about the Scarlet Woman of Babylon, and had shut the door in
Mr. Jessup's face when next he called to explain. This had happened when
Miss Leech was twenty. Now, at thirty, an orphan resigned to the world's
buffets, she found a gentle consolation in repeating the story of her
ill-starred engagement to her keenly interested friend and pupil; and
the oftener she repeated it the less did it grieve her, till at last she
came actually to enjoy the remembrance of it, pleased to have played the
principal part even in a drama that was hissed off her little stage,
glad to find a sympathetic listener, dwelling much and fondly on every
incident of that short period of importance and glory.

It is doubtful whether she would ever have extracted the same amount of
pleasure from Mr. Jessup had he remained fixed in the faith of his
fathers and married her in due season. By his secession he had
unconsciously become a sort of providence to Letty and herself, saving
them from endless hours of dulness, furnishing their lonely schoolroom
life with romance and mystery; and if in Miss Leech's mind he gradually
took on the sweet intangibility of a pleasant dream, he was the very
pith and marrow of Letty's existence. She glowed and thrilled at the
thought that perhaps she too would one day have a Mr. Jessup of her own,
who would have convictions, and give up everything, herself included,
for what he believed to be right.

As usual, they at once became absorbed in Mr. Jessup, forgetting in the
contemplation of his excellencies everything else in the world, till
they were roused to realities by their arrival at Stralsund; and Susie,
thrusting books and bags and umbrellas