blighted, it had never expired; that the germ survived when the flower drooped, and required only a kind hand to offer new nourishment, a patient care and cultivation, to restore its vigour and relume its brilliance; or whether—but conjecture is vain in a case so full of all that is most interesting to feminine apprehension and feminine tenderness. Her countenance was full of gentle joy and that perfectly reposing confidence which belongs to the guileless and the artless, who, utterly incapable of deception in themselves, suspect it not in others. That she had been the victim of such conduct, she had too good an understanding to doubt; hut when she learnt that Lord Allerton had been in the same predicament, as told by Glentworth, whose integrity and ability were equal, not the shadow of a doubt remained, and she felt that she could love as she had first loved, when "love and life itself were new."
To a woman so situated, especially one who has been reproached for looking pale or yellow, thin and lank, unlovely and unloveable, the next question that arrives will inevitably be, "How do I look?" this will branch out into many "Can I expect him to love me, when I am no more the same?" "Is he so foolish as to suppose I am still a girl?" "Does he remember that it is full seven years since I was nineteen?"
Miss Austin, in her admirable novel of "Persuasion," has declared that a woman's twenty-eighth year is the most interesting period of female life, and bow-
