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eaments of special or exclusive cast, which in ordinary moments are masked by a atereotyped expression and mien, start up with crude insistence to the view.

Frances, sitting beside her mother’s bueband, with Mr. Cope opposite, was naturally enough much regarded by the curate during the tedious sail home; at first with sympathetic smiles. Then, as the middie-aged father and his child grew each gray-faced, as the pretty blush of Frances disintegrated inte spotty stains, and the soft rotundities of her featares diverged from their familiar and reposeful beauty into elemental lines, Cope was gradually struck with the resemblance between a pair in their discomfort who in their ease presented nothing to the eye in common. Mr, Millborne and Frances in their indisposition were strangely, startlingly alike.

The inexplicable fact absorbed Cope’s attention quite. He forgot to smile at Frances, to hold her hand; and when they touched the shore he remained sitting for some moments like a man in a trance.

As they went homeward, and recovered their complexions and contours, the similarities one by one disappeared, and Frances and Mr. Millborne were again masked by the commonplace differences of sex and age. It was as if, daring the voyage, 2 mysterious veil had been lifted, temporarily revealing a strange pantomime of the past.

During the evening he said to her, casually: “Is your step-father a cousin of your mother, dear Frances ?”

“Oh no,” said she; “there is no relationship, He was only an old friend of hers. Why did yon suppose such a thing ?”

He did not explain, and the next morning started to resume his duties at Ivell.

Cope was an honest young fellow, and shrewd