st new
volume of poems, the picture of the year, and so on. There was nothing
awkward or provincial in her manner; and if she did not say anything
particularly brilliant, there was good sense in all her remarks, and she
had a bright animated way of speaking that was very charming.

She had lived a life of peculiar seclusion, rarely going beyond the
village of Lidford, and had contrived to find perfect happiness in that
simple existence. The Captain told Mr. Fenton this in the course of their
talk.

"I have not been able to afford so much as a visit to London for my
darling," he said; "but I do not know that she is any the worse for her
ignorance of the great world. The grand point is that she should be
happy, and I thank God that she has been happy hitherto."

"I should be very ungrateful if I were not, uncle George," the girl said
in a half whisper.

Captain Sedgewick gave a thoughtful sigh, and was silent for a little
while after this; and then the talk went on again until the clock upon
the chimney-piece struck the half-hour after ten, and Gilbert Fenton rose
to say good-night. "I have stayed a most unconscionable time, I fear," he
said; "but I had really no idea it was so late."

"Pray, don't hurry away," replied the Captain. "You ought to help me to
finish that bottle. Marian and I are not the earliest people in Lidford."

Gilbert would have had no objection to loiter away another half-hour in
the bow-window, talking politics with the Captain, or light literature
with Miss Nowell, but he knew that his prolonged absence must have
already caused some amount of wonder at Lidford House; so he held firmly
to his good-night, shook hands with his new friends, holding Marian
Nowell's soft slender hand in his for the first time, and wondering at
the strange magic of her touch, and then went out into the dreamy
atmosphere of the summer night a changed creature.

"Is this love at first sight?" he asked himself, as he walked homeward
along the rustic lane, where dog-roses and the starry flowers of the wild
convolvulus gleamed whitely in the uncertain light. "Is it? I should have
been the last of men to believe such a thing possible yesterday; and yet
to-night I feel as if that girl were destined to be the ruling influence
of my future life. Why is it? Because she is lovely? Surely not. Surely I
am not so weak a fool as to be caught by a beautiful face! And yet what
else do I know of her? Absolutely nothing. She may be t