"Stop!" cries Sarah loudly, putting her fingers in her ears, and abandoning the search for the young clergyman's name. "I will grant that there were six, sixteen, sixty—anything to put an end to that intolerable arithmetic of yours!"

Belinda is preparing to begin on her other hand, but at this concession she lets them both drop in her lap, and ceases counting. There is a silence. Sarah's roving eyes are despondently fastened on the white earthenware stove, and Belinda's large grave gaze is straying through the window, taking in at once the poetry of the blooming pear-tree and the prose of the Bohemian railway, and the ugly straight stuccoed houses beyond it.

"What could have been your inducement in this case," she says presently, turning with a judicial air to the offender, "I am quite at a loss to conjecture; it certainly could have been neither pleasure nor profit!"

"It certainly could not," answers Sarah, sighing profoundly, and wagging her head from side to side; "anyone who saw him would exonerate me from the suspicion of either motive!"

"Such a conquest could not have even gratified your vanity!" pursues Belinda relentlessly.

"Yes, but it did!" replies Sarah, abandoning her dispirited pose, and speaking with an animation which shows that she does not altogether relish this wholesale depreciation of her latest victim; " you may not think much of him, but I can assure you that he is considered a great luminary at Oxbridge. At the house where I met him they could not make enough of him; it seems he has written a book upon the Digamma!"

"And what is the Digamma?" asks Belinda curtly, totally unmoved by this evidence of erudition.

"You do not know what the Digamma is?" cries Sarah, lifting her eyebrows, and speaking with an air of pompous astonishment. "Well, then," breaking into a laugh, and even demeaning herself so far as to be guilty of the faintest possible shadow of a wink, "to tell you a secret, no more do I!"

"You cannot live upon the Digamma, I suppose!" says Belinda grimly, not much infected by her sister's mirth.

"I should be very sorry to try!" still laughing.

"Then I am quite as much in the dark as ever!" rejoins the other, inexorably grave.

"Well, it was not only the Digamma, of course," says Sarah, frowning in reluctant retrospect; "though, as far as I could make out, that appeared to be his cheval de bataille ; but he was looked upon as a genius generally. You should have seen how they all sat at his feet—such feet!— and hung on his words. There was one girl—she was at Girton—who waited on him hand and foot; she always warmed his great-coat for him, and helped him on with his goloshes!"

"Well?"

"Well, you know," impatiently, as if stating something too obvious to be contradicted, "one would not have been human if one could have stood calmly by, and looked on. I rushed into the fray. I too warmed his great-coat and put on his goloshes. Ugh! what a size they were! I could have lived roomily and commodiously in one of them!"

"Well?"

" Well , indeed! I do not call it at all well! I call it very ill!"

"There I have the good fortune thoroughly to agree with you."

"Well, as I was saying," resuming the thread of her narrative with a heavy sigh, "I rushed into the fray. I was successful, dreadfully successful! You know the sequel, as they say in books."

"I do not know the sequel," replies Belinda sternly; "all I know is that I will have neither part nor lot in it!"

"No? and yet," fawningly, "it would come so much better from you."

"Better or worse, it will not come from me."

But there are eyes, hard, horny, and inquisitive, to which an en-tout-cas —nay, a stone wall, if need be—is as glass. The coachman checks his horses; and Sarah, leaning angrily out to bid him drive quicker, perceives that he has no alternative, if he would not drive over a burly, middle-aged figure gesticulating with raised arms and waved umbrella in mid-road, and crying: "Halt, Kutscher!" with all the power of a strong pair of lungs.

"It is no use!" says the girl, sinking back in disgusted resignation on the cushions. "It never is any use!"

The next moment the lady to whom she alludes is presenting a hot, red face, a grizzled fringe of hair, and a large-patterned black and white plaid gown, at the carriage-door.

"I was afraid you might not see me!" she says, shaking hands warmly. "How are you? Where are you going to? I thought I must just stop you for a minute, to ask where you are going to? To Moritzburg? How pleasant! I wish I were going to Moritzburg too!" Then, as no invitation follows this very broad hint: "I dare say, now, as you seem to have plenty of room, you would not mind giving me a lift."

"It would be delightful!" says Belinda, with suspicious precipitancy; "but I am afraid—"

"I do not in the least mind sitting back, if that is what you are going to say. It is all one to me how I sit. If you had travelled as much as I, it would be all one to you!"

"If Belinda had travelled as much as you," says Sarah sarcastically, "I am sure that her one hope and prayer would be to be allowed to stay at home for the rest of her life. Well," with a would-be valedictory wave of the hand, "it is too unlucky; but as we have unfortunately promised to meet some people—"

"Some people! What people?" repeats the other inquisitively. "Anyone I know, I wonder? Professor Forth, of course, for one," with a meaning smile. "I saw him setting off this morning somewhere. I knew that it must be an excursion of some kind, because he had two overcoats; but I could not make out where. I asked at his lodgings, but the Dienstmädchen did not know. And Rivers—young Rivers?— are you going to meet him too? A propos what Rivers is he? I want to find out what Rivers he is; I know so many Rivers."

"I will ask him at once," says Sarah gravely. "I will say to him, 'What Rivers are you?' Au revoir . Drive on, Kutscher."

"Where are you going to-morrow? What are you going to do to-morrow? Will you come to Wesenstein? I want you all to come to Wesenstein! With a little packing we might all get into one carriage. What do you say to a long day at Wesenstein? or, better still, Tharandt? What do you say to a long day at Tharandt?"

But the carriage has rolled inexorably away; and the latter part of these propositions is addressed to the empty air.

"A form of thanksgiving to be used on land!" says Sarah, drawing a long breath, and blowing a kiss in ironical adieu to the lessening figure of their baffled friend.

They are nearing their goal now. Along the straight avenue of young horse-chestnuts and limes they trot; the wind-swept flat plain on either hand, and the long vista of tree-shaded road, ended by the Schloss.

They are driving up to the Gasthof Au Bon Morché. Belinda shuts her eyes. If he is here, he will be to be seen at once, or not at all. If he is not here, she will be ignorant of it for yet one moment more. She shuts her eyes; but in an instant Sarah's sarcastic ejaculation, obviously called forth by the first sight of her betrothed, "My king! my king!" makes her open them again; open them to see that she has succeeded in tricking the gods; that he is here; and that, judging by his looks, he too has been shutting his eyes and dreading.

"How do you do?" says Sarah gaily, giving him her hand. "I have a message for you from Miss Wheaton; she wants to know what Rivers you are! I was so afraid of forgetting that I thought I had better deliver it at once. Think it over, I advise you, against you meet her next. Bah! he does not hear a word I say!"

A quarter of an hour later they are all seated on deal chairs at a deal table under a primitive shed that does duty as an arbour, waited on by a civil, homely Dienstmädchen in a blue bib, and eating beefsteaks. At least two of them are. Two of them are past eating. For them the beefsteak cuts juicily; for them the schnitzel swims greasily; for them the excellent light lager-bier foams in lidded mugs—in vain. It is indeed dubious whether anyone except Sarah enjoys the luncheon quâ luncheon. The Professor is doubtful as to the digestibility of the schnitzel, and more than doubtful as to the prudence of lunching out of doors in a high wind on the 2nd of May. He had indeed gone so far as to have luncheon laid in the little beer-and-smoke-stained inn parlour; but his betrothed has explained to him so kindly yet firmly that if he lunches indoors he will lunch alone, that he has sullenly submitted, merely putting on ostentatiously, one atop of another, the two overcoats which, as Miss Watson faithfully reported, he had providently brought with him. And yet, though the wind is high, it is not spiteful. It rocks playfully the tall oleanders in pots, and swings the little wooden boxes hung in the trees to oblige the birds, who find them a quite satisfactory substitute for nests, judging, at least, by the easy cheerfulness with which the short-tailed, wise-faced starlings go in and out of the tiny apertures.

Whether or not it has pleased or been digestible, luncheon is now ended, and Professor Forth is surveying the bill through his spectacles.

"Six marks, sixty pfennigs!" he says, proclaiming the total in a tone which announces how very far from content he is with it; "one mark, sixty-five pfennigs a head! A very high charge, I should say; undoubtedly prices in Germany have doubled since the war! Viermal Bifstek !" reading aloud the items—"as it turned out, zweimal would have been ample. Zweimal Kartoffeln —"

He breaks off suddenly, for Sarah has twitched the paper out of his hand.

"In mercy spare us!" she cries. "What can be more dreadful than the recapitulation of the items of the food one has just swallowed? It is like beginning luncheon all over again, to which, with my present feelings, death would be preferable."

By-and-by they set off to visit the Schloss—the four-towered Schloss, with its round red domes, and all its little pinnacles and dormer windows—falling, as they go, into two couples, though this is not accomplished without a slight manoeuvring on the part of one.

"In heaven's name stop a moment to admire this pump!" says Rivers, in an eager whisper to Belinda. "Nothing to admire in it?—of course there is not! I never saw an uglier pump in my life, but it will give them a good start!"

"Are you so sure that they are anxious to get a good start?" asks Belinda with a significant look ahead at Sarah, who, continually throwing back restless glances over her shoulder, lagging, stopping on every possible pretext, if she cherishes a desire for a tête-à-tête , certainly disguises it admirably.

"I am not at all sure," replies the young man, with a dry laugh. "What I am sure of is that I wish it."

"Do you think that her back looks as if she were being tolerably civil to him?" pursues Belinda, talking on quickly and nervously; "one can gather so much from a person's back. I am afraid that the way in which she is jerking her head about does not augur very well for him. Was not she rude to him at luncheon? he must have heard her whisper to me that he was an old skinflint."

"Perhaps they are all right when they are alone," replies Rivers sanguinely.

Belinda shakes her head.

"I doubt it!"

They have reached the Schloss and its broad slabbed terrace. Belinda is leaning on the old stone balustrade, low and weather-worn, that runs round it. Her eyes are fixed on the carved stone figures, weather-worn too, that stand out against the pallid fair sky in their old-world quaintness; the fat Cupids with abnormal Dachshunds; the ancient vases, rough with stone lilies and roses; the fat Cupids again.

Belinda looks at the Cupids, and Rivers looks at her; looks at her as a wholesome minded and bodied boy of twenty-two does look at his first love. To him nothing now exists save that opaque white cheek; that small disdainful nose, on which Sarah hangs all its owner's mischances; that lovely stature that makes other women look squat and bunchy. To him all creation that is not Belinda—sun, moon, stars, Schloss, Professor, bifsteks—is an irrelevant and impertinent accident.

"After all," he says, with a trembling in his vigorous, fresh voice, "I do not think that I should much mind how like a dog the woman I loved treated me in company, if she were—if she were—as I would have her when we were alone!"

"Would not you?" replies Belinda, suddenly changing colour at the application that she herself makes of this speech; and then, in fevered consciousness of her own untimely flush, she adds with a callous, cold laugh: "I think I should agree with the poet: " 'Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,    But why need you kick me downstairs?' "

The poor boy looks terribly thrown back; and indeed what ardent young lover would not, at such a turn given to a tender speech? And yet in her heart she had felt as tender as he, though no human being could have guessed it. Both now lean their elbows on the balustrade, and look down on the garden grass, and the stiff fir-trees cut into prim yew-shapes; so that unless you look at them very closely you would swear that they were yews. And beyond the grass and the firs comes the ruffled blue water, which like a broad moat girds the Schloss around. The water is running to-day into little waves and ridges; and trees just greening are verdantly bordering its brim. In the garden, beneath the fir-trees a pair of figures are seen soberly pacing.

"There they are!" cries Belinda, pointing to them, and thankful for a safe subject with which to break the strained silence; "is it possible that she has taken his arm? No; I thought it could not be! I wonder what progress she has made towards telling him that she does not mean to marry him."

"Is that what she is telling him?" says Rivers, roused to interest by fellow-feeling, and craning his neck to look; "unhappy old devil!"

Belinda nods.

"I think so; that is what she meant to tell him; and, if I do not mistake, his haggling over the luncheon gave him his coup de grâce ."

Her tone is cold and trenchant, as of one who would check a displeasing topic. In point of fact it is intense shyness—the shyness of hearing herself talked about, and talked about by him—that makes it so; but to a listener it has all the effect of a freezing haughtiness, repressing impudent intrusion. She hears it herself with bitterness.

"Is it any wonder that no one has ever loved me?" she says internally.

It is clear that he hears it too.

"You are offended," he cries miserably. "I wish to heaven that I had never come to-day! Everything has gone wrong! You let Professor Forth help you out of the carriage! you let him hand you the potatoes—"

She smiles involuntarily.

"On the contrary: he recommended me not to take any; he said they were rancid!"

"You let him pick up your pocket-handkerchief!"

Again she smiles more broadly.

"The day after?"

"It is improbable."

"If you are waiting," says Belinda, stopping in mid-row of the stocking she is knitting to look severely at her sister, and speaking with an extremely clear and decided accent, "for me to do it for you, you will wait, as I told you yesterday, a very long time."

"I am aware of it," replies Sarah calmly. "Since I realised that you are engaged in a little pursuit of your own, I have abandoned the idea."

"Pursuit!" cries Belinda, with a shocked start, and crimsoning. "You are the first person who ever dared to say that I pursued anyone!"

"You would have been much pleasanter if you had," rejoins Sarah coolly. "Well, do not let us quarrel over a word! I did not say what part you took in the pursuit— whether you were the hunter or the hare!"

But Belinda has stooped her angry, blonde head over her stocking, and is speechlessly knitting her resentment into it.

"I never waste time," she says chillingly, "in speculating as to whether I should like or dislike what is absolutely out of the question."

There is a slight silence. Rivers feels as if a large pail of half-frozen water had been thrown over him, and were now trickling down the nape of his neck. Belinda is still hearing, with passionate vexation, the sound of her own ungracious voice. Why is it that she never can hit the juste milieu of cool and friendly civility? How is it that her heart is so burning hot, and her words so icy cold? Her eyes, averse from meeting the reproach of his, look across to where, on the other side of the racing beck, the rocks rise straight up, and out of their clefts slight little fir-trees grow, grasping the stony soil with their shallow roots, and dainty green birches wave, and just-new creasy ferns droop and sprout, and hang their small spring ensigns.

"What an iceberg you are!" says the young man at last, in a low tone of irrepressible mortification.

And so it may be; but as it is addressed to a person who is utterly incapable of making use of it, it is, like most other advice, wasted. To hurry the pace a little! For days and days afterwards the vile phrase recurs to her, dinning in her ears. As often—and that is not seldom— as the terror which had seized her in the Grosse Garten returns, so often does the brutal consolation with which her sister had tried to allay it. And as the priceless days slip by—slip away out of the fingers stretched forth in such a fever to detain them—it takes in her ears a horrible inflection of irony. Over and over and over again it keeps saying itself to her, as she lies awake at night, hour after hour—she can lie awake with the best of them now— hearing the engines screech and the trains thunder along the Bohmischer Bahn; watching the now withering blossoms drop from the pear-tree in the keen moonlight, and reckoning over to herself, until her brain grows dull and tardy sleep releases her, the small and diminishing hoard of precious hours during which there will be any object in living. For that what makes the essence of these days may not pass, may last on through a long transfigured lifetime, is a hope too glorious for her to dare lift her wet and dazzled eyes to its face. And meanwhile the days themselves are passing! Oh, how they are passing! To hurry the pace! How can she hurry the pace? she asks herself desperately, in the watches of the night, unconsciously accepting the detestable phrase. What can she, being she, do? How can she, tied down by her nature, by her stiff-necked virgin pride, by the very force of her dumb, pent passion, put out a finger to help herself? As easily can she make the grey irises of her eyes coal-black. Is it her fault that all strong emotion with her translates itself into a cold, hard voice, and a chill set face? With other women it translates itself into dimples and pink blushes and lowered eyes. Ah! but do they feel as she does? Sarah, for instance. When do men ever leave Sarah's company with the down-faced, baffled, white look with which Rivers has more than once quitted hers? Preening themselves rather; with sleeked feathers and cosseted vanity.

"I am not of the stuff of which the women that men love are made!" she says, thinking with an envious humility of her sister's graces, and staring blankly at the stove, beginning to glimmer white in the dawn. But for such a radical fault of nature and constitution what remedy can there be? Tamely to copy her sister's airy charms and light coquetries?

"It would be the donkey playing the lap-dog!" she cries bitterly.

And yet, despite all their mischances, and their agues, and their desperations, what superb days these are! Few? Yes, perhaps. But when one reflects how much acute happiness may be packed into five minutes, and how many five minutes there are in a month, these two may be accounted to have been largely dowered, seeing that to many a one, not held to be specially spited by fortune, it is not given in all his or her lifetime to attain to one such day. Days when round each corner lurks a splendid possibility; days when each ring at the bell may mean that Heaven has opened. Very often it means nothing of the kind; it means Miss Watson, or Gustel, or a parcel, but it may .

In later life you may be as fortunate as you please; a laurel garland round your head, a colossal balance at Coutts', a chaste, fond wife and paragon children, but Heaven can no longer pounce upon you from round the street corner.

Yes, superb days! though on one or two of them the east wind blew piercingly, sweeping across the wide plain; and on another one or two the rain slid down from the heavy clouds, and blurred the windows.

But if it blurred the windows, did it not thereby make the task of Miss Watson's spyglass a more difficult one? and could the wind reach them in the little pinewood behind the bleak Barracks, where they walked safe and warm on strewn fir needles, and listened to its harmless scolding far above their happy heads.

How often they meet! how perpetually, how always! In the Alt Markt, buying jonquils of the ugly German Fraus, as they sit under their great cotton umbrellas, queening it over their carrots and radishes; with the old houses, all different heights and shapes, russet-red roofed, endlessly dormer-windowed, standing round; at Plauen under the cool cherry orchards; at Meissen, in the hot Fabrik; in the NeuStadt, in the Alt-Stadt—everywhere. If, in after years, they revisit the bright city, what spot in all its precincts will be empty and innocent of associations to them?

Superb days! But they are going. Racing-pace they gallop by. How will it be when they are gone?

As the time passes, she grows ever less and less in a condition to face this problem. By-and-by she refuses to face it at all. When it comes it comes; but till then let her not be defrauded of her birthright. Let her too, like the Mayflies and the Painted Ladies, have her span of careless, giddy bliss.

Whenever the conversation turns upon their departure, their journey, their arrival in London, upon anything that lies beyond the horizon of the now and the here, if it be possible, she leaves the room; if it be not possible, she feverishly seeks to divert the talk into other channels.

But if she can fight thought off pretty well in the day, the variegated, distracting, kaleidoscope day, it indemnifies itself at night. At night there it is, and nothing but it; no flickering leaves, or scudding clouds, or passers-by; nothing but it: an image drawn on night's plain black canvas with a hard, cutting clearness, as of an acid biting into steel; so that she must look at it.

As for her, at this time she would be thankful that there were no night at all. She does not need its refreshment. Without it her every power seems strung up to the highest pitch of efficiency, and she dreads, oh how she dreads its solitude and silence! In the daytime, however unconventionally early or improbably late may be the hour, there is always a possibility, nay, a likelihood, of seeing his strapping figure and his burning eyes following the infant stolidity of the page, Tommy, into the salon. But in the night this is impossible. The night, therefore, is time absolutely wasted; now, too, when there is so little time left to waste. Of what use is it but for lying broad awake in, counting up how many hours the different moments, half-hours, of their meetings make? To her, just so much of life is worth reckoning as life at all; the rest is unimportant padding.

And he? As to him, the pavement of the quiet Lüttichau Strasse before her door is worn hollow by his footsteps; his eyes devour her; his tongue stutters in lame speech to her, and altogether omits to answer when addressed by anyone else. He has abandoned all other occupations in life but that of dogging her. But he has not asked her to be his wife.

To how much more purpose would be that one short practical question than all his resultless, love-sick manoeuvres; than all the enormous nosegays with which her room is over-filled and over-scented—for she cannot bear to throw away even the dead ones.

Perhaps this thought crosses her mind now and again. It certainly does Sarah's. It not only crosses it, but finds not unfrequent egress through her lips.

And meanwhile May is three-parts over. The 24th of that month is reached, and, indeed, is almost ended; for dinner is past, and the girls and their grandmother are loitering over their light and leisurely dessert.

Their grandmother is an old lady with a bright eye—strangely bright, considering that it has wept, or been supposed to weep, for a good-natured husband, five promising sons, and three dutiful daughters—with a skin that it is still no penance and that, if tradition lies not, it was once considered a high treat to kiss, and with a cap whose secret will die with her.

"Granny's religious principles are slack," Sarah is wont to say; "her morality is hazy, and in moments of excitement I have even known her let fly an oath; but, on the other hand, she is thoroughly clean, and she always laughs at my jokes; so that, taking her all round, I could better spare a better woman. One knows that if she were called upon for any of the sublimer virtues of life, she would be found wanting. But, after all, the sublimer virtues are the thousand- pound notes that one seldom needs to change, and granny has plenty of the sixpences."

At the present moment her attention is absorbed in the effort, aided by a cracknel, to induce her new pug Punch to give three cheers for the Queen, with the thorough mastery over which elegant accomplishment he has arrived credited. On the present occasion, however, this talent seems inclined to hang fire, for, though in general a remarkably free barker, he is now, relatively to his sovereign, either disloyally silent, or irrationally incoherent. He will give ten cheers, or one and a half, or five muffled ones and a sneeze, but he will not give three.

"Granny," says Sarah, desisting from a vain effort to make Slutty cheer too, an endeavour which the latter frustrates by instantly rolling over on her back, and remaining in that position until all attempt at education is suspended—"granny, do you know that we are going to have a long and happy day at that everlasting Wesenstein to-morrow?"

"By all means, my dear; so as you do not ask me to go with you."

"I believe," says Sarah, regarding her grandmother with an air of cool dispassionate speculation, "that if we were to tell you that we were going to Greenwich Fair, or the Argyle Rooms, you would say 'By all means, my dears!' Only that I am not at all so sure that in that case you would add, 'So as you do not expect me to go with you'!"

The old lady laughs pleasantly, as if her granddaughter had paid her a compliment.

"Are you going to take your sweethearts with you?" asks she gaily; "your popinjays? No, Punch! three cheers ! Nobody asked you to sneeze for the Queen!"

"Our popinjays?" cries Sarah, delighted. "Not mine, thank God! By-the-bye, granny, as I have no further use for him, I am thinking of arranging a marriage between you and him. Your ages are suitable; and, though you have slightly the advantage in externals, he is greatly your superior in intellect."

"God bless my soul! No, thank you, child!" replies Mrs. Churchill with energy; "I prefer Belinda's."

"So do we all!" says Sarah, with a dry look.

At this last speech, Belinda, who has been growing ever hotter and more restless since the word "Wesenstein" was mentioned, suddenly leaves her seat under the pretext of comforting Slutty. Slutty hates Punch and his tricks, and the kudos that attends them, and has now squeezed herself under a piece of furniture to which, in general, only Miss Watson's voice has power to banish her, and from beneath which there is now nothing visible of her but a small spiteful face, full of mortification and ire. As she firmly resists all Belinda's blandishing inducements to her to come forth, though the agitated beat of her tail upon the floor proves that she is not wholly unmoved by them, the young girl desist, and passes into the neighbouring salon, where, as there is no one to comment on her actions, she at once walks rapidly to the window, and looks eagerly down the dull and empty street. Not for long, however. Ere many moments have passed, a hand is laid on her shoulder; a rallying voice sounds in her ear:

"Come! he cannot be in sight yet! He will surely have the good feeling to let us swallow our coffee in peace."

Belinda gives a great start, and angrily shakes off her sister's touch.

"I cannot think how it concerns you," she says testily, in intense vexation at having been surprised on the watch; "he does not trouble you much!"

"That is the rub," replies Sarah calmly. "If he did, my nose would probably be flattened against the pane as well as yours. But seriously, I should not mind how often he came—not much, at least—not more," in candid parenthesis, "than I always hate seeing other people made love to, if it seemed to lead to anything; but, as I live, I cannot see that you are a step further advanced than you were when I spoke to you in the Grosse Garten three weeks ago. Come now, are you?"

For a moment Belinda is silent. Perhaps she has put that question to her own heart before now, and been as unable as now to give a satisfactory answer to it.

Instead of replying, "What a mercy it would be!" she says irritably, bringing her hands sharply together in a wrathful clasp, "If you could be persuaded to mind your own business, and leave me to be happy in my own way!"

"Happy in your own way!" repeats Sarah, with a shrewd look. "Yes; and when he has taken his twelve German lessons and gone home to his papa, the ironmonger—ironmaster—what is he?— how happy you will be in your own way then, eh?"

The other's hands unclasp, her arms drop limply to her sides; a sudden cold pallor chases the fierce vermilion from her cheeks.

"I suppose," she says slowly, "that there is a sort of coarse and brutal common sense in what you say; but I wonder," her voice breaking a little, "that it does not occur to even you, that since I am I, and not you—"

"Granny and I both agree," interrupts Sarah, "that it is the most tedious courtship we ever assisted at. Granny's idée fixe is that it should be arranged by the first, so that he may travel with us and look after the luggage: for my own part, I rather doubt if even after the twelve lessons he will be able to take our tickets and order our baths; at least," breaking into a laugh, I know that my Schatz was not, though he is in correspondence with half the savants of Germany."

Belinda has turned again to the window, but, that her motives may be beyond suspicion, she is ostentatiously gazing in the opposite direction to that whence Rivers will come. An occasional writhing, shivering movement of her shoulders alone betrays what suffering her sister's ruthless and irrepressible rummaging in her holy of holies is causing her.

"We do not blame him," continues Sarah, with a candid air; "in fairness, I must say that we do not blame him. He is always trying to pour out his poor little tale like water out of a jug; and you, for reasons best known to yourself, are always corking it back again. Mark my words," emphasizing the sentence with three pats on Slutty's chest—Slutty lying, as usual, reversed and Cleopatra-like upon her lap— "you will do it once too often!"

"What shall I do once too often?" cries poor Belinda in an agonised voice, wheeling suddenly round at bay. "What do I do? If you could only explain that to me! I believe," beginning to falter, "that you mean well; I would—would try to take any hints you could give me."

"I have always told you that your high and mighty airs would be the death of you," rejoins Sarah, not perceptibly conciliated by her sister's humility. "If you could make them up into a parcel and toss them into the Elbe, and perhaps throw in your high nose too, you would be a better and a happier woman."

"But I cannot!" very regretfully.

"I confess," says Sarah, after a pause, her eyes speculatively fixed on the two smart shoes extended before her—shoes whose unnatural altitude of heel, arch of instep, and crowding of lacerated toes proclaim them of the highest fashion—"I confess that I am a little disappointed that the news of our approaching departure did not bring him to the point. I should have thought that when that fact transpired, not even you could have iced him into silence."

"He does not yet know that we are going," replies Belinda murmuringly. "I have not told him."

"Have not you?" cries Sarah, joyfully leaping up and beginning to frolic about on one toe. "Courage! Then our best card is still unplayed!" Suddenly ceasing her frisking, approaching her sister, and speaking with great eagerness: "You must tell him to-morrow, at Wesenstein. Choose a good place; well in the wood if possible, out of eye and ear and Watson shot. Be a little depressed, and make him ask you what is the matter with you. If you could let fall a tear or two? No? Ah!" with a gesture of impatience, "I am sure you will spoil the whole situation! Dear me!" with an accent of sincere regret, "what a charming thing I could have made of it!"

"I will tell him," replies Belinda meekly, yet wincing.

"If it is not brought to a crisis at Wesenstein," pursues Sarah brutally, "I warn you that I shall ask him his intentions. I have been trying to spirit up granny to do it, but you know how she always shirks every duty. It would have come better from her, but since she will not, I must. I shall tell him that you are wasting away! I wonder," with an amused look at her sister's firm-fleshed, healthful beauty, "whether he will be idiot enough to believe it?"

For all answer, his heart-hunger mastering him, the poor boy fastens on the hand of which she speaks. There is a singing in his ears and a fog before his eyes; but he has it. In his own shaking fingers he holds that sacred palm, that never before, save in meaningless comings and goings, has he touched. In all its satin warmth and smoothness, it lies in his. Will he ever let man or devil rob him of it? He would tell you "No." So the supreme moment has come, and she recognises it.

"Do you see that I am to take a long journey?" she says, stooping her quivering face over their two locked hands.

What more propitious moment could even Sarah choose in which to tell him of their departure? But she does not think of Sarah.

For a moment he seems not to take in the meaning of her words. Is there room in all his seeing, hearing, understanding, for aught but the one surpassing fact that his lady has deigned at last to lay her hand in his, and that her starry eyes, soft, merciful, passionate, are, through a splendid curtain of tears, bent on his own.

After a while, "Are you going away?" he says mistily. Even yet words come but strangely to him, and his head swims.

"Yes," she answers, she, too, scarce knowing what she speaks; "the cherry-blossoms are gone, and the lilacs will soon go, and so must we!" Often beforehand has she rehearsed the scene in which she is to tell him of her going. Imagination has tricked it out in various shapes and colours, but the reality is unlike them all.

He expresses neither regret nor surprise —he expresses nothing. He only lifts the long lily hand that he holds, and laying its palm against his burning mouth, softly passes his lips to and fro over the little fair lines in which her history is written.

Where is his timidity now? It was only her displeasure that had ever made him afraid; and even he can see that there is no displeasure here. She is pale, indeed, but it is with the pallor of conquering passion; and very still, but it is the stillness of one who, looking up in awful joy, sees the dawn of a superb new world breaking upon her.

"Are you sorry?" she says, with a half- sob. "You do not tell me whether you are sorry."

He is no longer lying at her feet. He is kneeling in his beautiful glad manhood at her knee.

" Sorry !" he repeats, with a sort of ecstatic scorn. "Why should I be sorry? It is only you who can ever make me sorry again!"

So it has come. For a moment she closes her eyes, as one faint with a bliss whose keenness makes it cross the borderland and become pain, and so is gathered into his strenuous embrace.

For one second she lies on his heart. For one second the breath of her sweet sighs stirs his hair. Their faces are nearing each other slowly, in the luxury of a passionate delay, to make yet more poignant the pleasure of their supreme meeting at last, when—

She turns her head anxiously in the direction whence she expects him to appear, a creeping disquietude beginning, despite herself, to invade her heart. Is it possible that she can have mistaken his directions? Is it possible that, as she is waiting expectantly for him here, so may he be waiting expectantly for her in some other corner of the large pleasure-gardens? But she dismisses the idea. Did not his few words drop, distinct and clear as articulate words could do, into her ear? Has not she been saying them over to herself ever since? There is nothing for it but patience.

Again she fixes her eyes, not so untroubled as at first, upon the Teich, the swan-house, the swans. To the latter a child is throwing bread; a homely burgher couple have stopped to applaud. In the fostering sunshine the horse-chestnut leaves seem to grow momently larger and greener as she looks. Why does not he come? A sense of hurt maiden dignity, of hot and cruel shame at being thus made to appear so far the more eager of the two, at being kept thus long and unworthily waiting at her first love-rendezvous, has come to complicate and intensify her anxiety. In all the mental pictures that through her disturbed and tossing night she has drawn of this meeting, the one contingency that has never crossed her mind as most distantly possible, is that he should be a defaulter from it; he, whose mad over-eagerness to fulfil any engagement in which she is to have a part, has over and over again kept him raging up and down the Lüttichau Strasse for hours and hours in rain and shine, in fervid waiting, until the time has come when he may decently make his appearance. And to-day he is already half an hour late! It is impossible—incredible! And yet if any untoward accident had occurred to prevent him, surely he would have written! Perhaps even now there is a note awaiting her at home. Goaded by this thought, she takes two feverish steps in the direction of a return; then, arrested by the reflection that he may arrive in her absence and find her gone, she stops in painful irresolution. To sit still and look at the swans any longer is at all events impossible.

She walks—but with how different a tread to that with which she had at first approached the spot!—she walks a little away; not so far as to lose the bench, to which her hopes still cling, from sight, but far enough to get a good view down the great main drive. With her trembling hand lifted to shield her eyes, she strains her gaze eagerly down it. Oh, if she could but catch the most distant glimpse of him! Under the trees spreads in glory the dazzling strong spring grass, with its brightness toned down here and there by the shadows of the dark tree-trunks, that in their afternoon quiet lie stilly on it. There is nothing!

With a sort of sob in her throat that shocks herself, she is turning away, when, at the very other end of the avenue, she becomes aware of a man's figure that has suddenly come within eye-range. It is so distant that it is no taller than a pin; but surely it has something of his walk and gait.

Catching at this new hope, she advances quickly to meet the figure. Yes; it certainly has a look of him. Well, she will not upbraid him. No hurt self-love nor petty sulks shall be permitted to mar the heavenly harmony of the first outpouring of their hearts into each other. She will not even ask him why he is late. No doubt he has some good reason, which in his own time he will tell her. But, alas! she may keep her high resolves for another occasion. She will not need them now. It requires no very near approach to the stranger to reveal that he is not Rivers; that he is not even, when you come close to him, in the very least like him.

It is such a bitter disappointment that she turns into a side alley to hide her tears; but quickly drying them again, hastily returns to the meeting-place, in the panic fear that he may have appeared there from some unexpected point of the compass. But he is not there; and as she ascertains this, with a blank heart-sinking, the city clocks strike the half-hour. It is half-past five! For a whole hour she has been dancing attendance on his pleasure; waiting here, ridiculous and befooled.

With a movement of strong indignation she begin to walk swiftly homewards; but before she has gone five yards, her purpose slacks. She cannot yet bear to face the fact that this is what her day's splendid and apparently so sure promises are to end in—this humiliated, baulked, back- coming! She will give him five minutes more. Possibly, not very improbably even, he may have mistaken the appointed hour, and have thought that it was half-past five instead of half-past four. In that case he would be scarcely at all late, even now.

A little recovered by this new flicker of hope, she sits down. Yes; she will give him five minutes more, and during all these five she will not look round once, or send her eyes in search of him. Perhaps that will bring her luck. But it does not. The five minutes are gone, and he is not here. She gives him ten more, and then five again. Twice she repeats her little feverish excursion to the head of the main avenue; these times she is not even deluded by the will-of-the-wisp of a possible resemblance in any of the few saunterers that occupy it, to him whom she, with a now so evident hopelessness, seeks.

It is only the clocks striking six that at length makes her really and desperately turn homewards. Each one of their tranquil strokes seems to her the beat of a cruel hammer on her heart. But putting out of the question the bootlessness of any further delay, self-respect, at length aroused, forbids her to add any more moments to the humiliating and miserable hour and a half she has already spent.

"If I had had any proper pride, I should have gone home an hour ago," she says to herself in bitterest dejection, as she passes along. She holds her head, usually carried a little loftily, well down. It seems to her as if everybody who meets her must read in her face her deep discomfiture, and the fool's errand on which she has been. She quickens her pace to get away from them; to be safe out of the streets so full of gaudy light, where at any time she may meet an acquaintance—worse still, one of their yesterday's party; worst of all, Miss Watson.

As she nears the Lüttichau Strasse her distress lightens a little; the hope of finding there a note, a message, some solving of this most inhuman riddle, buoys up her steps and gives life again to her looks. It cannot be but that there must be some clearing up of this wretched contretemps . It will have, as she says to herself, to be a very bright clearing up indeed, to indemnify her for the sufferings of the afternoon—that very afternoon whose anticipated joys she had pitied every chance passer-by that she met, for not being about to share.

"Well," cries Sarah, standing in the open salon door, and looking expectantly beyond her sister's figure for another, "where is he? what have you done with him? I want to fall on his neck and kiss him. I have long," laughing, "been wishing for an excuse to do it, and now I have an excellent one."

Belinda had not meant to have entered the salon. She had hoped to have slunk unperceived to her room; for has not Tommy, in answer to her fevered questions, philosophically assured her that there has been neither note nor message left for her in her absence?

"Do not," she says hoarsely; "do not laugh. I cannot bear it. He was not there; he never came."

"Never came!" echoes Sarah in a tone of bottomless wonder, her pretty eyes and mouth opening with a stare and a gape. "Then," gradually recovering the power of speech, "then where have you been, may I ask—what have you been doing all this time?"

"I have been waiting for him," answers Belinda, trying to speak steadily, though at that humiliating confession such a tide of crimson rushes over her poor proud face as one would think must leave all the rest of her body bloodless.

"But it is monstrous!" cries the other in a tone of the wildest excitement; "ca n'a pas de nom; there is some mistake. He is a man, he is a gentleman; of course he has written—he has sent?"

Belinda shakes her head.

"No; I asked Tommy."

" Tommy !" repeats Sarah in a tone of the most contemptuous indignation. " Tommy , indeed! That boy is ripening for the tread-mill or the gallows, or both, as fast as he can. You will hardly believe that after what I said to him—you heard me—he showed them all up at once."

Then, ringing the bell violently, "Tommy," she says very sharply, "how dare you say that there is not a note for Miss Churchill? Of course there is a note. Go this moment to look for it, and do not come back without it!"

Paying no attention whatever to his asseverations, she waves him from the room; and then follow a few moments of painful waiting. At the end of them Tommy returns with, sure enough, a missive of some kind on a salver.

"I told you how it would be!" exclaims Sarah, triumphantly pouncing upon it and the unlucky child at once. "How dare you tell such a story, you naughty boy? Do you know where liars go to?"

And he may pour into her unheeding ear his faltering attempt to lay the blame on Gustel, who answers the bell when he is out; she does not hear a word he says. In a fury of impatient anxiety, she is stooping over Belinda's shoulder: Belinda, whose shaking fingers can scarcely tear the envelope asunder.

A thin blue paper falls out. It is the bill from a Porzellan Handlung for a couple of Meissen figures purchased there a week ago. In an uncontrollable spasm of misery, she throws it on the floor and bursts into tears.

"I took their tickets for them," pursues the unconscious narrator—"I never mind trouble—indeed, I insisted upon it. To tell truth, I was a little glad of the opportunity to find out where they were going to book to, about which they had made rather a foolish mystery, when, just as I was counting my change, whom should I see coming up to the ticket-office but young Rivers!"

"Well?" Even Sarah is a little breathless.

"'And what brings you here, pray?' I said. 'Are you come, too, to see the Rays off?' He did not hear me. I was prepared for that; you know you explained to me that he was a little deaf. By-the-way, that deafness should be seen to at once, and so I shall tell him, if I ever meet him again."

If she ever meets him again ! Belinda is leaning forward in an attitude of the acutest strained listening; her heart is beating against the edge of the table with loud, hard blows.

"Well, anyhow, the poor boy's character is cleared up," says Sarah gaily, sweeping in her long peignoir to the window, and standing blithely looking out at the tulips and the starlings—as brightly pretty as the former, as robustly cheerful as the latter. "After all, he has not been driven away by your unladylike warmth, as you had quite made up your mind last night; and as to his father, if it is he, our grief must be chastened by the thought that we have never set eyes upon him. Well, I suppose I must not spend the day in my dressing- gown," walking to the door.

Neither must Belinda; and yet, for long after her sister has left her, she sits, still poring over the meagre sheet that is her first love-letter. She laughs derisively. Will it be her last, too? At that thought she sets herself to weary calculations. It is, without stopping—he will, of course, stop nowhere between Dresden and London—a thirty-six hours' journey. Probably five or six hours more will be occupied in getting on to Yorkshire. It is a four days' post from England to Dresden. Even if he write to her immediately on arriving—a most unlikely hypothesis—it cannot be much less than a week before she hears. There must be five or six absolutely void black days, that yet will have the same complement of hours in them as the day at Moritzburg or the day at Wesenstein. She lays her hot forehead on the cool wooden chair-back. Oh, if they could but be slept through!

But at this moment the entrance of her maid, with the usual paraphernalia of her toilet, sufficiently reminds her that they cannot. They cannot be slept through! They must be dressed through, talked through, eaten through, made expeditions through, joked through. Worst of all, his departure, its cause, his probable or improbable return, he himself, must be continually discussed and worn threadbare in her hearing.

This, indeed, is an evil from which she suffers for only two days. After that, he being gone, and never having sought to make himself specially acceptable to any member of the little society save one, he slips from their talk and their thoughts.

She is deeply thankful when their chatter about him ceases, and yet angry with them for so soon forgetting him. And meanwhile the days in summer procession pace stately by, full of sap and growth and laughter. The date of the Churchill departure is now fixed for the 5th of June; and as that period approaches, a freezing panic fear begins to clutch Belinda more and more tightly in its hold—the fear that her own going may antedate the arrival of his letter; that he may write to her here, and the letter not be forwarded. The many tales she has heard of lives dismally wrecked upon some such small accident throng her memory.

The house is full of signs of an approaching déménagement ; full of packing, disarranging, bustling. It is mostly full also of German officers, who, being aware that their time for enjoying the society and the wit of their love-worthy Sarah is all too quickly passing, are resolved to have nothing to reproach themselves with in the way of not having availed themselves of it while they were able. Some of them are not unwilling to extend their endearments to the elder sister, seeing her no longer monopolized by her surly fellow-country- man; but she has received their compliments so blankly, that, ashamed of their brief infidelity, they have clanked hastily back to their first love, who sees them go and return with the same joyous indifference.

Belinda has been innocent of the least intention to snub them, but how can one receive pretty speeches—any speeches intelligently, when one is continually doing a sum in one's head—36 and 5, 4I; I day from 4 days; 1 day from 3 days, etc.?

The packing is not of so wholly occupying a nature as to exclude incidental amusements. It does not even forbid a farewell excursion to Tharandt; an excursion planned by Sarah and her rout of Uhlans; with some necessary padding of a lenient chaperon, and compliant girls.

Belinda has believed herself equal to sharing it. Tharandt is rendered agonizing by no associations. She has never visited Tharandt in his company, but, at the last moment, a trifle robs her of her fortitude— the sight of her cobwebby Wesenstein gown, extended with unconscious tactless cruelty by her maid on the bed. She throws herself down, ungovernably sobbing, beside it. It seems like the husk of her lost happiness. By-and-by they are all gone, and the house is left to her and to silence. It is deserted even by the dogs, who have been taken out driving by Mrs. Churchill; Slutty, supinely indifferent to view and air, curled at the carriage-bottom, and Punch standing up on his hind-legs, with his forepaws on the carriage-side, like an unsteady heraldic lion.

Belinda laughs a little at the thought of him as she returns to the salon, which is beginning to wear a desolate look, reduced to its own lodging-house furniture and shorn of the graces bestowed upon it by the Churchills' Indian rugs and Turkish chair-backs. Its new ugliness, meeting her eye, seems' to add to the vexation of her spirit. The sunlight on the street vexes her too. She wanders for a while aimlessly about the room, and then drops as aimlessly into a chair. To an observer it would seem that she were quite without occupation. But it is not so. She is still at work upon that sum. She has just finished it, or rather she has just begun it afresh, when an unexpected interruption drives it, not away—nothing, alas! could do that—but into the background of her mind.

The summer afternoon is at its drowsiest, even the flies buzz inertly along the pane, when the room-door opens and Professor Forth looks in.

"I beg your pardon," he says formally, "but I think your page must have been misinformed; he tells me that Sarah is not at home."

At the sound of his voice, separated by how many seas and continents from her thoughts, Belinda starts to her feet; then, conjuring suddenly up a civil smile, says gently:

"But I am afraid he is not misinformed. I am afraid she is out. Did you expect to find her?"

He has entered the room now in his hard and graceless academic black, which somehow looks out of character with the light-coloured room and the blazing day.

"Naturally I expected to find her," he replies sharply, "since it is by her own appointment that I am here. After evading on various trivial pretexts every meeting proposed by me for the past week, she herself gave me a distinct and definitive rendezvous for this hour and day. I am punctual to the moment!" glancing angrily at the Dresden clock.

"I am sadly afraid that she has forgotten all about it," replies Belinda, bursting into a helpless laugh; but indeed there is no greater fallacy than that one may not laugh heartily, violently, and not hysterically, when one's heart is breaking; "she has gone out upon an expedition."

"She is always going out upon expeditions," retorts he snappishly.

Belinda sighs; her mirth vanished as quickly as it came. She has no energy to take up the cudgels for Sarah, of whose conduct no one can think worse than she does, and of whose meditated villainy she is guiltily aware.

"She is young," she says lamely.

"I cannot see that that is any valid apology for a systematic neglect of all the more serious duties of life," he replies fretfully.

He has walked to the window, where he now stands drowned in a bath of golden radiance. Never has he looked less lovable; ill-humour rendering yet more pinched and captious his pinched pedant face; and never has Belinda felt so charitably towards him. "He is not amiable; Heaven knows that he is not attractive," she says to herself; "so much the worse for him. But he is unhappy; what better claim could he have upon my sympathy?"

"Do you want her for anything special?" she asks not unkindly, going up and standing beside him in the rain of sunbeams in her large young beauty; "anything in which I can help you?"

It is obvious that the idea had never occurred to him that in her he should find either the ability or the willingness to aid him.

"You are very good," he answers stiffly; "the fact is, I wanted to throw together a few thoughts upon the Idea of Colour among the Athenians," glancing at a bundle of notes and papers in his hands, "and I entirely depended upon Sarah to be my secretary. She is perfectly aware," with a revived and extreme exasperation of tone, "of the affection in my eyes which precludes the possibility of my writing more than a certain number of hours a day, and which keeps me here in the middle of term, unavoidably absent from my post and Oxbridge."

A paralysis of fear nails her to her chair. She feels an impulse of anger-against Sarah for doing what she herself is incapable of; for her quick movement towards the tray, her hasty turning over of the family's correspondence. There is a second's pause—a pause during which hope still lives: then in a moment it is dead. Sarah's voice would tell her that, even if her words did not.

"I am afraid there is nothing very interesting for you," she says reluctantly, tossing her three or four letters without looking at her. Belinda's heart dies; then suddenly there flares up a tiny flame of hope in it again. Possibly Sarah may not recognise his handwriting. Probably it is so disguised and disfigured by trouble and emotion as to be unrecognisable. Was not this the case with her note? She snatches at the letters and looks dizzily from one to the other of the superscriptions. Alas, no! they are all in the handwriting of familiar and habitual correspondents. She has told herself all night that her expectations were not highly raised for today; that to-day is the first day on which it would be possible to hear; that, being only possible, it is not also probable; that her chances are better for to-morrow or the day after. And yet, now that the disappointment has come, it seems to her ruinous and final. Her first movement is to dash the letters down on her lap; then, with that instinct of self-respect which parts us from the savage and the beast, remembering that Tommy's round gaze is upon her, she picks up one, and shakily unfolding it, lets her misery-shaded eyes fall on the page. Only for a moment, however; a fresh thought makes her drop it and fly to the papers.

In a second she has torn open one of the English journals, the Standard ; and seizing the advertisement sheet, greedily turns to the column of births, deaths, and marriages. She runs her eye down the names; she will not allow this horrible swimming to blind her; she will read for herself.

"Belinda is late," says Mrs. Churchill, drawing herself up into a sitting posture, the first preparatory step towards the unavoidable, dreaded move upstairs.

"I hope she will not come back until Jane is finished," answers Sarah warmly, hesitating for an instant in the choice of a pigment; while Jane opens her mouth in a large, bored, patient yawn.

"Perhaps she did not find it so tiresome as she expected," says Mrs. Churchill, reluctantly taking the second step towards departure, and rising to her feet.

"Perhaps not," replies Sarah absently, drawing back her head the better to judge of the effect of a large splash of gamboge, just applied upon Jane's right cheek.

"What an object you are making of that poor dog!" laughing lazily.

"She likes it!" replies Sarah gravely. "She thinks it is becoming. Do not tell her it is not. If she is a success, I mean to paint the others as Harlequin and Columbine!"

"I wish Belinda would come," says Mrs. Churchill, with a little comfortable curiosity in nowise akin to the loving, foolish solicitude that thinks that some unlikely misfortune must have happened to its beloved, if he or she be detained five minutes beyond his or her usual time.

"I hope she will not come until Jane is finished!" repeats Sarah seriously, working away with redoubled ardour.

"I think she must have been amused."

"H'm!" replies Sarah dubiously. "If she is, she is the first person in whom that emotion was ever provoked by an afternoon drum; and Belinda is not easily amused. I think," with quiet pride, "that Jane will amuse her. Ah, how provoking! Here she is!"

In effect, as the last words leave her lips the door opens, and her sister enters. If your eyes were shut, or if you were blind, your ear would never have told you that it was a young person's entrance, so measured and unelastic is her step.

"Do not come here! Do not look at Jane!" cries Sarah in an agonized voice, hastily throwing the cloth on which she has been wiping her brushes over Jane's long-suffering back. "Stay where you are! No! Now you may come!"

"Which am I to do?" asks Belinda; and her voice has as little spring in it as her step.

"Well?" cries Mrs. Churchill in a voice of cheerful expectancy, ready to abridge her dressing-time, to sit down again and be amused.

"Well?" replies Belinda unresponsively.

She has advanced to the fire, and now stands there, a foot on the fender, for the evening is chill; while the cheerful flames, upspringing, play upon the uncheerful beauty of her face, and lend a little of their own dancing to the "Eyes too expressive to be blue, Too lovely to be gray," that have no dancing of their own in them.

"You are the worst person in the world to send out," says Mrs. Churchill, disappointed and cross; "for all the news you bring back, you might as well stay at home."

A couple of years ago, Belinda would have pleasantly acquiesced in her own lack of observation; would have cheerfully tried to remedy it. Now she only answers, with a sullen look:

"What is there to tell? What is there ever to tell about a drum? There was a mob of women, and a smell of hot seal-skins!"

"Not a man, of course?" asks Sarah from the distant corner of the room, whither she has retired with the inchoate Jane, to pursue her artistic labours unseen.

"How glad I am I did not go!"

Belinda smiles. When she smiles, you see even more clearly than when she is grave the inexpressible hardening which has happened to her face.

"There were two or three men."

"The usual refuse that you meet in a second-class literary salon, I suppose," rejoins Sarah contemptuously. "Dirty little poets, and greasy little positivists?"

"I hope I have not chosen an inopportune moment for my visit?"

"Not at all! not at all!" she answers hastily; but the composure with which she had entered the room, had first addressed him, is gone; a fever has come into her cheek, and a hurry into her words. "As I told you, I am glad to see you. I want to talk to you. Why have not you gone back to Oxbridge?"

"I am to return by the 4.45 train," he replies; "and I thought that I could not better utilize the moments left me than by—"

"Yes, yes, I understand," she cries, brusquely pushing aside his civilities. "I want to ask you—I want you to tell me— I suppose that you are a competent judge —is not it quite possible for a person to live entirely by the intellect?"

He looks at her doubtfully. Such a question in the mouth of a Churchill his experience of Sarah has taught him profoundly to distrust.

"I mean," she says, nervously plucking at the Japanese hand-screen that she has taken up to shade her face—hot, but not with fire heat—"I mean," panting a little, "do not you think that that is the best life—the most satisfactory on the whole— the least liable to interruption and disappointment —that is built upon—upon— books, you know—upon the—the mind!"

"You must be aware," he answers frigidly, "that the whole tendency of my teaching is to show that the pursuit of knowledge is the only one that really and abundantly rewards the labour bestowed upon it."

"You think so?" she answers breathlessly, leaning eagerly forward, and fixing her large heart-hungry eyes upon him. "You think that it would be enough —that it would satisfy one—that one would not need anything beyond?"

There is an inexpressibly sorrowful yearning in the accent with which she pronounces this last phrase. Oh, if he could but furnish her with this anodyne, how she would fall on her knees and bless him!

"If my phrase offends you, I will change it!" he answers formally. " Since you are sincere in your desire for a—"

But again he breaks off. There is a ring at the door-bell.

"You have visitors," he says, in an annoyed voice. "We shall be interrupted."

"No, we shall not," she replies, shaking her head. "Tommy knows that when you are here, I am not at home to anyone."

It is a sentence susceptible of a flattering interpretation, that, indeed, would seem to bear no other, but it is uttered as such indifferent matter-of-fact that he would be indeed a coxcomb who was elated by it.

"Please go on," smiling faintly. "Since I am sincere in my desire for—what?"

But apparently he has lost the thread of his twice-begun speech.

"Your servant must have mistaken your directions," he says, with a vexed look; "he is evidently admitting some one."

"I want to make it quite clear to you," she says, still in that same deeply earnest voice, "so that you may not have cause to reproach me afterwards, or think that I have dealt unjustly with you: I have not one grain of love to give you, nor ever shall have!" letting fall each slow word with a weight of heavy emphasis. "Many men—most men—would refuse a woman upon such terms. It is open to you still to refuse me."

The person she is addressing moves uneasily in his chair.

"I imagined," he says fretfully, "that we had treated this subject exhaustively yesterday."

"We cannot treat it too exhaustively," she answers persistently. "Though I cannot love you—happily for you, you have no wish that I should—I will do my best by you; I will be as useful to you as I can. From what I gather of your circumstances I imagine that I can be very useful to you. You are not young; you have not good health; you are lonely."

"Give it me!" cries Sarah, snatching the little sheet, which looks older than it really is from obvious hard wear, continual unfolding, blistering tears. "I will read it again. Perhaps, reading it in cold blood like this, the meaning may strike one differently!"

"If you wish I can spare you the trouble," says Belinda bitterly. "I can say it to you if you wish."

The fire burns low and dull; and Sarah rises and stands right beneath the gas, so that no lack of light may hinder her examination of the document in her hand. But the rays of a June sun would be in this case of no use.

"I can make nothing of it," she says dispiritedly, giving it back to its owner; "but do not— do not burn it!"

For a moment Belinda hesitates, considering with quivering eyelids and trembling lip the small and faded paper. Then in a moment it has followed the flowers!

At first it gives a curling writhe, as if it hurt it to be burnt; then one or two sentences come out very clear before flying in black film up the chimney. The one that lasts longest and disappears latest is, "Oh, forgive me!"

After that there is silence. Sarah has dropped sulkily into an armchair; and Belinda has turned again to her childish treasures, and is beginning to sort and part them. But her hands move mechanically of their own accord, and with that want of purpose which shows that they are not directed by the brain.

When a quarter of an hour has gone dumbly by, Belinda speaks, in that flat and spiritless voice which is now habitual to her:

"I wanted to ask your advice; I want you to give me your opinion. Is it necessary —am I bound in honour to tell Professor Forth?"

She stops with a sudden sobbing catch in her breath.

"If you think that your confidence will be in the least likely to make him break his engagement, tell him by all means!" replies Sarah surlily. "Not only tell him what there is to tell, but invent a great deal more besides. I promise you that I will aid you with all the powers of my imagination!"

"Must I really tell him?" groans Belinda, with an accent of such acute pain that Sarah's heart smites her.

"Tell him!" she cries compassionately. "My poor child, what is there to tell?"

"What indeed!" acquiesces Belinda, in bitter humility. But she looks relieved. "Even if there were anything to tell," she goes on a moment later—"but, as you justly say, there is nothing, for one is not answerable to anyone for the freaks of one's own imagination—but even if there were, he has no concern with my past, has he? It is only from the tenth of next month onwards that I am accountable to him for my actions!"

"The tenth of next month!" repeats Sarah fiercely. "What, is that still the day on which the gallows is to be erected?"

"If you think that by wording it so offensively, you will induce me to put it off, you are mistaken," answers Belinda, with an access of miserable, sore ill-humour; "and you know the sooner I am 'out of the way'—I am always in the way now— the sooner you can be off to the South!"

"Save your sneers for granny, who deserves them," answers Sarah, genuinely hurt. "I do not."

"I know you do not!" cries the other remorsefully; "but you were the nearest thing to me. It seems, nowadays, as if I must put my sting into whatever is nearest to me!"

"That is the right frame of mind in which to be led to the gal—to the altar, is not it?" retorts Sarah sarcastically; and again they are silent.

"I now wish to heaven," resumes Sarah devoutly, at the expiration of a heavy interval, "that I had married him myself. Intensely as I should have disliked it, he could not have made me as unhappy as he will you. A wineglass holds less than a hogshead; and the pious hope of an early widowhood, which you will be too conscientious to indulge, would have buoyed me up!"

Belinda's only answer is a sickly smile.

"You would have gone on living with granny and the dogs," pursues Sarah, in earnest narrative; "she would have grown civiller to you when she found that she had no one else to depend on, and she really is very good company when she chooses; and by-and-by, some fine day, Rivers might have come back. No, no!" resolutely catching and holding down with her small, strong wrists the hands that her sister is hurrying to her tortured face. "I do not care whether you wince or no! I do not care whether it hurts you or no; you must and shall hear. Some day— Rivers—might—have come back again ! He may come back still; but it may be after the 10th of January!"

She pauses dramatically, and fixes her eyes upon the poor quivering features, so barely exposed to her piercing scrutiny. There comes no answer but a moaning sigh.

"I can give you no reason for it," continues Sarah; "I know no more about him than you do; but I have a conviction— something tells me, that there has been some mistake, some hitch, some unavoidable delay!"

"An unavoidable delay of eighteen months!" says Belinda, with faltering irony. "How likely!"

"A letter has been lost."

"Letters are never lost," hopelessly.

"Well, have it as you like!" cries Sarah impatiently. "All the same, my conviction remains that some day he will come back again. How glad you will be to see him! How pleasant it will be for you to introduce him to your husband, Mr. Forth!"

By a great wrench, Belinda succeeds in loosing one hand; but it is a very insufficient shield, and she has failed in liberating the other, so sturdily held in Sarah's small but potent grasp.

"I see him coming into the room with those blazing eyes of his," goes on Sarah, in a sort of prophetic frenzy—"they were not much like Mr. Forth's eyes, were they?—and you introducing them to each other: 'My husband, Mr. Forth! Mr. Rivers!' I envy you that moment!"

But at this Belinda tears herself free.

"This is too much!" she says, in a suffocated voice, and struggling to reach the door. "Let me go! I must go! I can bear no more!"

But Sarah falls on her knees, and catches her sister's gown.

"Do you think it is as bad as the reality will be?" she asks, in a thrilling, clear voice. "And you will not be able to run away from it! Do you suppose that there will be a single corner in the whole earth in which you can take refuge from it?"

Something in Sarah's tone has, more than her detaining gesture, arrested Belinda's flight. Stock-still she stands, in a wretched irresolution, death-pale.

"It is too late!" she murmurs miserably.

"It is not too late!" cries Sarah in wild excitement, clasping her sister's knees; "it will be too late after the 10th, but it is not too late now. Give it up! Throw him over! What will he care? What harm will it do him? How much the worse is he for having been thrown over by me?"

Belinda still stands, white and trembling, her eyes staring stonily out into vacancy. Before them, though they seem to see nothing, stands that dreadful vision conjured up by her sister; and the sight of it makes every limb shake.

"It is impossible!" she says feebly.

"It is not impossible!" asseverates Sarah, in passionate heat. "Give me a chance, and I will show you whether it is possible or no! Let me tell him. Give me that commission as my Christmas-box; it would be the best I ever had! I will tell him," laughing rather hysterically, "that it is a constitutional peculiarity of our family!"

Perhaps it is Sarah's laugh that recalls her sister to a more normal condition of feeling. With a long sigh she comes back to reality.

"Who would tell granny?" she asks, with a sarcastic smile. "Who would dare break to her that she was not to be robbed of her darling after all?"

" I would!" cries Sarah, with delighted eagerness. "I know few things in the world that would give me a purer pleasure. Let me go now, at once! Strike while the iron is hot!" jumping up, and moving in her turn rapidly towards the door. But it is now Belinda who detains her.

"Pooh!" she says coldly; "it was only a flight of fancy on my part. It would be amusing to give her a fright; but she has no real cause for alarm. What change has happened that I should change?" in a lifeless tone. "Your word-painting was so vivid, that for one moment I thought he had come back; but it seems not. I think," with a bitter smile, "that if I waited for him to come back to me, I should wait my life long."

"I do not ask you to wait your life long," cries Sarah, redoubling that energy of persuasion which, as she disppointedly sees, has been hitherto exercised in vain. "I only ask you to wait one month ! Surely," with a scathing sneer, "the joys that you expect are not so poignant but that you can afford to defer them for four weeks!"

"Why should I defer them?" asks Belinda, with a fierce restlessness in eye and gesture. "If I had had my will, I should have been married by now. It is this state of transition which is worst of all; one is unhinged; one is off one's balance."

Sarah has again fallen down on the floor before her sister, and is again suppliantly clasping her knees.

"One month! one month!" she cries beseechingly. "And before the month is out, you may be down on your knees as I am, thanking God and me for having saved you from perdition. One month! one month!"

She has pressed her head against her sister's gown, and through the woollen stuff her tears are soaking—Sarah's rare tears!

There is such a compelling ring in her voice that Belinda's cold, sick heart throbs beneath it. Again that vision rises before her, but changed and beautified. Rivers is coming into the room, but between him and her thrusts itself no chill, pedant figure.

As she so stands hesitating, thrilling, in a waking dream, the door of the room does in effect fly open, and some one enters. Is it Rivers? Alas, no!

"A merry Christmas to you!" bawls Miss Watson, noisily entering, and throwing her greeting at them like a paving-stone. "I have just been up to wish granny a merry Christmas, but she does not seem very bright, eh? Do you think she is breaking at all? She did not seem up to her usual mark!"

"But that was not my way," replies Belinda, again faintly smiling; "and, as you say sometimes, tous les goûts sont respectables . I am afraid that I shall be late if I delay any longer; good-bye, granny."

She speaks the two last words quite gently and friendly, and holds out her fair cold cheek to be kissed. Mrs. Churchill is afterwards not much fonder of thinking of the feel of that cheek, than of the look of that smile before spoken of.

"I wish I had not kissed her," she says to herself fretfully afterwards, as she sits with her still pretty feet resting on the well-warmed fender in the privacy of her dressing-room, when the brougham has rolled away; "it was almost like kissing a dead person!"

And meanwhile, through the dismal morning streets, dirty with that worst of all dirtiness, dirty snow, and where the lamp-lighters have only just put out the lamps, and would have done better not to put them out at all, Belinda drives, her sister by her side. The angry tears are raining down Sarah's face, encouraged rather than checked by their owner. In her small warm hands (for even on a bitter January morning wrath is warming) lie tightly clasped Belinda's cold ones. The shop-boys are only just beginning to take down the shutters; in the haberdashers' underessed windows, instead of costly fabrics and dainty webs, are to be seen nothing but bare boards and skeleton stands. The blue-armed housemaids are scrubbing the door-steps; through the squares the milk-carts rush.

"I wish you would cry," says Sarah presently, from among her sobs.

"Why should I?" replies Belinda calmly; "it is my own doing."

"That is the worst of it!" cries Sarah passionately.; "if you were doing it for some great cause—to save granny from the workhouse, or me from the scaffold— there would be some sense in it! there is no sense now!"

There is no sense in it! The words keep echoing, dancing—set to a teasing tune—in Belinda's head for the rest of the way. They reach the church-door. The carriage stops.

"We have got to the gallows, it seems!" says Sarah, with a fresh burst of sobs; then, vehemently wringing her sister's hands, she cries desperately: "Belinda! it is not too late yet! there is still time! it is not too late yet to go back!"

"I have no wish to go back," replies Belinda firmly, though her voice is low and weak, and her lips are white; "why should I wish to go back, when it is my own doing?"

So they get out. At the door they are received by a Churchill cousin, who, summoned as Belinda's nearest male relative to give her away, stands awaiting them, cross and shivering.

"Has he come? is he here? I do not see him!" says Sarah, with a last flare-up of hope, peering eagerly into the church, where here and there (only here and there, for they are not nearly all lit) a gas-lamp displays its dreary yellow flicker on the background of thick morning fog. "Yes; then"—with a sudden collapse into disappointment— "then he has not had a paralytic stroke at the last moment, worse luck!"

They walk up the aisle; a snuffy old pew-opener in a black crape bonnet preceding them; Belinda on her cousin's arm; Sarah, in her ostentatiously paraded grief, bringing up the rear. They have arrived at the altar, the candles upon which are lit, their wavering light falling upon an impatient clergyman and two elderly men; for the bridegroom has brought with him a friend of his own age and calling, whom he has summoned from Oxbridge to support him. The Churchill cousin has never before seen the bridegroom, nor has the bridegroom's friend ever before seen the bride. The opposing parties now stare at each other in unaffected astonishment. All through the service, the young Churchill, who had once himself thrown out feelers in the direction of Belinda, and had them civilly and firmly at once returned to him, is setting himself angrily in imagination by the side of the bridegroom, and wondering what the devil Belinda can have seen in this ugly old curmudgeon to prefer to himself.

All through the service, the bridegroom's supporter is staring in gaping wonder at the beautiful broken-hearted-looking girl, who has mysteriously elected to unite her fate with that of his old friend; ruefully reflecting that she will bring certain death to the constitutionals, and the pipes, and the discussions on the Enclitic de , and such-like light subjects, which they have been in the habit of sharing for the best part of the last forty years. All through the service the bridegroom is peevishly glancing over his shoulder to see whence comes the draught of raw air that, despite the black velvet skull-cap with which he has furnished himself, he feels at baleful play about his ears.

Belinda alone looks neither to the right nor to the left. If she were really the statue which her fair, still body so closely resembles, she could not be less conscious than she is of dank nipping air or curious look. She appears to listen with close attention, or is it indeed not attention, but the impassiveness of stone? Only once through all the service does her face come to life; and then it is stabbed into life, as one has heard in the grisly dissecting-room tale, of him who, thought dead, was brought back to agonizing momentary life by a knife-thrust! The knife-thrust that brings Belinda back to life lies in the words, "Forsaking all other, keep thee only unto him so long as ye both shall live."

"Forsaking all other!" She has been spared the trouble of forsaking that other. Has not he been beforehand with her? Has not he forsaken her?

Sarah, closely watching her, sees her ashy features contract in such a spasm of mortal pain, that she involuntarily starts forward. Is she going to faint? If she faint, and is carried out of church, may not she be saved even yet? She is not yet married! The service is not yet ended! But the next glance at her face dispels the momentary hope. Belinda is not going to faint; she has gained back her rigidity. She is dead again.

It is over now; over—even to the signing of names in the vestry. The clergyman offers his congratulations, but he does it hastily and abstractedly. He is thinking whether he will have time for a good warming and breakfasting before setting off for the funeral at Kensal Green, at which he has to assist. The bridegroom's friend and the Churchill cousin also offer theirs; but those of the first sound incredulous, and those of the latter ironical. Sarah alone keeps utter silence. The brougham stands at the door, the horse fidgety and stung by the cold. A crossing-sweeper and two pinched street children are watching the strange wedding-party's exit. The bridegroom, great-coated and comfortered to the end of his long nose, is bidding adieu to his ally. The bride turns to her sister:

"It is done now!" she says pantingly; "there is no going back from it now!"

"None!" replies Sarah dully.

"Say something to me, Sarah; wish me something good!"

She has flung her arms round her sister in an épanchement most unusual with her. Her icy cheek is hard pressed against her sister's hot and tear-reddened one.

"I wish you—I wish you—" cries Sarah, stammering, what between her sobs, the almost ungovernable impulse to invoke upon her sister a speedy widowhood, and the hopelessness of finding any other wish that will not sound a mockery.

"You—you cannot find anything to wish me!" says Belinda tremulously. "You are right; there is nothing."

"I—I wish you," says Sarah, driven to desperation by this tone, and clinging convulsively to her sister as though ten bridegrooms should not force them apart—"I wish you many happy returns of the day!" breaking into an hysterical laugh. "That is ambiguous! I may attach what meaning I choose to it."

These are the last words Belinda Forth hears, before the brougham whirls her away. The Churchill cousin takes Sarah home in a hansom, and a very unpleasant drive he has, as she cries violently the whole way, in passionate self-reproach at having found nothing kinder to say.

As she passes homewards, she finds that the day has bettered. The sun has swallowed up the mist, and now shines steadily bright, and even sensibly warm. The little waves are small and mild as summer ones, though the air is still full of penknives. Perhaps it is the increased brightness upon Nature's face; perhaps it is the two quiet hours of her own society, that have braced her to face with a greater courage the lot she has chosen, and the fried bacon that typifies it.

"I would do it!" she says to herself sternly, "and now it is done; now there is nothing for it but to put the best face upon it, and never to own to anyone that I would have it undone. There can never again be so bad a piece of my life as this!" (shuddering); "it is well to have the worst over first, it will be more endurable when we get to Oxbridge. I must try to learn how to look at things from his point of view, to count the grains of rice for a pudding, and save the old tea-leaves!" with a curling lip; "but I will not have the bacon kept in the drawing-room!"

Her resolutions in both respects outlast the day. That to make the best of things has body enough to withstand even the close examination to which her husband subjects the Sunday roast-beef, in order to discover whether it has been robbed of any of its native suet. He has a slow munching way of eating, which fidgets her inexpressibly; but she bears that too. She even resists the temptation to look away from him. Since he is to munch opposite to her till death do them part, would it not be wiser to accustom herself to the sight? Her resolution withstands also stoutly all the little trials attendant on their afternoon constitutional. When they emerge upon the Leas, they see a broad highway of molten copper stretching across the sea to the lowering sun. Belinda asks leave to run down the many steps on the clift's face to the water's edge, to set her feet in the foam fringe, and watch the long swell heaving ocean's sullen breast; but the Professor will not hear of it. A certain number of brisk turns on the Leas—always the same number—is the kind of walk to which alone he gives his approbation. No stopping to look at the copper sunset, or the fair ships riding past; nothing more likely to arrest the circulation and chill the liver. They meet the same people as they met yesterday and the day before, and as they will meet to-morrow and the day after; the same bath-chairs, the same dogs. The sick, white woman with her attentive burly husband; the deformed child; the frolic-some colley dogs; the frivolous Spitzes; the little blithe Scotch terriers.

Her resolution outlasts even the twilit hour, to her the most trying of the day. If she were to consult her own wishes, there would be no such hour; no space interposed between the fading of the day-light and the lighting of the gas. But it is in Professor Forth's programme that there shall be such an interval when he leans back in his armchair, with his eyes closed, and does not wish to be spoken to; whether in meditation or in sleep she cannot tell. There is nothing for her but to sit opposite to him, with his idleness, but without his repose. The lowered blinds prevent her looking out upon the first sunset-reddened, and by-and-by moon-silvered sea. She cannot even distinguish the lustres and the vulgar vases on the chimney-piece. She cannot even stir the fire into such a blaze as to enable her strong young eyes to read by it; for to stir the fire makes the coals burn quicker. It is the hour when the happy young build love-arbours out of, and see brave sweethearts in, the red coals. What love-arbour dare she build? What sweetheart dare she see? Then come the long hours of reading aloud. They are the most bearable of the day. It does her resolution the less credit to hold out through them. However, it does hold out. But will it endure through the next day? If it does, it must indeed be of a stout fibre. For no sooner has the next day risen, than it is clear that there has come one of those rare scourge-days with which God sometimes lashes His world; one of those days whose date is remembered, which is held up as a standard in after years for other fell days to measure themselves by; a day that wrecks ships by fleets; that strikes down centenary oaks by scores; that whelms trains in its snowdrifts; that stiffens into frozen death the sheep on the mountain-side, and the traveller fate-overtaken in the snow-choked country lane.

Snow often comes stilly; but to-day it is blowing—blowing mercilessly: not a bluff west wind, good-humouredly roistering, but an inhuman north-easter, the furious sleet driven, raging and sweeping, by its hellish lash.

When Belinda comes down to breakfast, there is not a soul on the Leas, but the luckless baker's boy butting with bent head against the razor-edged blast. It is scarcely the day which one would have chosen to spend in a flimsily-built seaside summer lodging-house. The Forths' lodgings are no better and no worse than most others of the class; with walls about as puny, with woodwork about as warped, with gaps between door and carpet about as wide, with curtains as miserably insufficient as most of their brethren. Though every door and window is religiously closed, there is the feeling of being sitting out of doors, only more draughty. Even in a warm, stoutly-built house one would shiver; but here! Well, here the cold is so marrow-piercing, that it usurps to itself the whole attention of the mind. It is not a subordinate, governable cold that by an effort of the will one may forget. It can never be out of the thoughts for one moment; from the hour of rising, until that of shuddering back to bed again.

The Professor, always a chill-blooded creature, sits all day with his knees within the fender, piled with every article of his own, and several of Belinda's wardrobe. Throwing economy to the winds, he has lit the gas, and piled the fire half-way up the chimney; though whenever fresh coals are put on, a great gust of greenish smoke, furiously beaten back by the blast, comes pouring down the chimney, and suffocatingly flooding the room.

Belinda, cold as she undoubtedly is, is not near the fire. She is standing by the window, with a pot of paste and some strips of paper in her numbed hands, pasting up the apertures in the ill-seasoned shrunk window-frames, through which the wind comes icily whistling and piping. Now and again she appeals for directions to the heap of wraps beside the hearth, trying to still her chattering teeth as she does so, to keep out of her tone the intense dispiritedness which has invaded her whole being; not to listen to the ironical demon voice that whispers in her ear:

"This is the honeymoon; that is the bridegroom of your own choosing!"

All day—all day the snow swirls past. All day the sea—dimly seen, sometimes seen not at all, through the white hurricane —booms and thunders on the shore. The snow cleaves to the window-panes, freezes there, darkens yet more the dismal room. Not a soul puts nose out of doors from the dark dawn to the soon-falling night. When at length Belinda has finished her pains-taking pasting-up of the windows, she asks in a voice of would-be cheerfulness whether the blast is not sensibly lessened; but receives for answer a melancholy negative. The whirlwind from under the door is such as to laugh to scorn all remedies applied elsewhere. And one cannot paste up the door.

"But one may put sand-bags beneath it," suggests Belinda, still with that same desperate cheerfulness. "They may have sand-bags in the house! she will ring and ask!"

But there are no sand-bags, and the landlady, embittered like everyone else by the weather, tartly replies that such a thing has never before been asked for in her house! However, Belinda is not yet at the end of her resources.

A slight noise breaks her trance. It is only the Professor poking the fire in the sitting-room below; a sound plainly audible through the thin flooring. But if it had been the great Trump of Doom, it could not have more effectually blared and shivered away her visions. There is a growing wildness in her eyes, as they retrace the sentences of the just-read letter. It is a good letter. No woman need wish to have an honester or a fonder one from her own true love. It has only the one trifling drawback of having come just three days too late. It is scarcely tactful to have thrust itself thus untimely between her and the husband of her choice!

"It is my own choice," she says; "there lies the point of the joke!" and she laughs aloud. Something in the sound of her own laugh frightens her. "Am I going mad?" she asks herself.

As she speaks, she staggers to the window, and throws up the sash; whether —even in this icehouse atmosphere— gasping for yet more air, or driven by some darker impulse. For the moment the hurricane has lulled. Outside it is all white with snow and moonshine: the moon herself not absolutely visible, too low to cut even her accustomed track upon the silvered sea, betrayed only by the sudden pale flash that each loud wave gives in turning over on the strand. Ceaselessly, as it has been snowing all day, the devilish wind has swept the pavement clean and bare. She can see the flagstones' fierce wet shine immediately beneath her. How hard they look! and at what a distance below her! One step from that easily accessible sill, and she will be for ever healed of that pain, than which none worse ever made dying man in deadly straits call upon death to set him free. But Death, the gentle genius with the reversed torch laying his soft hand, coolly liberating, on the over-weary heart, is not akin to the grisly, gory, murderous phantom that she in her misery invokes. For that dread step even her perfect woe has not yet ripened her. She shivers moaning back from the razoredged outer air, and shuts the window. She sits down by the table, and spreading out the letter before her, reads it deliberately through again. Not a tear dims her dry eye. They say that the worst of a thunder-storm is past when the rain comes. The worst of a human sorrow is past when the tear-rain comes. But Belinda's grief is far indeed from having reached that better stage. What would she not give for a few tears, or that this hideous keenness of consciousness might melt away blurred into a merciful swoon! But she is as far from the one relief as the other. If it had been written one day earlier! If she had yielded to Sarah's passionate persuasions to delay her marriage for one month! If—if! There are a hundred ifs; any one of which might have opened heaven to her! But not one of them did.

"It is my own choice!" she keeps repeating, half aloud; and then comes again that terrible impulse to laugh loudly at the ghastly irony of it! the mirth of it! Her own choice to be sitting here alone and marrow-chilled—chilled, yet with a red-hot sword slowly turning and turning in her heart; afraid even to groan aloud, lest she should be overheard, instead of—

But the reverse of that picture she dare not face. That is the road that lies straight to madness. Her eye wanders wildly yet again over the page. Even it, in cruelty, seems always to fasten on the fondest phrases:

"I am so mad with joy!" "Is it any wonder that I cannot write sense?"

As she looks at the words, written in such pure, glad, good faith, but that seem to stare back at her now in grinning mockery, a great dry sob rocks her whole body to and fro. The pity, lavished hitherto on herself alone, now changes its current, and pours in bitterest flood over him. " Mad with joy !" until when? Until casually taking up the newspaper, he reads that on the 10th of January James Forth, Professor of Etruscan in the University of Oxbridge, took to wife at St. Jude's Church, — Street, Mayfair, Belinda, elder daughter of the late John Churchill, Esq., of Churchill Park, Loamshire. He will not believe it! He will think that some one has inserted it as a joke. In humiliating torrent, and with a retentiveness of memory of which she had not believed herself capable, there rushes back into her mind the stream of hold-cheap jests and jeers and quips, in which they had united the forces of their joint wits, at the expense of him who is now her husband; whom at this moment she hears shovelling coal on the fire in the room beneath her. Upon no one's testimony but her own will Rivers believe it. And what words can she find in which to tell him? Again that fierce sobbing shakes her from head to foot; but she masters it. For a few moments she sits in motionless miserable thinking. Then apparently an idea strikes her; for she rises, and taking the candle in her hand drags herself to the looking-glass. For a moment she peers haggardly into it. At all events her face is not disfigured by tears; and the only person to whose scrutiny it will be subjected is no very nice observer of its variations.

Apparently she is satisfied with the result of her consultation, for she moves to the door, and opening and unlocking it, passes downstairs and re-enters the sitting-room.

Mr. Forth is in exactly the same posture as that in which she had left him, except that, having finished his letters, he has been able again completely to entomb himself—hands and all—in his wraps; out of which only an elderly face—its wrinkles ploughed deeper by cold and crabbediness —now peeps.

"Where have you been? What have you been doing all this time?" he inquires captiously.

"I have been in my room."

She had dreaded lest there may be something so unusual in the sound of her voice that he may turn round and look at her. But no! he keeps his attitude of peevish crouching over the hearth.

"I hope that the fire was burning well," he says anxiously. "If the grate is of the same construction as this one, it will require constant attention."

"I—I—do not think that it was burning at all," replies Belinda uncertainly.

Till this moment it has never struck her how many degrees of frost have been adding physical to her mental suffering.

"Not burning? Not lit?"

In a moment he has leapt to the bell and violently rung it; but as Maria's movements in responding to it are marked by no greater celerity than usual, there is time for the whole of the following little dialogue before her arrival.

"Have you been pasting up the windows? If not, I am at a loss to conceive what can have induced you to spend the best part of an hour in such an atmosphere."

"I—I—have not pasted them up; I will if you like."

"You have left the door open."

But when did Miss Watson ever fail to see anyone?

One final oaring of her powerful arm has brought her alongside of them.

"Belinda! Sarah!" she cries loudly, seeing that her mere presence, although sufficiently obvious, has apparently failed to attract their attention; "do not you know me? Emily Watson? Dresden? Has anything been going on? have I lost much?—I could not possibly get here before—quite a sudden thought my coming at all. I heard that the Sampsons were coming down to see their boy, who is at King's; so it struck me I would join them and come, too. I took them quite by surprise—met them at the station. 'Why not see Oxbridge all together?' I said; 'halve the expense, and double the pleasure!'"

She pauses out of breath, and looks eagerly onwards towards the spot where, beyond his mother's struggling lieges, the Prince sits, cool and civil, with his suite on their row of chairs.

"I was so afraid that the Prince might be gone," pursues she volubly; "the royalties sometimes go so early, you know. Have you been presented to him? Do you know him? well, enough to present me? No? Well, then I must re-introduce myself: I have no doubt that a word will suffice to recall me to H.R.H.'s recollection. Royal memories are proverbially good, you know. I must get hold of his equerry; I know him quite well—once crossed over in the same steamer from Newhaven to Dieppe with him."

The last few words are thrown back over her shoulder, as she has already resumed her vigorous fight onwards.

With fascinated eyes they watch her athlete's progress to the front. The human billows part before her. The crowd lies behind her. She has reached smooth water and the Prince.

The signalman's troubles are by this time drawing to their close. His rosy babe has been found lying smiling on the line; the express train having, contrary to its usual habit, passed over the pretty innocent without inflicting a scratch. Most people draw a long breath; but whether at the babe's immunity or their own, who shall decide?

"She is making him shake hands with her!" says Sarah, in a shocked voice, standing on tiptoe, and stretching her neck.

It is too true. In defiance of etiquette and despite the horrified look of the hostess, Miss Watson is warmly grasping her Duke's hand. Against the background of wall and chairs her figure stands out plainly silhouetted—fringe, garish evening-dress, and hot red neck! To their ears come even fragments of her resonant speech: "Your equerry, sir!" "Newhaven!" "Sea-sick!"

"I should like to sit down," says Belinda, in a spent voice.

This is easier said than done. By slow degrees, however, they succeed in edging out of the crowd; and are lucky enough to find an unoccupied sofa, upon which Belinda seats herself; and whither, presently, various of her acquaintance come and exchange remarks with her upon the success of the entertainment, the excellence of the supper, the affability of the Prince, etc.

In one of the intervals between two of these fragments of conversation she perceives that her charge has left her side; but it requires no very distant excursion of the eye to discover her standing at the supper-table, an ice in her hand, having, by the agency of one of her just-made acquaintance, effected an introduction to a good-looking undergraduate, who in return is presenting to her a second, who in his turn will obviously present to her a third and a fourth.

A little mob of young men is beginning to gather round her. A moment more, and, her ice finished, followed by her cortège , Sarah returns to her sister, winking so deftly as to be invisible to the outer world as she comes.

"Belinda," she says, "I want to introduce to you Mr. Bellairs, who tells me that he plays tennis remarkably well" (an indistinct disclaimer from the blushing Bellairs); "and Mr. Stanley, who plays very nicely too; and Mr. De Lisle, who thinks he would play very nicely if he had a little more practice."

Belinda laughs slightly, amused at the glibness with which her sister has already mastered her new admirers' names.

She has risen to her feet again—Professor Forth's wife—the stern-faced beauty whom in their walks and talks the boys have often with distant awe admired.

"I am sure," she says, with a sweet cold smile, "that if you care to try our small ground, I shall be very—"

She is a tall woman, and her eyes are on a level with Bellairs'. She can, therefore, easily look over his shoulder. What sight is it so seen that makes her stop suddenly in mid-speech, with a catch in her breath? The pause is but short. Almost before her auditors have had time to notice the hiatus, it is filled up.

"I shall be very happy to see you any day you choose to come—to-morrow, any day!"

Her words are perfectly collected; but surely she is far, far paler than she was when she began to speak; and though her sentences are addressed to the young men, her eyes are wandering oddly beyond them.

"Upon my soul, I believe the woman is off her head!" Stanley says confidentially to Bellairs, as they walk home together in the moonlight. "Did you notice her eyes when she was talking to us? they made me feel quite jumpy!"

"Off her head!" growls Bellairs, who finds it not impossible to combine a poignant interest in Sarah with a servile moth-and-candle-like homage to the elder and severer beauty; "so would you be, if you were married to an old mummy!"

"You must allow me to see you home," he answers firmly.

"I have already told you that it is absolutely unnecessary," retorts she roughly.

There is an instant's interval before his rejoinder. They are putting out the lights in the hall; the great building is greedily devouring half the moonlight in the quad, with its raven shadow. It has embraced the fountain in the middle. It is not much of a fountain, but how pleasantly its little voice pierces through the noise of rolling wheels and human shoutings. For how many centuries could she gladly stand here listening to it!

"You must allow me!" with perfect respect, but obstinately.

"I must not !" Is the night-wind heady, like wine? Her tone changes to one that is almost entreaty. "I had rather you did not; I ask you not!"

Her incivilities had left him iron; to her pleading he is as wax.

"It shall be as you wish," he says, gravely bowing.

"It is a matter of weather," she says quickly. "I am very much influenced by weather; you know that you always used to say that I was a Weatherglass!"

But is it a matter of weather? Is it the weather that sends her humming with irresistible gaiety to her desk and Menander? Spring-time, it is true, is exhilarating; morning is exhilarating; life's morning is exhilarating: why, then, should she not be exhilarated? But is it of these three innocent stimulants only that she is drinking? There must be something different from her wont in the very quality of her step as she enters her husband's study, for he looks up.

"You are late," he says briefly.

"Only three minutes," she answers pleasantly; "and I will make it up at the other end."

She seats herself at her escritoire, forcibly and with difficulty swallowing down the end of the tune that she has been singing to herself, under her breath, all the way upstairs. Even the very room—the hated task-work room—looks different from what it ordinarily does. Usually it is quite sunless; but this morning a long, slant dart of gold has squeezed itself in, taking no denial, and on it how the dust-motes are dancing! Must everything dance to-day?

The Professor, at least, is an exception to the general rule. He shows no signs of any wish to dance. While dictating, he is in the habit of walking up and down. She knows the exact square in the carpet from which he will start, and that at which he will pause and turn. He has begun his diurnal course; but there is a moment's interval before the first words of the first sentence leave his lips.

She pauses, pen in hand, awaiting them; and as she pauses, following him with her eyes, a feeling of genuine and potent compassion passes through her heart and brain.

"How dreadful to be old! How hideous to be ugly, cantankerous, unloved!"

"I think," she says, under this impulse, speaking in a gentle, hesitating voice, "that I owe you an apology for my rude speech about you to Sarah, after dinner yesterday. I dare say," laughing nervously, "that you have forgotten it. I am sure it was not worth remembering; but, at all events, it makes me easier in my mind to tell you that I regret it."

The intention of this speech is excellent; as a mere question of judgment and tact, it is doubtful whether it had not been wiser to have let her stinging jest lie, without resuscitating it even to repent of it.

The expression of his face shows whether or no he has forgotten it.

"I think," he says aridly, "that since we are already late, we had better keep to the subject in hand."

For a moment or two she bows her crimsoned face and bitten lips over her desk, in furious annoyance at having laid herself open to this self-inflicted humiliation. But, ere long, her serenity returns. It is only wounds inflicted by those we love whose sting lasts.

After all, she has done her part; she has made the amende . Of what least consequence is it how he has taken it? But her compassion is dead. He may look as old, as pinched, as bloodless as he chooses. No smallest throb of pity stirs her heart again; nor does any other word, unrelating to the subject of her labour, cross her lips.

Through all the fresh bright morning hours, he travels from his one carpet-square to his other carpet-square, elaborating careful, classic phrases as he goes; and she, in docile silence, follows him with her pen.

The sun soars high; the drowsy flies inside the shut window make their futile journeys up and down the pane. The swallows sweep across outside, bells ring, butchers and bakers drive up and drive away; but not one of these distracting objects does she allow to beguile her for one instant of her toil. She will do her task-work conscientiously, thoroughly, wholly, so that hereafter neither he nor she herself may have anything to reproach her with; and then, when it is ended —she allows herself one long breath of prospective enjoyment—why then the sun will still be high; the swallows will still be darting; the lengthy May afternoon, with probabilities too bright to be faced in its green lap, will still be hers.

And, meanwhile, how well the pens write! how clear her own apprehension seems! She has even suggested a verbal emendation or two, which his nice ear has accepted. How quickly the morning is passing! Can it indeed be a quarter to one that the College clocks are striking? After all, there is no great hardship in being amanuensis to a savan afflicted with weak eyes; it is a great matter to be able to be of use to some one!

She looks up, smiling rosily; if not forgetful, forgiving, of her former snub.

"We have done a good day's work!" she says congratulatingly. "You have been in vein this morning."

"It is fortunate if it is so," replies he grudgingly, "for we have large arrears of work to make up."

"It really is quite a curiosity in its way," says Sarah in a pleased voice; "it is as hard and horny as a day-labourer's. Do show it to Belinda!"

He looks towards her, hesitating and uncertain. She has resumed her former seat, and her work-basket.

"Do!" she says, trying to speak with her newly summoned tranquillity; and he holds it out to her, palm upwards.

It is a beautiful hand still, shapely and vigorous, but on it are disfiguring evidences of hard, coarse toil. There is nothing particularly affecting in a work-roughened palm: it is a condition to which are subjected the hands of ninety-nine out of every hundred of the human race; and yet, as she looks at it, she has much ado to prevent the tears from springing to her eyes.

"You know," he says, "I told you that I could not stand the confinement of an office life!"

" We know ?" cries Sarah, pricking up her ears. " You told us ? What do you mean? When have you ever had the chance of telling us?"

He stops—staggered and white. He had forgotten the presence of an auditor. Nor is Belinda in a plight to help him.

"I mean," he says floundering, "that I—I intended to tell you; and so," hurriedly resuming his narrative, "I—I went as an ordinary hand in the iron-works; and was set to work at the puddling-furnace."

"The puddling-furnace!" cries Sarah, delighted with the sound; "and what is a puddling-furnace , pray?" repeating the phrase with emphatic relish.

"A puddling-furnace is a furnace where the pig-iron from the smelting-furnace is worked about at a great heat with iron rakes— rabbles , they call them—and I had the honour and pleasure," with a shy laugh, "of working one of these rakes, until the iron became malleable."

Belinda's pretence of work has dropped unheeded on the grass beside her.

"H—m!" says Sarah, still agreeably interested; "no wonder that your hands are not so pretty as they might be. And was it very hard work?"

"It was not exactly child's play," he answers drily; "but they gave us high wages; they were glad to get hold of a good strong chap like me. We had need to be pretty strong!"

"And did you work at it all day?"

"We were relieved every six or eight hours. We could not have stood it longer on account of the heat; that was pretty bad!"

He pauses a moment, passing his disfigured hand, half in absence, half in kindness, along Slutty's roomy back; then adds:

"It is the heat that does it! As a rule, puddlers do not live long; it is the heat that does it."

He says it with complete simplicity, neither expecting nor wishing for compassion; as if to spend eight hours a day in a puddling-furnace were the natural and ordinary sequel of an education at Eton and Oxbridge.

It is a hopeless wet day. Once or twice, indeed, there has been a tantalizing thinning of, and movement among, the vapours; but it has ended only in a more resolute, inflexible fastening upon the earth. Eleven —that hour of clearing—has come and gone, and brought no clearing with it. After all, she might as well have done her plain duty, and sent him away. In that case she would at least have had the throbs of an approving conscience to keep her up. And what, pray, has she now?

The forenoon is gone; luncheon is over; they are again in the drawing-room. The novel has long ago dropped from Sarah's fingers, and she has slidden into a warm, infantile slumber. The door-bell, loudly jangling, wakes her with a jump.

"It is those hateful boys!" she cries petulantly, starting up. "Am I never to have any peace from them? and I was in such a beautiful sleep!"

One glance at her sister's face—that sister who has obviously not shared her slumbers; whose watch has been at length rewarded, though by no brightening of the material sky—tells her who is among "those hateful boys." Perhaps this fact adds a new tinge of ill-humour to her tone, as she advances, childishly rubbing her drowsy eyes with her knuckles, to meet her admirers.

"You woke me!" she says, pouting. "I was in such a beautiful sleep!"

This speech is not calculated to reassure three timid young gentlemen, who have already been questioning the wisdom of their own procedure, and doubtfully discussing among themselves the probabilities as to the mood, whether of summer warmth or December ice, that they will find their hostess in. Upon Sarah, at least, they had counted to stand by them. But aid from an unexpected quarter comes to them.

"Never mind her!" says Belinda, with a young and radiant smile of welcome and re-assurance. "What business has she to be asleep? A wet day? Yes, it is a wet day; but what delicious warm rain! how much good it will do to the country! the farmers are crying out for rain!"

This is the way in which she now regards the lately-execrated downpour. Is he not here? and whether in sunny boat on flashing river, gathering fritillaries in the water-meadows, or in little rain-darkened early-English drawing-room, is not it now all one to her?

"I hope you will forgive our calling so early," says Bellairs, a little relieved, but still not very comfortable in his spirits; "we—we wanted to know what you thought about the river."

" About the river !" cries Sarah, still cross and sleepy, casting a sarcastic glance, first at the weather, and then at the young man; "are we frogs, or young ducks?"

He looks so silly, that Miss Churchill laughs, her good-humour at once restored.

"Now that you are here, you may as well stay," she says, in a thoroughly wide-awake voice; "may not they, Belinda? If we depend upon the charms of conversation, I shall be asleep again in ten minutes; why should not we play games?"

"Why not?" responds Belinda readily.

Her cheeks are pink, and her eyes dancing. There is no pastime, however wildly, childishly hilarious, for which she is not in tune.

"Shouting Proverbs!" suggests Sarah joyously. "Not know Shouting Proverbs?" (with a reproving look at Staveley, who has murmured this objection). "Why, everybody shouts, and one guesses!" (in lucid explanation). "It makes a tremendous noise; I do not know that it has any other merit."

"The neighbours would indict us for a nuisance," says Belinda gaily, shaking her head. "Russian Scandal?"

"It does not make noise enough," says Sarah; "it is nothing but whispering; we will have no whispering" (rather curtly, and with an almost imperceptible glance towards Rivers, in application of the warning).

"Hare and Hounds is not a bad game in a house," says Mr. De Lisle, in a small, shy voice. "We played Hare and Hounds at a house I was staying at the other day; we ran all through every room, from attic to cellar; it was great fun!"

"Your friend evidently did not keep a mother-in-law out of repair upstairs," replies Sarah, dismissing at once, though with leniency, this not very bright suggestion; " we do. What does the company say to Post, eh?"

The company, who are one and all in the mood for riotous jollity in any form, hail the proposal with one-voiced effusion; and it is on the point of being carried into execution, when Miss Churchill suggests an improvement upon it.

"Why not dance? dancing is better than any games! Surely some one can play, or even whistle a tune, or set the musical-box tinkling out its one waltz. Room? Plenty of room! too much room! Wheel all the furniture out into the passage!"

No sooner said than done. Away trundles the early English suite of rush-bottomed chairs; away the Professor's sacred fauteuil ! away Belinda's work-table! everything but the piano and the music-stool, to which little De Lisle, having weakly admitted that he can play a little dance music, is at once ruthlessly nailed.

The rain patters, snow-soft outside. The valse strikes up. There is a moment's hesitation. Bellairs and Staveley, generously unwilling to steal a march upon each other, hang back; but Sarah settles the point by frisking up to the one nearest to her—it is all one to her with which she dances; it happens to be Bellairs—and swoops away with him smooth and sure as a swallow darting down upon a moth. Without a word exchanged between them, Belinda finds herself in Rivers' arms. The rain plash-plashes upon the open window's sill. How long it is since she has danced! How madly exhilarating are motion and measure! Is it in heaven or upon earth that that lame waltz is being strummed? After a turn or two he feels her light and buoyant body grow heavy in his embrace.

"Stop!" she says dizzily; "the room goes round."

He obeys at once; and fearing lest she may fall, keeps for one moment his arm around her.

"It is so long since I danced," she says, lifting one white hand to her giddy eyes; "so long! so long! not since—"

She breaks off.

"Not since your—"

He also breaks off. But she is none the less firmly and irrevocably wed, because of his inability to say "your marriage."

"Not since long before then," rejoins she, hurriedly interrupting, with a nervous dread lest he may complete the phrase; "not since—Dresden."

"But we never danced in—Dresden," he says, making the same slight pause as she had done before the name of the, to them, sacred city.

" You did not, perhaps," she answers with a charming saucy smile—for under the unwonted joyous excitement her spirits are towering perilously high—"but I did. Some Gardereiters came in one evening, and I took a turn with two of them; it was before your day."

Distant as is the epoch alluded to, and satisfactorily as he had been persuaded at the time by ocular evidence of the reciprocal indifference of Belinda and the Saxon officers, he cannot avoid a feeling of biting jealousy and offence against those innocent and both in time and space far off German valseurs.

"At least it is my day now," he says with emphasis; and she offering no contradiction, away they float into their trance again.

The valse ends; the patient De Lisle begins to hammer out a galop. They must part; for Bellairs, emboldened thereto by Sarah's warm approbation, is inviting Belinda, and she dare not refuse. Rivers dances with Miss Churchill. Why need he? Why need he dance at all? Why, above all, need he throw such spirit and animation into his dancing? He looks as if he were enjoying himself as much as Sarah. Staveley, after having vainly endeavoured to educate Slutty into a partner (Slutty, on unwilling hind-legs, and with tail abjectly tucked in, perhaps in the laudable intention of giving herself a more human air), galops bravely by himself. The galop ends. The musician, bringing out of his treasures things new and old, treats them to a venerable polka.

Once more he and she are together; and in what a different spirit her light feet now move! Bellairs had found her but a disappointing partner; inert, and often begging to be allowed to stop and take breath. In Rivers' arms, her life's tides are running at their highest. It is Staveley's turn to be Sarah's danseur , and Bellairs, emulating his friend's former example, polks alone. But not altogether with his friend's success. For Punch, inspired by a scientific curiosity to investigate the strange phenomena that have appeared on his horizon, unhappily runs between his legs, and brings him to the earth with some clamour. The player stops: the dancers pause.

"We have had enough of this," says Sarah, drawing her sister into the window for an aside, and speaking with some brusqueness; "it is not fair upon that poor boy" (indicating De Lisle); "he is getting cross, though he tries not to show it. As I have not three legs and arms like the Isle of Man, I cannot dance with them all at once, and you are not much help! Let us try something else."

"By all means," answers Belinda hurriedly, shrinking away from the reproach that her conscience tells her she so richly deserves; "anything! whatever you please!"

"The ball is ended," says Sarah authoritatively, returning to the young men, and clapping her hands to enforce silence; "but if the company pleases it will be immediately followed by some athletic sports. What does everyone say to a game of Blind Man's Buff?"

This second proposal is received with an enthusiasm as much hotter than the former as may be expected from the universal loosening of the bonds of shyness and conventionality which has taken place since that former one was first made.

Sarah at once volunteers to be blind-folded; and in two minutes she is established in the middle of the little room, a Liberty silk handkerchief tied over her jovial eyes, and her hands outstretched in futile blind groping and grabbing.

The rest of the party, in the most approved fashion, pull her gown, tweak her hair, nip her sleeve; but not for long. With one well-directed lunge—so well directed as to rouse an instant loud cry of dishonesty—she has pounced upon Bellairs, who in his turn is blind-folded—is in his turn tweaked and nipped—and in his turn catches Rivers; Rivers catches Belinda.

" Gone !" (with great animation and surprise), "gone where?"

"To the Better Land, my mother" (very loud).

"Oh indeed! Well, I only hope that they are taking good care of him: if I know that he is well looked after, that is all I care for!"

Belinda gasps. She has heard it all scores of times before: at first with pitiful wonder; then with a dreary amusement; and lastly with the indifferent apathy of use. To-day there seems to be a new and grisly jocularity about it. This then is life! A youth of passionately craving and foregoing; long pursuing and never overtaking; of hearts that leap for a moment and ache for a year; of jealousies that poison food and massacre sleep—leading up to an old age of garrulous idiocy!

She is released at last: set free to amuse herself as she best pleases. But of what amusement is a mind in such tune as hers capable? She has taken her hat in her hand, and walks along drawing in great gulps of the exquisite evening air; while her feet, without her bidding, lead her to the river-side.

Oxbridge is, as everyone knows, rich in two rivers, and it is to the lesser of these streams that the boating-party has committed itself. It is this lesser stream, also, which for a short part of its course St. Ursula's green meadow and pleasant walk border.

It is without any acknowledged hope of meeting them that she takes the direction indicated. It is likely that they will be so early returning? Is it likely that they, or any one of them, will be in much haste to abridge such an excursion? Tasting, as she now does, the delicacy of the air; viewing the homely loveliness of bushed bank and satin-sliding river, she can the better and more enviously figure to herself what its charm has been. But the air and the motion do her good. Beside her the stream steals along—a soothing, sluggish companion. No song or rush has it, like the flashing northern becks; but what green reflections in it! What long water-weeds, swinging slowly to its slow current! How the willows—pensive almost as olives in their grave dim leafage—have printed themselves on its quite, silent heart. How riotously green are the fat low meadows that, all winter long, the floods had drowned!

Here, a May-bush has strewn the white largesse of its petals on the water, and there another, less overblown, stoops to look at its own pink face's double. There are two cuckoos: one loud and near, one soft and distant, answering each other across the meads. Beneath the bank at her foot, an undergraduate lies stretched along his boat, with his book. Three others in a punt are waggishly trying to upset each other. She sits down on a bench and idly watches them, till, with shouts of young laughter, they float out of sight. Another punt, a canoe, a skiff, a boat with ladies in it. Her heart jumps. Ah, no! not her ladies! a boat freighted with hawthorn boughs and guelder-rose branches, that tell of a joyous day's Maying in the country. Endless young gentlemen in flannels, punting, sculling, lying supine. She has fallen into a dull comparison between their gaiety and her own gloom, when her attention is aroused by the sound of a loud voice coming from some bark yet unseen, that is approaching round the corner. Many of the boys' voices are loud: what is there then in the timbre of this voice that makes Belinda, at the instant that it strikes her ear, hastily rise and pursue her walk? But she might as well have remained seated on the bench.

A punt has come into sight, guided, with an unskilfulness that seems almost intentional, by a young man; colliding frequently with other punts, bumping with many jars against the bank, and with an ample female form reclining complacently —superior to bumps or jars—in its stern.

Belinda is living on her capital. At the week's end she will be bankrupt; let her then be merry while she may! Perhaps Sarah acquiesces in her sister's view of the unimportance of any course of action that must be compressed into so short a period of time as a week. Perhaps, being in her way wise, she recognises the futility of interference. Perhaps her hands are too full of her own affairs to have much time or attention to spare for her sister's; for seldom has Miss Churchill been in such amorous straits of her own making as at present.

The course of allurement which had merely warmed up the heavy German soldiers into a pleasant and manageable tenderness, has wrought three inflammable English boys to a white heat. Daily, and in proportion as their inconvenient ardour for Sarah increases, does their friendship for each other—close and warm to begin with—decline, and tend towards the opposite pole of animosity. On the last expedition but one, she dare no longer accept a bunch of fritillaries from one, without instantly crowding her hands with a similar bunch from each of the others. She can now never drink less than three cups of afternoon tea; as that affords to each an opportunity of handing her one. Even Bellairs, early convinced of the hopelessness of his adoration of Mrs. Forth, is now wholly hers, far more wholly indeed than she at all wishes.

"I am fast getting to hate the sight of them!" she cries, in a tone more nearly approaching tearful vexation than is often to be heard in her joyous voice, as she and her sister patrol in their wonted fashion the garden, on the morning of the week's last day. "None of them"—by this comprehensive phrase she always designates the noble army of her admirers, past and present—"none of them have ever given me half so much trouble; why cannot they understand that it is not the fox I care for, but the chase ?"

"How do you mean to live thorough it?"

"How do people endure existence on these occasions?"

She has knelt on the springy turf, and is cutting, one after one, a score of young and dewy pinks, to comfort her sister during her dusty up-journey; carefully, and with the grudging hand of a real flower-lover, choosing those that are budless: no easy feat, for there is scarcely one that has not a grey-green successor beneath its perfumed wing.

"Eating, drinking, sleeping, yawning!"

"Are you quite sure that you will have no other support?" asks Sarah abruptly, and yet slowly.

For a moment the garden-scissors in Mrs. Forth's hand cease their clipping, and remain suspended and open, like that other pair which snipped her namesake's love-lock, while a dye as opulent as that of the new peony, whose birth the garden-border this morning greeted, stains even the milk-coloured nape of her stooped neck.

She dresses with a resolute abstaining from adding a single adornment, or making any change, however slight, in her usual Sunday toilet. To do so would be to allow that she had some reason for the alteration. Perhaps, with this motive mingles an unconfessed superstition that to presuppose a pleasure by preparation for it, is the surest way to rob yourself of its fruition.

She reads the Lessons for the day to her mother-in-law, with as reverent a distinctness as if the poor old lady could follow them, or were even aware of the nature of the attention. It is a proceeding of whose judiciousness she herself has no great opinion; but it is one of the tasks imposed upon her by her husband, and which she would by no means intermit. When they are ended, having told her the news of her husband's death, which she receives with her usual pleased surprise, Belinda goes lightly away to put on her bonnet for church.

As she walks along, her memory grows suddenly occupied with the recollection of that other solitary walk to church at Folkestone; of the griding cold; the ice-bound earth; the misery of her yet more ice-bound heart; of the wretched prisoned starling to which she had likened herself. Not greater is earth's change than that which is wrought within herself. But for her change, what reason is there? Has the starling then escaped? The question flashes upon her with an uneasy start, but is instantly silenced again.

The service is one of those brief and modernized ones, that make us marvel at the patience of our earlier days; yet to Belinda it seems long. Whether sweetly singing, devoutly kneeling, or attentively listening, she has no peace from the buzzing thought—never allowed, never looked in the face—but always returning, gnat-like: "When will it be? Where will it be? How long will it last?" It does not leave her at the church door, but buzzes and teases all along the sunshiny road. It will buzz and tease until it gets its answer. Well, let it! For is not that answer now given?

At the turn of the road, close at home, free from the stream of churchgoers, which has flowed in other directions, with no more witness than a milkman swinging unconcernedly along beneath his yoke, there it will be—there it is! Has not every moment since their parting been but a leading up to and preparation for this moment? And yet, at the sight of him she starts, as if it were a surprise, which indeed she still feigns to herself that it is.

" You here?" she says in a voice of airy astonishment, that would be admirably natural did it not quiver, and were it not a little overdone. "Have you fallen from the clouds?"

His answer is not over-ready. He has not yet got over the stupefaction that the first sight of her after an interval always brings upon him—a stupefaction such as, they say, the sight of the sea, of Niagara, of any overwhelmingly great and noble natural object, produces in him who looks upon it for the first time. How much more beautiful she is than he had remembered her! how pious she looks! how chaste! Probably other women before now have carried large Prayer-books, and "Ancient and Modern Hymn-books" in their left hand, home from church; but it seems to him to be a wondrous feat of grace and holiness, performed for the first and only time in the world's history. At last:

"Are you surprised?" he asks, still feeling rather dizzy; "if you remember—"

"I am afraid that you will find all your friends gone down," she interrupts precipitately.

"Shall I?" he answers, with an indifference that he makes no attempt to conceal; "probably, no doubt."

Is it her large Prayer-book that is making her so unapproachable?

"Have you come from Yorkshire?" she asks quickly, not allowing a moment of silence to intervene, with the uneasy idea, probably, of keeping the conversation in the polite and distant society key in which she has elected to pitch it.

"Yes."

"Did not you find it very dusty travelling?" walking fast, and looking straight before her.

"I came by a night-train."

"Do you like night-travelling? I do not; but then I can't sleep. Perhaps you can sleep?"

"I did not sleep!"

There is a tinge of reproach in the manner in which he pronounces the last words. What has happened to her? Is it to hear these cold platitudes that he has been rushing towards her all through the night, chiding the iron wheels for being slow—that he has spent his holiday, and foregone his rest? Sleep! With this to-day —this now ahead of him! Is it likely that he should sleep?

They have reached her gate, and there paused. She does not ask him to accompany her in, nor does she make him any hospitable offer whatever. But that he has neither expected nor wished— would have declined on the unlikely hypothesis of her offering it. He has no desire to taste of Professor Forth's salt. There is something that tells him that her pause before dismissing him will be only a momentary one; and that if he does not utilize this very present instant, she will be gone, and he may return to Milnthorpe, whence he came, at his leisure.

"You will enjoy the country air after your Milnthorpe smoke," she says, her hand upon the latch, and with what he knows to be a valedictory smile.

"What do you do on Sunday afternoons?" he asks precipitately; "do you do anything?"

" Do anything! " she repeats, demurring; "what do you mean?"

"Do you go to church again?" very hurriedly, and doubling up his hands in his pockets to hinder their yielding to their almost ungovernable impulse to stretch themselves out, and—with her will, or against her will—there detain her.

She casts a furtive glance towards the house—a glance that makes in him the fear of her flight, and the impulse to check it, yet more nearly beyond his governance.

"No—o," she says slowly; "not often."

"What do you do then? Do you ever take a walk?"

He has his eye upon her. Would it be quite inadmissible, if she shows symptoms of leaving him unanswered, to lay one hand quite quietly, so that she should be scarcely conscious of it, upon her arm? There is a full minute—sixty seconds well rung—before she answers.

"Sometimes, as it happens, if it does not rain—if I feel inclined."

"And—and—have you any—any specially favourite walk?"

Again she looks towards the house, behind whose closed doors the dogs are plainly heard, telling her that they know she has come back from church, and asking her why she is dawdling.

"No; none!" she says, lifting the latch. "Of course," her words coming with a sort of shamefaced hurry, "I like the College gardens—everybody must like the College gardens; but," with a sudden remorse at this concession, "I very often do not go there, because of the dogs; one may not take the dogs into them."

She has opened the gate, and is passing through it. He has only half a minute left.

"Which is your favourite? Which do you like best?" he cries desperately after her.

"I have not any favourite. I do not know; I like them all."

She has taken out her latch-key, and is putting it into the lock.

"That means that you are determined not to tell me," he says, with a tremor of passionate disappointment in his voice; and so, taking off his hat, turns on his heel. But as he walks slowly down the road, telling his own heart that he has befooled himself—never would he allow that his high lady could befool him—a sort of whisper seems to travel to his ears, "Some people like St. Bridget's best!"

"Mr. Rivers?" she repeats stammeringly.

"Yes, Mr. Rivers, if you like to call him so!" with her strident laugh. "David Rivers; our old friend, David Rivers! Did not you know that he was here? Has not he been to see you?"

Belinda draws a long gasping breath, then answers distinctly:

"No!"

After all it is not a lie—not all a lie! He has not been to see her; and she has made a mental reservation as to her answer applying only to the second clause of her companion's speech.

"H'm!" says Miss Watson, biting her nails; "that in itself looks odd."

Since this last remark is not a question, and since she is by no means assured of having even a tolerable mastery over her voice, Mrs. Forth allows it to go by uncommented upon.

"What can he be doing up here?" continues the other, still biting her nails, and in a tone of the most poignant inquisitiveness. "The very deadest time of the long vacation; not a soul to be seen about! Why, you might drive a coach-and-four along the side walk from St. Ursula's to King's! I shall never rest till I have got to the bottom of it!"

Her guest's eyes are riveted upon Mrs. Forth with such an unwinking energy of stare, that she must needs form some halting answer.

"Will not you?" she says, with a sickly smile; "you had better ask him!"

"I only wish he would give me the chance," replies the other stoutly; "but he knows a great deal too well for that. I came face to face with him in Church Street, and before I could get my breath he had slipped away like an eel. If you remember, we used to think him a little deaf at Dresden, but I never heard that he was blind, too! There is always something louche in a man obviously avoiding the respectable women of his acquaintance, is not there?"

She repeats the question with such a pertinacity of inquiry, that Belinda is obliged to murmur that, "Yes, there is."

When the beef has gone to fulfil that destiny which Miss Watson had prophesied for it—she, at least, has done full justice to it—they move to the drawing-room.

"I am afraid that I must ask you to excuse me," says Belinda, with formality. "I always devote the next two hours to my mother-in-law."

"Pooh! do not mention it," replies the other cordially; "it would be very odd if such an old soldier as I did not know how to make herself comfortable. Do not trouble to entertain me. Books? magazines? eh?" turning over the objects on the table; "there is no fear but that I shall find something to amuse myself with!"

Nor is there. At intervals during the two hours Belinda catches sight of her from the window, bustling round the garden, pinching the few plums on the garden wall, trying to look into the windows of the next houses; hears her opening and shutting doors, pulling out drawers, etc.

For a moment a pang of apprehension crosses Mrs. Forth's mind. Can she ferret out anything? any letter? any paper? But no; a smile of pride and reassurance crosses Belinda's face. What in all her poor archives is there that might not be exposed to the eyes of the whole world? to the gimlet eyes of (if imagination could grasp the idea of such a hideous multiplication) a hundred Miss Watsons?

The two hours are gone. It is a quarter to four; the time at which she usually begins to put on hat and gloves, and saunter, deliberately blissful, towards St. Bridget's. It is clear that it is not the hour at which she will begin to saunter thither to-day. Nothing looks less like departure, more like a prolonged stay, than Miss Watson's bonnetless attitude, plunged recumbent in the Professor's chair.

"I have been having a look round," she says cheerfully; "I like to get the bearings of a house. There was one door locked; the Professor's sanctum, eh?"

"He likes me to keep it locked in his absence," replies the Professor's wife icily, "as he does not wish his books and papers to be disturbed."

"You shall show it me by-and-by," returns Miss Watson comfortably; "after all, there is no hurry. I have half a mind to stay till the late train, and have a bit of dinner with you; nothing extra; a cutlet, a grill—whatever you have ordered for yourself."

"It is a very slow train," says Belinda precipitately.

"I wonder what train Rivers came down by," continues the other thought-fully; "of course he has only run down for the day. I have been thinking it over, and the more I look at it the more louche it looks!"

Belinda has not sat down; in the forlorn hope, perhaps, that the maintenance of a standing attitude may give a less established tone to her guest's presence. She now hastens to the window, and begins to fidget with the blind-cord, which pulls up and down perfectly, and needs no rearrangement.

"It is an odd place to choose for an intrigue, too," continues the other reflectively. "I have always been told that the men are so strictly looked after; but perhaps it was its very unlikelihood that made him pitch upon it, eh?"

Possibly Belinda makes some answer, and that it is drowned in the rattling of the blind, which she is feverishly jerking up and down. Every drop of blood in her body seems to have given its fellow rendezvous in her face. An intrigue ! Does he indeed come to Oxbridge for an intrigue ? An intrigue with whom? An intrigue ! Is that what other people beside Miss Watson would call it?

"I shall certainly mention it to his mother, Lady Marion, when next I meet her," says Miss Watson resolutely; "I do not think that it would be acting a friend's part not to do so. I do not actually know her, but there is a sort of connection between us; I was at school for six months once at Brussels with a cousin of hers, and there is no doubt that there is something uncommonly louche about it."

Judging by the frequency with which during the next hour she repeats this phrase, it must be a favourite one of hers. By five o'clock its recurrence has driven Belinda to the verge of desperation. It seems to her (though that is a figment of her guilty fancy) that there is a dreadful meaning and significance in the unblinking look at her with which each repetition of the word is accompanied.

Five o'clock! He has been waiting for her a whole hour beneath St. Bridget's elms, straining his eyes up the long straight walk. At length:

"I think," she says, looking overtly at the clock—at which she has long been stealing covert glances of agonized impatience —"that if you wish to catch this train—and you would find the later one extremely tedious—you should be setting off!"

"Should I?" replies the guest indifferently. "It is of no consequence if I am late; I am a good walker, and I enjoy running it fine; I see no use in kicking one's heels at a station!"

She ties on her bonnet, and adjusts her strong grey fringe with a maddening deliberation; stops in the middle to examine and inquire the history of a piece of bric-à-brac , which she had not before noticed; and finally (it is said that no Englishwoman ever knows how to take leave) expends herself in an immense farewell speech, from which the word louche is by no means absent. But she is gone at last. Before she is well round the corner—before there is any real security of her not returning, according to her usual custom, to pounce afresh upon her just-freed prey, Belinda has fled to her room; and—her trembling preparations hurriedly made—is speeding, like an arrow shot from a bow, to St. Bridget's. There is no leisureliness about her walk to-day; no feigned indifference, no loitering, no counterfeit indecision, as to her goal. To-day she cannot afford to play her little comedy.

Is not she an hour and a quarter late? Will she find him gone? Will he still be there? Will his patience have held out? In the whole of life, in the whole scheme of nature, there seems to her no other question in the least worth answering.

People look at her oddly, she thinks, as she passes. Hitherto she has not minded how many people she met, or who knew whither, and to what end, her steps were tending. To-day it seems as if they all glance meaningly at her, as who should read her guilty secret in her face. Until to-day she has never thought it either a secret, or guilty. An intrigue ! That is what they call it! She is engaged in an intrigue ; and by some means they know it.

As she enters St. Bridget's a couple of humble lovers meet her face to face. As they pass her they happen to expand into a grin, provoked, probably, by some ponderous joke of their own making; but she takes it to herself. They know that she is a married woman hastening to an assignation. The very birds seem to chirp, and the boughs to rustle meaningly. Well, let them!

It will be a dreadful memory to face by-and-by; but for the moment there is no room for any other question but the one— "Will he be there?"

Before she reaches their trysting bench it is answered. She comes upon him so suddenly, that she has no time to tone down her pace to a decent saunter. He has seen the speed with which she was hasting towards him; her breathlessness, her pallor, the desperate anxiety of her eyes.

There is no use in shamming to-day. But, indeed, his own condition leaves him no right to criticize hers. Perhaps he is in even worse case than she; for she can speak, and he cannot.

"You are not gone!" she says with a gasp, such as one might give whose reprieve met him at the scaffold-foot. "I thought you would be gone!"

For answer, he grips her two hands in his (never before in all his life has he been master, and for how few poor minutes, but of one), and looks at her with a white fixity of passion, to whose relief no words come. Even when they are both seated on their bench—neither ever quite knows how they reached it—it is still she who speaks; nor when she does so, is it to ask him to release her hands. Perhaps in her agitation she is not aware that they are still in his keeping.

"Is it possible that you are threatened with a return of indisposition?" he asks, with a sudden, quick look of peevish anxiety.

She shakes her head, smiling suddenly and bitterly. It is so apparent that his solicitude is due, not to care for her health, but to apprehension of a new doctor's bill.

"Thanks, no."

"You appear to be unaccountably out of breath," he says, in a vexed voice.

"Not more than anyone must be, in climbing to this cock-loft," replies she sullenly.

Perhaps his examination of her face has reassured him as to her soundness, for once more he dips his pen into the ink-horn.

"You have not answered my question," says she brusquely, perceiving in him a deliberate intention of henceforth ignoring her.

He makes a gesture of annoyed impatience.

"Well?"

"He has no objection," answers Mrs. Forth slackly, sitting down, and letting her arms drop depressedly beside her.

"You tried to make him forbid you, and he would not," cries Sarah sharply, and with a pungent laugh.

"You are really too clever," replies Belinda, reddening, and with a petulance which shows that this shaft has gone home; "you have got your own way; you always get your own way. I am going with you; let us hear no more about it."

The carriage is at the door, and a few such idlers as mostly watch the arrival and departure of each coming and going vehicle, hang about it. Sarah is already seated, and is exchanging such chastened and diluted gallantries as the publicity of the situation will admit, with some one hanging over the balcony overhead. Belinda has purposely loitered over her dressing, in the hope that some opportune mountain storm may even yet intervene to hinder the execution of the, to her, so distasteful project.

But in vain. The perverse and hostile sky is, all too obviously, clearing. As she issues from the hall, she glances furtively to right and left. Yes, he is here! His voice, which but for Sarah's manoeuvring might have been all day in her happy ears, is addressing her.

"You are going out?"

(Do they all hear, as plainly as she does, the blank disappointment and discomfiture of his tone?)

"Yes," she answers, lifting for an instant her eyes with an instinct of ungovernable plaintiveness to his; "for the day! on a pleasure-trip! Wish me joy!"

She has taken her seat, and, just as they are setting off, she leans forward, and addressing the driver, repeats in a peculiarly clear and distinct voice that direction which has already been given him, "To Coniston!"

"You are determined that there shall be no mistake as to our destination, I see," says Sarah sarcastically.

Belinda's chest heaves.

"I thought that you might like Mr. Bellairs to know," she answers ironically. "By-the-bye, who is to keep watch and ward over him in your absence?"

"I have received private information that they all mean to come to Coniston too," replies Sarah tranquilly. "I thought I would be beforehand with them!—a poor project, but mine own!"

Away they go from the wind-freshened lake, whose waves are running riot in the sun; while, as they pass along, the clouds roll up and up from fell and scaw and nab, leaving only a lawny kerchief here and there about their necks; as though loth all at once to desert them. And by-and-by kerchief and veil are swept away too, and the hills are free.

Through loveliest pasture-fields, crowded with great bluebells and vetches, and meadow-sweet that smells of almonds; by meadows where women are tossing the late hay, beside the laughing Rotha; under Loughrigg and over chattering Brathay's grey stone bridge they go. Up and up they climb; between the weather-painted walls, with their lavish ferns and their crannied flowers; till at the top of the long ascent they pause to breathe the horses, and look back.

Fair mountain-wonders, now again conversing with the clouds; and yet lit on your bare flanks by the sun: Red Screes, Fairfield, Wansfell Pike, with your pointed head! to which of you shall we give crown and sceptre, as Queen-hill, in this your morning glory? For a while they both look in silence. Then:

"It seems a pity that we are not in the least enjoying ourselves," says Sarah regretfully.

Belinda's heart gives a passionate assent, though her lips are closed. Is not life full of such pities? of exquisite spread feasts, and gagged mouths that are not allowed to taste them? With what an agony of pleasure would she be looking at these curly mists and shining shoulders; at these heavenly becks, rain-swollen in their noisy mirth, dashing in happy bounds down the hillsides, if only—if only! And this is such an easy, probable "if," too!

"If you could but think it, you know," continues Miss Churchill, turning in calm reasoning to her sister, "I am really much better company than David; and it is no great stretch of imagination to say that you are not much duller than Bellairs, eh?"

But Belinda is still staring, in sullen, grudging misery at the wasted loveliness before her.

"Shall we try to pretend, at all events, that we like it?" says Sarah persuasively. "It would be more to our credit; I think I could, if you could."

But Mrs. Forth is unable to promise even thus much.

"You cannot do it?" says Sarah leniently; "well, I am the last person who has any right to blame you. Personally, I have never cared for a landscape without figures in the foreground!"

But as time goes on, this seems to be the species of landscape to which Miss Churchill is to-day to be condemned. Although Coniston has been long ago reached, luncheon eaten, and several coaches and char-à-bancs driven up and unloaded, yet is there no sign of the appearance of any one of the ornamental foreground figures for which she had confidently looked.

"Beaten by a banjo!" says she tragically; "if it had not been for the banjo I should have walked away from her. I will never go anywhere without a banjo again!"

Belinda laughs grimly. "I would not!"

"I suppose there must be some tiresome sight to be seen here," says Sarah, yawning; "it would never do if they found out that we had not seen it: not the lake— no! I could not bear that; it would remind me of the dinghey! What did the waiter tell us? copper-mines and a water-fall? Come, do look a little livelier, and brace your mind to copper-mines and a waterfall!"

They set out dispiritedly, but before they have gone five yards:

"I will leave word which way we have gone," cries Sarah, brightening, "in case anyone asks for us."

"A most unnecessary precaution!" replies Belinda morosely.

A walk undertaken in such a spirit is not likely to be productive of any very acute enjoyment.

"We are to turn to the right when we reach the Black Bull!" says Sarah gloomily; "I wonder what would happen if we turned to the left?"

But they have not the energy even to make this experiment. They have passed village and white-washed church, and asking their way of the civil villagers, presently find themselves climbing a mountain road, with a little gay river frisking over its worn boulder stones on their right, and a green fell on their left. Ere long the road leaves the bright beck, and climbs higher than it; and trees interpose a leafy shield between them and their noisy friend. But it calls to them from beneath, "I am here; you will find me soon again." And so they do. For by-and-by the road swerves to the right, and they are once more free from the envious sycamores and mountain ashes, with their red rosaries, and are standing on a rough stone mortarless bridge with parapet broken down, and beneath them the stream plunges in a little storm of foam. Is this the waterfall? They do not know; they do not much care. It is a little waterfall, even if it be not the one in search of which they have been sent.

"My cup is full!" says Sarah, sitting resolutely down. "I am hot; I have not a leg to stand upon; my pretty project has avorté ; if Niagara were round the corner I would not go to look at it. Oh, why did I leave my granny? dear granny! how she would have hated this!"

"Even more than you do?" asks Belinda cynically.

Mrs. Forth is still standing, her eyes riveted on the little cascade, and her heart repeating over and over to itself that bitter morning plaint: "How pleasant! if only—if only—what?"

"Belinda!" says her sister, after a while, in a voice of cautious triumph, "do you see anything moving between the trees? yes? I thought so! A more direct answer to prayer I have seldom heard of!" Then, with an abrupt change of tone to one of sharp and real annoyance: "If he has not brought that eternal David with him!"

She passes her hand across her forehead and rubs her eyes. In what room of the hotel—in which often-trodden spot by wave-lipped mere will the blow fell him? How will he take it? Will it kill him? She laughs aloud. "Pooh! as Sarah says, 'they take more killing than that!' And how much killing will she herself take?" This Sarah has never told her. How much of this slow death? A great, great deal! Was ever anyone so full of obstinate life as she? Other women—women who prayed to live, women with little children's chubby arms about their necks, with passionate, fond husbands, wetting their faint hands with good-bye tears—would have died of such an illness as hers. She, childless, hated and hating, has survived. A sense of impotent, dark rebellion fills her soul. Of what use to save her alive? What sense in it? To save her alive in order to show her just one small glimpse of what life might have been, and then to hurl her back into what life is! What life might have been! Oh, the terrible vividness of that vision!

She has fallen sideways upon her bed, which, as well as her whole body, is shaken with the force of her silent sobs. They must be silent, for the walls are thin, and her husband's attic is next door.

"If we had once belonged to each other," she says, with a violent agony of emphasis, "even if afterwards I had seen him struck dead at my feet, still, I should have known what is the very best thing that life holds; I could have said, 'I have lived!' but now I shall lie down in my grave, knowing that there has always been something immeasurably better than anything I know, just beyond me!"

After that, she lies quite still, a sort of numb calm succeeding the hurricane, and outside the rain swirls always, and the waterfall tumbles. There must be more of soothing properties in their joint sound than she gives them credit for, since by-and-by their sullen music grows dim in her ears, and she sleeps.

She awakes in the early morning, forlorn and cold, to find that she has lain all night fully dressed, outside her bed. She is down in good time, and stands outside the hall-door, waiting for breakfast to be announced. The rain has ceased. The wind has torn and hurled the clouds apart, and let the sun look through; and also swept clear little intensely blue islands in the sky. The shadows are flying, speedy as dreams, along Skiddaw's flanks, and Derwentwater lies—all billowy and disturbed— at the foot of her girdling fells. On the bit of marshy grass that intervenes between Belinda and the lake, several horses are grazing, and two rolling. One cannot roll quite over, which seems to annoy him.

"I hope that you are recovered from the effects of your yesterday's imprudence," says a voice at her elbow.

She starts.

"You will not be long away?" she says, with a passionate wistfulness; "you will not leave me long alone? you will come back as soon as you can?"

"Need you tell me that?"

There is almost derision in his tone. He has drawn her back to her former resting-place, and is most soothingly and half timidly caressing her hair. Not yet can he realize that it is the glorious proud head which has always seemed farther above him than the stars, that is lying in prone abandonment on his shoulder.

"You will not despise me more than you can help?" she whispers, with a sob; dark as it is, hiding her face on his breast. "Of course you must despise me; but you will try and hide it as well as you can, will not you?"

Are his wits wandering? Can this be his divine and lofty lady, preferring this miserable prayer? Can this be he, blasphemously listening to it?

"How am I to get through these days?" she moans, clinging to him; "oh, come quickly back! come quick! quick! How am I to look him in the face without telling him what I am planning against him? if he says one kind word to me, it will be the death of me! Happily for me, he never does!"

For all answer, he only strains her more desperately to his heart. What words can he find with which to console her? Surely that silent embrace, strongly enveloping her with its love and its pity, is best.

"I shall be always fancying that you are growing tired of me," she says, still whispering, and her speech broken by dry sobs; "promise not to grow tired of me! promise! Remember that I shall have nothing— nothing but you in the whole wide world; and that when you are gone from me, everything will be gone! But what is the use of making you promise?" with a despairing change of key; "how can you help it? If you grow tired of me, you will grow tired; and there will be an end of it!"

She has pulled herself out of his arms; and now stands apart from him, as if in prophetic renunciation. He puts up his hand to his head as if his brain were turning.

"When you say such things," he cries incoherently, "you make me feel as if my senses were gone! I grow tired of you! I! I! Oh, my love, my lady, my Queen!" falling down at her feet, and kissing the hem of her gown, as if no humility of posture could adequately express the abasement of his soul before her; "if you knew how I am eating my heart out with the thought that you may grow tired of me ! that you may find out I am not worthy of the sacrifice you are making for me!—that I , only I! —oh my poor love! my poor love!—may not be enough for you!"

He stops, choked, pressing his head against her trembling knees; and his scalding tears filter through her gown. The intensity of his emotion calms her a little. At all events, he is not tired of her yet ! She stoops, and lays her hand almost protectingly upon his head.

"Yes!" she says; "you will be enough!" But in the dusk her face looks livid, and she ends her sentence with a sob.

The next morning he goes—goes, leaving her to live through as best she may, the days that must intervene before his return. How—by what process as yet unconjectured by her—is she to live through them? They will pass, of course. No day has yet dawned upon sad humanity that did not pass; even Damiens' death-day passed. But how? The weather, at all events, will not come to her help. It has changed from capricious showers back to such headstrong, hopeless rain as accompanied their drive from Lowood. There will be no seeking escape in mountain walks; no tiring down thought by tired muscles.

How could she ever have thought the distance short? It is immeasurably, unbelievably long! The hotel is in sight! A few people are standing about the door. Have they heard? Are they talking about it? The fly has stopped. Is she in time? It seems as if there were an ominous silence about the idlers hanging round. Have they heard? She dare not look the waiter, who comes to help her out, in the face. She staggers past him into the hall; then, by a tremendous effort, steadying herself, she rushes upstairs. Is she in time? Flight after flight she mounts, with that question surging in her ears. She has reached her room—has burst into it. Is she in time? One glance gives her the answer. Yes, she is! Undisturbed, exactly as she had left them upon the top of the chest of drawers, lie letter and packet. She is in time! Oh, the relief of that thought! And yet, so complicatedly contradictory are we, that, at the sight so madly desired, a distinct pang of disappointment crosses her heart. Had the letter been discovered, there would have been the one and only refuge left her, and no one could then have blamed her for availing herself of it. She starts, shuddering at herself. Is she already repenting of her repentance? What security has she that she may not again go back from it? Within her there is none; if there is a security for her, it must be one outside her. She has taken the letter into her hand, and stands for a few moments motionless; a desperate determination gaining strength in her heart, and painting itself on her haggard yet resolute face. Since the letter has not yet been delivered to him, she herself will deliver it. She will tell him under what circumstances it was written. This shall be her expiation.

Without giving herself time for hesitation, she moves quickly out of the room, and knocks at her husband's door. There is no answer, and she knocks again. Still no reply. Perhaps, though it is not likely, he may be out. So she enters. No, he is in his usual seat, by his improvised writing-table. He could not have heard. His attitude is not quite his usual one, for he is apparently unoccupied, leaning back in his chair, and with his head bent a little forwards on his chest. He must be thinking, and will probably chide her for disturbing him. Well, it cannot be helped. Heaven knows he has cause enough to chide her!

"Can I speak to you?"

Her voice sounds strangely resonant in this silent room. There is no answer, nor does her husband show, by any movement or slightest change of position, that he is aware of her vicinity. It is very odd. She has spoken loudly and distinctly, and he is not deaf. He must be asleep; and yet, he is not apt to fall asleep in the morning! A chill terror is creeping over her, but she tries to shake it off. Her nerves are unstrung. Why should not he be asleep? How apt old people are to slide into a doze.

Conquering the nameless, senseless dread of approaching him that has come over her, she walks firmly up to him, and laying her hand on his arm, stoops and looks into his face. The next instant a sharp shriek rings through the hotel, and when frightened visitors and chamber-maids, hurrying from all quarters, reach the room, they find Mrs. Forth lying stretched on the floor beside her husband, as inanimate as he. Only that in time they bring her round again. As for him, he has for ever vindicated his character from the imputation of being a malade imaginaire , and the Professorship of Etruscan in the University of Oxbridge is vacant!