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on the atone in the garden for his favorite relaxation of trimming the box-tree borders to the plots, A sound like luggage thrown down from the coach was a gun far away at sea; and what looked like a tall mat by the gate at dusk was a yew bush cut into a quaint and attenuated shape, There is no such solitude in country places now as there was in those old days.

Yet all the while King George and his court were at his favorite sea-side resort, not more than five miles off,

The daughter's seclusion was great, but beyond the seclusion of the girl lay the seclusion of the father. If her social condition waa twilight, his was darkness, Yet he enjoyed his darkness, while her twilight oppressed her. Dr. Grove had been a professional man whose taste for lonely meditation over metaphysical questions had diminished his practice till it no longer paid him to keep it going; after which he had relinguished it and hired at a nominal rent the small, dilapidated half-farm half-manor-house of this obsoure inland nook, to make a sufficiency of an income which in a town would have been inadequate for their maintenance, He stayed in his garden the greater part of the day, growing more and more irritable with the lapse of time and the increasing perception that he had wasted his life in the pursuit of illusions, He saw his friends less and lesa frequently. Phyllis became so shy that if she met a stranger anywhere in her short rambles she felt ashamed at his gaze, walked awkwardly, and blushed to her shoulders.

Yet Phyllis was discovered even here by an admirer, and her hand most anexpeotedly asked in marriage.

The king, as aforesaid, was at the neighboring town, where he had taken up his abode at Gloucester Lodge;