eyes flashing, but a smile came upon her
lips, and she said:

"Well, Edie, am I to congratulate you, too?"

"What about?" flashed out the girl, bitterly mortified by the position
in which she had been placed. "Being made a laughing stock for you?"

"What do you mean, dear?" said Myra, startled by the girl's angry way;
but there was no answer, and, full of eagerness now, Myra caught her
hands. "Mr Barron said just now that Mr Stratton came to propose for
you."

"For me?" cried Edith bitterly. "Absurd!"

"But I always thought he was so attentive to you, dear. I always felt
that you were encouraging him."

"Oh, how can people be so stupidly blind!" cried Edie, snatching herself
away. "It is ridiculous."

"But, Edie, he was always with you. When he came here, or we met him
and his friend at auntie's--"

"Leave his friend alone, please," raged the girl. Then, trembling at
her sudden outburst, she continued seriously:

"Always with me! Of course he was: to sit and pour into my ears praises
of you; to talk about your playing and singing, and ask my opinion of
this and that which you had said and done, till I was sick of the man.
Do you hear? Sick of him!"

A mist began to form before Myra's eyes, gradually shutting her in as
she sank back in her chair, till all around was darkness, and she could
not see the unwonted excitement of her cousin, who, with her fingers
tightly enlaced, kept on moving from place to place, and talking
rapidly.

But there was a bright light beginning to flash out in Myra's inner
consciousness, and growing moment by moment, till the maiden calm within
her breast was agitated by the first breathings--the forerunners of a
tempest--and she saw little thoughts of the past, which she had crushed
out at once as silly girlish fancies, rising again, and taking solid
shape. Looks that had more than once startled her and set her thinking,
but suppressed at once as follies, now coming back to be illumined by
this wondrous light, till, in the full awakening that had come, she
grasped the sides of the chair and began to tremble, as Edie's voice
came out from beyond the darkness, in which externals were shrouded, the
essence of all coming home to her in one terrible reproach, as she told
herself that she had been blind, and that the awakening to the truth had
come too late.

"How could you--how could you!" cried Edie in a low voice, full of the
emotion which stirred her. "You thought I lov