Mrs. Colville had been absent nearly an hour, and Emily, who stayed at home to get on with her crochet (for the next day was the eventful birthday, and she was alarmed lest her offering should not be ready in time), had been all by her small and pretty self, and had croched away so hard that she had croched herself into a headache;--perceiving this to be the case, she laid down her work and fell a thinking, and having nothing agreeable to reflect upon in the present, she began to “try back,” till she had mentally jibbed as far as the day when she, and her friend Caroline, had been frightened by the footpad, and rescued by an interesting young stranger, whom you and I, dearest reader, know to have been Ernest Carrington, although the Rosebud was still in ignorance of that fact. From sheer listlessness and want of anything better to think about, Emily began speculating as to whom her deliverer could possibly have been, and whether, by any odd chance, she should ever meet him again, and if so, whether he would recollect her, or she him, when it occurred to her to try if she could remember his features well enough to sketch them. Emily had rather a talent for taking likenesses, so she provided herself with a pencil and a piece of paper, and drew away till she had produced, what an auctioneer would have termed, a “splendid portrait of a nice young man.” Having accomplished this feat, she held up her performance to scrutinise it, drawing back her head and bending her slender neck from side to side, like some graceful bird, till she got the light to fall properly upon her sketch,--“Yes, I think that is very like him,” she said, “only it hasn’t got quite his expression--there was something so calm and--spiritual, I suppose it would be called, in his look; he was very handsome, certainly; I wonder who he could be!” Resuming her pencil, she added two or three finishing touches, then appended to it her initials, and the date, with the intention of adding it to a select gallery of portraits of remarkable ball-partners, and other heroes of her imagination, which reposed inviolate within the sacred precincts of her writing-desk; but, at this moment, the house-door opened and Mrs. Colville entered, so hastily that Emily had only time to thrust her portrait between the leaves of the nearest book (which happened to be a volume of Blair’s Sermons), ere her mother had joined her. “Mamma, you are tired,” she said, as Mrs. Colville, hurriedly drawing off her gloves, seated herself on the sofa; observing her more attentively, she continued, “You look pale, and---- You are not ill? Has anything happened?”