giving expression to the yearnings for holiness and loftiness that had grown up within Isabel Conway in the cramped round of her existence.  The story went back to the troubadour days of Provence, where a knight, the heir of a line of shattered fortunes, was betrothed to the heiress of the oppressors, that thus all wrongs might be redressed.  They had learnt to love, when Sir Roland discovered that the lands in dispute had been won by sacrilege.  He met Adeline at a chapel in a little valley, to tell the whole.  They agreed to sacrifice themselves, that restitution should be made; the knight to go as a crusader to the Holy Land; the lady, after waiting awhile to tend her aged father, to enter a convent, and restore her dower to the church.  Twice had Isabel written that parting, pouring out her heart in the high-souled tender devotion of Roland and his Adeline; and both feeling and description were beautiful and poetical, though unequal.  Louisa used to cry whenever she heard it, yet only wished to hear it again and again, and when Virginia insisted on reading it to Miss King, tears had actually been surprised in the governess’s eyes.  Yet she liked still better Adeline’s meek and patient temper, where breathed the feeling Isabel herself would fain cherish—­the deep, earnest, spiritual life and high consecrated purpose that were with the Provencal maiden through all her enforced round of gay festivals, light minstrelsy, tourneys, and Courts of Love.  Thus far had the story gone.  Isabel had been writing a wild, mysterious ballad, reverting to that higher love and the true spirit of self-sacrifice, which was to thrill strangely on the ears of the thoughtless at a contention for the Golden Violet, and which she had adapted to a favourite air, to the extreme delight of the two girls.  To them the Chapel in the valley, Roland and his Adeline, were very nearly real, and were the hidden joy of their hearts,—­all the more because their existence was a precious secret between the three sisters and Miss King, who viewed it as such an influence on the young ones, that, with more meaning than she could have explained, she called it their Telemaque.  The following-up of the teaching of Isabel and Miss King might lead to results as little suspected by Lady Conway as Fenelon’s philosophy was by Louis XIV.

Lady Conway was several years older than her beautiful sister, and had married much later.  Perhaps she had aimed too high, and had met with disappointments unavowed; for she had finally contented herself with becoming the second wife of Sir Walter Conway, and was now his serene, goodnatured, prosperous widow.  Disliking his estate and neighbourhood, and thinking the daughters wanted London society and London masters, she shut up the house until her son should be of age, and spent the season in Lowndes-square, the autumn either abroad, in visits, or at watering-places.