absent Mr. Meredith, she might have found drawbacks in it; but, according to appearances, this was scarcely the case, and perhaps never had been. This lady was the first visitor Cara had in the Square. She came in next morning, about twelve o’clock, when the girl was languidly wondering what was to become of her. Cara had not spent a cheerful morning. Her father had come to breakfast, and had talked to her a little about ordinary matters, and things that were in the newspaper. He was as much puzzled as a man could be what to do with this seventeen-year-old girl whom he had sent for, as a matter of course, when he himself came home to settle, but whom now he found likely to be an interruption to all his habits. He did not know Cara, and was somehow uneasy in her presence, feeling in her a suspicion and distrust of himself which he could by no means account for. And Cara did not know him, except that she did distrust and suspect him, yet expected something from him, she could not tell what; something better than the talk about collisions and shipwrecks in the papers. She tried to respond, and the breakfast was not a sullen or silent meal. But what a contrast it was from the bright table at the Hill, with the windows open to the lawn, and all the spontaneous happy talk, which was not made up for any one, but flowed naturally, like the air they breathed! Mr. Beresford was much more accomplished than Aunt Cherry; a clever man, instead of the mild old maiden whom everybody smiled at, but---- All this went through Cara’s mind as she poured out his coffee, and listened to his account of the new steamboat. There was a perfect ferment of thought going on in her brain while she sat opposite to him, saying yes and no, and now and then asking a question, by way of showing a little interest. She was asking herself how things would have been if her mother had lived; how they would have talked then: whether they would have admitted her to any share in the talk, or kept her outside, as they had done when she was a child? All these questions were jostling each other in her mind, and misty scenes rising before her, one confusing and mixing up with the other; the same breakfast table, as she remembered it of old, when the father and mother in their talk would sometimes not hear her questions, and sometimes say, ‘Don’t tease, child,’ and sometimes bid her run away to the nursery; and as it might have been with her mother still sitting by, and herself a silent third person. Mr. Beresford had not a notion what the thoughts were which were going on under Cara’s pretty hair, so smoothly wound about her head, and shining in the autumn sunshine, and under the pretty dark blue morning dress which ‘threw up,’ as Cherry meant it to do, the girl’s whiteness and brightness. She could make _him_ out to some degree, only putting more meaning in him than he was himself at all aware of; but he could not make out her. Did thought