NEVER FORGOTTEN.

PART THE FIRST.
CHAPTER XXVIII. PRESENTED TO THE FERMOR
FAMILY.

NEXT morning he was with the Manuels very
early, and with a grave face demanded—though
not in terms—a private interview with Violet.
"My relations," he said, "are to be here
tomorrow, and desire that you should be presented
to them. As I need not impress on you how
much depends on the first effect you produce on
them, I may recommend you to be very careful
how you behave."

When she heard this terrible news, Violet felt
a shock. She had all along anticipated this
dreadful ceremonial, and her little heart fluttered
as if she had got a summons to the fashionable
Council of Ten. If she had known of that
fearful tribunal, she would, perhaps, have
preferred it. She felt all "blankness;" her heart
sank in, as though Fermor were the governor of
the jail come to tell her that she must get ready
for her scaffold on the next morning.

"Now," said Fermor, become suddenly like
her spiritual adviser, "this is a more serious
thing than you would perhaps imagine. Sit
down, Violet." And he got her a chair, in
which she placed herself, trembling, as if it were
a dentist's. "You have not seen so much life,"
he went on, "and have been brought up
differently. They have lived and had their being in
the highest classes. Fashion is as the air they
breathe. Naturally they are nice and critical,
and have a different order of associations. They
are very curious to see how you will behave, and
how you will turn out; and the question is,
how will you behave?"

Violet, who never thought how she would
behave before any one in the world, and whose
instinct in "acting" was her own simple heart,
looked up wistfully at the dentist standing
beside her, and said, sadly, "I don't—know."

"O," said he, gravely, "but we must try and
know. I am sorry to see you don't appreciate
how much depends on all this; you do not, indeed,
Violet. I am really nervous about it myself;
for there is a—a—and I would not say this
to you, but for the gravity of the situation—a
lightness, if I may call it, in your manner, a
sort of rusticity, which I know would jar on
persons brought up as they have been. This is
the rock I dread for you."

Poor Violet! whose voyaging had been a
graceful pleasure-yacht in the sun and the
smoothest of seas, to hear now of rocks! In
sore affliction she did not know how to answer.

"Take time," said Fermor, gravely.

"O," she suggested, after a pause, and raising
her eyes to him timorously, "I think if I were
to be natural, you know—just myself——"

She stopped, for Fermor started back in
alarm.

"Good gracious! no! Not for worlds! O,
I see, my dear Violet, it is hard to get you to
understand. You have not been trained to
think, and it is scarcely your fault. So we
must try and pull through as best we can."
And having, as it were, extracted his tooth,
with a hopeless air he prepared to go.

Seeing his resignation, and not knowing what
to do, she came up to him helplessly. "O,"
she said, "if you would only tell me—teach me."

"O no," said Fermor, still resigned, "I
have never found that to do. No, we must
trust, as you say, to nature. Only I beg,
I entreat, no spirits, no violent bursts of
laughter. I know it seems bad to tell you this,
but it is all for your own good."

Poor Violet! Bursts of laughter before them!

Fermor good naturedly made allowance, as
for a child, and she saw this idea plainly in his
face. He left her miserable; and then the idea
of what had since passed out of her head—the
"invalid girl"—came back. "She is not a
child," she thought, "and can understand
his instructions; and he respects her." Then
with a weight of worldly trial pressing on her
little brain, she went away to her room, and
battened on her new-found miseries. This, we
may say, on the whole, was the most gloomy
day of her little life.

Restless towards evening, she asked her
sister to come and take a walk. From her she
received balm, and Gilead was poured
abundantly into her wounds. They walked towards
Brown's-terrace. Pauline almost laughed as she
was told the particular woe of that sick girl.
"If you torment yourself in this way, my poor
child," she said, "you will fret yourself into a
grave. They live next door to him, and a little
civility is natural. Besides, he has told you that
he has found them out to be low people, and has
given them up."