What prospect of happiness opened before her? She cared for no one; she could care for no one after having given up her heart to Anthony. From childhood she had looked up to him as her allotted husband--she had grown up with a daily-increasing devotion to him. His good looks, his frankness had helped to make of him an idol before whom she bowed down and worshipped. He was swept out of the horizon of her ambition, and it had left that prospect utterly blank and colourless. She had valued her fortune, her home, only as means of enriching Anthony, and giving him a worthy position in the county. Her fortune was now wholly without value to her. She would have been contented to be a beggar with him, if she could have possessed him wholly as her own. Suddenly she started, and lost her colour; she saw Anthony coming up the drive to the house. He also saw her on the terrace, in her white gown under the yew-trees, and he waved his hat to her. She beckoned to him; she could not help herself. She knew that it would have been right for her to fly up the steps and hide in the walled garden which occupied the slope of the hill above the terraces, but she was powerless to move--to withhold her hand from signing to him to draw near. He obeyed at once, and came up the steps to the first terrace with a shouted salutation. How handsome he was! What dark, sparkling eyes! What wavy long hair, that fell over his brow and cheeks as he took off his broad-brimmed hat, so that he was forced to put his hands to his face and brush the thick curly locks back. Julian did not rise; she sat on her bench as though frozen, and her blood stood still in her arteries. She looked at him with eyes large and trembling between the lashes. Then he came striding towards her, with his hearty salutation, and at once all the blood that had been arrested in her veins, as Jordan when the Ark stood in its course, rushed back in pent-up, burning floods, and so blinded and stunned her that for a moment or two she could neither see nor speak. After a few moments, during which he stood respectfully by her, hat in hand, she looked up into his eyes, and asked why he had come. He was warm with walking, and the drops stood on his brow, and he had a heightened glow in his face. He was handsomer than ever, she exclaimed inwardly, and then thought, "Oh! if he had been mine! been mine! as he ought to have been--as he would have been but for----" Then she checked herself, assumed a coolness she did not feel, and asked, "Has anything else brought you here than the desire to give us honest pleasure at seeing again an old friend?"