and long ago that I used to live there. It is strange
how much older and different I feel. But I never forget you, dearest
Aunty, and I should like this very moment to stand by your side at your
window as I used to, and look out at the hills, or, better still, to lie
in your lap or on my bed, and hear you sing one of the dear old hymns. I
thought I had forgotten them until lately. But I remember them very often
now. I think of Pinewood a great deal, and I love you dearly; and yet
somehow I do not feel as if I cared to go back there to live. Isn't that
strange? Give my love to Grandpa, and tell him I am neither engaged to a
foreign minister, nor a New York merchant, nor a Southern planter--nor to
any body else. But he must keep up heart, for there's plenty of time yet.
Good-by, dear Aunty. I seem to hear you singing,

"'Oh that I now the rest might know!'

"Do you know how often you used to sing that? Good-by.

"Your affectionate, HOPE."

Mrs. Simcoe held the letter in her hand for a long time, looking, as
usual, out of the window.

Presently she rose, and went to a bureau, and unlocked a drawer with
a key that she carried in her pocket. Taking out an ebony box like a
casket, she unlocked that in turn, and then lifted from it a morocco
case, evidently a miniature. She returned to her chair and seated herself
again, swaying her body gently to and fro as if confirming some difficult
resolution, but with the same inscrutable expression upon her face. Still
holding the case in her hands unopened, she murmured:

"I want a sober mind,
A self-renouncing will,
That tramples down and casts behind
The baits of pleasing ill."

She repeated the whole hymn several times, as if it were a kind of spell
or incantation, and while she was yet saying it she opened the miniature.

The western light streamed over the likeness of a man of a gallant,
graceful air, in whom the fires of youth were not yet burned out, and
in whose presence there might be some peculiar fascination. The hair
was rather long and fair--the features were handsomely moulded, but
wore a slightly jaded expression, which often seems to a woman an air
of melancholy, but which a man would have recognized at once as the
result of dissipation. There was a singular cast in the eye, and a kind
of lofty, irresistible command in the whole aspect, which appeared to be
quite as much an assumption of manner as a real superiority. In fact it
was the likeness of what is tec