Dropping her work, she rose and crossing quickly to the other window, drew a footstool close up to her aunt and sat down on it. Then taking one of Miss Matilda’s still pretty hands, she held it closely. “Dear aunt,” she said, “I know that both you and Aunt Jane must think me a strange, cold, heartless girl because I seem so little affected by what has been told me to-day. And yet I feel it, although not perhaps in the way you think I ought to do. That, however, I cannot help. I am very much afraid that I shall shock you when I assure you that the breaking off of my engagement to Mr. Keymer comes as a positive relief to me. But you have taught me that the truth should never be hidden, and that is the truth. Now that I look back, it seems to me as if I could never have really cared for him as I have heard and read of other girls caring for those to whom they were engaged. Almost from the first moment of giving him my promise something whispered to me that I had made a mistake. I would have recalled it if I could, but I was too much of a coward to do so. I told myself that I was fickle and inconstant and did not know my own mind, and that love would grow and increase as time went on. Whether it would or no, I cannot tell. I was certainly pained by Mr. Keymer’s unaccountable silence. None of us like to feel ourselves neglected, and that was how I felt. And yet, while looking every day for a letter, my heart always gave a little bound when the postman, on his last round, failed to bring me one, and I knew that I was safe till the morrow. For all along a consciousness was working within me against which I vainly strove, that should a letter come, pressing that an early date might be fixed for my marriage, I should shrink from the prospect with something akin to terror, and what would then have happened I cannot tell. Now the necessity is one that will never have to be faced.” She paused and again pressed Miss Matilda’s hand to her cheek. “And now, dear aunt,” she resumed, “you will perhaps understand better than ever before what a strange, inconsistent creature I am, brimful of contradictions which sway me this way and that and make me a puzzle to myself. Well, I have had my—my love experience, if I may call it so.” An involuntary sigh fluttered from her lips. “And, dear aunts—both of you,” she went on after an almost imperceptible pause, “I pray you to believe me when I say that it has left no wound behind it which time will not quickly heal. From to-day I shall be once more your own Ethel and no one shall ever come between us again.” It was one of those sweet, high-flown promises which young people make with every intention of keeping them, but which, five times out six, after-events laugh to scorn. Ethel rose without a word more, and having pressed a tender kiss on Miss Matilda’s faded cheek, would have gone, but the spinster detained her.