Bluebell shivered.  She was not at a very critical age, but the culinary triumphs of the “general servant” made her practice a good deal of enforced abstinence since she had been accustomed to properly prepared cookery at “The Maples.”

“People who do nothing all day can’t expect to be hungry,” said Miss Opie, sententiously.  “If a man will not work neither may he eat.”

“Then it is all right,” retorted Bluebell, “as it seems I do neither.”

“Not work!” cried Mrs. Leigh.  “Why she has earned already more than I ever did in my life, and brought me ten dollars to get a dress with, only I shan’t, for I shall keep it for her.  I must say, Aunt Jane, you are always blaming the child; and, if her mother is satisfied, I think you may be.”

Aunt Jane was silenced, but she wondered what Bluebell could do that her shortsighted mother would not be satisfied with.  Meantime the object of the discussion had escaped from the room.  She had no wish to spend the afternoon in the dim parlour, stuffy with stove heat and the lingering aroma of baked mutton; and a fancy had occurred to her to wander through the wood she had last traversed with the sole occupant of her ill-regulated mind.

Trove, now a well-to-do and unabashed dog, rolled and kicked on his back in puppy-like ecstacy as he watched her dress, and officiously brought her her muff, which, however, he objected to resigning.  Trove was Bluebell’s confidant and the repository of her woes, and perhaps as safe a one as young ladies generally choose.

Not a sign of the Rollestons had she seen since her arrival at the cottage ten days ago.  Bluebell thought she could not have been more cut off from them if she had crossed the Atlantic instead of the Common.  Going to the Rink would have too much the appearance of seeking Du Meresq, so she rigorously avoided that; but even in King Street, where Cecil’s cutter flashed most days, she never caught sight of “Wings’” owl-decorated head.

There was a great deal of her father’s disposition in Bluebell, and she chafed at the monotony of days so grey and eventless, and longed for she knew not what; so that it was life, movement, pain even, to exhaust those new springs of thought and feeling that the awakening touch of a first love had called forth, and would not now be laid.

Bluebell, like most Canadians, had had plenty of early admiration from hobbledehoys, who made honest, though ungainly, love to her; but her heart would as soon have been touched by an amorous Orson as by these youthful tyros in the art.  Du Meresq had that deceptive countenance apparently created for the shipwreck of female hearts.  Sometimes men called him an ugly fellow, but no woman ever thought so.  There was expression enough in those luminous eyes to have set up three beauty men.  They could look both demoniacal and seraphic,—­tender often, but scarcely ever true; add to this a magnificent physique,