us and get him three hundred miles out of his own way. That is what I am wondering at."

"You look on it in that light, do you, Emily?" said Sir Charles. "I wonder," said Lady Emily, going on in her own line, "whether the fellow is good-looking, and has been making love to one of those red-haired, horse-breaking Herage girls. That is it, depend on it. Not another word, Charles, here comes

Laura."

"My dear mother, good morning!"

"You think he ought to come, then, Emily?" said Sir Charles. "You think he will do?”

"My dear Charles! Do! Such a paragon of a creature. The question is not whether he will do, but what he has been doing. I have the deepest curiosity to see the man. I suppose he will take his meals with us; what rooms shall I get ready for him?"

"Then he had better come?"

"It is not in my line at all to say yes or no. If my personal wishes were consulted, I should say let him come. You seem to have collected all the available rogues and fools in the south of Devon about your stable and kennel, and I am getting tired of them. I want to see a rogue from another country for a change. Have the man down."

"My dearest Emily, why are you so disagreeable this morning?"

"I did not mean to be so to you, Charles," said his wife, kissing him as she passed him. "Since you have taken me out of society, I have no one to whet my tongue on but you, you selfish man. And it is rather cool of Sir George Herage to try and foist off a man, who evidently has made the country too hot to hold him, on to us."

But, Emily dear, I won't have him if you think so." "Have him down, Charles, by all means have him down.” And so the paragon Hammersley came. And no one having said anything against it, it must be supposed that every one was perfectly satisfied. But Lady Emily determined to find out the reason of this wonderful recommendation of Sir George Herage or perish in the attempt. She neither did the one thing or the other at first; but she was not easily to be beaten.

Her sister, Lady Melton, on being appealed to by letter, at first could find out nothing more about the young man than that Sir George Herage had picked him up at Pau, where he was hunting the hounds during the illness of the huntsman, and had brought him home. That he certainly understood his business in a masterly way, but was uncivil, loutish, quarrelsome, and rode very little under twelve stone. Lady Melton added that she had never seen the young man, that he had never appeared with the quorn; and that was all she knew about him.

CHAPTER III.

I HAVE described the lay of the country as you look from the mountain down to the sea, and will describe for you directly the appearance of that country, looking up from the tideway towards the mountain, from the terraces of Leighton Court. But my eye rests on something in the immediate foreground which arrests it.

I find I cannot describe the dark purple moor, with Wysclith leaping from rock to rock down its side, without first getting rid of two figures in the foreground. From the terraces of Leighton Court, which surround the house east, seaward, and westward, one looks over the sand-bars of the river, here beginning to spread into its little estuary, on to the red county, beyond on to the flashing cascades of the river; above all on to the dark, black-blue moor. But there are two figures in the foreground, which seem to impersonate the scenery, and being animate, they must be looked to first.

Lady Emily stands nearest to us. A large, handsome, gypsylooking woman, whose real age was five-and-forty, but whose constant good humor, and the fact of her having had her own way, both in the county and in her family, for some twenty years, caused her to look ten years younger. She was a noble, kindly, nay, jolly-looking woman, so very like the nearer parts of the landscape; so rich in color, so bold in rounded outlines.

If Lady Emily stood well as a central figure to the blazing reds and greens of the fertile red sandstone country, her daughter might well represent to our fancy the dark purple moor which hung aloft in the distance, furrowed by deep rifts, which in their darkest depths showed the gleams of the leaping torrent; and yet which, through ten miles of atmosphere, seemed little more than a perpendicular plane, without cape or bay, prominence or depth. She was a little taller than her mother; her face, though like her mother's, was more refined with the refinement of youth; her face might get a trifle coarser by age, (who knows?) or might be swept by storms of passion; but at present she was as placid, as delicately tinted, as lofty, and apparently a thousand times more unapproachable, than the mountain on which she gazed.

People tell one that at the end of the last century there was a school or party among people of rank, whose specialité was the extreme care with which they educated their women, a party who hailed Mrs. Hannah More as their leader and example.

Very few of us have so little experience of life as not to have seen and respected one of the old ladies thus trained, and to reflect, one hopes, on the very great deal we owe to them and to their influence. None of us, however, have probably had the luck to see a more perfect specimen of this type of lady than was the old Countess of Southmolton, the bosom friend of Hannah More, grandmother of Laura Seckerton, whose gentle influence was still felt in her daughter's house. She had formed Lady Emily upon the most perfect model, and Lady Emily had fully answered her expectations, but, partly from the natural vivacity of her disposition, and partly from her having married a sporting baronet, she had become a trifle corrupted; so that her manners, beside her more sedate mother, appeared almost brusque and jovial. She, however, had vast reverence for her mother, and for her mother's system. And so Laura had been brought up, not so much by her mother as by her grandmother, in the very straitest mode of Queen Charlottism.

And she had taken to the style of thing kindly enough. As a child she was too slow and dreamy, too "good," as her grandmother would have said, to make any flat rebellion, and as she grew up, her grandmother, as having more talent, attracted her perhaps more than her mother; besides, the style of thing suited her. She was idle and dreamy, and she liked rules for life; and such wells of passion as were in her were as yet unruffled by any wind. So it was that her manner was far more staid, and her habits of thought far narrower than those of her mother.

A grand, imperial, graceful looking girl, with a Greek face, bearing not much color, and an imperial diadem of dark black hair, dark as the moor after a thunder-storm; was there a fault in her face? Only one; the mouth was rather large.

CHAPTER IV.

THESE two figures were so very prominent, as being perhaps the only two things visible in the landscape I have in my mind's eye, that I could see nothing, or make you see nothing, till they were disposed of. We will soon have done with the rest of the landscape, at which the reader will possibly rejoice.

Leighton Court was what is generally called Tudor, of a sort; stone-built, mullions, and transoms of granite. Length one hundred and five feet, depth fifty-two feet. It was very like Balliol

uncommonly like Oriel, and a perfect replicate of University. It stood near the extreme end of a promontory of the red country, some four hundred acres in extent, and say one hundred feet in extreme height, densely wooded, down to the very shore which divided the little estuary of the Wysclith from the larger estuary of the Avon.

An old Tudor house, say, standing on a promontory of red rock, feathered with deep green woods, whose base lost itself in an ocean of wide-spreading sea-sand. As you looked towards the sea from the hill landward of the house, you saw narrow sandy Wysclith on your right, broad sandy Avon on your left; the house deep bosomed in feathering woods, which ran down and fringed the sands in front, and beyond sands and sands bounded by the blue channel with toiling ships.

Wysclith, on your right, made but a small estuary, hardly could carry the tide a mile above the house, for he had to make the sea between the rib of sandstone on which Leighton Court stood, and another higher rib, three hundred yards to the westward, on the summit of which stood the great Norman keep of Morecombe Castle, which, at the equinoxes, threw its long shadow across the narrow tideway, and in March and September, at sunset, lay the shade of its tallest battlements on the smooth shorn turf of Leighton Court pleasance. At those two periods of the year when the sun was due west, and began to darken towards his setting, the tower of the keep of Morecombe seemed to hang minatory and darkly over its more peaceful neighbor, the hall; but at all other times the castle was a thing of beauty for the inhabitants of the Court. At morn it rose a column of gray, tinged with faint orange; at noon, pure pearl gray with purplish shadows; in the evening, dark leaden color, with the blaze of the sunset behind it, and its shadow barring the narrow river, and creeping towards the feet of those who sat on the terrace of the Court.

The river just began to narrow in opposite Leighton Court and Morecombe Castle, and not a quarter of a mile up, left creeping among sand-bars and took to chafing among vast shingle beds. There is no town on the river, only the big red village of South Wyston round a turn in the river. So you looked up a reach in the river, feathered with wood and ribbed with reddish-purple rocks, up to the corn-fields, wooded hedgerows, and woodlands of the red country, and above and beyond at the blue-brown moor, with young Wysclith raving down in a hundred cascades through a rift in the granite.

CHAPTER V.

PROFOUND as was Sir Charles's respect for his wife, and his reverence for his mother-in-law, there was one point in Laura's education on which, once for all, he had so coolly and calmly opposed them, that they, like sensible women, knew he was in earnest, and gave up the contest there and then.

Laura was to learn to ride; nay, O Shade of Hannah More! to hunt. He was so very distinct about this, the first point on which he had ever opposed them, that they knowing that although he was so easy-going to them, yet had among men the character of being a resolute, valiant man gave way at once, and did not even openly protest.

Laura was strong and healthy, and got very fond indeed of the sport. One need hardly say that under Sir Charles's tuition she turned out a first-rate horsewoman. The country was a difficult, nay, dangerous country, but then, with its continually recurring copses, it was a very slow country, by no means a bad country for a lady who knew every gap, low stile, and gate, for ten miles round; a better country, for a lady, perhaps, than faster countries nearer London, certainly easier than Leicestershire.

So she got very fond of the sport, and if the pace got too great for her, there was nothing to prevent her riding home alone. Mr. Sponge, not to mention Mr. Jorrocks, don't make hunting tours in the West. There were no strangers for her to meet, except perhaps an officer or so from Plymouth. And very few officers were at Plymouth many weeks without making her father's acquaintance, so that of real strangers there were none. She very much enjoyed the times when she got thrown out among the stone-walls, and had to ride home alone through the deep lanes, dreaming.

Dreaming! What could she do but dream? When she sat on her horse alone, on the hill which lay half way between the sea and the moor, she looked round on the widest horizon she had ever seen. She had heard of a great world which roared and whirled beyond that horizon; but she had never seen it, or seen a glimpse of it, with her own eyes. She heard her grandmother and her mother talking of this world; she had been expressly trained, carefully trained, for moving in this world. She could have gone, with her training and her nerve, into the best drawing-room in London, or more, in Paris, and have found her