This latter remark was a sly hit at the large, old-fashioned locket which Miss Bellamy wore round her neck on high days and holidays--at such times, in fact, as she wore her silver grey dress and her company cap, but at no other. Ambrose Murray could remember Miss Bellamy wearing this locket when she was a girl of nineteen, and she wore it still. He often joked her about it, and would offer to wager anything that if she would only let him have a peep inside it he should find there the portrait of a certain handsome cornet of dragoons, with whom, according to his account, she had at one time a desperate flirtation. But he never had seen inside the locket, and Miss Bellamy was quite sure that he never would do so with her consent; for within that old-fashioned piece of jewellery was shut up the cherished secret of Miss Bellamy's life. Ambrose Murray's laughing assertion that in it was hidden the portrait of a man was so far true, but the likeness was not that of any young cornet of dragoons, but that of Ambrose Murray himself--of Ambrose Murray at two-and-twenty, with brown hair, and laughing eyes, and no care in the world beyond that of making up his mind which one out of a bevy of pretty girls he was most in love with. He fell in love, not with Miss Bellamy, but with her friend, and Miss Bellamy's secret remained buried for ever in her own heart. With the portrait were shut up two locks of hair: one lock was of a light golden brown colour, the other was white. "There is room for another portrait," said Miss Bellamy to herself, with a sigh, when Ambrose Murray proposed going to the photographer's, "and then it will be full." She had left orders in her will that the locket should be buried with her. How her heart fluttered, how the unwonted colour rushed to her face, when Ambrose proposed that they should be photographed together! Years had no power to weaken or alter her love, but she would have died rather than let Murray suspect for a moment the existence of any such feeling on her part. He knew it not, but it was a fact that, with the exception of a few trifling legacies, all her little property was bequeathed to him, or, in event of his prior demise, to Eleanor. In her secret heart she could not help dreading a little the coming of that time when father and daughter should learn to know and love each other. She must then, of necessity, fall into the background; she must then, of necessity, sink into little more than a mere cypher in the sum of Ambrose Murray's existence. Had Eleanor been a daughter of her own she could hardly have loved her better, and she told herself, times without number, that to see the girl and her father happy in each other's love ought to be sufficient reward for any one who thought of others more than herself. And ought she not to study the happiness of these two, both of whom were so dear to her, rather than her own selfish feelings?