ty and directness which,
combined with a charming quality of mind and an unusual amount of
mental development, gave her that impress of originality which he had
recognized and been attracted by. He was gratified also to find that
the old-time stateliness, almost primness, which had been to him
from the first her chiefest exterior charm did not disappear with
association. She might sit on a rock muffled to her ears in furs, and
with her feet dangling in the air, and yet manage to look as dignified
as a duchess. She might race with him on horseback and clamber down a
cliff with the thoughtlessness of a child, but she always looked as
if she had been brought up on a chessboard. Dartmouth used to tell her
that her peculiarly erect carriage and lofty fashion of carrying her
head gave her the effect of surveillance over an invisible crown with
an unreliable fit, and that she stepped like the maiden in the fairy
tale who was obliged to walk upon peas. He made a tin halo one day,
and put it suddenly on her head when her back was turned, and she
avenged herself by wearing it until he went down on his knees and
begged her to take it off. When she sat in her carved high-back chair
at the head of her father's table, with the deep collar and cuffs
of linen and heavy lace to which she was addicted, and her dark,
sensuous, haughty, tender face motionless for the moment, against the
dark background of the leather, she looked like a Vandyke; and at such
times Dartmouth's artistic nature was keenly responsive, and he forgot
to chaff.

IV.

Dartmouth had been at Rhyd-Alwyn two weeks, when Sir Iltyd turned
to him one night as he was leaving the dining-room and asked him to
follow him into the library for a few moments.

"I feel quite alarmed," said Harold to Weir, as the door closed behind
her father. "Do you suppose he is going to tell me that I do not give
satisfaction?"

"Harold!" exclaimed Weir, reprovingly, "I wish you would not talk as
if you were a butler; you look much more dignified than you ever talk.
You look like an English nobleman, and you talk like any ordinary
young man about town."

"My dearest girl, would you have me a Sir Charles Grandison? The
English nobleman of your imagination is the gentleman who perambulates
the pages of Miss Burney's novels. The present species and the young
man about town are synonymous animals."

"There you are again! You always make me laugh; I cannot help that;
but I wish you