sits. I do not, however, think it
right to withdraw without telling you candidly that this is an unwise
step. Your daughter's health is in a very precarious condition.

Yours, etc.

Rosa burst out laughing. "I have nothing to fear, and I'm on the brink
of the grave. That comes of writing without a consultation. If they
had written at one table, I should have been neither well nor ill. Poor
Christopher!" and her sweet face began to work piteously.

"There! there! drink a glass of wine."

She did, and a tear with it, that ran into the glass like lightning.

Warned by this that grief sat very near the bright, hilarious surface,
Mr. Lusignan avoided all emotional subjects for the present. Next day,
however, he told her she might dismiss her lover, but no power should
make him dismiss his pet physician, unless her health improved.

"I will not give you that excuse for inflicting him on me again," said
the young hypocrite.

She kept her word. She got better and better, stronger, brighter, gayer.

She took to walking every day, and increasing the distance, till she
could walk ten miles without fatigue.

Her favorite walk was to a certain cliff that commanded a noble view of
the sea. To get to it she must pass through the town of Gravesend; and
we may be sure she did not pass so often through that city without some
idea of meeting the lover she had used so ill, and eliciting an APOLOGY
from him. Sly puss!

When she had walked twenty times, or thereabouts, through the town, and
never seen him, she began to fear she had offended him past hope. Then
she used to cry at the end of every walk.

But by and by bodily health, vanity, and temper combined to rouse the
defiant spirit. Said she, "If he really loved me, he would not take my
word in such a hurry. And besides, why does he not watch me, and find
out what I am doing, and where I walk?"

At last she really began to persuade herself that she was an ill-used
and slighted girl. She was very angry at times, and disconsolate at
others; a mixed state in which hasty and impulsive young ladies commit
lifelong follies.

Mr. Lusignan observed the surface only: he saw his invalid daughter
getting better every day, till at last she became a picture of health
and bodily vigor. Relieved of his fears, he troubled his head but little
about Christopher Staines. Yet he esteemed him, and had got to like
him; but Rosa was a beauty, and could do better than marry a struggling
physic