watched over them and cared for them since Mrs. MAYBLOOM'S death, many
years before, with all the tender care of the most devoted mother. And of
this fair and smiling throng, "my only rosary," as the Dean used to call
them, HERMIONE was, I think, the prettiest, as she was certainly the most
accomplished. Every kind of gift had been showered upon her by Nature. When
she played her violin, accompanied by her elder sister on the piano, tears
trickled unbidden down the aquiline nose of the militant Bishop of
Archester, the chapter stood hushed to a man, and the surrounding curates
were only prevented by a salutary fear of ruining their chances of
preferment from laying themselves, their pittances, and their garnered
store of slippers at her pretty feet. Then in a fit of charming petulance,
she would break off in the middle of the piece, lay down her violin, and,
with a pretty imperiousness, command a younger sister to fetch her zither,
on which to complete the subjugation of her adorers. And then her
caricatures--summer-lightning flashes of pencilled wit, as I heard the
Reverend SIMEON COPE describe them in a moment of enthusiasm after she had
shown us her sketch of his rival, the Reverend STEPHEN HANKINSON.

But even in those days, while she still had about her all the fascinations
of peerless beauty and fresh and glowing youth, I mistrusted her. Alone of
all the sisters she seemed to me to be wanting in heart. I heard her
several times attempt to snub her father, and once I noted how she spent a
whole evening in moody silence, and refused to play a note, for no other
reason that I could see except that Captain ARBLAST, of the 30th Lancers,
the dashing first-born of the Bishop, who happened to be spending a few
days of his long leave in Archester, devoted himself with all the assiduity
of his military nature to twirling his heavy moustache in the immediate
neighbourhood of SOPHY MAYBLOOM, and not in that of HERMIONE. Indeed, I
have reason to know that, after the guests had departed, poor SOPHY had to
endure from her sister a dreadful scene, the harsh details of which have