I am not disappointed. I like them, but
they are too young, too happy, and too rich
for me not to envy them a little, and
though love and jealousy may co-exist, love
and envy cannot.

"In all this long letter, my own Walter,
I have said nothing of you. You understand
why. I dare not. I dare not give
utterance to the discouragement which your
last vague letter caused me, lest such
discouragement should infect you, and by
lowering your spirits weaken your efforts.
Under these circumstances, and until I
hear from you more decisively, I will say
nothing, but strive and hope! On my side,
there is little striving possible, and I dare
not tell you how little hope.

"Your own,

"MARIAN."

To the strong, loving, and loyal heart of
Walter, a letter from Marian was a sacred
treasure, a full, intense, solemn delight.
She had thought the thoughts, written the
words, touched the paper. When
disappointment, distress, depression, and
uncertainty accumulated upon him most
ruthlessly, and bore him most heavily to the
ground, he shook them from him at the
bidding of a letter from her, and rose more
than ever determined not to be beaten in
the struggle which was to bring him such
a reward. The calmness, the seeming
coldness even of her letters did not annoy or
disappoint him; theirs was the perfect love
that did not need protestation, that was as
well and as ill, as fully and as imperfectly
expressed by the simplest affirmation as by
a score of endearing phrases. No letter of
Marian's had ever failed to delight, to
strengthen, to encourage Walter Joyce,
until this one reached him.

He opened the envelope with an eager
touch, his dark cheek flushed, and a tender
smile shone in his eyes; he murmured a
word of love as the closely-written sheets
met his impatient gaze.

"A long letter to-day, Marian, my
darling. Did you guess how sadly I wanted
it?"

But as Walter read the letter his
countenance changed. He turned back, and
read some portions twice over, then went
on, and when he concluded it began again.
But not with the iteration of a lover,
refreshing his first feeling of delight, seeking
pet passages to dwell on afresh. There
was no such pleasurable impulse in the
moody re-reading of this letter. Walter
frowned more than once while he read it,
and struck the hand in which he held it
monotonously against his knee when he
had acquired the full unmistakable meaning
of it.

His face had been sad and anxious when
the letter reached him—he had reason for
sadness and anxiety— but when he had
read it for the last time, and thrust it into
his breast-pocket, his face was more than
sad and anxious— it was haggard, gloomy,
and angry.

AS THE CROW FLIES.

DUE WEST. MARLBOROUGH TO GLASTONBURY.

THE crow has a fair flight westward over the
great Wiltshire plain, where the long chalk
waves of the old sea bed are now covered with
crisp short grass, which by turns the wild thyme
purples, and the drifts of thistle-down whiten;
and where, beside the graves of Danish kings,
wheatears flit from ant-hill to ant-hill, and
quick rabbits scud from thorn bush to thorn
bush. It is a lonely wind-swept region, whose
sentinels are the shepherds wrapped in soldiers'
grey great coats, and moodily watching their
flocks. Roman roads chequer the plain, British
graves dot its surface, Druid circles stud its
desolate regions. Old war-dykes traverse it in
shadowy lines, marking the spots where Alfred
smote the Saxon, or where he fell back
towards the Somersetshire marshes, ready to
pounce again upon their revelling camps.
Sarsen stones and grey wethers point the way
to the great temple of Stonehenge, and the
haunted clusters of Druid altars at Avebury.
Yonder, too, the crow sees here and there the
wool-gatherers, those witch-like old women,
who creep along the valleys of the Downs,
wrenching from the surly thorn-bushes the tufts
of wool the branches have snatched from the
sheltering sheep.

The wind here, with a free and clear rush
of thirty or forty miles, unimpeded by anything
more resisting than a clump of firs or a rifle
butt, comes laden with oxygen and life. As
Mr. Ruskin says of the wind on the Yorkshire
wolds, you can lean up against it. It is the
most vitalising wind that races over England;
and if it were not for the hard Wiltshire beer
and the still harder cheese, one hardly knows
how Wiltshire men could contrive to die, short
of a hundred years old. Free down the land
has always been here, free to the shifting
flocks of starlings, free to the rabbit and
the fox, free to the hare and the greyhound,
free to the shepherd and the wool-gatherer.
The Downs are quiet enough now— quietest
of all on summer Sundays, when the village
bells toss their music from valley to valley;
quiet at sunset, when the Druid altars grow
once more crimson, and the golden bars of
the western sky rise like steps to the gate of
Heaven, or the last fading rounds of that ladder
on which the patriarch saw the angels ascending
and descending. It was here round the