but a younger branch. Nowadays young men are probably not brought
up to care for these things: I was. Yours,

GUY HAUGHTON DARRELL.

MANOR HOUSE, FAWLEY.


Sophy picked up the fallen letters, placed them on Lionel's lap, and
looked into his face wistfully. He smiled, resumed his mother's epistle,
and read the concluding passages, which he had before omitted. Their
sudden turn from reproof to tenderness melted him. He began to feel that
his mother had a right to blame him for an act of concealment. Still she
never would have consented to his writing such a letter; and had that
letter been attended with so ill a result? Again he read Mr. Darrell's
blunt but not offensive lines. His pride was soothed: why should he not
now love his father's friend? He rose briskly, paid for the fruit, and
went his way back to the boat with Sophy. As his oars cut the wave he
talked gayly, but he ceased to interrogate Sophy on her past. Energetic,
sanguine, ambitious, his own future entered now into his thoughts.
Still, when the sun sank as the inn came partially into view from the
winding of the banks and the fringe of the willows, his mind again
settled on the patient, quiet little girl, who had not ventured to ask
him one question in return for all he had put so unceremoniously to her.
Indeed, she was silently musing over words he had inconsiderately let
fall,--"What I hate to think you had ever stooped to perform." Little
could Lionel guess the unquiet thoughts which those words might hereafter
call forth from the brooding deepening meditations of lonely childhood!
At length said the boy abruptly, as he had said once before,