We must again pick up the dropped thread of our story, and return to the family at Seaview, to see what the Ravensworths have been doing all this time. The sudden departure of the Earl had fallen like a thunderbolt on poor Ellen and her brother. Whilst they stayed at the Towers they had been to her like a bright ray of sunshine that bursts through the clouds on a stormy day, as evanescent as it was brilliant, it had soon departed. And now life seemed doubly dark and cheerless when she contrasted it with those happy days, numbered among the things that were. How much had been crowded into that short span,--how much compressed into that little month! It had found her a wild enthusiastic dreamer, a conjurer of vain hopes that might never be realized;--it had left her able to look back, not on the unreal fictions of a poetic mind, not on the airy castles of imagination, but on truth--substantial, real, earnest! It had found her a captive to love she could not reciprocate; it had left her loving,--fondly, devotedly loving, and she believed as fondly, as devotedly beloved. It had been an era of the utmost importance,--a month the most pleasurable and the most joyous of her young life. She had something, too, on which to rest her love,--something on which to anchor her affections; how else could she interpret the golden circlet with its virgin emeralds that gemmed her finger, and those oft-read words, "Hope on"? This was a link between parted lovers; whilst she owned that ring it seemed as though a bond bound their hearts together; it was a remembrance of bright days past,--a pledge of still brighter days to come; and however dull was her present life, however uneventful the passing hour, whilst she had this ring she had the "one remembrance fondly kept," and seemed to possess, as it were, a kind of loadstone which, though her guiding star was unseen, still trembled to the pole of her affections. Johnny's feelings were, of course, of a very different nature; he only regretted lost pleasures,--his rides, his drives. Another thing was, that while his great friends had been near he had been made much of, much petted; and of course liking the kind of life very well, and feeling it was a higher tone of society than he had been accustomed to, he had, naturally enough, cut all his old acquaintances and playmates; and now that the De Veres were gone he was left doubly lone, and much in the position of the jackdaw with borrowed plumes, unable to associate with those to whom he aspired, and in ill favour with those whom he cast off in his pride. So Johnny was thrown much more on his own resources, and, like his sister, his memory of past joys could ill atone for present miseries. It is a bad thing to be forced to live on the past. The mind becomes ill-directed, and it is a kind of mental backsliding. Careless of the future, forgetful of the present grows such a mind: it is like the antiquary groping in the ruins of old, and never allowing his eye to