ancying--'

'Oh! I am sure,' cried Amice.

Lady Adela thought the only safe way would be to turn the two young
creatures out to pour out their rapturous surmises to one another on the
winding paths of the Malvern hills, and very glad was she to have done
so, when by and by that other telegram was put into her hands.

Then, when Mary, unable to sit still, though with trembling limbs, came
back to the sitting-room, with a flush on her pale cheek, excited by the
sound at the door, Lady Adela pointed to the yellow paper, which she had
laid within the Gospel, open at the place.

Mary sank into a chair.

'It can't be a false hope,' she gasped.

'He would never have sent this, if it were not a certainty,' said Adela,
kneeling down by her, and holding her hands, while repeating what
Constance had said.

A few words were spent on wonder and censure on the girl's silence, more
unjust than they knew, but hardly wasted, since they relieved the
tension. Mary slid down on her knees beside her friend, and then came a
silence of intense heart-swelling, choking, and unformed, but none the
less true thanksgiving, and ending in a mutual embrace and an outcry of
Mary's--

'Oh, Adela! how good you are, you with no such hope'--and that great
blessed shower of tears that relieved her was ostensibly the burst of
sympathy for the bereaved mother with no such restoration in view. Then
came soothing words, and then the endeavour with dazed eyes and throbbing
hearts to look out the trains from Liverpool, whence, to their amazement,
they saw the telegram had started, undoubtedly from Lord Northmoor.
There was not too large a choice, and finally Lady Adela made the hope
seem real by proposing preparations for the child's supper and
bed--things of which Mary seemed no more to have dared to think than if
she had been expecting a little spirit; but which gave her hope
substance, and inspired her with fresh energy and a new strength, as she
ran up and downstairs, directing her maid, who cried for joy at the news,
and then going out to purchase those needments which had become such
tokens of exquisite hope and joy. After this had once begun, she seemed
really incapable of sitting still, for every moment she thought of
something her boy would want or would like, or hurried to see if all was
right.

Constance begged again and again to run on the messages, but she would
not allow it, and when the girl looked grieved, and said she was tiring
h