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CHAPTER IV.

a des filles à marier,

Je ne sais comment les marier."

French Song.

If the hearts of the young beauties of the Lindsay family beat high with a sort of indefinite expectation at the heir's approach, the head of the matchmaker throbbed and ached with her complicated calculations, her halfformed plots and incipient manœuvres.

Hitherto, as there was not one eligible match in the neighbourhood of Moss Grove Rectory, her tactics had been all of the defensive kind. She not only looked forward to Julian's arrival on his own account, but she knew that her brother-in-law meant to give her daughters the benefit of a season in town, which was to be shared with their cousin Ju

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lian. She had no doubt that a young man of three and twenty, thrown constantly into the sweet and exhilarating society of two brightly intellectual and beautiful girls, of such different styles, would fall violently in love with one. "A commonly pretty and moderately pleasing woman," she said to herself, "seen in the beguiling intimacy of every day life, ever at hand to throw over the harsh commonplaces of existence the halo of grace and good humour, and, by a playful and ready wit, to turn all domestic tragedies into farceseven such a one, watched closely, becomes a source of marvel and of love to the romantic dreamer-and what else is a man of three and twenty?-but, if he sought the world over, he could scarcely find two so gifted and so beautiful as these girls, and yet so sweetly con trasted. Many mothers would send the one away for a time, but I think they shew each other off; and, at least, I shall try the effect of the contrast. If the one acts as a countercharm to the other, it must be seen to."

Mrs. Lindsay loved both her daughters, and

could scarcely decide to which she wished the heir to propose. She had no doubt about Augusta's making a good match, whether she captivated her cousin or not. She saw in her something of the ambitious, plotting, and coquettish character she recognised in herself, but which she called maternal anxiety.

Augusta, then, she felt sure, would marry well; but Ellen-Ellen was to her the most impracticable of characters. She was so straightforward, she could not even understand any one's delighting in plots and counterplots; the spirit of intrigue was as incomprehensible to her as the patient pleasure people take in angling. Augusta could sympathise in the pride and joy of hooking a wily trout, and forget her own past fatigues and his tortures in the triumph of success. Ellen could never seem the thing she was not for a moment, nor bear to give the slightest pain to any thing that breathed. Under these circumstances, Mrs. Lindsay rather hoped that Ellen and Julian would make a match, and that Augusta would turn her season in town

to account, and secure both title and fortune.

True, Augusta was three or four years older than Ellen, and those years some people would have considered the best of a girl's life passed principally at Moss Grove Rectory, or Lindsay Hall, they had been lost as far as conquests were concerned, but Mrs. Lindsay thought improved, as far as the power of making conquests went. Her beauty, in the quiet life she had led, and the pure air she had inhaled, had ripened into perfection without losing one particle of its first bloom; and how much of tact, of presence of mind, and of the art of winning, and the greater art of keeping a lover, a young woman under the surveillance of a watchful mother acquires between the ages of nineteen and twentythree!

Mrs. Lindsay was an unsuspected matchmaker, for she never betrayed the very bad taste evinced in any thing like showing girls off. She knew how much opposition there is in man's stubborn heart-she knew that most

men hate the accomplishments which are forced upon them. If a mamma begs her

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darling girl," or her "sweet love," to oblige her with an overture or a song, the man listens with an angry and impatient fear of being victimized, bored, taken in, &c.; the same performance, had the mamma nothing to do with it, would have thrown him into ecstacies. So with drawing-large portfolios, she said, brought forward for display, were wearisome and odious; but let a man find out, as if by chance, that a girl had an undreamt-of talent for drawing-let her carelessly sketch something at hand, his own profile, perhaps, or his favourite dog, and ten to one his admiration increases, and his intentions, if wavering before, become confirmed.

Mrs. Lindsay had nothing of the transparent cunning of Mrs. Primrose, in the Vicar of Wakefield; she never betrayed her wishes by hints; she would never have bade Olivia and the squire stand up together to show how well they were matched; she would never,