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"Hush, sister!" broke out Aurelia in eager indignation

"What! is a lovely young creature, almost equal to what I was before my cruel malady, to waste her bloom on a wretched old melancholic, ill not so much as look at her!"

"Harriet, I cannot hear this--you know not of what you are talking! What is my poor skin-deep beauty--if beauty it be--cooodness and wisdom I find in him?"

"La! child, what heat is this? One would really think you loved him"

"Of course I do! I love and honour him more than any one I everby rote out of the o no further; and I do long to knohether you can be truly content at heart," said Harriet with real affection

"Dear sister," said Aurelia, touched, "believe me that indeed I am Mr Belamour is kindness itself He is all he ever promised to be to me, and sometimes more"

"Yet if he loved you, he could never let you live hted at the dark chamber? I should die of it!"

"The dark does not fright e I have not! Cohted to talk with a voice in the dark?"

"Scarcely ever!" said aurelia

"Scarcely--as that?"

"You will laugh, Harriet, but it is when he is most--most tender and full of warmth Then I hardly know him for the same"

"What! If he be not always tender to my poor dear child, he must be a wretch indeed"

"O no, no, Harriet! How shall I ever make you understand?" cried Aurelia "Never for a enerally like a father, onlyseems to come over him, and he is--oh! I cannot tell you--what I should think a lover would be," faltered Aurelia, colouring cri her face on her sister's shoulder, as old habits of confidence, and need of counsel and syht

"You silly little chit! Why don't you encourage these advances? You ought to be charhtened"

"They would ch---I should like it if it were not so like twothe other back"