That giant tree, the child of past centuries, that stood watching over it like a grim sentinel, seemed to her simple mind like an embodiment of evil. It had no grace, no beauty in her eyes; she had even sacrilegiously wished it levelled to the earth. It kept the sun from shining on her mother's grave; the robin and linnet never warbled their sweet hymns from among its heavy foliage. It had been planted by some one in the very despair of grief, and the ghost of sorrow hovered under its gloomy canopy. In spite of this morbid feeling, a strange sympathy with the unknown parent often drew Dorothy to the spot. A visit to the churchyard had been a favourite evening ramble with her and her lover, and, when tired of their seat on the low stone wall, they wandered hand in hand down to the sea-shore, to watch the passing sails, and to bathe their feet in the glad blue waters. Even in the churchyard, love, not divinity, formed the theme of their conversation; the presence of the dead failing to repress the hopes and joys of their young gushing life. In her walks to the parsonage, Dorothy felt a pensive delight in recalling every circumstance that had happened in these summer evening walks with Gilbert Rushmere. They were of little moment at the time, scarcely regarded; but absence had invested them with a twofold interest. First love stamps upon the memory of youth its undying image; and from trifles light as the thistle's down can erect for itself a monument more durable than granite. What a halo of beauty it casts over the scenes in which its first sight was breathed, its first vows fondly whispered, making the desert and solitary places to blossom as the rose. Even those bleak salt marshes bordering the sea, over which the sea-gull flapped her heavy grey wings, and which resounded to the pewitt's melancholy monotonous cry, possessed a charm for Dorothy. From those marshes Gilbert and Dorothy drove up the cows to be milked. On the banks of that sluggish river that lay like a dead thing between its slimy mud banks until filled by the tide, in which few persons could discover anything to interest the imagination, the twain, when boy and girl, used to fish for crabs with a small hooped net, after the tide had retired. Those were happy times, full of sport and glee. How they used to laugh and clap their hands, when the ugly spider-like creatures tumbled into the trap, and fought and quarrelled over the bait that had lured them to destruction. The old haunts, the well-remembered objects, however repulsive to the eye of taste, were dear to Dorothy; they brought her lover nearer, and she forgot the long stretch of sea and land that divided them. She never imagined that absence and the entire change that had taken place in his mode of life could make any alteration in his views and feelings with regard to herself; that it was possible that days and even months could elapse without his casting one thought on her.