to him, and the sound of her voice a balm. He grew fonder of her every day, in his way. Her kindly, little girlish homilies touched and warmed him. As Lisbeth had made him worse, so Georgie Esmond made him better. But the danger! The danger was not for himself, it was for Georgie. The day was slowly dawning when the girl’s innocent friendship and admiration for him would become something else. When she began to pity him, she began to tread on unsafe ground. She had lived through no miserable experience; she had felt no desolating passion; her heart was all untried, and his evident affection stirred it softly, even before she understood her own feelings. She thought her budding love was pity, and her tenderness sympathy. He had gone wrong, poor fellow, somehow, and she was sorry for him. “I am sure he does not mean the hard things he sometimes says,” she said to Lisbeth. “I think that satirical way of speaking is more a bad habit than anything else. Mamma thinks so, too, but,” with a little guileless blush, “we are both so fond of him, that we cannot help being sorry that he has fallen into it.” “It is a sort of fashion in these days,” returned Lisbeth, and she longed to add a scorching little sneer to the brief comment, but she restrained it for Georgie’s sake. Positively such a thing had become possible. She, who had never restrained her impulses before, had gradually learned to control them for this simple girl’s sake. On the one or two occasions, early in their acquaintance, when she had let her evil spirit get the better of her, the sudden pain and wonder in Georgie’s face had stung her so quickly, that she had resolved to hide her iniquities, at least in her presence. Sometimes she had even wished that she had been softer at heart and less selfish. It was so unpleasant to see herself just as she was, when she breathed that sweet atmosphere of which I have spoken. Georgie Esmond caused her to lose patience with Lisbeth Crespigny, upon more than one occasion. “I am a hypocrite,” she said to herself. “If she knew me as I am, what would she think of me? What would Mrs. Esmond say if she knew how cavalierly her ‘dear Lisbeth’ had treated those three loving old souls at Pen’yllan? I am gaining everything on false pretenses.” And one night, as she sat combing her hair before her mirror, she added, fiercely, “I am false and selfish all through; and I believe they are teaching me to be ashamed of myself.” The fact was, these two sweet women, this sweet mother and daughter, were teaching her to be ashamed of herself. She quite writhed under her conviction, for she felt herself convicted. Her self-love was wounded, but the day came when that perfect, obstinate self-confidence, which was her chief characteristic, was not a little shaken.