matrimony, young Lambert Evrard and his beautiful cousin, Cicely Clayton, glided imperceptibly from childhood's pretty playing at man and wife to the more serious kind of love-making, and by the time they had reached respectively the ages of twenty and seventeen, their union was fixed on. The young man was of a strangely meditative turn of mind; he was very studious, too, and had imbued his ladye love with a taste for the sombre musings and sage books he loved himself. There is one spot in the old garden--a knot of lindens shading a broken figure of Niobe--where I have often fancied those two lovers might have sat. It seems just the place for such an earnest, thoughtful love as theirs was, to hold communion in. Lambert inherited from his mother a rare skill in music; and he and Cicely would spend hours at the organ in the chapel, his fingers seeming unconsciously to wander over the keys, and his spirit apparently floating heavenward in the tide of glorious anthem and solemn symphony his art awakened. He was a painter, too; and many an hour would she sit before him as he sketched her lovely face, sometimes in the simple dress she wore at her books or work, at other times as the garlanded Pastorella, or the green-robed Laura of their favorite poets. His brother Maurice was seldom their companion in these pursuits. In disposition, and even in person, he was the very opposite of Lambert. When a child, his temper had been morose and reserved; and, as he grew up, all the unamiable points of his character became more conspicuous. In fact, he was galled perpetually by the manifest superiority of his brother, by his success in all he undertook, by his popularity with the tenantry, by Cicely's preference for him. He had great command of temper, however, and contrived to prevent any outbreaks of passion before his father or Cicely; but when alone with Lambert he would vent his ill-humor in sarcasms and taunts that would have bred innumerable quarrels, had the temper of the elder brother been a whit less equable than it was. But no human being is less prone to seek offense or contention than a gentle scholar whose poet-mind is just awakened by the spirit of love; and such was Lambert Evrard.