deprive others of their happiness for the sake of his recollections? but when this further revelation fell upon his conduct, Cara’s whole heart turned and shrank from her father. She could not bear the suggestion, and yet it returned to her in spite of herself. The shame of it, the wrong of it, the confused and dark ideas of suspicion and doubt which had been moving vaguely in her mind, all came together in a painful jumble. She put away her flowers, flinging away half of them in the tumult of her thoughts. It was too peaceful an occupation, and left her mind too free for discussion with herself. The girl’s whole being was roused, she scarcely knew why. Love! she had never thought of it, she did not know what it meant, and Oswald, whom her aunt supposed to entertain that wonderful occult sentiment for her, certainly did not do so, but found in her only a pleasant _confidante_, a friendly sympathiser. Something prevented Cara from inquiring further, from asking herself any questions. She did not venture even to think in the recesses of her delicate bosom, that Edward Meredith was anything more to her, or she to him, than was Miss Cherry. What was the use of asking why or wherefore? She had begun to be happy, happier certainly than she had been before; and here it was to end. The new world, so full of strange, undefined lights and reflections, was to break up like a dissolving view, and the old world to settle down again with all its old shadows. The thought brought a few hot, hasty tears to her eyes whenever it surprised her as it did now. Poor inconsistent child! She forgot how dull the Square had been when she came, how bitterly she had regretted her other home in those long dreary evenings when there was no sound in the house except the sound of the hall-door closing upon her father when he went out. Ah! upon her father as he went out! He who was old, whose life was over (for fifty is old age to seventeen), he could not tolerate the interruption of his habits, of his talk with his friend; but she in the first flush of her beginning was to be shut out from everything, banished from _her_ friends without a word! And then there crept on Cara’s mind a recollection of those evening scenes over the fire: Aunt Cherry bending her brows over her needlework, and Edward reading in the light of the lamp. How innocent it was; how sweet; and it was all over, and for what? Poor little Cara’s mind seemed to turn round. That sense of falsehood and insincerity even in the solid earth under one’s feet, which is the most bewildering and sickening of all moral sensations, overcame her. It was for her mother’s sake, because of the love he bore her, that he could not be at ease in this room, which had been so specially her mother’s; all those years while he had been wandering, it was because the loss of his wife was fresh upon his mind, and the blow so bitter that he could not resume his old life; but now what was this