nothing which she would have sought to hide. Now, as if some secret were hinted to her own consciousness through the medium of another’s perception, she was fain to let her eyelids droop beneath Clifford’s gaze. A blush, too, — the redder, because she strove hard to keep it down, — ascended bigger and higher, in a tide of fitful progress, until even her brow was all suffused with it.

“It is enough, Phoebe,” said Clifford, with a melancholy smile.

“When I first saw you, you were the prettiest little maiden in the world; and now you have deepened into beauty. Girlhood has passed into womanhood; the bud is a bloom! Go, now — I feel lonelier than I did.”

Phoebe took leave of the desolate couple, and