Never was happiness more visibly impressed or more keenly felt than by the youthful Countess.

Her husband, in his extreme fondness, had so fostered her at times almost childish glee, that he might have unfitted her for her duties, had not the mild counsels, the example of his sister, Miss Fortescue, turned aside the threatening danger, and to all the fascination of early childhood Lady Delmont united the more solid and enduring qualities of pious, well-regulated womanhood.
"I wonder Charles is not jealous," observed Mrs.Percy Hamilton, playfully, after admiring to Lord Delmont his wife's peculiar grace in waltzing.

"Allan seems to have claimed her attention entirely." "Charles has something better to do," replied his father, laughing, as the little Lord Manvers flew by him, with his arm twined round his cousin Gertrude in the inspiring galop, and seemed to have neither ear nor eye for any one or anything else.

"Caroline, do you permit your daughter to play the coquette so early ?" "Better at seven than seventeen, Edward, believe me; had she numbered the latter, I might be rather more uneasy, at present I can admire that pretty little pair without any such feeling.

Gertrude told me to-day, she did not like to see her cousin Charles so shy, and she should do all she could to make him as much at home as she and her brother are." "She has succeeded, then, admirably," replied Edward, laughing, "for the little rogue has not much shyness in him now.