home. Mr. Burt dined at two, and Miss Hope sat opposite her grandfather
at table; Hiram waited. Mrs. Simcoe dined alone in her room.

There, too, she sat alone in the long summer afternoons, when the work of
the house was over for the day. She held a book by the open window, or
gazed for a very long time out upon the landscape. There were pine-trees
near her window; but beyond she could see green meadows, and blue hills,
and a glittering river, and rounded reaches of woods. She watched the
clouds, or, at least, looked at the sky. She heard the birds in spring
days, and the dry hot locusts on sultry afternoons; and she looked with
the same unchanging eyes upon the opening buds and blooming flowers, as
upon the worms that swung themselves on filaments and ate the leaves and
ruined the trees, or the autumnal hectic which Death painted upon the
leaves that escaped the worms.

Sometimes on these still, warm afternoons her lips parted, as if she were
singing. But it was a very grave, quiet performance. There was none of
the gush and warmth of song, although the words she uttered were always
those of the hymns of Charles Wesley--those passionate, religious songs
of the New Jerusalem. For Mrs. Simcoe was a Methodist, and with Methodist
hymns she had sung Hope to sleep in the days when she was a baby; so that
the young woman often listened to the music in church with a heart full
of vague feelings, and dim, inexplicable memories, not knowing that she
was hearing, though with different words, the strains that her nurse had
whispered over her crib in the hymns of Wesley.

It is to be presumed that at some period Mrs. Simcoe, whom Mr. Burt
always addressed in the same manner as "Mrs. Simcoe, ma'am," had received
a general system of instruction to the effect that "My grand-daughter,
Miss Wayne--Mrs. Simcoe, ma'am--will marry a gentleman of wealth and