Nita had always led a remarkably quiet life. Her friends in or about Wellfield were very few; she had not a single intimate girlfriend. Her father, and still more her cousin, John Leyburn, had always been her greatest confidants. All things that a sister may say to and confide in a brother whom she esteems and loves, and in whom she has the most boundless trust and confidence, Nita had always been in the habit of saying to and confiding in John Leyburn. His image was inseparable from her scheme of life. She never saw him without a feeling of contented pleasure—much the same feeling as that she experienced when Speedwell, with a great sigh, came up to her, laid his great nose on her lap, and looked with his honest brown eyes intently into her face. The idea of life without John in it had never occurred to her. She was usually on excellent terms with her father’s cousin, Miss Shuttleworth, knowing her sterling worth; but her nature had not much real sympathy with the sternly disciplinarian one of Aunt Margaret. Their terms were neutral. The gaieties at Wellfield might be said to be—none. The Boltons visited with none of the old families residing near the place; they were looked upon, and they knew it, somewhat in the light of interlopers, which fact had not troubled them much. It sounds, in description, a dull life; but Nita had never found it so, hers being essentially one of those natures to which ‘peace at home’ is the one thing needful. She did not care to seek distractions outside, and no amount of distractions could have filled up the ache which would have been there if she had felt that at home, in the background, there was a jar, a quarrel, a dissension of any kind. Indeed, I am not sure that there may not be duller things for a girl than to live in a beautiful home which she loves, with human interests around her, not many, but deep, with a good father, a good friend, and a good dog as her chief and almost her only associates. Such a life Nita Bolton had led now for seven years—a silent, still, uneventful life, but one which she had always found sufficient, nay, delightful. Vague yearnings after lovers, and devotion, and romance, had been singularly absent from her thoughts. She had literally wandered ‘In maiden meditation, fancy free.’