Old Goodwin shook him warmly by the hand, and his wife once more had recourse to her pocket-handkerchief.  “God bless you, Mr. Woodward!” he exclaimed, “God bless you, I now see your worth, and know it; you already have our good-will and affections, and, what is more, we feel that you deserve them.”

“I wish, my dear sir,” said the other, “that Miss Goodwin understood me as well as you and her respected mother.”

“She does, Mr. Woodward,” replied her father; “she does, and she will too.”

“I tremble, however,” said Woodward, with a deep sigh; “but I will leave my fate in your hands, or, I should rather say in the hands of Heaven.”

Lunch was then announced, and they went down to the front parlor, where it was laid out.  On entering the room Woodward was a good deal disappointed to find that Miss Goodwin was not there.

“Will not Miss Goodwin join us?” he asked.

“Certainly,” said her father; “Martha, where is she?”

“You know, my dear, she seldom lunches,” replied her mother.

“Well, but she will now,” said Goodwin; “it is not every day we have Mr. Woodward; let her be sent for.  John, find out Miss Goodwin, and say we wish her to join us at luncheon.”

John in a few moments returned to say that she had a slight headache, and could not have the pleasure of coming down.

“O, I am very sorry to hear she is unwell,” said Woodward, with an appearance of disappointment and chagrin, which he did not wish to conceal; or, to speak the truth, which, in a great measure, he assumed.

After lunch his horse was ordered, and he set out on his way to Rathfillan, meditating upon his visit, and the rather indifferent reception he had got from Alice.

Miss Goodwin, though timid and nervous, was, nevertheless, in many things, a girl of spirit, and possessed a great deal of natural wit and penetration.  On that day Woodward exerted himself to the utmost, with a hope of making a favorable impression upon her.  He calculated a good deal upon her isolated position and necessary ignorance of life and the world, and in doing so, he calculated, as thousands of self-sufficient libertines, in their estimate of women, have done both before and since.  He did not know that there is an intuitive spirit in the female heart which often enables it to discover the true character of the opposite sex; and to discriminate between the real and the assumed with almost infallible accuracy.  But, independently of this, there was in Woodward’s manner a hardness of outline, and in his conversation an unconscious absence of all reality and truth, together with a cold, studied formality, dry, sharp, and presumptuous, that required no extraordinary penetration to discover; for the worst of it was, that he made himself disagreeably felt, and excited those powers of scrutiny and analysis that are so peculiar to the generality of the other sex.  In fact, he sought his way home in anything