love you, if anything, too
well. No one can ever come between us, unless it is dear little Judy."

"Judy! Don't you think you make too much fuss about that child? She is
such a morbid little piece of humanity."

"Not a bit of it. You don't quite understand her. She and I are much
more than ordinary sisters to each other. I feel as if I were in a
certain sense Judy's mother. When mother died she left Judy to me.
Little darling! No one ever had a more faithful or a nobler heart. You
must get fond of her too, for my sake; won't you, Jasper?"

"I'll do anything for your sake, you know that, Hilda. But don't let us
talk of Judy any more just now--let us----"

"Mr. Quentyns, is that your voice I hear?" called Aunt Marjorie, from
the drawing room. "And, Hilda, ought you to be out with the dew falling
so heavily?"

CHAPTER IV.

CHANGES.

Sing on! we sing in the glorious weather
Till one steps over the tiny strand,
So narrow in sooth, that still together
On either brink we go hand in hand.

The beck grows wider, the hands must sever,
On either margin our songs all done;
We move apart, while she singeth ever,
Taking the course of the stooping sun.

--JEAN INGELOW.

About a week after Hilda Merton's engagement, just when her friends were
full of the event, and congratulations began to pour in on all sides,
there came a very unexpected blow to the inmates of the peaceful and
pretty Rectory.

The parish of Little Staunton was large and scattered; it stretched away
at one side down to the sea, at another it communicated with great open
moors and tracts of the outlying lands of the New Forest. It was but
sparsely peopled, and those parishioners who lived in small cottages by
the sea, and who earned their living as fishermen, were most of them
very poor. Mr. Merton, however, was one of the ideal sort of rectors,
who helped his flock with temporal as well as spiritual benefits. The
stipend which he received from the church was not a large one, and every
penny of it was devoted to the necessities of his poor parishioners.

There came an awful morning, therefore, when a short announcement in the
local paper, and a long letter from Mr. Merton's lawyer, acquainted him
with the fact that the Downshire County Bank had stopped payment. In
plain language, Mr. Merton, from being a wealthy man, became suddenly a
very poor one.

Aunt Marjorie cried when she hea