thousand less; but it is yours, aunt, and was paid in to your account this morning."

"Dear boy," she cries, startled; “why did you do that? But, of course, it is all the same; it can stay there till you are able to add enough enough to to it to buy the old place."

"I shall never buy it back," I say, abruptly; "the money is only valuable to me now as giving me an opportunity of proving my gratitude to you, aunt."

"Never buy back Sieviking!" ejaculates the Squiffer, all the brightness dashed from his young face; "and we have worked so hard, we have denied ourselves in everything to be able to feel that we were helping, if only to buy back a square yard of the dear old house."

"There are too few of us," I say, calmly, but touched to the heart, nevertheless; "Jill

is gone, Anak is away; if we went back, it would never be the same."

"But it was something to look forward to, to work for," they cry, in a breath, looking at me with a dull estrangement that is one of the hardest thrusts I have experienced in this inhospitable home country.

"Perhaps Lady Florizel does not like the country," says Pink May, hoping to throw oil on the troubled waters.

"There's no Lady Florizel that ever stepped who's worth losing Sieviking for," they say as they go heavily away; and, in my heart, I echo, 66 No, not one."

CHAPTER II.

"O! weel sall ye my true love ken,

Sae sune as ye her see,

For o' a' the flowers o' fair England,
The fairest flower is she."

OW, that your beard is off," says Pink May, "it seems incredible that we should not have known you at first;

for, except that you look older, you are exactly the same as when you went away."

"You are altered," says Jill, wistfully, as she strokes my hair with the old motherly touch. "I miss something in your face, dear, though I don't know what it is."

"You are improved," says Bell, critically.

"You have lost that air of being so intensely in earnest over everything, that used to make people feel uncomfortable. Florizel has certainly given you polish."

"It is a pity you could not have brought her back with you," says Hetty, "after waiting a whole year, too; it was most provoking!"

66

Really, the old man is an unconscionable time in dying," says Cynthia in her soft gutturals; "he wants Sairy Gamp by to send him off like a lamb. But I do think it was very unwise of Dick not to wait a little longer; for who knows but that, left to herself over there, she may fall in love with somebody else?"

of

"You have a high opinion of Florizel-and me," I say, drily; "but to relieve your minds any further anxiety on the point, I may tell you that we have not the remotest idea of getting married."

"You are not engaged?" screams Bell.

"You have quarrelled?" cries Hetty.

"Neither the one nor the other-we are better friends than ever."

"Some of your high-flown notions about not living on your wife's money, I suppose," says Bell, indignantly. "And so she is to wait, forsooth, till you have satisfied your ridiculous pride by earning a paltry competence. It's simply disgraceful, considering that she has wasted five of the best years of her life on you already!"

"Who told you that we had any thoughts of one another?" I say, facing round on them all. "You made up your minds that it was to be, and there was an end of it all, without the slightest reference to the persons most concerned in the business."

"And pray," says Bell, trying, but failing to sit erect in the luxurious couch in which she is sunk, "will you deny that you flirted