"I am so glad you like it," observed his mother, following her own ambitious thoughts. "Rather romantic though. There is one I like that is more simple."

"Her mother was a Welsh lady—one of the Ap-Rhys of Llanchillwydd," added Lady Wedderburn, in an explanatory tone. "But she died, poor thing, at Madras, when Gwenny was about three years old, and I wonder that uncle William did not send her home to Europe long ago; but then she was his only child, and he would have missed her so much!"

As the conversation was now taking a domestic turn, and Sir John Wedderburn was evidently disturbed by the tidings-for, instead of his brother's death, his final return had been anticipated, Chesters, who hated the dark or gloomy side of anything, thought he had better go, as he had only ridden over to see a horse of Cyril's; yet he lingered for a time, smoking a cigar with him and Robert on the terrace before the mansion, while Lady Wedderburn was engaged in family council with her husband.

THE manor house of Willowdean is situated in the Merse, which, with Lauderdale and Lammermuir, forms one of the three great subdivisions of Berwickshire, each of which possesses distinct natural features; but the former has been long celebrated in Scottish annals for its rich scenery, its industrious population, and plentiful harvests, while the sterner Lauderdale is bold and rugged, and Lammermuir is lone, bleak, and dreary, all purple morass or pastoral hill, being, in fact, a vast sheepwalk.

Built on the site of an old Bastile-house, that had many a time been burned or stormed, restored and stormed again, by English armies and Warden raiders in the times of old; lastly, when the Bandes Françaises under D'Esse d'Epainvilliers were in full retreat from Haddington during the wars of Mary of Lorraine, Willowdean we may describe as a handsome modern house, of aristocratic appearance, with a peristyle of eight Ionic

pillars, in the pediment above which were the Wedderburn arms-a chevron between three mullets; while their motto-Fortiter et rectewas carved in large Roman letters on the frieze. The rooms were lofty, the double drawing-room, when its folding doors were slid into the wall, forming a stately salon for dancing, when all its rich furniture was removed, and the Karl Harrgs, Fosters, and Gilberts, that adorned its walls, were alone left behind.

There was, of course, a noble billiard-room, where many a game was played by Cyril and Chesters, not always to the advantage of the former; and a great conservatory filled with the rarest exotics, where more than one graceful acacia drooped over statues and fountains, was lit at night with roses of gas made at the home farm.

The park had been under grass for centuries, if it was ever ploughed at all. Tradition said that Leslie's six thousand cavalry had grassed there a night or two before the battle of Philiphaugh; and there, as its vista stretched far away to where the purple Lammermuir bounded the distance, far beyond the invisible fence that marked its actual limits, the brown fallow deer might be seen in summer browsing or lying under the ancient oaks and beeches, half hidden among the green fern and pink foxglove; and that nothing might be wanting in effect, some stately peacocks

spread their spotted plumage over the white balustrades of the terrace before the façade of the mansion, to which the gravelled carriagedrive approached by a semicircular sweep on each side, through the smooth and velvet grass.

Every comfort were there, and every luxuryice-pit, vineries and forcing-houses, stables and kennel-yet the means of the worthy Baronet were far from adequate to his expenses in this aspiring age, and in Willowdean, as in many a less pretentious dwelling, there was too often a struggle to "keep up appearances."

Perhaps no part of the house was furnished more luxuriously and elegantly than Lady Wedderburn's boudoir, the hangings and furniture of which were blue satin and silver; but few objects there were more treasured than certain Burmese idols, three-headed gods, triple-trunked elephants, and other hideous little monsters, in bronze and ivory, which her beloved Cyril had picked up amid the "loot" at Moulmein, and brought home for "dear mamma," when he was a boy ensign, in his first red coat.

And now for a little account of some of our dramatis personæ.

Captain Wedderburn, though a frank, honest, and good-hearted young fellow, was and ever had been a spoiled child of fortune. Pronounced by aunts and nurses a love of an infant" when crowing and nestling in his silk berceaunette, he

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had gone to Rugby a bold and beautiful schoolboy, and left college to join his regiment a dangerously handsome man. He had been pretty successful in all the little undertakings of the gay life he led the career of a soldier in the flirting times of peace. The horse he backed was pretty sure to win; he could keep his wicket against the prime bowler of the garrison, and march off the field with his bat on his shoulder; he won the prize at every pigeon match, rode straight to hounds, pulled a capital stroke oar, and was deemed one of the best round-dancers in the Royal Fusileers. There was one thing he had never been able to do, viz., to beat his acquaintance Chesters at cards or billiards, "and thereby hangs a tale." Few men among those distinguished Fusileers had been more petted, spoiled, fallen-in-love-with, or so lucky among the ladies as handsome Cyril Wedderburn, who became rather fastidious in consequence.

A prime hand he was in arranging picnics, or a social "spread" on the roof of a drag at race or review, and he affected to dabble in music too, for he had a fine voice, and many a mysterious air he had bribed the band-master to

fudge out of another," and dedicate to some pretty girl about whom he dangled till the route came; and it was his great-yet most ungrateful -boast, in mess-room parlance, that "no bit of white muslin had ever hooked him yet."