"Wish you to sing to-night, _petite_?..." said Mrs. Peters, clapping her little hands with delight ... "I rather think I shall.... I have had the terror of Mrs. Armstrong before my eyes for the last fortnight, and I think, Mary, that we have a novelty here that may save us from the faint praise usually accorded by her connoisseur-ship...." "I imagine we have, mamma," replied Mary, who was in every way delighted by the discovery of this unknown talent in her favourite. "But Agnes is right; she must really sing no more now.... You have had no walk to-day, Agnes, have you?" kindly adding, "if you like it, I will put on my bonnet again and take a stroll with you." Agnes blushed when she replied,--"No, I have not time to walk to-day.... I must go home now;" much as she might have done if, instead of intending to take a ramble with her thoughts, she had been about to enjoy a _tête-à-tête_ promenade with the object of them. "At least we will walk home with you," replied her friend; and accordingly the two eldest girls and Mr. Stephenson accompanied her to Sion Row. Ungrateful Agnes!... It was with a feeling of joy that made her heart leap that she watched the departure of her kind friends, and of him too who would have shed his blood for her with gladness ... in order that in silence and solitude she might live over again the moments she had passed with Hubert--moments which, in her estimation, outweighed in value whole years of life without him. Dear and precious was her little closet now. There was nothing within it that ever tempted her aunt to enter; her retreat, therefore, was secure, and deeply did she enjoy the conviction that it was so. It was not Petrarch, it was not Shakspeare, no, nor Spencer's fairy-land, in which, when fancy-free, she used to roam for hours of most sweet forgetfulness, that now chained her to her solitary chair, and kept her wholly unconscious of the narrow walls that hemmed her in. But what a world of new and strange thoughts it was amidst which she soon lost herself!... Possibilities, conjectures, hopes, such as had never before entered her head, arose within her as, with a singular mixture of distinctness of memory and confusion of feeling, she lived again through every instant of the period during which Colonel Hubert had been in her presence, and of that, more thrilling still as she meditated upon it, when she unconsciously had been in his. How anxiously she recalled her attitude, the careless disorder of her hair, and the unmeasured burst of enjoyment to which she had yielded herself!... How every song she had sung passed in review before her!... Her graces, her _roulades_, her childish trials of what she could effect, all seemed to rise in judgment against her, and her cheeks tingled with the blushes they brought. Yet in the midst of this, perhaps, ... a sense of self-approving _power_ Mixed with her busy thought ... and she felt that she was not sorry he had heard her sing.