He might just as well--and it needed no stern Mentor to remind him of the fact--have set his affections upon an empress. Never even by a glance (at least not to his own knowledge) had he hinted to the object of his senseless passion, that with a dreary and a hopeless, and yet with an all-engrossing love he watched and dreamed of, sighed and prayed for her. It was intensely foolish and unmanly, the more foolish and unmanly inasmuch as the great lady of Gillingham never allowed the comparatively lowly born rector to forget his place. If kindly-natured, charitable George Wallingford did in his heart believe the well-sounding axiom that “’tis only noble to be good,” the flattering unction was not laid so soothingly to his soul as to enable him to act, as regarded pretty Rhoda Vavasour, on the cheering conviction. It may be in the abstract perfectly true that “Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood;” but judging of things (the only really reliable test) on their marketable value, we shall, I greatly fear, be obliged to own that, individually considered, the coronets, and the blue blood have in this wicked world the best of it. But carefully under lock and key as the reverend George kept his secret, there was one who discovered its existence, and who, having so discovered it, was ever, with true feminine inquisitiveness, peering behind the veil of the good man’s heart for further and more satisfactory information. Rhoda Vavasour’s first sensation, when the fact (in some subtle and inexplainable manner) of Mr. Wallingford’s hopeless passion became apparent to her, was one of actual fear. In an instant there rose up before her a vision of Lady Millicent’s stern and astonished face, a face in which none of her children had ever traced a sign of tenderness, or the faintest line of sympathy or pity. It was to that very hardness, to the repellant influence felt by timid shrinking Rhoda whenever her thoughts turned to or her eyes rested on her mother’s unloving countenance, that might mainly be attributed the encouragement--for she did in her silent, gentle way encourage the young clergyman to hope--which Rhoda gave to the Rector of Switcham. But there was yet another, and perhaps an equally powerful, reason for the “underhand deceit,” the “grovelling tastes,” as Lady Millicent would have, and indeed did in later days describe them, that were displayed at that period of her life by her daughter. Nature had endowed poor Rhoda with a susceptible heart, and a strong propensity to cling. In default of any other object on which to fix her affections, and of some more suitable prop round which to twine, it was only in the common order of things that to the sole stay within her reach, the tendrils (heartstrings is perhaps the most appropriate word) of Rhoda’s inner woman should have wound themselves round the engaging young parson, to whose exhortations, delivered in a voice singularly pleasing, she meekly