e for me, near the refreshment table,
he said in a low voice, "Have you ever been so interested in a
book that you have been obliged to shut it up, and to pause
before you opened it again?"

"No," (I answered,) "I always look at the last page."

"I dare not look at my last page," he said, and his voice
trembled. At that moment I thought I liked him.

At six o'clock the next morning, in my dressing-gown and
shawl, I was at the window of my bedroom anxiously examining
the state of the weather, and trying to stretch my head beyond
the comer of the house, in order to find out whether there
might not be a very little bit of blue sky visible behind an
ominous mass of gray clouds; but either my head would not go
far enough, or else there was no blue sky to be seen, and each
survey only tending to discourage me more thoroughly, I laid
down again, and tried to go to sleep. At seven my maid came
in, and informed me that it was a dull morning, but the
carriages were to come round all the same, and the ladies were
getting up. We met in the breakfast-room, with the weary,
cross, sick-looking faces, which early rising, especially on a
gloomy day, is apt to produce. In the first carriage went Lady
Wyndham, Mrs. Brandon, Mr. Ernsley, and Mr. Moore. In the
second, Mrs. Ernsley, the two Miss Farnley's, and Sir Edmund
Ardern; Rosa Moore and myself had a pony-chaise to ourselves,
and the rest of the men rode. By the time we had reached the
gates of the park, the clouds began to break, and to sail
across the sky, in white fleecy shapes. Soon the sun himself
appeared after a desperate struggle with the clouds that hung
about him. Then the birds began to sing in the hedges, and
every leaf to glitter in the sunshine, while Rosa, who had
been yawning most unmercifully, and, in the intervals, holding
her pocket-handkerchief fast upon her mouth to keep the fog
out of it, brightened up, and began talking and laughing, as
if she had not been forced out of her bed at an unusual hour.
We drove through lanes, such lanes as Miss Mitford loves and
describes; through villages, each of which might have been
_her village_, in which the cottages had gardens full of
cabbages and sun-flowers, and the grass plots had geese and
pigs and rosy children; through which little girls were
walking to school in their straw bonnets and blue checked
aprons, and stopped to stare and to curtsey to the grand
people that were driving by; in which boys were swinging on