CHAPTER XIV.

HUMPHREY'S WOOING.

It was the middle of October when Guy Chichester left his home so abruptly. Dym wondered why his mother should fret so over a few days' absence. She had no idea that they would not see his face again till the Christmas bells sounded over the little valley.

Dym never called it the Happy Valley now; some brief mood of discontent was sweeping over our little heroine. Cinderella, in her prosperity, almost quarrelled with the magic wand that had transformed her. The cinder-wench, as the old Teutonic legends termed her, was sighing for her bed among the ashes again. The roses and sunshine had come into Dymphna Elliott's life; she fared softly, though her bread was the bread of dependence; she wore pretty tasteful dresses; she revelled in sweets and flowers; she drove out every day in a fine coach; even the pumpkin chariot had come to her; she had plenty of affection, no stint of indulgence and caresses; yet there were times when Dym's heart ached, and she wondered if she had not happier thoughts when she sat on the throne of boxes in the little garret at Lansdowne House, looking out over the house-tops to the green shimmering park beyond.

Dym had not yet rid herself of the unreality of her girlish dreams. She was still too dreamy and imaginative for practical life.

"You are enjoying too much of the dolce far niente," Will wrote once, when some trace of this vague discontent had made itself felt in her letter. "You have not enough to do, pet, and are growing fanciful again. I wish I could draft you off to St. Luke's for a few weeks, and give you some hard, rousing work to do. Your squire, as you call him, is doing the work of ten men among us. I can't half tell you how glad I am to get him back again."

How Dym sighed over that letter! A visit to St. Luke's, ay, even one talk with Will, would have healed the brief dis

temper. Mrs. Chichester was a very gentle companion, but Dym found even gentleness tedious at times. She wanted work, variety, plenty of occupation. The monotony, the ceaseless routine of letter-writing, useful reading, and endless knitting and wool-work, chafed and wearied her. She would have worked her fingers to the bone out of pure love and gratitude to Mrs. Chichester. Yet there were times when she would rather have been at Woodside slaving among the children, and listening to the long list of Mrs. Grey's ailments, than be sitting in that stately drawing-room.

Perhaps in the squire's absence Ingleside was a somewhat quiet abode for a young active girl. Dym, who was determined to be good, generally cured her irritability by taking Kelpie for a long run across the darkening November fields. The cold air quickened the young blood in her veins, and freshened her up for the long evenings.

Very often she met Humphrey returning from the home farm with Kiddle-a-wink at his heels. Humphrey would look pleased as the little figure in the Scotch tweed came running towards him in the twilight. Dym's large dark eyes would light up with merriment when she saw him. She and Humphrey had become fast friends. "What a child you are to be running with that dog!" he would say, taking her little hand with clumsy gentleness. One day he brought her a beautiful pheasant's wing to adorn her new hat. "It will just match your dress. You will be a regular Brownie then," he said one

day.

"Do the Brownies haunt the fields on November evenings?" exclaimed Dym. "Brownies and Kelpies-I wonder you are not afraid of such tricksy spirits, Mr. Nethecote."

Humphrey laughed, but somehow the name ever afterwards clung to her.

Honor had not come home with her brother; a cousin of theirs, almost the only relation they had still belonging to them, had been lately widowed, and Honor had for a little while assumed the management of the bereaved household.

"She will come home directly I send for her," said Humphrey, ruefully, one day when he had been somewhat bemoaning his dullness; they had met at the stile as usual, which might have been christened "the trysting place," only Dym was too innocent to perceive that design, and not accident,

brought honest Humphrey so often across her path; "it is not that I don't want her, for the Cottage is sadly lonesome without the Duchess, but I think the change is doing her good, and it is early days to leave poor Helen."

"Why don't you come up and see us sometimes? I am sure Mrs. Chichester and I find it dull enough," owned the girl, frankly-she made Humphrey laugh at her description of the state and loneliness of their evenings at Ingleside.

went on

"We have all the courses just as though the squire were here, and we always pass them as a matter of course,' Dym, dryly; "sometimes the vicar and Mrs. Fortescue come up to dinner, and then we have wax candles in the drawingroom instead of the white china lamps; but it is just as dullthe vicar always goes to sleep, and wakes up with an apology when the coffee comes in, and Mrs. Fortescue plays the same pieces over and over again; and when I am tired of yawning," finished naughty Dym, " I pick up Mrs. Chichester's dropped stitches and go to bed."

Humphrey gave one of his great hearty laughs over the girl's sarcasm; Dym chattered nonsense to him quite frankly now. The result of this conversation was that Humphrey came up to Ingleside the very next evening, and listened to Dym's reading, and made himself so agreeable that Mrs. Chichester gave him a general invitation during his sister's absence, of which he was not slow to avail himself. Dym honestly owned she was glad of this addition to their party; she read with greater zest when Humphrey was there to point out the jests with his gruff laugh. Mr. Nethecote was not intellectual, but he made very shrewd remarks at times. Dym, when she laid down her book, would direct a brisk little artillery of conversation against him, that first amused and then somewhat scandalized Mrs. Chichester.

"My dear, you must remember Mr. Nethecote is not forty yet," she said, once; you talk to him sometimes as though he were quite an elderly man."

Mrs. Chichester did not quite explain her meaning, and Dym only laughed off the rebuke; it never entered her head that her dark eyes and winsome face might become dangerously attractive to the worthy Yorkshireman. Dym would have tossed her pretty little head in scorn at such a notion. It was all very well for Mrs. Chichester to represent Humphrey as a sort of

middle-aged youth; eighteen has its own ideas on the subject of forty she persisted in treating Mr. Nethecote as though he were a favourite uncle or grandfather, all the more that he called her Brownie openly and met all her jests with the same good-humoured tolerance.

"Brownies must play their tricks," he said, once, when Dym had been teasing him for a whole evening, and Mrs. Chichester had at last gently called her to order. Mrs. Chichester began to smile quietly to herself as she rattled her knitting needles.

"She

Nothing could be better-these sort of girls generally prefer a man much older than themselves," she thought. will tease him into brightness, and then make him happy in the end what a good husband he will make her !"

Mr. Chichester laughed out loud over the next letter he received from Ingleside.

"Why is a good woman always a match-maker, I wonder? Do you know, my mother thinks she has found an excellent husband for your sister?" and as William Elliott looked up in astonishment, "Fancy Miss Elliott with a sober middle-aged lover of forty odd-Humphrey Nethecote, too; the most confirmed old bachelor in the whole of the three Ridings. I wonder whether my mother has a grain of probability in her fancy. Humphrey Nethecote-ha, ha!" and Mr. Chichester threw back his head, thoroughly tickled at the idea.

Will laughed, but he was rather pleasantly excited too; he made Mr. Chichester give him the whole history of Humphrey's antecedents.

"I don't know but what it might be a good thing, only the child is so absurdly young," he said, presently; but Mr. Chichester did not relax his air of amusement.

"Wait till you see them together first. I don't believe there's a word of truth in the whole story; Humphrey is too good for her he would bore her to death in the first twelvemonth. Fancy a pretty little sparkling thing like that mated with Humphrey's slow wits. Well, not pretty, exactly," as Will brightened up at this unexpected praise, "but taking, piquante. She'd better wait for a few years, and she'll find some one more to her liking.'

"I am afraid of Dym," replied her brother, slowly; those sort of natures are seldom happy. "Now that this subject

has been started, I wish you would tell me honestly if Dym really satisfies your mother."

"As far as I know, she does so entirely," replied Mr. Chichester, frankly; "my mother is wonderfully well pleased with her; but, to tell you the truth, I do not think she has seemed quite so happy of late."

"How so?" demanded Will, anxiously.

Mr. Chichester shrugged his shoulders.

"You know there are some children who are unreasonable enough to cry for the moon. I fancy your sister has one of these insatiable natures. She has too much mercury in her composition, is easily pleased and easily depressed: to look at her sometimes, no one would believe she has a temper, and yet one would never be surprised at an outbreak."

Either Dym had an eloquent face, or Mr. Chichester read human nature too shrewdly, and in his own sadness found time to notice the passing clouds on a girl's brow.

Will sighed, for he knew from past experience this description was true.

"I have sent her to the right place to be broken in," he said, with a smile. "Your mother's kindness will soften the hard places wonderfully; the poor child has been sadly knocked about, and has grown wilful with rough usage. I shall never be sufficiently grateful that she was placed under such loving protection."

"Broken in !" How little did William Elliott know how

truly his words would be fulfilled. Poor little Dym! Ah, in the long years to come, who would have recognized in the sweet-faced gentle woman the dreamy enthusiastic girl with the dark spirituelle eyes and quick vivacity, that could amuse herself at the expense of others, and laugh and cry in a breath?

Mr. Chichester never discussed the merits and demerits of his protégée again with her brother, and though Humphrey Nethecote was the principal topic in many succeeding letters, the subject was not revived between them. The squire was too preoccupied and ill at ease to take much interest in a girl's love-affair; his friendship with Will was as warm and unimpaired as ever, but he was as taciturn and sparing in his confidence as in the days when he was only Mr. Latimer.

As for Dym, she moped and brightened alternately at her

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