This news put Alfred in a phrensy of indignation and fear. Julia dancing the cachouka! Julia a jolly girl! Julia singing songs pathetic or merry, whichever were asked for! The heartless one! He called to mind all he had read in the classics, and elsewhere, about the fickleness of woman. But this impression did not last long; he recalled Julia's character, and all the signs of a love tender and true she had given him. He read her by himself, and, lover-like, laid all the blame on another. It was all her cold-blooded mother. “Fool that I have been. I see it all now. She appeals to my delicacy to keep away; then she goes to Julia and says, 'See, he deserts you at a word from his father. Be proud, be gay! He never loved you; marry another.' The shallow plotter forgets that whoever she does marry I'll kill. How many unsuspicious girls have these double-faced mothers deluded so? They do it in half the novels, especially in those written by women; and why? because these know the perfidy and mendacity of their sex better than we do; they see them nearer, and with their souls undrest. War, Mrs. Dodd! war to the death! From this moment I am alone in the world with her. I have no friend but Alfred Hardie: and my bitterest enemies are my cold-blooded father and her cold-blooded mother.” The above sentences, of course, were never uttered. But they represent his thoughts accurately, though in a condensed form, and are, as it were, a miniature of this young heart boiling over. From that moment he lay in wait for her, and hovered about the house day and night, determined to appeal to her personally, and undeceive her, and baffle her mother's treachery. But at this game he was soon detected: Mrs. Dodd lived on the watch now. Julia, dressed to go out, went to the window one afternoon to look at the weather; but retreated somewhat hastily and sat down on the sofa. “You flutter, darling,” said Mrs. Dodd. “Ah! he is there.” “Yes.” “You had better take off your things.” “Oh, yes. I tremble at the thoughts of meeting him. Mamma, he is changed, sadly changed. Poor, poor Alfred!” She went to her own room and prayed for him. She informed the Omniscient that, though much greater and better in other respects than she was, he had not Patience. She prayed, with tears, that he might have Christian patience granted Him from on high. “Heart of stone! she shuns me,” said Alfred, outside. He had seen her in her bonnet. Mrs. Dodd waited several days to see whether this annoyance would not die of itself: waiting was her plan in most things. Finding he was not to be tired out, she sent Sarah out to him with a note carefully sealed. “Mr. Alfred Hardie,--Is it generous to confine my daughter to the house?--Yours regretfully, “LUCY DODD.” A line came back instantly in pencil. “Mrs. Dodd,--Is all the generosity and all the good faith to be on one side?--Yours in despair, “ALFRED HARDIE.”