n home. He looked
several years younger, and a great deal handsomer.

Had Margaret wrought this improvement? Had she indeed supplanted me in
my tutor's guileless heart? I inquired of Edith after the wild creature,
whom I suspected some secret influence was beginning to tame.

"Oh! you have no idea how Madge is improved, since her visit to you,"
she answered. "She sometimes talks sensibly for five minutes at a time,
and I have actually caught her singing and playing a sentimental air.
Mamma says if she were in love with a man of sense and worth, he might
make of her a most invaluable character."

"Mr. Regulus, for instance!" said I.

Edith laughed most musically.

"Mr. Regulus in love! that would be a farce."

"I have seen that farce performed," said Dr. Harlowe, who happened to
come in at that moment, and caught her last words. "I have seen Mr.
Regulus as much in love as--let me see," glancing at me, "as Richard
Clyde."

Much as I liked Dr. Harlowe I felt angry with him for an allusion, which
always called the cloud to Ernest's brow, and the blush to my cheek.

"Do tell me the object of his romantic passion?" cried Edith, who seemed
excessively amused at the idea.

"Am I telling tales out of school?" asked the doctor, looking merrily at
me. "Do you not know the young enchantress, who has turned all the heads
in our town, not excepting the shoemaker's apprentice and the tailor's
journeyman? Poor Mr. Regulus could not escape the fascination. The old
story of Beauty and the Beast,--only Beauty was inexorable this time."

"Gabriella!" exclaimed Edith, with unutterable astonishment; "he always
called her his child. Who would have believed it? Why, Gabriella, how
many victims have your chariot wheels of conquest rolled over?"

"I am afraid if _I_ had not been a married man, she would have added me
to the number," said the doctor, with much gravity. "I am not certain
that Mrs. Harlowe is not jealous, in secret, of my public devotion."

Who would believe that light words like these, carelessly uttered, and
forgotten with the breath that formed them, should rankle like arrows in
a breast where reason was enthroned? But it was even so. The allusion to
Richard Clyde, the revelation of Mr. Regulus' romantic attachment, even
the playful remarks of Dr. Harlowe relative to his wife's jealousy, were
gall and wormwood, embittering the feelings of Ernest. He frowned, bit
his lip, rose, and walked into the piazza. His mother'