Chapter ii.

REDWOOD looked especially pleasant on summer afternoons. Mr Hesketh, seated in his chair under the great cedar-tree on the south lawn, thought so, at least. There was the quaint, red-brick mansion straight before his eyes, the terrace walk, and the long, modern sash windows of the breakfast-room, opening on to it. At the side, a broad level lawn again, with flower-beds here and there, and a sundial in the midst. Shrubberies, at all times rich and sedate with evergreens, luscious and brilliant in their seasons with lilac, syringa, and sweet-briar, rhododendron, and red English roses. Beyond them were meadows sloping gently downward to the thin streamlet that flowed through the park till it reached the large piece of water they ambitiously called the lake. Dark mysterious woods belted in the prospect. "So far shalt thou see, and no

farther," they seemed to say; and Caroline liked to imagine to herself a wonderful new world lying beyond that black shadow. She had been through it often enough; but when her eyes no longer looked on the actual beyond, she chose to disbelieve it, and went back to her own creations. That abrupt hill, especially, crowned with a pine wood, looked like the very edge of the world;— and the girl's eyes turned wistfully towards it many times in a day, with that constant longing for something in the future-some unattained newness, which is one of youth's irritating pleasures, sweet pains, which you will. She had lived at Redwood all these years, and had never yet ascended Crooksforth Hill. So she was saying to Mr Hesketh on this very afternoon, as she stood near him, leaning against the slender stem of a young silver birch, and twisting in her fingers a spray of roses gathered from the tree that overspread the southern wall of the house-rich, burning, passionate, red buds, like drops of sunfire.

Caroline, as a girl of sixteen, was equally picturesque and poetical to behold. There was a wild,

half Indian grace in her lithe, elastic movements; a flush of exquisite colour in the deep-toned gold of her hair, and the warm roses that for ever glowed on her cheek. Her features were fine, rather than pretty, with a certain strength in their outline which is not always so pleasant in a woman's face as it promised to be in hers. But when the spirit within her chose it, those grey eyes could soften into tenderness, that firmly-cut mouth could relax into a sweetness perfectly womanly, and entirely bewitching. Even now, in her early girlhood, these changes of expression were often perceptible; but as yet she was thoroughly girlish, with all a girl's eager susceptibility to impressionsquick, fast-succeeding feelings, and unanalysed sensations. In such a nature, reverie takes the place of thought; and indeed Caroline, while very prone to dream, to imagine, and to lose herself in the maze of her own wild fancies, was too little used to reflect. Moreover, she was seldom retrospective in her own mind. She talked of the past quite as frequently as she thought about it. As for the future, it is the special inheritance of youth,

and Caroline had taken possession long ago, and held it triumphantly, after the manner of an autocrat. As she stands now, twisting the rose-spray between her long, thin fingers, you may be very sure she is far enough away from Crooksforth Hill, the name which has just left her lips.

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But, my dear," observes Mr Hesketh, responsive to the remark she had made to him, "you

could go any day, you know.

Stokes would drive

you to the foot of the hill, and you might walk up to the top, or you could ride on your pony."

"Yes, I might," said Caroline, and went back to her empire straightway.

"There is a beautiful view from the top," went on the old man. "On clear days you can see the sea quite distinctly; and the moorlands are very fine on the other side. But it is many years since I was there. Vaughan went once, but it was a misty day, and he was disappointed. When he comes home, he must take you there. That will be the best plan."

"Ah, he will be here in a week now!" cried the girl, rising to the surface of things, with a

deep-drawn breath of much pleasure and satisfaction.

After all, she lived thoroughly and keenly in the outside world, at most times. She was a sentient being in the fullest degree: her perceptions were exquisitely acute; she responded like a finelystrung harp to every air that passed by, even from the faintest, to the loudest blast that shook the roof-tree.

The bright colours of some flowers in the shrubbery border caught her eye. She flitted across the lawn to gather them, singing in her clear but somewhat peculiar voice a fragment of some remembered French song. She looked very well in her white dress (Mr Hesketh especially liked her to wear white), with her wide-brimmed strawhat hanging on her arm,-where she more frequently wore it than on her head, and a blue scarf floating about her neck. She danced about with a joyousness that was quite infectious. was pleasant to watch the elastic spring of the slender feet from the ground, the unconscious grace of the whole figure, the careless, but har

It