f in token of adieu to the departing
travellers, Mrs. Lambert and her girls watched them pacing leisurely on
the first few hundred yards of their journey, and until such time as a
tree-clumped corner of the road hid them from the ladies' view. Behind
that clump of limes the good matron had many a time watched those she
loved best disappear. Husband departing to battle and danger, sons to
school, each after the other had gone on his way behind yonder green
trees, returning as it pleased Heaven's will at his good time, and
bringing pleasure and love back to the happy little family. Besides
their own instinctive nature (which to be sure aids wonderfully in the
matter), the leisure and contemplation attendant upon their home life
serve to foster the tenderness and fidelity of our women. The men gone,
there is all day to think about them, and to-morrow and to-morrow--when
there certainly will be a letter--and so on. There is the vacant room
to go look at, where the boy slept last night, and the impression of his
carpet bag is still on the bed. There is his whip hung up in the hall,
and his fishing-rod and basket--mute memorials of the brief bygone
pleasures. At dinner there comes up that cherry-tart, half of which
our darling ate at two o'clock in spite of his melancholy, and with a
choking little sister on each side of him. The evening prayer is said
without that young scholar's voice to utter the due responses. Midnight
and silence come, and the good mother lies wakeful, thinking how one of
the dear accustomed brood is away from the nest. Morn breaks, home and
holidays have passed away, and toil and labour have begun for him. So
those rustling limes formed, as it were, a screen between the world and
our ladies of the house at Oakhurst. Kind-hearted Mrs. Lambert always
became silent and thoughtful, if by chance she and her girls walked up
to the trees in the absence of the men of the family. She said she would
like to carve their names up on the grey silvered trunks, in the midst
of true-lovers' knots, as was then the kindly fashion; and Miss Theo,
who had an exceeding elegant turn that way, made some verses regarding
the trees, which her delighted parent transmitted to a periodical of
those days.

"Now we are out of sight of the ladies," says Colonel Lambert, giving a
parting salute with his hat, as the pair of gentlemen trotted past the
limes in question. "I know my wife always watches at her window until we
are round thi