This statement was made by the pretty Puritan with a mingling of simplicity and shrewdness, for which, to have looked in her innocent face, one would scarcely have given her credit. The tears of youth dry as quickly as the dews in summer; and the young heart rebounds from grief as swiftly as the arrow from the bow. Robin looked upon her with doubting, but with strong affection. He knew, though he struggled with hope against the conviction, that Dalton's friendship would hardly induce him to bestow his daughter upon such an unpropitious personage as himself; and he felt assured--or, at least, believed, in his more gloomy moments, that so it must be--no woman could, by any possibility, feel affection for him. He was also, at times, under the full assurance that Barbara only laughed at his addresses; and though she had more than once given him all reasonable encouragement, he most industriously placed it to the account of the universality of female coquetry, a theory in which he most conscientiously believed. Without, therefore, any notice of her little fable, or the visible inference so easily drawn from the comparison between Crisp and himself, he started off from the subject nearest his heart, with an abrupt inquiry as to whether her mistress would be likely to go abroad that evening. "I dare say she will come out in the twilight," replied Barbara, who had sufficient of the sensitiveness of her sex to feel deeply mortified at Robin's heedlessness of her delicate allusion, adding, "Good day; I cannot stay any longer with you; so give you good day;" and she added in a lower tone, "a more gentle humour when next we meet." Woman's pride impelled her footsteps with extraordinary alacrity; woman's affection, or curiosity, both of which are oftentimes at war with her reason, obliged her to look back as she entered the postern, and then she enjoyed the little triumph of observing that Robin remained on the same spot gazing after her. "I don't think I said any thing very unkind to him," she thought while passing along the gallery. "I have a great mind to go back and ask him if he wanted to send any message to my lady; I did not give the poor fellow time to speak--I ought not to serve anyone so. What would good Mr. Fleetword say, if he knew I spoke so snappishly to any fellow-christian?--Keep your cold nose away from my hand, Master Bright-eye; you forget how you behaved to my friend Crisp yesterday." Just as she arrived at this point of her soliloquy, she stood before a window, overlooking the part of the garden where she had left Robin.--He was no longer there! and the fond heart of little Barbara, at once forgetful of the harshness and waywardness of her early friend, was only aroused from profound reasoning upon her own unworthiness, by a smart tap on the shoulder from the fair hand of Lady Frances Cromwell.