l with flowing auburn hair, tiny hat and feather, and bright
scarlet stockings, looking very much as if she had walked out of a picture
by Mr. Millais.

The congregation stood up to sing a hymn when the sermon was ended, and
Gilbert Fenton turned his face towards the opposite line of pews, in one of
which, very near him, there was a girl, at whom Mrs. Lister had caught her
brother looking very often, during the service just concluded.

It was a face that a man could scarcely look upon once without finding
his glances wandering back to it afterwards; not quite a perfect face,
but a very bright and winning one. Large gray eyes, with a wonderful
light in them, under dark lashes and darker brows; a complexion that had
a dusky pallor, a delicate semi-transparent olive-tint that one seldom
sees out of a Spanish picture; a sweet rosy mouth, and a piquant little
nose of no particular order, made up the catalogue of this young lady's
charms. But in a face worth looking at there is always a something that
cannot be put into words; and the brightest and best attributes of this
face were quite beyond translation. It was a face one might almost call
"splendid"--there was such a light and glory about it at some moments.
Gilbert Fenton thought so to-night, as he saw it in the full radiance of
the western sunlight, the lips parted as the girl sang, the clear gray
eyes looking upward.

She was not alone: a portly genial-looking old man stood by her side, and
accompanied her to the church-porch when the hymn was over. Here they
both lingered a moment to shake hands with Mrs. Lister, very much to
Gilbert Fenton's satisfaction. They walked along the churchyard-path
together, and Gilbert gave his sister's arm a little tug, which meant,
"Introduce me."

"My brother Mr. Fenton, Captain Sedgewick, Miss Nowell."

The Captain shook hands with Gilbert. "Delighted to know you, Mr. Fenton;
delighted to know any one belonging to Mrs. Lister. You are going to stop
down here for some time, I hope."

"I fear not for very long, Captain Sedgewick. I am a business man, you
see, and can't afford to take a long holiday from the City."

Mrs. Lister laughed. "My brother is utterly devoted to commercial
pursuits," she said; "I think he believes every hour wasted that he
spends out of his counting-house."

"And yet I was thinking in church this evening, that a man's life might
be happier in such a place as this, drifting away in a kind of dreamy
idlene