warmer, but equally vague commendations. | taxing and paying; it's not to be borne, sir, "Yet none of you imagine she is being mar- in a land that calls itself free."

ried for herself," said the solitary individual, Whereupon politics came into possession who did not belong to Summerhayes, with a of the elders of the party, and young Cheslittle laugh at the perturbation he had caused. terfield resumed that tantalizing account of But nobody saw the fun of it: they went on the Meet which made the poor curate sigh. with the discussion, ignoring Mr. Temple. Poor Mrs. Clifford ! she had but scant sym"When a woman is in Mrs. Clifford's posi-pathy in those innumerable discussions, male tion," said the doctor," it is nonsense to talk and female, of which she was at present the of her being married. She is active, she is subject, all in and about Summerhayes. no longer passive in such a business. She's richer, she's gooder, she's handsomer, she's better off every way than Tom Summerhayes. How she ever came to fancy him is the wonder to me."

CHAPTER III.

WHAT THE CHILDREN HAD TO SAY.

MEANWHILE little Loo, with another pair of big tears in her brown eyes, had been driven home in the wintry twilight over the frosty road, which rang to every stamp of her ponies' heels in a way which would have ex

"Deuced nonsense," said the major; "why didn't he marry off his sisters and set up snug for himself? He's old enough to know better, that fellow is. There's young Chester-cited the little thing into positive enjoyment field there, he's at the time of life to make a fool of himself; but Summerhayes must be, let me see

"Don't let us go into chronology," said the rector. "Poor little Mary, I hope she'll be happy all the same. I married her to poor Clifford, and I dare say I'll have this little business to do as well. I wish she had a brother, or an uncle, or some one to take that piece of duty off my hands. I think I will have one of my attacks, and go off to Malvern, and leave it, Spencer, to you."

of the exhilarating sounds and sensations of rapid motion, had things been as usual. As it was, she sat wrapped up in a fur cloak, with her little veil over her face, watching the great trees glide past in the darkening, and turning her wistful looks now and then to the young winterly moon, which had strayed like a lost child into the midst of a whole covey of clouds, still crimsoned with reflections from the sunset. Loo's little heart ached so, and she was so steadfastly determined not to admit that it was aching, that “I wish she had an uncle or a brother for she was almost glad to feel how chill her litmore than that," said the doctor; "it ought tle feet were getting, and how benumbed the to be seen to-the settlement and all that hand which was outside the fur cloak. She should be looked well into. I hope she'll kept her little stiff fingers exposed to the have her wits about her. Not that I mean frosty breeze all the same, and was rather to ascribe any mean motives to Tom Summer- | glad of that sensation of misery which gave hayes; but still when there's five children to be considered

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They'll kill him, sir," said the major, with energy. "He'll not enjoy her money for long, mark my words; they'll kill him in a year. I have only got this to say, sir," continued the warrior, turning round upon Mr. Temple, who had ventured a remark not bearing on the present subject to the curate, "if this income-tax is going to be kept up without any compensation, I'll emigrate-it's the only thing that remains for honest Englishmen. After a life spent in the service of my country, I'll be driven to a colony, sir, in my old age. It's more than the country can bear, and what's better, it's more than the country will bear. We'll have a revolution, by Jove! that's what will come of all this

her a little excuse to herself for feeling unhappy. As the tinges of crimson stole out of the clouds, and the sky grew so wistfully, coldly clear around the moon, Fontanel came in sight, with lights in all its windows, twinkling through the trees in the long avenue, now one gleam, now another, as the little carriage drove on. There first of all was the great nursery window blazing with firelight, where Loo meant to hold a little committee as soon as she got in, and where she could so well picture "all of them" in all their different occupations, populating all the corners of the familiar room. A little further on it was the window of mamma's room, which lightened brightly out behind the bare branches of the great chestnut tree. What would the house be without mamma? the lit

and mademoiselle, and you're all to go down," said nurse; "you're too little to have the charge of Master Alf, and you've all got to be dressed, dears, for dessert."

"Then you can come up when I ring. I want the children by themselves," said little Loo, with her imperious air. "You can go away."

"You're a deal too forward for such a little thing. I'll speak to your ma, miss, I will," said the offended nurse. "At least I would if it was any good; but as long as missis enO children dear, there's changed times coming! You wont have the upper hand always; it's a comfort to a poor servant anyhow, whatever it may be to other folks. I'm going, Miss Loo; and you'll come up directly the very minute you leave your ma to be dressed."

tle girl asked herself, and the great blobs of
hot dew in her eyes fell upon her cold fingers.
"Aren't you well, Miss Loo?" asked the old
groom who drove her, and Loo made him a
very sharp answer in the irritation of her
troubled little heart. She ran into the light
and comfort of the house with a perverse,
childish misery which she did not understand.
She would not let old William take her cloak
from her, but threw it down, and stumbled
over it, and stamped her little foot, and could
have cried. Poor little Loo! she was sick at
heart, and did not know what it meant. In-courages her like this;
stead of going to her mother, as she usually
did, she hastened up to the nursery where
"all of them were in a highly riotous con-
dition at the moment, and where the dark-
ness of her little face was unnoted by all but
nurse, who took off her boots and warmed
her feet, and did away with the only physi-
cal reason Loo dared to pretend to as an ex-
cuse for looking wretched. It was not very
easy to look wretched in that room. By the
side of the fire where a great log blazed was
Harry, aged ten, with a great book clasped
in his arms, and his cheeks and hair equally
scorched and crimsoned with near vicinity to
the flame. Little Mary, and Alf, the baby,
were playing at the other end of the room.
Alf was six, though he was the baby; but
Mrs. Clifford was the kind of woman to love
a pet, and the little fellow's indignant man-
hood was still smothered in long curls and
lace tuckers. He avenged himself by exer-
cising the most odious tyranny over his next
little sister, who was baby's slave. All this
little company Loo looked round upon with
mysterious looks. She herself was twelve,
little and pale, with nothing particular about
her but her eyes, and her temper, which
had already made itself, unfortunately, felt
through the house. She sat maturing her
plans till she heard the clock strike, and saw
that it would shortly be time to go to her
mother in her dressing-room, as the Fontanel
children always did before dinner. She im-
mediately bestirred herself to her task.

Loo watched her to the door, and, skipping off her chair, closed it behind the dethroned guardian of the nursery. Now, children, come here, I want to speak to you all," said the little princess. "Mary, don't be as great a baby as Alf; you are eight-you are almost a woman. Alf, come here and stand by me like a gentleman. Harry

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But Harry was not so easily roused. He had been lectured so long about scorching his face that he was now proof to all appeals. He had to be hunted up out of his corner, and the book skilfully tilted up and thrown out of his arms, which operation surprised Loo into a momentary laugh, of which she was much ashamed. Harry!" she cried, with redoubled severity, "it is no nonsense I am going to talk of it is something very serious. O children!" exclaimed the elder sister, as Alf jumped upon Harry's back, and the two had a harmless scuffle in continuation of that assault which had roused Harry. "O children!" cried Loo, who had laughed in spite of herself, now bursting into quick tears of impatience and vexation. "You play and play and think of nothing else-and you wont let me talk to you of what's going to happen

to mamma."

"Nurse," said Loo, "will you take these "What is it?" cried Harry, opening a pair things down to mamma's dressing-room, of great bright eyes, and coming hastily to his please, and tell her we will all come pres-sister's side. Alf asked "What is it?" too, ently; and if you wish to go down-stairs, you and placed himself on the other hand. As may. I will take care of the children, and take them down to mamma. "Thank you, Miss Loo; but there's nobody to be at dinner but Mr. Summerhayes

for Mary, she was frightened and stood a little apart, ready to rush off to her mother, or to ring for nurse, or to do anything else that the exigency might demand.

"She said he was going to be a father to us," said Harry, rather stolidly.

“And we didn't know what it meant," said little Mary, breaking in eagerly, "but nurse told me afterwards. It means that mamma is going to be married to Cousin Tom. Oh, wont it be queer? Shall we have to call him рара, Loo? I shall never recollect, I am sure."

"Do you remember what mamma said to | When Mrs. Clifford's bell rang the children us when we were in the dining-room on Sun- went down-stairs, looking rather scared, in day after dinner, when Tom-I mean Mr. a kind of procession, Loo coming last with Summerhayes was there when he kissed us Alf, who had to be held tightly by the hand all?" said Loo, with a little red spot sud- lest he should break out into gambols, and denly glowing out upon one indignant little destroy all the solemnity of the proceeding. cheek. Mrs. Clifford was sitting by the fire when they went in, in an attitude of thought. The candles were not lighted, and it was very easy to suppose that mamma herself looked sad, and was quite in a state of mind to be thus addressed. Harry and Mary, rather ashamed of themselves, were already carrying on a quiet scuffle at the door when Loo came up to them. "You go first, Harry,"-" No, you," they were saying to each other. "O, you stupid, stupid children, you have no feeling!" cried Loo, bitterly, as she swept past them. Mrs. Clifford looked up with a smile, and held out her hand, which she expected to be grasped immediately by a crowd of little fingers, but the mother's looks were dreamy to-night, and some one else was before her children in her thoughts. She was startled when she felt Loo's little cold hand put into hers, and woke up and pushed her chair back from the fire to look at the little things who stood huddled together before her. "What is the matter?" said Mrs. Clifford.

Loo gazed with eyes growing larger and larger in the face of her insensible sister. Then seeing Mary's arm on the top of the great nursery fender, Loo, we are sorry to say, was so far betrayed by her resentment as to thrust little Mary violently away with a sob of passion. They all looked at her with wondering eyes.

mamma,

"O, you stupid, stupid children!" cried the poor little heroine, "don't you know though she is so pretty, is not a young lady like other people that are going to be married; don't you know people talk about it, and laugh at her, and say she is foolish? I have heard them do it!" cried Loo. "I heard them in Summerhayes today talking and scolding about our mamma. She knows best what to do better than all of them. She will never be unkind to us, or stop loving us. Oh, only think if she knew that people said such things-it would kill her! I heard them, and I thought I should have died. And now, children," said Loo, solemnly, "what we've got to do is to go down to mamma, not jumping or making a noise like great babies, but quiet and serious; and to tell her that she is to do what she thinks best, and never mind what people say; and that we-we," sobbed the little girl, vainly trying to preserve her composure, as she brought out word after word with a gush of tears-" we'll stand by her and trust in her, and never believe anything. That is what we must go and say."

After she had finished her speech Loo fell into a little passion of crying, in which she partly lost the slight murmurs and remonstrances of her calmer and wondering audience; but passion as usual carried the day.

THIRD SERIES. LIVING AGE.

1001

"O mamma, mamma!" cried Loo; her poor little voice grew shrill, notwithstanding all her efforts. She had to make a pause, and to preserve her dignity had to let Alf go, who immediately went off to ride on the arm of the sofa, and compromise the seriousness of the scene. "O mamma, dear," said Loo, feeling that no time was to be lost, "we have come to say that we will never believe anything; that we know you love us, and will always love us-and-and-we believe in you; O mamma, we believe in you, and we will always stand by you, if everybody in the world were on the other side."

Here Loo fell, choking with tears and passion, on her mother's footstool, and laid her poor little head, which ached with cold and crying, on Mrs. Clifford's lap. The mother's eyes had woke up out of all their dreaming. Perhaps it was as well the candles were not lighted. That cheek which the widow screened with her hand was as crimson and hot as Harry's had been reading over the fire. She was glad Loo's keen eyes were hidden upon her lap; she blushed, poor, tender

woman as she was, before her children. The all the transitory, delicious lights of youth. little woman-daughter was dreadful to her Somehow that prospect darkened under a mother at the moment—a little female judge, strange cloud of alarm and shame when the endued with all the awfulness of nature; mother felt her cheeks flush at the look of shaming the new love in her mature heart. her woman-child. "I am doing it for-all "What does all this mean, children?" their sakes," she tried to say to herself; but said Mrs. Clifford, trying to be a little angry, her innocence grew like guilt, as she felt in to conceal the shock she had received. her heart that this pretence was not true.

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O, please, mamma, it's Loo," cried Mary, frightened. "She made us come; it was one of her passions."

"No, it was not one of her passions," said Harry, who was Loo's champion; "it was to tell mamma we would always stand by her; and so I will," cried the boy on his own account, kindling up, "if there were any robbers or anything-for I'm the eldest son when Charley's at school."

CHAPTER IV.

HER OWN THOUGHTS.

MRS. CLIFFORD had not much time to think that night, and the impression went off her when she was in her lover's company-which was very nearly always; for, long before this had been thought of, Tom Summerhayes had been the soul of everything at Fontanel. She had come so gradually to consult him about everything-to take his counsel upon small and great that happened that it seemed only natural now that he should belong to her; but after Loo's little scene a variety of

Loo heard this where she lay, with her head on her mother's lap; she was incapable of speech or motion almost, but she could not but groan with impatience over the stupidity of the children; and Alf was riding loudly annoyances came upon Mary-indications of on the arm of the sofa, shouting to his imaginary horse. Loo gathered herself up with a blush upon her cheeks; it did not enter her head to imagine that her mother blushed much more hotly and violently when the little face unfolded itself slowly out of her lap.

the world's opinion-evidences that it did not seem so natural to other people as to herself. Even Charley's schoolboy letter was rather dreadful to his mother. The boy bestowed his approbation upon her match, and was to stand by her, too, in Loo's very vein; "Hush! Loo, don't say any more," said and the mother felt more humbled by thus Mrs. Clifford; then with a little effort the obtaining the consent of her children than mother put her arm round the child and drew she would have been by the sacrifice of all her close. "I understand what you mean- she had in the world. Still it never came but you must not say any more," she said; into her head to give up her marriage-never, then she stooped down her hot cheek upon perhaps, till a day or two before, when that wet one of poor Loo. "We shall all things were much too far advanced for any be very happy, I hope," said Mrs. Clifford drawing back, and when she sat alone by her in the dark, in her little daughter's ear. "I fire, with her desk open before her, late at am doing it-for-for all your sakes, dear. night, when all the household were asleep. He will stand by you and me, and all of us, In her desk were various little matters which Loo. I hope we shall be very happy-hap- had been treasures to Mary Clifford. She pier even than we are now," said Mrs. Clif- took them out with trembling hands-a ford with a faint little tremble in her voice withered flower, given to her, oh, so long and quiver at her heart. When she had ago, when she was little more than a child, kissed Loo, and the child had gone away to and preserved with girlish romance; a little compose herself, poor Mary, the mother, sat ring made of hair, which she had worn in for a long time looking into the fire with a her days of betrothal; a little faded drawterrible misgiving upon her-" happier even ing, made by herself at the same period, of than we are now." Ah! just then she had her early lover; and last and most imporbeen so happy-all well in the prosperous, tant of all, some letters-not many, but very plentiful house; not an ache or a trouble tender-the love-letters of her youth. How that she knew of among all her children; not she had cried over them many a sad day after a single look of love dimmed to her yet by her Harry died; how she had gradually forher resolution; and the new love, sweet as gotten them again and left them in their safe any girl's dream, restoring to her firmament concealment; how of late she had rather

avoided the place where they were, and Alas, for that immortality of union which shrank from touching the little desk that comforts the heart of grief! What if Harry contained them; and now, at last, upon the met her at the very gates of heaven when she eve of her second wedding, here they were got there, and claimed her, she who was goall spread out before her, to be disposed of ing to be another man's bride? Sitting alone somehow. Mary's treasures! she had heard in the night, with all the household asleep, them called so had called them so herself. and such thoughts for companions, it was not What were they now! wonderful if a panic seized upon Mrs. Clifford's heart. Poor Harry, who had loved her so well, appeared like a pursuing spectre to the soft little woman. If it was true that she belonged to him forever and ever, how could she dare to love Tom Summerhayes? and if she did not belong to him forever and ever

Poor, little, soft, tender-hearted woman! There was no passion in her. She was in love with all her heart, but it was affectionately, not passionately, or else she never could have opened that desk. She took out the flower, and cried, and looked at it; then, with a hasty impulse, put it softly on the fire, and watched it blaze into sudden ashes, and cried again, and felt guilty to her heart. "I was such a child," she said to herself in her tears, and took a kind of melancholy comfort from thinking how young she had been when she was first a bride. Then she looked at her own drawing, which was not the least like him, and thought with a compunction of her Harry. Poor Harry! All this bright house, all these dear children, were his as well as hers; but he was put away in the family vault, poor fellow, and nothing was henceforward to belong to him in this living world-not even the name he had given her, not her thoughts, not any of her heart. She cried over that too like the rest. She put up the ring in a little parcel for Loo-she laid aside the portrait for little Harry. She tried to indemnify him by making over all those little mementoes, which it troubled her to look at, to his children. Then she took up the bundle of yellow letters and timidly opened one of them, and read a few sentences. There she read of the young love that was never to die, never to know change. Poor Mary put them away again with a sob almost of terror, and hastily locked up the desk, and resolved to put it away somewhere out of sight. She could not examine any further into those "treasures" which had become ghosts. She drew her chair to the fire, and shivered in her thoughts. She was a simple-minded woman, not wise, but moved by every wind of feeling. It came to her mind just then to recollect how, in her first widowhood, she had taken comfort from the thought that Harry was near and saw her tears for him, and knew how faithful her poor heart was. Now that thought was too much for Mary's strength. She gave a cry of helpless terror when it occurred to her.

he who had loved her to the end, and had never done anything to forfeit her affection— what was the hereafter, the heaven where love, it appeared, could not be immortal? These fancies wrung poor Mary's heart. She did not know any answer to make to them. The question put by the Sadducees nohow answered her case. She who blushed before her children, how could she ever look Harry in the face? She felt herself an infidel, trembling and crying over that everlastingness which had once given her such consolation. That Harry could ever cease to love her, nature contradicted as impossible. He was in heaven, far off, unseen, fixed in solemn unchangeableness in all the elevation of love and grief he died in, never to alter; and she?

Step by step unconsciously that elevation of grief and love had died away from her in the changing human days, and now here she sat weeping, trembling, thinking with awe of Harry, wondering how he would claim her hereafter, how she could dare name his name when she was another man's wife. Poor little trembling soul! She stole away to bed when she could bear it no longer, and sought refuge in sleep with the tears still in her eyes, some grand and desperate resolution of making a sacrifice of herself being in her mind, as was natural. She had troubled dreams, and woke up quite unrefreshed in the morning, which was very unlucky that day of all others, because the lawyers were coming, and all her business affairs were to be settled before her marriage. However, Mrs. Clifford could not remember at her first waking what it was which had thrown such a cloud upon her; and when her thoughts of the previous night did return to her mind, they were neither so intolerable nor so urgent as they had been. In the daylight, somehow,