the theme remains as fresh as ever, like the gush of delicate and ethereal flowers that comes with the young year: we gaze at them time after time with wonder and awe, and fear that a speck should sully their holy beauty."
"Robert, it is not thinking or feeling, it is floating—actual floating in as pure an ether as this world knows of—for a little, you know, only for a little while. How soon it passes, never to come again!"
"You don't mean, Clara, that Miss Jerpoint loved Mr. Sandilands, and that something coming between them—although when you mean to tell me what, I don't know—she married Mr. Burnet without loving him?"
"No, I do not mean that at all. Her love for Mr. Burnet, I don't doubt, was and is fervent and deep, but different in kind. You have spoken of spring flowers. The feelings with which she regarded Mr. Sandilands were the spring flowers of her life : they came with the season, and went with it: delicate, unrevealing, simple and childlike they were. When she married Mr. Burnet she was six years older, and the fruit of time is most certainly the knowledge of good and evil. Besides, what an experience was shut into those six years of her life! I should call her first love the snowdrop, her second the rose: it had the deep coloring and fragrance of midsummer."
"If I had to choose between them, I would have the rose, but it's all taste."
"Ah," said Clara, "perhaps I had better tell you the rest of the story another time?"
"As you please: indeed, I begin to suspect there is nothing particular to tell."
"Then, to punish you for such a suspicion, I shall make you sit still and here and now listen to the end."
CHAPTER III.
"Miss Jerpoint and Mr. Sandilands were engaged to be married, and the latter himself communicated the fact to Sir Francis Butler, who, together with Lady Butler, was heartily rejoiced to hear it. They valued Miss Jerpoint, and were pleased that she should be permanently settled near them, and they were glad for her sake that she should be so well settled, for they believed she was the very person to supply or reform anything that was deficient or amiss in Mr. Sandilands; and most likely they were correct in thinking so. I can fancy, if the marriage had taken place, that the wife with her serene nature and rare good sense would have had the happiest effect in drawing forth what was best in her husband: each would have impressed the other, and as the years went on their lives would have blended—they would have lived for noble ends. They might have filled in Tennyson's picture:
And so these twain upon the skirts of time
Sit side by side, full summed in all their powers,
Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be,
Self-reverent each and reverencing each.
Distinct in individualities,
But like each other, even as those who love."
"Really, Clara, you are too tantalizing: leave reflection and Tennyson, and say what happened. They were engaged, you say, and not married. He did not die, and she did not die: what on earth was it?"
"Oh, I could give you the bare facts in five words, but you would prefer getting the outs and ins, would you not?"
"Well, as I am not very busy at this moment, I'll hang up my curiosity for a little and let you take your own way: and a roundabout way it is, but pleasant enough too in the gloaming."
"In December they plighted their troth to each other. That circumstance crowned the year with gladness for them: the date was an epoch, and the next year dawned upon Miss Jerpoint as what was to be the happiest of her life. The dull leaden skies and cutting winds of spring passed all unheeded by her. A tremendous storm of wind—a cyclone on its travels, probably—one night made all the woods of Middleton Hall rock and creak and strain like the masts of a storm-tossed vessel, and next day the poor people got a harvest of fallen branches to gather. Miss Jerpoint met one of them in her usual walk—an old
