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MRS. JULIA MEREDITH had arrived, and the
brown farm-house was in a state of unusual excitement;
not that Captain Humphreys or his
good wife, Aunt Ruth, respected very highly the great
lady who so seldom honored them with her presence, and
who always tried to impress them with a sense of her
superiority, and the mighty favor she conferred upon
them by occasionally condescending to bring her aristocratic
presence into their quiet, plain household, and turn
it topsy-turvy. Still she was Anna's aunt, and then it
was a distinction which Aunt Ruth rather enjoyed,—that
of having a fashionable city woman for her guest,—and
so she submitted with a good grace to the breaking in
upon all her customs, and uttered no word of complaint
when the breakfast-table waited till eight, and sometimes
nine o'clock, and the freshest eggs were taken from the
nest, and the cream all skimmed from the pans to gratify
the lady who came very charming and pretty in her
handsome cambric wrapper, with rosebuds in her hair.
She had arrived the previous night, and while the rector

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was penning his letter, she was running her eye rapidly
over Anna's face and form, making an inventory of her
charms, and calculating their value.

“A very graceful figure, neither too short nor too tall.
This she gets from the Ruthvens. Splendid eyes and
magnificent hair, when Valencia has once taken it in
hand. Complexion a little too brilliant, but a few weeks
of dissipation will cure that. Fine teeth, and features
tolerably regular, except that the mouth is too wide and
the forehead too low, which defects she takes from the
Humphreys. Small feet and rather pretty hands, except
that they seem to have grown wide since I saw her before.
Can it be these horrid people have set her to milking
the cows?”

These were Mrs. Meredith's thoughts that first evening
after her arrival at the farm-house, and she had not
materially changed her mind when the next afternoon
she went with Anna down to the Glen, for which she
affected a great fondness, because she thought it was
romantic and girlish to do so, and she was far from having
passed the period when women cease caring for youth
and its appurtenances. She had criticised Anna's taste
in dress,—had said that the belt she selected did not
harmonize with the color of the muslin she wore, and
suggested that a frill of lace about the neck would be
softer and more becoming than the stiff white linen
collar.

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“But in the country it does not matter,” she added.
“Wait till I get you to New York, under Madam
Blank's supervision, and then we shall see a transformation
such as will astonish the Hanoverians.”

This was up in Anna's room; and when the Glen was
reached Mrs. Meredith continued the conversation, telling
Anna of her plans for taking her first to New York,
where she was to pass through a reformatory process
with regard to dress. Then they were going to Saratoga,
where she expected her niece to reign supreme, both as a
beauty and a belle.

“Whatever I have at my death I shall leave to you,”
she said; “consequently you will pass as an heiress expectant,
and I confidently expect you to make a brilliant
match before the winter season closes, if, indeed, you do
not before we leave Saratoga.”

“O aunt,” Anna exclaimed, her eyes flashing with
unwonted brilliancy, and the rich color mantling her
cheek. “You surely are not taking me to Saratoga on
such a shameful errand as that?”

“Shameful errand as what?” Mrs. Meredith asked,
looking quickly up, while Anna replied:

“Trying to find a husband. I cannot go if you are,
much as I have anticipated it. I should despise and
hate myself forever. No, aunt, I cannot go.”

“Nonsense, child. You don't know what you are
saying,” Mrs. Meredith retorted, feeling intuitively that

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she must change her tactics and keep her real intentions
concealed if she would lead her niece into the snare laid
for her.

Cunningly and carefully for the next half hour she
talked, telling Anna that she was not to be thrust upon
the notice of any one,—that she herself had no patience
with those intriguing mammas who push their bold
daughters forward, but that as a good marriage was the
ultima thule of a woman's hopes, it was but natural that
she, as Anna's aunt, should wish to see her well settled
in life, and settled, too, near herself, where they could
see each other every day.

“Of course there is no one in Hanover whom you, as
a Ruthven, would stoop to marry,” she said, fixing her
eyes inquiringly upon Anna, who was pulling to pieces
the wild flowers she had gathered, and thinking of
that twilight hour when she had talked with their
young clergyman as she never talked before. Of the
many times, too, when they had met in the cottages
of the poor, and he had walked slowly home with her,
lingering by the gate as if loth to say good-by, she
thought, and the life she had lived since he first came to
Hanover, and she learned to blush when she met the
glance of his eye, looked fairer far than the life her aunt
marked out as the proper one for a Ruthven.

“You have not told me yet. Is there any one in
Hanover whom you think worthy of you?” Mrs.

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Meredith asked, just as a footstep was heard, and the rector
of St. Mark's came round the rock where they were
sitting.

He had called at the farm-house, bringing the letter,
and with it a book of poetry, of which Anna had asked
the loan.

Taking advantage of her guest's absence, Grandma
Humphreys had gone to a neighbor's after a receipt for
making a certain kind of cake, of which Mrs. Meredith
was very fond, and only Esther, the servant, and Valencia,
the smart waiting-maid, without whom Mrs. Meredith
never travelled, were left in charge.

“Miss Anna's down in the Glen with Mrs. Meredith.
Will you be pleased to wait while I call them?” Esther
said, in reply to the rector's inquiries for Miss Ruthven.

“No, I will find them myself,” Mr. Leighton rejoined.
Then, as he thought how impossible it would be to
give the letter to Anna in the presence of her aunt, he
slipped it into the book, which he bade Esther take to
Miss Ruthven's room.

Knowing how honest and faithful Esther was, the
rector felt that he could trust her without a fear for
the safety of his letter, and went to the Glen, where
the tell-tale blushes which burned on Anna's cheek at
sight of him more than compensated for the coolness
with which Mrs. Meredith greeted him. She, too, had
detected Anna's embarrassment, and when the stranger

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was presented to her as “Mr. Leighton, our clergyman,”
the secret was out.

“Why is it that since the beginning of time girls have
run wild after young ministers?” was her mental comment,
as she bowed to Mr. Leighton, and then quietly
inspected his personnel.

There was nothing about Arthur Leighton's appearance
with which she could find fault. He was even
finer-looking than Thornton Hastings, her beau ideal of
a man, and as he stood a moment by Anna's side, looking
down upon her, the woman of the world acknowledged
to herself that they were a well-assorted pair,
and as across the chasm of twenty years there came
to her an episode in her life, when, on just such a day
as this, she had answered “no” to one as young and
worthy as Arthur Leighton, while all the time the
heart was clinging to him, she softened for a moment,
and by the memory of the weary years passed with
the rich old man whose name she bore, she was tempted
to leave alone the couple standing there before her, and
looking into each other's eyes with a look which she
could not mistake. But when she remembered that
Arthur was only a poor clergyman, and thought of that
house on Madison Square which Thornton Hastings
owned, the softened mood was changed, and Arthur
Leighton's chance with her was gone.

Awhile they talked together in the Glen, and then

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walked back to the farm-house, where the rector bade
them good-evening, after casually saying to Anna:

“I brought the book you spoke of when I was here
last. You will find it in your room, where I asked
Esther to take it.”

That Mr. Leighton should bring her niece a book did
not seem strange at all, but that he should be so very
thoughtful as to tell Esther to take it to her room struck
Mrs. Meredith as rather odd, and as the practised warhorse
scents the battle from afar, so she at once suspected
something wrong, and felt a curiosity to know what the
book could be.

It was lying on Anna's table as she reached the door
on her way to her own room, and pausing for a moment,
she entered the chamber, took it in her hands, read the
title page, and then opened it where the letter lay.

“Miss Anna Ruthven,” she said. “He writes a fair
hand;” and then, as the thought, which at first was
scarce a thought, kept growing in her mind, she turned
it over, and found that, owing to some defect, it had become
unsealed, and the lid of the envelope lay temptingly
open before her. “I would never break a seal,” she
said, “but surely, as her protector, and almost mother, I
may read what this minister has written to my niece.”

And so she read what he had written, while a scowl
of disapprobation marred the smoothness of her brow.

“It is as I feared. Once let her see this, and Thornton

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Hastings may woo in vain. But it shall not be. It is
my duty, as the sister of her dead father, to interfere,
and not let her throw herself away.”

Perhaps Mrs. Meredith really felt that she was doing
her duty. At all events she did not give herself much
time to reason upon the matter, for, startled by a slight
movement in the room directly opposite, the door of
which was ajar, she thrust the letter into her pocket,
and turned to see—Valencia, standing with her back
to her, and arranging her hair in a mirror which hung
upon the wall.

“She could not have seen me; and, even if she
did, she would not suspect the truth,” was the guilty
woman's thought, as with the stolen missive in her
pocket she went down to the parlor, and tried, by petting
Anna more than her wont, to still the voice of conscience,
which clamored loudly of the wrong, and urged
a restoration of the letter to the place whence it was
taken.

But the golden moment fled, and when, later in the
evening, Anna went up to her chamber, and opened the
book which the rector had brought, she never suspected
how near she had been to the great happiness she had
sometimes dared to hope for, or dreamed how fervently
Arthur Leighton prayed that night, that if it were possible,
God would grant the boon he craved above all others,—
the priceless gift of Anna Ruthven's love.

p605-304

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