rving herself to ask a question. Without turning round, and
speaking very carelessly, she asked it.

"I suppose Mr. Thorndyke is in New York. Have you seen him lately?"

A jealous pang shot through the lawyer's heart. She remembered yet.

"I see him very often," he answered, promptly, and a little coldly; "I
saw him the day I left. He is about to be married."

She was standing with her back to him, fluttering in a restless sort of
way. As he said this she suddenly grew still.

"The match is a very old affair," Mr. Gilbert went on, resolutely; "he
has been engaged nearly two years. His uncle, Mr. Darcy, wishes it very
much. The young lady is an heiress, and extremely handsome. They are
very much attached to one another, it is said and are to be married
early in the spring."

She did not move--she did not speak. A blank uncomfortable silence
followed, and once more poor Mr. Gilbert's heart contracted with a
painful jealous spasm. If she would only turn round and let him see her
face. Who was to understand these girls!

"What! all in the dark, Norry?" cried Uncle Reuben's cheery voice, as he
came bustling in redolent of stable odors. "Come, light up, and give Mr.
Gilbert a song."

She obeyed at once. The glare of the lamp fell full upon her, what
change was it that he saw in her face? She was hardly paler than usual,
she rarely had much color, but there was an expression about the
soft-cut childish mouth, an unpleasant tightness about the lips that
quite altered the whole expression of the face.

She opened the piano and sung--sung and played better than he had ever
heard her before. She sang for hours, everything she knew--Mr.
Thorndyke's favorites and all. She never rose until the striking of ten
told her that bedtime had come.

The lawyer stayed all night; but in that pleasant guest-chamber that had
lodged his rival last, he slept little. Was she in love with Thorndyke,
or was she not? Impossible to judge these women--any girl in her teens
can baffle the shrewdest lawyer of them all. He lay tossing about full
of hope, of love, of jealousy, of doubt, his fever at its very climax.

"I'll endure this torture no longer," he resolved, sullenly. "I'll ask
her to marry me to-morrow."

With Richard Gilbert to resolve was to act. Five seconds after they had
met, shaken hands, and said good-morning, he proposed a sleigh ride. The
day was mild and sunny, the sleighing splendid, and a sleigh ride to a
New Yorker a rar