d
forgotten.' Her life was prolonged twelve years after the day of her
narration, and she has now been dead nearly twenty. The oblivion which
in her modesty and humility she courted for herself has only partially
fallen on her, with the unfortunate result of inflicting an injustice
upon her memory; since such fragments of her story as got abroad at the
time, and have been kept alive ever since, are precisely those which are
most unfavourable to her character.

It all began with the arrival of the York Hussars, one of the foreign
regiments above alluded to. Before that day scarcely a soul had been
seen near her father's house for weeks. When a noise like the brushing
skirt of a visitor was heard on the doorstep, it proved to be a scudding
leaf; when a carriage seemed to be nearing the door, it was her father
grinding his sickle on the stone in the garden for his favourite
relaxation of trimming the box-tree borders to the plots. A sound like
luggage thrown down from the coach was a gun far away at sea; and what
looked like a tall man by the gate at dusk was a yew bush cut into a
quaint and attenuated shape. There is no such solitude in country places
now as there was in those old days.

Yet all the while King George and his court were at his favourite sea-
side resort, not more than five miles off.

The daughter's seclusion was great, but beyond the seclusion of the girl
lay the seclusion of the father. If her social condition was twilight,
his was darkness. Yet he enjoyed his darkness, while her twilight
oppressed her. Dr. Grove had been a professional man whose taste for
lonely meditation over metaphysical questions had diminished his practice
till it no longer paid him to keep it going; after which he had
relinquished it and hired at a nominal rent the small, dilapidated, half
farm half manor-house of this obscure inland nook, to make a sufficiency
of an income which in a town would have been inadequate for their
maintenance. He stayed in his garden the greater part of the day,
growing more and more irritable with the lapse of time, and the
increasing perception that he had wasted his life in the pursuit of
illusions. He saw his friends less and less frequently. Phyllis became
so shy that if she met a stranger anywhere in her short rambles she felt
ashamed at his gaze, walked awkwardly, and blushed to her shoulders.

Yet Phyllis was discovered even here by an admirer, and her hand most
unexpectedly ask