Never until this morning had she felt so much like talking freely with her aunt of her future, and her growing fear lest, after all her years of waiting, Roy Leighton should eventually be lost to her. Nervous and weak from the effects of last night’s interview with Maude, and the headache from which she was suffering, she could only bury her face in her pillow and cry when her aunt read the would-be-lover’s letter, and asked what answer she should return. “I had hoped to see you settled at Leighton ere this, but Roy does not seem as much inclined that way as he did some time ago,” Mrs. Burton remarked. And then the whole story came out, and Mrs. Burton understood just how passionately her niece loved Roy Leighton; and how galling to her pride it was to have had her name coupled with his so long, without any apparent result. Mrs. Burton was roused, and resolved at once to strike a decisive blow. Roy had no right to play “fast and loose” with Georgie, as he certainly had done. Everybody supposed they were engaged, and he had given them reason to think so, and done enough to warrant Georgie in suing him for breach of promise if she would stoop so low as that, as of course she would not. Mrs. Burton was not one to expose herself or family to public ridicule. What she did would be done quietly and with no chance of detection from the world, and she at once set herself to it, thinking it surely was a Providence which sent her lord home on that particular day. Kissing Georgie affectionately, and bidding her to think no more of the Boston match or of Roy either, as it was sure to come right, she sought her husband, and found him in the library with Maude, who had been telling him of her engagement with Jack Heyford, and whose face was suffused with blushes when her aunt came in. Of course Mrs. Burton had to be told also, and she behaved very properly, and kissed Maude twice, and said she had done well; that Mr. Heyford, though poor, was a very estimable young man, and a brother of Georgie. This last was evidently his chief recommendation to the lady whose infatuation with regard to Georgie was something wonderful. It was not Mrs. Burton’s way to skirt round a thing or to hesitate when a duty was to be performed; but on this occasion she did feel a little awkward, and after Maude was gone stood a moment uncertain how to begin. At last, as if it had just occurred to her, she said: “Maude’s engagement reminds me to tell you that Georgie has just received through me an offer from that young Bigelow of Boston, whom you may remember having seen at Saratoga last summer.” Mr. Burton was very anxious to resume the paper he had been reading, when Maude came asking an interview; but he was too thoroughly polite to do that with his wife standing there talking to him, and so he answered her: “Maude first and Georgie next, hey? We are likely to be left alone, I see. Does he belong to the genuine Bigelow race?”