“A.  Du MERESQ.”

Cecil rode thoughtfully on, as she turned the letter over in her mind, trying to penetrate Bertie’s meaning.

“Why does he not speak out more plainly?” thought she.  “He will never be any richer unless he marries me, so it is useless waiting for that.  I will not, any how, be in too great a hurry to understand him this time.  If his debts are paid, and he leaves the army soon, he must say more—­or nothing.”  And at that chance Cecil turned rather pale, and giving Wings his head, who had been fretting some time, started off at a good refreshing galop.  They were on the race course now, and, excited by the turf, he gave her quite enough to do to hold him.

“What fun station-life must be,” thought she.  “Always riding in a wild, strange country,—­birds, animals, plants, scenery, and ideas, all different and unhackneyed.  Canada is well enough, but it mimics England too much, and is fifty years behind it.”  Before she got home, she had composed a clear-headed and sympathetic, but not at all lover-like, letter to Bertie, who was disappointed at the tone of it; and—­“as the nymph flies, the swain pursues”—­he wrote a much more affectionate one back, and then Cecil suffered her thoughts to take a more decided shape, and they dwelt especially on a “lodge in some vast wilderness” of her colonial paradise,—­picturesque, but not luxurious—­an exquisite climate, and Bertie combining the life of a happy hunter and enterprising colonist, returning to sup on a kangaroo steak, and to wake up to another day of movement and adventure.

Cecil passed a great deal of her time in this ideal log-house, sometimes garrisoning and defending it, during Bertie’s absence, against a war party of savages, for danger was by no means excluded from her scheme of felicity, except perhaps one, like St. Senaun’s isle, her—­

    “Sacred sod,
  Should ne’er by Woman’s feet be trod.”

In such dreams and the companionship of Bluebell, who gave no further offence, now that she had learnt self-command and the necessity of keeping her feelings to herself, the spring advanced apace, and the first bluebird, alighting on the garden rails, was descried with a shriek of ecstacy by Lola.

The children, who unlike their elders, had had no gaieties, or sleighing and skating parties, to wile away the rigours of the snow king’s reign, were emancipated from dulness by the approach of summer.  Their lessons could be carried on in the garden; and, one day, Lola, who had shut her eyes while repeating to herself an irregular verb, saw, on opening them, a jewelled humming-bird balancing itself in the air on a level with her hat, and apparently inspecting that head-dress with wonder and curiosity, after which it flashed off and dived into a flower.

The garden was alive with fairy wonders; wild canaries came to it—­pure saffron, except their black-flecked wings,—­the soldier-bird, so bold and scarlet,—­robins were a drug in the market, and only tolerated for their tameness and vocal powers.  But none could weary of the bluebirds, whose azure took so vivid a hue in flight, from the sun shining through their wings.