For a few days after Morley's arrival, he felt almost happy--happy in the society of Ethel, though the time when she would have to quit Laurel Lodge and sail from England--a time of painful, and it bade fair to be most hopeless separation--hung like a black cloud on the horizon of their future, and, alas! that time was not far distant now. In three days the air of his native England had begun to redden Morley's cheek, but his eyes were sad in expression, and his heart was at times oppressed by thoughts which even Ethel's smile failed to dispel. We have said the season was spring, and the last days of April, the time of which Clare sang so sweetly in his "Shepherd's Calendar." "With thee the swallow dares to come And cool his sultry wing; And urged to seek his yearly home, Thy suns the martin bring. "Oh, lovely month, be leisure mine, Thy yearly mate to be. Though May-day scenes may lighter shine, Their birth belongs to thee." All the old familiar places where Ethel and Morley had wandered hand in hand before, they revisited now together. The old green lanes of the picturesque village of Acton-Rennel, which, with its quaint old tumble-down houses of white-washed brick, and the black oak beams that run through their walls at every angle, its ivied porches and latticed windows, half hidden by wild roses and honeysuckles, is one of the prettiest in England, were wandered in again and again. Then there was the ancient church, with its moss-covered Lyke-gate and sequestered graveyard; the stile near her mother's tomb, where they had plighted their troth, and split the sixpence which has already figured in our story; Acton Chine, a dreadful chasm in the cliffs which overhung the sea, where the brain grew giddy if the eye attempted to fathom its depth, where the sea-birds wheeled and screamed in mid-air, and where the boom of the breakers on the rocks below came faintly to the ear--all were visited again and again, and never were Morley and Ethel weary of rambling by the margin of glittering Acton Mere, where the snow-white swans "swim double, swan and shadow," or in Acton Chase, scheming and dreaming of a future all their own, when he would strive to rejoin her in the Mauritius, and fortune yet might smile upon them all. They were too young, too loving, and too ardent to be without such hopes and day-dreams, though more than once Morley Ashton said: "Oh, Ethel, I thought the time had gone for ever when I could lose myself in a world of my own creating." They spent hours together by Cherrywood Hill and the Norman cross, where, according to old tradition, a Crusader, lord of Acton-Rennel, when returning from Jerusalem, had died of joy at the sight of his English home; but no place loved they more than stately Acton Chase.