and to work her fingers to the bone! Poor Lily, who knew so little what working your fingers to the bone meant! who thought that would be blessedness beside one you loved, and in the world where you were born! So, no doubt, it would have been; but yet, in all probability, though she did not intend it so, it would have been Robina’s fingers, not hers, that were worked to the bone. I would not have the reader think that, translated into ordinary parlance, all this meant the vulgar fact that Lily was longing to be married, and would not accept the counsels of patience and wait, though she was only twenty-three, and had so many, many years before her. Had Ronald been an eager lover, ready to brave fortune for her sake, and consider that, for love, the world were well lost, she would no doubt have taken the other side of the question, and preached patience to him, and borne her own part of the burden with a smile. But it is very different when it is the lover who is prudent, and when the girl, with an unsatisfied heart, has to wait and know that her happiness, her society, her life, are of less value to him than the fortune which he hopes, by patience, to secure along with her; also that she can do nothing to emancipate herself, nothing to escape from whatever painful circumstances may surround her, till he gives the word, which he shows no inclination to give, and which womanly pride and feeling forbid her even to suggest; also, and above all, that in his hesitation, in his prudence and delay, he is falling short of the ideal which every lover should fulfil or lose his place and power. This was the worst of all: not only that Ronald was acting so, but that it was so far, far different from the manner in which Ronald, had he been the Ronald she thought, would have acted. This gave the bitterness under which Lily’s heart sank. Again, she did not know what he meant to do, or if he meant to do any thing, or if she were to remain as she was, perhaps for long years, consuming her heart in loneliness and vacancy, diversified by moments of clandestine meeting and unlovely happiness, bought by deceit. She could not again yield to that, she said to herself, with passionate tears. Though her heart were to break, she would not heal it at the cost of lies. It might not have given Lily many compunctions, perhaps, to have deceived her uncle; but to deceive Helen, to deceive kind Katrin and Dougal, to give false accounts of the simplest circumstances--oh! no, no; never again, never again! She said this to herself, with passionate tears falling like rain, as she sat at her lonely window on many a dreary day, straining her eyes across the moor, where the rain so often fell to double the effect of those tears. Let them give each other up mutually; let them part and be done with it if he chose; but to deceive every-body and meet secretly, or meet openly upon the falsest of pretences--oh! no, no, Lily said to herself, never more!