but Mary enquired whether they were to conclude that Mr. Noel was like Shylock.

'Not exactly, Polly; I only mean that a Radical is not altogether beyond the pale of humanity.'

'I hope that you are not going to take up politics,' said Mary a little anxiously; 'I think that it would annoy Sir Richard.'

'He may not like it at first, but, when he is reconciled to the idea, he will declare that it is a laudable and excellent pursuit for women. You know the process.' And Mary smiled, acknowledging Thomasina's power to win over Sir Richard from the strongest opposition to whatever might be her reigning fancy.

They

Edward Noel's intimacy with the Bertrams was established after this evening. met more frequently at the Chase than in the hunting field, for Sir Richard was certainly growing old, and Thomasina was less zealous

about the sport, and they went out but little as the winter advanced. There was a succession of early frosts that year, foggy, slippery mornings, which made it doubtful whether the scent would lie or not and daunted the hearts of all but the most ardent sportsmen. At first Thomasina was disappointed when Sir Richard sent the horses back to the stable, but she was not inconsolable when she found that Mr. Noel shared his disinclination to hunt in such weather. She heaped the library grate with roaring logs and coiled herself into the deep leathern armchair in which she loved to read, and seldom waited in vain for the sound of horses' footsteps, which heralded Noel's approach. He sometimes rode over in the afternoon, and was persuaded to stay to dinner in his morning dress, but he was more apt to appear in the morning and spend an hour or two with Thomasina before Sir Richard came in, to assume, as a matter

of course, that he had come to stay to

luncheon.

Mrs. Gibbs and Giles shook their grey old heads together, and wondered whether Sir Richard was aware how long the young man had been in the house already. The truth was that it scarcely occurred to him that Noel was a young man. He was thoughtful and intelligent, and Thomasina had so openly deplored the deficiencies of her education, deficiencies which Mr. Edward Noel had been good enough to promise to supply, that Sir Richard was content to regard him in the light of a discreet and elderly tutor. He could not indeed see any necessity for so much learning, but the child had many lonely hours to pass away in the great, desolate house, and she could not employ them more innocently. Thomasina was therefore satisfied that she was acting with her grandfather's sanction and approval, and especially

since her culture was rather in the direction of poetry than of politics. Edward Noel was a good reader, and she listened with rapt attention to the passages he selected from the poems of Shelley and Keats, always telling her, with the almost paternal care which is very entrancing to a young girl, that they were not authors whose works he could advise her to read for herself. On one occasion he brought a book too modern to have found its way into the library at the Chasethe poems of a young and still unknown author named Alfred Tennyson. He left the volume in Thomasina's keeping, and seemed unwilling to receive it again at her hands, although she did not return it until she had conned her favourite poems again and again, and especially those lines which had been scored by Noel's pencil.

Mary Bertram would probably have been more clear-sighted than Sir Richard if she

had been allowed to watch the progress of the intimacy, but she was at the time shut out from intercourse with the great house. The children had been ill, and Sir Richard, much more alive to the risk of infection from measles or from scarlet fever than from love, forbade Thomasina to go to the cottage, or even to see her father when he came to Bertram's Chase. Even when the doctor had declared that the children were recovering from influenza, and that there was nothing more to fear, Sir Richard observed that it was best to err on the safe side and to keep away from them for a few days longer; but he graciously added that he should not object to Mary's visiting the Chase, and on one sunny morning in December Anthony persuaded her to walk up with him. While Anthony repaired to his father's business. room, Mary found her way to the library, and she was a little startled to find that