two other persons, who was a tall dark gentleman whom she had seen in the shrubbery. One told her it must have been Mr. Luxmoor, the member for the county, another did not know could not imagine whom she meant, a third thought it might have been one of the Italian singers, but this she knew could not be, because of the good English which the stranger spoke; and nothing else could she learn.

At past twelve o'clock Gertrude's cloak was put on, her hands affectionately pressed by Mrs. Apley and her daughters, with many entreaties not to let their acquaintance drop, but to come and see them as often as she could. Mark took her to the carriage. She saw him watching her from the colonnade, as long as she was in sight, and she drove home with a confusion of ideas in her head, and fatigue and excitement bewildering her thoughts. It seemed to her ast if she had lived through a whole life since she left home that morning with Father Lifford. But one thought was uppermost one image was prominent one impression supreme, and as she laid her tired, but not sleepy head on the pillow, the idea that passed through her mind was this: "To-morrow I shall look at the Duke of Gandia's picture."

CHAPTER IX.

"The eloquence of goodness

Scatters not words in the ear, but grafteth them

To grow there and to bear."

"Love is a great transformer."

SHAKESPEARE.

On the morrow Mrs. Lifford was too ill to speak. The exertions of the last few days had been too much for her, and the doctor desired that none but her maid should go near her. When Gertrude came down later than usual to the breakfast-room, she found that her two usual companions had left it, her uncle had gone to the same cottage where he had been summoned the day before, and her father had already shut himself up in his study. She threw the windows wide open, and sat down to her solitary meal, which was quickly finished. Then she took a camp-stool, and Luigi da Porto's romance of Romeo and Giulet, which Maurice had brought with him from Italy. She took them into the shade, underneath one of the largest trees of the park, and there remained for several hours reading and dreaming alternately. had never felt to dislike Lifford Grange so little. She wanted time for thinking or rather musing, and the profound stillness of that wide solitary park was not irksome then.

It was one of those sultry days in September when not a leaf stirs, when scarcely an insect buzzes in the sunshine; when Nature seems asleep in the plenitude of her power she has yielded up her harvest, and reposes from her labour. Gertrude had read the words which the enamoured girl addresses to young Montague when he takes her hand in the dance, at that ball which decides her fate, "Benedetta sia la vostra venuta qui presso me, Messer Romeo," and then the book dropped from her hand upon her knee, and she wondered if such a sudden love as that were indeed possible; and on this theme she meditated long. She thought of Jacob and Rachel, of James of Scotland and Madeleine of France, and then again of Romeo and Juliet, and believed in love at first sight.

Her eyes fixed on the green grass; her head resting on her breast, so motionless that she heard the sound of her own breathing; her hands joined together on the book, she mentally made as it were her profession of that faith, and seldom as it occurs, who can deny that such love there is? It is not common, perhaps it is undesirable perhaps unreasonable but, if it is real, there may be in it as much truth and strength and purity, as in the affections which are excited by a few weeks' flirting, stimulated on the one side by coquetry and on the other by vanity. If at the end of three months' flirtation, and of such conversations as passed the day before between her and

Mark Apley, Gertrude had thought herself in love with him, would she or ought she to have stood higher in her own esteem, or in ours, than she does now, when she is conscious of having yielded up her heart at first sight to one whose countenance indeed may be deceitful, whose soul and whose intellect may be unequal to the stamp affixed on his brow, to the promise of his face; but in whom even if such were the case, she would only have been misled to pay homage to the semblance of all that is admirable in man?

Who he was, whence he came, she knew not; what he was, still less: but this very ignorance reassured her, and gave her confidence in the nature of the impression he had made upon her. That he could be anything but exalted in character and intellect she felt to be impossible, and would have staked her life on his excellence, without an instant's hesitation. "Poor little fool," some people will say ay, it was folly, but not of the meanest sort, and we pity those who have never seen the man on the faith of whose eyes they would have done the same.

While she was thus contemplating, a footstep roused her from her abstraction. It was Father Lifford walking slowly along on his way back to the house. He looked hot and fatigued. Gertrude sprang up from her hiding-place under the spreading boughs, and called to him eagerly:

"Here is a stool, Father Lifford; do come and rest. The air is so sultry."

"Nonsense, child, I am not tired."

"Do sit down a moment," she said in a tone so unusual that he looked surprised, and perhaps something her mother had said to him, in their last long conversation, came into his mind; for his manner changed, and, sitting down as she wished, he wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, and asked her how she felt after a day of such unaccustomed fatigue and excitement.

She had taken her seat opposite to him, on one of the low branches of the elm, her arm twisted round another, and her feet scarcely reaching the ground. "I am very well, Father Lifford."

"That is more than you look. You have not a bit of colour in your cheeks."

"It is the heat."

"It is sitting up late."

66
"O no,

I never slept better in my life."

"What are you doing here?" She pulled some leaves off the branch and let them fall on the book which was lying on the grass. He pushed them aside with his stick and turned over the pages with it.

“An Italian novel. How very useful! Ah, Gertrude, it is not in this way that you will prepare for yourself such a close to your life as the one I have witnessed to-day."