Her feeling for him had, indeed, much changed, and she never thought bitterly of his old misdoings towards her. Time, which softens a grief, heals many a difference; and, though she always had the consciousness of having been hardly used, she constantly found herself making allowances for him, and compassion was beginning to tone down all her sources of irritation against him. Jean's letter, posted over-night, arrived just after breakfast; the girls were dismayed; they had parted from him with angry feelings, and now, how were they to meet? Margaret, calling Grace in vain to accompany her, set off for a long expedition among the lower hills that crowned the heights behind Lornbay. From high up she obtained a larger view, and, with Tennyson in her hands, with whom she spent all her happiest moments, she prepared to wander far, not sorry to be alone, and feeling secure from the companionship of Mr. Paul Lyons or of any of those common-place, if friendly, women who had by degrees gathered round Mrs. Dorriman and who tried Margaret's patience sorely. Would a day ever come to her, she often thought with girlish impatience, when the interests of life would be narrowed to a new pattern in cross-stitch or crewel-work, and to the want of taste in some person's way of setting a bow on the side of a cap. These trivial matters lay so far outside anything that contained possible interest to her, that she despised the people who evidently considered them of consequence. Margaret also was beginning to make another discovery, and one that filled her with pain and even terror. She had too candid a mind not to own a truth to herself, however unwillingly, and the truth which frightened her and dismayed her was the wide difference existing between her sister and herself. She had all her life looked up to Grace, admired her and worshipped her. Every day now showed her that Grace had, in all ways, a lower standard than she had. She was contented to spend her time in perfect and complete idleness; she would no longer even talk upon matters of any importance with her sister. All those questions of religious thought which crowd upon a young girl when her mind begins to draw its own conclusions and she shakes off those boundaries and lines which have, up till then, been the accepted guides for all her belief, were too evidently distasteful to Grace to be persisted in. We feel it as irreverent to allow a careless hand to touch our holiest and highest thoughts as we do if a scoffer enters a church with us. Poor Margaret, often perplexed, asking herself questions that have always baffled the wisest men, blamed her own want of perception for not understanding. She had a high ideal, a desire for the best, and she was often miserable because of a supposed short-coming of a faith that was not unwavering. To turn to Grace, who was, she thought, so far her superior in point of cleverness, would have been such an endless comfort to her.