wild and daring
enough, Brian never yet forgot he was a gentleman. Was it not so, Anne?"

Anne assented.

"He was a fine generous fellow, too. Do you remember how a week before
he left us so suddenly he rode fifty miles across the country to get
some ice for you in your fever? You were very ill then, my poor girl."
It was touching to hear him call Miss Valery a "girl"--she whom the
young Agatha regarded as quite an elderly woman.

"And though he did leave us so abruptly--wherefore, remains to this day
a mystery, unless it was a young man's whim and love of change--still I
have the greatest dependence on Brian Harper," continued the Squire, who
seemed as a parental right to monopolise all the talk at table.

"Brian Harper!" exclaimed Mr. Dugdale, waking from a trance. "Yes--Brian
would surely be able to furnish those statistics on Canadian wheat. His
judgment was always as sound as his politics."

"What was your remark, Marmaduke" said the old Squire, testily.

"O, nothing--nothing, father!" Harrie quickly answered, with a half
merry, half warning frown at her lord. Mr. Dugdale folded himself up
again into silence, with the quiet consciousness of one who has a pearl
in his keeping--the undoubted value of which there is no need either to
put forward or to defend.

Miss Valery here came to the rescue, and turned the conversation into
a merry channel Agatha was surprised to find what a wondrous power of
unfeigned home-cheerfulness there was in this woman, who had lived to be
called even by those that loved her, "an old maid." And when at last the
Squire gracefully allowed the departure of his women-kind, who floated
away like a flock of released birds, they all clustered around Anne, as
though she were in the constant habit of knowing everybody's business,
and of thinking and judging for everybody.

Agatha sat a little way off, watching her, and wondering what could be
the strange influence which always made her take delight in watching
Anne Valery.

There is something very peculiar in this admiration which one woman
occasionally conceives for another, generally much older than herself.
It is not exactly friendship, but partakes more of the character of
love--in its idealisation, its shyness, its enthusiastic reverence, its
hopeless doubt of requital, and, above all, its jealousies. For this
reason, it generally comes previous to, or for want of, the real love,
the drawing of the feminine soul towards its masculin