"Your own loving and respectful nurse, "NELLY O'TOOLE." Miss Vernon sat for some time lost in perplexed thought, she was truly glad to get nurse's affectionate letter, yet wished she had not told her that Lord Effingham was in town. "I must not betray nurse, and yet I should very much like to write openly to Georgy, her suspicions are once more all alive," and the indignant colour rose to Kate's cheek at the idea of such pertinacious injustice. "I must write as if regardless of any change in her tone since we last met, I wish dear nurse had not mentioned Lord Effingham, I wish I never had heard his name." Rousing herself from these fruitless reflections she called Willie, and knowing of old what potent consolers fresh air and sunshine always proved, asked Mrs. Storey's leave to take him with her to Kensall-green Cemetery where her grandfather's remains had been interred. She had not yet visited his grave, and choose the child's companionship during that visit of tender duty, as more congenial than any other. Willie, dancing with joy at the delight in prospect of a walk with Miss Vernon, was soon equipped, and the two friends started lovingly hand in hand. Their way lay through pleasant fields with a pretty back-ground of wooded country towards Harrow, all glowing in the rich light of an Autumn sun. Kate was quite inattentive to the pretty talk of her little squire. She was traversing these fields again with a far different companion, she was living over again many autumns all distinctly marked in her faithful memory; it had always been the gayest time at Dungar, it had been the brightest period of her sojourn at A----, dear A, which she found usurping the place Dungar had formerly held in her heart. And last autumn though clouded, was not all gloom; she had then that beloved grandfather, the nucleus round which, all her deepest affections, her noblest energies, her most unfaltering fortitude had ever rallied, rich in their undying truth. She recalled with the distinctness of unchanging affection, the incidents, trifling though they were, which marked the last days of his life; the gradual progress of a dejection she could not cheer; the quiet resignation of earthly hopes; the silent, the gentleness, the child-like simplicity of the noble spirit with which she had intimately communed during her whole life. Oh how vividly it all came back to her; the placid smile so sad in its sweetness; the thoughtfulness for others so marked in his last illness; and it was all over; never more on earth should she behold him. Roused at length from her thoughts by the unwonted silence of poor little Willie who was discouraged by receiving no answer to his many questions, she pressed the hand she held kindly and asked--"does Willie know the way to my dear grandfather's grave?"