the two girls passed several years of their
lives.

During the long Midsummer holidays
they rambled over the common at Shipley-
in-the-Wold, or rode about the country
lanes on a rough pony provided for their
joint use. In the winter time they would
steal into the kitchen of an evening, and
coax old Joanna, the cook, to tell them
some of her quaint country legends, or
stories of ghosts and runaway marriages,
and mysterious warnings, which were
supposed to be the exclusive (and one would
think unenviable) privileges of sundry
ancient county families in whose service
Joanna had lived.

Or else they would sit in the gloaming
at Mrs. Levincourt's knee and listen to her
tales of the brilliant life she had led in
Florence, the gaiety, the brightness, the
company! The balls at the Pitti and at
the noble mansions of the Principessa della
Scatola da Salsa and the dowager Countess
Civetta, and the Russian lady, whose exact
rank was not known, but who was supposed
to be the wife of a hospodar. Only she
and the hospodar did not agree, and so
they lived apart; and they met once a year
in Paris, and were admirably polite to each
other; and the hospodaress allowed the
hospodar several millions of roubles per
annum to stay away from her; and she had
a necklace of emeralds as big, very nearly,
as pigeons' eggs; and she smoked the very
finest tobacco extant, and she was altogether
a most charming person.

These narratives, and many more, did
Maud and Veronica greedily devour. Maud
believed them with the same sort of good
faith with which she threw herself into
Aladdin, or the exquisite fancies of Undine.
She was willing to accept the Russian lady,
pigeons'-egg emeralds and all.

Such people might exist, did, no doubt,
but in a far-off way, altogether out of her
sphere. She no more expected to meet
such an individual hung with chains of
barbaric splendour, and puffing forth clouds
of incense from an amber pipe, than she
anticipated the appearance of a geni twenty
feet high, when she rubbed her little
turquoise ring to keep it bright.

Veronica, however, being two years older,
and owning a different turn of mind, looked
at matters in a much more practical light.

"And did you go to balls nearly every
night, mamma? And did you wear white
dresses with short sleeves, and have flowers
in your hair? Oh, how beautiful you must
have looked!"

"I was never half so handsome as thou,
tesoro mio," the fond mother would reply.

"When I am grown up, I won't stay at
Shipley."

That was the burthen of the song, the
moral of the story, the issue of it all, for
Veronica.

On the whole the family at the vicarage
led an isolated life, and the tone of thought
and feeling that pervaded their home was
very singularly at odds with the general
notion of their neighbours as to what was
becoming in the household of a clergyman.

In the first place, Mr. Levincourt was
entirely devoid of the least tincture of what
may, without offence, be called professional
parsonism. It is by no means asserted that
he was altogether the better for having no
such tincture. Men are naturally and
legitimately influenced in their outward
bearing by the nature of their calling in
life. The work which a man does heartily,
earnestly, and constantly, will most
assuredly communicate a certain bent to his
mind, and even a certain aspect to his
body. But the work which a man does
grudgingly, without thoroughness and faith,
will be to him as irksome as an ill-fitting
garment, and will, like such a garment, be
laid aside and put out of sight altogether
whensoever its wearer can get rid of it.

People did not get intimate at the vicarage.
The neighbourhood was but sparsely
peopled with families of the rank of gentlefolks.
Without the command of some
vehicle, visiting was out of the question.

At first Mrs. Levincourt had gone out
rather frequently to formal dinner-parties
at great dull country houses, and also to
some country houses that were not dull.
The hosts sent their carriages for the vicar
and his wife, if they lived at a great distance
from Shipley. Or a lumbering old chaise
was hired from the Crown at Shipley Magna.

But gradually such intercourse dropped.
Mrs. Levincourt was not strong. Mrs.
Levincourt did not care for dinner-parties.
Mrs. Levincourt had her little girl to attend
to. The fact was, that Stella liked society,
and she was by no means conscious of the
surprise which her sayings and doings
were apt to excite among the Daneshire
magnates. But her husband was very
thoroughly conscious of it. And, as the
only kind of visiting they could have,
afforded him no amusement, their life
became more and more secluded.

When the two girls were aged respectively
seventeen and fifteen, Mrs. Levincourt
died, and then Veronica returned