"Not I. I am not the school girl you take me for. I have no ideal hero. I do not believe in ideal heroes. Montrose was a man, with the faults of a man; full of faults, and yet not a bad man either."

"Very far from it."

"He had great faults, but grand qualities to match them,—worth a thousand of the small, tame, correct virtues that one sees hereabouts."

"Dangerous ideas, those, Mrs. Primrose would tell you."

"Deliver me from Mrs. Primrose!" ejaculated Fanny.

They rode in silence for a few minutes, Morton's companion murmuring to herself fragments of the lines which he had just repeated.

"Look!" she cried, suddenly. "How slowly our horses have been walking! The rest are almost out of sight. We had better join them. Will you race with me?"

"Any thing you please."

"Come on, then."

She touched her horse with the whip, and they set for. . . Read More