Blanche has just come in, fresh and blooming, from an errand of mercy amongst the poor in the adjoining village. Her bonnet is even now hanging on her arm, and her long clustering hair is damp and limp with the dews of evening. Is that a tear clinging to her eyelashes? or is it only the moisture of heaven caught as it fell, and prisoned in those silken meshes? Blanche is often in tears now, and loves to be alone. She and Mary ride and walk together as usual, but the unreserved confidence that used to exist between them is gone. It has been dying a natural death ever since the former paid her memorable visit at Frank Hardingstone’s hotel; and though it has flickered up again with an expiring flash or two, it is now finally extinct. Our young lady has aged much since her thoughtless days of only last spring. Pique, disappointment, anxiety, and self-communing have been doing their work silently and surely, shading the fair young brow, indeed, but at the same time tempering and mellowing the careless, buoyant heart. Blanche has begun to find that life is not all _couleur de rose_, even for the young, and the lesson has not been without its usual salutary effect. Though no longer the wealthy heiress--and, to do her justice, she seldom dwells upon that as a misfortune--she is beginning to feel that she too has a part to act on the stage of life, or rather that, no longer acting the vain part of every-day frivolity, she has a _reality_ to fulfil. So she is never so happy now as when busying herself about her poor people, her decrepit old women, and her little ragged children, to whom she does acts of unassuming kindness, in the performance of which she forgets her own annoyances and heart-burnings, though her woman nature is as yet but half-trained, and she has occasional fits of despondency and bursts of reactionary sorrow, which make her very unhappy for the time. Blanche has had a fresh grievance, too, for the last few days, connected, of all things in the world, with Cousin Charlie’s return--that return which was to have been such a jubilee of rejoicing, and which she now almost dreads to look forward to. The girl feels as if she had lost her self-respect, and turn which way she will, the sting ever rankles in her breast, ever reminds her of what she chooses to consider her degradation. The fact is, she has sustained an interview with Uncle Baldwin in the formidable study; and the General, who is not given to beat about the bush when he has an object in view, has developed to her, in as few words as possible, his projects for her future welfare, and proposed to her, point blank, that on her cousin’s return from abroad she should marry him forthwith. Blanche, as in nature bound, made sundry hesitating objections, all of which her uncle chose to consider as mere maiden modesty, _de rigueur_ on such an occasion; and as Blanche could not say she _didn’t like him_, and as Uncle Baldwin had always been so kind, in fact, a second father to her, and made