“Do you know you have set me on the right track, as I believe, by your mad scraps of paper? They are mad, but there’s method in them. I am coming to your house to-night, but I shan’t dare, you know, to speak to you. Come to the library, where we have met before, at about four o’clock. You can make an excuse to change books or match worsted or something--any pretext you like, but come. It will be dark, and I can walk with you part of the way home. There is no telling what may come out of those papers of yours--freedom, I think, in the first place, and the power to decide upon my own life. Come, my little Janet, my sweet little girl, at four, to your devoted--C.” While Janet read this her heart beat and thumped upon her bosom, and took away her breath. He had no right to write to her like that. It was abominable of him, a great liberty--“My dearest!” She was not his dearest, she was only an acquaintance whom he had known about two months. And to bid her come “where they had met before,” as if she had been in the habit of meeting him before--as if it had not been merely an accidental or chance meeting. Janet was very angry, and shed hot and bitter tears. But yet to be called his dearest, though it was false, was somehow sweet. “His little Janet!” She was not his little Janet; he had nothing to do with her. How dared he?--how dared he? Janet went with scarlet cheeks to the school-room, when she heard Julia moving about there; and with her soul as much disturbed as her face. How difficult it is to attend to verbs and spelling when your heart is rent between two things--the good which you can barely see, and are doubtful of, and which as so painful; and the evil, which has everything to recommend it except that it is evil. Janet tried to put that conflict aside while she attended to Julia’s lessons, thinking all the time how trifling was the one in consideration of the other, what loss of time to worry concerning the way in which she spelt disappointed. It was just as miserable a word if you spelt it one way or the other; diss-apointed does not look so well, but Julia knew no difference. Poor little girl! it is perhaps as vain writing down the tale of Janet’s little troubles, while the narrator perhaps has a heart filled with things that hurt and wound a great deal more. But Julia could not fail to remark those scarlet cheeks. “Why are you so red?” she said; “you look as if you had been scorching your cheeks, as mamma says I do, reading over the fire.” “It is nothing,” said Janet; “have you got out all the books?” “And your eyes look as if you had been crying,” said Julia.