least, all ready to do impossibilities in her service, among whom she should choose, but not too soon, letting each have a chance. Perhaps in the present state of statistics this is somewhat impracticable, and it may perhaps be doubted whether the adoration of these seven gentlemen would be a very safe moral atmosphere for the young lady. It also goes rather against the other rule which insists on a girl falling in love as well as her lover; that is to say, making her selection by chance, by impulse, and not by proof of the worthiest. But at least it is a high authority in favor of a plurality of suitors, and might be adduced by the offenders in such cases as a proof that their otherwise not quite excusable satisfaction in the devotion of more than one was almost justifiable. The dogma had not been given forth in Rosalind’s day, and she was not aware that she had any excuse at all, but blushed for herself if ever she was momentarily conscious of so improper a sentiment. She blushed, and then she withdrew from the outside world in which these two looked at her with looks so different from those they directed towards any other, and thought of neither of them. On such occasions she would return to her room with a vague cloud of incense breathing about her, a sort of faint atmosphere of flattered and happy sentiment in her mind, or sit down in the firelight in the drawing-room, which Aunt Sophy had left, and think. About whom? Oh, about no one! she would have said--about a pair of beautiful eyes which were like Johnny’s, and which seemed to follow and gaze at her with a rapture of love and devotion still more wonderful to behold. This image was so abstract that it escaped all the drawbacks of fact. There was nothing to detract from it, no test of reality to judge it by. Sometimes she found it impossible not to laugh at Roland; sometimes she disagreed violently with something Mr. Rivers said; but she never quarrelled with the visionary lover, who had appeared out of the unknown merely to make an appeal to her, as it seemed, to frustrate her affections, to bid her wait until he should reveal himself. Would he come again? Should she ever see him again? All this was unreal in the last degree. But so is everything in a young mind at such a moment, when nature plays with the first approaches of fate.