to the squire.

"I have been thinking over what you said, ma'am, and it may be that you
are right, and that I have partly misjudged the squire. I hope so, for
Aggie's sake, and yet I cannot help feeling sorry. I have always felt
almost sure he would have nothing to say to her, and I have clung to
the hope that I should not lose my little girl. I know, of course, how
much better it will be for her, and have done all I could to make her
so that she should be fit for it, if he took her. But it will be a
wrench, ma'am. I can't help feeling it will be a wrench;" and the old
soldier's voice quivered as he spoke.

"It cannot be otherwise, sergeant," Mrs. Walsham said kindly. "You have
been everything to each other, and though, for her good and happiness,
you are ready to give her up, it is a heavy sacrifice for you to make."

That afternoon, the sergeant went for a long walk alone with Aggie, and
when they returned Mrs. Walsham saw, by the flushed cheeks and the
swollen eyes of the child, that she had been crying. James noticed it
also, and saw that she seemed depressed and quiet. He supposed that her
grandfather had been telling her that he was going to take her away,
for hitherto nothing had been said, in her hearing, as to the
approaching termination of the stay with his mother.

As they came out of church, Mrs. Walsham had waited for a moment at the
door, and had told the butler at the Hall that she wished particularly
to speak to him, that afternoon, if he could manage to come down. They
were not strangers, for the doctor had attended John's wife in her last
illness, and he had sometimes called with messages from the Hall, when
the doctor was wanted there.

John Petersham was astonished, indeed, when Mrs. Walsham informed him
that the little girl he had seen in her pew, in church, was his
master's granddaughter.

"You don't say so, ma'am. You don't say as that pretty little thing is
Master Herbert's child! But why didn't you say so afore? Why, I have
caught myself looking at her, and wondering how it was that I seemed to
know her face so well; and now, of course, I sees it. She is the
picture of Master Herbert when he was little."

"I couldn't say so before, John, because I only knew it myself last
night. Her grandfather--that is, her other grandfather, you
know--placed her with me to educate, and, as he said, to make a little
lady of, two years ago; but it was only last night he told me."

"Only to think of it!