own mind feels. Yon won't?

bye."

Well then, good

Certainly I wish you to come-let us run."

We took hands, and were ready to start. Why should you fancy I didn't wish you to eat your dinner ?"

But we were in full career, and ran straight on through the billiard-room window; Walter declaring that if he could get his hand free he would turn back, and calling me all sorts of names for my explanatory question.

CHAPTER XIII.

IN the sweet and splendid scenery of the Pyrenees, it is a lovely thing to see the strong warm sun of early morn shine amid the soft blue haze that lightly fills the balmy air of the exquisite valleys, coming between you and the glorious mountains, like a veil of gauze shading the radiant face of beauty.

Such a haze came now to temper the bright sunshine of our young life's morn.

That life was still happy, very happy, but the haze was around us.

Basil was studying Greek and Latin; Walter was away; and the shadow on our mother's lovely brow was falling deeper, was becoming visi

ble even to her thoughtless children. Was not the haze mingling with our sunshine? Yes; but it only softened the brightness; it gave no indication of a looming cloud.

Wilton was in sole possession of our morning haunts: but in the evening he left these haunts to the twins, for he now considered himself too much of a young man not to be otherwise engaged after dinner than he used to be when a boy, so we had them to ourselves, and there often, when the midnight moonlooked at us through the trees, there the twins wandered together, their arms round each others necks, their hearts, and thoughts, and feelings one.

Were the hours lost, or were they, to one of us at least, to be as the Castalian spring to which a parching mind and weary brain were to return to draw drops of refreshment? Was this childhood of poetry to prepare the way for a life of prose?

Wilton took every occasion, when we met, to speak against the absent Walter. I did not like this, and I felt whatever degree of affection I had or him as one of our little set in childhood was

turning into a sentiment of dislike, just as the youth appeared determined to take the case for the reverse. It struck me that he wished one to like him, but could not condescend to the appearance of trying to make one do so; and I began to suspect that at present, this desire proceeded more from antipathy to poor Walter than from any real attachment to myself.

So one day I said to him

66

Wilton, I beg you will not say anything to me against Walter; he is our friend, and I never will give him up."

Wilton fixed his round small eyes upon me, with a look that I thought was full of something like cruelty.

Perhaps," he said, "there are not many who wonld dispute Miss St. Pierre's right to such a possession."

If he wished to inflict a mortification, he succeeded in doing so.

VOL I.

L

CHAPTER XIV.

THE eldest brother of our Augustus Wilton was one of a species I believe to be extinct in our present matter-of-fact-business-and-commonsense times; a species described in some of Miss Burney's novels as Insensibilists, but which in our own early times passed under the title of Exquisite, Exclusive, or, in vulgar speech, Dandy.

The state of his father's affairs left him in reversion only the usual inheritance of trouble that devolves in such cases on elder sons; but being an Irish gentleman he was not, of course, brought up to any profession. He had, Walter Greville said, been offered a commission, but declined it on the ground that to have to appear