w, just to
choose the engagement ring. He says he can't trust to an order; that
he must go and choose one worthy of me."

"Oh! it's plain enough that that game is all in your hands, as to him,
Lillie; but, Lil, what will your Cousin Harry say to all this?"

"Well, of course he won't like it; but I can't help it if he don't.
Harry ought to know that it's all nonsense for him and me to think of
marrying. He does know it."

"To tell the truth, I always thought, Lil, you were more in love with
Harry than anybody you ever knew."

Lillie laughed a little, and then the prettiest sweet-pea flush
deepened the pink of her cheeks.

"To say the truth, Belle, I could have been, if he had been in
circumstances to marry. But, you see, I am one of those to whom the
luxuries are essential. I never could rub and scrub and work; in fact,
I had rather not live at all than live poor; and Harry is poor, and
he always will be poor. It's a pity, too, poor fellow, for he's nice.
Well, he is off in India! I know he will be tragical and gloomy, and
all that," she said; and then the soft child-face smiled to itself in
the glass,--such a pretty little innocent smile!

All this while, John sat up with his heart beating very fast, writing
all about his engagement to his sister, and, up to this point, his
nearest, dearest, most confidential friend. It is almost too bad to
copy the letter of a shy man who finds himself in love for the first
time in his life; but we venture to make an extract:--

"It is not her beauty merely that drew me to her, though she is the
most beautiful human being I ever saw: it is the exquisite feminine
softness and delicacy of her character, that sympathetic pliability by
which she adapts herself to every varying feeling of the heart. You,
my dear sister, are the noblest of women, and your place in my
heart is still what it always was; but I feel that this dear little
creature, while she fills a place no other has ever entered, will yet
be a new bond to unite us. She will love us both; she will gradually
come into all our ways and opinions, and be insensibly formed by us
into a noble womanhood. Her extreme beauty, and the great admiration
that has always followed her, have exposed her to many temptations,
and caused most ungenerous things to be said of her.

"Hitherto she has lived only in the fashionable world; and her
literary and domestic education, as she herself is sensible, has been
somewhat neglected.

"But