persecution, enough to drive the victim crazy; but oddly enough it did not produce this effect. On the contrary, the sense of his constant presence near her, watching her perpetually, became like an intoxication to Agnes. She went about more and more like a person in a dream. To feel that when you lift your eyes you will most probably see a handsome face full of tender interest, anxiously waiting to secure your answering glance, and beautiful eyes full of love and eagerness watching you wherever you go, is not a thing which produces a very displeasing effect upon the mind of a girl. He could not approach her directly, had not a chance of speaking to her; but he never gave her time to forget him. The excitement of this pursuit delighted Oswald. It would have pleased him, even had he been much less truly touched by genuine love than he was, so far as that love can be considered genuine which springs from the sudden impression made by a fair face, and which has no foundation (to speak of) of personal knowledge or intimate acquaintance. As this, however, is what is called love by the great majority of the world, we need not apologise for Oswald’s sentiment, which was quite real and very engrossing. But it suited his character admirably to carry it on in this way. He enjoyed the sensation of foiling all precautions, and conveying by a glance, by the taking off of his hat, by his mere appearance, as much as other men do by chapters of more practical wooing. Agnes, after a week or two of such treatment, began to forget all her doubts, and to feel herself floated upwards into a visionary world, a kind of poetical paradise, in which the true knight worships and the fair lady responds at a saintly distance, infinitely above him yet beneath him, half angelic yet half parasitic, owing to his worship the greater part of her grandeur. She made a little feeble resistance, now and then, saying to herself that she did not know him, that he did not know her; asking herself how could this interchange of glances and the dozen words they had spoken to each other form any foundation for ‘friendship,’ which in the trouble of her mind was what she chose to call it? But such arguments do not count for much in the mind of a girl who feels and knows that all her comings and goings are marked by adoring eyes, that some instinct guides her lover across her path whenever she leaves the shelter of her home, and that his love is great enough to encounter perpetual fatigue and trouble, and to make him give up his entire leisure to the chance of seeing her. If it ever gleamed across her mind that he might have found out an easier way by making love to her parents, and that this would at once have delivered them both from all possibility of misunderstanding, the idea faded as quickly as it entered, driven away by the next appearance of Oswald’s reverential salutation, his eager glance, his apparently accidental presence. Sister