A few days after this interview Mary Armstrong stood at the window of her uncle's house in Park Lane, looking out over the Park, now radiant in the glorious beauty of a June morning. There had been a strange contest in Mary's heart at the proposal to spend a month with her aunt in London. She was very fond of her aunt Helen, and ready to accept the invitation with great delight. The house, the arrangements, the varied appliances of taste and refinement which belong to society when composed of the well-bred as well as the rich, were all congenial to Mary. At home the influence of her father was still too strong to allow Mrs. Armstrong to carry out her own refined tastes even at the dinner-table. The early habits at a farm-house were not so easily overcome, and the exquisite and tasteful style of Mrs. Herbert's table was not yet tolerated at Lime Grove. Good, solid, and in profusion, but plain and homely, and without flowers or other ornaments, was considered more suitable for a dinner-table than what Mr. Armstrong called useless trumpery or expensive nicknacks. And yet, with all that could satisfy her most refined tastes, Mary Armstrong, as she stood at the open French window, sighed at the memory of home. The country lanes which still remained near Lime Grove, the broad high road which passed Englefield Grange as well as her father's house, and along which she and her little brother Freddy had walked to school on that cold morning that seemed now so long ago; the carriage drive home after that fascinating evening at Mr. Drummond's, even the meeting in the road when her father offered hospitality to Mr. Halford, which he was never to accept--all this was connected with the rural suburb surrounding her home. Still onward flew the rapid thoughts to a pleasant hotel at Oxford, and all the happy hours of that never-to-be-forgotten week, the strolls from college to college, from chapel to chapel, the soul-stirring music of the choirs, the boat excursions on the Thames beneath a June sky as bright as that now casting a radiant but somewhat misty glow upon the Park, and that last evening in Christ Church meadows beneath the moonlight, when those trivial words were uttered which had stirred in her girlish heart thoughts and feelings before unknown. Very lovely she looked as she stood in the reflected sunlight from the Park. The pretty lilac-sprigged muslin, finished at the throat and wrists with lace collar and wristlets, bows from the throat down the front of lilac ribbon, and one of the same colour in her hair, were truly becoming to the fair face and bright brown tresses. The only ornaments she wore consisted of a silver brooch and the chain belonging to her watch. So deeply were Mary's thoughts occupied, that her uncle and his friend had reached the centre of the room before she was aware of their presence. She started as her uncle said-- "Why, Mary, my dear, what a reverie!"