Colonel of our corps wasn't against it, and so off I came; the mother doesn't know I am here.'

Rosa longed to ask him how he liked the service, and if he knew that she had left the Mill, and a hundred other questions, but she felt shy with him; he looked so tall and handsome, she could talk to him better in the fields as she used to do.

They stopped at the gate leading to the villa; Heinrich opened it, and let the children go through, and then for a moment his old self returned. He took Rosa's hand, and whispering something into her ear, he left a kiss upon her forehead. The gate closed again, and Rosa walked with the two children up the gravel path. There were a few explanations to be given as to the lateness of the hour, and after an excited enumeration from the children of the events of the evening, Dick and Alice were despatched to bed.

Rosa bustled about over her work, and

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at last when she had finished everything, she sat down by the little round table in the nursery, and indulged in a dream of happiness brighter than any she had known for a long while.

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CHAPTER XIV.

TIDINGS AT LAST.

'A shadow flits before me,
Not thou, but like to thee.

Ah, Christ! that it were possible

For one short hour to see

The souls we loved, that they might tell us
What and where they be!'-Maud.

'I SHALL Send Dick to school in England,' said Mr. Stanley one day, as he paused outside the drawing-room window, at which Nesta was sitting; he had been passing the gravel walk for some minutes, smoking a cigar, but the cigar was either a bad one, or the humour for smoking it was more quickly at an end than usual, for Mr. Stanley having held it in his hand till it was nearly out, at last threw it away, and walked up to the drawing-room window.

The boy is idle,' he continued, as he caught Nesta's look of surprise,‘and it's no use going on in this way. He will be teach

ing Ernie to get into scrapes. next, and two scapegraces in one family is too much of a good thing.'

Dick's doom had been impending all day; it had been sealed during that measured walk on the gravel path. Dick had found holiday freedom rather too pleasant, and had gone a little beyond its bounds. His misdemeanours had involved others, as is generally the case, and Ernie was not a little proud of walking in his brother's footsteps. Ernie was his father's favourite, and was not often found fault with, but on this occasion his share in the escapade was too apparent to escape reproof, and Dick's doom impended over him also.

'Come here, you ugly dog,' said his father as he met the child in the garden a few minutes after the announcement to Nesta; the child was especially handsome, with large dark eyes, and well formed features like his mother; 'should you like to go to England and see grandmamma, and go to school and learn to be an Englishman?'

'I shall like to go to England, but I am an

Englishman,' said Ernest, his native pride aroused at the moment by such an aspersion. 'Rosa calls me her little German, and I fight her when she says so. Rosa will like to go to England, she told me so one day.'

Mr. Stanley took his little boy's hand, and they walked round the garden.

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'How soon shall we go, papa ? to-morrow?' 'My dear child, I have hardly thought of it at present. I am not at all sure of going at all. It's the worst of children,' he muttered to himself, the moment one says a thing they make so much of it, and before tomorrow this whole Auerbach world will hear that I am starting off for England.' 'There, there, run away,' he added, and don't talk any more nonsense about going away.'

6

As was usual on such occasions, Ernest went and found out Dick, who was his oracle whenever he did not understand. He told Dick all about it, and Dick came to the decision that there was more in it than they knew, and that he was quite certain his papa meant that they were going away. He rehearsed in his own mind various conversa