faithful services. He had shown deep emotion when informed of her engagement to Mr. Abbot, and it was hard to confess this. It soon became apparent to her that he desired her to understand that he deeply loved her, and was deterred only by his poverty from seeking her hand. Then came letters that were constructed with a skill that would have excited the envy of an Iago, hinting at other correspondences on part of Mr. Abbot and of neglects and infidelities that made her proud heart sore. Still there were no direct accusations; but, taken in connection with the long periods of apparent silence on his part and the unloverlike tone of his letters when they reached her, the hints went far to convince her that she had promised her hand to a careless and indifferent wooer. This palliated in her mind the disloyalty of which she was guilty towards him, and at last, in the summer just gone, she had actually written to Mr. Hollins for proofs of his assertions. For a long time--for weeks--he seemed to hold back, but at last there came three letters, written in a pretty, girlish hand. She shrank from opening them, but Mr. Hollins, in his accompanying lines, simply bade her have no such compunction. They had been read by half a dozen men in camp already, and the girl was some village belle who possibly knew no better. She did read, just ten lines, of one of them, and was shamed at her act as she was incensed at her false _fiance_. The ten lines were sweet, pure, maidenly words of trust and gratitude for his praise of her heroic brother; and in them and through them it was easy for the woman nature to read the budding love of a warm-hearted and innocent girl.