an India-ink drawing, outside; sometimes the warm, hasty summer rain switches on the roof; sometimes there is a fresh chorus of birds beneath our window, and mating sparrows flit about the chimneys. "Hound of the Temple--Stain to thine order--Set free the damsel!" "Bois-Guilbert, notwithstanding the confusion of the bloody fray, showed every attention to her safety. Repeatedly he was by her side, and neglecting his own defence, held before her the fence of his triangular steel-plated shield." "That's the way I'd take care of you," says Gwynne, not grasping the point of Bois-Guilbert's assiduities about Rebecca. "Let's play it, and we'll play the trunk's Zamor, the good steed that never yet failed his master." We could be as noisy as we chose in the attic, for the whole lofty barn-like ballroom beneath us intervened to deaden all sounds. There was no other place about the house where we were allowed to run and shout, and even outside we must go decorously. We longed to play Robin Hood under the beautiful old beeches and in the alleys of the garden, but someone was forever hushing us. Mrs. Peters would come out on the veranda, where, standing between the columns at the top of the steps in her flowing black she looked exactly like Medea in the big steel-engraving of "The Marriage of Jason and Creusa" over the sideboard in the dining room: "Gwynne, my son, I am astonished. Don't you know you may disturb your Aunt Caroline?" No one ever saw Gwynne's Aunt Caroline. She lived in one of the large bedrooms towards the front of the house--a bedroom with iron bars at the windows. "Why are those rods there?" I once asked. "It used to be a nursery--that's a place where they put babies, you know," said Gwynne, flushing oddly; he had the singularly delicate, fair skin common to all red-haired people, and a change of colour showed brilliantly on his ordinarily pale face. "The bars were put there to keep them from falling out." I was satisfied; it would never have occurred to me to doubt Gwynne, who was even touchily truthful. But Miss Clara Vardaman, the doctor's old-maid sister, who kept house for him, overhearing us, frowned impartially on us both and shook her head. "Gwynne, child----" she began severely; then checked herself, and turning upon me with a severity even greater, in that it was, as I felt, unjust: "You shouldn't ask so many questions," she said. "Little girls should be seen and not heard." This was perplexing behaviour in Miss Clara, who, in general, was the gentlest and tenderest of souls. She cried when the doctor chloroformed their old cat; I think she would have cut off her hand rather than spank either one of us, although we must sometimes have tried her sorely. She used to invite us in and fill us with doughnuts or other deleterious sweets when she caught us trespassing in their garden. I remember a transient and rather resentful wonder at the pained look on her face when she thus reproved us; and she was