console him. In his palmy days of self-assurance, she had really disliked him. But, on finding that he could be hectored by his father and lectured by his mother, like any other delinquent of his years, she took him under her protection.

There was nothing alarming to her fancy in the debts he was said to have contracted; nor even in the allusion to Colonel Hartley's embarrassments so kindly made by Sir Horace. For to a girl of her age, such a fortune as Lord Glastonbury's appears inexhaustible; ten or fifteen thousand a-year in process of spending, conveying a vague impression of the proprietorship of Fortunio's purse.

She conceived, therefore, when she saw the boozy Colonel sulking for days with his son, and Lady Mary taciturn and resentful, that they were endeavouring, tardily but never too late, to afford him a lesson.

The lesson being disagreeably prolonged, however, it was far from disagreeable to the young Paria, who for the first time found himself huffed, to be kindly and coaxingly accosted by the beautiful cousin who had hitherto treated him so diregardfully; and who now behaved towards him with the affectionate indulgence of an elder sister. He felt it the more, because, as if to deepen the odium of his own misdemeanours, everybody at Glastonbury took occasion to praise his cousin. The poor old Earl persisted in calling her his own lovely Emily. Colonel Hartley swore she was the first horsewoman in England. Lady Mary declared her to be the life and soul of the house. While the Miss Holcombes and their mother, to prove that they were neither envious nor jealous of the London belle, insisted that she was the most distinguished-looking of the numerous aristocratic London beauties who had brightened the Castle coterie. It was even whispered to him by Ralph Holcombe, as they cigarred it together one morning on their way to covert, that Sir Horace Lumley and Lord Hugh Ferguson had severally bolted from the Castle, the day after the ball, from having been refused by Miss Downham in the heyday of her triumphs the preceding night.

Lord Hartingham, at whose age, almost

all preferences are imitative, and who was apt to value people and things according to the value he saw set upon them by others, instantly discovered that the eyes of the scornful beauty who had refused the fashionable Sir Horace Lumley, were far more brilliant than the eyes of the girl whom Efferville had “thrown over.” He began to think he had undervalued the fair cousin who was so much the more kind and conciliating for seeing him “bullied by the governor;" and was really flattered when she consulted his taste about what songs she should sing, or valses she should play, when a dinner at Holcombe Manor, some days afterwards, was crowned with that one greater evil than a country dinner-party,—"a little music.”

“Yes! Helen was wonderfully improved!” he replied to Ralph Holcombe, who, being despe- . rately in love with the only fashionable London girl who had ever bewildered his bumpkin brains, could talk of nothing else to her cousin. “He could hardly believe her to be the same person he thought so flighty in town. She was grown so sociable and so entertain

ing, that Glastonbury was quite another place."

The truth was, though Lord Hartingham's careless nature did not detect it, that his heart had been drawn towards her in the first instance by the sort of indefinable family resemblance that often exists between sisters whose features, form, and character, are really dissimilar. Certain words,-certain intonations of voice,—a manner of taking up a book or laying down her work,—-brought Blanche (from whom he had now been ten months parted) before his eyes, whenever he was talking to Helen ;-or rather, rendered him conscious of a vague happiness by association with those pleasant times, when the absent one was all in all to his heart. By degrees, the feeling invested itself in the beauteous cousin by his side. How could it be otherwise ?-She took so much pains to please him !--And a very lovely girl who takes pains to please a very young man, must have a hard heart to deal with, if it do not meet her half-way.

Lady Mary sat by,-neither blind nor unobservant, but without fear. Apprehensive that the moment her son's embarrassments were removed, he would start off anew for Paris, and resume the ruinous dissipations in which he had been involved, she was well content to detain him at the Castle, by no matter what attraction. And when her son, though little in the habit of late of confiding his impressions to her, admitted how great an improvement he found in his cousin, she replied, “ Yes! Helen is everything I could wish. Had you taken a fancy to her, Hart., instead of that stupid, yea-nay sister, there would have been some excuse for you.

Helen has sense and spirit.—Helen is formed to shine in society. Helen would have done us honour as the representative of our family. - If anything happened to me, I should have felt satisfied to leave your sisters to be brought up and brought out by Helen.--I look on her, in fact, as far more my daughter than my niece :and it is a great act of self-denial on my part to advise her against accepting Ralph Holcombe; for you may judge what a comfort it would be to have her settled at Holcombe Manor for life.”

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