"Lovely gals!--wish I'd an umbrella, my angels!--Take my arm? Ah! Pretty gals!" "Who _are_ you, sir?" at length exclaimed Kate, spiritedly, suddenly stopping, and turning to the rude speaker. [Who else should it be but Tittlebat Titmouse!] "Who am I? Ah, ha! Lovely gals! one that loves the pretty gals!" "Do you know, fellow, who I am?" inquired Miss Aubrey, indignantly, flinging aside her veil, and disclosing her beautiful face, white as death, but indistinctly visible in the darkness, to her insolent assailant. "No, 'pon my soul, no; but lovely gal! lovely gal!--'pon my life, spirited gal!--do you no harm! Take my arm?"---- "Wretch! ruffian! How dare you insult a lady in this manner? Do you know who I am? My name, sir, is Aubrey--I am Miss Aubrey of the Hall! Do not think"---- Titmouse felt as if he were on the point of dropping down dead at that moment, with amazement and terror; and when Miss Aubrey's servant screamed out at the top of her voice, "Help!--help, there!" Titmouse, without uttering a syllable more, took to his heels, just as the door of a cottage, at only a few yards' distance, opened, and out rushed a strapping farmer, shouting--"Hey! what be t' matter?" You may guess his amazement on discovering Miss Aubrey, and his fury at learning the cause of her alarm. Out of doors he pelted, without his hat, uttering a volley of fearful imprecations, and calling on the unseen miscreant to come forward; for whom it was lucky that he had time to escape from a pair of fists that in a minute or two would have beaten his little carcass into a jelly! Miss Aubrey was so overcome by the shock she had suffered, that but for a glass of water she might have fainted. As soon as she had a little recovered from her agitation, she set off home, accompanied by Margaret, and followed very closely by the farmer, with a tremendous knotted stick under his arm--(he wanted to have taken his double-barrelled gun)--and thus she soon reached the Hall, not a little tired and agitated. This little incident, however, she kept to herself, and enjoined her two attendants to do the same; for she knew the distress it would have occasioned those whom she loved. As it was she was somewhat sharply rebuked by her mother and brother, who had just sent two servants out in quest of her, and whom it was singular that she should have missed. This is not the place to give an account of the eccentric movements of our friend Titmouse; still there can be no harm in my just mentioning that the sight of Miss Aubrey on horseback had half maddened the little fool; her image had never been effaced from his memory since the occasion on which, as already explained, he had first seen her; and as soon as he had ascertained, through Snap's inquiries, who she was, he became more frenzied in the matter than before, because he thought he now saw a probability of obtaining her. "If, like children," says Edmund Burke, "we will cry for the moon, why, like