side
with the younger brother, and likewise to introduce him to the worthy
family whose inmate she was.

She did so, making the whole circuit of the room towards Miss Jane
Ianson, in the hope that he would cast anchor, or else be grappled by
that young lady, and so she should get rid of him. However, fate was
adverse; the young gentleman showed no inclination to be thus put aside,
and Miss Bowen, driven to despair, was just going to extinguish him
altogether with some specimen of the unceremonious manner which she
occasionally showed to "boys," when, observing him more closely, she
discovered that he could not exactly come under this category.

His fair face, fair hair, and thin, stripling-like figure, had deceived
her. Investigating deeper, there was a something in his grave eye
and firmly-set mouth which bespoke the man, not the boy. Agatha, who,
treating him with a careless womanly superiority that girls of nineteen
use, had asked "how long he had been in Canada?" and been answered
"Fifteen years,"--hesitated at her next intended question--the very rude
and malicious one--"How old he was when he left home?"

"I was, as you say, very young when I quitted England," he answered, to
a less pointed remark of Miss Ianson's. "I must have been a lad of nine
or ten--little more."

Agatha quite started to think of the disrespectful way in which she
had treated a gentleman twenty-five years old! It made her shy and
uncomfortable for some minutes, and she rather repented of her habit of
patronising "boys."

However, what was even twenty-five? A raw, uncouth age. No man was
really good for anything until he was thirty. And, as quickly as
courtesy and good feeling allowed her, she glided from the uninteresting
younger brother to the charmed circle where the elder was talking away,
as only Major Harper could talk, using all the weapons of conversation
by turns, to a degree that never can be truly described. Like Taglioni's
_entrechats_, or Grisi's melodious notes, such extrinsic talent dies on
the senses of the listener, who cannot prove, scarcely even explain, but
only say that it was so. Nevertheless, with all his power of amusing, a
keen observer might have discerned in Major Harper a want of depth--of
reading--of thought; a something that marked out the man of society
in contradiction to the man of intellect or of letters. Had he been an
author--which he was once heard to thank Heaven he was not--he would
probably have be