Augusta gazed at him with unfeigned surprise.

"Is your sister aware of this? Shall I have her consent?"

"My sister!-her consent!" The truth flashed on Augusta at once; and, before she betrayed her mistake, she recovered her selfpossession. "I do not know her sentiments on the subject but I am cordially your

friend."

Though vain and spoiled, Augusta had not a bad heart.

"Thank you!-oh, thanks!" And the silent, pale, reserved man rose and caught her hand. "I love your sister-have loved her in silence ever since I first saw her do love her so, that I fear to address her directly; for I reverence-I adore her; there is a delicacy a shrinking, angelic purity about her which makes me almost fear that a confession of earthly passion might offend. May I implore you to plead my cause; and before I venture to address, let me know whether I have any hope. God bless you! do not keep

me long in suspense." hat, and hurried away.

He snatched up his

"Coquettish, tuft-hunting matchmakers," said Augusta, to herself, "here is a lesson for you. I, the brilliant Augusta, insulted by the basest proposal from an old miscreant like Gripeall, and the reserved and modest Ellen an object of trembling reverence and wild idolatry to the handsome, wealthy, catchmatch, Sir Valentine Dashington. Ha! ha! ha! I must seek Ellen; if she does but like him, her good fortune reconciles me almost to my own disgrace."

But Ellen did not like him; or, rather, did like him, but loved another. So she wept, and wrote the kindest of refusals, and secured Augusta's promise not to break her mother's heart by letting her know that she had refused such a match.

"And now," said Augusta, after she had poured all her strange story into Ellen's wondering and indignant breast-" now I want to know what Ogleton has been saying to my uncle; whether he has been proposing for

me or for you! I require something to reinstate me in my own opinion."

Mr. Lindsay came in, and the girls soon learned that his visit had had no reference to either, but had been undertaken merely to induce Mr. Lindsay to assist in promoting some speculation relating to the East, by which the interests of his lordship would be greatly benefited, and Mr. Lindsay's pockets lightened of a few hundreds.

Augusta!

Alas! poor

CHAPTER XXIV.

"It's ye hae wooers mony ane;
And, lassie, ye're but young, ye ken;
Then wait a wee, and cannie wale,
A routhie butt, a routhie ben.
There's Johnnie o' the buskie glen,
Fu' is his barn, fu' is his byre;
Tak this frae me, my bonnie hen,

It's plenty heets the luver's fire."
BURNS.

Great, indeed, was the discomfiture of the matchmaker at the result of her well-laid scheme for inveigling the old earl. However, after the first burst of natural indignation, not being a delicate nor a high-minded woman, she decided in her own mind that it was no great matter, that such an insult had been offered by many men to women who, by a little judicious management, became their wives-nay, their tyrants that it was no

fault of hers if the earl was a coxcombical dotard that there would be the more glory in hooking so wily an old trout. "Let us but keep our own counsel," she said, to herself; "least said soonest mended "- her soliloquies were generally made up of wise saws and old ings" Augusta must play her cards well, for old birds are not caught with chaff."

However, Augusta was inexorable.

say

She

was vain, ambitious, and a coquette; but the straws and the bubbles were all on the surface

deep and clear beneath flowed the current of maiden purity; that the old fool had disturbed; he had outraged her womanly pride and delicacy. He had betrayed, at once, his sense of his own importance and of her insignificance. He the old, the hideous, the profligate, and the mean, had presumed upon the rank he disgraced, and the ill-judged attentions of her matchmaking mother, to offer to her-the beautiful, the proud, and the courted who would have felt a proposal of marriage from him to be presumptuous, and a union with him a frightful sacrifice to