'Twas she indeed; and this was her last visit to her conservatory. Many rare, delicate, and beautiful flowers were there. The air was laden with the fragrant odors which they exhaled, as it were in sighs, on account of the dreaded departure of their lovely mistress. At length she stooped down, and, in stooping, a tear fell right upon the small sprig of geranium which she gently detached from its stem, and placed in her bosom. "Sweet flowers," thought she, "who will tend you as I have tended you, when I am gone? Why do you look now more beautiful than ever you did before?"--Her eye presently fell upon the spot on which, till the day before, had stood her aviary. Poor Kate had sent it, as a present, to Lady De la Zouch, and it was then at Fotheringham Castle. What a flutter there used to be among the beautiful little creatures, when they perceived Kate's approach! She turned her head away. She felt oppressed, and attributed it to the closeness of the conservatory--the strength of the odors given out by the numerous flowers; but it was sorrow that oppressed her; and she was in a state at once of mental excitement and physical exhaustion. The last few weeks had been an interval of exquisite suffering. She could not be happy alone, nor yet bear the company of her brother and sister-in-law, or their innocent and lovely children. Quitting the conservatory with a look of lingering fondness, she passed along into the house with a hurried step, and escaped, unobserved, to her chamber--the very chamber in which the reader obtained his first distant and shadowy glimpse of her; and in which, now entering it silently and suddenly, the door being only closed, not shut, she observed her faithful little maid Harriet, sitting in tears before a melancholy heap of packages prepared for travelling on the morrow. She rose as Miss Aubrey entered, and presently exclaimed passionately, bursting afresh into tears, "Ma'am, I _can't_ leave you--indeed I can't! I know all your ways; I won't go to any one else! I shall hate service! and I know they'll hate _me_ too; for I shall cry myself to death!" "Come, come, Harriet," faltered Miss Aubrey, "this is very foolish; nay, it is unkind to distress me in this manner at the last moment." "Oh, ma'am, if you _did_ but know how I love you! How I'd go on my knees to serve you all the rest of the days of my life!" "Don't talk in that way, Harriet; that's a good girl," said Miss Aubrey, rather faintly, and, sinking into the chair, she buried her face in her handkerchief, "you know I've had a great deal to go through, Harriet, and am in very poor spirits."