be acted upon. I think it certainly should be acted on,’ he said. ‘The year’s mourning for her father will be over, if that is what they are waiting for--and look at all the correspondence she has, and the trouble. She wants somebody to help her. Someone should certainly suggest to Anne that it would be a right thing to follow Fanny Woodhead’s advice.’ Heathcote, who, though he had allowed himself a month of the season, was back again in Mount, with a modest household gathered round him, and every indication of a man ‘settling down,’ concurred in this counsel, so far as to write, urging very warmly that Mount should be their head-quarters while they remained in England. Mr. Loseby was of opinion that the match was one which never would come off at all, an idea which moved several bosoms with an unusual tremor. There was a great deal of agitation altogether on the subject among the little circle, which felt that the concerns of the Mountfords were more or less concerns of their own; and when it was known that Charley Ashley, who was absent on his yearly holiday, was to see the ladies on his way through London, there was a general impression that something would come of it--that he would be able to set their duty before them, or to expedite the settlement of affairs in one way or another. The Curate himself said nothing to anyone, but he had a very serious purpose in his mind. He it was who had introduced these two to each other; his friendship had been the link which had connected Douglas--so far as affairs had yet gone, very disastrously--with the woman who had been the adoration of poor Charley’s own life. He had resigned her, having neither hopes nor rights to resign, to his friend, with a generous abandonment, and had been loyal to Cosmo as to Anne, though at the cost of no little suffering to himself. But, if it were possible that Anne herself was being neglected, then Charley felt that he had a right to a word in the matter. He was experimenting sadly in French seaside amusements with his brother at Boulogne, when the ladies returned to England. Charley and Willie were neither of them great in French. They had begun by thinking all the humours of the bathing place ‘fun,’ and laughing mightily at the men in their bathing dresses, and feeling scandalised at their presence among the ladies; but, after a few days, they had become very much bored, and felt the drawback of having ‘nothing to do;’ so that, when they heard that the Mountfords had crossed the Channel and were in London, the two young men made haste to follow. It was the end of July when everybody was rushing out of town, and only a small sprinkling of semi-fashionable persons were to be seen in the scorched and baked parks. The Mountfords were understood to be in town only for a few days. It was all that any lady who respected herself could imagine possible at this time of the year.