seemed now to be used purely to grasp and absorb could in any way be turned outwards, mean talent of the original productive sort. She was active minded, but her activity stopped short when required to move beyond its own self-chosen lines of thought. She was able just as long as she was free, and shrank into a kind of incapacity that was due half to timidity and half to pride when there was a question of subordination or even joint action with others.

She had been much knocked about, and had in her own way seen a good deal of the world; but it had all kept her from acquaintance with her girl contemporaries, and girls seem to rub the freshness off each other as no other contact can do. So when, as had actually happened at Pau two years before, this child of no particular age had found herself in possession of two real lovers, the fact had amused her puzzled, bewildered, even vexed her a little; but of answering affection, real or affected, there was absolutely not a shadow. Of these,

one was a middle-aged Frenchman, to whom Ida seemed the embodiment of all that was most admirable as a "jeune fille anglaise," and the other was the Hugh Linwood to whom reference has been made. He was a distant connection, a handsome young soldier fresh from India, with a certain halo round his head, as having had a share in real fighting, in which he was said to have distinguished himself. He was an old friend, too; the only boy except her brothers that she had ever known. He had been much about the old house at Sandford before they had gone abroad and he to India; and then, as a child of ten years of age, after an overdose of "Lalla Rookh," read among the branches of a pet oak-tree in the field (Mrs. Bygrave's belief in the good of books for children had always been a little indiscriminate), he had been quite the most prominent feature in her dream-world. Hence it resulted that loyalty to the past gave him exceptional place in her

thoughts. But even with that advantage, when he talked of love, she simply wished he had not.

Hugh had been passionate and imploring, and had pleaded hard to hold her at least to a half-made engagement; and though she had said very calmly, "I don't think it would do," Mrs. Bygrave, who liked Hugh very much, had chosen that moment to remember that her daughter was a child, and had rather put the matter off than negatived it. Hugh had soon gone back to India, and though there had been talk of a correspondence, it had come to nothing; for Ida had avoided writing, as she would not write to him as a lover, and had, she pleaded, no taste for letter-writing at all. Her mind simply revolted at the thought of any kind of tie. Much as she liked Hugh, she knew she would not like him very long if tied to him. Marriage she

thought of as a thing a thing that would come by-and-by-must, indeed, for girls that did

not marry were old maids, and the word at that age was was enough. But oh, how

much nicer really it would be never to marry, but to live free among charming clever people,-artists and authors, even poets perhaps !

A common sense vein caused her not to believe very much in this last dream ; so she did settle that she would marry some day, do her duty, be a good wife, and make some one very happy quite astonishingly so; but it never entered her mind that she would love and be happy too. She thought of society, position, of many outside things (for she had a way of dreaming very elaborately), but across that child's dreams, into which questions of love-making had been forced by outside. circumstances, the thought of love never came. She was about as capable of understanding love as hate, and could as little realise the influence of the one passion as the other. "Lalla Rookh" she now con

sidered only fit for children, and looked back on her past self with a considerable degree of contempt. She had missed the best part of her childhood, and the woman was not awake; and though in girls of her age there is often enough of schoolgirl sentimentalism to play odd pranks, from that Ida's solitary training had saved her.

When she reached home that morning, after saying good-bye to Mary Maxwell, she saw in the hall a hat and stick that she recognised; and instead of going to the dining-room, where she would be sure to find her mother at that hour of the day, she went quietly upstairs to her own little den.

"I shall have enough of that after lunch," she said to herself, as she closed the door, and sat down in a little low chair by the window, and thought she was going to study. This made her feel very good; for her solitary studies, though she cared for nothing else half so much, did seem to her more virtuous and excellent things than the lessons