ith in the justness of his sister's arrangements.

She looked at him a moment--at his expression of agreeable veracity;
and, with that justness that he admired, she replied, "Say what you
please. Tell my story in the way that seems to you most--natural." And
she bent her forehead for him to kiss.

CHAPTER II

The next day was splendid, as Felix had prophesied; if the winter had
suddenly leaped into spring, the spring had for the moment as quickly
leaped into summer. This was an observation made by a young girl who
came out of a large square house in the country, and strolled about in
the spacious garden which separated it from a muddy road. The flowering
shrubs and the neatly-disposed plants were basking in the abundant
light and warmth; the transparent shade of the great elms--they were
magnificent trees--seemed to thicken by the hour; and the intensely
habitual stillness offered a submissive medium to the sound of a distant
church-bell. The young girl listened to the church-bell; but she was not
dressed for church. She was bare-headed; she wore a white muslin waist,
with an embroidered border, and the skirt of her dress was of colored
muslin. She was a young lady of some two or three and twenty years
of age, and though a young person of her sex walking bare-headed in
a garden, of a Sunday morning in spring-time, can, in the nature of
things, never be a displeasing object, you would not have pronounced
this innocent Sabbath-breaker especially pretty. She was tall and pale,
thin and a little awkward; her hair was fair and perfectly straight; her
eyes were dark, and they had the singularity of seeming at once dull
and restless--differing herein, as you see, fatally from the ideal "fine
eyes," which we always imagine to be both brilliant and tranquil. The
doors and windows of the large square house were all wide open, to admit
the purifying sunshine, which lay in generous patches upon the floor
of a wide, high, covered piazza adjusted to two sides of the mansion--a
piazza on which several straw-bottomed rocking-chairs and half a dozen
of those small cylindrical stools in green and blue porcelain, which
suggest an affiliation between the residents and the Eastern trade, were
symmetrically disposed. It was an ancient house--ancient in the sense
of being eighty years old; it was built of wood, painted a clean, clear,
faded gray, and adorned along the front, at intervals, with flat wooden
pilasters, painted whit