have discerned the fact, for I am observant; and though I have, I hope, outlived the first exuberance of masculine conceit, I did not err in imputing the tranquil, ladylike indifference with which you received me to a preoccupied mind, rather than to an absence of interest or curiosity about the almost unknown son of your guardian. Life at Knockholt Park has little variety or excitement to offer; and the advent of a Guardsman, a demi-semi-cousin, and an heir-apparent, would have made a little more impression, would it not, had not the Church secured its proper precedence of the Army? I perceived the state of things with satisfaction; for I liked you very much from the first, and I thought Cuthbert a very good fellow; just the man to hold your respect all his life long and to make you happy. In my reflections on your share, then, in the impossibility of the fulfilment of my father's request, I experienced little pain. My own was not so easily disposed of after his death as during his life. I was destined to frustrate his wishes. Had you and I met, as we ought to have done, long before; had I had the good fortune to have seen you and learned to contrast you with the meretricious and heartless of your sex, who had frittered away my heart and soured my temper, perhaps, Helen, I might have won you, and the old man might have been made happy. "We met under circumstances which made any such destiny for us impossible, for reasons which equally affected both. My preoccupation was of a different sort from yours; it had neither present happiness nor future hope in it,--it had much of the elements of doubt and fear; but it was powerful, far more powerful than I then thought, and powerful it will always be. All this is enigmatical to you, dear Helen, and it must remain so. I would not have said anything about it, but that I owed it to you, to the friendship which I trust will never know a chill, to prevent your supposing that your share in the frustration of my father's wishes is disproportionate to mine. I would not have you think--as without this explanation you might justly think--that I magnanimously renounce my claims, my pretensions to your love in favour of the actual possessor. No, Helen; for us both our meeting was too late. We were not to love each other; I was not to be suffered to win the heart of a true and priceless woman, such as you are, when I had not a heart to give her in exchange. But though we were not to love each other, we were destined to be friends--friends in the fullest and firmest sense; and believe me, friendship between a man and woman, with its keen sympathy, its unrestrained, confidence, and its perfect toleration, is a tie as valuable as it is rare.