be curious to discover what is concealed from her, but although your uncle thinks she is uncertain whether her father be living or dead, she carefully shuns all reference to the subject.  There is the doorbell!  Hannah will let somebody in before I can fly down and tell her to excuse me.  How stupid of people not to know that my Bishop has come!  Oh dear! it is Mrs. Cartney, and she has come for the aprons I promised to make for the Asylum children, and they have not been touched!  Yes, Hannah, I am coming.  Why didn’t you say I was engaged with my son?”

She disappeared, and after awhile Douglass Lindsay went down to the library, and thence through the door opening upon two steps that led into the garden.

It was one of those rare golden-aired days that sometimes break over the bleak brows of brawling March in sunny prophecy of yet distant summer; windless days, when rime and haze are equally unknown, and tender fingers of the timid spring, lifting the shrouding sod, advance tendril and leaf and bud as heralds of the annual resurrection.  Double daffodils stood erect and conspicuous like commissioned officers along the line of yellow jonquils that bordered the walks, and snowy narcissus and purple and rose hyacinths made a fragrant mosaic over which the brown bees swung, and hummed their ceaseless hymn—­laborare est orare.  Following the winding path that led to the palings which shut out the poultry realm, the young minister leaned against the gate, overshadowed by a tall lilac, and looked across at the feathered folk, of which from boyhood he had been particularly fond.

In the centre of the enclosure was a handsome pigeon-house, circular in form, and easily accessible by a flight of steps, while upon the top of a cupola that sprung from the roof was built a small but prettily painted martin’s home, in the quaint shape of the ark as we find it in Scriptural illustrations.  Throughout the length and breadth of the Continent, probably no other mere amateur fowl fancier possessed such a collection as Mr. Hargrove had patiently and gradually gathered from various sources.  The peculiarity consisted in the whiteness of the fowls;—­turkeys, guineas, geese, ducks, English Pile, Leghorn, Brahma chickens all spotlessly pure, while the pigeons resembling drifting snow-flakes,—­and the pheasants gleamed like silver.

Upon one of the steps of the columbary sat Regina, with a basket of mixed grain by her side, and in her lap a pair of white rabbits which she was feeding with celery and cabbage leaves.  At her feet stood two beautiful Chinese geese, whose golden bills now and then approached the edge of the basket, or encroached upon the rabbits’ evening meal.  The girl was bareheaded, and the fading sunshine lingered lovingly upon the glossy hair and delicate lovely face which had lost naught of the purity that characterized it eighteen months before, while during that time she had grown much taller, and gave promise of attaining unusual height and symmetry.