ould you want a partner?"

"It isn't a partner for myself that I'm talking about, my pretty. I want
a son--and the partner would be for you. In plain words, Donald MacPhail
is head over ears in love with you Cynthia. Couldn't you bring yourself
to look upon him as your husband, don't you think?"

"No, I could not," said Cynthia quickly and decisively. "There is only
one man whom I could think of--and you know who that one is. If I do not
marry him, I will marry nobody at all."

Westwood sighed and looked dispirited, but said no more.

Cynthia exerted herself to be particularly frigid to Mr. MacPhail when
he next visited the house, and succeeded so well that the young
Scotchman was utterly dismayed by her demeanor, and was not seen there
again for many a long day.

Mr. MacPhail was not the only suitor that Cynthia had to send about his
business. She was too handsome, too winning, to escape remark in a place
where attractive women were rather rare. Her father used afterwards to
observe, with a chuckle of delight, that she had had an offer from every
eligible young man--and from some that were not eligible--within a
circuit of sixty miles around his homestead; but Cynthia did not
altogether like the recollection.

They did not often see English newspapers; but at this time Westwood
took to poring over any that he could obtain from neighbors or from the
nearest town. One day Cynthia saw that a copy of the _Standard_ was
lying in a very conspicuous position on her writing-table. She took it
up and read the announcement of the death at her own house of Leonora
Vane, aged sixty-nine. She wondered a little that Enid had not written
to tell her of Miss Vane's death; and then the tears fell slowly from
her eyes, as she considered how completely she was now cut off from the
Vanes and all their concerns--as completely as if she herself had
"passed to where beyond these voices there is peace." The old life was
over; she had come to a new world where all her duties lay; and the
past, with its vigorous life, its passionate emotions, its intense joys,
its bitter pains, existed for her no more.

And yet she could not forget it; absorb herself as she would in
household cares, busy herself as she would with her father's
requirements and the needs of her poorer neighbors--and for these
Cynthia was a centre of all that was beneficent and beautiful--moments
would come when the present seemed to her like a dream and the past the
only