il and lawlessness, a
wild flavor infinitely more to her taste than would be any prudent,
commendable affection grown in drawing-rooms, nourished by
conventionalism, and propped by social fitness; and remembering the
manly beauty and brilliant parts of her lover, she felt that she would
not exchange him for the proudest noble of the realm.

After a time Bessie came stealing up from the drawing-room, and lay
down by her cousin's side, softly, for fear of waking her; and all night
long Bessie's secret curled about her smiling mouth, and quivered
through the lids of her shut eyes, and overran her red lips in murmurs
of happy dreams; but Zelma's secret burned like slow fire in her deepest
heart. Bessie dreamed of merry games and quiet rambles and country
_fetes_ with the gay Sir Harry; but Zelma, when at last she slept,
dreamed of wandering with her adventurous lover from province to
province,--then of playing Juliet to his Romeo before a vast
metropolitan audience.

Days went on, and Bessie's pure, transparent nature, a lily-bud of
sweetest womanhood, seemed unconsciously revealing itself, leaf by leaf,
to all the world, and blooming out its beautiful innermost life; but
Zelma's secret still smouldered in her shut heart, never by any chance
flaming up to her lips in words. Her month assumed a look of rigid
resolution, almost of desperation; and her eyes shone with a hard,
diamond-like brilliancy, fitful, but never soft or tearful. Her manner
grew more and more moody and constrained, till even her matter-of-fact
uncle and aunt, good easy souls, and her absorbed cousin, became curious
and anxious. The little elfish black pony was in more frequent request
than ever; for his mistress now went out at any hour that suited her
whim, in any weather, chose the loneliest by-ways, and rode furiously.
Often, at evening, she ascended a dark gorge of the western hills and
plunged down on the other side, as though in hot pursuit of the setting
sun; and at length there came a report from the gossiping post-mistress
of a little village over there, that she came for letters, which she
duly received, addressed in a dashing, manly hand. This story, coming to
the ears of Roger Burleigh, quickened his dull suspicions that
"something was wrong with that poor girl"; and just as he was getting
positive and peremptory, and Bessie perplexed and alarmed, Zelma
disappeared!

For several days there were anxious inquiries and vain searches in every