a hurried glance, yet it was sufficient for her to decipher its full meaning.  As she realized this a dark cloud passed across her features, she moved silently to the window and looked out; when she again turned the cloud had vanished and her face was calm and serene.  So occupied with the mail bag had been both uncle and niece that the action of the lady in question, in first glancing over the paper on the desk and her subsequent movement towards the window, had remained unnoticed by either.

“There is a letter for you, my dear,” said the Baronet handing one to Edith.  “Oh!” said she joyously, “it is from Arthur.  He is the dearest old fellow, and one of the best correspondents alive; he tells the funniest stories of the college scrapes he gets into, and how cleverly he gets out of them, and makes all manner of fun in his caricatures of the musty old professors.”

“There, there now, away to your own room,” said her uncle, “and let me know what new scrape your dear old fellow has been getting in and out of, during our walk after dinner.”  Edith blushed slightly and hurried out of the apartment.

“There are no letters for you this morning, Mrs. Fraudhurst, but here are the London papers, I have no time at present to look over them, and would feel obliged if you would lay them on the library table.”  She took them, and with a graceful courtesy, smilingly left the room, and went direct to the library, sat down at the table and drew the writing materials towards her as if about to write; but ere she commenced her head sank on her hand and she appeared to be, for some moments, lost in thought.  As she will be brought prominently forward as our story progresses, we had better inform the reader at once, all we know of her antecedents.

Mr. Fraudhurst had been a lawyer of some standing in the village of Vellenaux; he was reported wealthy, and when on the shady side of fifty married the niece of his housekeeper, much to the disgust of the said housekeeper, and several maiden ladies of doubtful ages who resided in the neighbourhood, who had each in her own mind marked him as her especial property, to be gobbled up at the first opportunity he or chance might afford them for so doing, and they waxed wrath and were very bitter against her who had secured the prize and carried it off when as they thought it just within their grasp.  The lawyer and the Baronet had been upon terms of intimacy for several years prior to the marriage, and Sir Jasper being a bachelor saw no objection to his friend’s wife visiting Vellenaux, although she had, as he would facetiously observe, risen from the ranks.

The lady in question was, at eighteen, tall, pretty and ambitious.  She had at an early age determined to rise above the station in which she was born, and for that object she had studied most assiduously at the village school, where she attained the reputation of being the most apt scholar of her class.  A few years residence with a relative London served to develop her natural abilities, and she lost no opportunity of pursuing her studies or of affecting the tone and fashion of persons moving in a far higher circle than her own.