and kindness that the young girl had received she might have expressed herself a little more warmly, and not seemed so indifferent now that there was no further need of her protection. But Georgy appeared impassible; so they parted: and the mother did not know who had loved her son best.

CHAPTER XXII.

GEORGY resumed her former life at Grainthorpe, which was different in some respects from what it had been. She had grown older by a great deal in a few months' absence; and, without any effort on her part, her uncle and aunt seemed to acknowledge it. She was not afraid of Aunt Jane, who had become far more affable towards her. Uncle Robert was very kind now; perhaps because she knew better how to manage him.

She had some idea of going away to live by herself. Mr. Sandon said, that "Surely she would not think of such a thing: she was too young, and it could not be."

He was paternal; and to Georgy, who was of an obedient nature, her plan became an impossibility, when soberly and kindly asked to give it up. She was too young, and it was altogether a perfectly romantic idea. What would the Macbeans have said if they had known that such a thing had ever been mentioned? We must not offend the world.

So the time passed on, and Stephen remained at

Grainthorpe, and Georgy's life began again to be a repetition of her former one. She sat at the window, watching the sea and the sand-hills, until the image of both seemed stereotyped upon her brain, and she hated both. It was no doubt well for her that she could not indulge her solitary propensities, and did not live alone, unconstrained by any of those vulgar necessities of getting ready for dinner, answering questions, and the like. The time seemed very long, and she often thought with dismay, "that all through life she should be obliged every day to answer people." She regarded the faculty of speech in no other light than as entailing the necessity of communication with those who were indifferent to her.

Now that she returned fully to every grinding little repetition of Grainthorpe life, it seemed that she learnt afresh what suffering was; surely she knew it to the end: no fresh page could ever be turned for her. That is thought at every new phase of pain, and still there will sometimes come another. Who knows? perhaps half her misery was from loneliness. Amongst all the inequalities of human circumstances, that of the comparative loneliness of some is not one of the smallest.

Her love was past; she had forgotten it, perhaps. There are some, who, when they have loved, and it is over, will talk of it: then a past feeling becomes Some do not act so; and surely it

an amusement.

is better not. Bury your love and look at it no more--bury it, and tread down the earth upon it. But you should do it: let no one else smile at what has been your life. Trample on it yourself, for you have worshipped it, and whisper the renunciation of what you have glorified. But let no one else come near that grave, for your flesh and blood is buried there too. You will need no memorial to remember it; and you will be happy, if sometimes the past does not return unbidden, and force you to look upon the face of your dead again. So love was gone!— No, not that: if it cannot remain long after we are what they call "in love,"-long after we have forgotten that—it is a small, pitiful thing. We are in love for a day, but may love on into eternity.

After some time, that happened which prosaic people may have predicted from the beginning, and said was the best thing; others have declared monstrous and impossible. Georgy married Stephen Anstruther. He loved her fondly and faithfully. She had judged him harshly once, disregarding his affection; and because she had no sympathy with him, she imputed that want to him as a failing. He was impoverished through his desire to benefit her, and now she had the satisfaction of knowing that she could compensate him for that. His love won the day, for she had no one else to love her, and in time she married him. Do not ask why? Such

marriages are not impossible-not uncommon, perhaps. The reasons which produce them are more difficult to describe than any one positive feeling of like or dislike. But life is made up of occurrences springing from such complex causes.

As Georgy left Grainthorpe, she smiled to herself, perhaps at the thought how, long ago, when almost a child, she had engaged herself to Stephen, that she might get away: and now things had come round almost to the same point where they were before; and she married the man whom it had once appeared to her impossible to marry. Only her view of all things was changed, and to leave Grainthorpe was no longer positive happiness.

They lived not far from Grainthorpe. Stephen, still being engaged in Mr. Sandon's affairs, preferred it.

Georgy made no opposition to him in anything and had the satisfaction of knowing that her money had saved him from the poverty to which, for her sake, he would otherwise have been condemned. He gardened and farmed: he did not gain much by that last occupation. Georgy gardened too, and listened to her husband's theories upon agriculture, education, and many other subjects. If the test of a woman's domestic happiness be her disinclination for general society, surely Georgy's was complete; for society she never sought. Her acquaintance