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“Oh, my Araminta! how my heart beats!” exclaimed Miss Warwick.

“How my mouth waters!” cried Betty Williams, looking round at the fruit and confectionaries.

“Would you, ma’am, he pleased,” said Mrs. Bertrand, “to take a glass of ice this warm evening? cream-ice, or water-ice, ma’am? pine-apple or strawberry ice?” As she spoke, Mrs. Bertrand held a salver, covered with ices, toward Miss Warwick: but, apparently, she thought that it was not consistent with the delicacy of friendship to think of eating or drinking when she was thus upon the eve of her first interview with her Araminta. Betty Williams, who was of a different nature from our heroine, saw the salver recede with excessive surprise and regret; she stretched out her hand after it, and seized a glass of raspberry-ice; but no sooner had she tasted it than she made a frightful face, and let the glass fall, exclaiming–

“Pless us! ’tis not as good as cooseherry fool.”

Mrs. Bertrand next offered her a cheesecake, which Betty ate voraciously.

“She’s actually a female Sancho Panza!” thought Angelina: her own more striking resemblance to the female Quixote never occurred to our heroine–so blind are we to our own failings.

“Who is the young lady?” whispered the mistress of the fruit shop to Betty Williams, whilst Miss Warwick was walking–we should say pacing –up and down the room, in anxious solicitude, and evident agitation.

“Hur’s a young lady,” replied Betty, stopping to take a mouthful of cheesecake between every member of her sentence, “a young lady–that has–lost hur–“

“Her heart–so I thought.”

“Hur purse!” said Betty, with an accent, which showed that she thought this the more serious loss of the two.

“Her purse!–that’s bad indeed:–you pay for your own cheesecake and raspberry-ice, and for the glass that you broke,” said Mrs. Bertrand.

“Put hur has a great deal of money in hur trunk, I pelieve, at Llanwaetur,” said Betty.

“Surely Miss Hodges does not know I am here,” cried Miss Warwick–“her Angelina!”

“Ma’am, she’ll be down immediately, I do suppose,” said Mrs. Bertrand. “What was it you pleased called for–angelica, ma’am, did you say? At present we are quite out, I’m ashamed to say, of angelica, ma’am–Well, child,” continued Mrs. Bertrand to her maid, who was at this moment seen passing by the back door of the shop in great haste.

“Ma’am–anan,” said the maid, turning back her cap from off her ear.

“Anan! deaf doll! didn’t you hear me tell you to tell Miss Hodges a lady wanted to speak to her in a great hurry?”

“No, mam,” replied the girl, who spoke in the broad Somersetshire dialect: “I heard you zay, up to Miss Hodges; zoo I thought it was the bottle o’brandy, and zoo I took alung with the tea-kettle–but I’ll go up again now, and zay miss bes in a hurry, az she zays.”

“Brandy!” repeated Miss Warwick, on whom the word seemed to make a great impression.

“Pranty, ay, pranty,” repeated Betty Williams–“our Miss Hodges always takes pranty in her teas at Llanwaetur.”

“Brandy!–then she can’t be my Araminta.”

“Oh, the very same, and no other; you are quite right, ma’am,” said Mrs. Bertrand, “if you mean the same that is publishing the novel, ma’am,–‘The Sorrows of Araminta’–for the reason I know so much about it is, that I take in the subscriptions, and distributed the pur posals.”

Angelina had scarcely time to believe or disbelieve what she heard, before the maid returned, with “Mam, Mizz Hodges haz hur best love to you, mizz–and please to walk up–There be two steps; please to have a care, or you’ll break your neck.”

Before we introduce Angelina to her “unknown friend,” we must relate the conversation which was actually passing between the amiable Araminta and her Orlando, whilst Miss Warwick was waiting in the fruit shop. Our readers will be so good as to picture to themselves a woman, with a face and figure which seemed to have been intended for a man, with a voice and gesture capable of setting even man, “imperial man,” at defiance–such was Araminta. She was, at this time, sitting cross-legged in an arm-chair at a tea-table, on which, beside the tea equipage, was a medley of things of which no prudent tongue or pen would undertake to give a correct inventory. At the feet of this fair lady, kneeling on one knee, was a thin, subdued, simple-looking quaker, of the name of Nathaniel Gazabo.