"I think you are a little hard on Hugh; he has promised that he will speak to his father to-day." "I am glad of that," very gravely. "I confess that this procrastination has made me very uneasy; it was not treating you fairly, Margaret, to leave his father all these months in ignorance of the engagement." "Yes, but you forget," interposed his sister, eagerly, "he did write telling Sir Wilfred everything, but the letter never reached him. You are generally so charitable. Raby, and yet you misjudge poor Hugh so readily." There was an injured tone in Margaret's voice that made Raby smile; he knew that she was blind to Hugh's faults--that she believed in him with all a loving woman's credulity: and yet as he smiled he sighed. He knew his sister well, the simplicity and strength of her nature, the unselfishness and purity of her aims--few women had so high a standard--and he reverenced as well as loved her, for every day showed him new beauties in her character. But his knowledge of his sister made him doubt the wisdom of her choice; in his heart he had never really approved of her engagement with Hugh Redmond. Hugh was a capital fellow, he told himself; a pleasant companion, lovable in his way, and not without his special gifts, but he was not worthy of Margaret. Raby had not always been blind, and his intimacy with Hugh Redmond had given him plenty of opportunity to judge truly of his friend's defects. He knew Hugh was manly and generous, but he was also weak and impulsive, hot-tempered and prone to restlessness; and he marveled sadly how Margaret's calm, grand nature should center its affections and hopes on such an unstable character as Hugh Redmond. "She will never be happy with him," he said to himself; "one day he must disappoint her. Oh, I know well there is no harm in him; every one would call him a good fellow; he is clever, he has plenty of pluck, he has gentlemanly feelings, and he worships Margaret. But in my opinion the wife should not be superior to the husband; if there must be weakness, it should be on the other side." And here Raby sighed and gave himself up to melancholy and more personal broodings, and he thought how strange and baffling were the perversities of human nature, and how hearts cleaved to each other--in spite of a hundred faults and blemishes--as Margaret's cleaved to Hugh Redmond. No, there was no love without suffering, he thought; even happy love had its thrills and tremors of doubt, its hours of anticipatory fears. A little while ago and his own life had stretched before him, bright, hopeful and full of enjoyment, and then a cloud had blotted out all the goodly land of promise, and he had been left a poor prisoner of hope on the dim borders, led in paths that he truly had not known--mysterious paths of suffering and patience. Raby had not answered his sister's reproachful speech, but he had taken her hand and pressed it, as though asking her pardon.