NO sooner did Mrs. Grainger find herself safely locked in her room, than she re-opened the letter the post had just brought her. It was exceedingly brief, and seemed hastily written:

It was a name to bring up many memories, and Miss Grainger sat gazing at the lines before her in a state of wonderment blended with terror. Once only, had she read of him since his departure; it was, when agitated and distressed to know what had become of him, she ventured on a step of, for her, daring boldness, and to whose temerity she would not make her nieces the witnesses. She wrote a letter to Miss Sophia Calvert, begging to have some tidings of her cousin, and some clue to his whereabouts. The answer came by return of post; it ran thus:

The reading of this epistle made the old lady keep her bed for three days, her sufferings being all the more aggravated, since they imposed secrecy. From that day forth she had never heard Calvert’s name; and though for hours long she would think and ponder over him, the mention of him was so strictly interdicted, that the very faintest allusion to him was even avoided.

And now, like one risen from the grave, he was come back again! Come back to renew, Heaven could tell what sorrows of the past, and refresh the memory of days that had always been dashed with troubles.

It was already Friday. Where and how could a message reach him? She dreaded him, it is true: but why she dreaded him she knew not. It was a sort of vague terror, such as some persons feel at the sound of the sea, or the deep-voiced moaning of the wind through trees. It conveyed a sense of peril through a sense of sadness—no more. She had grown to dislike him from the impertinent rebuke Miss Calvert had administered to her on his account. The mention of Calvert was coupled with a darkened room, leeches, and ice on the head, and worse than all, a torturing dread that her mind might wander, and the whole secret history of the correspondence leak out in her ramblings.

Were not these reasons enough to make her tremble at the return of the man who had occasioned so much misery? Yet, if she could even find a pretext, could she be sure that she could summon courage to say, “I’ll not see you?” There are men to whom a cruelly cold reply is a repulse; but Calvert was not one of these, and this she knew well. Besides, were she to decline to receive him, might it not drive him to come and ask to see the girls, who now, by acceding to his request, need never hear or know of his visit?

After long and mature deliberation, she determined on her line of action. She would pretend to the girls that her letter was from her lawyer, who, accidentally finding himself in her neighbourhood, begged an interview as he passed through Orta on his way to Milan, and for this purpose she could go over in the boat alone, and meet Calvert on his arrival. In this way she could see him without the risk of her nieces’ knowledge, and avoid the unpleasantness of not asking him to remain when he had once passed her threshold.

“I can at least show him,” she thought, “that our old relations are not to be revived, though I do not altogether break off all acquaintanceship. No man has a finer sense of tact,-and he will understand the distinction I intend, and respect it” She also bethought her it smacked somewhat of a vengeance—though she knew not precisely how or why—that she’d take Sophia Calvert’s note along with her, and show him how her inquiry for him was treated by his family. She had a copy of her own, a most polite and respectful epistle it was, and in no way calculated to evoke the rebuke it met with. “He’ll be perhaps able to explain the mystery,” thought she, “and whatever Miss Calvert’s misconception, he can eradicate it when he sees her.”

“How fussy and important aunt is this morning!” said Florence, as the old lady stepped into the boat. “If the interview were to be with the Lord Chancellor instead of a London solicitor, she could not look more profoundly impressed with its solemnity.”

“She’ll be dreadful when she comes back,” said Emily, laughing; “so full of all the law jargon that she couldn’t understand, but will feel a right to repeat, because she has paid for it.”

It was thus they criticised her. Just as many aunts and uncles, and some papas and mammas, too, are occasionally criticised by those younger members of the family who are prone to be very caustic as to the mode certain burdens are borne, the weight of which has never distressed their own shoulders. And this, not from any deficiency of affection, but simply through a habit which, in the levity of our day, has become popular, and taught us to think little of the ties of parentage, and call a father a Governor.