ide, where it
was high treason to glance at any book that was neither a devotional
work nor a novel. Lettice loved her mother, but the prospect did not
strike her as either brilliant or cheering.

It was the beginning, although at first she knew it not, of a new
era in her life. Her happy childhood was over; she was bound henceforth
to take up the heavy burden which custom lays on the shoulders of so
many women: the burden of trivial care, unchanging routine, petty
conventionalities--

"Heavy as frost and deep almost as life."

Sydney went out into the world to fight; Lettice sat in idleness at
home; and society, as well as the rector and his wife, judged this
division of labor to be fair and right. But to Lettice, whose courage
was high and whose will and intellect were strong, it seemed a terrible
injustice that she might not fight and labor too. She longed for
expansion: for a wider field and sharper weapons wherewith to contest
the battle; and she longed in vain. During her father's lifetime it
became more and more impossible for her to leave home. She was
five-and-twenty before she breathed a larger air than that of Angleford.

CHAPTER III.

PROGRESS.

In due time, Sydney proceeded to Cambridge, and Lettice was left alone.
The further development of brother and sister can scarcely be understood
without a retrospective glance at their own and their parents' history.

The Reverend Lawrence Campion, Rector of Angleford, was at this time a
prosperous and contented man. Before he reached his fortieth year, he
had been presented by an old college friend to a comfortable living.
Married to the woman of his early choice, he had become the father of
two straight-limbed, healthy, and intelligent children; and then, for
another twenty years, he felt that he would not care to change his lot
with that of the most enviable of his fellow-creatures.

Being himself a scholar and a student, he determined that his boy and
girl, so far as he could shape their lives, should be scholars also. To
teach them all he knew was henceforth his chief occupation; for he would
not hand over to another a task which for him was a simple labor of
love. Day by day he sat between them in his comfortable study, where
roses tapped at the lozenge-shaped window panes all through the summer,
and in winter the glow of the great logs upon the hearth was reflected
from the polished binding and gilt lettering of his books in a thousand
au