examination to-day! Both his father and I feel sure, though, that he will be a high wrangler. Only—I should like to have seen him, my own dear boy. But it is best as it is.”

Molly was a little puzzled by this speech, but soon put it out of her head. It was a disappointment to her, too, that she should not see this beautiful, brilliant young man, his mother’s hero. From time to time, her maiden fancy had dwelt upon what he would be like; how the lovely boy of the picture in Mrs. Hamley’s dressing-room would have changed in the ten years that had elapsed since the likeness was taken; whether he would read poetry aloud; whether he would ever read his own poetry? However, in the never-ending feminine business of the day, she soon forgot her own disappointment; it only came back to her on first wakening the next morning, as a vague something that was not quite so pleasant as she had anticipated, and then was banished as a subject of regret. Her days at Hamley were well filled up with the small duties that would have belonged to a daughter of the house, had there been one. She made breakfast for the lonely Squire, and would willingly have carried up Madam’s; but that daily piece of work belonged to the Squire, and was jealously guarded by him. She read the smaller print of the newspapers aloud to him, city-articles, money and corn-markets included. She strolled about the gardens with him, gathering fresh flowers, meanwhile, to deck the drawing-room against Mrs. Hamley should come down. She was her companion when she took her drives in the close carriage; they read poetry and mild literature together in Mrs. Hamley’s sitting-room upstairs. She was quite clever at cribbage now, and could beat the Squire if she took pains. Besides these things, there were her own independent ways of employing herself. She used to try to practise an hour daily on the old grand-piano in the solitary drawing-room, because she had promised Miss Eyre she would do so. And she had found her way into the library, and used to undo the heavy bars of the shutters, if the housemaid had forgotten this duty, and mount the ladder, sitting on the steps for an hour at a time, deep in some book of the old English classics. The summer days were very short to this happy girl of seventeen.