wn. She does
not know it, but as the first reflection of the dawn strikes the
unconscious sky and shadows the coming of its king, so the red flush
that now so often springs unbidden to her brow, tells of girlhood's
twilight ended, and proclaims the advent of woman's life and love.

"Angela," called her father one day, as he heard her footsteps passing
his study, "come in here; I want to speak to you."

His daughter stopped, and a look of blank astonishment spread itself
over her face. She had not been called into that study for years. She
entered, however, as bidden. Her father, who was seated at his
writing-table, which was piled up with account-books, did not greatly
differ in appearance from what he was when we last saw him twenty
years ago. His frame had grown more massive, and acquired a slight
stoop, but he was still a young, powerful-looking man, and certainly
did not appear a day more than his age of forty-two. The eyes,
however, so long as no one was looking at them, had contracted a
concentrated stare, as though they were eternally gazing at some
object in space, and this appearance was rendered the more marked by
an apparently permanent puckering of the skin of the forehead. The
moment, however, that they came under the fire of anybody else's
optics, and, oddly enough, more particularly those of his own
daughter, the stare vanished, and they grew shifty and uncertain to a
curious degree.

Philip was employed in adding up something when his daughter entered,
and motioned to her to sit down. She did so, and fixed her great grey
eyes on him with some curiosity. The effect was remarkable; her father
fidgeted, made a mistake in his calculations, glanced all round the
room with his shifty eyes (ah, how changed from those bold black eyes
with which Maria Lee fell in love four-and-twenty years ago!) and
finally threw down his pen with an exclamation that would have shocked
Angela had she understood it.

"How often, Angela, have I asked you not to stare me out of
countenance! It is a most unladylike trick of yours."

She blushed painfully.

"I beg your pardon; I forgot. I will look out of the window."

"Don't be a fool; look like other people. But now I want to speak to
you. In the first place, I find that the household expenditure for the
last year was three hundred and fifty pounds. That is more than I can
afford; it must not exceed three hundred this year."

"I will do my best to keep the expenses dow