Dr. Snell’s letter:—­

Dear sir,—­Miss Lusignan has written to me somewhat impatiently and seems disposed to dispense with my visits.  I do not, however, think it right to withdraw without telling you candidly that this is an unwise step.  Your daughter’s health is in a very precarious condition.

Yours, etc.

Rosa burst out laughing.  “I have nothing to fear, and I’m on the brink of the grave.  That comes of writing without a consultation.  If they had written at one table, I should have been neither well nor ill.  Poor Christopher!” and her sweet face began to work piteously.

“There! there! drink a glass of wine.”

She did, and a tear with it, that ran into the glass like lightning.

Warned by this that grief sat very near the bright, hilarious surface, Mr. Lusignan avoided all emotional subjects for the present.  Next day, however, he told her she might dismiss her lover, but no power should make him dismiss his pet physician, unless her health improved.

“I will not give you that excuse for inflicting him on me again,” said the young hypocrite.

She kept her word.  She got better and better, stronger, brighter, gayer.

She took to walking every day, and increasing the distance, till she could walk ten miles without fatigue.

Her favorite walk was to a certain cliff that commanded a noble view of the sea.  To get to it she must pass through the town of Gravesend; and we may be sure she did not pass so often through that city without some idea of meeting the lover she had used so ill, and eliciting an apology from him.  Sly puss!

When she had walked twenty times, or thereabouts, through the town, and never seen him, she began to fear she had offended him past hope.  Then she used to cry at the end of every walk.

But by and by bodily health, vanity, and temper combined to rouse the defiant spirit.  Said she, “If he really loved me, he would not take my word in such a hurry.  And besides, why does he not watch me, and find out what I am doing, and where I walk?”

At last she really began to persuade herself that she was an ill-used and slighted girl.  She was very angry at times, and disconsolate at others; a mixed state in which hasty and impulsive young ladies commit lifelong follies.

Mr. Lusignan observed the surface only:  he saw his invalid daughter getting better every day, till at last she became a picture of health and bodily vigor.  Relieved of his fears, he troubled his head but little about Christopher Staines.  Yet he esteemed him, and had got to like him; but Rosa was a beauty, and could do better than marry a struggling physician, however able.  He launched out into a little gayety, resumed his quiet dinner-parties; and, after some persuasion, took his now blooming daughter to a ball given by the officers of Chatham.