The culprit, from her upper window, flattened her pretty piquant little nose against the window-pane and gazed after the departing quartet with great sparkling tears in the lovely eyes whose rare and peculiar shade of deep purple-blue had been caught from the far-off strain of Irish blood that flowed in her veins. They were “sweetest eyes were ever seen,” at once arch and tender and shaded by long, black-fringed lashes overarched by-- “Slender brows of shining jet, Limned against the forehead’s snow, Like triumphal arches set O’er the conquering eyes below.” The Rodneys entered the carriage, and Aline flung them one last despairing kiss from the tips of her slim white fingers, but no one saw except, perhaps, her little brother, who looked up regretfully and saw the lovely, girlish face smiling at him through its sparkling tears. Then the carriage door was closed, Mouse and Kitty broke into a sedate trot, and the sweet face retired from the window and hid itself in a small square of snowy linen. Aline’s heart was for the moment completely broken. It was no small trial to be shut up in that hot, stifling little chamber all that lovely, sunny July day. She thought of the beautiful green grove close by the shining river, with the light winds ruffling its cool breast, of the happy gathering of young people, the games, the dancing, the hamper baskets of cold chicken and sweetmeats, indigestible pickles and pies and cakes, prepared for the gay, unceremonious dinner, and her heart sunk heavily. She would not willingly have foregone the delights of that day for anything she possessed. Any other punishment she could have borne with equanimity, but it did seem as if mamma had been actuated by malice prepense in forbidding the picnic to which Aline had looked forward eagerly for two long weeks. She wept some bitter tears, distinctly tinctured with anger, into her snowy handkerchief, then she wiped her eyes and looked about her for some means of passing the tedious time away. Her mother had brought her up a volume of sermons, by way of profitable reading. Aline vented her spite and disappointment most unjustifiably on the unoffending volume, by tossing it out of the little end window into her neighbor’s garden, and the innocent missile, in its rapid descent, hit her neighbor sharply upon the head. When she saw what she had done, a little cry of dismay broke from her lips. The great gray stone mansion standing in the beautiful garden next door to Mr. Rodney’s cottage was known throughout the little village of Chester as a haunted house; and its owner, the dark, moody-looking man who had just returned from a protracted sojourn abroad, was generally considered a very mysterious man. He was immensely rich, a bachelor, and handsome in a dark, corsair-like style that the girls of Chester considered very fascinating although it was so inaccessible.