His own wishes took a most decisive shape before she had quite completed her eighteenth year; but his hopes stood on a very different ground: shifting in their appearance as if they rested on a quicksand, and varying with every interview. That such a notion had never entered her head he would have boldly maintained, had it been necessary; he would have staked his fortune fearlessly on her perfect innocence and simplicity; he had cautiously guarded against putting it there by any conduct of his own; for he had an intuitive conviction that the day his wishes were discovered would be the last of that pleasant, frank, comfortable intercourse which now existed; and he by no means felt convinced that it would be replaced by any thing more pleasant. Every part of her conduct convinced him that she did not love him; Sybil and Gwyneth could not have appeared more unconscious and unsusceptible of this feeling. But he hoped that time would produce a change; there was no fear of a rival, so he could wait; and rather than risk all by a premature discovery, he did wait, and watch and guard his looks and manners, and lived in hopes of the future. He was quite right; Hilary did not love him. He was very pleasant; a great comfort to her father; most kind to her sisters, and very good-natured to herself; but for some hidden reason, she never entertained for him the smallest approach to what could be called love; perhaps it was because she did not think about it: busy and useful, cheerful and yet thoughtful, she had adopted Maurice’s notion that she should never marry, but should continue as she now was. To leave her father or desert her sisters, indeed, would have seemed a monstrous impossibility to her――a thing too much contrary to right even to be thought of with a negative. Nest, who was but just five years old, would want her care for fifteen years to come at least; and oh! what an age that seems to the girl who has herself only counted eighteen years of life. But it was very kind and pleasant to have such a friend as Mr. Huyton, to lend them books, and bring them reviews and prints, and help them in the parish with money, and especially to be so fond of Maurice――write to him so often, and always show the letters he received from him to them. And so matters went on, and things took their course, and Hilary worked and read, and governed her household, her sisters, and herself, and, very unconsciously, the owner of the Ferns also; and months passed, and she saw her nineteenth birth-day arrive, and wondered to think how old she felt when she was yet so young, and questioned much with herself whether she had rightly fulfilled her task, and feared that could her step-mother revisit her children, she would find her best efforts had been fearfully imperfect, and that their characters were too much the result of chance and circumstance, and that the guiding hand had been too weak to be efficient.