to it, and
find out first harmonies, then tunes, with that quickness and delicacy
of ear peculiar to the blind.

"How well she plays! I wish I could buy her one of those new
instruments they call 'pianofortes;' I was looking into the mechanism
of one the other day."

"She would like an organ better. You should have seen her face in the
Abbey church this morning."

"Hark! she has stopped playing. Guy, run and bring your sister here,"
said the father, ever yearning after his darling.

Guy came back with a wonderful story of two gentlemen in the parlour,
one of whom had patted his head--"Such a grand gentleman, a great deal
grander than father!"

That was true, as regarded the bright nankeens, the blue coat with gold
buttons, and the showiest of cambric kerchiefs swathing him up to the
very chin. To this "grand" personage John bowed formally, but his wife
flushed up in surprised recognition.

"It is so long since I had the happiness of meeting Miss March, that I
conclude Mrs. Halifax has forgotten me?"

"No, Lord Luxmore, allow me to introduce my husband."

And, I fancied, some of Miss March's old hauteur returned to the
mother's softened and matronly mien;--pride, but not for herself or in
herself, now. For, truly, as the two men stood together--though Lord
Luxmore had been handsome in his youth, and was universally said to
have as fine manners as the Prince Regent himself--any woman might well
have held her head loftily, introducing John Halifax as "my husband."

Of the two, the nobleman was least at his ease, for the welcome of both
Mr. and Mrs. Halifax, though courteous, was decidedly cold. They did
not seem to feel--and, if rumour spoke true, I doubt if any honest,
virtuous, middle-class fathers and mothers would have felt--that their
house was greatly honoured or sanctified by the presence of the Earl of
Luxmore.

But the nobleman was, as I have said, wonderfully fine-mannered. He
broke the ice at once.

"Mr. Halifax, I have long wished to know you. Mrs. Halifax, my
daughter encouraged me to pay this impromptu visit."

Here ensued polite inquiries after Lady Caroline Brithwood; we learned
that she was just returned from abroad, and was entertaining, at the
Mythe House, her father and brother.

"Pardon--I was forgetting my son--Lord Ravenel."

The youth thus presented merely bowed. He was about eighteen or so,
tall and spare, with thin features and large soft eyes. He soon
retreated to the