Robert Orange

th her in the evenings, and feed her peacocks in the morning. She is tired of poor Miss Wilmington. An old tyrant!"

"She hopes to hear soon when the marriage is to take place. I wish I could tell her the day. I do so long to have it fixed."

"Dear papa," she said, with a charming smile, "you are anxious, I see, to be rid of me. I will write to him to-night."

"And to what effect?"

"The wisest."

"That means the happiest, too?" he asked with anxiety.

"For you and him, I hope. As for me--am I a woman who could, by any chance, be both happy and wise at the same moment?"

Her existence was very solitary. The flippancy of the lives around her, the inanity of her relatives' pursuits, their heedlessness of those inner qualities which make the real--indeed, the only considerable difference between man and man, could but fret, and mortify, and abash a heart which, in the absence of any religious faith, had, at any rate, the need of it. Her father, who entertained clear view