ashamed of her rustic garb. Robert, a very masterful and extraordinary young farmer, the intimate friend of a major and a polished English gentleman, the prize drinker in his own village and a water-drinker here, a man of double life and double character, and at the same time single and truthful in both, has already sharpened her acute sensibilities for the penetration of doubt of Dahlia. She is dropped into a bitter depth of brooding by the fact that Dahlia is not there to meet her when she arrives. It is late at night when Dahlia comes to fetch away her mother’s Bible, and finds her sister. The surprise decides her destiny for that night. She stays with her sister, and sends away the young man waiting for her on the pavement below. This young man is the son of Sir William Blancove, in whose bank Anthony is employed as a clerk. Thus had he met Dahlia, to her cost. He and his cousin Algernon, son of the neighbouring squire at Wrexham, were the youths who stood watching the girls one May Day feast. Algernon is a flippant sinner of the well-known school, generally beset with debts, and not much troubled with morals. Edward, Dahlia’s lover, is of other texture--of a perilous superiority, cold-brained, legal, sharp, and unyouthfully serious. They have a cousin, Mrs. Margaret Lovell, whose part in the story it is difficult to define. She does harm, and sometimes appears to wish to do well. Fabulously fair, brilliant and proud, she plays with both young men, and seems to play the mischief all round. In the first scene between the youths we are dashed from a conviction of Edward’s cynicism by a very human and sincere cry: ‘Virtue, by heaven! I wish I were entitled to preach it to any man on earth.’ And yet this cry and the flush are contradicted by his cold perusal of Dahlia’s heart-broken letter explaining why she sent him away alone. ‘The poor child threatens to eat no dinner if I don’t write,’ he says, and we pity the girl doubly.