| My gay green leayes are yellow black
| Upon the dank autumnal floor :

| For love, departed once, comes back

| No more again, no more.

That was the worst of it.

| she could not love any one else either. Her heart
was dead and dry. Oh that something would hap-
pen to stir up her dormant powers of feeling, and
relax this heavy uniformity of suffering, which had
grown now to a dead weight, of dull aching, more

felt at first. It seemed to Nest, unconscious of the
merciful effect of time, that this burden would be
i hers to carry to her life’s end.

Wait, Nest. You are in the wilderness, and
ithere you must wait for many a day yet, but per-
| haps you may yet find the promise of yesterday’s
‘anthem true.
which break out there, if you patiently abide their
appearing, will bring you rest and refreshing, not for
| the moment only, but for all time, and beyond it.

|

x.
NEST’S TROUBLES.

He that is surprised by the first frost, feels it all the winter

after.
G. HERBERT.

Asa matter of course, the breaking off of Nest’s
engagement proved to be a nine days’ wonder
among her friends and neighbours.
nothing which gives rise to more discussion and
surmise in a country place such as Lyke than any
event of this sort: and one cannot but suspect
sometimes that sundry unhappy marriages have
existed because the bride had not the moral courage
to face being made the subject of discussion by the
whole body of her neighbours.

Mrs. Heydon said she had never liked Mr.
Anderson’s looks, and that she never had thought
that Nest had sufficient penetration to go through
the world without being taken in.
did not publish the cause of their separation, and
it was said to .be by mutual consent, the world in
general was extraordinarily anxious to discover the
grounds of it. She would not even giye the reason
to her aunts, and they were certainly a little vexed
thereby.

“You have told Winny,” said Aunt Immy : “and
one would have thought that the confidence you
give to a silly little chit like that you might have
given to us who stand in the place of your parents.”

T would tell you. I can’t tell what concerns other
people.”

“ Humph !” said Aunt Immy, and walked away.
Before she reached the door, however, she stopped.

THE PANELLED HOUSE.

weary to bear than the sharp pain which she had |

You may be certain that the streams |

There is |

But since Nest |

She could not love }
| Edward any more. It almost seemed to her that | ipis Jast speech.

| for change of scene.

usual.
* Winny found out; I did not tell her,” said Nest.
“But indeed, Aunt Immy, if it were my own secret |

“Well! you girls must settle your own affairs, I
suppose, if you won’t let wiser heads have any thing
to do with it. But mind, it is not our fault if you”
burn your fingers.”

Winny came in from the garden in time to hear

“How can we help it, either of us, Nest !” she
said. “If mamma was alive it would be so different,
J always think if she were here, I should tell her
every thing. But one can’t tell Aunt Hermy and
Aunt Immy every thing, though they mean to be
very kind. If I had told them about poor Jack
Heydon, and the way I had behaved to him, they
would have thought me so awfully wicked, and
then they would have been always at me to
persuade me to change my mind. I can’t think
how it is—but some people have no feelers on their
heads !”

“JT would have given any thing to have had
mamma alive lately,” said Nest, in a choky voice ;
“she could have told me what to do, and helped
me to bear it.”

“And she could have told me what to say to

| Escott when he comes to me about his troubles,”
| said Winny.

“Oh Nest, it’s a great mistake to be
motherless !”

The two girls both felt the need of help and
advice ; and yet both felt instinctively that it was
not from their aunts that they could obtain it.

| Good, kindly, and excellent, as the Misses Rivers

were, they had lived too much in one groove for
vivid sympathy with young girls like Nest and
Winny. They had had no love-experiences them-
selves, and were not sufiiciently imaginative to
enter into the phase in others. Nest’s sore heart,
and Winny’s anxious one, both were beyond their
ken.

However they did what Was the best possible
thing for Nest: they settled to take her to the sea
It was not before she wanted
it, for she drooped, grew thin, and lost her
appetite: and though she was of too durable a
fibre to be likely to die of a broken heart, her
health seemed evidently suffering. Winny was not
particularly well either : the autumn always affected
her, and they had to take care of her in the winter.
So it was determined to spend a month at Sand-
beach, a warm, sunny little watering-place about
thirty miles off.

The last Sunday before they were to go, they
walked back from church with the Armyns as
Nest, Flora, Colonel Armyn, and the two
aunts walked in a row spreading across the road:
Winny and Escott had just fallen behind, as they
usually did. If the aunts noticed this constant
habit of theirs, they must have accounted for it by
thinking that the two most foolish of the party

naturally gravitated together. Perhaps they