er devotion?

* * * * *

Another picture from Honora Charlecote's life. It is about half after
six, on a bright autumnal morning; and, rising nearly due east, out of a
dark pine-crowned hill, the sun casts his slanting beams over an
undulating country, clothed in gray mist of tints differing with the
distance, the farther hills confounded with the sky, the nearer dimly
traced in purple, and the valleys between indicated by the whiter,
woollier vapours that rise from their streams, a goodly land of fertile
field and rich wood, cradled on the bosoms of those soft hills.

Nestled among the woods, clothing its hollows on almost every side, rises
a low hill, with a species of table land on the top, scattered over with
large thorns and scraggy oaks that cast their shadows over the pale buff
bents of the short soft grass of the gravelly soil. Looking southward is
a low, irregular, old-fashioned house, with two tall gable ends like
eyebrows, and the lesser gable of a porch between them, all covered with
large chequers of black timber, filled up with cream-coloured cement. A
straight path leads from the porch between beds of scarlet geraniums,
their luxuriant horse-shoe leaves weighed down with wet, and china
asters, a drop in every quilling, to an old-fashioned sun-dial, and
beside that dial stands Honora Charlecote, gazing joyously out on the
bright morning, and trying for the hundredth time to make the shadow of
that green old finger point to the same figure as the hand of her watch.

'Oh! down, down, there's a good dog, Fly; you'll knock me down! Vixen,
poor little doggie, pray! Look at your paws,' as a blue greyhound and
rough black terrier came springing joyously upon her, brushing away the
silver dew from the shaven lawn.

'Down, down, lie down, dogs!' and with an obstreperous bound, Fly flew to
the new-comer, a young man in the robust strength of eight-and-twenty, of
stalwart frame, very broad in the chest and shoulders, careless, homely,
though perfectly gentleman-like bearing, and hale, hearty, sunburnt face.
It was such a look and such an arm as would win the most timid to his
side in certainty of tenderness and protection, and the fond voice gave
the same sense of power and of kindness, as he called out, 'Holloa,
Honor, there you are! Not given up the old fashion?'

'Not till you give me up, Humfrey,' she said, as she eagerly laid her
neatly gloved fingers in the grasp of th