CHAPTER III.
JULIUS SANDAL.
"Variety's the very spice of life That gives it all its flavor." "Domestic happiness, thou only bliss Of Paradise that has survived the fall." Life has a chronology quite independent of the almanac.

The heart divides it into periods.

When the sheep-shearing had been forgotten by all others, the squire often looked back to it with longing.

It was a boundary which he could never repass, and which shut him out forever from the happy days of his daughters' girlhood,--the days when they had no will but his will, and no pleasures but in his smile and companionship.

His son Harry had never been to him what Sophia and Charlotte were.