return from Europe, where he had spent three years in completing his medical education. Ella always played the kitten, though she was no longer a child, and a very Methuselah, if age could be numbered by her conquests. She had no heart to speak of, and less conscience, but she impressed every male creature with a sense of childish, artless innocence. She was a brunette, petite, with dark short ringlets about her small head, a peach bloom on her cheeks, and a babyish, pouting mouth, whose sweetness Albert Delano had found difficult to forget, or even to recall without regret, until he had found in Clara something infinitely superior to the sweetness and prettiness that had so charmed him in earlier days. This something he hardly comprehended, though he owned its power to a certain extent. It was soul, for want of a better name—a moral sweetness, a divine, emotional sensitiveness, and a straightforward honesty of purpose, that made you conscious, last of all, that she was beautiful in person and exceedingly graceful in every movement. This evening Clara remembered long after, as the happiest in her life. The bright moon shone through the climbing foliage on the veranda, carpeting the floor with soft mosaic patterns, through which the “mated footsteps” of the lovers passed and repassed, talking in low tones of the beauty of the scene, at intervals, when time could be spared from the dearer theme of their perfections in each other’s eyes, and the future that, before them, ——“like a fruitful land reposed.” Of course, they took no note of time, and Miss Marston, after talking some time with Mrs. Forest, went quietly to her room. Leila fidgeted about for awhile, and then exclaimed, crossly: “I _don’t_ see why they wish to moon out there all night.” “Why, Leila!” said Mrs. Forest, reproachfully. “I see nothing improper in their enjoying each other’s society, and you should not speak in that way.” “She’s jealous,” remarked Linnie. “You mean thing! I’m not,” Leila answered, in a high key, and then they went to bed to fight it out in the ordinary sisterly way; and I take it that sisters can be as caustic and insolently mean in their treatment of each other as any kindred under the sun. In this case, however, Linnie was really fond of her sister, and would have manifested it quite lavishly by way of petting, but for being discouraged and called “spooney” by Leila whenever she attempted any expression of sentiment.