Two worn travelers, a young man and a fair girl about four years old, sat on the towing-path by the side of the Trent.

The young man had his coat off, by which you might infer it was very hot: but no, it was a keen October day, and an east wind sweeping down the river. The coat was wrapped tightly round the little girl, so that only her fair face with blue eyes and golden hair peeped out; and the young father sat in his shirt sleeves, looking down on her with a loving but anxious look. Her mother, his wife, had died of consumption, and he was in mortal terror lest biting winds and scanty food should wither this sweet flower too, his one remaining joy.

William Hope was a man full of talent; self-educated, and wonderfully quick at learning anything; he was a linguist, a mechanic, a mineralogist, a draughtsman, an inventor. Item, a bit of a farrier, and half a surgeon; could play the fiddle and the guitar; could draw and paint and drive a four-in-hand. Almost the only thing he could not do was to make money and keep it.

Versatility seldom pays. But, to tell the truth, luck was against him; and although in a long life every deserving man seems to get a chance, yet Fortune does baffle some meritorious men for a limited time. Generally, we think, good fortune and ill fortune succeed each other rapidly, like red cards and black; but to some ill luck comes in great long slices; and if they don't drink or despair, by-and-by good luck comes continuously, and everything turns to gold with him who has waited and deserved.

Well, for years Fortune was hard on William Hope. It never let him get his head above-water. If he got a good place, the employer died or sold his business. If he patented an invention, and exhausted his savings to pay the fees, no capitalist would work it, or some other inventor proved he had invented something so like it that there was no basis for a monopoly.

At last there fell on him the heaviest blow of all. He had accumulated £50 as a merchant's clerk, and was in negotiation for a small independent business, when his wife, whom he loved tenderly, sickened.

For eight months he was distracted with hopes and fears. These gave way to dismal certainty. She died, and left him broken-hearted and poor, impoverished by the doctors, and pauperized by the undertaker. Then his crushed heart had but one desire--to fly from the home that had lost its sunshine, and the very country which had been calamitous to him.

He had one stanch friend, who had lately returned rich from New Zealand, and had offered to send him out as his agent, and to lend him money in the colony. Hope had declined, and his friend had taken the huff, and had not written to him since. But Hope knew he was settled in Hull, and too good-hearted at bottom to go from his word in his friend's present sad condition. So William Hope paid every debt he owed in Liverpool, took his child to her mother's tombstone, and prayed by it, and started to cross the island, and then leave it for many a long day.

He had a bundle with one brush, one comb, a piece of yellow soap, and two changes of linen, one for himself, and one for his little Grace--item, his fiddle, and a reaping hook; for it was a late harvest in the north, and he foresaw he should have to work his way and play his way, or else beg, and he was too much of a man for that. His child's face won her many a ride in a wagon, and many a cup of milk from humble women standing at their cottage doors.

Now and then he got a day's work in the fields, and the farmer's wife took care of little Grace, and washed her linen, and gave them both clean straw in the barn to lie on, and a blanket to cover them. Once he fell in with a harvest-home, and his fiddle earned him ten shillings, all in sixpences. But on unlucky days he had to take his fiddle under his arm, and carry his girl on his back; these unlucky days came so often that still as he traveled his small pittance dwindled. Yet half-way on his journey Fortune smiled on him suddenly. It was in Derbyshire. He went a little out of his way to visit his native place--he had left it at ten years old. Here an old maid, his first cousin, received Grace with rapture, and Hope pottered about all day, reviving his boyish recollections of people and places. He had left the village ignorant; he returned full of various knowledge; and so it was that in a certain despised field, all thistles and docks and every known weed, which field the tenant had condemned as a sour clay unfit for cultivation, William Hope found certain strata and other signs which, thanks to his mineralogical studies and practical knowledge, sent a sudden thrill all through his frame. "Here's luck at last!" said he. "My child! my child! our fortune is made."

The proprietor of this land, and indeed of the whole parish, was a retired warrior, Colonel Clifford. Hope knew that very well, and hurried to Clifford Hall, all on fire with his discovery.

He obtained an interview without any difficulty. Colonel Clifford, though proud as Lucifer, was accessible and stiffly civil to humble folk. He was gracious enough to Hope; but, when the poor fellow let him know he had found signs of coal on his land, he froze directly; told him that two gentlemen in that neighborhood had wasted their money groping the bowels of the earth for coal, because of delusive indications on the surface of the soil; and that for his part, even if he was sure of success, he would not dirty his fingers with coal. "I believe," said he, "the northern nobility descend to this sort of thing; but then they have not smelted powder, and seen glory, and served her Majesty. I have."

Hope tried to reason with him, tried to get round him. But he was unassailable as Gibraltar, and soon cut the whole thing short by saying: "There, that's enough. I am much obliged to you, sir, for bringing me information you think valuable. You are traveling--on foot--short of funds perhaps. Please accept this trifle, and--and--good-morning." He retreated at marching pace, and the hot blood burned his visitor's face. An alms!

But on second thoughts he said:

"Well, I have offered him a fortune, and he gives me ten shillings. One good turn deserves another." So he pocketed the half-sovereign, and bought his little Grace a neck-handkerchief, blue with white spots; and so this unlucky man and his child fought their way from west to east, till they reached that place where we introduced them to the reader.

That was an era in their painful journey, because until then Hope's only anxiety was to find food and some little comfort for his child. But this morning little Grace had begun to cough, a little dry cough that struck on the father's heart like a knell. Her mother had died of consumption: were the seeds of that fatal malady in her child? If so, hardship, fatigue, cold, and privation would develop them rapidly, and she would wither away into the grave before his eyes. So he looked down on her in an agony of foreboding, and shivered in his shirt sleeves, not at the cold, but at the future. She, poor girl, was, like the animals, blessed with ignorance of everything beyond the hour; and soon she woke her father from his dire reverie with a cry of delight.

"Oh, what's they?" said she, and beamed with pleasure. Hope followed the direction of her blue eyes, open to their full extent; and lo! there was a little fleet of swans coming round a bend of the river. Hope told her all about the royal birds, and that they belonged to sovereigns in one district, to cities in another. Meantime the fair birds sailed on, and passed stately, arching their snowy necks. Grace gloated on them, and for a day or two her discourse was of swans.

At last, when very near the goal, misfortunes multiplied. They came into a town on a tidal river, whence they could hope to drift down to their destination for a shilling or two; but here Hope spent his last farthing on Grace's supper at an eating-house, and had not wherewithal to pay for bed or breakfast at the humble inn. Here, too, he took up the local paper, praying Heaven there might be some employment advertised, however mean, that so he might feed his girl and not let the fiend Consumption take her at a gift.

No, there was nothing in the advertising column, but in the body of the paper he found a paragraph to the effect that Mr. Samuelson, of Hull, had built a gigantic steam vessel in that port, and was going out to New Zealand in her on her trial trip, to sail that morning at high tide, 6.45 A.M., and it was now nine.

How a sentence in a newspaper can blast a man! Bereavement, Despair, Lost Love--they come like lightning in a single line. Hope turned sick at these few words, and down went his head and his hands, and he sat all of a heap, cold at heart. Then he began to disbelieve in everything, especially in honesty. For why? If he had only left Liverpool in debt and taken the rail, he would have reached Hull in ample time, and would have gone out to New Zealand in the new ship with money in both pockets.

But it was no use fretting. Starvation and disease impended over his child. He must work, or steal, or something. In truth he was getting desperate. He picked himself up and went about, offering his many accomplishments to humble shop-keepers. They all declined him, some civilly. At last he came to a superior place of business. There were large offices and a handsome house connected with it in the rear. At the side of the offices were pulleys, cranes, and all the appliances for loading vessels, and a yard with horses and vans, so that the whole frontage of the premises was very considerable. A brass plate said, "R. Bartley, ship-broker and commission agent"; but the man was evidently a ship-owner and a carrier besides; so this miscellaneous shop roused hopes in our versatile hero. He rapidly surveyed the outside, and then cast hungry glances through the window of the man's office. It was a bow-window of unusual size, through which the proprietor or his employees could see a long way up and down the river. Through this window Hope peered. Repulses had made him timid. He wanted to see the face he had to apply to before he ventured.

But Mr. Bartley was not there. The large office was at present occupied by his clerks; one of these was Leonard Monckton, a pale young man with dark hair, a nose like a hawk, and thin lips. The other was quite a young fellow, with brown hair, hazel eyes, and an open countenance. "Many a hard rub puts a point on a man." So Hope resolved at once to say nothing to that pale clerk so like a kite, but to interest the open countenance in him and his hungry child.

There were two approaches to the large office. One, to Hope's right, through a door and a lobby. This was seldom used except by the habitues of the place. The other was to Hope's left, through a very small office, generally occupied by an inferior clerk, who kept an eye upon the work outside. However, this office had also a small window looking inward; this opened like a door when the man had anything to say to Mr. Bartley or the clerks in the large office.

William Hope entered this outer office, and found it empty. The clerk happened to be in the yard. Then he opened the inner door and looked in on the two clerks, pale and haggard, and apprehensive of a repulse. He addressed himself to the one nearest him; it was the one whose face had attracted him.

"Sir, can I see Mr. Bartley?"

The young fellow glanced over the visitor's worn garments and dusty shoes, and said, dryly, "Hum! if it is for charity, this is the wrong shop."

"I want no charity," said Hope, with a sigh; "I want employment. But I do want it very badly; my poor little girl and I are starving."

"Then that is a shame," said the young fellow, warmly. "Why, you are a gentleman, aren't you?"

"I don't know for that," said Hope "But I am an educated man, and I could do the whole business of this place. But you see I am down in the world."

"You look like it," said the clerk, bluntly. "But don't you be so green as to tell old Bartley that, or you are done for. No, no; I'll show you how to get in here. Wait till half past one. He lunches at one, and he isn't quite such a brute after luncheon. Then you come in like Julius Cæsar, and brag like blazes, and offer him twenty pounds' worth of industry and ability, and above all arithmetic, and he will say he has no opening (and that is a lie), and offer you fifteen shillings, perhaps."

"If he does, I'll jump at it," said Hope eagerly. "But whether I succeed with him or not, take my child's blessing and my own."

His voice faltered, and Bolton, with a young man's uneasiness under sentiment, stopped him. "Oh, come, old fellow, bother all that! Why, we are all stumped in turn." Then he began to chase a solitary coin into a corner of his waistcoat pocket. "Look here, I'll lend you a shilling--pay me next week--it will buy the kid a breakfast. I wish I had more, but I want the other for luncheon. I haven't drawn my screw yet. It is due at twelve."

"I'll take it for my girl," said Hope, blushing, "and because it is offered me by a gentleman and like a gentleman."

"Granted, for the sake of argument," said this sprightly youth; and so they parted for the time, little dreaming, either of them, what a chain they were weaving round their two hearts, and this little business the first link.

THE world is very big, and contains hundreds of millions who are strangers to each other. Yet every now and then this big world seems to turn small; so many people whose acquaintance we make turn out to be acquaintances of our acquaintances. This concatenation of acquaintances is really one of the marvels of social life, if one considers the chances against it, owing to the size and population of the country.

As an example of this phenomenon, which we have all observed, William Hope was born in Derbyshire, in a small parish which belonged, nearly all of it, to Colonel Clifford; yet in that battle for food which is, alas! the prosaic but true history of men and nations, he entered an office in Yorkshire, and there made friends with Colonel Clifford's son, Walter, who was secretly dabbling in trade and matrimony under the name of Bolton; and this same Hope was to come back, and to apply for a place to Mr. Bartley; Mr. Bartley was brother-in-law to that same Colonel Clifford, though they were at daggers drawn, the pair.

Miss Clifford, aged thirty-two, had married Bartley, aged thirty-seven. Each had got fixed habits, and they soon disagreed. In two years they parted, with plenty of bitterness, but no scandal. Bartley stood on his rights, and kept their one child, little Mary. He was very fond of her, and as the mother saw her whenever she liked, his love for his child rather tended to propitiate Mrs. Bartley, though nothing on earth would have induced her to live with him again.

Little Mary was two months younger than Grace Hope, and, like her, had blue eyes and golden hair. But what a difference in her condition! She had two nurses and every luxury. Dressed like a princess, and even when in bed smothered in lace; some woman's eye always upon her, a hand always ready to keep her from the smallest accident.

Yet all this care could not keep out sickness. The very day that Grace Hope began to cough and alarm her father, Mary Bartley flushed and paled, and showed some signs of feverishness.

The older nurse, a vigilant person, told Mr. Bartley directly; and the doctor was sent for post-haste. He felt her pulse, and said there was some little fever, but no cause for anxiety. He administered syrup of poppies, and little Mary passed a tranquil night.

Next day, about one in the afternoon, she became very restless, and was repeatedly sick. The doctor was sent for, and combated the symptoms; but did not inquire closely into the cause. Sickness proceeds immediately from the stomach; so he soothed the stomach with alkaline mucilages, and the sickness abated. But next day alarming symptoms accumulated, short breathing, inability to eat, flushed face, wild eyes. Bartley telegraphed to a first-rate London physician. He came, and immediately examined the girl's throat, and shook his head; then he uttered a fatal word--Diphtheria.

They had wasted four days squirting petty remedies at symptoms, instead of finding the cause and attacking it, and now he told them plainly he feared it was too late--the fatal membrane was forming, and, indeed, had half closed the air-passages.

Bartley in his rage and despair would have driven the local doctor out of the house, but this the London doctor would not allow. He even consulted him on the situation, now it was declared, and, as often, happens, they went in for heroic remedies since it was too late.

But neither powerful stimulants nor biting draughts nor caustic applications could hinder the deadly parchment from growing and growing.

The breath reduced to a thread, no nourishment possible except by baths of beef tea, and similar enemas. Exhaustion inevitable. Death certain.

Such was the hopeless condition of the rich man's child, surrounded by nurses and physicians, when the father of the poor man's child applied to the clerk Bolton for that employment which meant bread for his child, and perhaps life for her.

William Hope returned to his little Grace with a loaf of bread he bought on the road with Bolton's shilling, and fresh milk in a soda-water bottle.

He found her crying. She had contrived, after the manner of children, to have an accident. The room was almost bare of furniture, but my lady had found a wooden stool that could be mounted upon and tumbled off, and she had done both, her parent being away. She had bruised and sprained her little wrist, and was in the depths of despair.

"Ah," said poor Hope, "I was afraid something or other would happen if I left you."

He took her to the window, and set her on his knee, and comforted her. He cut a narrow slip off his pocket handkerchief, wetted it, and bound it lightly and deftly round her wrist, and poured consolation into her ear. But soon she interrupted that, and flung sorrow to the winds; she uttered three screams of delight, and pointed eagerly through the window.

"Here they be again, the white swans!"

Hope looked, and there were two vessels, a brig and a bark, creeping down the river toward the sea, with white sails bellying to a gentle breeze astern.

It is experience that teaches proportion. The eye of childhood is wonderfully misled in that matter. Promise a little child the moon, and show him the ladder to be used, he sees nothing inadequate in the means; so Grace Hope was delighted with her swans.

But Hope, who made it his business to instruct her, and not deceive her as some thoughtless parents do, out of fun, the wretches, told her, gently, they were not swans, but ships.

She was a little disappointed at that, but inquired what they were doing.

"Darling," said he, "they are going to some other land, where honest, hardworking people cannot starve, and, mark my words, darling," said he--she pricked her little ears at that--"you and I shall have to go with them, for we are poor."

"Oh," said little Grace, impressed by his manner as well as his words, and nodded her pretty head with apparent wisdom, and seemed greatly impressed.

Then her father fed her with bread and milk, and afterward laid her on the bed, and asked her whether she loved him.

"Dearly, dearly," said she.

"Then if you do," said he, "you will go to sleep like a good girl, and not stir off that bed till I come back."

"No more I will," said she.

However, he waited until she was in an excellent condition for keeping her promise, being fast as a church.

Then he looked long at her beautiful face, wax-like and even-tinted, but full of life after her meal, and prayed to Him who loved little children, and went with a beating heart to Mr. Bartley's office.

But in the short time, little more than an hour and a half, which elapsed between Hope's first and second visit, some most unexpected and remarkable events took place.

Bartley came in from his child's dying bed distracted with grief; but business to him was the air he breathed, and he went to work as usual, only in a hurried and bitter way unusual to him. He sent out his clerk Bolton with some bills, and told him sharply not to return without the money; and while Bolton, so-called, was making his toilet in the lobby, his eye fell on his other clerk, Monckton.

Monckton was poring over the ledger with his head down, the very picture of a faithful servant absorbed in his master's work.

But appearances are deceitful. He had a small book of his own nestled between the ledger and his stomach. It was filled with hieroglyphics, and was his own betting book. As for his brown-study, that was caused by his owing £100 in the ring, and not knowing how to get it. To be sure, he could rob Mr. Bartley. He had done it again and again by false accounts, and even by abstraction of coin, for he had false keys to his employer's safe, cash-box, drawers and desk. But in his opinion he had played this game often enough, and was afraid to venture it again so soon and on so large a scale.

He was so absorbed in these thoughts that he did not hear Mr. Bartley come to him; to be sure, he came softly, because of the other clerk, who was washing his hands and brushing his hair in the lobby.

So Bartley's hand fell gently, but all in a moment, on Monckton's shoulder, and they say the shoulder is a sensitive part in conscious rogues. Any way, Monckton started violently, and turned from pale to white, and instinctively clapped both hands over his betting book.

"Monckton," said his employer gravely, "I have made a very ugly discovery."

Monckton began to shiver.

"Periodical errors in the balances, and the errors always against me."

Monckton began to perspire. Not knowing what to say, he faltered, and at last stammered out, "Are you sure, sir?"

"Quite sure. I have long seen reason to suspect it, so last night I went through all the books, and now I am sure. Whoever the villain is, I will send him to prison if I can only catch him."

Monckton winced and turned his head away, debating in his mind whether he should affect indignation and sympathy, and pretend to court inquiry, or should wait till lunch time, and then empty the cash-box and bolt.

While thus debating these words fell unexpectedly on his ear:

"And you must help me."

Then Monckton's eyes turned this way and that in a manner that is common among thieves, and a sardonic smile curled his pale thin lip.

"It is my duty," said the sly rogue, demurely. Then, after a pause, "But how?"

Then Mr. Bartley glanced at Bolton in the lobby, and not satisfied with speaking under his breath, drew this ill-chosen confidant to the other end of the office.

"Why, suspect everybody, and watch them. Now there's this clerk Bolton; I know nothing about him; I was taken by his looks. Have your eye on him."

"I will, sir," said Monckton, eagerly. He drew a long breath of relief. For all that, he was glad when a voice in the little office announced a visitor.

It was a clear, peremptory voice, short, sharp, incisive, and decisive. The clerk called Bolton heard it in the lobby, and scuttled into the street with a rapidity that contrasted drolly enough with the composure and slowness with which he had been brushing his hair and titivating his nascent whiskers.

A tall, stiff military figure literally marched into the middle of the office, and there stood like a sentinel.

Mr. Bartley could hardly believe his senses.

"Colonel Clifford!" said he, roughly.

"You are surprised to see me here?"

"Of course I am. May I ask what brings you?"

"That which composes all quarrels and squares all accounts--Death.".

Colonel Clifford said this solemnly and with less asperity. He added, with a glance at Monckton, "This is a very private matter."

Bartley took the hint and asked Monckton to retire into the inner office.

As soon as he and Colonel Clifford were alone, that warrior, still standing straight as a dart, delivered himself of certain short sentences, each of which seemed to be propelled, or indeed jerked out of him, by some foreign power seated in his breast.

"My sister, your injured wife, is no more."

"Dead! This is very sudden. I am very, very sorry. I--"

Colonel Clifford looked the word "Humbug," and continued to expel short sentences.

"On her death-bed she made me promise to give you my hand. There it is."

His hand was propelled out, caught flying by Bartley, released, and drawn back again, all by machinery it seemed.

"She leaves you £20,000 in trust for the benefit of her child and yours--Mary Bartley."

"Poor, dear Eliza."

The Colonel looked as less high-bred people do when they say "Gammon," but proceeded civilly though bruskly.

"In dealing with the funds you have a large discretion. Should the girl die before you, or unmarried, the money lapses to your nephew, my son, Walter Clifford. He is a scapegrace, and has run away from me; but I must protect his just interests. So as a mere matter of form I will ask you whether Mary Bartley is alive."

Bartley bowed his head.

Colonel Clifford had not heard she was ill, so he continued: "In that case"-- and then, interrupting himself for a moment, turned away to Bartley's private table, and there emptied his pockets of certain documents, one of which he wanted to select.

His back was not turned more than half a minute, yet a most expressive pantomime took place in that short interval.

The nurse opened the door of communication, and stood with a rush at the threshold: indeed, she would have rushed in but for the stranger. She was very pale, and threw up her hands to Bartley.

Her face and her gesture were more expressive than words.

Then Bartley, clinging by mere desperate instinct to money he could not hope to keep, flew to her, drove her out by a frenzied movement of both hands, though he did not touch her, and spread-eagled himself before the door, with his face and dilating eyes turned toward Colonel Clifford.

The Colonel turned and stepped toward him with the document he had selected at the table. Bartley went to meet him.

The Colonel gave it to him, and said it was a copy of the will.

Bartley took it, and Colonel Clifford expelled his last sentences.

"We have shaken hands. Let us forget our past quarrels, and respect the wishes of the dead."

With that he turned sharply on both heels, and faced the door of the little office before he moved; then marched out in about seven steps, as he had marched in, and never looked behind him for two hundred miles.

The moment he was out of sight, Bartley, with his wife's will in his hand and ice at his heart, went to his child's room. The nurse met him, crying, and said, "A change"--mild but fatal words that from a nurse's lips end hope.

He came to the bedside just in time to see the breath hovering on his child's lips, and then move them as the summer air stirs a leaf.

Soon all was still, and the rich man's child was clay.

The unhappy father burst into a passion of grief, short but violent. Then he ordered the nurse to watch there, and let no one enter the room: then he staggered back to his office, and flung himself down at his table and buried his head. To do him justice, he was all parental grief at first, for his child was his idol.

The arms were stretched out across the table; the head rested on it; the man was utterly crushed.

While he was so, the little office door opened softly, and a pale, worn, haggard face looked in. It was the father of the poor man's child in mortal danger from privation and hereditary consumption. That haggard face was come to ask the favor of employment, and bread for his girl, from the rich man whose child was clay.

HOPE looked wistfully at that crushed figure, and hesitated; it seemed neither kind nor politic to intrude business upon grief.

But if the child was Bartley's idol, money was his god, and soon in his strange mind defeated avarice began to vie with nobler sorrow. His child dead! his poor little flower withered, and her death robbed him of £20,000, and indeed of ten times that sum, for he had now bought experience in trade and speculation, and had learned to make money out of money, a heap out of a handful. Stung by this vulgar torment in its turn, he started suddenly up, and dashed his wife's will down upon the floor in a fury, and paced the room excitedly. Hope still stood aghast, and hesitated to risk his application.

But presently Bartley caught sight of him, and stared at him, but said nothing.

Then the poor fellow saw it was no use waiting for a better opportunity, so he came forward and carried out Bolton's instructions; he put on a tolerably jaunty air, and said, cheerfully, "I beg your pardon, sir; can I claim your attention for a moment?"

"What do you want?" asked Bartley, but like a man whose mind was elsewhere.

"Only employment for my talent, sir. I hear you have a vacancy for a manager."

"Nothing of the sort. I am manager."

Hope drew back despondent, and his haggard countenance fell at such prompt repulse. But he summoned courage, and once more acting genial confidence, returned to the attack.

"But you don't know, sir, in how many ways I can be useful to you. A grand and complicated business like yours needs various acquirements in those who have the honor to serve you. For instance, I saw a small engine at work in your yard; now I am a mechanic, and I can double the power of that engine by merely introducing an extra band and a couple of cogs."

"It will do as it is," said Bartley, languidly, "and I can do without a manager."

Bartley's manner was not irritated but absorbed. He seemed in all his replies to Hope to be brushing away a fly mechanically and languidly. The poor fly felt sick at heart, and crept away disconsolate. But at the very door he turned, and for his child's sake made another attempt.

"Have you an opening for a clerk? I can write business letters in French, German, and Dutch; and keep books by double entry."

"No vacancy for a clerk," was the weary reply.

"Well, then, a foreman in the yard. I have studied the economy of industry, and will undertake to get you the greatest amount of labor out of the smallest number of men."

"I have a foreman already," said Bartley, turning his back on him peevishly, for the first time, and pacing the room, absorbed in his own disappointment.

Hope was in despair, and put on his hat to go. But he turned at the window and said: "You have vans and carts. I understand horses thoroughly. I am a veterinary surgeon, and I can drive four-in-hand. I offer myself as carman, or even hostler."

"I do not want a hostler, and I have a carman."

Bartley, when he had said this, sat down like a man who had finally disposed of the application.

Hope went to the very door, and leaned against it. His jaw dropped, he looked ten years older. Then, with a piteous attempt at cheerfulness, he came nearer, and said: "A messenger, then. I'm young and very active, and never waste my employer's time."

Even this humble proposal was declined, though Hope's cheeks burned with shame as he made it. He groaned aloud, and his head dropped on his breast.

His eye fell on the will lying on the ground; he went and picked it up, and handed it respectfully to Bartley.

Bartley stared, took it, and bowed his head an inch or two in acknowledgment of the civility. This gave the poor daunted father courage again. Now that Bartley's face was turned to him by this movement, he took advantage of it, and said, persuasively;

"Give me some kind of employment, sir. You will never repent it." Then he began to warm with conscious power. "I've intelligence, practicability, knowledge; and in this age of science knowledge is wealth. Example: I saw a swell march out of this place that owns all the parish I was born in. I knew him in a moment--Colonel Clifford. Well, that old soldier draws his rents when he can get them, and never looks deeper than the roots of the grass his cattle crop. But I tell you he never takes a walk about his grounds but he marches upon millions--coal! sir, coal! and near the surface. I know the signs. But I am impotent; only fools possess the gold that wise men can coin into miracles. Try me, sir; honor me with your sympathy. You are a father--you have a sweet little girl, I hear."--Bartley winced at that.--"Well, so have I, and the hole my poverty makes me pig in is not good for her, sir. She needs the sea air, the scent of flowers, and, bless her little heart, she does enjoy them so! Give them to her, and I will give you zeal, energy, brains, and a million of money."

This, for the first time in the interview, arrested Mr. Bartley's attention.

"I see you are a superior man," said he, "but I have no way to utilize your services."

"You can give me no hope, sir?" asked the poor fellow, still lingering.

"None--and I am sorry for it."

This one gracious speech affected poor Hope so that he could not speak for a moment. Then he fought for manly dignity, and said, with a lamentable mixture of sham sprightliness and real anguish, "Thank you, sir; I only trust that you will always find servants as devoted to your interest as my gratitude would have made me. Good-morning, sir." He clapped his hat on with a sprightly, ghastly air, and marched off resolutely.

But ere he reached the door, Nature overpowered the father's heart; away went Bolton's instructions; away went fictitious deportment and feigned cheerfulness. The poor wretch uttered a cry, indeed a scream, of anguish, that would have thrilled ten thousand hearts had they heard it; he dashed his hat on the ground, and rushed toward Bartley, with both hands out--"FOR GOD'S SAKE DON'T SEND ME AWAY--MY CHILD IS STARVING!"

Even Bartley was moved. "Your child!" said he, with some little feeling. This slight encouragement was enough for a father. His love gushed forth. "A little golden-haired, blue-eyed angel, who is all the world to me. We have walked here from Liverpool, where I have just buried her mother. God help me! God help us both! Many a weary mile, sir, and never sure of supper or bed. The birds of the air have nests, the beasts of the field a shelter, the fox a hole, but my beautiful and fragile girl, only four years old, sir, is houseless and homeless. Her mother died of consumption, sir, and I live in mortal fear; for now she is beginning to cough, and I cannot give her proper nourishment. Often on this fatal journey I have felt her shiver, and then I have taken off my coat and wrapped it round her, and her beautiful eyes have looked up in mine, and seemed to plead for the warmth and food I'd sell my soul to give her."

"Poor fellow," said Bartley; "I suppose I ought to pity you. But how can I? Man--man--your child is alive, and while there is life there is hope; but mine is dead--dead!" he almost shrieked.

"Dead!" said Hope, horrified.

"Dead," cried Bartley. "Cut off at four years old, the very age of yours. There--go and judge for yourself. You are a father. I can't look upon my blasted hopes, and my withered flower. Go and see my blue-eyed, fair-haired darling! --clay, hastening to the tomb; and you will trouble me no more with your imaginary griefs." He flung himself down, with his head on his desk.

Hope, following the direction of his hand, opened the door of the house, and went softly forward till he met the nurse. He told her Mr. Bartley wished him to see the deceased. The nurse hesitated, but looked at him. His sad face inspired confidence, and she ushered him into the chamber of mourning. There, laid out in state, was a little figure that, seen in the dim light, drew a cry of dismay from Hope. He had left his own girl sleeping, and looking like tinted wax. Here lay a little face the very image of hers, only this was pale wax.

Had he looked more closely, the chin was unlike his own girl's, and there were other differences. But the first glance revealed a thrilling resemblance. Hope hurried away from the room and entered the office pale and disturbed. "Oh, sir! the very image of my own. It fills me with forebodings. I pity you, sir, with all my heart. That sad sight reconciles me to my lot. God help you!" and he was going away; for now he felt an unreasoning terror lest his own child should have turned from colored wax to pale.

Mr. Bartley stopped him. "Are they so very like?" said he.

"Wonderfully like," And again he was going, but Bartley, who had received him so coldly, seemed now unwilling to part with him.

"Stay," said he, "and let me think." The truth is, a daring idea had just flashed through that brain of his; and he wanted to think it out. He walked to and fro in silent agitation, and "his face was as a book in which you may read strange matter." At last he made up his mind, but the matter was one he did not dare to approach too bluntly, so he went about a little.

"Stay--you don't know all my misfortunes. I am ambitious--like you. I believe in science and knowledge--like you. And, if my child had lived, you should have been my adviser and my right hand: I want such a man as you."

Hope threw up his hands. "My usual luck!" said he: "always a day too late." Bartley resumed:

"But my child's death robs me of the money to work with, and I can't help you nor help myself."

Hope groaned.

Bartley hesitated. But after a moment he said, timidly, "Unless"--and then stopped.

"Unless what?" asked Hope, eagerly. "I am not likely to raise objections: my child's life is at stake."

"Well, then, unless you are really the superior man you seem to be: a man of ability and--courage."

"Courage!" thought Hope, and began to be puzzled. However, he said, modestly, that he thought he could find courage in a good cause.

"Then you and I are made men," said Bartley. These were stout words; but they were not spoken firmly; on the contrary, Mr. Bartley's voice trembled, and his brow began to perspire visibly.

His agitation communicated itself to Hope, and the latter said, in a low, impressive voice, "This is something very grave, Mr. Bartley. Sir, what is it?"

Mr. Bartley looked uneasily all round the room, and came close to Hope. "The very walls must not hear what I now say to you." Then, in a thrilling whisper, "My daughter must not die." Hope looked puzzled. "Your daughter must take her place."

Now just before this, two quick ears began to try and catch the conversation. Monckton had heard all that Colonel Clifford said, that warrior's tones were so incisive; but, as the matter only concerned Mr. Bartley, he merely grinned at the disappointment likely to fall on his employer, for he knew Mary Bartley was at death's door. He said as much to himself, and went out for a sandwich, for it was his lunch-time. But when he returned with stealthy foot, for all his movements were cat-like, he caught sight of Bartley and Hope in earnest conversation, and felt very curious.

There was something so mysterious in Bartley's tones that Monckton drew up against the little window, pushed it back an inch, and listened hard.

But he could hear nothing at all until Hope's answer came to Bartley's proposal.

Then the indignant father burst out, so that it was easy enough to hear every word. "I part with my girl! Not for the world's wealth. What! You call yourself a father, and would tempt me to sell my own flesh and blood? No! Poverty, beggary, anything, sooner than that. My darling, we will thrive together or starve together; we will live together or die together!"

He snatched up his hat to leave. But Bartley found a word to make him hesitate. He never moved, but folded his arms and said, "So, then, your love for your child is selfish."

"Selfish!" cried Hope; "so selfish that I would die for her any hour of the day." For all that, the taunt brought him down a step, and Bartley, still standing like a rock, attacked him again. "If it is not selfish, it is blind." Then he took two strides and attacked him with sudden power. "Who will suffer most if you stand in her light? Your daughter: why, she may die." Hope groaned. "Who will profit most if you are wise, and really love her, not like a jealous lover, but like a father? Why, your daughter: she will be taken out of poverty and want, and carried to sea-breezes and scented meadows; her health and her comfort will be my care; she will fill the gap in my house and in my heart, and will be my heiress when I die."

"But she will be lost to me," sighed poor Hope.

"Not so. You will be my right hand; you will be always about us; you can see her, talk to her, make her love you, do anything! but tell her you are her father. Do this one thing for me, and I will do great things for you and for her. To refuse me will be to cut your own throat and hers--as well as mine."

Hope faltered a little. "Am I selfish?" said he.

"Of course not," was the soothing reply. "No true father is--give him time to think."

Hope clinched his hands in agony, and pressed them against his brow. "It is selfish to stand in her light; but part with her--I can't; I can't."

"Of course not; who asks you? She will never be out of your sight; only, instead of seeing her sicken, linger, and die, you will see her surrounded by every comfort, nursed and tended like a princess, and growing every day in health, wealth, and happiness."

"Health, wealth, and happiness?"

"Health, wealth, and happiness!"

These words made a great impression on the still hesitating father; he began to make conditions. They were all granted heartily.

"If ever you are unkind to her, the compact is broken and I claim my own again."

"So be it. But why suppose anything so monstrous; men do not ill-treat children. It is only women, who adore them, that kill them and ill-use them accordingly. She will be my little benefactress, God bless her! I may love her more than I ought, being yours, for my home is desolate without her; but that is the only fault you shall ever find with me. There is my hand on it."

Hope at the last was taken off his guard, and took the proffered hand. That is a binding action, and somehow he could no longer go back.

Then Bartley told him he should live in the house at first, to break the parting. "And from this hour," said he, "you are no clerk nor manager, but my associate in business, and on your own terms."

"Thank you," said Hope, with a sigh.

"Now lose no time; get her into the house at once while the clerks are away, and meantime I must deal with the nurse, and overcome the many difficulties. Stay, here is a five-pound note. Buy yourself a new suit, and give the child a good meal. But pray bring her here in half an hour if you can."

Then Bartley took him to the lobby, and let him out in the street, while he went into the house to buy the nurse and make her his confidante.

He had a good deal of difficulty with her; she was shocked at the proposal, and, being a woman, it was the details that horrified her. She cried a good deal. She stipulated that her darling should have Christian burial, and cried again at the doubt. But as Bartley conceded everything, and offered to settle a hundred pounds a year on her, so long as she lived in his house and kept his secret, he prevailed at last and found her an invaluable ally.

To dispose of this character for the present we must inform the reader that she proved a woman can keep a secret, and that in a very short time she was as fond of Grace Hope as she had been of Mary Bartley.

We have said that Colonel Clifford's talk penetrated Monckton's ear, but produced no great impression at the time. Not so, however, when he had listened to Bartley's proposal, Hope's answer, and all that followed. Then he put this and Colonel Clifford's communication together, and saw the terrible importance of the two things combined. Thus, as a congenital worm grew with Jonah's gourd, and was sure to destroy it, Bartley's bold and elaborate scheme was furnished from the outset with a most dangerous enemy.

Leonard Monckton was by nature a schemer and by habit a villain, and he was sure to put this discovery to profit. He came out of the little office and sat down at his desk, and fell into a brown-study.

He was not a little puzzled, and here lay his difficulty. Two attractive villainies presented themselves to his ingenious mind, and he naturally hesitated between them. One was to levy blackmail on Bartley; the other to sell the secret to the Cliffords.

But there was a special reason why he should incline toward the Cliffords, and, while he is in his brown-study, we will let the reader into his secret.

This artful person had immediately won the confidence of young Clifford, calling himself Bolton, and had prepared a very heartless trap for him. He introduced to him a most beautiful young woman--tall, dark, with oval face and glorious black eyes and eyebrows, a slight foreign accent, and ingratiating manners. He called this beauty his sister, and instructed her to win Walter Clifford in that character, and to marry him. As she was twenty-two, and Master Clifford nineteen, he had no chance with her, and they were to be married this very day at the Register Office.

Maneuvering Monckton then inclined to let Bartley's fraud go on and ripen, but eventually expose it for the benefit of young Walter and his wife, who adored this Monckton, because, when a beautiful woman loves an ugly blackguard, she never does it by halves.

But he had no sooner thought out this conclusion than there came an obstacle. Lucy Muller's heart failed her at the last moment, and she came into the office with a rush to tell her master so. She uttered a cry of joy at sight of him, and came at him panting and full of love. "Oh, Leonard, I am so glad you are alone! Leonard, dear Leonard, pray do not insist on my marrying that young man. Now it comes to the time, my heart fails me." The tears stood in her glorious eyes, and an honest man would have pitied her, and even respected her a little for her compunction, though somewhat tardy.

But her master just fixed his eyes coldly on his slave, and said, brutally, "Never mind your heart; think of your interest."

The weak woman allowed herself to be diverted into this topic. "Why, he is no such great catch, I am sure."

"I tell you he is, more than ever: I have just discovered another £20,000 he is heir to, and not got to wait for that any longer than I choose."

Lucy stamped her foot. "I don't care for his money. Till he came with his money you loved me."

"I love you as much as ever," said Monckton, coldly.

Lucy began to sob. "No, you don't, or you wouldn't give me up to that young fool."

The villain made a cynical reply, that not every Newgate thief could have matched. "You fool," said he, "can't you marry him, and go on loving me? you won't be the first. It is done every day, to the satisfaction of all parties."

"AND TO THEIR UNUTTERABLE SHAME," said a clear, stern voice at their back. Walter Clifford, coming rapidly in, had heard but little, but heard enough; and there he stood, grim and pale, a boy no longer. These two skunks had made a man of him in one moment. They recoiled in dismay, and the woman hid her face.

He turned upon the man first, you may be sure. "So you have palmed this lady off on me as your sister, and trapped me, and would have destroyed me." His lip quivered; for they had passed the iron through his heart. But he manned himself, and carried it off like a soldier's son:

"But if I was fool enough to leave my father, I am not fool enough to present to the world your cast-off mistress as my wife." (Lucy hid her face in her hands.) "Here, Miss Lucy Monckton--or whatever your name may be--here is the marriage license. Take that and my contempt, and do what you like with them."

With these words he dashed into Bartley's private room, and there broke down. It was a bitter cup, the first in his young life.

The baffled schemers drank wormwood too; but they bore it differently. The woman cried, and took her punishment meekly; the man raged and threatened vengeance.

"No, no," said Lucy; "it serves us right. I wish I had never seen the fellow: then you would have kept your word, and married me."

"I will marry you now, if you can obey me."

"Obey you, Leonard? You have been my ruin; but only marry me, and I will be your slave in everything--your willing, devoted, happy slave."

"That is a bargain," said Monckton, coolly. "I'll be even with him; I will marry you in his name and in his place."

This puzzled Lucy.

"Why in his name?" said she.

He did not answer.

"Well, never mind the name," said she, "so that it is the right man--and that is you."

Then Monckton's fertile brain, teeming with villainies, fell to hatching a new plot more felonious than the last. He would rob the safe, and get Clifford convicted for the theft; convicted as Bolton, Clifford would never tell his real name, and Lucy should enter the Clifford's house with a certificate of his death and a certificate of his marriage, both obtained by substitution, and so collar his share of the £20,000, and off with the real husband to fresh pastures.

Lucy looked puzzled. Hers was not a brain to disentangle such a monstrous web.

Monckton reflected a moment. "What is the first thing? Let me see. Humph! I think the first thing is to get married."

"Yes," said Lucy, with an eagerness that contrasted strangely with his cynical composure, "that is the first thing, and the most understandable." And she went dancing off with him as gay as a lark, and leaning on him at an angle of forty-five; while he went erect and cold, like a stone figure marching.

Walter Clifford came out in time to see them pass the great window. He watched them down the street, and cursed them--not loud but deep.

"Mooning, as usual," said a hostile voice behind him. He turned round, and there was Mr. Bartley seated at his own table. Young Clifford walked smartly to the other side of the table, determined this should be his last day in that shop.

"There are the payments," said he.

Bartley inspected them.

"About one in five," said he, dryly.

"Thereabouts," was the reply. (Consummate indifference.)

"You can't have pressed them much."

"Well, I am not good at dunning."

"What are you good at?"

"Should be puzzled to say."

"You are not fit for trade."

"That is the highest compliment was ever paid me."

"Oh, you are impertinent, as well as incompetent, are you? Then take a week's warning, Mr. Bolton."

"Five minutes would suit me better, Mr. Bartley."

"Oh! indeed! Say one hour."

"All right, sir; just time for a city clerk's luncheon--glass of bitter, sandwich, peep at Punch, cigarette, and a chat with the barmaid."

Mr. Walter Clifford was a gentleman, but we must do him the justice to say that in this interview with his employer he was a very impertinent one, not only in words, but in the delivery thereof. Bartley, however, thought this impertinence was put on and that he had grave reasons for being in a hurry. He took down the numbers of the notes Clifford had given him, and looked very grave and suspicious all the time.

Then he locked up the notes in the safe, and just then Hope opened the door of the little office and looked in.

"At last," said Bartley.

"Well, sir," said Hope, "I have only been half an hour, and I have changed my clothes and stood witness to a marriage. She begged me so hard: I was at the door. Such a beautiful girl! I could not take my eyes off her."

"The child?" said Bartley, with natural impatience.

"I have hidden her in the yard."

"Bring her this moment, while the clerks are out."

Hope hurried out, and soon returned with his child, wrapped up in a nice warm shawl he had bought her with Bartley's money.

Bartley took the child from him, looked at her face, and said, "Little darling, I shall love her as my own;" then he begged Hope to sit down in the lobby till he should call him and introduce him to his clerks. "One of them is a thief, I'm afraid."

He took the child inside, and gave her to his confederate, the nurse.

"Dear me," thought Hope, "only two clerks, and one of them dishonest. I hope it is not that good-natured boy. Oh, no! impossible!"

And now Bartley returned, and at the same time Monckton came briskly in through the little office.

At sight of him Bartley said, "Oh, Monckton, I gave that fellow Bolton a week's notice. But he insists on going directly." Monckton replied, slyly, that he was sorry to hear that.

"Suspicious? Eh?" said Bartley.

"So suspicious that if I were you--Indeed, Mr. Bartley, I think, in justice to me, the matter ought to be cleared to the bottom."

"You are right," said Bartley: "I'll have him searched before he goes. Fetch me a detective at once."

Bartley then wrote a line upon his card, and handed it to Monckton, directing him to lose no time. He then rushed out of the house with an air of virtuous indignation, and went to make some delicate arrangements to carry out a fraud, which, begging his pardon, was as felonious, though not so prosaic, as the one be suspected his young clerk of. Monckton was at first a little taken aback by the suddenness of all this; but he was too clearheaded to be long at fault. The matter was brought to a point. Well, he must shoot flying.

In a moment he was at the safe, whipped out a bunch of false keys, opened the safe, took out the cash-box, and swept all the gold it contained into his own pockets, and took possession of the notes. Then he locked up the cash-box again, restored it to the safe, locked that, and sat down at Bartley's table. He ran over the notes with feverish fingers, and then took the precaution to examine Bartley's daybook. His caution was rewarded--he found that the notes Bolton had brought in were numbered. He instantly made two parcels--clapped the unnumbered notes into his pocket. The numbered ones he took in his hand into the lobby. Now this lobby must be shortly described. First there was a door with a glass window, but the window had dark blue gauze fixed to it, so that nobody could see into the lobby from the office; but a person in the lobby, by putting his eye close to the gauze, could see into the office in a filmy sort of way. This door opened on a lavatory, and there were also pegs on which the clerks hung their overcoats. Then there was a swing-door leading direct to the street and sidewise into a small room indispensable to every office.

Monckton entered this lobby, and inserted the numbered notes into young Clifford's coat, and the false keys into his bag. Then he whipped back hastily into the office, with his craven face full of fiendish triumph.

He started for the detective. But it was bitter cold, and he returned to the lobby for his own overcoat. As he opened the lobby door the swing-door moved, or he thought so; he darted to it and opened it, but saw nobody, Hope having whipped behind the open door of the little room. Monckton then put on his overcoat, and went for the detective.

He met Clifford at the door, and wore an insolent grin of defiance, for which, if they had not passed each other rapidly, he would very likely have been knocked down. As it was, Walter Clifford entered the office flushed with wrath, and eager to leave behind him the mortifications and humiliations he had endured.

He went to his own little desk and tore up Lucy Muller's letters, and his heart turned toward home. He went into the lobby, and, feeling hot, which was no wonder, bundled his office overcoat and his brush and comb into his bag. He returned to the office for his penknife, and was going out all in a hurry, when Mr. Bartley met him.

Bartley looked rather stern, and said, "A word with you, sir."

"Certainly, sir," said the young man, stiffly.

Mr. Bartley sat down at his table and fixed his eyes upon the young man with a very peculiar look.

"You seem in a very great hurry to go."

"Well, I am."

"You have not even demanded your salary up to date."

"Excuse the oversight; I was not made for business, you know."

"There is something more to settle besides your salary."

"Premium for good conduct?"

"No, sir. Mr. Bolton, you will find this no jesting matter. There are defalcations in the accounts, sir."

The young man turned serious at once, "l am sorry to hear that, sir," said he, with proper feeling.

Bartley eyed him still more severely. "And even cash abstracted."

"Good heavens!" said the young man, answering his eyes rather than his words. "Why, surely you can't suspect me?"

Bartley answered, sternly, "I know I have been robbed, and so I suspect everybody whose conduct is suspicious."

This was too much for a Clifford to bear. He turned on him like a lion. "Your suspicions disgrace the trader who entertains them, not the gentleman they wrong. You are too old for me to give you a thrashing, so I won't stay here any longer to be insulted."

He snatched up his bag and was marching off, when the door opened, and Monckton with a detective confronted him.

"No," roared Bartley, furious in turn; "but you will stay to be examined."

"Examined!"

"Searched, then, if you like it better."

"No, don't do that," said the young fellow. "Spare me such a humiliation."

Bartley, who was avaricious, but not cruel, hesitated.

"Well," said he, "I will examine the safe before I go further."

Mr. Bartley opened the safe and took out the cashbox. It was empty. He uttered a loud exclamation. "Why, it's a clean sweep! A wholesale robbery! Notes and gold all gone! No wonder you were in such a hurry to leave! Luckily some of the notes were numbered. Search him."

"No, no. Don't treat me like a thief!" cried the poor boy, almost sobbing.

"If you are innocent, why object?" said Monckton, satirically.

"You villain," cried Clifford, "this is your doing! I am sure of it!"

Monckton only grinned triumphantly; but Bartley fired up. "If there is a villain here, it is you. He is a faithful servant, who warned his employer." He then pointed sternly at young Bolton, and the detective stepped up to him and said, curtly, "Now, sir, if I must."

He then proceeded to search his waistcoat pockets. The young man hung his head and looked guilty. He had heard of money being put into an innocent man's pockets, and he feared that game had been played with him.

The detective examined his waistcoat pockets and found--nothing. His other pockets--nothing.

The detective patted his breast and examined his stockings--nothing.

"Try the bag," said Monckton.

Then the poor fellow trembled again.

The detective searched the bag--nothing.

He took the overcoat and turned the pockets out--nothing.

Bartley looked surprised. Monckton still more so. Meantime Hope had gone round from the lobby, and now entered by the small office, and stood watching a part of this business, viz., the search of the bag and the overcoat, with a bitter look of irony.

"But my safe must have been opened with false keys," cried Bartley. "Where are they?"

"And the numbered notes," said Monckton, "where are they?"

"Gentlemen," said Hope, "may I offer my advice?"

"Who the devil are you?" said Monckton.

"He is my new partner, my associate in business," said the politic Bartley.

Then deferentially to Hope, "What do you advise?"

"You have two clerks. I would examine them both."

"Examine me?" cried Monckton. "Mr. Bartley, will you allow such an affront to be put on your old and faithful servant?"

"If you are innocent, why object?" said young Clifford, spitefully, before Bartley could answer.

The remark struck Bartley, and he acted on it.

"Well, it is only fair to Mr. Bolton," said he. "Come, come, Monckton, it is only a form."

Then he gave the detective a signal, and he stepped up to Monckton, and emptied his waistcoat pockets of eighty-five sovereigns.

"There!" cried Walter Clifford. "There! there!"

"My own money, won at the Derby," said Monckton coolly; "and only a part of it, I am happy to say. You will find the remainder in bank-notes."

The detective found several notes.

Bartley examined the book and the notes. The Derby! He was beginning to doubt this clerk, who attended that meeting on the sly. However, he was just, though no longer confiding.

"I am bound to say that not one of the numbered notes is here."

The detective was now examining Monckton's overcoat. He produced a small bunch of keys.

"How did they come there?" cried Monckton, in amazement.

It was an incautious remark. Bartley took it up directly, and pounced on the keys. He tried them on the safe. One opened the safe, another opened the cash-box.

Meantime the detective found some notes in the pocket of the overcoat, and produced them.

"Great heavens!" cried Monckton, "how did they come there?"

"Oh, I dare say you know," said the detective.

Bartley examined them eagerly. They were the numbered notes.

"You scoundrel," he roared, "these show me where your gold and your other notes came from. The whole contents of my safe--in that villain's pockets!"

"No, no," cried Monckton, in agony. "It's all a delusion. Some rogue has planted them there to rum me."

"Keep that for the beak," said the policeman; "he is sure to believe it. Come, my bloke. I knew who was my bird the moment I clapped eyes on the two. 'Tain't his first job, gents, you take my word. We shall find his photo in some jail or other in time for the assizes."

"Away with him!" cried Bartley, furiously.

As the policeman took him off, the baffled villain's eye fell on Hope, who stood with folded arms, and looked down on him with lowering brow and the deep indignation of the just, and yet with haughty triumph.

That eloquent look was a revelation to Monckton.

"Ah," he cried, "it was you."

Hope's only reply was this: "You double felon, false accuser and thief, you are caught in your own trap."

And this he thundered at him with such sudden power that the thief went cringing out, and even those who remained were awed. But Hope never told anybody except Walter Clifford that he had undone Monckton's work in the lobby; and then the poor boy fell upon his neck, and kissed his hand.

To run forward a little: Monckton was tried, and made no defense. He dared not call Hope as his witness, for it was clear Hope must have seen him commit the theft and attempt the other villainy. But the false accusation leaked out as well as the theft. A previous conviction was proved, and the indignant judge gave him fourteen years.

Thus was Bartley's fatal secret in mortal peril on the day it first existed; yet on that very day it was saved from exposure, and buried deep in a jail.

Bartley set Hope over his business, and was never heard of for months. Then he turned up in Sussex with a little girl, who had been saved from diphtheria by tracheotomy, and some unknown quack.

There was a scar to prove it. The tender parent pointed it out triumphantly, and railed at the regular practitioners of medicine.

WALTER CLIFFORD returned home pretty well weaned from trade, and anxious to propitiate his father, but well aware that on his way to reconciliation he must pass through probation.

He slipped into Clifford Hall at night, and commenced his approaches by going to the butler's pantry. Here he was safe, and knew it; a faithful old butler of the antique and provincial breed is apt to be more unreasonably paternal than Pater himself.

To this worthy, then, Walter owed a good bed, a good supper, and good advice: "Better not tackle him till I have had a word with him first."

Next morning this worthy butler, who for seven years had been a very good servant, and for the next seven years rather a bad one, and would now have been a hard master if the colonel had not been too great a Tartar to stand it, appeared before his superior with an air slightly respectful, slightly aggressive, and very dogged.

"There is a young gentleman would be glad to speak to you, if you will let him."

'"Who is he?" asked the colonel, though by old John's manner he divined.

"Can't ye guess?"

"Don't know why I should. It is your business to announce my visitors."

"Oh, I'll announce him, when I am made safe that he will be welcome."

"What! isn't he sure of a welcome? good, dutiful son like him?"

"Well, sir, he deserves a welcome. Why, he is the returning prodigal."

"We are not told that he deserved a welcome."

"What signifies?--he got one, and Scripture is the rule of life for men of our age, now we are out of the army."

"I think you had better let him plead his own cause, John; and if he takes the tone you do, he will get turned out of the house pretty quick; as you will some of these days, Mr. Baker."

"We shan't go, neither of us," said Mr. Baker, but with a sudden tone of affectionate respect, which disarmed the words of their true meaning. He added, hanging his head for the first time, "Poor young gentleman! afraid to face his own father!"

"What's he afraid of?" asked the colonel roughly.

"Of you cursing and swearing at him," said John.

"Cursing and swearing!" cried the colonel--"a thing I never do now. Cursing and swearing, indeed! You be ----!"

"There you go," said old John. "Come, colonel, be a father. What has the poor boy done?"

"He has deserted--a thing I have seen a fellow shot for, and he has left me a prey to parental anxieties."

"And so he has me, for that matter. But I forgive him. Anyway, I should like to hear his story before I condemn him. Why, he is only nineteen and four months, come Martinmas. Besides, how do we know?--he may have had some very good reason for going."

"His age makes that probable, doesn't it?"

"I dare say it was after some girl, sir?"

"Call that a good reason?"

"I call it a strong one. Haven't you never found it?" (the colonel was betrayed into winking). "From sixteen to sixty a woman will draw a man where a horse can't."

"Since that is so," said the colonel dryly, "you can tell him to come to breakfast."

"Am I to say that from you?"

"No; you can take that much upon yourself. I have known you presume a good deal more than that, John."

"Well, sir," said John, hanging his head for a moment, "old servants are like old friends--they do presume a bit; but then" (raising his head proudly) "they care for their masters, young and old. New servants, sir--why, this lot that we've got now, they would not shed a tear for you if you was to be hanged."

"Why should they?" said the colonel. "A man is not hanged for building churches. Come, beat a retreat. I've had enough of you. See there's a good breakfast."

"Oh," said John, "I've took care of that."

When the colonel came down he found his son leaning against the mantelpiece; but he left it directly and stood erect, for the colonel had drilled him with his own hands.

"Ugh!" said the colonel, giving a snort peculiar to himself, but he thought, "How handsome the dog is!" and was proud of him secretly, only he would not show it. "Good-morning, sir," said, the young man, with civil respect.

"Your most obedient, sir," said the old man stiffly.

After that neither spoke for some time, and the old butler glided about like a cat, helping both of them, especially the young one, to various delicacies from the side of the table. When he had stuffed them pretty well, he retired softly and listened at the door. Neither of the gentlemen was in a hurry to break the ice; each waited for the other.

Walter made the first remark---"What delicious tea!"

"As good as where you come from?" inquired Colonel Clifford, insidiously.

"A deal better," said Walter.

"By-the-by," said the Colonel, "where do you come from?"

Walter mentioned the town.

"You astonish me," said the colonel. "I made sure you had been, enjoying the pleasures of the capital."

"My purse wouldn't have stood that, sir."

"Very few purses can," said Colonel Clifford. Then in an off-hand way, "Have you brought her along with you?"

"Certainly not," said Walter, off his guard. "Her? Who?"

"Why, the girl that decoyed you from your father's roof."

"No girl decoyed me from here, sir, upon my honor."

"Whom are we talking about, then? Who is her her?"

"Her? Why, Lucy Monckton."

"And who is Lucy Monckton?"

"Why, the girl I fell in love with, and she deceived me nicely; but I found her out in time."

"And so you came home to snivel?"

"No, sir, I didn't; I'm not such a muff. I'm too much your son to love any woman long when I have learned to despise her. I came home to apologize, and to place myself under your orders, if you will forgive me, and find something useful for me to do."

"So I will, my boy; there's my hand. Now out with it. What did you go away for, since it wasn't a petticoat?"

"Well, sir, I am afraid I shall offend you."

"Not a bit of it, after I've given you my hand. Come, now, what was it?"

Walter pondered and hesitated, but at last hit on a way to explain.

"Sir," said he, "until I was six years old they used to give me peaches from Oddington House; but one fine day the supply stopped, and I uttered a small howl to my nurse. Old John heard me, and told me Oddington was sold, house, garden, estate, and all."

Colonel Clifford snorted.

Walter resumed, modestly but firmly.

"I was thirteen; I used to fish in a brook that ran near Drayton Park. One day I was fishing there, when a brown velveteen chap stopped me, and told me I was trespassing. 'Trespassing?' said I. 'I have fished here all my life; I am Walter Clifford, and this belongs to my father.' 'Well,' said the man, 'I've heerd it did belong to Colonel Clifford onst, but now it belongs to Muster Mills; so you must fish in your own water, young gentleman, and leave ourn to us as owns it.' Till I was eighteen I used to shoot snipes in a rushy bottom near Calverley Church. One day a fellow in black velveteen, and gaiters up to his middle, warned me out of that in the name of Muster Cannon."

Colonel Clifford, who had been drumming on the table all this time, looked uneasy, and muttered, with some little air of compunction: "They have plucked my feathers deucedly, that's a fact. Hang that fellow Stevens, persuading me to keep race horses; it's all his fault. Well, sir, proceed with your observations."

"Well, I inquired who could afford to buy what we were too poor to keep, and I found these wealthy purchasers were all in trade, not one of them a gentleman."

"You might have guessed that," said Colonel Clifford: "it is as much as a gentleman can do to live out of jail now-a-days."

"Yes, sir," said Walter. "Cotton had bought one of these estates, tallow another, and lucifer-matches the other."

"Plague take them all three!" roared the colonel.

"Well, then, sir," said Walter, "I could not help thinking there must be some magic in trade, and I had better go into it. I didn't think you would consent to that. I wasn't game to defy you; so I did a meanish thing, and slipped away into a merchant's office."

"And made your fortune in three months?" inquired the colonel.

"No, I didn't; and don't think trade is the thing for me. I saw a deal of avarice and meanness, and a thief of a clerk got his master to suspect me of dishonesty; so I snapped my fingers at them all, and here I am. But," said the poor young fellow, "I do wish, father, you would put me into something where I can make a little money, so that when this estate comes to be sold, I may be the purchaser."

Colonel Clifford started up in great emotion.

"Sell Clifford Hall, where I was born, and you were born, and everybody was born! Those estates I sold were only outlying properties."

"They were beautiful ones," said Walter. "I never see such peaches now."

"As you did when you were six years old," suggested the colonel. "No, nor you never will. I've been six myself. Lord knows when it was, though!"

"But, sir, I don't see any such trout, and no such haunts for snipe."

"Do you mean to insult me?" cried the colonel, rather suddenly. "This is what we are come to now. Here's a brat of six begins taking notes against his own father; and he improves on the Scotch poet--he doesn't print 'em. No, he accumulates them cannily until he is twenty, but never says a word. He loads his gun up to the muzzle, and waits, as the years roll on, with his linstock in his hand, and one fine day at breakfast he fires his treble charge of grape-shot at his own father."

This was delivered so loudly that John feared a quarrel, and to interrupt it, put in his head, and said, mighty innocently: "Did you call, sir? Can I do anything for you, sir?"

"Yes: go to the devil!"

John went, but not downstairs, as suggested--a mere lateral movement that ended at the keyhole.

"Well, but, sir," said Walter, half-reproachfully, "it was you elicited my views."

"Confound your views, sir, and ---- your impudence! You're in the right, and I am in the wrong" (this admission with a more ill-used tone than ever). "It's the race-horses. Ring the bell. What sawneys you young fellows are! it used not to take six minutes to ring a bell when I was your age."

Walter, thus stimulated, sprang to the bell-rope, and pulled it all down to the ground with a single gesture.

The colonel burst out laughing, and that did him good; and Mr. Baker answered the bell like lightning; he quite forgot that the bell must have rung fifty yards from the spot where he was enjoying the dialogue.

"Send me the steward, John; I saw him pass the window."

Meantime the colonel marched up and down with considerable agitation. Walter, who had a filial heart; felt very uneasy, and said, timidly, "I am truly sorry, father, that I answered your questions so bluntly."

"I'm not, then," said the colonel. "I hold him to be less than a man who flies from the truth, whether it comes from young lips or old. I have faced cavalry, sir, and I can face the truth."

At this moment the steward entered. "Jackson," said the colonel, in the very same tone he was speaking in, "put up my race-horses to auction by public advertisement."

"But, sir, Jenny has got to run at Derby, and the brown colt at Nottingham, and the six-year-old gelding at a handicap at Chester, and the chestnut is entered for the Syllinger next year."

"Sell them with their engagements."

"And the trainer, sir?"

"Give him his warning;"

"And the jockey?"

"Discharge him on the spot, and take him by the ear out of the premises before he poisons the lot. Keep one of the stable-boys, and let my groom do the rest."

"But who is to take them to the place of auction, sir?"

"Nobody. I'll have the auction here, and sell them where they stand. Submit all your books of account to this young gentleman."

The steward looked a little blue, and Walter remonstrated gently. "To me, father?"

"Why, you can cipher, can't ye?"

"Rather; it is the best thing I do."

"And you have been in trade, haven't ye?"

"Why, yes."

"Then you will detect plenty of swindles, if you find out one in ten. Above all, cut down my expenditure to my income. A gentleman of the nineteenth century, sharpened by trade, can easily do that. Sell Clifford Hall? I'd rather live on the rabbits and the pigeons and the black-birds, and the carp in the pond, and drive to church in the wheelbarrow."

So for a time Walter administered his father's estate, and it was very instructive. Oh! the petty frauds--the swindles of agency--a term which, to be sure, is derived from the Latin word "agere," to do--the cobweb of petty commissions--the flat bribes--the smooth hush-money!

Walter soon cut the expenses down to the income, which was ample, and even paid off the one mortgage that encumbered this noble estate at five per cent, only four per cent of which was really fingered by the mortgagee; the balance went to a go-between, though no go-between was ever wanted, for any solicitor in the country would have found the money in a week at four per cent.

The old gentleman was delighted and engaged his own son as steward at a liberal salary; and so Walter Clifford found employment and a fair income without going away from home again.

WHILE Mr. Bartley's business was improving under Hope's management, Hope himself was groaning under his entire separation from his daughter. Bartley had promised him this should not be; but among Hope's good qualities was a singular fidelity to his employers, and he was also a man who never broke his word. So when Bartley showed him that the true parentage of Grace Hope--now called Mary Bartley--could never be disguised unless her memory of him was interrupted and puzzled before she grew older, and that she as well as the world must be made to believe Bartley was her father, he assented, and it was two years before he ventured to come near his own daughter.

But he demanded to see her at a distance himself unseen, and this was arranged. He provided himself with a powerful binocular of the kind that is now used at sea, instead of the unwieldy old telescope, and the little girl was paraded by the nurse, who was in the secret. She played about in the sight of this strange spy. She was plump, she was rosy, she was full of life and spirit. Joy filled the father's heart: but then came a bitter pang to think that he had faded out of her joyous life; by and by he could see her no longer, for a mist came from his heart to his eyes; he bowed his head and went back to his business, his prosperity, and his solitude. These experiments were repeated at times. Moreover, Bartley had the tact never to write to him on business without telling him something about his girl, her clever sayings, her pretty ways, her quickness at learning from all her teachers, and so on. When she was eight years old a foreign agent was required in Hartley's business and Hope agreed to start this agency and keep it going till some more ordinary person could be intrusted to work it.

But he refused to leave England without seeing his daughter with his own eyes and hearing her voice. However, still faithful to his pledge, he prepared a disguise; he actually grew a mustache and beard for this tender motive only, and changed his whole style of dress; he wore a crimson necktie and dark green gloves with a plaid suit, which combination he abhorred as a painter, and our respected readers abominate, for surely it was some such perverse combination that made a French dressmaker lift her hands to heaven and say, "Quelle immoralite!" So then Bartley himself took his little girl for a walk, and met Mr. Hope in an appointed spot not far from his own house. Poor Hope saw them coming, and his heart beat high. "Ah!" said Bartley, feigning surprise; "why, it's Mr. Hope. How do you do, Hope? This is my little girl. Mary, my dear, this is an old friend of mine. Give him your hand."

The girl looked in Hope's face, and gave him her hand, and did not recognize him.

"Fine girl for her years, isn't she?" said Bartley. "Healthy and strong, and quick at her lessons; and, what's better still, she is a good girl, a very good girl."

"Papa!" said the child, blushing, and hid her face behind Bartley's elbow, all but one eye, with which she watched the effect of these eulogies upon the strange gentleman.

"She is all a father could wish," said Hope, tenderly.

Instantly the girl started from her position, and stood wrapt in thought; her beautiful eyes wore a strange look of dreamy intelligence, and both men could see she was searching the past for that voice.

Bartley drew back, that the girl might not see him, and held up his finger. Hope gave a slight nod of acquiescence, and spoke no more. Bartley invited him to take an early dinner, and talk business. Before he left he saw his child more than once; indeed, Bartley paraded her accomplishments. She played the piano to Hope; she rode her little Shetland pony for Hope; she danced a minuet with singular grace for so young a girl; she conversed with her governess in French, or something very like it, and she worked a little sewing machine, all to please the strange gentleman; and whatever she was asked to do she did with a winning smile, and without a particle of false modesty, or the real egotism which is at the bottom of false modesty.

Anybody who knew William Hope intimately might almost recognize his daughter in this versatile little mind with its faculty of learning so many dissimilar things.

Hope left for the Continent with a proud heart, a joyful heart, and a sore heart. She was lovely, she was healthy, she was happy, she was accomplished, but she was his no longer, not even in name: her love was being gained by a stranger, and there was a barrier of iron, as well as the English Channel, between William Hope and his own Mary Bartley.

It would weary the reader were we to detail the small events bearing on the part of the story which took place during the next five years. They might be summed up thus: That William Hope got a peep at his daughter now and then; and, making a series of subtle experiments by varying his voice as much as possible, confused and nullified her memory of that voice to all appearance. In due course, however, father and daughter were brought into natural contact by the last thing that seemed likely to do it, viz., by Bartley's avarice. Bartley's legitimate business at home and abroad could now run alone: so he invited Hope to England to guide him in what he loved better than steady business, viz., speculation. The truth is, Bartley could execute, but had few original ideas. Hope had plenty, and sound ones, though not common ones. Hope directed the purchase of convertible securities on this principle: Select good ones; avoid time bargains, which introduce a distinct element of risk; and buy largely at every panic not founded on a permanent reason or out of proportion. Example: A great district bank broke. The shares of a great district railway went down thirty per cent. Hope bade his employer and pupil observe that this was rank delusion, the dividends of the railway were not lowered one per cent by the failure of that bank, nor could they be: the shareholders of the bank had shares in the railway, and were compelled to force them on the market; hence the fall in the shares. "But," said Hope, "those depreciated shares are now in the hands of men who can hold them, and will, too, until they return from this ridiculous 85 to their normal value, which is from 105 to 115. Invest every shilling you have got; I shall." Bartley invested £30,000, and cleared twenty per cent in three months.

Example 2: There was a terrible accident on another railway, and part of the line broken up. Vast repairs needed. Shares fell twenty per cent.

"Out of proportion," said Hope. "The sum for repairs will not deduct from the dividends one-tenth of the annual sum represented by the fall, and, in three months, fear of another such disaster will not keep a single man, woman, child, bullock, pig or coal truck off that line. Put the pot on."

Bartley put the pot on, and made fifteen per cent.

Hope said to Bartley:

"When an English speculator sends his money abroad at all, he goes wild altogether. He rushes at obscure transactions, and lends to Peru, or Guatemala, or Tierra del Fuego, or some shaky place he knows nothing about. The insular maniac overlooks the continent of Europe, instead of studying it, and seeking what countries there are safe and others risky. Now, why overlook Prussia? It is a country much better governed than England, especially as regards great public enterprises and monopolies. For instance, the directors of a Prussian railway cannot swindle the shareholders by false accounts, and passing off loans for dividends. Against the frauds of directors, the English shareholder has only a sham security. He is invited to leave his home, and come two hundred miles to the directors' home and vote in person. He doesn't do it. Why should he? In Prussia the government protects the shareholder, and inspects the accounts severely. So much for the superior system of that country. Now, take a map. Here is Hamburg, the great port of the Continent, and Berlin, the great Continental center; and there is one railway only between the two. What English railway can compare with this? The shares are at 150. But they must go to 300 in time unless the Prussian Government allows another railway, and that is not likely, and, if so, you will have two years to back out. This is the best permanent investment of its class that offers on the face of the globe."

Bartley invested timidly, but held for years, and the shares went up over 300 before he sold.

"Do not let your mind live in an island if your body does," was a favorite saying of William Hope; and we recommend it impartially to Britons and Bornese.

On one of Hope's visits Bartley complained he had nothing to do. "I can sit here and speculate. I want to be in something myself; I think I will take a farm just to occupy me and amuse me."

"It will not amuse you unless you make money by it," suggested Hope.

"And nobody can do that nowadays. Farms don't pay."

"Plowing and sowing don't pay, but brains and money pay wherever found together."

"What, on a farm?"

"Why not, sir? You have only to go with the times. Observe the condition of produce: grain too cheap for a farmer because continents can export grain with little loss; fruit dear; meat dear, because cattle cannot be driven and sailed without risk of life and loss of weight; agricultural labor rising, and in winter unproductive, because to farm means to plow and sow, and reap and mow, and lose money. But meet those conditions. Breed cattle, sheep, and horses, and make the farm their feeding ground. Give fifty acres to fruit; have a little factory on the land for winter use, and so utilize all your farm hands and the village women, who are cheaper laborers than town brats, and I think you will make a little money in the form of money, besides what you make in gratuitous eggs, poultry, fruit, horses to ride, and cart things for the house--items which seldom figure in a farmer's book as money, but we stricter accountants know they are."

"I'll do it," said Bartley, "if you'll be my neighbor, and work it with me, and watch the share market at home and abroad."

Hope acquiesced joyfully, to be near his daughter; and they found a farm in Sussex, with hills for the sheep, short grass for the colts, plenty of water, enough arable land and artificial grasses for their purpose, and a grand sunny slope for their fruit trees, fruit bushes, and strawberries, with which last alone they paid the rent. "Then," said Hope, "farm laborers drink an ocean of beer. Now look at the retail price of beer: eighty per cent over its cost, and yet deleterious, which tells against your labor. As an employer of labor, the main expense of a farm, you want beer to be slightly nourishing, and very inspiring, not somniferous."

So they set up a malt-house and a brew-house, and supplied all their own hands with genuine liquor on the truck system at a moderate but remunerative price, and the grains helped to feed their pigs. Hope's principle was this: Sell no produce in its primitive form; if you change its form you make two profits. Do you grow barley? Malt it, and infuse it, and sell the liquor for two small profits, one on the grain, and one on the infusion. Do you grow grass? Turn it into flesh, and sell for two small profits, one on the herb, and one on the animal.

And really, when backed by money, the results seemed to justify his principle.

Hope lived by himself, but not far from his child, and often, when she went abroad, his loving eyes watched her every movement through his binocular, which might be described as an opera-glass ten inches long, with a small field, but telescopic power.

Grace Hope, whom we will now call Mary Bartley, since everybody but her father, who generally avoided her name, called her so, was a well-grown girl of thirteen, healthy, happy, beautiful, and accomplished. She was the germ of a woman, and could detect who loved her. She saw in Hope an affection she thought extraordinary, but instinct told her it was not like a young man's love, and she accepted it with complacency, and returned it quietly, with now and then a gush, for she could gush, and why not? "Far from us and from our friends be the frigid philosophy"--of a girl who can't gush.

Hope himself was loyal and guarded, and kept his affection within bounds; and a sore struggle it was. He never allowed himself to kiss her, though he was sore tempted one day, when he bought her a cream-colored pony, and she flung her arms round his neck before Mr. Bartley and kissed him eagerly; but he was so bashful that the girl laughed at him and said, half pertly, "Excuse the liberty, but if you will be such a duck, why, you must take the consequences."

Said Bartley, pompously, "You must not expect middle-aged men to be as demonstrative as very young ladies; but he has as much real affection for you as you have for him."

"Then he has a good deal, papa," said she sweetly. Both the men were silent, and Mary looked to one and the other, and seemed a little puzzled.

The great analysts that have dealt microscopically with commonplace situations would revel in this one, and give you a curious volume of small incidents like the above, and vivisect the father's heart with patient skill. But we poor dramatists, taught by impatient audiences to move on, and taught by those great professors of verbosity, our female novelists and nine-tenths of our male, that it is just possible for "masterly inactivity," alias sluggish narrative, creeping through sorry flags and rushes with one lily in ten pages, to become a bore, are driven on to salient facts, and must trust a little to our reader's intelligence to ponder on the singular situation of Mary Bartley and her two fathers.

One morning Mary Bartley and her governess walked to a neighboring town and enjoyed the sacred delight of shopping. They came back by a short-cut, which made it necessary to cross a certain brook, or rivulet, called the Lyn. This was a rapid stream, and in places pretty deep; but in one particular part it was shallow, and crossed by large stepping-stones, two-thirds of which were generally above-water. The village girls, including Mary Bartley, used all to trip over these stones, and think nothing of it, though the brook went past at a fine rate, and gradually widened and deepened as it flowed, till it reached a downright fall; after that, running no longer down a decline, it became rather a languid stream.

Mary and her governess came to this ford and found it swollen by recent rains, and foaming and curling round the stepping-stones, and their tops only were out of the water now.

The governess objected to pass this current.

"Well, but," said Mary, "the other way is a mile round, and papa expects us to be punctual at meals, and I am, oh, so hungry! Dear Miss Everett, I have crossed it a hundred times."

"But the water is so deep."

"It is deeper than usual; but see, it is only up to my knee. I could cross it without the stones. You go round, dear, and I'll explain against you come home."

"Not until I've seen you safe over."

"That you will soon see," said the girl, and, fearing a more authoritative interference, she gathered up her skirts and planted one dainty foot on the first stepping-stone, another on the next, and so on to the fourth; and if she had been a boy she would have cleared them all. But holding her skirts instead of keeping her arms to balance herself, and wearing idiotic shoes, her heels slipped on the fifth stone, which was rather slimy, and she fell into the middle of the current with a little scream.

To her amazement she found that the stream, though shallow, carried her off her feet, and though she recovered them, she could not keep them, but was alternately up and down, and driven along, all the time floundering. Oh, then she screamed with terror, and the poor governess ran screaming too, and making idle clutches from the bank, but powerless to aid.

Then, as the current deepened, the poor girl lost her feet altogether, and was carried on toward the deep water, flinging her arms high and screaming, but powerless. At first she was buoyed up by her clothes, and particularly by a petticoat of some material that did not drink water. But as her other clothes became soaked and heavy, she sank to her chin, and death stared her in the face.

She lost hope, and being no common spirit, she gained resignation; she left screaming, and said to Everett, "Pray for me."

But the next moment hope revived, and fear with it--this is a law of nature--for a man, bare-headed and his hair flying, came galloping on a barebacked pony, shouting and screaming with terror louder than both the women. He urged the pony furiously to the stream; then the beast planted his feet together, and with the impulse thus given Hope threw himself over the pony's head into the water and had his arm round his child in a moment. He lashed out with the other hand across the stream. But it was so powerful now as it neared the lasher that they made far more way onward to destruction than they did across the stream; still they did near the bank a little. But the lasher roared nearer and nearer, and the stream pulled them to it with iron force. They were close to it now. Then a willow bough gave them one chance. Hope grasped it, and pulled with iron strength. From the bough he got to a branch, and finally clutched the stem of the tree, just as his feet were lifted up by the rushing water, and both lives hung upon that willow tree. The girl was on his left arm, and his right arm round the willow.

"Grace," said he, feigning calmness.

"Put you arm around my neck, Mary."

"Yes, dear," said she, firmly.

"Now don't hurry yourself--there's no danger; move slowly across me, and hold my right arm very tight."

She did so.

"Now take hold of the bank with your left hand; but don't let go of me."

"Yes, dear," said the little heroine, whose fear was gone now she had Hope to take care of her.

Then Hope clutched the tree with his left hand, pushed Mary on shore with his right, and very soon had her in his arms on terra firma.

But now came a change that confounded Mary Bartley, to whom a man was a very superior being; only not always intelligible.

The brave man fell to shaking like an aspen leaf; the strong man to sobbing and gasping, and kissing the girl wildly. "Oh, my child! my child!"

Then Mary, of course, must gulp and cry a little for sympathy; but her quick-changing spirit soon shook it off, and she patted his cheek and kissed him, and then began to comfort him, if you please. "Good, dear, kind Mr. Hope," said she. "La! don't go on like that. You were so brave in the water, and now the danger is over. I've had a ducking, that is all. Ha! ha! ha!" and the little wretch, began to laugh.

Hope looked amazed; neither his heart nor his sex would let him change his mood so swiftly.

"Oh, my child," said he, "how can you laugh? You have been near eternity, and if you had been lost, what should I-- O God!"

Mary turned very grave. "Yes," said she, "I have been near eternity. It would not have mattered to you--you are such a good man--but I should have caught it for disobedience. But, dear Mr. Hope, let me tell you that the moment you put your arm round me I felt just as safe in the water as on dry land; so you see I have had longer to get over it than you have; that accounts for my laughing. No, it doesn't; I am a giddy, giggling girl, with no depth of character, and not worthy of all this affection. Why does everybody love me? They ought to be ashamed of themselves."

Hope told her she was a little angel, and everybody was right to love her; indeed, they deserved to be hanged if they did not.

Mary fixed on the word angel. "If I was an angel," she said, "I shouldn't be hungry, and I am, awfully. Oh, please come home; papa is so punctual. Mr. Hope, are you going to tell papa? Because if you are, just you take me and throw me in again. I'd rather be drowned than scolded." (This with a defiant attitude and flashing eyes.)

"No, no," said Hope. "I will not tell him, to vex him, and get you scolded."

"Then let us run home."

She took his hand, and he ran with her like a playmate, and oh! the father's heart leaped and glowed at this sweet companionship after danger and terror.

When they got near the house Mary Bartley began to walk and think. She had a very thinking countenance at times, and Hope watched her, and wondered what were her thoughts. She was very grave, so probably she was thinking how very near she had been to the other world.

Standing on the door-step, while he stood on the gravel, she let him know her thoughts. All her life, and even at this tender age, she had very searching eyes; they were gray now, though they had been blue. She put her hands to her waist, and bent those searching eyes on William Hope.

"Mr. Hope," said she, in a resolute sort of way.

"My dear," said he, eagerly.

"YOU LOVE ME BETTER THAN PAPA DOES, THAT'S ALL."

And having administered this information as a dry fact that might be worth looking into at leisure, she passed thoughtfully into the house.

HOPE paid a visit to his native place in Derbyshire, and his poor relations shared his prosperity, and blessed him, and Mr. Bartley upon his report; for Hope was one of those choice spirits who praise the bridge that carries them safe over the stream of adversity.

He returned to Sussex with all the news, and, among the rest, that Colonel Clifford had a farm coming vacant. Walter Clifford had insisted on a higher rent at the conclusion of the term, but the tenant had demurred.

Bartley paid little attention at the time; but by-and-by he said, "Did you not see signs of coal on Colonel Clifford's property?"

"That I did, and on this very farm, and told him so. But he is behind the age. I have no patience with him. Take one of those old iron ramrods that used to load the old musket, and cover that ramrod with prejudices a foot and a half deep, and there you have Colonel Clifford."

"Well, but a tenant would not be bound by his prejudices."

"A tenant! A tenant takes no right to mine, under a farm lease; he would have to propose a special contract, or to ask leave, and Colonel Clifford would never grant it."

There the conversation dropped. But the matter rankled in Bartley's mind. Without saying any more to Hope, he consulted a sharp attorney.

The result was that he took Mary Bartley with him into Derbyshire.

He put up at a little inn, and called at Clifford Hall.

He found Colonel Clifford at home, and was received stiffly, but graciously. He gave Colonel Clifford to understand that he had left business.

"All the better," said Colonel Clifford, sharply.

"And taken to farming."

"Ugh!" said the other, with his favorite snort.

At this moment, who should walk into the room but Walter Clifford.

Bartley started and stared. Walter started and stared.

"Mr. Bolton," said Bartley, scarcely above a whisper.

But Colonel Clifford heard it, and said, bruskly: "Bolton! No. Why, this is Walter Clifford, my son, and my man of business.--Walter, this is Mr. Bartley."

"Proud to make your acquaintance, sir," said the astute Bartley, ignoring the past.

Walter was glad he took this line before Colonel Clifford: not that he forgave Mr. Bartley that old affront the reader knows of.

The judicious Bartley read his face, and, as a first step toward propitiation, introduced him to his daughter. Walter was amazed at her beauty and grace, coming from such a stock. He welcomed her courteously, but shyly. She replied with rare affability, and that entire absence of mock-modesty which was already a feature in her character. To be sure, she was little more than fifteen, though she was full grown, and looked nearer twenty.

Bartley began to feel his way with Colonel Clifford about the farm. He told him he was pretty successful in agriculture, thanks to the assistance of an experienced friend, and then he said, half carelessly, "By-the-by, they tell me you have one to let. Is that so?"

"Walter," said Colonel Clifford, "have you a farm to let?"

"Not at present, sir; but one will be vacant in a month, unless the present tenant consents to pay thirty per cent more than he has done."

"Might I see that farm, Mr. Walter?" asked Bartley.

"Certainly," said Walter; "I shall be happy to show you over it." Then he turned to Mary. "I am afraid it would be no compliment to you. Ladies are not interested in farms."

"Oh, but I am, since papa is, and Mr. Hope: and then on our farm there are so many dear little young things: little calves, little lambs, and little pigs. Little pigs are ducks--very little ones, I mean; and there is nearly always a young colt about, that eats out of my hand. Not like a farm? The ideal"

"Then I will show you all over ours, you and your papa," said Walter, warmly. He then asked Mr. Bartley where he was to be found; and when Bartley told him at the "Dun Cow," he looked at Mary and said, "Oh!"

Mary understood in a moment, and laughed and said: "We are very comfortable, I assure you. We have the parlor all to ourselves, and there are samplers hung up, and oh! such funny pictures, and the landlady is beginning to spoil me already."

"Nobody can spoil you, Mary," said Mr. Bartley.

"You ought to know, papa, for you have been trying a good many years."

"Not very many, Miss Bartley," said Colonel Clifford, graciously. Then he gave a half start and said: "Here I am calling her miss when she is my own niece, and, now I think of it, she can't be half so old as she looks. I remember the very day she was born. My dear, you are an impostor."

Bartley changed color at this chance shaft. But Colonel Clifford explained:

"You pass for twenty, and you can't be more than-- Let me see."

"I am fifteen and four months," said Mary, "and I do take people in--cruelly,"

"Well," said Colonel Clifford, "you see you can't take me in. I know your date. So come and give your old ruffian of an uncle a kiss."

"That I will," cried Mary, and flew at Colonel Clifford, and flung both arms round his neck and kissed him. "Oh, papa," said she, "I have got an uncle now. A hero, too; and me that is so fond of heroes! Only this is my first--out of books."

"Mary, my dear," said Bartley, "you are too impetuous. Please excuse her, Colonel Clifford. Now, my dear, shake hands with your cousin, for we must be going."

Mary complied; but not at all impetuously. She lowered her long lashes, and put out her hand timidly, and said, "Good-by, Cousin Walter."

He held her hand a moment, and that made her color directly. "You will come over the farm. Can you ride? Have you your habit?"

"No, cousin; but never mind that. I can put on a long skirt."

"A skirt! But, after all, it does not matter a straw what you wear."

Mary was such a novice that she did not catch the meaning of this on the spot, but half-way to the inn, and in the middle of a conversation, her cheeks were suddenly suffused with blushes. A young man had admired her and said so. Very likely that was the way with young men. No doubt they were bolder than young women; but somehow it was not so very objectionable in them.

That short interview was a little era in Mary's young life. Walter had fixed his eyes on her with delight, had held her hand some seconds, and admired her to her face. She began to wonder a little, and to flutter a little, and to put off childhood.

Next day, punctual to the minute, Walter drove up to the door in an open carriage drawn by two fast steppers. He found Mr. Bartley alone, and why? because, at sight of Walter, Mary, for the first time in her life, had flown upstairs to look at herself in the glass before facing the visitor, and to smooth her hair, and retouch a bow, etc., underrating, as usual, the power of beauty, and overrating nullities. Bartley took this opportunity, and said to young Clifford:

"I owe you an apology, and a most earnest one. Can you ever forgive me?"

Walter changed color. Even this humble allusion to so great an insult was wormwood to him. He bit his lip, and said:

"No man can do more than say he is sorry. I will try to forget it, sir."

"That is as much as I can expect," said Bartley, humbly. "But if you only knew the art, the cunning, the apparent evidence, with which that villain Monckton deluded me--"

"That I can believe."

"And permit me one observation before we drop this unhappy subject forever. If you had done me the honor to come to me as Walter Clifford, why, then, strong and misleading as the evidence was, I should have said, 'Appearances are deceitful, but no Clifford was ever disloyal.'"

This artful speech conquered Walter Clifford. He blushed, and bowed a little haughtily at the compliment to the Cliffords. But his sense of justice was aroused.

"You are right," said he. "I must try and see both sides. If a man sails under false colors, he mustn't howl if he is mistaken for a pirate. Let us dismiss the subject forever. I am Walter Clifford now--at your service."

At that moment Mary Bartley came in, beaming with youth and beauty, and illumined the room. The cousins shook hands, and Walter's eyes glowed with admiration.

After a few words of greeting he handed Mary into the drag. Her father followed, and he was about to drive off, when Mary cried out, "Oh, I forgot my skirt, if I am to ride."

The skirt was brought down, and the horses, that were beginning to fret, dashed off. A smart little groom rode behind, and on reaching the farm they found another with two saddle-horses, one of them, a small, gentle Arab gelding, had a side-saddle. They rode all over the farm, and inspected the buildings, which were in excellent repair, thanks to Walter's. supervision. Bartley inquired the number of acres and the rent demanded. Walter told him. Bartley said it seemed to him a fair rent; still, he should like to know why the present tenant declined.

"Perhaps you had better ask him," said Walter. "I should wish you to hear both sides."

"That is like you," said Bartley, "but where does the shoe pinch, in your opinion?"

"Well, he tells me, in sober earnest, that he loses money by it as it is; but when he is drunk he tells his boon companions he has made seven thousand pounds here. He has one or two grass fields that want draining, but I offer him the pipes; he has only got to lay them, and cut the drains. My opinion is that he is the slave of habit; he is so used to make an unfair profit out of these acres that he cannot break himself of it and be content with a fair one."

"I dare say you have hit it," said Bartley. "Well, I am fond of farming, but I don't live by it, and a moderate profit would content me."

Walter said nothing. The truth is, he did not want to let the farm to Bartley. Bartley saw this, and drew Mary aside.

"Should not you like to come here, my child?"

"Yes, papa, if you wish it; and you know it's dear Mr. Hope's birthplace."

"Well, then, tell this young fellow so. I will give you an opportunity."

That was easily managed, and then Mary said, timidly, "Cousin Walter, we should all three be so glad if we might have the farm."

"Three?" said he. "Who is the third?"

"Oh, somebody that everybody likes and I love. It is Mr. Hope. Such a duck! I am sure you would like him."

"Hope! Is his name William?"

"Yes, it is. Do you know him?" asked Mary, eagerly.

"I have reason to know him; he did me a good turn once, and I shall never forget it."

"Just like him!" cried Mary. "He is always doing people good turns. He is the best, the truest, the cleverest, the dearest darling dear that ever stepped, and a second father to me; and, cousin, this village is his birthplace, and he didn't say much, but it was he who told us of this farm, and he would be so pleased if I could write and say, 'We are to have the farm--Cousin Walter says so.'"

She turned her lovely eyes, brimming with tenderness, toward her cousin Walter, and he was done for.

"Of course you shall have it," he said warmly. "Only you will not be angry with me if I insist on the increased rent. You know, cousin, I have a father too, and I must be just to him."

"To be sure you must, dear," said Mary incautiously; and the word penetrated Walter's heart as if a woman of twenty-five had said it all of a sudden and for the first time.

When they got home, Mary told Mr. Bartley he was to have the farm if he would pay the increased rent.

"That is all right," said Bartley. "Then to-morrow we can go home."

"So soon!" said Mary, sorrowfully.

"Yes," said Bartley, firmly; "the rest had better be done in writing. Why, Mary, what is the use of staying on now? We are going to live here in a month or two."

"I forgot that," said Mary, with a little sigh. It seemed so ungracious to get what they wanted, and then turn their backs directly. She hinted as much, very timidly.

But Bartley was inexorable, and they reached home next day.

Mary would have liked to write to Walter and announce their safe arrival, but nature withheld her. She was a child no longer.

Bartley went to the sharp solicitor and had a long interview with him. The result was that in about ten days he sent Walter Clifford a letter and the draft of a lease, very favorable to the landlord on the whole, but cannily inserting one unusual clause that looked inoffensive.

It came by post, and Walter read the letter, and told his father whom it was from.

"What does the fellow say?" grunted Colonel Clifford.

"He says: 'We are doing very well here, but Hope says a bailiff can now carry out our system; and he is evidently sweet on his native: place, and thinks the proposed rent is fair and even moderate. As for me, my life used to be so bustling that I require a change now and then; so I will be your tenant. Hope says I am to pay the expense of the lease, so I have requested Arrowsmith & Cox to draw it. I have no experience in leases. They have drawn hundreds. I told them to make it fair. If they have not, send it back with objections.' "

"Oh! oh!" said Colonel Clifford. "He draws the lease, does he? Then look at it with a microscope."

Walter laughed.

"I should not like to encounter him on his own ground. But here he is a fish out of water; he must be. However, I will pass my eye over it. Where the farmer generally overreaches us, if he draws the lease, is in the clauses that protect him on leaving. He gets part possession for months without paying rent, and he hampers and fleeces the incoming tenant, so that you lose a year's rent or have to buy him out. Now, let me see, that will be at the end of the document--No; it is exceedingly fair, this one."

"Show it to our man of business, and let him study every line. Set an attorney to catch an attorney."

"Of course I shall submit it to our solicitor," said Walter.

This was done, and the experienced practitioner read it very carefully. He pronounced it unusually equitable for a farmer's lease.

"However," said he, "we might suggest that he does all the repairs and draining, and that you find the materials; and also that he insures all the farm buildings. But you can hardly stand out for the insurance if he objects. There's no harm trying. Stay! here is one clause that is unusual; the tenant is to have the right to bore for water, or to penetrate the surface of the soil and take out gravel or chalk or minerals, if any. I don't like that clause. He might quarry, and cut the farm in pieces. Ah, there's a proviso that any damage to the surface or the agricultural value shall be fully compensated, the amount of such injury to be settled by the landlord's valuer or surveyor. Oh, come, if you can charge your own price, that can't kill you."

In short, the draft was approved, subject to certain corrections. These were accepted. The lease was engrossed in duplicate, and in due course signed and delivered. The old tenant left, abusing the Cliffords, and saying it was unfair to bring in a stranger, for he would have given all the money.

Bartley took possession.

Walter welcomed Hope very warmly, and often came to see him. He took a great interest in Hope's theories of farming, and often came to the farm for lessons. But that interest was very much increased by the opportunities it gave him of seeing and talking to sweet Mary Bartley. Not that he was forward or indiscreet. She was not yet sixteen, and he tried to remember she was a child.

Unfortunately for that theory she looked a ripe woman, and this very Walter made her more and more womanly. Whenever Walter was near she had new timidity, new blushes, fewer gushes, less impetuosity, more reserve. Sweet innocent! She was set by Nature to catch the man by the surest way, though she had no such design.

Oh, it was a pretty, subtle piece of nature, and each sex played its part. Bold advances of the man, with internal fear to offend, mock retreats of the girl, with internal throbs of complacency, and life invested with a new and growing charm to both. Leaving this pretty little pastime to glide along the flowery path that beautifies young lives to its inevitable climax, we go to a matter more prosaic, yet one that proved a source of strange and stormy events.

Hope had hardly started the farm when Bartley sent him off to Belgium--TO STUDY COAL MINES.

MR. HOPE left his powerful opera-glass with Mary Bartley. One day that Walter called she was looking through it at the landscape, and handed it to him. He admired its power. Mary told him it had saved her life once.

"Oh," said he, "how could that be?"

Then she told him how Hope had seen her drowning, a mile off, with it, and ridden a bare-backed steed to her rescue.

"God bless him!" cried Walter. "He is our best friend. Might I borrow this famous glass?"

"Oh," said Mary, "I am not going into any more streams; I am not so brave now as I used to be."

"Please lend it to me, for all that."

"Of course I will, if you wish it."

Strange to say, after this, whether Mary walked out or rode out, she very often met Mr. Walter Clifford. He was always delighted and surprised. She was surprised three times, and said so, and after that she came to lower her lashes and blush, but not to start. Each meeting was a pure accident, no doubt, only she foresaw the inevitable occurrence.

They talked about everything in the world except what was most on their minds. Their soft tones and expressive eyes supplied that little deficiency.

One day he caught her riding on her little Arab. The groom fell behind directly. After they had ridden some distance in silence, Walter broke out:

"How beautifully you ride!"

"Me!" cried Mary. "Why, I never had a lesson in my life."

"That accounts for it. Let a lady alone, and she does everything more gracefully than a man; but let some cad undertake to teach her, she distrusts herself and imitates the snob. If you could only see the women in Hyde Park who have been taught to ride, and compare them with yourself!"

"I should learn humility."

"No; it would make you vain, if anything could."

"You seem inclined to do me that good turn. Come, pray, what do these poor ladies do to offend you so?"

"I'll tell you. They square their shoulders vulgarly; they hold the reins in their hands as if they were driving, and they draw the reins to their waists in a coarse, absurd way. They tighten both these reins equally, and saw the poor devil's mouth with the curb and the snaffle at one time. Now you know, Mary, the snaffle is a mild bit, and the curb is a sharp one; so where is the sense of pulling away at the snaffle when you are tugging at the curb? Why, it is like the fellow that made two holes at the bottom of the door--a big one for the cat to come through and a little one for the kitten. But the worst of all is they show the caddess so plainly."

"Caddess! what is that; goddess you mean, I suppose?"

"No; I mean a cad of the feminine gender. They seem bursting with affectation and elated consciousness that they are on horseback. That shows they have only just made the acquaintance of that animal, and in a London riding-school. Now you hold both reins lightly in the left hand, the curb loose, since it is seldom wanted, the snaffle just feeling the animal's mouth, and you look right and left at the people you are talking to, and don't seem to invite one to observe that you are on a horse: that is because you are a lady, and a horse is a matter of course to you, just as the ground is when you walk upon it."

The sensible girl blushed at his praise, but she said, dryly, "How meritorious! Cousin Walter, I have heard that flattery is poison. I won't stay here to be poisoned--so." She finished the sentence in action; and with a movement of her body she started her Arab steed, and turned her challenging eye back on Walter, and gave him a hand-gallop of a mile on the turf by the roadside. And when she drew bridle her cheeks glowed so and her eyes glistened, that Walter was dazzled by her bright beauty, and could do nothing but gaze at her for ever so long.

If Hope had been at home, Mary would have been looked after more sharply. But if she was punctual at meals, that went a long way with Robert Bartley.

However, the accidental and frequent meetings of Walter and Mary, and their delightful rides and walks, were interfered with just as they began to grow into a habit. There arrived at Clifford Hall a formidable person--in female eyes, especially--a beautiful heiress. Julia Clifford, great-niece and ward of Colonel Clifford; very tall, graceful, with dark gray eyes, and black eyebrows the size of a leech, that narrowed to a point and met in finer lines upon the bridge of a nose that was gently aquiline, but not too large, as such noses are apt to be. A large, expressive mouth, with wonderful rows of ivory, and the prettiest little black down, fine as a hair, on her upper lip, and a skin rather dark but clear, and glowing with the warm blood beneath it, completed this noble girl. She was nineteen years of age.

Colonel Clifford received her with warm affection and old-fashioned courtesy; but as he was disabled by a violent fit of gout, he deputed Walter to attend to her on foot and horseback.

Miss Clifford, accustomed to homage, laid Walter under contribution every day. She was very active, and he had to take her a walk in the morning, and a ride in the afternoon. He winced a little under this at first; it kept him so much from Mary. But there was some compensation. Julia Clifford was a lady-like rider, and also a bold and skillful one.

The first time he rode with her he asked her beforehand what sort of a horse she would like.

"Oh, anything," said she, "that is not vicious nor slow."

"A hack or a hunter?"

"Oh, a hunter, if I may."

"Perhaps you will do me the honor to look at them and select."

"You are very kind, and I will." He took her to the stables, and she selected a beautiful black mare, with a coat like satin.

"There," said Walter, despondingly. "I was afraid you would fix on her. She is impossible. I can't ride her myself."

"Vicious?"

"Not in the least."

"Well, then--"

Here an old groom touched his hat, and said, curtly, "Too hot and fidgety, miss. I'd as lieve ride of a boiling kettle,"

Walter explained: "The poor thing is the victim of nervousness."

"Which I call them as rides her the victims," suggested the ancient groom.

"Be quiet, George. She would go sweetly in a steeple-chase, if she didn't break her heart with impatience before the start. But on the road she is impossible. If you make her walk, she is all over lather in five minutes, and she'd spoil that sweet habit with flecks of foam. My lady has a way of tossing her head, and covering you all over with white streaks."

"She wants soothing," suggested Miss Clifford.

"Nay, miss. She wants bleeding o' Sundays, and sweating over the fallows till she drops o' week-days. But if she was mine I'd put her to work a coal-cart for six months; that would larn her."

"I will ride her," said Miss Clifford, calmly; "her or none."

"Saddle her, George," said Walter, resignedly. "I'll ride Goliah. Black Bess shan't plead a bad example. Goliah is as meek as Moses, Miss Clifford. He is a gigantic mouse."

"I'd as lieve ride of a dead man," said the old groom.

"Mr. George," said the young lady, "you seem hard to please. May I ask what sort of animal you do like to ride?"

"Well, miss, summat between them two. When I rides I likes to be at peace. If I wants work, there's plenty in the yard. If I wants fretting and fuming, I can go home: I'm a married man, ye know. But when I crosses a horse I looks for a smart trot and a short stepper, or an easy canter on a bit of turf, and not to be set to hard labor a-sticking my heels into Goliah, nor getting a bloody nose every now and then from Black Bess a-throwing back her uneasy head when I do but lean forward in the saddle. I be an old man, miss, and I looks for peace on horseback if I can't get it nowhere else."

All this was delivered while saddling Black Bess. When she was ready, Miss Clifford asked leave to hold the bridle, and walk her out of the premises. As she walked her she patted and caressed her, and talked to her all the time--told her they all misunderstood her because she was a female; but now she was not to be tormented and teased, but to have her own way.

Then she asked George to hold the mare's head as gently as he could, and Walter to put her up. She was in the saddle in a moment. The mare fidgeted and pranced, but did not rear. Julia slackened the reins, and patted and praised her, and let her go. She made a run, but was checked by degrees with the snaffle. She had a beautiful mouth, and it was in good hands at last.

When they had ridden a few miles they came to a very open country, and Julia asked demurely, if she might be allowed to try her off the road. "All right," said Walter; and Miss Julia, with a smart decision that contrasted greatly with the meekness of her proposal, put her straight at the bank, and cleared it like a bird. They had a famous gallop, but this judicious rider neither urged the mare nor greatly checked her. She moderated her. Black Bess came home that day sweating properly, but with a marked diminution of lather and foam. Miss Clifford asked leave to ride her into the stable-yard, and after dismounting talked to her, and patted her, and praised her. An hour later the pertinacious beauty asked for a carrot from the garden, and fed Black Bess with it in the stable.

By these arts, a very light hand, and tact in riding, she soothed Black Bess's nerves, so that at last the very touch of her habit skirt, or her hand, or the sound of her voice, seemed to soothe the poor nervous creature; and at last one day in the stable Bess protruded her great lips and kissed her fair rider on the shoulder after her manner.

All this interested and amused Walter Clifford, but still he was beginning to chafe at being kept from Miss Bartley, when one morning her servant rode over with a note.

"DEAR COUSIN WALTER -- Will you kindly send me back my opera-glass? I want to see what is going on at Clifford Hall.

"Yours affectionately,

"MARY BARTLEY."

Walter wrote back directly that he would bring it himself, and tell her what was going on at Clifford Hall.

So he rode over and told her of Julia Clifford's arrival, and how his father had deputed him to attend on her, and she took up all his time. It was beginning to be a bore.

"On the contrary," said Mary, "I dare say she is very handsome."

"That she is," said Walter.

"Please describe her."

"A very tall, dark girl, with wonderful eyebrows; and she has broken in Black Bess, that some of us men could not ride in comfort."

Mary changed color. She murmured, "No wonder the Hall is more attractive than the farm!" and the tears shone in her eyes.

"Oh, Mary," said Walter, reproachfully, "how can you say that? What is Julia Clifford to me?"

"I can't tell," said Mary, dryly. "I never saw you together through my glasses, you know."

Walter laughed at this innuendo.

"You shall see us together to-morrow, if you will bless one of us with your company."

"I might be in the way."

"That is not very likely. Will you ride to Hammond Church to-morrow at about ten, and finish your sketch of the tower? I will bring Miss Clifford there, and introduce you to each other."

This was settled, and Mary was apparently quite intent on her sketch when Walter and Julia rode up, and Walter said:

"That is my cousin, Mary Bartley. May I introduce her to you?"

"Of course. What a sweet face!"

So the ladies were introduced, and Julia praised Mary's sketch, and Mary asked leave to add her to it, hanging, with pensive figure, over a tombstone. Julia took an admirable pose, and Mary, with her quick and facile fingers, had her on the paper in no time. Walter asked her, in a whisper, what she thought of her model.

"I like her," said Mary. "She is rather pretty."

"Rather pretty! Why, she is an acknowledged beauty."

"A beauty? The idea! Long black thing!"

Then they rode all together to the farm. There Mary was all innocent hospitality, and the obnoxious Julia kissed her at parting, and begged her to come and see her at the Hall.

Mary did call, and found her with a young gentleman of short stature, who was devouring her with his eyes, but did not overflow in discourse, having a slight impediment in his speech. This was Mr. Percy Fitzroy. Julia introduced him.

"And where are you staying, Percy?" inquired she.

"At the D--D--Dun Cow."

"What is that?"

Walter explained that it was a small hostlery, but one that was occasionally honored by distinguished visitors. Miss Bartley stayed there three days.

"I h--hope to st--ay more than that," said little Percy, with an amorous glance at Julia.

Miss Clifford took Mary to her room, and soon asked her what she thought of him; then, anticipating criticism, she said there was not much of him, but he was such a duck.

"He dresses beautifully," was Mary's guarded remark.

However, when Walter rode home with her, being now relieved of his attendance on Julia, she was more communicative. Said she: "I never knew before that a man could look like fresh cambric. Dear me! his head and his face and his little whiskers, his white scarf, his white waistcoat, and all his clothes, and himself, seem just washed and ironed and starched. I looked round for the bandbox."

"Never mind," said Walter. "He is a great addition. My duties devolve on him. And I shall be free to-- How her eyes shone and her voice mellowed when she spoke to him! Confess, now, love is a beautiful thing."

"I cannot say. Not experienced in beautiful things." And Mary looked mighty demure.

"Of course not. What am I thinking of? You are only a child."

"A little more than that, please."

"At all events, love beautified her."

"I saw no difference. She was always a lovely girl."

"Why, you said she was 'a long black thing.'"

"Oh, that was before--she looked engaged."

After this young Fitzroy was generally Miss Clifford's companion in her many walks, and Walter Clifford had a delightful time with Mary Bartley.

Her nurse discovered how matters were going. But she said nothing. From something Bartley let fall years ago she divined that Bartley was robbing Walter Clifford by substituting Hope's child for his own, and she thought the mischief could be repaired and the sin atoned for if he and Mary became man and wife. So she held her tongue and watched.

The servants at the Hall watched the whole game, and saw how the young people were pairing, and talked them over, very freely.

The only person in the dark was Colonel Clifford. He was nearly always confined to his room. However, one day he came down, and found Julia and Percy together. She introduced Percy to him. The colonel was curt, but grumpy, and Percy soon beat a retreat.

The colonel sent for Walter to his room. He did not come for some time, because he was wooing Mary Bartley.

Colonel Clifford's first word was, "Who was that little stuttering dandy I caught spooning your Julia?"

"Only Percy Fitzroy!"

"Only Percy Fitzroy! Never despise your rivals, sir. Always remember that young women are full of vanity, and expect to be courted all day long. I will thank you not to leave the field open a single day till you have secured the prize."

"What prize, sir?"

"What prize, you ninny? Why, the beautiful girl that can buy back Oddington and Drayton, peaches and fruit and all. They are both to be sold at this moment. What prize? Why, the wife I have secured for you, it you don't go and play the fool and neglect her."

Walter Clifford looked aghast.

"Julia Clifford!" said he. "Pray don't ask me to marry her."

"Not ask you?--but I do ask you; and what is more, I command you. Would you revolt again against your father, who has forgiven you, and break my heart, now I am enfeebled by disease? Julia Clifford is your wife, or you are my son no more."

THE next time Walter Clifford met Mary Bartley he was gloomy at intervals. The observant girl saw he had something on his mind. She taxed him with it, and asked him tenderly what it was.

"Oh, nothing," said he.

"Don't tell me!" said she. "Mind, nothing escapes my eye. Come, tell me, or we are not friends."

"Oh, come, Mary. That is hard."

"Not in the least. I take an interest in you."

"Bless you for saying so!"

"And so, if you keep your troubles from me, we are not friends, nor cousins."

"Mary!"

"Nor anything else."

"Well, dear Mary, sooner than not be anything else to you, I will tell you, and yet I don't like. Well, then, if I must, it is that dear old wrong-headed father of mine. He wants me to marry Julia Clifford."

Mary turned pale directly. "I guessed as much," said she. "Well, she is young and beautiful and rich, and it is your duty to obey your father."

"But I can't."

"Oh yes, you can, if you try."

"But I can't try."

"Why not?"

"Can't you guess?"

"No."

"Well, then, I love another girl--as opposite to her as light is to darkness."

Mary blushed and looked down. "Complimentary to Julia," she said. "I pity her opposite, for Julia is a fine, high-minded girl."

"Ah, Mary, you are too clever for me; of course I mean the opposite in appearance."

"As ugly as she is pretty?"

"No; but she is a dark girl, and I don't like dark girls. It was a dark girl that deceived me so heartlessly years ago."

"Ah!"

"And made me hate the whole sex."

"Or only the brunettes?"

"The whole lot."

"Cousin Walter, I thank you in the name of that small company."

"Until I saw you, and you converted me in one day."

"Only to the blondes?"

"Only to one of them. My sweet Mary, the situation is serious. You, whose eye nothing escapes--you must have seen long ago how I love you."

"Never mind what I have seen, Walter," said Mary, whose bosom was beginning to heave.

"Very well," said Walter; "then I will tell you as if you didn't know it. I admired you at first sight; every time I was with you I admired you, and loved you more and more. It is my heaven to see you and to hear you speak. Whether you are grave or gay, saucy or tender, it is all one charm, one witchcraft. I want you for my wife, and my child, and my friend. Mary, my love, my darling, how could I marry any woman but you? and you, could you marry any man but me, to break the heart that beats only for you?"

This and the voice of love, now ardent, now broken with emotion, were more than sweet, saucy Mary could trifle with; her head drooped slowly upon his shoulder, and her arm went round his neck, and the tremor of her yielding frame and the tears of tenderness that flowed slowly from her fair eyes told Walter Clifford without a word that she was won.

He had the sense not to ask her for words. What words could be so eloquent as this? He just held her to his manly bosom, and trembled with love and joy and triumph. She knew, too, that she had replied, and treated her own attitude like a sentence in rather a droll way. "But for all that," said she, "I don't mean to be a wicked girl if I can help. This is an age of wicked young ladies. I soon found that out in the newspapers; that and science are the two features. And I have made a solemn vow not to be one of them"--(query, a science or a naughty girl)--"making mischief between father and son."

"No more you shall, dear," said Walter. "Leave it to me. We must be patient, and all will come right."

"Oh, I'll be true to you, dear, if that is all," said Mary.

"And if you would not mind just temporizing a little, for my sake, who love you?"

"Temporize!" said Mary, eagerly. "With all my heart. I'll temporize till we are all dead and buried."

"Oh, that will be too long for me," said Walter.

"Oh, never do things by halves," said the ready girl.

If his tongue had been as prompt as hers, he might have said that "temporizing" was doing things by halves; but he let her have the last word. And perhaps he lost nothing, for she would have had that whether or no.

So this day was another era in their love. Girls after a time are not content to see they are beloved; they must hear it too; and now Walter had spoken out like a man, and Mary had replied like a woman. They were happy, and walked hand in hand purring to one another, instead of sparring any more.

On his return home Walter found Julia marching swiftly and haughtily up and down upon the terrace of Clifford Hall, and he could not help admiring the haughty magnificence of her walk. The reason soon appeared. She was in a passion. She was always tall, but now she seemed lofty, and to combine the supple panther with the erect peacock in her ireful march. Such a fine woman as Julia really awes a man with her carriage at such a time. The poor soul thinks he sees before him the indignation of the just; when very likely it is only what in a man would be called Petulance.

"Anything the matter, Miss Clifford?" said he, obsequiously.

"No, sir" (very stiffly).

"Can I be of any service?"

"No, you can not." And then, swifter than any weather-cock ever turned: "You are a good creature: why should I be rude to you? I ought to be ashamed of myself. It is that little wretch."

"Not our friend Fitzroy?"

"Why, what other little wretch is there about? We are all Grenadiers and May-poles in this house except him. Well, let him go. I dare say somebody else--hum--and Uncle Clifford has told me more than once I ought to look higher. I couldn't well look lower than five feet nothing. Ha! ha! ha! I told him so."

"That was cruel."

"Don't scold me. I won't be lectured by any of you. Of course it was, dear. Poor little Percy. Oh! oh! oh!"

And after all this thunder there was a little rain, by a law that governs Atmosphere and Woman impartially.

Seeing her softened, and having his own reasons for wishing to keep Fitzroy to his duty, Walter begged leave to mediate, if possible, and asked if she would do him the honor to confide the grievance to him.

"Of course I will," said Julia. "He is angry with Colonel Clifford for not wishing him to stay here, and he is angry with me for not making Uncle Clifford invite him. As if I could! I should be ashamed to propose such a thing. The truth is, he is a luxurious little fellow, and my society out-of-doors does not compensate him for the cookery at the Dun Cow. There! let him go."

"But I want him to stay."

"Then that is very kind of you."

"Isn't it?" said Walter, slyly. "And I must make him stay somehow. Now tell me, isn't he a little jealous?"

"A little jealous! Why, he is eaten up with it; he is pétrie de jalousie."

"Then," said Walter, timidly, and hesitating at every word, "you can't be angry if I work on him a little. Would there be any great harm if I were to say that nobody can see you without admiring you; that I have always respected his rights, but that if he abandons them--"

Julia caught it in a moment. She blushed, and laughed heartily. "Oh, you good, sly Thing!" said she; "and it is the truth, for I am as proud as he is vain; and if he leaves me I will turn round that moment and make you in love with me."

Walter looked queer. This was a turn he had not counted on.

"Do you think I couldn't, sir?" said she, sharply.

"It is not for me to limit the power of beauty," said Walter, meekly.

"Say the power of flattery. I could cajole any man in the world--if I chose."

"Then you are a dangerous creature, and I will make Fitzroy my shield. I'm off to the Dun Cow."

"You are a duck," said this impetuous beauty. "So there!" She took him round the neck with both hands, and gave him a most delicious kiss.

"Why, he must be mad," replied the recipient, bluntly. She laughed at that, and he went straight to the Dun Cow. He found young Fitzroy sitting rather disconsolate, and opened his errand at once by asking him if it was true that they were to lose him.

Percy replied stiffly that it was true.

"What a pity!" said Walter.

"I d--don't think I shall be m--much m--missed," said Percy, rather sullenly.

"I know two people who will miss you."

"I d--don't know one."

"Two, I assure you--Miss Clifford and myself. Come, Mr. Fitzroy, I will not beat about the bush. I am afraid you are mortified, and I must say, justly mortified, at the coolness my father has shown to you. But I assure you that it is not from any disrespect to you personally."

"Oh, indeed!" said Percy, ironically.

"No; quite the reverse--he is afraid of you."

"That is a g--g--good joke."

"No; let me explain. Fathers are curious people. If they are ever so disinterested in their general conduct, they are sure to be a little mercenary for their children. Now you know Miss Clifford is a beauty who would adorn Clifford Hall, and an heiress whose money would purchase certain properties that join ours. You understand?"

"Yes," said the little man, starting up in great wrath. "I understand, and it's a--bom--inable. I th--thought you were my friend, and a m--man of h--honor."

"So I am, and that is why I warn you in time. If you quarrel with Miss Clifford, and leave this place in a pet, just see what risks we both run, you and I. My father will be always at me, and I shall not be able to insist on your prior claim; he will say you have abandoned it. Julia will take the huff, and you know beautiful women will do strange things--mad things--when once pique enters their hearts. She might turn round and marry me."

"You forget, sir, you are a man of honor."

"But not a man of stone. Now, my dear Fitzroy, be reasonable. Suppose that peerless creature went in for female revenge; why, the first thing she would do would be to make me love her, whether I chose or no. She wouldn't give me a voice in the matter. She would flatter me; she would cajole me; she would transfix my too susceptible heart with glances of fire and bewitching languor from those glorious eyes."

"D--d----! Ahem!" cried Percy, turning green.

Walter had no mercy. "I heard her say once she could make any man love her if she chose."

"So she could," said Percy, ruefully. "She made me. I had an awful p--p--prejudice against her, but there was no resisting."

"Then don't subject me to such a trial. Stick to her like a man."

"So I will; b--but it is a m--m--mortifying position. I'm a man of family. We came in with the C--Conquest, and are respected in our c--county; and here I have to meet her on the sly, and live at the D--Dun Cow."

"Where the cuisine is wretched."

"A--b--b--bominable!"

Having thus impregnated his mind with that soothing sentiment, jealousy, Walter told him he had a house to let on the estate--quite a gentleman's house, only a little dilapidated, with a fine lawn and garden, only neglected into a wilderness. "But all the better for you," said he. "You have plenty of money, and no occupation. Perhaps that is what leads to these little quarrels. It will amuse you to repair the crib and restore the lawn. Why, there is a brook runs through it--it isn't every lawn has that--and there used to be water-lilies floating, and peonies nodding down at them from the bank: a paradise. She adores flowers, you know. Why not rent that house from me? You will have constant occupation and amusement. You will become a rival potentate to my governor. You will take the shine out of him directly; you have only to give a ball, and then all the girls will worship you, Julia Clifford especially, for she could dance the devil to a stand-still."

Percy's eyes flashed. "When can I have the place?" said he, eagerly.

"In half an hour. I'll draw you a three months' agreement. Got any paper? Of course not. Julia is so near. What are those? Playing-cards. What do you play? 'Patience,' all by yourself. No wonder you are quarrelsome! Nothing else to bestow your energy on."

Percy denied this imputation. The cards were for pistol practice. He shot daily at the pips in the yard.

"It is the fiend Ennui that loads your pistols, and your temper too. Didn't I tell you so?"

Walter then demanded the ace of diamonds, and on its face let him the house and premises on a repairing lease for three years, rent £5 a year: which was a good bargain for both parties, since Percy was sure to lay out a thousand pounds or two on the property, and to bind Julia more closely to him, who was worth her weight in gold ten times over.

Walter had brought the keys with him, so he drove Percy over at once and gave him possession, and, to do the little fellow justice, the moisture of gratitude stood in his eyes when they parted.

Walter told Julia about it the same night, and her eyes were eloquent too.

The next day he had a walk with Mary Bartley, and told her all about it. She hung upon him, and gazed admiringly into his eyes all the time, and they parted happy lovers.

Mr. Bartley met her at the gate. "Mary," said he, gravely, "who was that I saw with you just now?"

"Cousin Walter."

"I feared so. You are too much with him."

Mary turned red and white by turns, but said nothing.

Bartley went on: "You are a good child, and I have always trusted you. I am sure you mean no harm. But you must be more discreet. I have just heard that you and that young man are looked upon as engaged lovers. They say it is all over the village. Of course a father is the last to hear these things. Does Mrs. Easton know of this?"

"Oh yes, papa, and approves it."

"Stupid old woman! She ought to be ashamed of herself."

"Oh, papa!" said Mary, in deep distress; "why, what objection can there be to Cousin Walter?"

"None whatever as a cousin, but every objection to intimacy. Does he court you?"

"I don't know, papa. I suppose he does."

"Does he seek your love?"

"He does not say so exactly."

"Come, Mary, you have never deceived me. Does he love you?"

"I am afraid he does; and if you reject him he will be very unhappy. And so shall I."

"I am truly sorry to hear it, Mary, for there are reasons why I can not consent to an engagement between him and you."

"What reasons, papa?"

"It would not be proper to disclose my reasons; but I hope, Mary, that it will be enough to say that Colonel Clifford has other views for his son, and I have other views for my daughter. Do you think a blessing will attend you or him if you defy both fathers?"

"No, no," said poor Mary. "We have been hasty and very foolish. But, oh, papa, have you not seen from the first? Oh, why did you not warn me in time? Then I could have obeyed you easily. Now it will cost me the happiness of my life. We are very unfortunate. Poor Walter! He left me so full of hope. What shall I do? what shall I do?"

It was Mary Bartley's first grief. She thought all chance of happiness was gone forever, and she wept bitterly for Walter and herself.

Bartley was not unmoved, but he could not change his nature. The sum he had obtained by a crime was dearer to him than all his more honest gains. He was kind on the surface, but hard as marble. "Go to your room, my child," said he, "and try and compose yourself. I am not angry with you. I ought to have watched you. But you are so young, and I trusted to that woman."

Mary retired, sobbing, and he sent for Mrs. Easton.

"Mrs. Easton," said he, "for the first time in all these years I have a fault to find with you."

"What is that, sir, if you please?"

"Young Clifford has been courting that child, and you have encouraged it."

"Nay, sir," said the woman, "I have not done that. She never spoke to me, nor I to her."

"Well, then, you never interfered."

"No, sir; no more than you did."

"Because I never observed it till today."

"How could I know that, sir? Everybody else observed it. Mr. Hope would have been the first to see it, if he had been in your place." This sudden thrust made Bartley wince, and showed him he had a tougher customer to deal with than poor Mary.

"You can't bear to be found fault with, Easton," said he, craftily, "and I don't wonder at it, after fourteen years' fidelity to me."

"I take no credit for that," said the woman, doggedly. "I have been paid for it."

"No doubt. But I don't always get the thing I pay for. Then let by-gones be by-gones; but just assist me now to cure the girl of this folly."

"Sir," said the woman, firmly, "it is not folly; it is wisest and best for all; and I can't make up my mind to lift a finger against it."

"Do you mean to defy me, then?"

"No, sir. I don't want to go against you, nor yet against my own conscience, what's left on't. I have seen a pretty while it must come to this, and I have written to my sister Sally. She keeps a small hotel at the lakes. She is ready to have me, and I'm not too old to be useful to her. I'm worth my board. I'll go there this very day, if you please. I'm as true to you as I can be, sir. For I see by Miss Mary crying so you have spoken to her, and so now she is safe to come to me for comfort; and if she does, I shall take her part, you may be sure, for I love her like my own child." Here the dogged voice began to tremble; but she recovered herself, and told him she would go at once to her sister Gilbert, that lived only ten miles off, and next day she would go to the little hotel at the lakes, and leave him to part two true lovers if he could and break both their hearts; she should wash her hands of it.

Bartley asked a moment to consider.

"Shall we be friends still if you leave me like that? Surely after all these years you will not tell your sister? You will not betray me?"

"Never, sir," said she. "What for? To bring those two together? Why, it would part them forever. I wonder at you, a gentleman, and in business all your life, yet you don't seem to see through the muddy water as I do that is only a plain woman."

She then told him her clothes were nearly all packed, and she could start in an hour.

"You shall have the break and the horses," said he, with great alacrity.

Everything transpires quickly in a small house, and just as she had finished packing, in came Mary in violent distress. "What, is it true? Are you going to leave me, now my heart is broken? Oh, nurse! nurse!"

This was too much even for stout-hearted Nancy Easton.

"Oh, my child! my child!" she cried, and sat down on her box sobbing violently, Mary infolded in her arms, and then they sat crying and rocking together.

"Papa does not love me as I do him," sobbed Mary, turning bitter for the first time. "He breaks my heart, and sends you away the same day, for fear you should comfort me."

"No, my dear," said Mrs. Easton; "you are wrong. He does not send me away; I go by my own wish."

"Oh, nurse, you desert me! then you don't know what has happened."

"Oh yes, I do; I know all about it; and I'm leaving because I can't do what he wishes. You see it is this way, Miss Mary--your father has been very good to me, and I am his debtor. I must not stay here and help you to thwart him--that would be ungrateful--and yet I can't take his side against you. Master has got reasons why you should not marry Walter Clifford, and--"

"He told me so himself," said Mary.

"Ah, but he didn't tell you his reasons."

"No."

"No more must I. But, Miss Mary, I'll tell you this. I know his reasons well; his reasons why you should not marry Walter Clifford are my reasons why you should marry no other man."

"Oh, nurse! oh, you dear, good angel!"

"So when friends differ like black and white, 'tis best to part. I'm going to my sister Gilbert this afternoon, and to-morrow to my sister Sally, at her hotel."

"Oh, nurse, must you? must you? I shall have not a friend to advise or console me till Mr. Hope comes back. Oh, I hope that won't be long now."

Mrs. Easton dropped her hands upon her knees and looked at Mary Bartley.

"What, Miss Mary, would you go to Mr. Hope in such a matter as this? Surely you would not have the face?"

"Not take my breaking heart to Mr. Hope!" cried Mary, with a sudden flood of tears. "You might as well tell me not to lay my trouble before my God. Dear, dear Mr. Hope, who saved my life in those deep waters, and then cried over me, darling dear! I think more of that than of his courage. Do you think I am blind? He loves me better than my own father does; and it is not a young man's love; it is an angel's. Not cry to him when I am in the deep waters of affliction? I could not write of such a thing to him for blushing, but the moment he returns I shall find some way to let him know how happy I have been, how broken-hearted I am, and that papa has reasons against him, and they are your reasons for him, and that you are both afraid to let me know these curious reasons--me, the poor girl whose heart is being made a football of in this house. Oh! oh! oh!"

"Don't cry, Miss Mary," said Nurse Easton, tenderly; "and pray don't excite yourself so. Why, I never saw you like this before."

"Had I ever the same reason? You have only known the happy, thoughtless child. They have made a woman of me now, and my peace is gone. I must not defy my father, and I will not break poor Walter's heart--the truest heart that ever beat. Not tell dear Mr. Hope? I'll tell him everything, if I'm cut in pieces for it." And her beautiful eyes flashed lightning through her tears.

"Hum!" said Mrs. Easton, under her breath, and looking down at her own feet. "And pray what does 'hum' mean?" asked Mary, fixing her eyes with prodigious keenness on the woman's face.

"Well, I don't suppose 'hum' means anything," said Mrs. Easton, still looking down.

"Doesn't it?" said Mary. "With such a face as that it means a volume. And I'll make it my business to read that volume."

"Hum!"

"And Mr. Hope shall help me."

WALTER, little dreaming the blow his own love had received, made Percy write Julia an apology, and an invitation to visit his new house if he was forgiven. Julia said she could not forgive him, and would not go. Walter said, "Put on your bonnet, and take a little drive with me."

"Oh, with pleasure," said Julia, slyly.

So then Walter drove her to the new house, without a word of remonstrance on her part, and Fitzroy met her radiant, and Walter slipped away round a corner, and when he came back the quarrel had dissolved. He had brought a hamper with all the necessaries of life--tablecloth, napkins, knives, forks, spoons, cold pie, salad, and champagne. They lunched beside the brook on the lawn. The lovers drank his health, and Julia appointed him solemnly to the post of "peace-maker," "for," said she, "you have shown great talent that way, and I foresee we shall want one, for we shall be always quarreling; shan't we, Percy?"

"N--o; n--never again."

"Then you mustn't be jealous."

"I'm not. I d--despise j--jealousy. I'm above it."

"Oh, indeed," said Julia, dryly.

"Come, don't begin again, you two," said Walter, "or--no champagne."

"Now what a horrid threat!" said Julia. "I'll be good, for one."

In short they had a merry time, and Walter drove Julia home. Both were in high spirits.

In the hall Walter found a short note from Mary Bartley:

"DEAR, DEAR WALTER--I write with a bleeding heart to tell you that papa has only just discovered our attachment, and I am grieved to say he disapproves of it, and has forbidden me to encourage your love, that is dearer to me than all the world. It is very hard. It seems so cruel. But I must obey. Do not make obedience too difficult, dear Walter. And pray, pray do not be as unhappy as I am. He says he has reasons, but he has not told me what they are, except that your father has other views for you; but, indeed, with both parents against us what can we do? Forgive me the pain this will give you. Ask yourself whether it gives me any less. You were all the world to me. Now everything is dull and distasteful. What a change in one little day! We are very unfortunate. But it cannot be forever. And if you will be constant to me, you know I shall to you. I could not change. Ah, Walter, I little thought when I said I would temporize, how soon I should be called on to do it. I can't write any more for crying. I do nothing but cry ever since papa was so cruel; but I must obey. Your loving, sorrowful

"MARY."

This letter was a chilling blow to poor Walter. He took it into his own room and read it again and again. It brought the tears into his own eyes, and discouraged him deeply for a time. But, of course, he was not so disposed to succumb to authority as the weaker vessel was. He wrote back:

"MY OWN LOVE--Don't grieve for me. I don't care for anything so long as you love me. I shall resist, of course. As for my father, I am going to marry Julia to Percy Fitzroy, and so end my governor's nonsense. As for your father, I do not despair of softening him. It is only a check; it is not a defeat. Who on earth can part us if we are true to each other? God bless you, dearest! I did not think you loved me so much. Your letter gives me comfort forever, and only disappointment for a time. Don't fret, sweet love. It will be all right in the end.

"Your grateful, hopeful love, till death,

"WALTER."

Mary opened this letter with a beating heart. She read it with tears and smiles and utter amazement. She knew so little about the male character that this way of receiving a knock-down blow astonished and charmed her. She thought to herself, "no wonder women look up to men. They will have their own way; they resist, of course. How sensible! We give in, right or wrong. What a comfort I have got a man to back me, and not a poor sorrowing, despairing, obeying thing like myself!"

So she was comforted for the minute, and settled in her own mind that she would be good and obedient, and Walter should do all the fighting. But letters soon cease to satisfy the yearning hearts of lovers unnaturally separated. Walter and Mary lived so near each other, yet now they never met. Bartley took care of that. He told Mary she must not walk out without a maid or ride without a servant; and he gave them both special orders. He even obliged her with his own company, though that rather bored him.

Under this severe restraint Mary's health and spirits suffered, and she lost some of her beautiful color.

Walter's spirits were kept up only by anger. Julia Clifford saw he was in trouble, and asked him what was the matter.

"Oh, nothing that would interest you," said he, rather sullenly.

"Excuse me," said she. "I am always interested in the troubles of my friends, and you have been a good friend to me."

"It is very good of you to think so. Well, then, yes, I am unhappy. I am crossed in love."

"Is it that fair girl you introduced me to when out riding?"

"Yes."

"She is lovely."

"Miss Clifford, she is an angel."

"Ha! ha! We are all angels till we are found out. Who is the man?"

"What man?"

"That she prefers to my good Walter. She deserves a good whipping, your angel."

"Much obliged to you, Miss Clifford; but she prefers no man to your good Walter, though I am not worthy to tie her shoes. Why, we are devoted to each other."

"Well, you needn't fly out at me. I am your friend, as you will see. Make me your confidante. Explain, please. How can you be crossed in love if there's no other man?"

"It's her father. He has discovered our love, and forbids her to speak to me."

"Her father!" said Julia, contemptuously. "Is that all? That for her father! You shall have her in spite of fifty fathers. If it had been a lover, now."

"I should have talked to him, not to you," said. Walter, with his eyes flashing.

"Be quiet, Walter; as it is not a lover, nor even a mother, you shall have the girl; and a very sweet girl she is. Will you accept me for your ally? Women are wiser than men in these things, and understand one another."

"Oh, Miss Clifford," said Walter, "this is good of you! Of course it will be a great blessing to us both to have your sympathy and assistance."

"Well, then," said Julia, "begin by telling me--have you spoken to her father?".

"No."

"Then that is the very first thing to be done. Come, order our horses. We will ride over directly. I will call on Miss Bartley, and you on Mister. Now mind, you must ignore all that has passed, and just ask his permission to court his daughter. While you are closeted with him, the young lady and I will learn each other's minds with a celerity you poor slow things have no idea of."

"I see one thing," said Walter, "that I am a child in such matters compared with you. What decision! what promptitude!"

"Then imitate it, young man. Order the horses directly;" and she stamped her foot impatiently.

Walter turned to the stables without another word, and Julia flew upstairs to put on her riding-habit.

Bartley was in a study with a map of the farm before him, and two respectable but rather rough men in close conference over it. These were practical men from the county of Durham, whom he had ferreted out by means of an agent, men who knew a great deal about coal. They had already surveyed the farm, and confirmed Hope's opinion that coal lay below the surface of certain barren fields, and the question now was as to the exact spot where it would be advisable to sink the first shaft.

Bartley was heart and soul in this, and elevated by love of gain far above such puny considerations as the happiness of Mary Bartley and her lover. She, poor girl, sat forlorn in her little drawing-room, and tried to draw a bit, and tried to read a bit, and tried to reconcile a new German symphony to her ear as well as to her judgment, which told her it was too learned not to be harmonious, though it sounded very discordant. But all these efforts ended in a sigh of despondency, and in brooding on innocent delights forbidden, and a prospect which, to her youth and inexperience, seemed a wilderness robbed of the sun.

While she sat thus pensive and sad there came a sudden rush and clatter of hoofs, and Miss Clifford and Walter Clifford reined up their horses under the very window.

Mary started up delighted at the bare sight of Walter, but amazed and puzzled. The next moment her quick intelligence told her this was some daring maneuver or other, and her heart beat high.

Walter opened the door and stood beside it, affecting a cold ceremony.

"Miss Bartley, I have brought Miss Clifford to call on you at her request. My own visit is to your father. Where shall I find him?"

"In his study," murmured Miss Bartley.

Walter returned, and the two ladies looked at each other steadily for one moment, and took stock of one another's dress, looks, character, and souls with supernatural rapidity. Then Mary smiled, and motioned her visitor to a seat, and waited.

Miss Clifford made her approaches obliquely at first. "I ought to apologize to you for not returning your call before this. At any rate, here I am at last."

"You are most welcome, Miss Clifford," said Mary, warmly.

"Now the ice is broken, I want you to call me Julia."

"May I?"

"You may, and you must, if I call you Mary. Why, you know we are cousins; at least I suppose so. We are both cousins of Walter Clifford, so we must be cousins to each other."

And she fixed her eyes on her fair hostess in a very peculiar way.

Mary returned this fixed look with such keen intelligence that her gray eyes actually scintillated.

"Mary, I seldom waste much time before I come to the point. Walter Clifford is a good fellow; he has behaved well to me. I had a quarrel with mine, and Walter played the peace-maker, and brought us together again without wounding my pride. By-and-by I found out Walter himself was in grief about you. It was my turn, wasn't it? I made him tell me all. He wasn't very willing, but I would know. I see his love is making him miserable, and so is yours, dear."

"Oh yes."

"So I took it on me to advise him. I have made him call on your father. Fathers sometimes pooh-pooh their daughters' affections; but when the son of Colonel Clifford comes with a formal proposal of marriage, Mr. Bartley cannot pooh-pooh him."

Mary clasped her hands, but said nothing.

Julia flowed on:

"And the next thing is to comfort you. You seem to want a good cry, dear."

"Yes, I d--do."

"Then come here and take it."

No sooner said than done. Mary's head on Julia's shoulder, and Julia's arm round Mary's waist. "Are you better, dear?"

"Oh, so much."

"It is a comfort, isn't it? Well, now, listen to me. Fathers sometimes delay a girl's happiness; but they don't often destroy it; they don't go and break her heart as some mothers do. A mother that is resolved to have her own way brings another man forward; fathers are too simple to see that is the only way. And then a designing mother cajoles the poor girl and deceives her, and does a number of things a man would call villainies. Don't you fret your heart out for so small a thing as a father's opposition. You are sure to tire him out if he loves you, and if he doesn't love you, or loves money better, why, then, he is not a worthy rival to my cousin Walter, for that man really loves you, and would marry you if you had not a penny. So would Percy Fitzroy marry me. And that is why I prefer him to the grenadiers and plungers with silky mustaches, and half an eye on me and an eye and a half on my money."

Many other things passed between these two, but what we have endeavored to repeat was the cream of Julia's discourse, and both her advice and her sympathy were for the time a wonderful comfort to the love-sick, solitary girl.

But our business is with Walter Clifford. As soon as he was announced, Mr. Bartley dismissed his rugged visitors, and received Walter affably, though a little stiffly.

Walter opened his business at once, and told him he had come to ask his permission to court his daughter. He said he had admired her from the first moment, and now his happiness depended on her, and he felt sure he could make her happy; not, of course, by his money, but by his devotion. Then as to making a proper provision for her--

Here Bartley stopped him.

"My young friend," said he, "there can be no objection either to your person or your position. But there are difficulties, and at present there are serious ones. Your father has other views."

"But, Mr. Bartley," said Walter, eagerly, "he must abandon them. The lady is engaged."

"Well, then," said Bartley, "it will be time to come to me when he has abandoned those views, and also overcome his prejudices against me and mine. But there is another difficulty. My daughter is not old enough to marry, and I object to long engagements. Everything, therefore, points to delay, and on this I must insist."

Bartley having taken this moderate ground, remained immovable. He promised to encourage no other suitor; but in return he said he had a right to demand that Walter would not disturb his daughter's peace of mind until the prospect was clearer. In short, instead of being taken by surprise, the result showed Bartley quite prepared for this interview, and he baffled the young man without offending him. He was cautious not to do that, because he was going to mine for coal, and feared remonstrances, and wanted Walter to take his part, or at least to be neutral, knowing his love for Mary. So they parted good friends; but when he retailed the result to Julia Clifford she shook her head, and said the old fox had outwitted him. Soon after, knitting her brows in thought for some time, she said, "She is very young, much younger than she looks. I am afraid you will have to wait a little, and watch."

"But," said Walter, in dismay, "am I not to see her or speak to her all the time I am waiting?"

"I'd see both fathers hanged first, if I was a man," said Julia.

In short, under the courageous advice of Julia Clifford, Walter began to throw himself in Mary's way, and look disconsolate; that set Mary pining directly, and Julia found her pale, and grieving for Walter, and persuaded her to write him two or three lines of comfort; she did, and that drew pages from him. Unfortunately he did not restrain himself, but flung his whole heart upon paper, and raised a tumult in the innocent heart of her who read his passionate longings.

She was so worked upon that at last one day she confided to Julia that her old nurse was going to visit her sister, Mrs. Gilbert, who lived only ten miles off, and she thought she should ride and see her.

"When?" asked Julia, carelessly.

"Oh, any day next week," said Mary, carelessly. "Wednesday, if it is fine. She will not be there till Monday."

"Does she know?" asked Julia.

"Oh yes; and left because she could not agree with papa about it; and, dear, she said a strange thing--a very strange thing: she knew papa's reasons against him, and they were her reasons for him."

"Fancy that!" said Julia. "Your father told you what the reasons were?"

"No; he wouldn't. They both treat me like a child."

"You mean they pretend to," she added.

"I see one thing; there is some mystery behind this. I wonder what it is?"

"Ten to one, it is money. I am only twenty, but already I have found out that money governs the world. Let me see--your mother was a Clifford. She must have had money. Did she settle any on you?"

"I am sure I don't know."

"Ten to one she did, and your father is your trustee; and when you marry, he must show his accounts and cash up. There, that is where the shoe pinches."

Mary was distressed.

"Oh, don't say so, dear. I can't bear to think that of papa. You make me very unhappy."

"Forgive me, dear," said Julia. "I am too bitter and suspicious. Someday I will tell you things in my own life that have soured me. Money--I hate the very word," she said, clinching her teeth.

She urged her view no more, but in her own heart she felt sure that she had read Mr. Bartley aright. Why, he was a trader, into the bargain.

As for Mary, when she came to think over this conversation, her own subtle instincts told her that stronger pressure than ever would now be brought upon her. Her timidity, her maiden modesty, and her desire to do right set her on her defense. She determined to have loving but impartial advice, and so she overcame her shyness and wrote to Mr. Hope. Even then she was in no hurry to enter upon such a subject by letter, so she must commence by telling him that her father had set a great many people, most of them strangers, to dig for coal. That cross old thing, Colonel Clifford, had been heard to sneer at her dear father, and say unkind and disrespectful things--that the love of money led to loss of money, and that papa might just as well dig a well and throw his money into that. She herself was sorry he had not waited for Mr. Hope's return before undertaking so serious a speculation. Warmed by this preliminary, she ventured into the delicate subject, and told him the substance of what we have told the reader, only in a far more timid and suggestive way, and implored him to advise her by return of post if possible--or why not come home? Papa had said only yesterday, "I wish Hope was here." She got an answer by return of post. It disappointed her, on the whole. Mr. Hope realized the whole situation, though she had sketched it faintly instead of painting it boldly. He was all sympathy, and he saw at once that he could not himself imagine a better match for her than Walter Clifford. But then he observed that Mr. Bartley himself offered no personal objection, but wished the matter to be in abeyance until she was older, and Colonel Clifford's objection to the connection should be removed or softened. That might really be hoped for should Miss Clifford marry Mr. Fitzroy; and really in the meantime he (Hope) could hardly take on him to encourage her in impatience and disobedience. He should prefer to talk to Bartley first. With him he should take a less hesitating line, and set her happiness above everything. In short, he wrote cautiously. He inwardly resolved to be on the spot very soon, whether Bartley wanted him or not; but he did not tell Mary this.

Mary was disappointed. "How kind and wise he is!" she said to Julia--"too wise."

Next Wednesday morning Mary Bartley rode to Mrs. Gilbert, and was received by her with courtesy, but with a warm embrace by Mrs. Easton. After a while the latter invited her into the parlor, saying there is somebody there; but no one knows. This, however, though hardly unexpected, set Mary's heart beating, and when the parlor door was opened Mrs. Easton stepped back, and Mary was alone with Walter Clifford.

Then might those who oppose an honest and tender affection have learned a lesson. It was no longer affection only. It was passion. Walter was pale, agitated, eager; he kissed her hands impetuously, and drew her to his bosom. She sobbed there; he poured inarticulate words over her, and still held her, panting, to his beating heart. Even when the first gush of love subsided a little he could not be so reasonable as he used to be. He was wild against his own father, hers, and every obstacle, and implored her to marry him at once by special license, and leave the old people to untie the knot if they could.

Then Mary was astonished and hurt. "A clandestine marriage, Mr. Clifford!" said she. "I thought you had more respect for me than to mention such a thing."

Then he had to beg her pardon, and say the separation had driven him mad.

Then she forgave him.

Then he took advantage of her clemency, and proceeded calmly to show her it was their only chance.

Then Mary forgot how severely she had checked him, and merely said that was the last thing she would consent to, and bound him on his honor never to mention to Julia Clifford that he had proposed such a thing. Walter promised that readily enough, but stuck to his point; and as Mary's pride was wounded, and she was a girl of great spirit though love-sick, she froze to him, and soon after said she was very sorry, but she must not stay too long or papa would be angry. She then begged him not to come out of the parlor, or the servant would see him.

"That is a trifle," said Walter. "I am going to obey you in greater things than that. Ah! Mary, Mary, you don't love me as I love you!"

"No, Walter," said Mary, "I do not love you as you love me, for I respect you." Then her lip trembled, and her eyes filled with tears.

Walter fell on his knees, and kissed her skirt several times; then ended with her hand. "Oh, don't harbor such a thought as that!" said he.

She sobbed, but made no reply.

They parted good friends, but chilled.

That made them both unhappy to think of.

It was only two, or at the most three, days after this that, as Mary was walking in the garden, a nosegay fell at her feet. She picked it up, and immediately found a note half secreted in it. The next moment it was entirely secreted in her bosom. She sauntered in-doors, and scudded upstairs to her room to read it.

The writer told her in a few agitated words that their fathers had met, and he must speak to her directly. Would she meet him for a moment at the garden gate at nine o'clock that evening?

"No, no, no!" cried Mary, as if he was there. She was frightened. Suppose they should be caught. The shame--the disgrace. But oh, the temptation! Well, then, how wrong of him to tempt her! She must not go. There was no time to write and refuse; but she must not go. She would not go. And in this resolution she persisted. Nine o'clock struck, and she never moved. Then she began to picture Walter's face of disappointment and his unhappiness. At ten minutes past nine she tied a handkerchief round her head and went.

There he was at the gate, pale and agitated. He did not give her time to scold him.

"Pray forgive me," he said; "but I saw no other way. It is all over, Mary, unless you love me as I love you."

"Don't begin by doubting me," she said. "Tell me, dear."

"It is soon told. Our fathers have met at that wretched pit, and the foreman has told me what passed between them. My father complained that mining for coal was not husbandry, and it was very unfair to do it, and to smoke him out of house and home. (Unfortunately the wind was west, and blew the smoke of the steam-engine over his lawn.) Your father said he took the farm under that express stipulation. Colonel Clifford said, 'No; the condition was smuggled in.' 'Then smuggle it out,' said Mr. Bartley."

"Oh!"

"If it had only ended there, Mary. But they were both in a passion, and must empty their hearts. Colonel Clifford said he had every respect for you, but had other views for his son. Mr. Bartley said he was thankful to hear it, for he looked higher for his daughter. 'Higher in trade, I suppose,' said my father; 'the Lord Mayor's nephew.' 'Well,' said Mr. Bartley, 'I would rather marry her to money than to mortgages.' And the end of it was they parted enemies for life."

"No, no; not for life!"

"For life, Mary. It is an old grudge revived. Indeed, the first quarrel was only skinned over. Don't deceive yourself. We have nothing to do but disobey them or part."

"And you can say that, Walter? Oh, have a little patience!"

"So I would," said. Walter, "if there was any hope. But there is none. There is nothing to wait for but the death of our parents, and by that time I shall be an elderly man, and you will have lost your bloom and wasted your youth--for what? No; I feel sometimes this will drive me mad, or make me a villain. I am beginning to hate my own father, and everybody else that thwarts my love. How can they earn my hate more surely? No, Mary; I see the future as plainly as I see your dear face, so pale and shocked. I can't help it. If you will marry me, and so make sure, I will keep it secret as long as you like; I shall have got you, whatever they may say or do; but if you won't, I'll leave the country at once, and get peace if I can't get love."

"Leave the country?" said Mary, faintly. "What good would that do?"

"I don't know. Perhaps bring my father to his senses for one thing; and--who knows?--perhaps you will listen to reason when you see I can't wait for the consent of two egotists--for that is what they both are--that have no real love or pity for you or me."

"Ah," said Mary, with a deep sigh, "I see even men have their faults, and I admired them so. They are impatient, selfish."

"Yes, if it is selfish to defend one's self against brutal selfishness, I am selfish; and that is better than to be a slave to egotists, and lie down to be trodden on as you would do. Come, Mary, for pity's sake, decide which you love best--your father, who does not care much for you, or me, who adore you, and will give you a life of gratitude as well as love, if you will only see things as they are and always will be, and trust yourself to me as my dear, dear, blessed, adored wife!"

"I love you best," said Mary, "and I hope it is not wicked. But I love him too, though he does say 'wait.' And I respect myself, and I dare not defy my parent, and I will not marry secretly; that is degrading. And, oh, Walter, think how young I am and inexperienced, and you that are so much older, and I hoped would be my guide and make me better; is it you who tempt me to clandestine meetings that I blush for, and a clandestine marriage for which I should despise myself?"

Walter turned suddenly calm, for these words pricked his conscience.

"You are right," said he. "I am a blackguard, and you are an angel of purity and goodness. Forgive me, I will never tempt nor torment you again. For pity's sake forgive me. You don't know what men's passions are. Forgive me!"

"With all my heart, dear," said Mary, crying gently.

He put both arms suddenly round her neck and kissed her wet eyes with a sigh of despair. Then he seemed to tear himself away by a great effort, and she leaned limp and powerless on the gate, and heard his footsteps die away into the night. They struck chill upon her foreboding heart, for she felt that they were parted.

WALTER, however, would not despair until he had laid the alternative before his father. He did so, firmly but coolly.

His father, irritated by the scene with Bartley, treated Walter's proposal with indignant scorn.

Walter continued to keep his temper, and with some reluctance asked him whether he owed nothing, not even a sacrifice of his prejudices, to a son who had never disobeyed him and had improved his circumstances.

"Come, sir," said he; "when the happiness of my life is at stake I venture to lay aside delicacy, and ask you whether I have not been a good son, and a serviceable one to you?"

"Yes, Walter," said the Colonel, "with this exception."

"Then now or never give me my reward."

"I'll try," said the grim colonel; "but I see it will be hard work. However, I'll try and save you from a mesalliance."

"A mesalliance, sir? Why, she is a Clifford!"

"The deuce she is!"

"As much a Clifford as I am."

"That is news to me."

"Why, one of her parents was a Clifford, and your own sister. And one of mine was an Irish woman."

"Yes; an O'Ryan; not a trader; not a small-coal man."

"Like the Marquis of Londonderry, sir, and the Earl of Durham. Come, father, don't sacrifice your son, and his happiness and his love for you, to notions the world has outlived. Commerce does not lower a gentleman, nor speculation, either, in these days. The nobility and the leading gentry of these islands are most of them in business. They are all shareholders, and often directors of railways, and just as much traders as the old coach proprietors were. They let their land, and so do you, to the highest bidder, not for honor or any romantic sentiment, but for money, and that is trade. Mr. Bartley is his own farmer; well, so was Mr. Coke of Norfolk, and the queen made him a peer for it--what a sensible sovereign! Are Rothschild and Montefiore shunned for their speculations by the nobility? Whom do their daughters marry? Trade rules the world, and keeps it from stagnation. Genius writes or paints or plays 'Hamlet'--for money; and is respected in exact proportion to the amount of money it gets. Charity holds bazars, and sells at one hundred per cent profit, and nearly every new church is a trade speculation. Is my happiness and hers to be sacrificed to the chimeras and crotchets that everybody in England but you has outlived?"

"All this," replied the unflinching sire, "I have read in the papers, and my son shall not marry the daughter of a trader and cad who has insulted me grossly; but that, I presume, you don't object to."

This stung Walter so that he feared to continue the discussion.

"I will not reply," said he. "You drive me to despair. I leave you to reflect. Perhaps you will prize me when you see me no more."

With this he left the room, packed up his clothes, went to the nearest railway, off to London, collected his funds, crossed the water, and did not write one word to Clifford Hall, except a line to Julia. "Left England heartbroken, the victim of two egotists and my sweet Mary's weak conscientiousness. God forgive me, I am angry even with her, but I don't doubt her love."

This missive and the general consternation at Clifford Hall brought Julia full gallop to Mary Bartley.

They read the letter together, and Julia was furious against Colonel Clifford. But Mary interposed.

"I am afraid," said she, "that I am the person who was most to blame."

"Why, what have you done?"

"He said our case was desperate, and waiting would not alter it; and he should leave the country unless--"

"Unless what? How can I advise you if you have any concealments from me?"

"Well, then, it was unless I would consent to a clandestine marriage."

"And you refused--very properly."

"And I refused--very properly one would think--and what is the consequence? I have driven the man I love away from his friends, as well as from me, and now I begin to be very sorry for my properness."

"But you don't blush for it as you would for the other. The idea! To be married on the sly and to have to hide it from everybody, and to be found out at last, or else be suspected of worse things."

"What worse things?"

"Never you mind, child; your womanly instinct is better than knowledge or experience and it has guided you straight. If you had consented, I should have lost my respect for you."

And then, as the small view of a thing is apt to enter the female head along with the big view, she went on, with great animation:

"And then for a young lady to sneak into a church without her friends, with no carriages, no favors, no wedding-cake, no bishop, no proper dress, not even a bridal veil fit to be seen! Why, it ought to be the great show of a girl's life, and she ought to be a public queen, at all events for that one day, for ten to one she will be a slave all the rest of her life if she loves the fellow."

She paused for breath one moment.

"And it isn't as if you were low people. Why, it reminds me of a thing I read in some novel: a city clerk, or some such person, took a walk with his sweetheart into the country, and all of a sudden he said, 'Why, there is something hard in my pocket. What is it, I wonder? A plain gold ring. Does it fit you? Try it on, Polly. Why, it fits you, I declare; then keep it till further orders.' Then they walked a little further. 'Why, what is this? Two pairs of white gloves. Try the little pair on, and I will try the big ones. Stop! I declare here's a church, and the bells beginning to ring. Why, who told them that I've got a special license in my pocket? Hallo! there are two fellows hanging about; best men, witnesses, or some such persons, I should not wonder. I think I know one of them; and here is a parson coming over a stile! What an opportunity for us now just to run in and get married! Come on, old girl, lend me that wedding-ring a minute, I'll give it you back again in the church.' No, thank you, Mr. Walter; we love you very dearly, but we are ladies, and we respect ourselves."

In short, Julia confirmed Mary Bartley in her resolution, but she could not console her under the consequences. Walter did not write a line even to her; she couldn't but fear that he was really in despair, and would cure himself of his affection if he could. She began to pine; the roses faded gradually out of her cheeks, and Mr. Bartley himself began at last to pity her, for though he did not love her, he liked her, and was proud of her affection. Another thing, Hope might come home now any day, and if he found the girl sick and pining, he might say this is a breach of contract.

He asked Mary one day whether she wouldn't like a change. "I could take you to the seaside," said he, but not very cordially.

"No, papa," said Mary; "why should you leave your mine when everything is going so prosperously? I think I should like to go to the lakes, and pay my old nurse a visit."

"And she would talk to you of Walter Clifford?"

"Yes, papa," said Mary firmly, "she would; and that's the only thing that can do me any good."

"Well, Mary," said Bartley, "if she could be content with praising him, and regretting the insuperable obstacles, and if she would encourage you to be patient--there, let me think of it."

Things went hard with Colonel Clifford. He felt his son's desertion very bitterly, though he was too proud to show it; he now found out that universally as he was respected, it was Walter who was the most beloved both in the house and in the neighborhood.

One day he heard a multitude shouting and soon learned the reason. Bartley had struck a rich vein of coal and tons were coming up to the surface. Colonel Clifford would not go near the place, but he sent old Baker to inquire, and Baker from that day used to bring him back a number of details, some of them especially galling to him. By degrees, and rapid ones, Bartley was becoming a rival magnate; the poor came to him for the slack, or very small coal, and took it away gratis; they nattered him, and, to please him, spoke slightingly of Colonel Clifford, which they had never ventured to do before. But soon a circumstance occurred which mortified the old soldier more than all. He was sole proprietor of the village and every house in it, with the exception of a certain beer house, flanked by an acre and a half of ground. This beer-house was a great eye-sore to him; he tried to buy this small freeholder out; but the man saw his advantage and demanded £1,500--nearly treble the real value. Walter, however, by negotiating in a more friendly spirit, had obtained a reduction, and was about to complete the purchase for £1,150. But when Walter left the country the proprietor never dreamed of going again to the haughty colonel. He went to Bartley, and Bartley purchased the property in five minutes for £1,200, and paid a deposit to clinch the contract. He completed the purchase with unheard-of rapidity, and set an army of workmen to raise a pit village, or street of eighty houses. They were ten times better built than the colonel's cottages; not one of them could ever be vacant, they were too great a boon to the miners; nor could the rent be in arrears, with so sharp a hand as the mine-owner; the beer-house was to be perpetuated, and a nucleus of custom secured from the miners, partly by the truck system, and partly by the superiority of the liquor, for Bartley announced at once that he should brew the beer.

All these things were too much for a man with gout in his system; Colonel Clifford had a worse attack of that complaint than ever; it rose from his feet to other parts of his frame, and he took to his bed.

In that condition a physician and surgeon visited him daily, and his lawyer also was sent for, and was closeted with him for a long time on more than one occasion.

All this caused a deal of speculation in the village, and as a system of fetch and carry was now established by which the rival magnates also received plenty of information, though not always accurate, about each other, Mr. Bartley heard what was going on, and put his own construction upon it.

Just when Mr. Hope was expected to return came a letter to Mary to say that he should be detained a day or two longer, as he had a sore throat and fever, but nothing alarming. Three or four days later came a letter only signed by him, to say he had a slight attack of typhoid and was under medical care.

Mary implored Mr. Bartley to let her go to him. He refused, and gave his reasons, which were really sufficient, and now he became more unwilling than ever to let her visit Mrs. Easton.

This was the condition of affairs when one day an old man with white hair, dressed in black, and looking almost a gentleman, was driven up to the farm by Colonel Clifford's groom, and asked, in an agitated voice, if he might see Miss Mary Bartley.

Her visitors were so few that she was never refused on speculation, so John Baker was shown at once into her drawing-room. He was too agitated to waste time.

"Oh, Miss Bartley," said he, "we are in great distress at the Hall. Mr. Walter has gone, and not left his address, and my poor master is dying!"

Mary uttered an unfeigned exclamation of horror.

"Ah, miss," said the old man, "God bless you; you feel for us. I'm not on the old man's side, miss; I'm on Mr. Walter's side in this as I was in the other business, but now I see my poor old master lying pale and still, not long for this world, I do begin to blame myself. I never thought that he would have taken it all to heart like this. But, there, the only thing now is to bring them together before he goes. We don't know his address, miss; we don't know what country he is in. He sent a line to Miss Clifford a month ago from Dover, but that is all; but, in course, he writes to you--that stands to reason; you'll give me his address, miss, won't you? and we shall all bless you."

Mary turned pale, and the tears streamed down her eyes. "Oh, sir," said she, "I'd give the world if I could tell you. I know who you are; my poor Walter has often spoken of you to me, Mr. Baker. One word from you would have been enough; I would have done anything for you that I could. But he has never written to me at all. I am as much deserted as any of you, and I have felt it as deeply as any father can, but never have I felt it as now. What! The father to die, and his son's hand not in his; no looks of love and forgiveness to pass between them as the poor old man leaves this world, its ambitions and its quarrels, and perhaps sees for the first time how small they all are compared with the love of those that love us, and the peace of God!" Then this ardent girl stretched out both her hands. "Oh, God, if my frivolous life has been innocent, don't let me be the cause of this horrible thing; don't let the father die without comfort, nor the son without forgiveness, for a miserable girl who has come between them and meant no harm!"

This eloquent burst quite overpowered poor old John Baker. He dropped into a chair, his white head sunk upon his bosom, he sobbed and trembled, and for the first time showed his age.

"What on earth is the matter?" said Mr. Bartley's voice, as cold as an icicle, at the door. Mary sprang toward him impetuously. "Oh, papa!" she cried, "Colonel Clifford is dying, and we don't know where Walter is; we can't know."

"Wait a little," said Bartley, in some agitation. "My letters have just come in, and I thought I saw a foreign postmark." He slipped back into the hall, brought in several letters, selected one, and gave it to Mary. "This is for you, from Marseilles."

He then retired to his study, and without the least agitation or the least loss of time, returned with a book of telegraph forms.

Meanwhile Mary tore the letter open, and read it eagerly to John Baker.

"GRAND HOTEL NOAILLES, MARSEILLES, May 16.

"MY OWN DEAR LOVE--I have vowed that I will not write again to tempt you to anything you think wrong; but it looks like quarreling to hide my address from you. Only I do beg of you, as the only kindness you can do me now, never to let it be known by any living creature at Clifford Hall.

"Yours till death,

"WALTER."

Mr. Bartley entered with the telegraph forms, and said to Mary sharply, "Where is he?" Mary told him. "Well, write him a telegram. It shall be at the railway in half an hour, at Marseilles theoretically in one hour, practically in four."

Mary sat down and wrote her telegram: "Pray, come to Clifford Hall. Your father is dangerously ill."

"Show it to me," said Bartley. And on perusing it: "A woman's telegram. Don't frighten him too much; leave him the option to come or stay."

He tore it up, and said, "Now write a business telegram, and make sure of the thing you want."

"Come home directly--your father is dying."

Old Baker started up. "God bless you, sir," says he, "and God bless you, miss, and make you happy one day. I'll take it myself, as my trap is at the door." He bustled out, and his carriage drove away at a great rate.

Mr. Bartley went quietly to his study to business without another word, and Mary leaned back a little, exhausted by the scene, but a smile almost of happiness came and tarried on her sweet face for the first time these many days; as for old John Baker, he told his tale triumphantly at the Hall, and not without vanity, for he was proud of his good judgment in going to Mary Bartley.

To the old housekeeper, a most superior woman of his own age, and almost a lady, he said something rather remarkable which he was careful not to bestow on the young wags in the servants' hall: "Mrs. Milton," says he, "I am an old man, and have knocked about at home and abroad, and seen a deal of life, but I've seen something to-day that I never saw before."

"Ay, John, surely; and what ever was that?"

"I've seen an angel pray to God, and I have seen God answer her."

From that day Mary had two stout partisans in Clifford Hall.

Mr. Hartley's views about Mary now began to waver. It occurred to him that should Colonel Clifford die and Walter inherit his estates, he could easily come to terms with the young man so passionately devoted to his daughter. He had only to say: "I can make no allowance at present, but I'll settle my whole fortune upon Mary and her children after my death, if you'll make a moderate settlement at present," and Walter would certainly fall into this, and not demand accounts from Mary's trustee. So now he would have positively encouraged Mary in her attachment, but one thing held him back a little: he had learned by accident that the last entail of Clifford Hall and the dependent estates dated two generations back, so that the entail expired with Colonel Clifford, and this had enabled the colonel to sell some of the estates, and clearly gave him power now to leave Clifford Hall away from his son. Now the people who had begun to fetch and carry tales between the two magnates told him of the lawyer's recent visits to Clifford Hall, and he had some misgivings that the colonel had sent for the lawyer to alter his will and disinherit, in whole or in part, his absent and rebellious son. All this taken together made Mr. Bartley resolve to be kinder to Mary in her love affair than he ever had been, but still to be guarded and cautious.

"Mary, my dear," said he. "I am sure you'll be on thorns till this young man comes home; perhaps now would be a good time to pay your visit to Mrs. Easton."

"Oh, papa, how good of you! but it's twenty miles, I believe, to where she is staying at the lakes."

"No, no," said Mr. Bartley; "she's staying with her sister Gilbert; quite within a drive."

"Are you sure, papa?"

"Quite sure, my dear; she wrote to me yesterday about her little pension; the quarter is just due."

"What! do you allow her a pension?"

"Certainly, my dear, or rather I pay her little stipend as before: how surprised you look, Mary! Why, I'm not like that old colonel, intolerant of other people's views, when they advance them civilly. That woman helped me to save your life in a very great danger, and for many years she has been as careful as a mother, and we are not, so to say, at daggers drawn about Walter Clifford. Why I only demand a little prudence and patience both from you and from her. Now tell me. Is there proper accommodation for you in Mrs. Gilbert's house?"

"Oh, yes, papa; it is a farmhouse now, but it was a grand place. There's a beautiful spare room with an oriel-window."

"Well, then, you secure that, and write to-day to have a blazing fire, and the bed properly aired as well as the sheets, and you shall go to-morrow in the four-wheel; and you can take her her little stipend in a letter."

This sudden kindness and provision for her health and happiness filled Mary's heart to overflowing, and her gratitude gushed forth upon Mr. Bartley's neck. The old fox blandly absorbed it, and took the opportunity to say, "Of course it is understood that matters are to go no further between you and Walter Clifford. Oh, I don't mean that you're to make him unhappy, or drive him to despair; only insist upon his being patient like yourself. Everything comes sooner or later to those that can wait."

"Oh, papa," cried Mary, "you've said more to comfort me than Mrs. Easton or anybody can; but I feel the change will do me good. I am, oh, so grateful!"

So Mary wrote her letter, and went to Mrs. Easton next day. After the usual embraces, she gave Mrs. Easton the letter, and was duly installed in the state bedroom. She wrote to Julia Clifford to say where she was, and that was her way of letting Walter Clifford know.

Walter himself arrived at Clifford Hall next day, worn, anxious, and remorseful, and was shown at once to his father's bedside. The colonel gave him a wasted hand, and said:

"Dear boy, I thought you'd come. We've had our last quarrel, Walter."

Walter burst into tears over his father's hand, and nothing was said between them about their temporary estrangement.

The first thing Walter did was to get two professional nurses from Derby, and secure his father constant attention night and day, and, above all, nourishment at all hours of the night when the patient would take it. On the afternoon after his arrival the colonel fell into a sound sleep. Then Walter ordered his horse, and in less than an hour was at Mrs. Gilbert's place.

THE farmhouse the Gilberts occupied had been a family mansion of great antiquity with a moat around it. It was held during the civil war by a stout Royalist, who armed and garrisoned it after a fashion with his own servants. This had a different effect to what he intended. It drew the attention of one of Cromwell's generals, and he dispatched a party with cannon and petards to reduce the place, while he marched on to join Cromwell in enterprises of more importance. The detachment of Roundheads summoned the place. The Royalist, to show his respect for their authority, made his kitchen wench squeak a defiance from an upper window, from which she bolted with great rapidity as soon as she had thus represented the valor of the establishment, and when next seen it was in the cellar, wedged in between two barrels of beer. The men went at it hammer and tongs, and in twenty-four hours a good many cannon-balls traversed the building, a great many stuck in the walls like plums in a Christmas pudding, the doors were blown in with petards, and the principal defenders, with a few wounded Roundheads, were carried off to Cromwell himself; while the house itself was fired, and blazed away merrily.

Cromwell threatened the Royalist gentleman with death for defending an untenable place.

"I didn't know it was untenable," said the gentleman. "How could I till I had tried?"

"You had the fate of fortified places to instruct you," said Cromwell, and he promised faithfully to hang him on his own ruins.

The gentleman turned pale and his lips quivered, but he said, "Well, Mr. Cromwell, I've fought for my royal master according to my lights, and I can die for him."

"You shall, sir," said Mr. Cromwell.

About next morning Mr. Cromwell, who had often a cool fit after a hot one, and was a very big man, take him altogether, gave a different order. "The fool thought he was doing his duty; turn him loose."

The fool in question was so proud of his battered house that he left it standing there, bullets and all, and built him a house elsewhere.

King Charles the Second had not landed a month before he made him a baronet, and one tenant after another occupied a portion of the old mansion. Two state-rooms were roofed and furnished with the relics of the entire mansion, and these two rooms the present baronet's surveyor occupied at rare intervals when he was inspecting the large properties connected with the baronet's estate.

Mary Bartley now occupied these two rooms, connected by folding-doors, and she sat pensive in the oriel-window of her bedroom. Young ladies cling to their bedrooms, especially when they are pretty and airy. Suddenly she heard a scurry and patter of a horse's hoof, reined up at the side of the house. She darted from the window and stood panting in the middle of the room. The next minute Mrs. Easton entered the sitting-room all in a flutter, and beckoned her. Mary flew to her.

"He is here."

"I thought he would be."

"Will you meet him downstairs?"

"No, here."

Mrs. Easton acquiesced, rapidly closed the folding-doors, and went out, saying, "Try and calm yourself, Miss Mary."

Miss Mary tried to obey her, but Walter rushed in impetuously, pale, worn, agitated, yet enraptured at the first sight of her, and Mary threw herself round his neck in a moment, and he clasped her fluttering bosom to his beating heart, and this was the natural result of the restraint they had put upon a passionate affection: for what says the dramatist Destouches, improving upon Horace, so that in England his immortal line is given to Molière. "Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop."

The next thing was, they held each other at arm's-length, and mourned over each other.

"Oh, my poor Mary, how ill you look!"

"Oh, my poor Walter, how pale and worn!"

"It's all my fault," said Mary.

"No; it's all mine," said Walter.

And so they blamed themselves, and grieved over each other, and vowed that come what might they would never part again. But, lo and behold! Walter went on from that to say:

"And that we may never part again let us marry at once, and put our happiness out of the reach of accidents."

"What!" said Mary. "Defy your father upon his dying bed."

"Oh, no," said Walter, "that I could not do. I mean marry secretly, and announce it after his decease, if I am to lose him."

"And why not wait till after his decease?" said Mary.

"Because, then, the laws of society would compel us to wait six months, and in that six months some infernal obstacle or other would be sure to occur, and another would be sure to follow. I am a great deal older than you, and I see that whoever procrastinates happiness, risks it; and whoever shilly-shallies with it deserves to lose it, and generally does."

Where young ladies are concerned, logic does not carry all before it, and so Mary opposed all manner of feminine sentiments, and ended by saying she could not do such a thing.

Then Walter began to be mortified and angry; then she cunningly shifted the responsibility, and said she would consult Mrs. Easton.

"Then consult her in my presence," said Walter.

Mary had not bargained for that; she had intended to secure Mrs. Easton on her side, and then take her opinion. However, as Walter's proposal was fair, she called Mrs. Easton, and they put the case to her, and asked her to give her candid opinion.

Mrs. Easton, however, took alarm at the gravity of the proposal, and told them both she knew things that were unknown to both of them, and it was not so easy for her to advise.

"Well, but," said Walter, "if you know more than we do you are the very person that can advise. All I know is that if we are not married now, I shall have to wait six months at least, and if I stay here Mr. Bartley and I shall quarrel, and he will refuse me Mary; and if I go abroad again I shall get knocked on the head, or else Mary will pine away again, and Bartley will send her to Madeira, and we shall lose our happiness, as all shilly-shallying fools do."

Mrs. Easton made no reply to this, though she listened attentively to it. She walked to the window and thought quietly to herself; then she came back again and sat down, and after a pause she said, very gravely, "Knowing all I know, and seeing all I see, I advise you two to marry at once by special license, and keep it secret from every one who knows you--but myself--till a proper time comes to reveal it; and it's borne in upon me that that time will come before long, even if Colonel Clifford should not die this bout, which everybody says he will."

"Oh, nurse," said Mary, faintly, "I little thought that you'd be against me."

"Against you, Miss Mary!" said Mrs. Easton, with much feeling. "I admire Mr. Walter very much, as any woman must with eyes in her head, and I love him for loving of you so truly, and like a man, for it does not become a man to shilly-shally, but I never saw him till he was a man, but you are the child I nursed, and prayed over, and trembled for in sickness, and rejoiced over in health, and left a good master because I saw he did not love you so well as I did."

These words went to Mary's heart, and she flew to her nurse, and hung weeping round her neck. Her tears made the manly but tender-hearted Walter give a sort of gulp. Mary heard it, and put her white hand out to him. He threw himself upon his knees, and kissed it devotedly, and the coy girl was won.

From this hour Walter gave her no breathing-time; he easily talked over old Baker, and got him to excuse his short absence; he turned his hunters into roadsters, and rode them very hard; he got the special license; he squared a clergyman at the head of the lake, who was an old friend of his and fond of fees, and in three days after her consent, Mary and Mrs. Easton drove a four-wheeled carriage Walter had lent them to the little hotel at the lakes. Walter had galloped over at eleven o'clock, and they all three took a little walk together. Walter Clifford and Mary Bartley returned from that walk MAN AND WIFE.

WALTER CLIFFORD and Mary sat at a late breakfast in a little inn that looked upon a lake, which appeared to them more lovely than the lake of Thun or of Lucerne. He beamed steadily at her with triumphant rapture; she stole looks at him of wonder, admiration, and the deepest love.

As they had nothing now to argue about, they only spoke a few words at a time, but these were all musical with love.

To them, as we dramatists say, entered Mrs. Easton, with signs of hurry.

"Miss Mary--" said she.

"Mrs. Mary," suggested Walter, meekly.

Mrs. Mary blew him a kiss.

"Ay, ay," said Mrs. Easton, smiling, "Of course you will both hate me, but I have come to take you home, Mistress Mary."

"Home!" said Mary; "why, this feels like home."

"No doubt," said Mrs. Easton, "but for all that in half an hour we must start."

The married couple remonstrated with one accord, but Mrs. Easton was firm. "I dreamed," said she, "that we were all found out--and that's a warning. Mr. Walter, you know that you'll be missed at Clifford Hall, and didn't ought to leave your father another day. And you, Miss Mary, do but think what a weight I have taken upon my shoulders, and don't put off coming home, for I am almost shaking with anxiety, and for sure and certain my dream it was a warning, and there's something in the wind."

They were both so indebted to this good woman that they looked at each other piteously, but agreed. Walter rang the bell, and ordered the four-wheeler and his own nag.

"Mary, one little walk in that sweet garden."

"Yes, dear," said Mary, and in another moment they were walking in the garden, intertwined like the ivy and the oak, and purring over their present delights and glowing prospects.

In the meantime Mrs. Easton packed up their things: Walter's were enrolled in a light rug with straps, which went upon his saddle. They left the little inn, Mary driving. When they had gone about two miles they came to crossroads.

"Please pull up," said Mrs. Easton; then turning to Walter, who was riding ridiculously close to Mary's whip hand, "Isn't that the way to Clifford Hall?"

"It's one way," said he; "but I don't mean to go that way. How can I? It's only three miles more round by your house."

"Nurse," said Mary, appealingly.

"Ay, ay, poor things," said Mrs. Easton. "Well, well, don't loiter, anyway. I shall not be my own woman again till we're safe at the farm."

So they drove briskly on, and in about an hour more they got to a long hill, whence they could see the Gilbert's farm.

"There, nurse," said Mary, pouting a little, "now I hope you're content, for we have got safe home, and he and I shall not have a happy day together again."

"Oh, yes, you will, and many happy years," said Mrs. Easton. "Well, yes, I don't feel so fidgety now."

"Oh!" cried Mary, all of a sudden. "Why, there's our gray mare coming down the hill with the dog-cart! Who's that driving her? It's not papa. I declare it's Mr. Hope, come home safe and sound. Dear Mr. Hope! Oh, now my happiness is perfect!"

"Mr. Hope!" screamed Mrs. Easton. "Drive faster, for Heaven's sake! Turn your horse, sir, and gallop away from us as hard as you can!"

"Well, but Mrs. Easton--" objected Walter.

Mrs. Easton stood up in the carriage. "Man alive!" she screamed, "you know nothing, and I know a deal; begone, or you are no friend of mine: you'll make me curse the hour that I interfered."

"Go, darling," said Mary, kindly, and so decidedly that he turned his horse directly, gave her one look of love and disappointment, and galloped away.

Mary looked pale and angry, and drove on in sullen silence.

Mrs. Easton was too agitated to mind her angry looks. She kept wiping the perspiration from her brow with her handkerchief and speaking in broken sentences: "If we could only get there first--fool not to teach my sister her lesson before we went, she's such a simpleton!--can't you drive faster?"

"Why, nurse," said Mary, "don't be so afraid of Mr. Hope. It's not him I'm afraid of; it's papa."

"You don't know what you're talking about, child. Mr. Bartley is easily blinded; I won't tell you why. It isn't so with Mr. Hope. Oh, if I could only get in to have one word with my simple sister before he turns her inside out!"

This question was soon decided. Hope drove up to the door while Mary and Mrs. Easton were still some distance off and hidden by a turn in the road. When they emerged again into sight of the farm they just caught sight of Hope's back, and Mrs. Gilbert courtesying to him and ushering him into the house.

"Drive into the stableyard," said Mrs. Easton, faintly. "He mustn't see your traveling basket, anyway."

She told the servant to put the horse into the stable immediately, and the basket into the brew-house. Then she hurried Mary up the back stairs to her room, and went with a beating heart to find Mr. Hope and her sister.

Mrs. Gilbert, though a simple and unguarded woman, could read faces like the rest, and she saw at once that her sister was very much put out by this visit of Mr. Hope, and wanted to know what had passed between her and him. This set the poor woman all in a flutter for fear she should have said something injudicious, and thereupon she prepared to find out, if possible, what she ought to have said.

"What! Mr. Hope!" said Mrs. Easton. "Well, Mary will be glad. And have you been long home, sir?"

"Came last night," said Hope. "She hasn't been well, I hear. What is the matter?" And he looked very anxious.

"Well, sir," said Mrs. Easton, very guardedly, "she certainly gave me a fright when she came here. She looked quite pale: but whether it was that she wanted a change--but whatever it was, it couldn't be very serious. You shall judge for yourself. Sister, go to Miss Mary's room, and tell her."

Mrs. Easton, in giving this instruction, frowned at her sister as much as to say, "Now don't speak, but go."

When she was gone, the next thing was to find out if the woman had made any foolish admission to Mr. Hope; so she waited for him.

She had not long to wait.

Hope said: "I hardly expected to see you; your sister said you were from home."

"Well, sir," said Mrs. Easton, "we were not so far off, but we did come home a little sooner than we intended, and I am rare glad we did, for Miss Mary wouldn't have missed you for all the views in the county."

With that she made an excuse, and left him. She found her sister in Mary's room: they were comparing notes.

"Now," said she to Mrs. Gilbert, "you tell me every word you said to Mr. Hope about Miss Mary and me."

"Well, I said you were not at home, and that is every word; he didn't give me time to say any more for questioning of me about her health."

"That's lucky," said Mrs. Easton, dryly. "Thank Heaven, there's no harm done; he shan't see the carriage,"

"Dear me, nurse," said Mary, "all this time I'm longing to see him."

"Well, you shall see him, if you won't own to having been a night from home."

Mary promised, and went eagerly to Mr. Hope. It did not come natural to her to be afraid of him, and she was impatient for the day to come when she might tell him the whole story. The reception he gave her was not of a nature to discourage this feeling; his pale face--for he had been very ill--flushed at sight of her, his eyes poured affection upon her, and he held out both hands to her. "This the pale girl they frightened me about!" said he. "Why, you're like the roses in July."

"That's partly with seeing of you, sir," said Mrs. Easton, quietly following, "but we do take some credit to ourselves too; for Miss Mary was rather pale when she came here a week ago; but la, young folks want a change now and then."

"Nurse," said Mary, "I really was not well, and you have done wonders for me, and I hope you won't think me ungrateful, but I must go home with Mr. Hope."

Hope's countenance flushed with delight, and Mrs. Easton saw in a moment that Mary's affection was co-operating with her prudence! "I thought that would be her first word, sir," said she. "Why, of course you will, miss. There, don't you take any trouble; we'll pack up your things and put them in the dogcart; but you must eat a morsel both of you before you go. There's a beautiful piece of beef in the pot, not oversalted, and some mealy potatoes and suet dumplings.. You sit down and have your chat, while Polly and I get everything ready for you."

Then Mary asked Mr. Hope so many questions with such eager affection that he had no time to ask her any, and then she volunteered the home news, especially of Colonel Clifford's condition, and then she blushed and asked him if he had said anything to her father about Walter Clifford.

"Not much," said Mr. Hope. "You are very young, Mary, and it's not for me to interfere, and I won't interfere. But if you want my opinion, why, I admire the young man extremely. I always liked him; he is a straightforward, upright, manly, good-hearted chap, and has lots of plain good sense-- Heaven knows where he got it!"

This eulogy was interrupted by Mary putting a white hand and a perfect nose upon Hope's shoulder, and kissing the cloth thereon.

"What," said Hope tenderly, and yet half sadly--for he knew that all middle-aged men must now be second--"have I found the way to your heart?"

"You always knew that, Mr. Hope," said Mary softly; "especially since my escapade in that horrid brook."

Their affectionate chat was interrupted by a stout servant laying a snowy cloth, and after her sailed in Mrs. Gilbert, with a red face, and pride unconcealed and justifiable, carrying a grand dish of smoking hot boiled beef, set in a very flower bed, so to speak, of carrots, turnips, and suet dumplings; the servant followed with a brown basin, almost as big as a ewer, filled with mealy potatoes, whose jackets hung by a thread. Around this feast the whole party soon collected, and none of them sighed for Russian soups or French ragouts; for the fact is that under the title of boiled beef there exist two things, one of which, without any great impropriety, might be called junk; but this was the powdered beef of our ancestors, a huge piece just slightly salted in the house itself, so that the generous juice remained in it, but the piquant slices, with the mealy potatoes, made a delightful combination. The glasses were filled with home-brewed ale, sparkling and clear and golden as the finest Madeira. They all ate manfully, stimulated by the genial hostess. Even Mary outshone all her former efforts, and although she couldn't satisfy Mrs. Gilbert, she declared she had never eaten so much in all her life. This set good Mrs. Gilbert's cheeks all aglow with simple, honest satisfaction.

Hope drove Mary home in the dog cart. He was a happy man, but she could hardly be called a happy woman. She was warm and cold by turns. She had got her friend back, and that was a comfort, but she was not treating him with confidence; indeed, she was passively deceiving him, and that chilled her; but then it would not be for long, and that comforted her, and yet even when the day should come for the great doors of Clifford Hall to fly open to her, would not a sad, reproachful look from dear Mr. Hope somewhat imbitter her cup of happiness? Deceit, and even reticence, did not come so natural to her as they do to many women: she was not weak, and she was frank, though very modest.

Mr. Bartley met them at the door, and, owing to Hope's presence, was more demonstrative than usual. He seemed much pleased at Mary's return, and delighted at her appearance.

"Well," said he, "I am glad I sent you away for a week. We have all missed you, my dear, but the change has set you up again. I never saw you look better. Now you are well, we must try and keep you well."

We must leave the reader to imagine the mixed feelings with which Mrs. Walter Clifford laid her head upon the pillow that night, and we undertake to say that the female readers, at all events, will supply this blank in our narrative much better than we could, though we were to fill a chapter with that subject alone.

Passion is a terrible enemy to mere affection. Walter Clifford loved his father dearly, yet for twenty-four hours he had almost forgotten him. But the moment he turned his horse's head toward Clifford Hall, uneasiness and something very like remorse began to seize him. Suppose his father had asked for him, and wondered where he was, and felt himself deserted and abandoned in his dying moments. He spurred his horse to a gallop, and soon reached Clifford Hall. As he was afraid to go straight to his father's room, he went at once to old Baker, and said, in an agitated voice--

"One word, John--is he alive?"

"Yes, sir, he is," said John, gravely, and rather sternly.

"Has he asked for me?"

"More than once or twice, sir."

Walter sank into a chair, and covered his face with his hands. This softened the old servant, whose manner till then had been sullen and grim.

"You need not fret, Mr. Walter," said he; "it's all right. In course I know where you have been."

Walter looked up alarmed.

"I mean in a general way," said the old man. "You have been a-courting of an angel. I know her, sir, and I hope to be her servant some day; and if you was to marry any but her, I'd leave service altogether, and so would Rhoda Milton; but, Mr. Walter, sir, there's a time for everything: I hope you'll forgive me for saying so. However, you are here now, and I was wideawake, and I have made it all right, sir."

"That's impossible," said Walter. "How could you make it right with my poor dear father if in his last moments he felt himself neglected?"

"But he didn't feel himself neglected."

"I don't understand you," said Walter.

"Well, sir," said old Baker, "I'm an old servant, and I have done my duty to father and son according to my lights: I told him a lie."

"A lie, John!" said Walter.

"A thundering lie," said John, rather aggressively. "I don't know as I ever told a greater lie in all my life. I told him you was gone up to London to fetch a doctor."

Walter grasped John Baker's hand. "God bless you, old man," said he, "for taking that on your conscience! Well, you shan't have yourself to reproach for my fault. I know a first-class gout doctor in London; he has cured it more than once. I'll wire him down this minute; you'll dispatch the message, and I'll go to my father."

The message was sent, and when the colonel awoke from an uneasy slumber he saw his son at the foot of the bed, gazing piteously at him.

"My dear boy," said he faintly, and held out a wasted hand. Walter was pricked to the heart at this greeting: not a word of remonstrance at his absence.

"I fear you missed me, father," said he sadly.

"That I have," said the old man; "but I dare say you didn't forget me, though you weren't by my side."

The high-minded old soldier said no more, and put no questions, but confided in his son's affection, and awaited the result of it. From that hour Walter Clifford nursed his father day and night. Dr. Garner arrived next day. He examined the patient, and put a great many questions as to the history and progress of the disorder up to that date, and inquired in particular what was the length of time the fits generally endured. Here he found them all rather hazy. "Ah," said he, "patients are seldom able to assist their medical adviser with precise information on this point, yet it's very important. Well, can you tell me how long this attack has lasted?"

They told him that within a day or two.

"Then now," said he, "the most important question of all: What day did the pain leave his extremities?"

The patient and John Baker had to compare notes to answer this question, and they made it out to be about twenty days.

"Then he ought to be as dead as a herring," whispered the doctor.

After this he began to walk the room and meditate, with his hands behind him.

"Open those top windows," said he. "Now draw the screen, and give his lungs a chance; no draughts must blow upon him, you know." Then he drew Walter aside. "Do you want to know the truth? Well, then, his life hangs on a thread. The gout is creeping upward, and will inevitably kill him if we can't get it down. Nothing but heroic remedies will do that, and it's three to five against them. What do you say?"

"I dare not--I dare not. Pray put the question to him."

"I will," said the doctor; and accordingly he did put it to him with a good deal of feeling and gentleness, and the answer rather surprised him.

Weak as he was, Colonel Clifford's dull eye flashed, and he half raised himself on his elbow. "What a question to put to a soldier!" said he. "Why, let us fight, to be sure. I thought it was twenty to one--five to three? I have often won the rubber with five to three against me."

"Ah!" said Dr. Garner, "these are the patients that give the doctor a chance." Then he turned to Baker. "Have you any good champagne in the house--not sweet, and not too dry, and full of fire?"

"Irroy's Carte d'Or," suggested the patient, entering into the business with a certain feeble alacrity that showed his gout had not always been unconnected with imprudence in diet.

Baker was sent for the champagne. It was brought and opened, and the patient drank some of it fizzing. When he had drank what he could, his eyes twinkled, and he said--

"That's a hair of a dog that has often bitten me."

The wine soon got into his weakened head, and he dropped asleep.

"Another draught when he wakes," said the doctor, "but from a fresh bottle."

"We'll finish this one to your health in the servants' hall," said honest John Baker.

Dr. Garner stayed there all night, keeping up the patient's strength with eggs and brandy, and everything, in short, except medicine; and he also administered champagne, but at much longer intervals.

At one o'clock next day the patient gave a dismal groan; Walter and the others started up in alarm.

"Good!" said the doctor, calmly; "now I'll go to bed. Call me if there's any fresh symptom."

At six o'clock old Baker burst in the room: "Sir, sir, he have swore at me twice. The Lord be praised!"

"Excellent!" said the doctor. "Now tell me what disagrees with him most after champagne?"

"Why, Green Chartreuse, to be sure," said old Baker.

"Then give him a tablespoonful," said the doctor. "Get me some hot water."

"Which first?" inquired Baker.

"The patient, to be sure," said Dr. Garner.

Soon after this the doctor stood by his patient's side, and found him writhing, and, to tell the truth, he was using bad language occasionally, though he evidently tried not to.

Dr. Garner looked at his watch. "I think there's time to catch the evening train."

"Why," said Walter, "surely you would not desert us; this is the crisis, is it not?"

"It's something more than that," said the doctor; "the disease knows its old place; it has gone back to the foot like a shot; and if you can keep it there, the patient will live; he's not the sort of patient that strikes his colors while there's a bastion left to defend."

These words pleased the old colonel so that he waved a feeble hand above his head, then groaned most dismally, and ground his teeth to avoid profanity.

The doctor, with exquisite gentleness, drew the clothes off his feet, and sent for a lot of fleecy cotton or wool, and warned them all not to touch the bed, nor even to approach the lower part of it, and then he once more proposed to leave, and gave his reasons.

"Now, look here, you know, I have done my part, and if I give special instructions to the nurses, they can do the rest. I'm rather dear, and why should you waste your money?"

"Dear!" said Walter, warmly; "you're as cheap as dirt, and as good as gold, and the very sight of you is a comfort to us. There's a fast train at ten; I'll drive you to the station after breakfast myself. Your fees--they are nothing to us. We love him, and we are the happiest house in Christendom; we, that were the saddest."

"Well," said the doctor, "you north countrymen are hearty people. I'll stay till to-morrow morning--indeed, I'll stay till the afternoon, for my London day will be lost anyway."

He stayed accordingly till three o'clock, left his patient out of all present danger, and advised Walter especially against allowing colchicum to be administered to him until his strength had recovered.

"There is no medicinal cure for gout," said he; "pain is a mere symptom, and colchicum soothes that pain, not by affecting the disease, but by stilling the action of the heart. Well, if you still the action of that heart there, you'll kill him as surely as if you stilled it with a pistol bullet. Knock off his champagne in three or four days, and wheel him into the sun as soon as you can with safety, fill his lungs with oxygen, and keep all worry and disputes and mental anxiety from him, if you can. Don't contradict him for a month to come."

The colonel had a terrible bout of it so far as pain was concerned, but after about a fortnight the paroxysms intermitted, the appetite increased. Everybody was his nurse; everybody, including Julia Clifford, humored him; Percy Fitzroy was never mentioned, and the name of Bartley religiously avoided. The colonel had got a fright, and was more prudent in his diet, and always in the open air.

Walter left him only at odd times, when he could hope to get a hasty word with Mary, and tell her how things were going, and do all that man could do to keep her heart up, and reconcile her to the present situation.

Returning from his wife one day, and leaving her depressed by their galling situation, though she was never peevish, but very sad and thoughtful, he found his father and Julia Clifford in the library. Julia had been writing letters for him; she gave Walter a deprecatory look, as much as to say, "What I am doing is by compulsion, and you won't like it." Colonel Clifford didn't leave the young man in any doubt about the matter. He said: "Walter, you heard me speak of Bell, the counsel who leads this circuit. I was once so fortunate as to do him a good turn, and he has not forgotten it; he will sleep here the day after to-morrow, and he will go over that blackguard's lease: he has been in plenty of mining cases. I have got a sort of half opinion out of him already; he thinks it contrary to the equity of contracts that minerals should pass under a farm lease where the surface of the soil is a just equivalent to the yearly payment; but the old fox won't speak positively till he has read every syllable of the lease. However, it stands to reason that it's a fraud; it comes from a man who is all fraud; but thank God I am myself again."

He started up erect as a dart. "I'll have him off my lands; I'll drag him out of the bowels of the earth, him and all his clan."

With this and other threats of the same character he marched out of the room, striking the floor hard with his stick as he went, and left Julia Clifford amazed, and Walter Clifford aghast, at his vindictive fury.

WALTER CLIFFORD was so distressed at this outburst, and the prospect of actual litigation between his father and his sweetheart's father, that Julia Clifford pitied him, and, after thinking a little, said she would stop it for the present. She then sat down, and in five minutes the docile pen of a female letter-writer produced an ingratiating composition impossible to resist. She apologized for her apparent insincerity, but would be candid, and confide the whole truth to Mr. Bell. Then she told him that Colonel Clifford "had only just been saved from death by a miracle, and a relapse was expected in case of any great excitement or irritation, such as a doubtful lawsuit with a gentleman he disliked would certainly cause. The proposed litigation was, for various reasons, most distressing to his son and successor, Walter Clifford, and would Mr. Bell be so very kind as to put the question off as long as possible by any means he thought proper?"

Walter was grateful, and said, "What a comfort to have a lady on one's side!"

"I would rather have a gentleman on mine," said Julia, laughing.

Mr. Bell wrote a discreet reply. He would wait till the Assizes--six weeks' delay--and then write to the colonel, postponing his visit. This he did, and promised to look up cases meantime.

But these two allies not only baffled their irascible chief; they also humored him to the full. They never mentioned the name of Bartley, and they kept Percy Fitzroy out of sight in spite of his remonstrances, and, in a word, they made the colonel's life so smooth that he thought he was going to have his own way in everything, and he improved in health and spirits; for you know it is an old saying, "Always get your own way, and you'll never die in a pet."

And then what was still a tottering situation was kept on its legs by the sweet character and gentle temper of Mary Bartley.

We have already mentioned that she was superior to most women in the habit of close attention to whatever she undertook. This was the real key to her facility in languages, history, music, drawing, and calisthenics, as her professor called female gymnastics. The flexible creature's limbs were in secret steel. She could go thirty feet up a slack rope hand over hand with wonderful ease and grace, and hang by one hand for ten minutes to kiss the other to her friends. So the very day she was surprised into consenting to marry Walter secretly she sat down to the Marriage Service and learned it all by heart directly, and understood most of it.

By this means she realized that now she had another man to obey as well as her father. So now, when Walter pressed her for secret meetings, she said, submissively, "Oh, yes, if you insist." She even remarked that she concluded clandestine meetings were the natural consequence of a clandestine marriage.

She used to meet her husband in the day when she could, and often for five minutes under the moon. And she even promised to spend two or three days with him at the lakes if a safe opportunity should occur. But for that she stipulated that Mr. Hope must be absent.

Walter asked her why she was more afraid of Mr. Hope than of her father.

Her eyes seemed to look inward dimly, and at first she said she didn't know. But after pondering the matter a little she said, "Because he watches me more closely than papa, and that is because-- You won't tell anybody?"

"No."

"Not a soul, upon your honor?"

"Not a soul, dearest, upon my honor."

"Well, then, because he loves me more."

"Oh, come!" said Walter, incredulously.

But Mary would neither resign her opinion nor pursue a subject which puzzled and grieved her.

We have now indicated the peaceful tenor of things in Derbyshire for a period of some months. We shall have to show by-and-by that elements of discord were accumulating under the surface; but at present we must leave Derbyshire, and deal very briefly with another tissue of events, beginning years ago, and running to a date three months, at least, ahead of Colonel Clifford's recovery. The reader will have no reason to regret this apparent interruption. Our tale hitherto has been rather sluggish; but it is in narrative as it is in nature, when two streams unite their forces the current becomes broader and stronger.

Leonard Monckton was sent to Pentonville, and after some years transferred to Portland. In both places he played the game of an old hand; always kept his temper and carnied everybody, especially the chaplain and the turnkeys. These last he treated as his only masters; and if they gave him short weight in bread or meat, catch him making matters worse by appealing to the governor! Toward the end of his time at Pentonville he had some thought of suicide, but his spirits revived at Portland, where he was cheered by the conversation of other villains. Their name was legion; but as he never met one of them again, except Ben Burnley, all those miscreants are happily irrelevant. And the reader need not fear an introduction to them, unless he should find himself garroted in some dark street or suburb, or his home rifled some dark and windy night. As for Ben Burnley, he was from the North country, imprisoned for conspiracy and manslaughter in an attack upon non-union miners. Toward the end of his time he made an attack upon a warder, and got five years more. Then Monckton showed him he was a fool, and explained to him his own plan of conduct, and bade him observe how popular he was with the warders, and reaped all the favor they dared to show him.

"He treated me like a dog," said the man, sullenly.

"I saw it," said Leonard. "And if I had been you I would have said nothing, but waited till my time was out, and then watched for him till he got his day out, and settled his hash. That is the way for your sort. As for me, killing is a poor revenge; it is too soon over. Do you think I don't mean to be revenged on that skunk Bartley, and, above all, on that scoundrel Hope, who planted the swag in my pockets, and let me into this hole for fourteen years?" Then, with all his self-command, he burst into a torrent of curses, and his pale face was ghastly with hate, and his eyes glared with demoniac fire, for hell raged in his heart.

Just then a warder approached, and to Burnley's surprise, who did not see him coming, Monckton said gently, "And therefore, my poor fellow, do just consider that you have broken the law, and the warders are only doing their duty and earning their bread, and if you were a warder to-morrow you'd have to do just what they do."

"Ay," said the warder, in passing, "you may lecture the bloke, but you will not make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."

That was true, but nevertheless the smooth villain Monckton obtained a great ascendency over this rough, shock-headed ruffian Burnley, and he got into no more scrapes. He finished his two sentences, and left before Monckton. This precious pair revealed to each other certain passages in their beautiful lives. Monckton's were only half-confidences, but Burnley told Monckton he had been concerned with others in a burglary at Stockton, and also in the death of an overseer in a mine in Wales, and gave the particulars with a sort of quaking gusto, and washing his hands nervously in the tainted air all the time. To be sure the overseer had earned his fate; he had himself been guilty of a crime--he had been true to his employer.

The grateful Burnley left Portland at last, and promised faithfully to send word to a certain friend of Monckton's, in London, where he was, and what he was doing. Meantime he begged his way northward from Portland, for the southern provinces were a dead letter to him.

Monckton's wife wrote to him as often as the rules of the jail permitted, and her letters were full of affection, and of hope that their separation would be shortened. She went into all the details of her life, and it was now a creditable one. Young women are educated practically in Germany; and Lucy was not only a good scholar, and almost a linguist, but excellent at all needlework, and better still, could cut dresses and other garments in the best possible style. After one or two inferior places, she got a situation with an English countess; and from that time she was passed as a treasure from one member of the aristocracy to another, and received high stipends, and presents of at least equal value. Being a German, she put by money, and let her husband know it. But in the seventh year of her enforced widowhood her letters began to undergo subtle changes, one after another.

First there were little exhibitions of impatience. Then there were signs of languor and a diminution of gush.

Then there stronger protestations of affection than ever.

Then there were mixed with these protestations queries whether the truest affection was not that which provided for the interests of the beloved person.

Then in the eighth year of Monckton's imprisonment she added to remarks of the above kind certain confessions that she was worn out with anxieties, and felt her lonely condition; that youth and beauty did not last forever; that she had let slip opportunities of doing herself substantial service, and him too, if he could look at things as coolly now as he used to; and she began to think she had done wrong.

This line once adopted was never given up, though it was accompanied once or twice with passionate expressions of regret at the vanity of long-cherished hopes. Then came a letter or two more in which the fair writer described herself as torn this way and that way, and not knowing what to do for the best, and inveighed against Fate.

Then came a long silence.

Then came a short letter imploring him, if he loved her as she loved him, to try and forget her, except as one who would always watch over his interests, and weep for him in secret.

"Crocodile!" said Monckton, with a cold sneer.

All this showed him it was his interest not to lose his hold on her. So he always wrote to her in a beautiful strain of faith, affection, and constancy.

But this part of the comedy was cut short by the lady discontinuing the correspondence and concealing her address for years.

"Ah!" said Monckton, "she wants to cure me. That cock won't fight, my beauty." A month before he was let loose upon society came a surprise--a letter from his wife, directing him to call at the office of a certain solicitor in Serjeant's Inn, Fleet Street, when he would receive £50 upon his personal receipt, and a similar sum from time to time, provided he made no attempt to discover her, or in any way disturb her life. "Oh, Leonard," said she, "you ruined me once. Pray do not destroy me again. You may be sure I am not happy; but I am in peace and comfort, and I am old enough to know their value. Dear Leonard, I offer them both to you. Pray, pray do not despise them, and, whatever you do, do not offend against the law again. You see how strong it is."

Monckton read this with calm indifference. He did not expect a woman to give him a pension unconditionally, or without some little twaddle by way of drawback. He called on the lawyer, and sent in his name. He was received by the lawyer in person, and eyed very keenly. "I am directed to call here for £50, sir," said he.

"Yes, Mr. Monckton. I believe the payment is conditional."

"No, sir; not the first £50. It is the future payments that are to depend upon my conniving at my wife's infidelity;" and with that he handed him the letter.

The lawyer perused it, and said: "You are right, sir. The £50 shall be paid to you immediately; but we must request you to consider that our client is your friend, and acts by our advice, and that it will not be either graceful or delicate to interpret her conduct to her discredit."

"My good sir," said Monckton, with one of his cynical sneers, "every time your client pays me £50, put on the receipt that black is white in matters of conjugal morality, and I'll sign the whole acknowledgment."

Finding he had such a serpent to deal with, the lawyer cut the dialogue short, and paid the money. However, as Monckton was leaving, he said: "You can write to us when you want any more, and would it be discreet of me to ask where we can address you?"

"Why not?" said Monckton. "I have nothing to conceal. However, all I can tell you at present is that I am going to Hull to try and find a couple of rogues."

To Hull he went, breathing avarice and vengeance. This dangerous villain was quite master of Hartley's secret, and Hope's. To be sure, when Hope first discovered him in Hartley's office, he was puzzled at the sudden interference of that stranger. He had only seen Hope's back until this, and, moreover, Hope had been shabbily dressed in black cloth hard worn, whereas he was in a new suit of tweed when he exposed Monckton's villainy. But this was explained at the trial, and Monckton instructed his attorney to cross-examine Hope about his own great fraud; but counsel refused to do so, either because he disbelieved his client, or thought such a cross-examination would be stopped, or set the court still more against his client.

Monckton raged at this, and, of course, said he had been bought by the other side. But now he was delighted that his enemies' secret had never been inquired into, and that he could fall on them both like a thunder-bolt.

He was at Hull next day, and rambled about the old shop and looked in at the windows. All new faces, and on the door-plate "Atkinson & Co."

Then he went in, and asked for Mr. Bartley.

Name not known.

"Why, he used to be here. I was in his employ."

No; nobody knew Mr. Bartley.

Could he see Mr. Atkinson?

Certainly; Mr. Atkinson would be there at two o'clock.

Monckton, after some preamble, asked whether he had not succeeded in this business to Mr. Robert Bartley.

No. He had bought the business from Mrs. Duplex, a widow residing in this town, and he happened to know that her husband had taken it from Whitaker, a merchant at Boston.

"Is he alive, sir?"

"I believe so, and very well known."

Monckton went off to Whitaker, and learned from him that he had bought the business from Bartley, but it was many years ago, and he had never heard of the purchaser since that day.

Monckton returned to London baffled. What was he to do? Go to a secret-inquiry office? Advertise that if Mr. Robert Bartley, late of Hull, would write to a certain agent, he would hear of something to his advantage? He did not much fancy either of these plans. He wanted to pounce on Bartley, or Hope, or both.

Then he argued thus: "Bartley has got lots of money now, or he would not have given up business. Ten to one he lives in London, or visits it. I will try the Park."

Well, he did try the Park, both at the riding hour and the driving hour. He saw no Bartley at either time.

But one day in the Lady's Mile, as he listlessly watched the carriages defile slowly past him, with every now and then a jam, there crawled past him a smart victoria, and in it a beautiful woman with glorious dark eyes, and a lovely little boy, the very image of her. It was his wife and her son.

Monckton started, but the lady gave no sign of recognition. She bowed, but it was to a gentleman at Monckton's side, who had raised his hat to her with marked respect.

"What a beautiful crechaar!" said a little swell to the gentleman in question. "You know her?"

"Very slightly."

"Who is she? A duchess?"

"No; a stock-broker's wife, Mrs. Braham. Why, she is a known beauty."

That was enough for Monckton. He hung back a little, and followed the carriage. He calculated that if it left the Park at Hyde Park corner, or the Marble Arch, he could take a hanson and follow it.

When the victoria got clear of the crowd at the corner, Mrs. Braham leaned forward a moment and whispered a word to her coachman. Instantly the carriage dashed at the Chesterfield Gate and into Mayfair at such a swift trot that there was no time to get a cab and keep it in sight.

Monckton lighted a cigarette. "Clever! girl!" said he, satirically. "She knew me, and never winked."

The next day he went to the lawyer and said, "I have a little favor to ask you, sir."

The lawyer was on his guard directly, but said nothing.

"An interview in this office--with Mrs. Braham."

The lawyer winced, but went on his guard again directly.

"Client of ours?"

"Yes, sir."

"Braham? Braham?" said the lawyer, affecting to search the caverns of professional memory.

"Stock-broker's wife."

"Where do they live?"

"What! don't you know? Place of business--Threadneedle Street. Place of bigamy--Portman Square."

"I have no authority to grant a personal interview with any such person."

"But you have no power to hinder one, and it is her interest the meeting should take place here, and the stock-broker be out of it."

The lawyer reflected.

"Will you promise me it shall be a friendly interview? You will never go to her husband?"

"Her stock-broker, you mean. Not I. If she comes to me here when I want her."

"Will that be often?"

"I think not. I have a better card to play than Mrs. Braham. I only want her to help me to find certain people. Shall we say twelve o'clock to-morrow?"

The lawyer called on Mrs. Braham, and after an agitated and tearful interview, persuaded her to keep the appointment.

"Consider," said he, "what you gain by making our office the place of meeting. Establish that at once. It's a point of defense."

The meeting took place in the lawyer's private room, and Mrs. Braham was so overcome that she nearly fainted. Then she was hysterical, and finally tears relieved her.

When she came to this point, Monckton, who had looked upon the whole exhibition as a mere preliminary form observed by females, said--

"Come, Lucy, don't be silly. I am not here to spoil your little game, but to play my own. The question is, will you help me to make my fortune?"

"Oh, that I will, if you will not break up my home."

"Not such a fool, my dear. Catch me killing a milch-cow! You give me a percentage on your profits, and I'm dumb."

"Then all you want is more money?"

"That is all; and I shall not want that in a month's time."

"I have brought £100, Leonard," said she timidly.

"Sensible girl. Hand it over."

Two white hands trembled at the strings of a little bag, and took out ten crisp notes.

Leonard took them with satisfaction.

"There," said he. "This will last me till I have found Bartley and Hope, and made my fortune."

"Hope!" said Mrs. Braham. "Oh, pray keep clear of him! Pray don't attack him again. He is such an able man!"

"I will not attack him again to be defeated. Forewarned, forearmed. Indeed, if I am to bleed Bartley, I don't know how I can be revenged on Hope. That is the cruel thing. But don't you trouble about my business, Lucy, unless," said he, with a sneer, "you can tell me where to find them, and so save me a lot of money."

"Well, Leonard," said Lucy, "it can't be so very hard to find Hope. You know where that young man lives that you-- that I--"

"Oh, Walter Clifford! Yes, of course I know where he lives. At Clifford Hall, in Derbyshire."

"Well, Leonard, Hope saved him from prison, and ruined you. That young man had a good heart. He would not forget such a kindness. He may not know where Mr. Bartley lives, but surely he will know where Hope is."

"Lucy," said Leonard, "you are not such a fool as you were. It is a chance, at all events. I'll go down to that neighborhood directly. I'll have a first-rate disguise, and spy about, and pick up all I can."

"And you will never say anything or do anything to-- Oh, Leonard, I'm a bad wife. I never can be a good one now to anybody. But I'm a good mother; and I thought God had forgiven me, when he sent me my little angel. You will never ruin his poor mother, and make her darling blush for her!"

"Curse me if I do!" said Leonard, betrayed into a moment's warmth. But he was soon himself again. "There," said he, "I'll leave the little bloke my inheritance. Perhaps you don't know I'm heir to a large estate in Westmoreland; no end of land, and half a lake, and only eleven lives between the estate and me. I will leave my 'great expectations' to that young bloke. What's his Christian name?"

"Augustus."

"And what's his father's name?"

"Jonathan."

Leonard then left all his property, real and personal, and all that should ever accrue to him, to Augustus Braham, son of Jonathan Braham, and left Lucy Braham sole executrix and trustee.

Then he hurried into the outer office, signed this document, and got it witnessed. The clerks proposed to engross it.

"What for?" said he. "This is the strongest form. All in the same handwriting as the signature; forgery made easy are your engrossed wills."

He took it in to Mrs. Braham, and read it to her, and gave it her. He meant it all as a joke; he read it with a sneer. But the mother's heart overflowed. She put it in her bosom, and kissed his hand.

"Oh, Leonard," said she, "God bless you! Now I see you mean no ill to me and mine. You don't love me enough to be angry with me. But it all comes back to me. A woman can't forget her first. Now promise me one thing; don't give way to revenge or avarice. You are so wise when you are cool, but no man can give way to his passions and be wise. Why run any more risks? He is liberal to me, and I'm not extravagant. I can allow you more than I said, and wrong nobody."

Monckton interrupted her, thus: "There, old girl, you are a good sort; you always were. But not bleed that skunk Bartley, and not be revenged on that villain Hope? I'd rather die where I stand, for they have turned my blood to gall, and lighted hell in my heart this many a year of misery."

He held out his hand to her; it was cold. She grasped it in her warm, soft palm, and gave him one strange, searching look with her glorious eyes; and so they parted.

Next day, at dusk, there arrived at the Dun Cow an elderly man with a large carpet-bag and a strapped bundle of patterns--tweed, kersey, velveteen, and corduroys. He had a short gray mustache and beard, very neat; and appeared to be a commercial traveler.

In the evening he asked for brandy, old rum, lemons, powdered sugar, a kettle, and a punch-bowl. A huge one, relic of a past age, was produced. He mixed delicious punch, and begged the landlady to sit down and taste it. She complied, and pronounced it first-rate. He enticed her into conversation.

She was a rattling gossip, and told him first her own grievances. Here was the village enlarging, and yet no more custom coming to her because of the beer-house. The very mention of this obnoxious institution moved her bile directly. "A pretty gentleman," said she, "to brew his own beer and undersell a poor widow that have been here all her days and her father before her! But the colonel won't let me be driven out altogether, no more will Mr. Walter: he do manage for the old gentleman now."

Monckton sipped and waited for the name of Hope, but it did not come. The good lady deluged him with the things that interested her. She was to have a bit of a farm added on to the Dun Cow. It was to be grass land, and not much labor wanted. She couldn't undertake that; was it likely? But for milking of cows and making butter or cheese, that she was as good at as here and there one; and if she could have the custom of the miners for her milk. "But, la, sir," said she, "I'll go bail as that there Bartley will take and set up a dairy against me, as he have a beer shop."

"Bartley?" said Monckton, inquiringly.

"Ay, sir; him as owns the mine, and the beer.-shop, and all, worse luck for me."

"Bartley? Who is he?"

"Oh, one of those chaps that rise from nothing nowadays. Came here to farm; but that was a blind, the colonel says. Sunk a mine, he did, and built a pit village, and turns everything into brass [money]. But there, you are a stranger, sir; what is all this to you?"

"Why, it is very interesting," said Monckton. "Mistress, I always like to hear the whole history of every place I stop at, especially from a sensible woman like you, that sees to the bottom of things. Do have another glass. Why, I should be as dull as ditch-water, now, if I had not your company."

"La, sir, I'm sure you are welcome to my company in a civil way; and for the matter of that you are right; life is life, and there's plenty to be learned in a public--do but open your eyes and ears."

"Have another glass with me. I am praised for my punch."

"You deserve it, sir. Better was never brewed."

She sipped and sipped, and smacked her lips, till it was all gone.

This glass colored her cheeks, brightened her eyes, and even loosened her tongue, though that was pretty well oiled by nature.

"Well, sir," said she, "you are a bird of passage, here to-day and gone tomorrow, and it don't matter much what I tell you, so long as I don't tell no lies. There will be a row in this village."

Having delivered this formidable prophecy, the coy dame pushed her glass to her companion for more, and leaning back cozily in the old-fashioned high-backed chair, observed the effect of her thunderbolt.

Monckton rubbed his hands. "I'm glad of it," said he, genially; "that is to say, provided my good hostess does not suffer by it."

"I'm much beholden to you, sir," said the lady. "You are the civilest-spoken gentleman I have entertained this many a day. Here's your health, and wishing you luck in your business, and many happy days well spent. My service to you, sir."

"The same to you, ma'am."

"Well, sir, in regard to a row between the gentlefolks--not that I call that there Bartley one--judge for yourself. You are a man of the world and a man of business, and an elderly man apparently."

"At all events, I am older than you, madam."

"That is as may be," said Mrs. Dawson dryly. "We hain't got the parish register here, and all the better for me. So once more I say, judge for yourself."

"Well, madam," said Monckton, "I will try, if you will oblige me with the facts."

"That is reasonable," said Mrs. Dawson, loftily, but after some little consideration. "The facts I will declare, and not a lie among 'em."

"That will be a novelty," thought her cynical hearer, but he held his tongue, and looked respectfully attentive.

"Colonel Clifford," said Mrs. Dawson, "hates Bartley like poison, and Bartley him. The colonel vows he will have him off the land and out of the bowels of the earth, and he have sent him a lawyer's letter; for everything leaks out in this village, along of the servants' chattering. Bartley he don't value a lawyer's letter no more than that. He defies the colonel, and they'll go at it hammer and tongs at the 'Sizes, and spend a mint of money in law. That's one side of the question. But there's another. Master Walter is deep in love with Miss Mary."

"Who is she?"

"Who is she? Why, Bartley's daughter, to be sure; not as I'd believe it if I hadn't known her mother, for she is no more like him in her looks or her ways than a tulip is to a dandelion. She is the loveliest girl in the county, and better than she's bonny. You don't catch her drawing bridle at her papa's beer-house, and she never passes my picture. It's 'Oh, Mrs. Dawson, I am so thirsty, a glass of your good cider, please, and a little hay and water for Deersfoot.' That's her way, bless your silly heart! She ain't dry; and Deersfoot, he's full of beans, and his coat's like satin; but that's Miss Mary's way of letting me know that she's my customer, and nobody else's in the town. God bless her, and send her many happy days with the man of her heart, and that is Walter Clifford, for she is just as fond of him as he is of her. I seen it all from the first day. 'Twas love at first sight, and still a-growing to this day. Them old fogies may tear each other to pieces, but they won't part such lovers as those. There's not a girl in the village that doesn't run to look at them, and admire them, and wish them joy. Ay, and you mark my words, they are young, but they have got a spirit, both of them. Miss Mary, she looks you in the face like a lion and a dove all in one. They may lead her, but they won't drive her. And Walter, he's a Clifford from top to toe. Nothing but death will part them two. Them's the facts, sir, without a lie, which now I'm a-waiting for judgment."

"Mrs. Dawson," said Monckton, solemnly, "since you do me the honor to ask my opinion, I say that out of these facts a row will certainly arise, and a deadly one."

"It must, sir; and Will Hope will have to take a side. 'Tis no use his trying to be everybody's friend this time, though that's his natural character, poor chap."

Monckton's eyes flashed fire, but he suppressed all appearance of excitement, and asked who Mr. Hope was.

Mrs. Dawson brightened at the very name of her favorite, and said, "Who is Will Hope? Why, the cleverest man in Derbyshire, for one thing; but he is that Hartley's right-hand man, worse luck. He is inspector of the mine and factotum. He is the handiest man in England. He invents machines, and makes fiddles and plays 'em, and mends all their clocks and watches and wheelbarrows, and charges 'em naught. He makes hisself too common. I often tell him so. Says I, 'Why dost let 'em all put on thee so? Serve thee right if I was to send thee my pots and pans to mend?' 'And so do,' says he, directly. 'There's no art in it, if you can make the sawder, and I can do that, by the Dick and Harry!' And one day I said to him, 'Do take a look at this fine new cow of mine as cost me twenty-five good shillings and a quart of ale. What ever is the matter with her? She looks like the skin of a cow flattened against the board.' So says he, 'Nay, she's better drawn than nine in ten; but she wants light and shade. Send her to my workshop.' 'Ay, ay,' says I; 'thy workshop is like the churchyard; we be all bound to go there one day or t'other.' Well, sir, if you believe me, when they brought her home and hung her again she almost knocked my eye out. There was three or four more women looking on, and I mind all on us skreeked a bit, and our hands went up in the air as if one string had pulled the lot; and says Bet Morgan, the carter's wife, 'Lord sake, gie me a bucket somebody, and let me milk her!' 'Nay, but thou shalt milk me,' said I, and a pint of fourpenny I gave her, then and there, for complimenting of my cow. Will Hope, he's everybody's friend. He made the colonel a crutch with his own hands, which the colonel can use no other now. Walter swears by him. Miss Mary dotes on him; he saved her life in the river when she was a girl. The very miners give him a good word, though he is very strict with them; and as for Bartley, it's my belief he owes all his good luck to Will Hope. And to think he was born in this village, and left it a poor lad; ay, and he came back here one day as poor as Job, seems but t'other day, with his bundle on his back and his poor little girl in his hand. I dare say I fed them both with whatever was going, poor bodies."

"What was she like?"

"A poor little wizened thing. She had beautiful golden hair, though."

"Like Miss Bartley's?"

"Something, but lighter."

"Have you ever seen her since?"

"No; and I never shall."

"Who knows?"

"Nay, sir. I asked him after her one day when he came home for good. He never answered me, and he turned away as if I had stung him. She has followed her mother, no doubt. And so now she is gone he's well-to-do; and that is the way of it, sir. God sends mouths where there is no meat, and meat where there's no mouths. But He knows best, and sees both worlds at once. We can only see this one--that's full of trouble."

Monckton now began to yawn, for he wanted to be alone and think over the schemes that floated before him now.

"You are sleepy, sir," said Mrs. Dawson. "I'll go and see your bed is all right."

He thanked her and filled her glass. She tossed it off like a man this time, and left him to doze in his chair.

Doze, indeed! Never did a man's eyes move to and fro more restlessly. Every faculty was strung to the utmost.

At first as all the dramatis personæ he was in search of came out one after another from that gossip's tongue, he was amazed and delighted to find that instead of having to search for one of them in one part of England, and another in another, he had got them all ready to his hand. But soon he began to see that they were too near each other, and some of them interwoven, and all the more dangerous to attack.

He saw one thing at a glance. That it would be quite a mistake to settle a plan of action. That is sometimes a great advantage in dealing with the unguarded. But it creates a stiffness. Here all must be supple and fitted with watchful tact to the situation as it rose. Everything would have to be shot flying.

Then as to the immediate situation. Reader, did ever you see a careful setter run suddenly into the middle of a covey who were not on their feet nor close together, but a little dispersed and reposing in high cover in the middle of the day? No human face is ever so intense or human form more rigid. He knows that one bird is three yards from his nose, another the same distance from either ear, and, in short, that they are all about him, and to frighten one is to frighten all.

His tail quivers, and then turns to steel, like his limbs. His eyes glare; his tongue fears to pant; it slips out at one side of his teeth and they close on it. Then slowly, slowly, he goes down, noiseless as a cat, and crouches on the long covert, whether turnips, rape, or clover.

Even so did this designing cur crouch in the Dun Cow.

The loyal quadruped is waiting for his master, and his anxiety is disinterested. The biped cur was waiting for the first streak of dawn to slip away to some more distant and safe hiding-place and sallyport than the Dun Cow, kept by a woman who was devoted to Hope, to Walter, and to Mary, and had all her wits about her--mother-wit included.

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