ngs and heart-sinkings of recent weeks. All that
remained was crowded with love.

Tom, dulled and stunned, took the story in gradually, and got used to it
as he went along. He came and slept at night in the tutor's room, and
felt how much worse things might have been had it not been for the
stalwart protector who put hope and cheer into him, and filled the blank
in his heart with sturdier views of life than the boy had ever harboured
there before.

As for Jill, for a week all was blackness and darkness to her. She felt
deserted--lost. She cried herself to sleep at night, and by day
wandered over the house, peeping into her father's room, and half
expecting to see him back. Then her gentle spirit took courage, and she
looked up, and her eyes lit with comfort and hope on Mr Armstrong.
Everything could not be lost if he was there; and when he sometimes
came, and took her little hand in his, and invited her to be his
companion in his rides, or sought her out in her lonely walks and made
her teach him the haunts of her favourite flowers or read to him from
her favourite books, she began to think there was still some joy left on
earth.

"Dear Mr Armstrong," she said one day when, by invitation, she came to
make afternoon tea for him in his room, "you are so awfully kind to me!
If I was only as old as Rosalind, I would marry you."

This rather startling declaration took the tutor considerably aback. He
laughed and said--

"You are very nice as you are, Jill."

"You think I'm silly, I know," said she, "but I'm not. Would you hate
me if I was older?"

"I don't think I could hate you, not even if you were a hundred."

"I love you ever so much," said she. "Please don't believe what Tom
said about the Duke. I don't like him a millionth part as much as you."

"Poor Duke!" said the tutor.

"Really and truly. And oh, Mr Armstrong, if you would only wait I
would love to marry you some day! How soon shall I be big enough?"

This was getting embarrassing. But the tutor was in a tender mood, and
had it not in his heart to thwart the little Leap-year maid. "Time
flies fast," said he; "you'll be grown up before we know where we all
are."

She sighed.

"I know you'd sooner have Rosalind. But she doesn't care for you as
much as I do. She likes Roger best; but I don't; I like you fifty
thousand times better. Would it be an _awful_ bother, Mr Armstrong?"

"What! to have Jill for my little wife?" said he. "Not