‘No more it didn’t ought to, Miss Cherry; but what can a person do? I’ve said a word now and again, when I’ve had an opportunity, about the deceitfulness of young men, and as how young ladies had best pay no heed to them--when I could, you know, ma’am. But whether them warnings is ever any good I’m not the one to say. A young lady like Miss Cara never thinks that it can be her as is meant. Even me, I can remember, though but a poor girl, it was always in my mind, as I was the exception, and there couldn’t be no question of deceiving with me.’ ‘Oh, deceiving!’ said Cherry; ‘that is not the question; but Cara is with her papa in the evenings? That must be a comfort to him, and to her too, poor child.’ Nurse gave a little cough. ‘Master--mostly--spends the evening out,’ she said. Miss Cherry did not ask any more; her suspicions were all confirmed and her anxieties increased; for though there was no question of deceiving in Nurse’s sense of the word, and though that good woman’s homilies no doubt fell quite harmless upon Cara, yet the visits of a couple of young men to a girl ‘almost every morning’ conveyed an idea of danger which made Miss Cherry’s hair stand on end. What the poor child had been plunged into the moment she left that safe feminine nest at the Hill, all flowery and sweet, where some kind guardian was always at hand! Launched into the world--never words could be more true. Miss Cherry sat in the haunted room, where poor Cara felt her mother’s eyes upon her, so full of pondering that she had no leisure to be affected by that memory. The poor woman, who was dead and safe, died away out of all thoughts when the affairs of the living came uppermost--the living who were so far from being safe, whose life lay before them, liable to be coloured through and through by the events of any solitary moment. This could scarcely be said of James Beresford perhaps, whose life was three-parts over; but what penalties might not Cara have to pay for the pleasure of the moment!--the gay visitors who ‘brightened her up’ might leave darkness behind when their more active life carried them away to other scenes and occupations, and the companionship which made this opening of her existence cheerful might throw all the rest into shadow. So Miss Cherry, whose life knew nothing more than this, who had no varied experiences to show how one affection pushed out another, and on what lines of natural progress the course of life was drawn, thought to herself as she waited by the side of the fire, slowly sipping her cup of tea, for Cara’s return. She thought no more of her brother and Mrs. Meredith--people who were old enough to manage their own concerns. Cara occupied all her thoughts. She was herself, though she was old, more on Cara’s level of life than on that which was occupied by the kind neighbour for whom she had been so anxious when she came. After a while she heard voices outside, and going to the window, saw a little group at