“Whatever I have at my death I shall leave to you,” she said; “consequently you will pass as an heiress expectant, and I confidently expect you to make a brilliant match before the winter season closes, if, indeed, you do not before we leave Saratoga.” “O aunt,” Anna exclaimed, her eyes flashing with unwonted brilliancy, and the rich color mantling her cheek. “You surely are not taking me to Saratoga on such a shameful errand as that?” “Shameful errand as what?” Mrs. Meredith asked, looking quickly up, while Anna replied: “Trying to find a husband. I cannot go if you are, much as I have anticipated it. I should despise and hate myself forever. No, aunt, I cannot go.” “Nonsense, child. You don’t know what you are saying,” Mrs. Meredith retorted, feeling intuitively that she must change her tactics and keep her real intentions concealed if she would lead her niece into the snare laid for her. Cunningly and carefully for the next half hour she talked, telling Anna that she was not to be thrust upon the notice of any one,—that she herself had no patience with those intriguing mammas who push their bold daughters forward, but that as a good marriage was the _ultima thule_ of a woman’s hopes, it was but natural that she, as Anna’s aunt, should wish to see her well settled in life, and settled, too, near herself, where they could see each other every day. “Of course there is no one in Hanover whom you, as a Ruthven, would stoop to marry,” she said, fixing her eyes inquiringly upon Anna, who was pulling to pieces the wild flowers she had gathered, and thinking of that twilight hour when she had talked with their young clergyman as she never talked before. Of the many times, too, when they had met in the cottages of the poor, and he had walked slowly home with her, lingering by the gate as if loth to say good-by, she thought, and the life she had lived since he first came to Hanover, and she learned to blush when she met the glance of his eye, looked fairer far than the life her aunt marked out as the proper one for a Ruthven. “You have not told me yet. Is there any one in Hanover whom you think worthy of you?” Mrs. Meredith asked, just as a footstep was heard, and the rector of St. Mark’s came round the rock where they were sitting. He had called at the farm-house, bringing the letter, and with it a book of poetry, of which Anna had asked the loan. Taking advantage of her guest’s absence, Grandma Humphreys had gone to a neighbor’s after a receipt for making a certain kind of cake, of which Mrs. Meredith was very fond, and only Esther, the servant, and Valencia, the smart waiting-maid, without whom Mrs. Meredith never travelled, were left in charge. “Miss Anna’s down in the Glen with Mrs. Meredith. Will you be pleased to wait while I call them?” Esther said, in reply to the rector’s inquiries for Miss Ruthven.