what language
he could have couched such a scandalous desire; but she tore the letter
up. Dear! dear! it might have happened to-day, it is all so clear to
me."

"Too clear," says Miss Priscilla.

"I recollect, too," says Miss Penelope, leaning her elbows on the table,
pushing her untasted tea from her, and warming to the dismal memory,
"how she would not come down to dinner on that eventful evening, though
we had the red-currant tart she was so fond of, and how I took some up
myself and knocked at her door and entreated her to open to me and to
eat some of it. There was whipped cream on it; and she was very fond of
cream, too."

"And she refused to open the door?" asks Miss Priscilla, with the
satisfied air of one who has often heard the thrilling recital before,
yet was never tired of it.

"Absolutely! so I laid the plate on a little table outside her door.
Some hours afterwards, going up to bed, I saw the plate was gone and her
door slightly ajar. Stealing into her room on tiptoe, I saw she was
sleeping peacefully, and that she had eaten the red-currant tart. I felt
so happy then. Poor dear child! how fond she was of that tart."

"She liked everything that had sugar in it," says Miss Priscilla,
mournfully.

"It was only natural. 'Sweets to the sweet,'" says Miss Penelope,
letting one little white jewelled hand fall slowly, sadly upon the
other.

There is a lengthened pause.

Presently, stooping slightly towards her sister, Miss Penelope says in a
mysterious whisper,--

"I wonder, my dear Priscilla, _why_ she married James Beresford a month
afterwards."

"Who can read the human heart? Perhaps it was pride drove her into that
marriage,--a desire to show George Desmond how lightly she treated his
desertion of her. And James was a handsome young fellow, whereas George
was----"

"Ugly," says Miss Penelope, with quite an amazing amount of vicious
satisfaction for her.

"Strikingly so," says Miss Priscilla, acquiescing most agreeably. "But
then the Desmond estates mean half the county; and we _used_ to think he
was the soul of honor."

"It was our father's expressed desire upon his deathbed that Katherine
should marry him."

"Yes, yes; a desire to be held sacred. And Katherine gave her promise to
our dying parent. Nothing," says Miss Priscilla, in a solemn tone,
"should induce any one to break such an oath. I have often said so to
the dear child. But she appeared not only willing, but anxious, to marry