“I suppose all that’s very clever; but I don’t understand it. All I know is, that it’s a very dangerous thing to shut two young men of one and three and twenty up in a country-house like this with a girl of seventeen—choose what her gowns may be like, or her hair, or her eyes. And I told you particularly I didn’t want Osborne, or either of them, indeed, to be falling in love with her. I’m very much annoyed.”

Mrs. Hamley’s face fell; she became a little pale.

“Shall we make arrangements for their stopping away while she is here; staying up at Cambridge, or reading with some one? going abroad for a month or two?”

“No; you’ve been reckoning this ever so long on their coming home. I’ve seen the marks of the weeks on your almanack. I’d sooner speak to Gibson, and tell him he must take his daughter away, for it’s not convenient to us”——

“My dear Roger! I beg you will do no such thing. It will be so unkind; it will give the lie to all I said yesterday. Don’t, please, do that! For my sake, don’t speak to Mr. Gibson!”

“Well, well, don’t put yourself in a flutter,” for he was afraid of her becoming hysterical; “I’ll speak to Osborne when he comes home, and tell him how much I should dislike anything of the kind.”

“And Roger is always far too full of his natural history and comparative anatomy, and messes of that sort, to be thinking of falling in love with Venus herself. He has not the sentiment and imagination of Osborne.”

“Ah, you don’t know; you never can be sure about a young man! But with Roger it wouldn’t so much signify. He would know he couldn’t marry for years to come.”

All that afternoon the Squire tried to steer clear of Molly, to whom he felt himself to have been an inhospitable traitor. But she was so perfectly unconscious of his shyness of her, and so merry and sweet in her behaviour as a welcome guest, never distrusting him for a moment, however gruff he might be, that by the next morning she had completely won him round, and they were quite on the old terms again. At breakfast this very morning, a letter was passed from the Squire to his wife, and back again, without a word as to its contents; but—

“Fortunate!”

“Yes! very!”

Little did Molly apply these expressions to the piece of news Mrs. Hamley told her in the course of the day; namely, that her son Osborne had received an invitation to stay with a friend in the neighbourhood of Cambridge, and perhaps to make a tour on the Continent with him subsequently; and that, consequently, he would not accompany his brother when Roger came home.

Molly was very sympathetic.

“Oh, dear! I am so sorry!”

Mrs. Hamley was thankful her husband was not present, Molly spoke the words so heartily.

“You have been thinking so long of his coming home. I am afraid it is a great disappointment.”

Mrs. Hamley smiled—relieved.

“Yes! it is a disappointment certainly, but we must think of Osborne’s pleasure. And with his poetical mind, he will write us such delightful letters about his travels. Poor fellow! he must be going into the