luxury consistent with our station in life. She had had her flower-garden and her poultry and her pony-chair, and I my pets and my piano and--my lover. Ah! as I stood at the wire-blinded windows of Lady Cunningham’s dining-room that sad November afternoon, and recalled these things, I knew by the pang which assailed me at the thought of Bruce Armytage, which loss of them all had affected me most. My father and mother, who from my youth up had so tenderly loved and guarded me, were in their graves, and with them had vanished all the luxuries and possessions of my early days. But though I stood there a penniless orphan, with no joy in my present and very little hope in my future, the tears had not rushed to my eyes until my memory had rested on Bruce Armytage; and then they fell so thickly that they nearly blinded me; for mingled with his memory came shame as well as regret, and to a woman perhaps shame is the harder feeling of the two. His conduct had been so very strange, so marvellously strange and unaccountable to me, that to that day I had found no clue to it. When he first came down and took lodgings in Fairmead--for the purpose of studying to pass his examination for the law, he said--he had seemed so very, very fond of me that our engagement followed on the avowal of his love as a matter of course. But then his family interfered; they thought, perhaps, that he ought to marry some one higher than myself, though my father was a gentleman, and no man can be more; at any rate, _his_ father wrote to say that Bruce was far too young (his age was then just twenty) to fix upon his choice for life, and that no regular engagement must be made between us until he returned from the two years’ foreign tour he was about to make. My father and mother said that old Mr. Armytage was right, and that in two years’ time, both I and my lover would be better able to form an opinion on so serious a matter. Bruce and I declared it was all nonsense, that fifty years of separation could make no difference to us, and that what we felt then, we should feel to our lives’ end. And they smiled, the old people, whilst our young hearts were being tortured, and talked about the evanescence of youthful feelings, whilst we drank our first draught of this world’s bitterness. How seldom can old people sympathise with the young! How soon they become accustomed to the cold neutral tints of middle age, and forget even the appearance of the warm fires of youth at which they lighted those passions which time has reduced to ashes! It was so with my parents: they were not unkind, but they were unsympathetic; they rather hoped, upon the whole, that I should forget Bruce Armytage; and, in order to accomplish their end, they pretended to believe it. But he went, with the most passionate protestations upon his lips, that as soon as he returned to England, no earthly power should keep us separate; and he never came back to me again! My