DYNEVOR TERRACE.

VOL. II.

BY

CHARLOTTE M. YONGE

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.

THE TRYSTE.

One single flash of glad surprise
Just glanced from Isabel's dark eyes,
Then vanished in the blush of shame
That as its penance instant came—
'O thought unworthy of my race!'
The Lord of the Isles.

As little recked Fitzjocelyn of the murmurs which he had provoked, as he guessed the true secret of his victory. In his eyes, it was the triumph of merit over prejudice, and Mrs. Frost espoused the same gratifying view, though ascribing much to her nephew's activity, and James himself, flushed with hope and success, was not likely to dissent.

Next they had to make their conquest available. Apart from Louis's magnificent prognostications, at the lowest computation, the head master's income amounted to a sum which to James appeared affluence; and though there was no house provided, it mattered the less since there were five to choose from in the Terrace, even if his grandmother had not wished that their household should be still the same. With Miss Conway's own fortune and the Terrace settled on herself, where could be any risk?

Would Lady Conway think so? and how should the communication be made? James at first proposed writing to her, enclosing a letter to Isabel; but he changed his mind, unable to satisfy himself that, when absent from restraint, she might not send a refusal without affording her daughter the option. He begged his grandmother to write to Isabel; but she thought her letter might carry too much weight, and, whatever might be her hopes, it was not for her to tell the young lady that such means were sufficient.

Louis begged to be the bearer of the letter. His aunt would certainly keep terms with him, and he could insure that the case was properly laid before Isabel; and, as there could be no doubt at present of his persuasive powers, James caught at the offer. The party were still at Beauchastel, and he devised going to his old quarters at Ebbscreek, and making a descent upon them from thence.

When he came to take up his credentials, he found James and his little black leathern bag, determined to come at least to Ebbscreek with him, and declaring it made him frantic to stay at home and leave his cause in other hands, and that he could not exist anywhere but close to the scene of action.

Captain Hannaford was smoking in his demi-boat, and gave his former lodgers a hearty welcome, but he twinkled knowingly with his eye, and so significantly volunteered to inform them that the ladies were still at Beauchastel, that James's wrath at the old skipper's impudence began to revive, and he walked off to the remotest end of the garden.

The Captain, remaining with Louis, with whom he was always on far more easy terms, looked after the other gentleman, winked again, and confessed that he had suspected one or other of them might be coming that way this summer, though he could not say he had expected to see them both together.

'Mind, Captain,' said Louis,' it wasn't I that made the boat late this time last year.'

'Well! I might be wrong, I fancied you cast an eye that way. Then maybe it ain't true what's all over the place here.'

Louis pressed to hear what. 'Why, that when the French were going on like Robert Spear and them old times, he had convoyed the young lady right through the midst of them, and they would both have been shot, if my Lady's butler hadn't come down with a revolver, killed half-a-dozen of the mob, and rescued them out of it, but that Lord Fitzjocelyn had been desperately wounded in going back to fetch her bracelet, and Mr. Delaford had carried him out in his arms.'

'Well!' said Louis, coolly, without altering a muscle of his face, as the Captain looked for an angry negative.

'And when they got home,—so the story went,—Mr. Frost, the tutor, was so mad with jealousy and rage, that my Lady declared those moorings would not suit her no longer, but had let go, and laid her head right for Beauchastel.'

'Pray what was the young lady supposed to think of the matter?'

'Stories appeared to vary. One version said that Mr. Delaford had found him on his knees to her; and that my Lady had snatched her cruelly away, because she would not have her married before her own daughters, and looked over all the post, for fear there should be a letter for her. Another declared that Miss Conway would not have him at any price, and was set upon the poor tutor, and that he was lying dangerously ill of a low fever. —The women will have it so,' observed the Captain, 'the story's everywhere, except maybe in the parlour at Beauchastel, and I wouldn't wonder if Mrs. Mansell knew it all herself, for her maid has a tongue a yard long. I won't say but I thought there might be some grain of truth at the bottom—'

'And you shall hear it by-and-by, when I know what it is myself.'

'I'd not say I would have believed it the more if that fine gentleman had taken his oath of it—a fellow that ain't to be trusted,' observed the Captain.

This might have led to a revelation, if Louis had had time to attend to it; but he had pity on James's impatient misery, and proceeded to ask the loan of the boat. The tide would not, however, serve; and as waiting till it would was not to be endured, the two cousins set off to walk together through the woods, Louis beguiling the way by chaffing James, as far as he would bear, with the idea of Isabel's name being trifled with by the profane crowd.

He left James at the gate of the park, prowling about like a panther to try for a glimpse of Isabel's window, and feeding his despair and jealousy that Louis should boldly walk up to the door, while he, with so much better a right, was excluded by his unguarded promise to Lady Conway.

All the tumultuary emotions of his mind were endlessly repeated, and many a slow and pealing note of the church-clock had added fuel to his impatience, and spurred him to rush up to the door and claim his rights, before Louis came bounding past the lodge-gates, flourishing his cap, and crying, 'Hurrah, Jem! All right!'

'I'm going to her at once!' cried Jem, beginning to rush off; but Louis caught and imprisoned his arm.

'Not so fast, sir! You are to see her. I promise you shall see her if you wish it, but it must be in my aunt's way.'

'Let me go, I say!'

'When I have walked five miles in your service, you won't afford me an arm to help me back. I am not a horse with wings, and I won't be Cupid's post except on my own terms. Come back.'

'I don't stir till I have heard the state of the case.'

'Yes, you do; for all the sportsmen will be coming home, and my aunt would not for all the world that Mr. Mansell caught you on the forbidden ground.'

'How can you give in to such shuffling nonsense! If I am to claim Isabel openly, why am I not to visit her openly? You have yielded to that woman's crooked policy. I don't trust you!'

'When you are her son, you may manage her as you please. Just now she has us in her power, and can impose conditions. Come on; and if you are good, you shall hear.'

Drawing James along with him through the beechwood glades, he began, 'You would have been more insane still if you had guessed at my luck. I found Isabel alone. Mrs. Mansell had taken the girls to some juvenile fete, and Delaford was discreet enough not to rouse my aunt from her letters. I augured well from the happy conjunction.'

'Go on; don't waste time in stuff.'

'Barkis is willing, then. Is that enough to the point?'

'Fitzjocelyn, you never had any feelings yourself, and therefore you trifle with those of others.'

'I beg your pardon. It was a shame! Jem, you may be proud. She trusts you completely, and whatever you think sufficient, she regards as ample.'

'Like her! Only too like her. Such confidence makes one feel a redoubled responsibility.'

'I thought I had found something at which you could not grumble.'

'How does she look? How do they treat her?'

'Apparently they have not yet fed her on bread and water. No; seriously, I must confess that she looked uncommonly well and lovely! Never mind, Jem; I verily believe that, in spite of absence and all that, she had never been so happy in her life. If any description could convey the sweetness of voice and manner when she spoke of you! I could not look in her face. Those looks can only be for you. We talked it over, but she heeded no ways and means; it was enough that you were satisfied. She says the subject has never been broached since the flight from Northwold, and that Lady Conway's kindness never varies; and she told me she had little fear but that her dear mamma would be prevailed on to give sanction enough to hinder her from feeling as if she were doing wrong, or setting a bad example to her sisters. They know nothing of it; but Walter, who learnt it no one knows how, draws the exemplary moral, that it serves his mother right for inflicting a tutor on him.'

'Has she had my letter? Does she know I am here?'

'Wait! All this settled, and luncheon being ready, down came my Lady, and we played unconsciousness to our best ability. I must confess my aunt beat us hollow! Isabel then left us to our conference, which we conducted with the gravity of a tailor and an old woman making a match in Brittany.'

'You came out with that valuable improvable freehold, the Terrace, I suppose?'

'I told the mere facts! My aunt was rather grand about a grammar-school; she said even a curacy would sound better, and she must talk it over with Isabel. I gave your letter, conjuring her to let Isabel have it, and though she declared that it was no kindness, and would put the poor darling into needless perplexity, she was touched with my forbearance, in not having given it before, when I had such an opportunity. So she went away, and stayed a weary while: but when she came, it was worth the waiting. She said Isabel was old enough to know her own mind, and the attachment being so strong, and you so unexceptionable, she did not think it possible to object: she had great delight in seeing you made happy, and fulfilling the dictates of her own heart, now that it could be done with moderate prudence. They go to Scarborough in a fortnight, and you will be welcome there. There's for you!'

'Louis, you are the best fellow living! But you said I was to see her at once.'

'I asked, why wait for Scarborough?' and depicted you hovering disconsolately round the precincts. Never mind, Jem, I did not make you more ridiculous than human nature must needs paint a lover, and it was all to melt her heart. I was starting off to fetch you, when I found she was in great terror. She had never told the Mansells of the matter, and they must be prepared. She cannot have it transpire while she is in their house, and, in fact, is excessively afraid of Mr. Mansell, and wants to tell her story by letter. Now, I think, considering all things, she has a right to take her own way.'

'You said I was not to go without meeting her!'

'I had assented, and was devising how to march off my lunatic quietly, when the feminine goodnatured heart that is in her began to relent, and she looked up in my face with a smile, and said the poor dears were really exemplary, and if Isabel should walk to the beach and should meet any one there, she need know nothing about it.'

'What says Isabel?'

'She held up her stately head, and thought it would be a better return for Mr. Mansell's kindness to tell him herself before leaving Beauchastel; but Lady Conway entreated her not to be hasty, and protested that her fears were of Mr. Mansell's displeasure with her for not having taken better care of her—she dreaded a break, and so on,—till the end of it was, that though we agree that prudence would carry us off to-morrow morning, yet her ladyship will look the other way, if you happen to be on the southern beach at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning. I suppose you were very headlong and peremptory in your note, for I could not imagine Isabel consenting to a secret tryste even so authorized.'

'I never asked for any such thing! I would not for worlds see her led to do anything underhand.'

'She will honour you! That's right, Jem!'

'Neither as a clergyman, nor as a Dynevor, can I consent to trick even those who have no claim to her duty!'

'Neither as a gentleman, nor as a human creature,' added Louis, in the same tone. 'Shall I go back and give your answer?'

'No; you are walking lame enough already.'

'No matter for that.'

'To tell you the truth, I can't stand your being with her again, while I am made a fool of by that woman. If I'm not to see her, I'll be off. I'll send her a note; we will cross to Bickleypool, and start by the mail-train this very night.'

Louis made no objection, and James hurried him into the little parlour, where in ten minutes the note was dashed off:—

My Own Most Precious One!—(as, thanks to my most unselfish of cousins, I may dare to call you,)—I regret my fervency and urgency for an interview, since it led you to think I could purchase even such happiness by a subterfuge unworthy of my calling, and an ill return of the hospitality to which we owed our first meeting. We will meet when I claim you in the face of day, without the sense of stolen felicity, which is a charm to common-place minds. My glory is in the assurance that you understand my letter, approve, and are relieved. With such sanction, and with ardour before you like mine, I see that you could do no other than consent, and there is not a shadow of censure in my mind; but if, without compromising your sense of obedience, you could openly avow our engagement to Mr. Mansell, I own that I should feel that we were not drawn into a compromise of sincerity. What this costs me I will not say; it will be bare existence till we meet at Scarborough.

'Your own, J. E. F. D.'

Having written this and deposited it in the Ebbscreek post-office, James bethought himself that his submissive cousin had thrown himself on the floor, with his bag for a pillow, trying to make the most of the few moments of rest before the midnight journey. Seized with compunction, James exclaimed, 'There, old fellow, we will stay to-night.'

'Thank you—' He was too sleepy for more.

The delay was recompensed. James was trying to persuade Louis to rouse himself to be revived by bread-and-cheese and beer, and could extort nothing but a drowsy repetition of the rhyme, in old days the war-cry of the Grammar-school against the present headmaster,—

'The Welshman had liked to be choked by a mouse,
But he pulled him out by the tail,'—

when an alarum came in the shape of a little grinning boy from Beauchastel, with a note on which James had nearly laid hands, as he saw the writing, though the address was to the Viscount Fitzjocelyn.

'You may have it,' said Louis. 'If anything were wanting, the coincidence proves that you were cut out for one another. I rejoice that the moon does not stoop from her sphere.'

'My Dear Cousin,—I trust to you to prevent Mr. F. Dynevor from being hurt or disappointed; and, indeed, I scarcely think he will, though I should not avail myself of the permission for meeting him so kindly intended. I saw at once that you felt as I did, and as I know he will. He would not like me to have cause to blush before my kind friends—to know that I had acted a deceit, nor to set an example to my sisters for which they might not understand the justification. I know that you will obtain my pardon, if needed; and to be assured of it, would be all that would be required to complete the grateful happiness of
'Isabel.'

The boy had orders not to wait; and these being seconded by fears of something that 'walked' in Ebbscreek wood after dark, he was gone before an answer could be thought of. It mattered the less, since Isabel must receive James's note early in the morning; and so, in fact, she did—and she was blushing over it, and feeling as if she could never have borne to meet his eye but for the part she had fortunately taken, when Louisa tapped at her door, with a message that Mr. Mansell wished to speak with her, if she were ready.

She went down-stairs still in a glow; and her old friend's first words were a compliment on her roses, so pointed, that she doubted for a moment whether he did not think them suspicious, especially as he put his hands behind his back, and paced up and down the room, for some moments. He then came towards her, and said, in a very kind tone, 'Isabel, my dear, I sent for you first, because I knew your own mother very well, my dear; and though Lady Conway is very kind, and has always done you justice,—that I will always say for her,—yet there are times when it may make a difference to a young woman whether she has her own mother or not.'

Isabel's heart was beating. She was certain that some discovery had been made, and longed to explain; but she was wise enough not to speak in haste, and waited to see how the old gentleman would finally break it to her. He blundered on a little longer, becoming more confused and distressed every minute, and at last came to the point abruptly. 'In short, Isabel, my dear, what can you have done to set people saying that you have been corresponding with the young men at Ebbscreek?'

'I sent a note to my cousin Fitzjocelyn last night,' said Isabel, with such calmness, that the old gentleman fairly stood with his mouth open, looking at her aghast.

'Fitzjocelyn! Then it is Fitzjocelyn, is it?' he exclaimed. 'Then, why could he not set about it openly and honourably? Does his father object? I would not have thought it of you, Isabel, nor of the lad neither!'

'You need not think it, dear Mr. Mansell. There is nothing between Lord Fitzjocelyn and myself but the warmest friendship.'

'Isabel! Isabel! why are you making mysteries? I do not wish to pry into your affairs. I would have trusted you anywhere; but when it comes round to me that you have been sending a private messenger to one of the young gentlemen there, I don't know what to be at! I would not believe Mrs. Mansell at first; but I saw the boy, and he said you had sent him yourself. My dear, you may mean, very rightly—I am sure you do, but you must not set people talking! It is not acting rightly by me, Isabel; but I would not care for that, if it were acting rightly by yourself.' And he gazed at her with a piteous, perplexed expression.

'Let me call mamma,' said Isabel.

'As you will, my dear, but cannot you let the simple truth come out between you and your own blood-relation, without all her words to come between? Can't you, Isabel? I am sure you and I shall understand each other.'

'That we shall,' replied Isabel, warmly. 'I have given her no promise. Dear Mr. Mansell, I have wished all along that you should know that I am engaged, with her full consent, to Mr. Frost Dynevor.'

'To the little black tutor!' cried Mr. Mansell, recoiling, but recollecting himself. 'I beg your pardon, my dear, he may be a very good man, but what becomes of all this scrambling over barricades with the young Lord?'

Isabel described the true history of her engagement; and it was received with a long, low whistle, by no means too complimentary.

'And what makes him come and hide in holes and corners, if this is all with your mamma's good will?'

'Mamma thought you would be displeased; she insisted on taking her own time for breaking it to you,' said Isabel.

'Was there ever a woman but must have her mystery? Well, I should have liked him better if he had not given into it!'

'He never did!' said Isabel, indignant enough to disclose in full the whole arrangement made by Lady Conway's manoeuvres and lax good-nature. 'I knew it would never do,' she added, 'though I could not say so before her and Fitzjocelyn. My note was to tell them so: and look here, Mr. Mansell, this is what Mr. Dynevor had already written before receiving mine.'

She held it out proudly; and Mr. Mansell, making an unwilling sound between his teeth, took it from her; but, as he read, his countenance changed, and he exclaimed, 'Ha! very well! This is something like! So that's it, is it? You and he would not combine to cheat the old man, like a pair of lovers in a trumpery novel!'

'No, indeed!' said Isabel, 'that would be a bad way of beginning.'

'Where is the young fellow?—at Ebbscreek, did you say? I'll tell you what, Isabel,' with his hand on the bell, 'I'll have out the dogcart this minute, and fetch him home to breakfast, to meet my Lady when she comes down stairs, if it be only for the sake of showing that I like plain dealing!'

'Isabel could only blush, smile, look doubtful, and yet so very happy and grateful, that Mr. Mansell became cautious, lest his impulse should have carried him too far, and, after having ordered the vehicle to be prepared, he caught her by the hand, and detained her, saying, 'Mind you, Miss, you are not to take this for over-much. I'm afraid it is a silly business, and I did not want you to throw yourself away on a schoolmaster. I must see and talk to the man myself; but I won't have anything that's not open and above-board, and that my Lady shall see for once in her life!'

'I'm not afraid,' said Isabel, smiling. 'James will make his own way with you.'

Isabel ran away to excuse and explain her confession to Lady Conway; while Mr. Mansell indulged in another whistle, and then went to inform his wife that he was afraid the girl had been making a fool of herself; but it was not Lady Conway's fault that she was nothing worse, and he was resolved, whatever he did, to show that honesty was the only thing that would go down with him.

The boat was rocking on the green waves, and Louis was in the act of waving an adieu to deaf Mrs. Hannaford, when a huntsman's halloo caused James to look round and behold Mr. Mansell standing up in his dogcart, making energetic signals with his whip.

He had meant to be very guarded, and wait to judge of James before showing that he approved, but the excitement of the chase betrayed him into a glow of cordiality, and he shook hands with vehemence.

'That's right!—just in time! Jump in, and come home to breakfast. So you wouldn't be a party to my Lady's tricks!—just like her—just as she wheedled poor Conway. I will let her see how I esteem plain dealing! I don't say that I see my way through this business; but we'll talk it over together, and settle matters without my Lady.'

James hardly knew where he was, between joy and surprise. The invitation was extended to his companion; but Fitzjocelyn discerned that both James and Mr. Mansell would prefer being left to themselves; he had a repugnance to an immediate discussion with the one aunt, and was in haste to carry the tidings to the other: and besides, it was becoming possible that letters might arrive from the travellers. Actuated by all these motives, he declined the offer of hospitality, and rowed across to Bickleypool, enlightening the Captain on the state of affairs as far as he desired.

CHAPTER II.

THE THIRD TIME.

Tho' this was fair, and that was braw,
And you the toast of all the town,
I sighed and said, amang them a',
Ye are not Mary Morison.
BURNS.

Mrs. Frost and Louis were very merry over the result of Lady Conway's stratagems, and sat up indulging in bright anticipations until so late an hour, that Louis was compelled to relinquish his purpose of going home that night, but he persisted in walking to Ormersfield before breakfast, that he might satisfy himself whether there were any letters.

It was a brisk October morning, the sportsman's gun and whistle re-echoing from the hill sides; where here and there appeared the dogs careering along over green turnip-fields or across amber stubble. The Little Northwold trees, in dark, sober tints of brown and purple, hung over the grey wall, tinted by hoary lichen; and as Louis entered the Ormersfield field paths, and plunged into his own Ferny dell, the long grass and brackens hung over the path, weighed down with silvery dew, and the large cavernous web of the autumnal spider was all one thick flake of wet.

If he could not enter the ravine without thankfulness for his past escape, neither could he forget gratitude to her who had come to his relief from hopeless agony! He quickened his pace, in the earnest longing for tidings, which had seized him, even to heart sickness.

It was the reaction of the ardour and excitement that had so long possessed him. The victory had been gained—he had been obliged to leave James to work in his own cause, and would be no longer wanted in the same manner by his cousin. The sense of loneliness, and of the want of an object, came strongly upon him as he walked through the prim old solitary garden, and looked up at the dreary windows of the house, almost reluctant to enter, as long as it was without Mary's own serene atmosphere of sympathy and good sense, her precious offices of love, her clear steady eyes, even in babyhood his trustworthy counsellors.

Was it a delusion of fancy, acting on reflections in the glass, that, as he mounted the steps from the lawn, depicted Mary's figure through the dining-room windows? Nay, the table was really laid for breakfast—a female figure was actually standing over the tea-chest.

'A scene from the Vicar of Wakefield deluding me,' decided Louis, advancing to the third window, which was open.

It was Mary Ponsonby.

'Mary!'

'You here?—They said you were not at home!'

'My father!—Where?'

'He is not come down. He is as well as possible. We came at eleven last night. I found I was not wanted,' added Mary, with a degree of agitation, that made him conclude that she had lost her father.

One step he made to find the Earl, but too much excited to move away or to stand still, he came towards her, wrung her hand in a more real way than in his first bewildered surprise, and exclaimed in transport, 'O Mary! Mary! to have you back again!' then, remembering his inference, added, low and gravely, 'It makes me selfish—I was not thinking of your grief.'

'Never mind,' said Mary, smiling, though her eyes overflowed, 'I must be glad to be at home again, and such a welcome as this—'

'O Mary, Mary!' he cried, nearly beside himself, 'I have not known what to do without you! You will believe it now, won't you?'—oh, won't you?'

Mary would have been a wonderful person had she not instantly and utterly forgotten all her conclusions from Frampton's having declared him gone to Beauchastel for an unlimited time; but all she did was to turn away her crimson tearful face, and reply, 'Your father would not wish it now.'

'Then the speculations have failed? So much the better!'

'No, no! he must tell you—'

She was trying to withdraw her hand, when Lord Ormersfield opened the door, and in the moment of his amazed 'Louis!' Mary had fled.

'What is it? oh! what is it, father? cried Louis for all greeting, 'why can she say you would not wish it now?'

'Wish it? wish what?' asked the Earl, without the intuitive perception of the meaning of the pronoun.

'What you have always wished—Mary and me—What is the only happiness that life can offer me!'

'If I wished it a year ago, I could only wish it the more now,' said the Earl. 'But how is this?—I fully believed you committed to Miss Conway.'

'Miss Conway! Miss Conway!' burst out Louis, in a frenzy. 'Because Jem Frost was in love with her himself, he fancied every one else must be the same, and now he will be married to her before Christmas, so that's disposed of. As to my feeling for her a particle, a shred of what I do for Mary, it was a mere fiction—a romance, an impossibility.'

'I do not understand you, Louis. Why did you not find this out before?'

'Mrs. Ponsonby called it my duty to test my feelings, and I have tested them. That one is a beautiful poet's dream. Mary is a woman, the only woman I can ever love. Not an hour but I have felt it, and now, father, what does she mean?'

'She means, poor girl, what only her own scrupulous delicacy could regard as an objection, but what renders me still more desirous to have a right to protect her. The cause of our return—'

'How? I thought her father was dead.'

'Far worse. At Valparaiso we met Robson, the confidential agent. I learnt from him that Mr. Ponsonby had hardly waited for her mother's death to marry a Limenian, a person whom everything pointed out as unfit to associate with his daughter. Even Robson, cautious as he was, said he could not undertake to recommend Miss Ponsonby to continue her journey.'

'And this was all?' exclaimed Louis, too intent on his own views for anything but relief.

'All? Is it not enough to set her free? She acquiesced in my judgment that she could do no otherwise than return. She wrote to her father, and I sent three lines to inform him that, under the circumstances, I fulfilled my promise to her mother by taking her home. I had nearly made her promise that, should we find you about to form an establishment of your own, she would consider herself as my child; but—'

'Oh, father! how shall we make her believe you care nothing for her scruple? The wretched man! But—oh! where is she?'

'It does not amount to a scruple in her case,' deliberately resumed the Earl. 'I always knew what Ponsonby was, and nothing from him could surprise me—even such an outrage on feeling and decency. Besides, he has effectually shut himself out of society, and degraded himself beyond the power of interfering with you. For the rest, Mary is already, in feeling, so entirely my child, that to have the right to call her so has always been my fondest wish. And, Louis, the months I have spent with her have not diminished my regard. My Mary! she will have a happier lot than her mother!'

The end of the speech rewarded Louis for the conflict by which he had kept himself still to listen to the beginning. Lord Ormersfield had pity on him, and went in search of Mary; while he, remembering former passages, felt that his father might be less startling and more persuasive, but began to understand what James must have suffered in committing his affairs to another.

The Earl found Mary in what had been her mother's sitting-room, striving to brace her resolution by recalling the conversation that had taken place there on a like occasion. But alas! how much more the heart had now to say! How much it felt as if the only shelter or rest in the desolate world was in the light of the blue eyes whose tender sunshine had been on her for one instant!

Yet she began firmly—'If you please, would you be so kind as to let me go to Aunt Melicent?'

'By-and-by, my dear, when you think fit.'

'Oh, then, at once, and without seeing any one, please!'

'Nay, Mary,' with redoubled gentleness, 'there is one who cannot let you go without seeing him. Mary, you will not disappoint my poor boy again. You will let him be an amendment in my scheme.'

'You have been always most kind to me, but you cannot really like this.'

'You forget that it has been my most ardent wish from the moment I saw you what only your mother's child could be.'

'That was before— No, I ought not! Yours is not a family to bring disgrace into.'

'I cannot allow you to speak thus. I knew your trials at home when first I wished you to be my son's wife, and my opinion is unchanged, except by my increased wish to have the first claim to you.'

'Lord Ormersfield,' said Mary, collecting herself 'only one thing. Tell me, as if we were indifferent persons, is this a connexion such as would do Louis any harm? I trust you to answer.'

He paced along the room, and she tried to control her trembling. He came back and spoke: No, Mary. If he were a stranger, I should give the same advice. Your father's own family is unexceptionable; and those kind of things, so far off—few will ever hear of them, and no one will attach consequence to them. If that be your only scruple, it does you infinite credit; but I can entirely remove it. What might be an injury to you, single, would be of comparatively little importance to him.'

'Miss Conway,' faltered Mary, who could never remember her, when in Louis's presence.

'A mere delusion, of our own. There was nothing in it. He calls you the only woman who can make him happy, as I always knew you were. He must explain all. You will come to him, my dear child.'

Mary resisted no more; he led her down stairs, and left her within the dining-room door.

'Mary, you will now—' was all Louis said; but she let him draw her into his arms, and she rested against his breast, as when he had come to comfort her in the great thunderstorm in auld lang-syne. She felt herself come at length to the shelter and repose for which her heart had so long yearned, in spite of her efforts, and as if the world had nothing more to offer of peace or joy.

'Oh, Mary, how I have wanted you! You believe in me now!'

'I am sure mamma would!' murmured Mary.

He could have poured forth a torrent of affection, but the suspicion of a footstep made her start from him; and the next moment she was herself, glowing, indeed, and half crying with happiness, but alarmed at her own agitation, and struggling to resume her common-place manner.

'There's your father not had a morsel of breakfast!' she exclaimed, hurrying back to her teacups, whose ringing betrayed her trembling hand. 'Call him, Louis.'

'Must I go?' said Louis, coming to assist in a manner that threatened deluge and destruction.

'Oh yes, go! I shall be able to speak to you when you come back.'

He had only to go into the verandah. His father was watching at the library window, and they wrung each other's hand in gladness beyond utterance.

Mary had seated herself in the solid stately chair, with the whole entrenchment of tea equipage before her. They knew it signified that she was to be unmolested; they took their places, and the Earl carved ham, and Louis cut bread, and Mary poured out tea in the most matter-of-fact manner, hazarding nothing beyond such questions as, 'May I give you an egg?'

Then curiosity began to revive: Louis ventured, 'Where did you land?' and his father made answer, 'At Liverpool, yesterday,' and how the Custom-house had detained them, and he had, therefore, brought Mary straight home, instead of stopping with her at Northwold, at eleven o'clock, to disturb Mrs. Frost.

'You would have found us up,' said Louis.

'You were sleeping at the Terrace?'

'Yes, I walked here this morning.'

'Then your ankle must be pretty well,' was Mary's first contribution to the conversation.

'Quite well for all useful purposes,' said Louis, availing himself of the implied permission to turn towards her.

'But, Louis,' suddenly exclaimed the Earl, 'did you not tell me something extraordinary about James Frost? Whom did you say he was going to marry?'

'Isabel Conway.'

Never was his love of electrifying more fully gratified! Lord Ormersfield was surprised into an emphatic interjection, and inquiry whether they were all gone mad.

'Not that I am aware of,' said Louis. 'Perhaps you have not heard that Mr. Lester is going to retire, and Jem has the school?'

'Then, it must be Calcott and the trustees who are out of their senses.'

'Do you not consider it an excellent appointment?'

'It might be so some years hence,' said the Earl. 'I am afraid it will tie him down to a second-rate affair, when he might be doing better; and the choice is the last thing I should have expected from Calcott.'

'He opposed it. He wanted to bring in a very ordinary style of person, from —— School, but Jem's superiority and the general esteem for my aunt carried the day.'

'What did Ramsbotham and his set do?'

'They were better than could have been hoped; they gave us their votes when they found their man could not get in.'

'Ha? As long as that fellow is against Calcott, he cares little whom he supports. I am sorry that Calcott should be defeated, even for James's sake. How did Richardson vote?'

'He was doubtful at first, but I brought him over.'

Lord Ormersfield gave a quick, searching glance as he said,' James Frost did not make use of our interest in this matter.'

'Jem never did. He and my aunt held back, and were unwilling to oppose the Squire. They would have given it up, but for me. Father, I never supposed you could be averse to my doing my utmost for Jem, when all his prospects were at stake.'

'I should have imagined that James was too well aware of my sentiments to allow it.'

What a cloud on the happy morning!

Louis eagerly exclaimed: 'James is the last person to be blamed! He and my aunt were always trying to stop me, but I would not listen to their scruples. I knew his happiness depended on his success, and I worked for him, in spite of himself. If I did wrong, I can only be very sorry; but I cannot readily believe that I transgressed by setting the question before people in a right light. Only, whose fault soever it was, it was not Jem's.'

Lord Ormersfield had not the heart to see one error in his son on such a day as this, more especially as Mary peeped out behind the urn to judge of his countenance, and he met her pleading eyes, swimming in tears.

'No, I find no fault,' he kindly said. 'Young, ardent spirits may be excused for outrunning the bounds that their elders might impose. But you have not removed my amazement. James intending to marry on the grammar-school!—it cannot be worth 300 pounds a year.'

'Isabel is satisfied. She never desired anything but a quiet, simple, useful life.'

'Your Aunt Catharine delighted, of course? No doubt of that; but what has come to Lady Conway?'

'She cannot help it, and makes the best of it. She gave us very little trouble.'

'Ah! her own daughter is growing up,' said the Earl, significantly.

'Isabel is very fond of Northwold,' said Mary, feeling that Louis was wanting her sympathy. 'She used to wish she could settle there—with how little consciousness!'

'If I had to judge in such a case,' said Lord Ormersfield, thoughtfully, 'I should hesitate to risk a woman's happiness with a temper such as that of James Frost.'

'Oh, father!' cried Louis, indignantly.

'I suspect,' said Lord Ormersfield, smiling, 'that of late years, James's temper has been more often displayed towards me than towards you.'

'A certain proof how safe his wife will be,' returned Louis.

His father shook his head, and looking from one to the other of the young people, congratulated himself that here, at least, there were no perils of that description. He asked how long the attachment had existed.

'From the moment of first sight,' said Louis; 'the fine spark was lighted on the Euston Square platform; and it was not much later with her. He filled up her beau ideal of goodness—'

'And, in effect, all Lady Conway's pursuit of you threw them together,' said Lord Ormersfield, much entertained.

'Lady Conway has been their very best friend, without intending it. It would not have come to a crisis by this time, if she had not taken me to Paris. It would have been a pity if the catastrophe of the barricades had been all for nothing.'

Lord Ormersfield and Mary here broke out in amazement at themselves, for having hitherto been oblivious of the intelligence that had greeted them on their first arrival, when Frampton had informed them of Lord Fitzjocelyn's wound and gallant conduct, and his father had listened to the story like the fastening of a rivet in Miss Conway's chains, and Mary with a flush of unselfish pride that Isabel had been taught to value her hero. They both claimed the true and detailed account, as if they had hitherto been defrauded of it, and insisted on hearing what had happened to him.

'I dare say you know best,' said Louis, lazily. 'I have heard so many different accounts of late, that I really am beginning to forget which is the right one, and rather incline to the belief that Delaford brought a rescue or two with his revolver, and carried us into a fortress where my aunt had secured the windows with feather-beds—'

'You had better make haste and tell, that the true edition may be preserved,' said Mary, rallying her spirits in her eagerness.

'I have begun to understand why there never yet has been an authentic account of a great battle,' said Louis. 'Life would make me coincide with Sir Robert Walpole's judgment on history. All I am clear about is, that even a Red Republican is less red than he is painted; that Isabel Conway is fit to visit the sentinels in a beleaguered castle—a noble being— But oh, Mary! did I not long sorely after you when it came to the wounded knight part of the affair! I am more sure of that than of anything else!'

Mary blushed, but her tender heart was chiefly caring to know how much he had been hurt, and so the whole story was unfolded by due questioning; and the Earl had full and secret enjoyment of the signal defeat of his dear sister-in-law, the one satisfaction on which every one seemed agreed.

It was a melancholy certainty that Mary must go to Mrs. Frost, but the Earl deferred the moment by sending the carriage with an entreaty that she would come herself to fetch her guest. Mary talked of writing a note; but the autumn sun shone cheerily on the steps, and Louis wiled her into seating herself on the upper step, while he reclined on the lower ones, as they had so often been placed when this was his only way of enjoying the air. The sky was clear, the air had the still calm of autumn, the evergreens and the yellow-fringed elms did not stir a leaf—only a large heavy yellow plane leaf now and then detached itself by its own weight and silently floated downwards. Mary sat, without wishing to utter a word to disturb the unwonted tranquillity, the rest so precious after her months of sea-voyage, her journey, her agitations. But Louis wanted her seal of approval to all his past doings, and soon began on their inner and deeper story, ending with, 'Tell me whether you think I was right, my own dear governess—'

'Oh no, you must never call me that any more.'

'It is a name belonging to my happiest days.'

'It was only in play. It reverses the order of things. I must look up to you.'

'If you can!' said Louis, playfully, slipping down to a lower step.

A tear burst out as Mary said, 'Mamma said it must never be that way.' Then recovering, she added, 'I beg your pardon, Louis; I was treating it as earnest. I think I am not quite myself to-day, I will go to my room!'

'No, no, don't,' he said; 'I will not harass you with my gladness, dearest.' He stepped in-doors, brought out a book, and when Mrs. Frost arrived to congratulate and be congratulated, she found Mary still on the step, gazing on without seeing the trees and flowers, listening without attending to the rich, soothing flow of Lope de Vega's beautiful devotional sonnets, in majestic Spanish, in Louis's low, sweet voice.

CHAPTER III.

MISTS.

Therefore thine eye through mist of many days
Shines bright; and beauty, like a lingering rose,
Sits on thy cheek, and in thy laughter plays;
While wintry frosts have fallen on thy foes,
And, like a vale that breathes the western sky,
Thy heart is green, though summer is gone by.
F. TENNYSON.

Happy Aunt Kitty!—the centre, the confidante of so much love! Perhaps her enjoyment was the most keen and pure of all, because the most free from self—the most devoid of those cares for the morrow, which, after besetting middle life, often so desert old age as to render it as free and fresh as childhood. She had known the worst: she had been borne through by heart-whole faith and love, she had seen how often frettings for the future were vain, and experienced that anticipation is worse than reality. Where there was true affection and sound trust, she could not, would not, and did not fear for those she loved.

James went backwards and forwards in stormy happiness. He had come to a comfortable understanding with old Mr. Mansell, who had treated him with respect and cordiality from the first, giving him to understand that Isabel's further expectations only amounted to a legacy of a couple of thousands on his own death, and that meantime he had little or no hope of helping him in his profession. He spoke of Isabel's expensive habits, and the danger of her finding it difficult to adapt herself to a small income; and though, of course, he might as well have talked to the wind as to either of the lovers, his remonstrance was so evidently conscientious as not to be in the least offensive, and Mr. Frost Dynevor was graciously pleased to accept him as a worthy relation.

All was smooth likewise with Lady Conway. She and Mr. Mansell outwardly appeared utterly unconscious of each other's proceedings, remained on the most civil terms, and committed their comments and explanations to Mrs. Mansell, who administered them according to her own goodnatured, gossiping humour, and sided with whichever was speaking to her. There was in Lady Conway much kindness and good-humour, always ready to find satisfaction in what was inevitable, and willing to see all at ease and happy around her—a quality which she shared with Louis, and which rendered her as warm and even caressing to 'our dear James' as if he had been the most welcome suitor in the world; and she often sincerely congratulated herself on the acquisition of a sensible gentleman to consult on business, and so excellent a brother for Walter. It was not falsehood, it was real amiability; and it was an infinite comfort in the courtship, especially the courtship of a Pendragon. As to the two young sisters, their ecstasy was beyond description, only alloyed by the grief of losing Isabel, and this greatly mitigated by schemes of visits to Northwold.

The marriage was fixed for the end of November, so as to give time for a little tranquillity before the commencement of James's new duties. As soon as this intelligence arrived, Mrs. Frost removed herself, Mary, and her goods into the House Beautiful, that No. 5 might undergo the renovations which, poor thing! had been planned twenty years since, when poor Henry's increasing family and growing difficulties had decided her that she could 'do without them' one year more.

'Even should Miss Conway not like to keep house with the old woman,' said she, by way of persuading herself she had no such expectation, 'it was her duty to keep the place in repair.'

That question was soon at rest: Isabel would be but too happy to be allowed to share her home, and truly James would hardly have attached himself to a woman who could not regard it as a privilege to be with the noble old lady. Clara was likewise to be taken home; Isabel undertook to complete her education, and school and tuition were both to be removed from the contemplation of the happy girl, whose letters had become an unintelligible rhapsody of joy and affection.

Isabel had three thousand pounds of her own, which, with that valuable freehold, Dynevor Terrace, James resolved should be settled on herself, speaking of it with such solemn importance as to provoke the gravity of those accustomed to deal with larger sums. With the interest of her fortune he meant to insure his life, that, as he told Louis, with gratified prudence, there might be no repetition of his own case, and his family might never be a burden on any one.

The income of the school, with their former well-husbanded means, was affluence for the style to which he aspired; and his grandmother, though her menus plaisirs had once doubled her present revenue, regarded it as the same magnificent advance, and was ready to launch into the extravagance of an additional servant, and of fitting up the long-disused drawing-room, and the dining-parlour, hitherto called the school-room, and kicked and hacked by thirty years of boys. She and Clara would betake themselves to their present little sitting-room, and make the drawing-room pleasant and beautiful for the bride.

And in what a world of upholstery did not the dear old lady spend the autumn months! How surpassingly happy was Jane, and how communicative about Cheveleigh! and how pleased and delighted in little Charlotte's promotion!

And Charlotte! She ought to have been happy, with her higher wages and emancipation from the more unpleasant work, with the expectation of one whom she admired so enthusiastically as Miss Conway, and, above all, with the long, open-hearted, affectionate letter, which Miss Ponsonby had put into her hand with so kind a smile. Somehow, it made her do nothing but cry; she felt unwilling to sit down and answer it; and, as if it were out of perverseness, when she was in Mrs. Martha's very house, and when there was so much to be done, she took the most violent fit of novel-reading that had ever been known; and when engaged in working or cleaning alone, chanted dismal ballads of the type of 'Alonzo the brave and the fair Imogens,' till Mrs. Martha declared that she was just as bad as an old dumbledore, and not worth half so much.

One day, however, Miss Ponsonby called her into her room, to tell her that a parcel was going to Lima, in case she wished to send anything by it. Miss Ponsonby spoke so kindly, and yet so delicately, and Charlotte blushed and faltered, and felt that she must write now!

'I have been wishing to tell you, Charlotte,' added Mary, kindly, 'how much we like Mr. Madison. There were some very undesirable people among the passengers, who might easily have led him astray; but the captain and mate both spoke to Lord Ormersfield in the highest terms of his behaviour. He never missed attending prayers on the Sundays; and, from all I could see, I do fully believe that he is a sincerely good, religions man; and, if he keeps on as he has begun, I think you are very happy in belonging to him.'

Charlotte only curtsied and thanked; but it was wonderful how those kind, sympathizing words blew off at once the whole mists of nonsense and fancy. Tom was the sound, good, religious man to whom her heart and her troth were given; the other was no such thing, a mere flatterer, and she had known it all along. She would never think of him again, and she was sure he would not think of her. Truth had dispelled all the fancied sense of hypocrisy and double-dealing: she sat down and wrote to Tom as if Delaford had never existed, and forthwith returned to be herself again, at least for the present.

Poor Mary! she might speak cheerfully, but her despatches were made up with a trembling heart. Louis and Mary missed the security and felicity that seemed so perfect with James and Isabel. In the first place, nothing could be fixed without further letters, although the Earl had tried to persuade Mary that her father had virtually forfeited all claim to her obedience, and that she ought to proceed as if in fact an orphan, and secure herself from being harassed by him, by hastening her marriage. Of this she would not hear, and she was exceedingly grateful to Louis for abstaining from pressing her, as well as for writing to Mr. Ponsonby in terms against which no exception could be taken.

Till secure of his consent, she would not consider her engagement as more than conditional, nor consent to its being mentioned to any one. If Isabel knew it, that was James's fault. Even the Faithfull sisters were kept in ignorance; and she trusted thus to diminish the wrong that she felt her secrecy to be doing to Aunt Melicent, who was so much vexed and annoyed at her return, that she dreaded exceedingly the effect of the knowledge of her engagement. Miss Ponsonby was convinced that the news had been exaggerated, and insisted that but for Lord Ormersfield's dislike, it would have been further sifted; and she wrote to Mary to urge her coming to her to await the full tidings, instead of delaying among her father's avowed enemies.

Mary settled this point by mentioning her promise to Mrs. Frost to remain with her until her grandchildren should be with her; and Miss Ponsonby's correspondence ceased after a dry, though still kind letter, which did not make Mary more willing to bestow her confidence, but left her feeling in her honest heart as if she were dealing insincerely by Aunt Melicent.

The discretion and reserve rendered requisite by the concealment were such as to be very tormenting even to so gentle a temper as that of Louis, since they took from him all the privileges openly granted to the cousin, and scarcely left him those of the friend. She, on whose arm he had leant all last summer, would not now walk with him without an escort, and, even with Mrs. Frost beside her, shrank from Ormersfield like forbidden ground. Her lively, frank tone of playful command had passed away; nay, she almost shrank from his confidence, withheld her counsel, and discouraged his constant visits. He could not win from her one of her broad, fearless comments on his past doings; and in his present business, the taking possession of Inglewood, the choice of stock, and the appointment of a bailiff, though she listened and sympathized, and answered questions, she volunteered no opinions, ahe expressed no wishes, she would not come to see.

Poor Louis was often mortified into doubts of his own ability to interest or make her happy; but he was very patient. If disappointed one day, he was equally eager the next; he submitted obediently to her restrictions, and was remorseful when he forgot or transgressed; and they had real, soothing, comforting talks just often enough to be tantalizing, and yet to convince him that all the other unsatisfactory meetings and partings were either his own fault, or that of some untoward circumstance.

He saw, as did the rest, that Mary's spirits had received a shock not easily to be recovered. The loss of her mother was weighing on her more painfully than in the first excitement; and the step her father had taken, insulting her mother, degrading himself, and rending away her veil of filial honour, had exceedingly overwhelmed and depressed her; while sorrow hung upon her with the greater permanence and oppression from her strong self-control, and dislike to manifestation.

All this he well understood; and, reverent to her feeling, he laid aside all trifling, and waited on her mood with the tenderest watchfulness. When she could bear it, they would dwell together on the precious recollections of her mother; and sometimes she could even speak of her father, and relate instances of his affection for herself, and all his other redeeming traits of character; most thankful to Louis for accepting him on her word, and never uttering one word of him which she could wish unsaid.

What Louis did not see, was that the very force of her own affection was what alarmed Mary, and caused her reserve. To a mind used to balance and regulation, any sensation so mighty and engrossing appeared wrong; and repressed as her attachment had been, it was the more absorbing now that he was all that was left to her. Admiration, honour, gratitude, old childish affection, and caressing elder-sisterly protection, all flowed in one deep, strong current; but the very depth made her diffident. She could imagine the whole reciprocated, and she feared to be importunate. If the day was no better than a weary turmoil, save when his voice was in her ear, his eyes wistfully bent on her, the more carefully did she restrain all expression of hope of seeing him to-morrow, lest she should be exacting and detain him from projects of his own. If it was pride and delight to her to watch his graceful, agile figure spring on horseback, she would keep herself from the window, lest he should feel oppressed by her pursuing him; and when she found her advice sought after as his law, she did not venture to proffer it. She was uncomfortable in finding the rule committed to her, and all the more because Lord Ormersfield, who had learnt to talk to her so openly that she sometimes thought he confounded her with her mother, used in all his schemes to appear to take it for granted that she should share with him in the managing, consulting headship of the house, leaving Louis as something to be cared for and petted like a child, without a voice in their decisions. These conversations used to make her almost jealous on Louis's account, and painfully recall some of her mother's apprehensions.

That was the real secret source of all her discomfort—namely, the misgiving lest she had been too ready to follow the dictates of her own heart. Would her mother have been satisfied? Had not her fondness and her desolation prevailed, where, for Louis's own sake, she should have held back! Every time she felt herself the elder in heart, every time she feared to have disappointed him, every time she saw that his liveliness was repressed by her mournfulness, she feared that she was letting him sacrifice himself. And still more did she question her conduct towards her father. She had only gradually become aware of the extent of the mutual aversion between him and the Earl; and Miss Ponsonby's reproaches awakened her to the fear that she had too lightly given credence to hostile evidence. Her affection would fain have justified him; and, forgetting the difficulties of personal investigation in such a case, she blamed herself for having omitted herself to question the confidential clerk, and having left all to Lord Ormersfield, who, cool and wary as he ordinarily was, would be less likely to palliate Mr. Ponsonby's errors than those of any other person. Her heart grew sick as she counted the weeks ere she could hear from Lima.

None of her troubles were allowed to interfere with Mrs. Frost's peace. Outwardly, she was cheerful and helpful; equable, though less lively. Those carpets and curtains, tables and chairs, which were the grand topics at the House Beautiful, were neither neglected nor treated with resigned impatience. Mary's taste, counsel, and needle did good service; her hearty interest and consideration were given to the often-turned volume of designs for bedsteads, sofas, and window-curtains; and Miss Mercy herself had hardly so many resources for making old furniture new. Many of her happiest half-hours with Louis were spent as she sewed the stiff slippery chintz, and he held the curtain rings, while Aunt Catharine went to inspect the workmen, and many a time were her cares forgotten, and her active spirits resumed, while Louis acted carpenter under her directions, and rectified errors of the workmen. It might not be poetical, but the French sky-blue paper, covered with silvery fern-leaves, that Louis took such pains to procure, and the china door-handles that he brought over in his pockets, and the great map which Mary pasted over the obstinate spot of damp in the vestibule, were the occasions of the greatest blitheness and merriment that they shared together. Much did they enjoy the prediction that James would not know his own house; greatly did they delight in sowing surprises, and in obtaining Aunt Catharine's never-failing start of well-pleased astonishment. Each wedding present was an event;—Mr. Mansell's piano, which disconcerted all previous designs; Lord Ormersfield's handsome plate; and many a minor gift from old scholars, delighted to find an occasion when an offering would not be an offence. Even Mr. Calcott gave a valuable inkstand, in which Mrs. Frost and Louis beheld something of forgiveness.

Isabel had expressed a wish that Mary should be one of her bridesmaids. A wedding was not the scene which poor Mary wished to witness at present; but she saw Louis bent on having her with him, and would not vex him by reluctance. He had also prevailed on his father to be present, though the Earl was much afraid of establishing a precedent, and being asked to act the part of father on future contingencies. There was only one bride, as he told Louis, whom he could ever wish to give away. However, that trouble was spared him by Mr. Mansell; but still Louis would not let him off, on the plea that James's side of the house should make as imposing a demonstration as possible.

Mrs. Frost was less manageable. Though warmly invited by the Conways, and fondly entreated by her grandson, she shook her head, and said she was past those things, and that the old mother always stayed at home to cook the wedding dinner. She should hear all when Clara came home the next day, and should be ready for the happy pair when they would return for Christmas, after a brief stay at Thornton Conway, which Isabel wished James to see, that he might share in all her old associations.

All the rest of the party journeyed to London on a November day; and, in gaslight and gloom, they deposited Mary at her aunt's house in Bryanston Square.

Gaslight was the staple of Hymen's torch the next morning. London was under one of the fogs, of which it is popularly said you may cut them with a knife. The church was in dim twilight; the bride and bridegroom loomed through the haze, and the indistinctness made Clara's fine tall figure appear quite majestic above the heads of the other bridesmaids.

The breakfast was by lamp-light, and the mist looked lurid and grim over the white cake, and no one talked of anything but the comparative density of fogs; and Mr. Mansell's asthma had come on, and his speech was devolved upon Lord Ormersfield, to whom Louis had imprudently promised exemption.

What was worse, Lady Conway had paired them off in the order of precedence; and Louis was a victim to two dowagers, between whom he could neither see nor speak to Mary. He was the more concerned, because he had thought her looking depressed and avoiding his eye.

He tried to believe this caution, but he thought she was also eluding his father, and her whole air gave him a vague uneasiness. The whole party were to dine with Lady Conway; and, trusting in the meantime to discover what was on her spirits, he tried to resign himself to the order of the day, without a farther glimpse of her.

When the married pair took leave, Walter gave his sister a great hug, but had no perception of his office of handing her downstairs; and it was Fitzjocelyn who gave her his arm, and put her into the carriage, with an augury that the weather would be beautiful when once they had left the fog in London.

She smiled dreamily, and repeated, 'beautiful,' as though all were so beautiful already to her that she did not so much as perceive the fog.

James pressed his hand, saying, 'I am glad you are to be the one to be happy next.'

'You do not look so,' said Clara, earnestly.

The two sisters had come partly downstairs, but their London habits had restrained them from following to the street-door, as Clara had done; and now they had rushed up again, while Clara, with one foot on the staircase, looked in her cousin's face, as he tried to smile in answer, and repeated, 'Louis, I hoped you were quite happy.'

'I am,' said Louis, quickly.

'Then why do you look so grave and uneasy?'

'Louis!' said an entreating voice above, and there stood Mary—'Pray say nothing, but call a cab for me, please. No, I am not ill—indeed, I am not—but I cannot stay!'

'You look ill! It has been too much for you! Clara, take her—let her lie down quietly,' cried Louis, springing to her side.

'Oh no, thank you-no,' said Mary, decidedly, though very low; 'I told Lady Conway that I could not stay. I settled it with Aunt Melicent.'

'That aunt of yours—'

'Hush! No, it is for my own sake—my own doing. I cannot bear it any longer! Please let me go!'

'Then I will take you. I saw the brougham waiting. We will go quietly together.'

'No, that must not be.'

'I was thoughtless in urging you to come. The turmoil has been too much. My poor Mary! That is what comes of doing what I like instead of what you like. Why don't you always have your own way? Let me come; nay, if you will not, at least let Clara go with you, and come back.'

Mary roused herself at last to speak, as she moved downstairs—'You need not think of me; there is nothing the matter with me. I promised Aunt Melicent to come home. She is very kind—it is not that.'

'You must not tell me not to think. I shall come to inquire. I shall be with you the first thing tomorrow.'

'Yes, you must come to-morrow,' said Mary, in a tone he could not interpret, and a tight lingering grasp on his hand, as he put her into his father's carriage.

He stood hesitating for a moment as it drove off; then, instead of entering the house, walked off quickly in the same direction.

Clara had stood all the time like a statue on the stairs, waiting to see if she were wanted, and gazing intently, with her fingers clasped. When both were gone she drew a long breath, and nodded with her head, whispering to herself, in a grave and critical voice—'That is love!'

She did not see Fitzjocelyn again till nearly dinner-time; and, as he caught her anxious interrogating eye, he came to her and said, very low, 'I was not let in; Miss Ponsonby was engaged. Miss Mary lying down—I believe they never told her I was there.'

'It is all that aunt—horrid woman!'

'Don't talk of it now. I will see her to-morrow.'

Clara grieved for him whenever she saw him called on to exert himself to talk; and she even guarded him from the sallies of his young cousins. Once, when much music and talk was going on, he came and sat by her, and made her tell him how fondly and affectionately she had parted with her schoolfellows; and how some of her old foes had become, as she hoped, friends for life; but she saw his eye fixed and absent even while she spoke, and she left off suddenly. 'Go on,' he said, 'I like to hear;' and with a manifest effort he bent his mind to attend.

'Oh!' thought Clara, as she went up that night—'why will the days one most expects to be happy turn out so much otherwise? However, he will manage to tell me all about it when he and his father take me home to-morrow.'

CHAPTER IV.

OUTWARD BOUND.

The voice which I did more esteem
Than music in her sweetest key—
Those eyes which unto me did seem
More comfortable than the day—
Those now by me, as they have been,
Shall never more be heard or seen.
GEORGE WITHER.

In suspense and impatience, Fitzjocelyn awaited the end of his father's breakfast, that he might hasten to learn what ailed Mary. The post came in, vexing him at first merely as an additional delay, but presently a sound of dissatisfaction attracted his notice to the foreign air of two envelopes which had been forwarded from home.

'Hem!' said the Earl, gravely, 'I am afraid this fellow Ponsonby will give us some trouble.'

'Then Mary had heard from him!' cried Louis. 'She was keeping it from me, not to spoil the day. I must go to her this moment—'but pausing again, 'What is it? He cannot have had my letter!'

'No, but he seems to have anticipated it. Puffed up as they are about these speculations, he imagines me to have brought Mary home for no purpose but to repair our fortunes; and informs me that, in the event of your marriage, she will receive not a farthing beyond her mother's settlements. I am much obliged! It is all I ever thought you would receive; and but for me, it would have been in the bottom of some mine long ago! Do you wish to see what he says?'

Louis caught up the missive. It was the letter of a very angry man, too violent to retain the cold formality which he tried to assume. 'He was beholden to his lordship for his solicitude about his daughter. It was of a piece with other assistance formerly rendered to him in his domestic arrangements, for which he was equally obliged. He was happy to inform his lordship that, in this instance, his precautions had been uncalled for; and referred him to a letter which he would receive from Mr. Dynevor by the same mail, for an explanation of the circumstances to which he referred. He had been informed, by undoubted authority, that Lord Fitzjocelyn had done his daughter the honour of soliciting her hand. It might console his lordship to learn that, should the union take place, the whole of his property would be secured to Mrs. Ponsonby, and his daughter's sole fortune would be that which she inherited by her mother's marriage settlements. Possibly this intelligence might lead to a cessation of these flattering attentions.'

'Mrs. Ponsonby! he can mention her in the same sentence with Mary's mother!' said the Earl.

Louis turned pale as he read, and scarcely breathed as he looked up at his father, dreading that he might so resent the studied affronts as to wish to break off the connexion, and that he might have him likewise to contend with; but on that score he was set at rest. The Earl replied to his exclamation of angry dismay, 'It is little more than I looked for. It is not the first letter I have had from him. I find he has some just cause for offence. The marriage is less disgraceful than I had been led to believe. Here is Oliver Dynevor's testimony.'

Oliver Dynevor's was a succinct business-like letter, certifying his cousin that he had been mistaken in his view of the marriage. Dona Rosita de Guzman was an orphan of a very respectable family, who had come to spend the year before her intended noviciate at the house of an uncle. She was very young, and Mr. Dynevor believed that the marriage had been hastened by her relations making her feel herself unwelcome, and her own reluctance to return to her convent, and that she might not be aware how very recently Mr. Ponsonby had become a widower. For his own part, he was little used to ladies' society, and could form no judgment of the bride; but he could assure Lord Ormersfield that she had been guilty of no impropriety; she was visited by every one; and that there was no reason against Mary Ponsonby associating with her.

'What could the clerk be thinking of?' exclaimed Louis.

'My first impression was not taken from the clerk. What I heard first, and in the strongest terms, was from the captain of a ship at Valparaiso. In fact, it was in the mouth of all who had known the family. Robson neither confirmed nor contradicted, and gave me the notion of withholding much from regard for his employer. He lamented the precipitation, but seemed willing to make excuses. He distinctly said, he would not take it on himself to recommend Miss Ponsonby's continuing her journey. He was right. If I had known all this, I should still have brought her home. I must write an apology, as far as her character is concerned; but, be that as it may, the marriage is atrocious—an insult—a disgrace! He could not have waited six weeks—'

'But I must go to Mary!' cried Louis, as though reproaching himself for the delay. 'Oh! that she should have forced herself to that wedding, and spared me!'

'I am coming with you,' said the Earl. 'She will require my personal assurance that all this makes no difference to me.'

'I am more afraid of the difference it may make to her,' said Louis. 'You have never believed how fond she is of her father.'

On arriving, they were ushered into the room where Miss Ponsonby was at breakfast, and a cup of tea and untasted roll showed where her niece had been. She received them with stiff, upright chillness; and to their hope that Mary was not unwell, replied—'Not very well. She had been over-fatigued yesterday, and had followed her advice in going to lie down.'

Louis began to imagine a determination to exclude him, and was eagerly beginning to say that she had asked him to come that morning—could she not see him? when the lady continued, with the same severity—'Until yesterday, I was not aware how much concern Lord Fitzjocelyn had taken in what related to my niece.'

At that moment, when Louis's face was crimson with confusion and impatience, the door was softly pushed ajar, and he heard himself called in low, hoarse tones. Miss Ponsonby was rising with an air of vexed surprise, but he never saw her, and, hastily crossing the room, he shut the door behind him, and followed the form that flitted up the stairs so fast, that he did not come up with her till she had entered the drawing-room, and stood leaning against a chair to gather breath. She was very pale, and her eyes looked as if she had cried all night, but she controlled her voice to say, 'I could not bear that you should hear it from Aunt Melicent.'

'We had letters this morning, dearest. Always thinking for me! But I must think for you. You can hardly stand—'

He would have supported her to the sofa, but she shrank from him; and, leaning more heavily on the chair, said—'Do you not know, Louis, all that must be at an end?'

'I know no such thing. My father is here on purpose to assure you that it makes not the slightest difference to him.'

'Yours! Yes! But oh, Louis!' with a voice that, in its faintness and steadiness, had a sound of anguish—'only think what I allowed him to make me do! To insult my father and his choice! It was a mistake, I know,' she continued, fearing to be unjust and to grieve Louis; 'but a most dreadful one!'

'He says he should have brought you home all the same—' began Louis. 'Mary, you must sit down!' he cried, interrupting himself to come nearer; and she obeyed, sinking into the chair. 'What a state you are in! How could you go through yesterday? How could you be distressed, and not let me know?'

'I could not spoil their wedding-day, that we had wished for so long.'

'Then you had the letter?'

'In the morning. Oh, that I had examined farther! Oh, that I had never come home!'

'Mary! I cannot hear you say so.'

'You would have been spared all this. You were doing very well without me—as you will—'

He cried out with deprecating horror.

'Louis!' she said, imploringly. 'Oh, Louis! do not make it harder for me to do right.'

'Why—what? I don't understand! Your father has not so much as heard how we stand together. He cannot be desiring you to give me up.'

'He—he forbids me to enter on anything of the sort with you. I don't know what made him think it possible, but he does. And—' again Mary waited for the power of utterance, 'he orders me to come out with Mrs. Willis, in the Valdivia, and it sails on the 12th of December!'

'But Mary, Mary! you cannot be bound by this. It is only fair towards him, towards all of us, to give him time to answer our letters.'

Mary shook her head. 'The only condition, he says, on which he could allow me to remain, would be if I were engaged to James Frost.'

'Too late for that, certainly,' said Louis; and the smile was a relief to both. 'At any rate, it shows that he can spare you. Only give him time. When he has my father's explanation—and my father is certain to be so concerned at having cast any imputation on a lady. His first thought was to apologize—'

'That is not all! I remember now that dear mamma always said she did not know whether he would consent. Oh! how weak I was ever to listen—'

'No, Mary, that must not be said. It was my presumptuous, inveterate folly that prevented you from trusting my affection when she might have helped us.'

'I don't know. It would have caused her anxiety and distress when she was in no state for them. I don't think it did,' said Mary, considering; 'I don't think she ever knew how much I cared.'

The admission could only do Louis's heart good, and he recurred to his arguments that her father could be persuaded by such a letter as he felt it in him to write.

'You do not know all,' said Mary. 'I could not show you his letter; but, from it and from my aunt, I better understand what impressions he has of you all, and how hopeless it is.'

'Tell me!'

She could not help giving herself the relief, when that most loving, sympathizing face was pleading with her to let him comfort her. She knew there was no fiery nor rancorous temper to take umbrage, and it was best for him to know the completeness of the death-blow.

'Oh, Louis! he fancies that my dear mother's fondness for her own family destroyed his domestic peace. He says their pride and narrow notions poisoned—yes, that is the word—poisoned her mind against him; and that was the reason he insisted on my being brought up here, and kept from you all.'

'But I don't understand why he let you come straight home to us, and live in Dynevor Terrace?'

'Then he was really sorry mamma was so ill; and—and for all that was past; I am sure he felt it was the last parting, and only wished to do anything that could make up to her. He freely gave her leave to go wherever she pleased, and said not a word against Northwold. It was one of her great comforts that he never seemed in the least vexed at anything she had done since we went home. Besides, my aunt says that he and Mr. Dynevor had some plans about James and me.'

'He will have that out of his head. He will come to reason. Fond of you, and sorry for the past, he will listen. No wonder he was in a passion; but just imagine what it would be to heed half Jem Frost says when he is well worked up!'

'Papa is not like James,' said Mary; 'things go deeper with him. He never forgets! I shall never forgive myself for not having spoken to Robson! I know his manner, seeming to assent and never committing himself, and I ought to have gone through anything rather than have taken such an accusation for granted.'

To hinder his pleading against her self-conviction, she re-opened her letter to prove the cruelty of the injustice. Mr. Ponsonby professed to have been unwilling to enter so speedily on the new tie; but to have been compelled, by the species of persecution which was exercised on Rosita, in order to make her return to her nunnery. He dwelt on her timid affection and simplicity, and her exceeding mortification at the slur which Mary had been induced to cast upon her; though, he said, her innocent mind could not comprehend the full extent of the injury; since the step his daughter had taken would, when known, seriously affect the lady's reception into society, in a manner only to be repaired by Mary's immediately joining them at Lima. He peremptorily indicated the ship and the escort—a merchant's wife, well known to her and charged her, on her duty, as the only proof of obedience or affection which could remedy the past, to allow no influence nor consideration whatever to detain her. 'You see?' said Mary.

'I see!' was the answer. 'Mary, you are right, you must go.'

The words restored her confiding look, and her face lost almost all the restless wretchedness which had so transformed it. 'Thank you,' she said, with a long breath; 'I knew you would see it so.'

'It will be a very pretty new style of wedding tour. Andes for Alps! No, Mary, you need not suspect me of trifling now! I really mean it, and, seriously, our going in that way would set this Rosita straight with society much more handsomely and effectually. Don't doubt my father—I will fetch him.'

'Stop, Louis! You forget! Did I not tell you that he expressly warns me against you? He must have heard of what happened before: he says I had prudence once to withstand, and he trusts to my spirit and discretion to—' Mary stopped short of the phrase before her eyes—to resist the interested solicitations of necessitous nobility, and the allurements of a beggarly coronet. 'No,' she concluded; 'he says that you are the last person whom he could think of allowing me to accept.' She hid her face in her hands, and her voice died away.

'Happily that is done,' said Louis, not yet disconcerted; 'but if you go, as I own you must, it shall be with a letter of mine, explaining all. You will plead for me—I think you will, and when he is satisfied that we are no rebels, then the first ship that sails for Peru—Say that will do, Mary.'

'No, Louis, I know my father.' She roused herself and sat upright, speaking resolutely, but not daring to look at him—'I made up my mind last night. It was weak and selfish in me to enter into this engagement, and it must be broken off. You must be left free—not bound for years and years.'

'Oh, Mary! Mary! this is too much. I deserved distrust by my wretched folly and fickleness last year, but I did not know what you were to me then—my most precious one! Can you not trust me! Do you not know how I would wait?'

'You would wait,' said poor Mary, striving with choking tears, 'and be sorry you had waited.'

'Are you talking madness, Mary? I should live for the moment to compensate for all.'

'You would waste your best years, and when the time came, you would still be young, and I grown into an old careworn woman. You would find you had waited for what was nothing worth!'

'How can you talk so!' cried Louis, wounded, 'when you know that to cherish and make up to you would be my dearest, fondest wish! No, don't shake your head! You know it is not a young rose and lily beauty that I love,—it is the honest, earnest glance in my Mary's eyes, the rest, and trust, and peace, whenever I do but come near her. Time can't take that away!'

'Pray,' said Mary, feebly, 'don't let us discuss it now. I know it is right. I was determined to say it to-day, that the worst might be over, but I can't argue, nor bear your kindness now. Please let it wait.'

'Yes, let it wait. It is depression. You will see it in a true light when you have recovered the shock, and don't fancy all must be given up together. Lie down and rest; I am sure you have been awake all night.'

'I may rest now I have told you, and seen you not angry with poor papa, nor with me. Oh! Louis—the gratitude to you, the weight off my mind!'

'I don't think any one could help taking the same view,' said Louis. 'It seems to me one of the cases where the immediate duty is the more clear because it is so very painful. Mary, I think that you are committing your way unto the Lord, and you know 'He shall bring it to pass.''

As he spoke there was a tap at the door, and Miss Ponsonby, stiffly entering, said, 'Excuse my interruption, but I hope Lord Fitzjocelyn will be considerate enough not to harass you any longer with solicitations to act against your conscience.'

'He is not persuading me,' said Mary, turning towards her aunt a face which, through all her dejection, proved her peace in his support and approval, 'he is helping me.'

'Yes,' said Louis to the astonished aunt; 'since I have heard the true state of the case, I have been convinced that there is no choice for her but to go out, to repair the injustice so unfortunately done to this poor lady. It is a noble resolution, and I perfectly concur with her.'

'I am glad you think so properly, sir,' returned Miss Ponsonby. 'Lord Ormersfield seems quite of another opinion. He was desirous of seeing you, Mary; but I have been telling him I could permit no more interviews to-day.'

'Oh no,' said Mary, putting her hand to her head, as if it could bear no more; 'not to-day! Louis, tell him how it is. Make him forgive me; but do not let me see him yet.'

'You shall see no one,' said Louis, tenderly; 'you shall rest. There—' and, as if he had the sole right to her, he arranged the cushions, placed her on the sofa, and hung over her to chafe her hands, and bathe her forehead with eau de Cologne; while, as he detected signs of hasty preparations about the room, he added, 'Don't trouble yourself with your arrangements; I will see about all I can to help you. Only rest, and cure your head.'

'Say that one thing to me again,' whispered Mary, ere letting his hand go.

Again he murmured the words, 'Commit thy way unto the Lord, and He shall bring it to pass.'

Then Mary felt her hand pressed to his lips, but she would not unclose her burning eyes; she would fain sleep beneath the impress of that spell of patient confidence.

The gentle authority of his manner had deprived Miss Ponsonby of all notion of interfering. This 'odious, frivolous young man of fashion,' so entirely disconcerted her ideas of ardent lovers, or of self-interested puppies, that she gazed at him, surprised and softened; and when he looked at her anxiously, to judge whether Mary would find in her a kind comforter, her eyes were full of tears, and she said as they left the room, 'It must be a great relief to my poor Mary that you see it so sensibly. She has been suffering much in anticipation of this meeting.'

'Her unselfishness goes to one's heart!' said Louis, almost overcome. 'If she would but have spared herself yesterday!'

'Ah! she said she could not bear that you should be pained on your friend's wedding-day. I am much comforted to find that you appreciate the effort.'

This was not what Miss Ponsonby had intended to say, but there was something about the young man that touched her exceedingly; even when fresh from a very civil and decorous combat with his father, and a ripping-up of all the ancient grievances of the married life of their two relations, rendering wider than ever the breach between the houses of Ponsonby and Fitzjocelyn.

Lord Ormersfield came forward to learn whether he might see Mary, and was met by assurances that she must be kept as quiet as possible; upon which he took leave, making a stately bend of the head, while Louis shook Miss Ponsonby's hand, and said he should come to the door to inquire before the day was over.

'I never saw her so broken down,' he said, in answer to his father's compassionate but indignant exclamation as they walked home. 'Yesterday was a terrible strain on her.'

'I wish we had never brought her here,' said Lord Ormersfield. 'The aunt is your enemy, as she always was that of Mary's mother. She nearly avowed that she set her brother on making this premature prohibition.'

'I do not think she is unkind to Mary,' said Louis; 'I could be almost glad that the dear Aunt Kitty is spared all this worry. It would make her so very miserable.'

'Her influence would be in your favour, whereas this woman is perfectly unreasonable. She justifies her brother in everything, and is actually working on that poor girl's scruples of conscience to send her out by this ship.'

'Nay,' said Louis, 'after hearing her father's letter, I do not see that it is possible for her to do otherwise.'

Lord Ormersfield hastily turned to look at his son's countenance,—it was flushed and melancholy, but fully in earnest; nevertheless the Earl would not believe his ears, and made a sound as if he had missed the words.

'I am grieved enough to say so,' repeated Louis; 'but, as he puts it, I do not see how Mary can refuse to obey him.'

'I declare, Fitzjocelyn,' exclaimed his father, with some anger, 'any one who takes the trouble, may talk you into anything imaginable!'

'Not into believing her wrong.'

'I did not think you so weak!' continued his father. 'It is the very case where a woman's exaggerated notions of right may be wrought on to do her infinite harm! They become quite ridiculous without some one to show that such things may be carried too far! I must say, I did expect strength of mind and common sense for your own interest. I esteem it a mere matter of duty to put an end to such nonsense.'

'My dear father,' said Louis, 'it was Mary and her mother who first taught me my own obligations. I should never dare to interfere with any one's filial duty—above all, where my own happiness is so deeply concerned.'

'Yours! I am not talking of yours. What is to become of Mary with such a man as that? and this Spanish woman, who, if she does not deserve all that has been said of her, no doubt soon will?—no education, no principles, breaking out of her convent! And you let yourself be drawn into calling it Mary's duty to run into such company as that! You are not fit to protect her.'

'From all I have heard of Mr. Ponsonby, I am convinced he has too much regard for his daughter to summon her into any improper society. I do not hear that he has been to blame as a father. I wish I could see it as you do; but not only do I know that Mary could not have an instant's peace under the sense of his displeasure, but it seems to me that this is one of the express commands which could not be disobeyed without setting aside the law of Heaven. If I gave my voice against it, I should fear to bring on us a curse, and not a blessing.'

'Fitzjocelyn, I always knew how it would be if you took to being one of those very good people. Nothing is so weak, and yet so unmanageable. Any rational being would look on it as a duty to rescue her from such a man as that; but that is too ordinary a virtue for you. You must go higher.'

Louis made no answer. Never had his father pained him so much, and he could ill brook additional suffering.

'However,' said the Earl, recovering, 'I shall see her. I shall put the matter in a just light. She is a sensible girl, and will understand me when she has recovered the shock. On one head I shall give warning. She must choose between us and her father. If she persist in going out to join this establishment, I will have your engagement given up.'

'Father! father! you would not be so cruel!'

'I know what I am saying. Am I to allow you to be encumbered all the time she is on the other side of the world, waiting Ponsonby's pleasure, to come home at last, in ten or fifteen years' time, worried and fretted to death, like her poor mother? No, Louis, it must be now or never.'

'You are only saying what I would not hear from her. She has been insisting on breaking off, and all my hope was in you.'

'She has? That is like her! The only reasonable thing I have heard yet.'

'Then you will not help me? You, who I thought loved her like your own daughter, and wished for nothing so much!'

'So I might; but that is a different thing from allowing you to wear out your life in a hopeless engagement. If she cast off her family, nothing could be better, otherwise, I would never connect you with them.'

It did not occur to his lordship that he was straining pretty hard the filial duty of his own son, while he was arguing that Mary should snap asunder the same towards her father.

The fresh discomfiture made poor Louis feel utterly dejected and almost hopeless, but lest silence should seem to consent, he said, 'When you see Mary, you will be willing for me to do anything rather than lose what is so dear and so noble.'

'Yes, I will see Mary. We will settle it between us, and have it right yet; but we must give her to-day to think it over, and get over the first shock. When she has had a little time for reflection, a few cool arguments from me will bring her to reason.'

So it was all to be settled over Louis's passive head; and thus satisfied, his father, who was exceedingly sorry for him, forgot his anger, and offered to go home alone as Clara's escort, promising to return on the Monday, to bring the full force of his remonstrances to bear down Mary's scruples.

Lord Ormersfield believed Clara too much of a child to have any ideas on what was passing; and had it depended on him, she must have gone home in an agony of ignorance on the cause of her cousin's trouble, but Louis came with them to the station, and contrived to say to her while walking up and down the platform, 'Her father is bitter against me. He has sent for her, and she is going!'

Clara looked mutely in his face, with a sort of inquiring dismay.

'You'll hear all about it when my father has told Aunt Kitty,' said Louis. 'Clara,'—he paused, and spoke lower—'tell her I see what is right now; tell her to—to pray for me, that I may not be talked into tampering with my conscience or with hers. Don't let it dwell on you or on my aunt,' he added, cheerfully. 'No, it won't; you will be thinking of Jem and Isabel.' And as his father came up, his last words were, in his own bright tone, 'Tell granny from me that giraffes ought always to be seen by gaslight.'

Clara's countenance returned him a look of sorrowful reproach, for thinking her capable of being amused when he was in distress; and she sat in silent musings all the way home—pondering over his words, speculating on his future, wondering what Mary felt, and becoming blunt and almost angry, when her grave escort in the opposite corner consulted civility by addressing some indifferent remark to her, as if, she said to herself, 'she were no better than a stuffed giraffe, and knew and cared nothing about anybody!'

He might have guessed that she understood something by the sudden way in which she curtailed her grandmother's rapturous and affectionate inquiries about the wedding, ran upstairs on the plea of taking off her bonnet, and appeared no more till he had gone home; when, coming down, she found granny, with tearful eyes, lamenting that Mr. Ponsonby was so harsh and unkind, and fully possessed with the rational view which her nephew had been impressing on her.

'Ha!' said Clara, 'that is what Louis meant. I'll tell you what, granny, Lord Ormersfield never knew in his life what was right, half as well as Louis does. I wish he would let him alone. If Mary is good enough for him, she will go out and wait till her father comes round. If she is not, she won't; and Lord Ormersfield has no business to tease her.'

'Then you would like her to go out?' said Mrs. Frost.

'I like anything that makes Louis happy. I thought it would have been delightful to have him married—one could be so much more at Ormersfield, and Mary would be so nice; but as to their being over-persuaded, and thinking themselves half wrong! why, they would never be happy in their lives; and Louis would be always half-asleep or half mad, to save himself the trouble of thinking. But he'll never do it!'

On the Saturday morning Mary's healthy and vigorous spirit had quite resumed its tone. The worst was over when she had inflicted the stroke on Louis, and seen him ready to support instead of adding to her distress. He found her pale and sorrowful, but calm, collected, and ready for exertion. By tacit consent, they avoided all discussion of the terms on which they were to stand. Greatly touched by her consideration for him on the wedding-day, he would not torture her with pleadings, and was only too grateful for every service that he was allowed to render her without protest, as still her chief and most natural dependence.

She did not scruple to allow him to assist her; she understood the gratification to him, and it was only too sweet to her to be still his object. She could trust him not to presume, his approval made her almost happy; and yet it was hard that his very patience and acquiescence should endear him so much as to render the parting so much the more painful. The day was spent in business. He facilitated much that would have been arduous for two solitary women, and did little all day but go about for Mary, fulfilling the commissions which her father had sent home; and though he did it with a sore heart, it was still a privilege to be at work for Mary.

Rigid as Miss Ponsonby was, she began to be touched. There was a doubt as to his admission when he came on Sunday morning—'Mistress saw no one on Sunday,' but when his name was carried in, Miss Ponsonby could not withstand Mary's face. She took care to tell him her rule; but that, considering the circumstances, she had made an exception in his favour, on the understanding that nothing was to break in upon the observance of the Sabbath.

Louis bent his head, with the heartfelt answer that he was but too glad to be permitted to go to church once more with Mary.

Aunt Melicent's Sunday was not quite their own Sunday, but all that they could desire was to be quietly together, and restricted from all those agitating topics and arrangements. It was a day of rest, and they valued it accordingly. In fact, Miss Ponsonby found the young Lord so good and inoffensive, that she broke her morning's resolution, invited him to partake of the cold dinner, let him go to church with them again in the evening, and remain to tea; and when he took leave, she expressed such surprised admiration at his having come and gone on his own feet, his church-going, and his conduct generally, that Mary could not help suspecting that her good aunt had supposed that he had never heard of the Fourth Commandment.

Miss Ponsonby was one of the many good women given to hard judgments on slight grounds, and to sudden reactions still more violent; and the sight of Lord Fitzjocelyn spending a quiet, respectable Sunday, had such an effect on her, that she transgressed her own mandate, and broached 'the distressing subject.'

'Mary, my dear, I suppose this young gentleman is an improved character?'

'He is always improving,' said Mary.

'I mean, that an important change must have taken place since I understood you to say you had refused him. I thought you acted most properly then; and, as I see him now, I think you equally right in accepting him.'

'He was very much what he is now,' said Mary.

'Then it was from no doubt of his being a serious character?'

'None whatever,' said Mary, emphatically.

'Well, my dear, I must confess his appearance, his family, and your refusal, misled me. I fear I did him great injustice.'

A silence, and then Miss Ponsonby said, 'After all, my dear, though I thought quite otherwise at first, I do believe that, considering what the youth is, and how much attached he seems, you might safely continue the engagement.'

Mary's heart glowed to her aunt for having been thus conquered by Louis—she who, three nights back, had been so severely incredulous, so deeply disappointed in her niece for having been deluded into endurance of him. But her resolution was fixed. 'It would not be right,' she said; 'his father would not allow it. There is so little chance of papa's relenting, or of my coming home, that it would be wrong to keep him in suspense. He had better turn his thoughts elsewhere while he is young enough to begin again.'

'It might save him from marrying some mere fine lady.'

'That will never be, whatever woman he chooses will—' She could not go on, but presently cleared her voice—'No; I should like to leave him quite free. I was less his choice than his father's; and, though I thought we should have been very happy, it does not seem to be the leading of Heaven. I am so far his inferior in cleverness, and everything attractive, and have been made so like his elder sister, that it might not have been best for him. I want him to feel that, in beginning afresh, he is doing me no injury; and then in time, whenever I come home, it may be such a friendship as there was between our elders. That is what I try to look forward to,—no, I don't think I look forward to anything. Good night, Aunt Melicent—I am so glad you like him!'

In this mind Mary met Lord Ormersfield. The delay had been an advantage, for he was less irritated, and she had regained self-possession. Her passage had been taken, and this was an argument that told on the Earl, though he refused to call it irrevocable. He found that there was no staggering her on the score of the life that awaited her; she knew more on that subject than he did, had confidence in her father, and no dread of Rosita; and she was too much ashamed and grieved at the former effect of his persuasions to attend to any more of a like description. He found her sense of duty more stubborn than he had anticipated, and soon had no more to say. She might carry it too far; but the principle was sound, and a father could not well controvert it. He had designed the rupture with Louis as a penalty to drive her into his measures; but he could not so propound it, and was wondering how to bring it in, when Mary relieved him by beginning herself, and stating the grounds with such sensible, unselfish, almost motherly care of Louis's happiness, that he was more unwilling than ever to let him resign her, and was on the point of begging her to re-consider, and let Louis wait for ever rather than lose her. But he knew they ought not to be bound, under such uncertainties, and his conviction was too strong to give way to emotion. He thanked her, and praised her with unwonted agitation, and regretted more than ever; and so they closed the conference by deciding that, unless Mr. Ponsonby should be induced to relent by his daughter's representations on her arrival, Mary and Louis must consider themselves as mutually released.

That loophole—forlorn, most forlorn hope, as they knew it to be—was an infinite solace to the young people, by sparing them a formal parting, and permitting them still to feel that they belonged to each other. If he began declaring that nothing would ever make him feel disconnected with Mary, he was told that it was not time to think of that, and they must not waste their time. And once Mary reminded him how much worse it would be if they had been separated by a quarrel. 'Anger might give one spirits,' he said, smiling mournfully.

'At the time; but think what it would be not to be able to remember happy times without remorse.'

'Then you do mean to recollect, Mary?'

'I trust to bring myself to remember rightly and wisely. I shall try to set it for a reward for myself to cure me of repinings,' said Mary, looking into his face, as if the remembrance of it must bring cheerfulness and refreshment.

'And when shall I not think, Mary! When I leave off work, I shall want you for a companion; when I go to work, the thought must stir me up. Your judgment must try my own.'

'Oh, hush, Louis! this is not good. Be yourself, and be more than yourself, and only think of the past as a time when we had a great deal of pleasantness, and you did me much good.'

'Did I?'

'Yes; I see it now I am with Aunt Melicent. You put so many more thoughts in my head, and showed me that so much more was good and wholesome than I used to fancy. Dear mamma once said you were educating me; and I hope to go on, and not let your lessons waste away.'

'Nay, Mary, you won good everywhere. If you had not been Mary, I might have made you a great goose. But you taught me all the perseverance I ever had. And oh! Mary, I don't wonder you do not trust it.'

'There is the forbidden subject,' said Mary, firmly.

That was the sort of conversation into which they fell now and then during those last days of busy sadness.

Truly it could have been worse. Suffering by their own fault would have rent them asunder more harshly, and Louis's freedom from all fierceness and violence softened all ineffably to Mary. James Frost's letter of fiery indignation, almost of denunciation, made her thankful that he was not the party concerned; and Louis made her smile at Isabel's copy of all his sentiments in ladylike phrases.

The last day came. Louis would not be denied seeing Mary on board the Valdivia; and, in spite of all Miss Ponsonby's horror of railways, he persuaded her to trust herself under his care to Liverpool. She augured great things from the letter which she had entrusted to Mary, and in which she had spoken of Lord Fitzjocelyn in the highest terms her vocabulary could furnish.

They parted bravely. Spectators hindered all display of feeling, and no one cried, except Miss Ponsonby.

'Good-bye, Louis; I will not forget your messages to Tom Madison. My love to your father and Aunt Catharine.'

'Good-bye, Mary; I shall see Tom and Chimborazo yet.'

CHAPTER V.

THE NEW WORLD.

Still onward, as to southern skies,
We spread our sails, new stars arise,
New lights upon the glancing tide,
Fresh hues where pearl and coral hide:
What are they all but tokens true
Of grace for ever fresh and new!
Prayers for Emigrants.

There are some days in the early year, devoid indeed of spring brilliance, but full of soft, heavy, steaming fragrance, pervading the grey air with sweet odours, and fostering the growth of tender bud and fragile stem with an unseen influence, more mild and kindly than even the smiling sunbeam or the gushing shower. 'A growing day,' as the country-people term such genial, gentle weather, might not be without analogy to the brief betrothal of Louis and Mary.

Subdued and anxious, there had been little of the ordinary light of joy, hope, or gaiety, and their pleasures had been less their own than in preparing the happiness of their two friends. It was a time such as to be more sweet in memory than it was in the present; and the shade which had hung over it, the self-restraint and the forbearance which it had elicited, had unconsciously conduced to the development of the characters of both, preparing them to endure the parting far more effectually than unmixed enjoyment could have done. The check upon Louis's love of trifling, the restraint on his spirits, the being thrown back on his own judgment when he wanted to lean upon Mary, had given him a habit of controlling his boyish ways.

It was a call to train himself in manliness and self-reliance. It changed him from the unstable reed he once had been, and helped him to take one steady and consistent view of the trial required of him and of Mary, and then to act upon it resolutely and submissively. With Mary gone, he cared little what became of him until her letters could arrive; and his father, with more attention to his supposed benefit than to his wishes, carried him at once, without returning home, to a round of visits among all his acquaintance most likely to furnish a distracting amount of Christmas gaieties. In the midst of these, there occurred a vacancy in the representation of a borough chiefly under the influence of Sir Miles Oakstead; and, as it was considered expedient that he should be brought into Parliament, his father repaired with him at once to Oakstead, and involved him in all the business of the election. On his success, he went with his father to London for the session, and this was all that his friends at Northwold knew of him. He wrote hurried notes to James or to Mr. Holdsworth on necessary affairs connected with his farm and improvements, mentioning facts instead of feelings, and promising to write to Aunt Catharine when he should have time; but the time did not seem to come, and it was easy to believe that his passiveness of will, increased by the recent stroke, had caused him to be hurried into a condition of involuntary practical activity.

Mary, meanwhile, was retracing her voyage, in the lull of spirits which, after long straining, had nothing to do but to wait in patience, bracing themselves for a fresh trial. Never suffering herself, at sea, her first feelings, after the final wrench of parting, were interrupted by the necessity of attending to her friend, a young mother, with children enough to require all the services that the indefatigable Mary could perform. If Mrs. Willis always averred that she never could have gone through the voyage without Miss Ponsonby, Mary felt, in return, that the little fretful boy and girl, who would never let her sit and think, except when both were asleep, had been no small blessing to her.

Yet Mary was not so much absorbed and satisfied with the visible and practical as had once been the case. The growth had not been all on Louis's side. If her steadfast spirit had strengthened his wavering resolution, the intercourse and sympathy with him had opened and unfolded many a perception and quality in her, which had been as tightly and hardly cased up as leaf-buds in their gummy envelopes. A wider range had been given to her thoughts; there was a swelling of heart, a vividness of sensation, such as she had not known in earlier times; she had been taught the mystery of creation, the strange connexion with the Unseen, and even with her fellow-men. Beyond the ordinary practical kind offices, for which she had been always ready, there was now mingled something of Louis's more comprehensive spirit of questioning what would do them good, and drawing food for reflection from their diverse ways.

She was sensible of the change again and again, when sights recurred which once had only spoken to her eye. That luminous sea, sparkling like floods of stars, had been little more than 'How pretty! how funny!' at her first voyage. Now, it was not only 'How Louis would admire it!' but 'How profusely, how gloriously has the Creator spread the globe with mysterious beauty! how marvellously has He caused His creatures to hold forth this light, to attract others to their needful food!' And the furrow of fire left by their vessel's wake spoke to her of that path 'like a shining light, shining more and more unto the perfect day.' If with it came the remembrance of his vision of the threads of light, it was not a recollection which would lead to repining.

And when at Cape Horn, a mighty ice mountain drifted within view, spired, pinnacled, encrusted with whiteness, rivalled only by the glory of the summer cloud, caverned here and there into hollows of sapphire blue, too deeply dazzling to behold, or rising into peaks of clear, hard, chill green; the wild fantastic points sometimes glimmering with fragments of the rainbow arch; the rich variety, endless beyond measure in form and colouring, and not only magnificent and terrible in the whole mass, but lovely beyond imagination in each crystal too minute for the eye. Mary had once, on a like occasion, only said, 'it was very cold;' and looked to see whether the captain expected the monster to bear down on the ship. But the present iceberg put her in mind of the sublime aspirations which gothic cathedrals seem as if they would fain embody. And then, she thought of the marvellous interminable waste of beauty of those untrodden regions, whence yonder enormous iceberg was but a small fragment—a petty messenger—regions unseen by human eye—beauty untouched by human hand-the glory, the sameness, yet the infinite variety of perfect purity. Did it not seem, with all the associations of cold, of peril, of dreariness, to be a visible token that indeed He who fashioned it could prepare 'good things past man's understanding!'

It was well for Mary that southern constellations, snowy, white-winged albatross, leaping flying-fish, and white-capped mountain-coast, had been joined in her mind with something higher, deeper, and less personal, or their recurrence would have brought her nothing but pain unmitigated in the contrast with the time when first she had beheld them six years ago.

Then she was full of hope and eager ardour to arrive, longing for the parental presence of which she had so long been deprived, hailing every novel scene as a proof that she was nearer home, and without the anticipation of one cloud, only expecting to be loved, to love, and to be useful. And now, all fond illusions as to her father had been snatched away, her very love for him rendering the perception doubly cruel; her mother, her precious mother, far away in Ormersfield churchyard—her life probably shortened by his harshness—her place occupied by a young girl, differing in language, in Church, in everything—Mary's own pardon uncertain, after all her sacrifices—A sense of having deeply offended, hung upon her; and her heart was so entirely in England, that had her home been perfect, her voyage must still have been a cruel effort. That one anticipation of being set at rest by her father's forgiveness, and the forlorn despairing hope of his relenting towards Louis, were all she dared to dwell on; and when Mrs. Willis counted the days till she could arrive and meet her husband, poor Mary felt as if, but for these two chances of comfort, she could gladly have prolonged the voyage for the rest of her life.

But one burning tropical noon, the Valdivia was entering Callao harbour, and Mary, sick and faint at heart, was arraying herself in a coloured dress, lest her mourning should seem to upbraid her father. The voyage was over, the ship was anchored, boats were coming offshore, the luggage was being hoisted out of the hold, the passengers were congregated on deck, eager to land, some gazing with curious and enterprising eyes on the new country, others scanning every boat in hopes of meeting a familiar face. Mrs. Willis stood trembling with hope, excitement, and the strange dread often rushing in upon the last moment of expectation. She clung to Mary for support, and once said—

'Oh, Miss Ponsonby, how composed you are!' Mary's feelings were too deep—too much concentrated for trembling. She calmed and soothed the wife's sudden fright, lest 'something should have happened to George;' and she even smiled when the children's scream of ecstacy infected their mother, when the papa and uncle they had been watching for with straining eyes proved to be standing on deck close beside them.

Mary cast her eyes round, and saw nothing of her own. She stood apart, while the Willis family were in all the rapture of the meeting; she saw them moving off, too happy and sufficient for themselves even to remember her. She had a dull, heavy sensation that she must bear all, and this was the beginning; and she was about to begin her arrangements for her dreary landing, when Mrs. Willis's brother, Mr. Ward, turned back. He was a middle-aged merchant, whom her mother had much liked and esteemed, and there was something cheering in his frank, hearty greeting, and satisfaction in seeing her. It was more like a welcome, and it brought the Willises back, shocked at having forgotten her in the selfishness of their own joy; but they had made sure that she had been met. Mr. Ward did not think that she was expected by the Valdivia; Mr. Ponsonby had not mentioned it as likely. So they were all seated in the boat, with the black rowers; and while the Willises fondled their children, and exchanged home-news, Mr. Ward sat by Mary, and spoke to her kindly, not openly referring to the state of her home, but showing a warmth and consideration which evinced much delicate sympathy.

They all drove together in the Willises' carriage up the sloping road from Callao to Lima, and Mary heard astonishment, such as she had once felt, breaking out in screams from the children at the sight of omnibuses filled with gaily-dressed negroes, and brown horsewomen in Panama hats and lace-edged trousers careering down the road. But then, her father had come and fetched her from on board, and that dear mamma was waiting in the carriage! They entered the old walled town when twilight had already closed in, and Mrs. Willis was anxious to take her tired little ones home at once. They were set down at their own door; but Mr. Ward, with protecting anxious kindness, insisted on seeing Miss Ponsonby safely home before he would join them. As they drove through the dark streets, Mary heard a little restless movement, betraying some embarrassment; and at last, with an evident desire of reassuring her, he said, 'Senora Rosita is thought very pleasing and engaging;' and then, as if willing to change the subject, he hastily added, 'I suppose you did not speak the Pizarro?'

'No.'

'She has sailed about three weeks. She takes home your cousin, Mr. Dynevor.'

Mary cried out with surprise.

'I thought him a complete fixture, but he is gone home for a year. It seems his family property was in the market, and he was anxious to secure it.'

'How glad his mother will be!' was all Mary could say, as there rushed over her the thought of the wonderful changes this would make in Dynevor Terrace. Her first feeling was that she must tell Louis; her second, that two oceans were between them; and then she thought of Aunt Catharine having lived, after all, to see her son.

She had forgotten to expect the turn when the carriage wheeled under the arched entry of her father's house. All was gloom and stillness, except where a little light shone in a sort of porter's lodge upon the eager negro features of two blacks, with much gesticulation, playing at dice. They came out hastily at the sound of the carriage; and as Mr. Ward handed out Mary, and inquired for Mr. Ponsonby, she recognised and addressed the white-woolled old Xavier, the mayor domo. Poor old Xavier! Often had she hunted and teased him, and tried to make him understand 'cosas de Inglaterra,' and to make him cease from his beloved dice; but no sooner did he see her face than, with a cry of joy, 'La Senorita Maria! la Senorita Maria!' down he went upon his knees, and began kissing the hem of her dress.

All the rest of the negro establishment came round, capering and chattering Spanish; and, in the confusion, Mary could not get her question heard—Where was her father? and Xavier's vehement threats and commands to the others to be silent, did not produce a calm. At last, bearing a light, there came forward a faded, sallow dame, with a candle in her hand, who might have sat for the picture of the Duena Rodriguez, and at her appearance the negroes subsided. She was an addition to the establishment since Mary's departure; but in her might be easily recognised the Tia, the individual who in Limenian households holds a position between companion and housekeeper. She introduced herself by the lugubrious appellation of Senora Dolores, and, receiving Mary with obsequious courtesy, explained that the Senor and Senora were at a tertulia, or evening party. She lighted Mary and Mr. Ward into the quadra; and there Mr. Ward, shaking hands with her as if he would thereby compensate for all that was wanting in her welcome, promised to go and inform her father of her arrival.

Mary stood in the large dark room, with the soft matted floor, and the windows high up near the carved timbered ceiling, the single lamp, burning in rum, casting a dim gleam over the well-known furniture, by which her mother had striven to give an English appearance to the room. It was very dreary, and she would have given the world to be alone with her throbbing head, her dull heartache, and the weariness of spirits over-long wound up for the meeting; but her own apartment could be no refuge until it had been cleansed and made ready, and Dolores and Xavier were persecuting her every moment with their hospitality and their inquiries. Then came a quick, manly tread, and for a moment her heart almost seemed to stand still, in the belief that it was her father; but it was only Robson, hurrying in to offer his services and apologies. Perhaps he was the very last person she could bear to see, feeling, as she did, that if he had been more explicit all the offence would have been spared. He was so much aware of all family matters, and was accustomed to so much confidence from her father, that she could not believe him unconscious; and there was something hateful to her in the plausible frankness and deferential familiarity of his manners, as, brushing up his sandy hair upon his forehead, he poured forth explanations that Mr. Ponsonby would be delighted, but grieved that no one had met her—Valdivia not expected so soon—not anticipated the pleasure—if they had imagined that Miss Ponsonby was a passenger—

'My father desired that I would come out by her,' said Mary.

'Ay, true—so he informed me; but since later intelligence'—and he cast a glance at Mary, to judge how much further to go; but meeting with nothing but severity, he covered the impertinence by saying, 'In fact, though the Valdivia was mentioned, and Mrs. Willis, Mr. Ponsonby had reason to suppose you would not receive his letters in time to avail yourself of the escort.'

'I did so, however,' said Mary, coldly.

'Most gratifying. Mr. and Mrs. Ponsonby will be highly gratified. In fact, Miss Ponsonby, I must confess that was a most unfortunate blunder of mine last August. I should not have fallen into the error had I not been so long absent at Guayaquil that I had had no opportunity of judging of the amiable lady; and I will own to much natural surprise and some indignation, before I had had the pleasure of personal acquaintance with the charms and the graces—Hem! In effect, it was a step that no one could have recommended; and when your noble relative put it to me in so many words whether I would counsel your continuing your journey, I could not take it on me to urge a measure so painful to your feelings, unaware as I was then of the amiable qualities of the lady who occupies the situation of the highly beloved and esteemed—'

Mary could not bear to hear her mother's name in his mouth, so she cut him short by saying, 'I suppose you thought you acted for the best, Mr. Robson; it was very unfortunate, but it cannot be helped. Pray can you tell me where the lad Madison is?' she added, resolved to show him that she would not discuss these matters with him; 'I have a parcel for him.'

'He is at the San Benito mine, Miss Ponsonby.'

'How does he go on?'

'Well—I may say very well, allowing for inexperience. He appears a steady, intelligent lad, and I have no doubt will answer the purpose well.'

There was one gratification for Mary, at least, in the pleasure this would afford at home; but Robson continued making conversation about Mr. Dynevor's visit to England, and the quantity of work this temporary absence entailed on him; and then on the surprise it would be to his patron to find her, and Senora Rosita's interest in her, and the numerous gaieties of the bride, and the admiration she excited, and his own desire to be useful. This afforded Mary an opportunity for getting rid of him at last, by sending him to make arrangements for her baggage to be sent from Callao the next morning.

Ten minutes more, half spent in conquering her disgust, half in sick anticipation, and other feet were crossing the matted sala, the curtain over the doorway was drawn aside, and there stood her father, and a lady, all white and diamonds, by his side. He held out his arms, Mary fell into them, and it was the same kind rough kiss which had greeted her six years back. It seemed to be forgiveness, consolation, strength, all at once; and their words mingled—'Papa, you forgive me'—'Mary, my good girl, I did not think they would have let you come back to me. This was but a dreary coming home for you, my dear.' And then, instantly changing his language to Spanish, he added, appealing to his wife, that had they guessed she was on board, they would have come to meet her.

Rosita replied earnestly to that effect, and warmly embraced Mary, pitying her for such an arrival, and hoping that Dolores had made her comfortable. The rest of the conversation was carried on in the same tongue. Rosita was much what Mary had expected—of a beautiful figure, with fine eyes, and splendid raven hair, but without much feature or expression. She looked almost like a dream to-night, however, with her snowy robes, and the diamonds sparkling with their dewdrop flashes in her hair and on her arms, with the fitful light caught from the insufficient candles. All she ventured to say had a timid gracefulness and simplicity that were very winning; and her husband glanced more than once to see if she were not gaining upon his daughter; and so in truth she was, personally, though it was exceedingly painful to see her where Mary had been used to see that dear suffering face; and it was impossible not to feel the contrast with her father as painfully incongruous. Mr. Ponsonby was a large man, with the jovial manner of one never accustomed to self-restraint; good birth and breeding making him still a gentleman, in spite of his loud voice and the traces of self-indulgence. He was ruddy and bronzed, and his eyebrows and hair looked as if touched by hoar frost; altogether as dissimilar a partner as could be devised for the slender girlish being by his side.

After a little Spanish conversation, all kind on his aide, and thus infinitely relieving Mary, they parted for the night. She laid before him the packet of letters, which she had held all this time as the last link to Louis, and sought his eye as she did so with a look of appeal; but he carefully averted his glance, and she could read nothing.

Weary as she was, Mary heard again and again, through her unglazed windows, the watchman's musical cry of 'Ave Maria purisima, las—es temblado!' 'Viva Peru y sereno!' and chid herself for foolish anticipations that Louis would hear and admire all the strange sounds of the New World. The kindness of her welcome gave her a little hope; and she went over and over again her own part of the discussion which she expected, almost persuading herself, that Louis's own conduct and her aunt's testimony must win the day.

She need not have spent so many hours in preparation for the morning. She was up early, in hopes of seeing her father before he went to his office, but he was gone for a ride. The English breakfast, which had been established, much to his content, by her own exertions, had quite vanished, each of the family had a cup of chocolate in private, and there was no meeting till, late in the morning, Rosita sauntered into her room, embraced her, made inquiries as to her rest, informed her that she was going to the Opera that night, and begged her to accompany her. To appear in public with Rosita was the tribute for which Mary had come out, so she readily agreed; and thereupon the Senora digressed into the subject of dress, and required of Mary a display of all her robes, and an account of the newest fashions of the English ladies. It was all with such innocent, earnest pleasure, that Mary could not be annoyed, and good-naturedly made all her disappointing display.

The midday meal brought her father—still kind and affectionate, but never dropping the Spanish, nor manifesting any consciousness of her letters. She had hopes of the period allotted to the siesta, to which custom, in old days, she had never acceded, but had always spent the interval on any special occupation—above all, to writing for him; but he went off without any notice of her, and she was in no condition to dispense with the repose, for her frame was tired out, though her hopes and fears could not even let her dreams rest.

Then came a drive with Rosita, resplendent in French millinery, then supper; then the Opera, to which her father accompanied them, still without a word. Another day was nearly the same, only that this time she had to do her best to explain the newest fashions in behalf of a dress of Rosita's, then being made, and in the evening to go to a party at the Consul's, where she met Mr. Ward, and had some talk which she might have enjoyed but for her suspense.

On the third, Rosita was made happy by unpacking an elegant little black papier mache table, a present from Miss Ponsonby. Good Melicent! were ever two sisters-in-law more unlike? But Lord Ormersfield had done Rosita and her husband good service. If Aunt Melicent had first learned the real facts, her wrath would have been extreme—a mere child, a foreigner, a Roman Catholic, a nun! Her horror would have known no bounds, and she would, perhaps, have broken with her brother forever. But by making the newly-married pair victims of injustice, the Earl had made the reality a relief, and Melicent had written civilly to her brother, and a sisterly sort of stiff letter to the bride—of which the Limenian could not understand one word; so that Mary had to render it all into Spanish, even to her good aunt's hopes that Rosita would be kind to her, and use all her influence in favour of her happiness.

Whether Rosita would have comprehended this without Mary's blushes might be questioned, but she did say, 'Ah! yes! you were to have married the Visconde, were you not? El Senor was so angry! Did his father forbid when your father refused your portion?'

'Oh no, he would receive me if I brought nothing.'

'And you wish to marry?' said Rosita.

'If my father would only consent.'

'But why did you come here then?' said Rosita, opening her large eyes.

'My father commanded me.'

'England is a long way off,' said Rosita, languidly, 'he could not have reached you there. You would have been a great lady and noble! How could you come away, if he would still have you?'

'Because it would have been wrong. We could not have been happy in disobeying my father.'

'Ah! but you could have done penance. I had many penances to do for quitting my convent; Padre Inigo was very severe, but they are over at last, and I am free for giving alms twice a week, and the Sisters have forgiven me, and send me so many silver flowers and dulces; I will show them to you some day. Could you not have done penance?'

'I am afraid not.'

'Ah! I forgot you were a heretic, poor thing! How inconvenient! And so you will not come with me to the bull-fight next Sunday?'

Such being Rosita's ideas on the point, Mary gave up much hope in her influence, and tried what a good-humoured announcement of her re-establishment of the English breakfast would effect towards bringing her father to a tete-a-tete, but he never came near it. The waiting in silence was miserable enough for herself, but she would have continued to bear it except for the injustice to Louis, who must not be kept in suspense. The departure of the next English mail should be the limit of her endurance, and after a day of watching, she finally went up to her father when he would have bidden her good night, and said, in English, 'Papa, if you please, I must speak to you.'

'So you shall, my dear, but we are all tired; we must have our night's rest.'

'No, papa, it must be to-night, if you please. It is necessary for me to know before to-morrow how I am to write to Lord Fitzjocelyn.'

'Pshaw! Mary, I've settled that young fellow!'

'Papa, I don't think you know—'

'I've written him a civil answer, if that's what you mean, much civiller than he or his father deserve,' he said, speaking loud, and trying to fling away from her, but she stood her ground, and spoke calmly and steadily, though her heart beat violently.

'You do not understand the true state of the case, papa; and without doing so, you cannot write such an answer as they deserve.'

'I know this, that old Ormersfield has been the curse of my life!' and out poured one of those torrents of fierce passion which had been slowly but surely the death of his wife. Mary had never heard one in the full tide before, but she stood firm; there were none of the tears, auch as, in her mother, had been wont to exasperate him further, but with pale cheeks, compressed lips, and hands locked together, her heart was one silent entreaty that it might be forgiven him above. Thus she stood while the storm of anger raged, and when at last it had exhausted itself, he said, in a lower voice, 'And so you are still taken with this fellow's son, this young puppy! I thought you had more spirit and sense, Mary, or I never would have trusted you among them.'

'There are very few people in this world half so good or so right-minded as Fitzjocelyn,' said Mary, earnestly and deliberately. 'It was he who bade me come to you, well knowing that we could never be happy without your consent.'

'Oh! he did so, did he? He is deeper than I thought would not risk your fortune. Why, Mary, I did not think a girl of your sense could be so taken in! It is transparent, I tell you. They get you there, flatter you up with their attentions, but when they find you too wise for them the first time, off goes this youth to Miss Conway, finds her a bad speculation, no heiress at all, and disposes of her to his cousin. I wonder if he'll find old Dynevor grateful. Meanwhile the old Lord must needs come out here, finds our gains a better prize than he expected, trumps up this story at Valparaiso, takes you in, and brings you home to this precious youth. And you, and your aunt too, are ready to believe it all! I always knew that women were fools whenever a title came in their way, I see it more than ever now, since you and Melicent are both like the rest of 'em.'

'Papa,' said Mary, again rallying her firmness, 'we have found sadly how easy it is to be deceived when one is not on the spot. Will you listen to me, who saw it all?'

'No, Mary, I will not hear the nonsense they have put into your head, my poor girl. No! I tell you it is of no use! It is my resolute purpose that not one farthing of mine shall go to patch up the broken-down Ormersfield property! The man is my enemy, and has sown dissension in my family from the first moment I connected myself with him. I'll never see my daughter his son's wife. I wonder he had the impudence to propose it! I shall think you lost to all feeling for your father, if you say another word about it.'

'Very well,' said Mary, with steady submission. 'Then I will only write one more letter to Fitzjocelyn, and tell him that your objections are insuperable, and that he must think of it no more.'

'That's right, Mary! you are a good girl, after all! You'll stand by your father, in spite of all the House of Peers! I'm glad to see you hold up your head so bravely. So you did fancy being a Viscountess, did you! but it is not a heartbreaking matter either, my girl!'

This was too much for Mary, and when her father would have kissed her, she laid her head on his shoulder and wept silently but bitterly.

'Ha! what's all this? Why, you don't pretend to care for a young mercenary scamp like that?'

'He is the noblest, most generous, most disinterested man I ever knew!' said Mary, standing apart, and speaking clearly. 'I give him up because—you command me, father, but I will not hear him spoken of unjustly.'

'Ha! ha! so long as you give him up, we won't quarrel. He shall be all that, and more too, if you like; and we'll never fight over the matter again, since I have you safe back, my child.'

'I do not mean to mention him again,' said Mary; 'I wish to obey you.'

'Then there's an end of the matter. You'll get over it, my girl, and we'll find some honest man worth two of your niggardly, proud-spirited earls. There, I know you are a reasonable girl that can be silent, and not go on teasing. So, Mary, you may have a cup of tea for me to-morrow in the sala, like old times. Goodnight, my dear.'

Waiting upon himself! That was the reward that Mr. Ponsonby held out to his daughter for crushing her first love!

But it was a reward. Anything that drew her father nearer to her was received with gratitude by Mary, and the words of kindness in some degree softened the blow. She had never had much hope, though now she found it had been more than she had been willing to believe; and even now she could not absolutely cease to entertain some hopes of the results of Oliver's return, nor silence one lingering fancy that Louis might yet wait unbound; although she told herself of his vacillation between herself and Isabel, of his father's influence, and of the certainty that he would see many more worthy of his love than herself. Not any one who could love him so well—oh no! But when Mary found her thoughts taking this turn, she rose up as she lay, clasped her hands together, and repeated half aloud again and again, 'Be Thou my all!'

And by the morning, though Mary's cheek was very white, and her eyes sunken for want of sleep, she had a cheerful word for her father, and a smile, the very sight of which would have gone to the heart of any one of those from whom he had cut her off.

Then she wrote her letters. It was not so hard to make this final severance as it had been to watch Louis's face, and think of the pain she had to inflict. Many a time had she weighed each phrase she set down, so that it might offend neither against sincerity nor resignation, and yet be soothing and consoling. Some would have thought her letter stiff and laboured, but she had learned to believe that a grave and careful style befitted a serious occasion, and would have thought incoherency childish or affected.

She released him entirely from his engagement, entreating him not to rebel against the decision, but to join her in thankfulness that no shade need be cast over the remembrance of the happy hours spent together; and begging him not to grieve, since she had, after the first pain, been able to acquiesce in the belief that the separation might conduce to his happiness; and she should always regard him as one of those most near and dear to her, and rejoice in whatever was for his welfare, glad that his heart was still young enough to form new ties. 'Forgive me for speaking thus,' she added; 'I know that it may wound you now, but there may come a time when it may make you feel more at ease and unfettered; and I could not endure to imagine that the affection which you brought yourself to lavish on one so unworthy, should stand in the way of your happiness for life.' She desired him to make no answer, but to consider this as the final dissolution: and she concluded by all that she thought would prove most consoling, as to the present state of affairs with her; and with a few affectionate words, to show that he was still a great deal to her, though everything he might not be.

This done, Mary faced her life in the New World. She had to form her habits for herself, for her importance in the house was gone; but she went to work resolutely, and, lonely as she was, she had far more resources than if she had never been at Ormersfield. She had many hours to herself, and she unpacked her books, and set herself courses of study, to which Louis had opened the door. She unveiled her eyes to natural history, and did not find flower or butterfly unsoothing. She undertook the not very hopeful task of teaching a tiny negro imp, who answered the purpose of a bell, to read and work; and she was persevering in her efforts to get Xavier and Dolores to make her father comfortable.

Her father was decidedly glad of her company. He liked conversation, and enjoyed the morning meeting, to which Mr. Ward was often a welcome addition, delighting in anything so English, and finding Miss Ponsonby much improved by her introduction to English society. Sometimes Mary wrote for her father, and now and then was consulted; and she was always grateful for whatever made her feel herself of use. She was on kind and friendly terms with Rosita, but they did not become more intimate than at first. The Senora was swinging in a hammock half-asleep, with a cigarette between her lips, all the morning; and when she emerged from this torpid state, in a splendid toilette, she had too many more congenial friends often to need her step-daughter in her visits, her expeditions to lotteries, and her calls on her old friends the nuns. On a fast-day, or any other occasion that kept her at home, she either arranged her jewels, discussed her dresses, or had some lively chatter, which she called learning English. She coaxed, fondled, and domineered prettily over Mr. Ponsonby; and he looked on amused, gratified her caprices, caressed her, and seemed to regard her as a pretty pet and plaything.

CHAPTER VI.

THE TWO PENDRAGONS.

The red dragon and the white,
Hard together gan they smite,
With mouth, paw, and tail,
Between hem was full hard batail.
The History of Merlin.

SPRING was on the borders of summer, when one afternoon, as Clara sat writing a note in the drawing-room, she heard a tap at the door of the little sitting-room, and springing to open it, she beheld a welcome sight.

'Louis! How glad I am! Where do you come from?'

'Last from the station,' said Louis.

'What makes you knock at that door, now the drawing-room is alive?'

'I could not venture on an unceremonious invasion of Mrs. James Frost's territory.'

'You'll find no distinction of territory here,' laughed Clara. 'It was a fiction that we were to live in separate rooms, like naughty children. Does not the drawing-room look nice?'

'As much improved as the inhabitant. Where are the other natives?'

'Granny and Isabel are walking, and will end by picking up Jem coming out of school. We used to wait for him so often, that at last he said we should be laughed at, so there's a law against it which no one dares to transgress but granny.'

'So I conclude that you are a happy family.'

'After all, it was worth spending two years at school to enjoy properly the having it over.'

'I give Jem credit for having secured a first-rate governess for you.'

'That she is! Why, with her I really do like reading and drawing all the morning! I almost believe that some day I shall wake up and find myself an accomplished young lady! And, Louis, have you read the last Western Magazine?'

'I have read very little for sport lately.'

'Then I must tell you. Jem was bemoaning himself about having nothing to give to the new Blind Asylum, and the next evening Isabel brought out the prettiest little manuscript book, tied with blue ribbon, and told him to do as he pleased with it. It was a charming account of her expedition to the Hebrides, written out for her sisters, without a notion of anything further; but Jem sent it to this Magazine, and it is accepted, and the first part is out. She will have quite a sum for it, and all is to go to the Blind Asylum!'

'Capital!—Let me take it home to night, Clara, and I will stand an examination on it to-morrow.'

'We ask her whether she projects a sketch of the Paris Revolution,' said Clara, laughing. 'She has a famous heap of manuscripts in her desk, and one long story about a Sir Roland, who had his name before she knew Jem, but it is all unfinished, she tore out a great many pages, and has to make a new finish; and I am afraid the poor knight is going to die of a mortal wound at his lady's feet. Isabel likes sad things best;—but oh! here they come, and I'm talking dreadful treason.'

Three more joyous-looking people could hardly have been found than those who entered the room, welcoming Louis with delight, and asking what good wind had brought him.

'Partly that Inglewood is crying out for the master's eye,' said Louis; 'and partly that my father fancied I looked fagged, and kindly let me run down for a holiday.'

'I am of his mind,' said Mrs. Frost, tenderly; 'there is an M.P. expression gathering on your brows, Louis.'

'For you to dispel, Aunt Kitty. I told him you were the best dissipation, and Virginia was of the same mind. Isabel, she says Dynevor Terrace is the only place she ever wishes to see again.'

'Do you often see Virginia?' asked Isabel.

'Not unless I go early, and beg for her; and then she generally has some master. That last onset of accomplishments is serious!'

'Yes,' said Isabel, 'the sense of leisure and tranquillity here is marvellous!'

'Not leisure in the sense of idleness,' said James.

'No,' said Isabel; 'but formerly idle requirements thronged my time, and for nothing worth doing could I find leisure.'

'There is nothing more exacting than idle requirements,' said James. 'Pray is Clara accepting that invitation? Come to dinner, Louis, and give us an excuse.'

'No, he won't,' said Mrs. Frost, 'he will take my side. These young people want to cast off all their neighbours.'

'Now, granny,' exclaimed James, 'have we not dutifully dined all round? Did not Isabel conduct Clara to that ball? Is it not hard to reproach us with sighing at an evening immolated at the shrine of the Richardsons?'

'Well, my dears, you must judge.'

'I am ready to do whatever you think right; I leave you to settle it,' said Isabel, moving out of the room, that Louis might be free for a more intimate conversation.

'Now,' cried James, 'is it in the nature of things that she should live in such society as Mrs. Walby's and Mrs. Richardson's? People who call her Mrs. James!'

'Such a queen as she looks among them!' said Clara.

'One comfort is, they don't like that,' said James. 'Even Mrs. Calcott is not flattered by her precedence. I hope we shall soon be dropped out of their parties. As long as I do my duty by their sons, what right have they to impose the penance of their society on my wife? All the irksomeness of what she has left, and none of the compensations!'

'Blissful solitude' said Louis, 'thereto I leave you.'

'You are not going yet! You mean to dine here?' was the cry.

'My dear friends,' he said, holding up his hands, 'if you only knew how I long to have no one to speak to!'

'You crying out for silence!' exclaimed James.

'I am panting for what I have not had these five months—space for my thoughts to turn round.'

'Surely you are at liberty to form your own habits!' said James.

'I am told so whenever my father sees me receive a note,' said Louis, wearily; 'but I see that, habituated as he is to living alone, he is never really at ease unless I am in the way; so I make our hours agree as far as our respective treadmills permit; and though we do not speak much, I can never think in company.'

'Don't you have your rides to yourself?'

'Why, no. My father will never ride enough to do him good, unless he wants to do me good. People are all surprised to see him looking so well; the country lanes make him quite blooming.'

'But not you, my poor boy,' said his aunt; 'I am afraid it is a sad strain.'

'There now, Aunt Kitty, I am gone. I must have the pleasure of looking natural sometimes, without causing any vituperation of any one beyond seas.'

'You shall look just as you please if you will only stay. We are just going to dinner.'

'Thank you, let me come to-morrow. I shall be better company when I have had my sulk out.'

His aunt followed him to the stairs, and he turned to her, saying, anxiously, 'No letter?' She shook her head. 'It would be barely possible,' he said, 'but if it would only come while I am at home in peace!'

'Ah! this is sadly trying!' said she, parting his hair on his brow as he stood some steps below her, and winning a sweet smile from him.

'All for the best,' he said. 'One thing may mitigate another. That political whirlpool might suck me in, if I had any heart or hopes for it. And, on the other hand, it would be very unwholesome to be left to my own inertness—to be as good for nothing as I feel.'

'My poor dear boy, you are very good about it. I wish you could have been spared.'

'I did not come to make you sad, Aunt Kitty,' he replied, smiling; 'no; I get some energy back when I remember that this may be a probation. Her mother would not have thought me man enough, and that is what I have to work for. Whether this end well or not, she is the leading star of my life.' And, with the renewal of spirit with which he had spoken, he pressed his aunt's hand, and ran down stairs.

When he rode to Northwold, the following afternoon, having spent the morning in walking over his fields, he overtook a most comfortable couple—James and Isabel, returning from their holiday stroll, and Louis, leaving his horse at the inn, and joining them, began to hear all their school affairs. James had thrown his whole heart into his work, had been making various reforms, introducing new studies, making a point of religious instruction, and meditating on a course of lectures on history, to be given in the evenings, the attendance to be voluntary, but a prize held out for proficiency. Louis took up the subject eagerly, and Isabel entered into the discussion with all her soul, and the grammar-school did indeed seem to be in a way to become something very superior in tone to anything Northwold had formerly seen, engrossing as it did all the powers of a man of such ability, in the full vigour of youth.

Talking earnestly, the trio had reached the Terrace, and James was unlatching the iron gate, when he interrupted himself in the midst of detailing his views on modern languages to say, 'No, I have nothing for you.'

'Sir, I beg your pardon!' was the quick reply from a withered, small, but not ill-dressed old man, 'I only asked—'

'Let the lady pass,' said James, peremptorily, wishing to save his wife from annoyance, 'it is of no use, I never look at petitions.'

'Surely he is not a beggar!' said Isabel, as he drew her on.

'You may be easy about him, my dear,' said James. 'He has laid hold of Louis, who would swallow the whole Spanish legion of impostors. He will be after us directly with a piteous story.'

Louis was after him, with a face more than half arch fun—'Jem, Jem, it is your uncle!'

'Nonsense! How can you be so taken in! Don't go and disappoint granny—I'll settle him.'

'Take care, Jem—it is Oliver, and no mistake! Why, he is as like you as Pendragon blood can make him! Go and beg his pardon.'

James hastened down stairs, as Louis bounded up—sought Mrs. Frost in the sitting-rooms, and, without ceremony, rushed up and knocked at the bed-room door. Jane opened it.

'He is come!' cried Louis—'Oliver is come.'

Old Jane gave a shriek, and ran back wildly, clapping her hands. Her mistress started forward—'Come!—where?'

'Here!—in the hall with Jem.'

He feared that he had been too precipitate, for she hid her face in her hands; but it was the intensity of thanksgiving; and though her whole frame was in a tremor, she flew rather than ran forward, never even seeing Louis's proffered arm. He had only reached the landing-place, when beneath he heard the greeting—'Mother, I can take you home—Cheveleigh is yours.' But to her the words were drowned in her own breathless cry—'My boy! my boy!' She saw, knew, heard nothing, save that the son, missed and mourned for thirty-four years, was safe within her arms, the longing void filled up. She saw not that the stripling had become a worn and elderly man,—she recked not how he came. He was Oliver, and she had him again! What was the rest to her?

Those words? They might be out of taste, but Fitzjocelyn guessed that to speak them at the first meeting had been the vision of Oliver's life—the object to which he had sacrificed everything. And yet how chill and unheeded they fell!

Louis could have stood moralizing, but his heart had begun to throb at the chance that Oliver brought tidings of Mary. He felt himself an intrusive spectator, and hastened into the drawing-room, when Clara nearly ran against him, but stood still. 'I beg your pardon, but what is Isabel telling me? Is it really?'

'Really! Kindred blood signally failed to speak.'

Clara took a turn up and down the room. 'I say, Louis, ought I to go down?'

'No; leave him and granny to their happiness,' said Louis; and James, at the same moment running up, threw himself into a chair, with an emphatic 'There!'

'Dear grandmamma!' said Isabel; 'I hope it is not too much for her.'

James made no answer.

'Are you disappointed in him, dear James?' she continued.

'I could not be disappointed,' he answered, shortly.

'Poor man—he has a poor welcome among you,' said Louis.

'Welcome is not to be bought,' said James. 'I could not stand hearing him reply to poor granny's heartfelt rapture with his riches and his Cheveleigh, as if that were all she could prize.'

Steps were mounting the stairs, and the alert, sharp tones of Oliver were heard—'Married then? Should have waited—done it in style.'

James and Isabel glanced at each other in amused indignation; and Mrs. Frost entered, tremulous with joy, and her bright hazel eyes lustrous with tears, as she leant on the arm of her recovered son. He was a little, spare, shrivelled man, drolly like his nephew, but with all the youthfulness dried out of him, the freckles multiplied by scores, and the keen black eyes sunken, sharpened, and surrounded with innumerable shrewd puckers. The movements were even more brisk, as if time were money; and in speech, the small change of particles was omitted, and every word seemed bitten off short at the end; the whole man, in gesture, manner, and voice, an almost grotesque caricature of all James's peculiarities.

'Mrs. Roland Dynevor, I presume? said Oliver, as Isabel came forward to meet him.

'Never so known hitherto,' returned her husband. 'My wife is Mrs. James Frost, if you please.'

'That is over now,' said Oliver, consequentially; and as his mother presented to him 'poor Henry's little Clara,' he kissed her affectionately, saying, 'Well-grown young lady, upon my word! Like her father—that's right.'

'Here is almost another grandchild,' said Mrs. Frost—'Louis Fitzjocelyn—not much like the Fitzjocelyn you remember, but a new M.P. as he was then.'

'Humph!' said Oliver, with a dry sound, apparently expressing, 'So that is what our Parliament is made of. Father well?' he asked.

'Quite well, thank you, sir.'

Oliver levelled his keen eyes on him, as though noting down observations, while he was burning for tidings of Mary, yet held back by reserve and sense of the uncongeniality of the man. His aunt, however, in the midst of her own joy, marked his restless eye, and put the question, whether Mary Ponsonby had arrived?

'Ha! you let her go, did you?' said Oliver, turning on Louis. 'I told her father you'd be no such fool. He was in a proper rage at your letter, but it would have blown over if you had stuck by her, and he is worth enough to set you all on your legs.'

Louis could not bring himself to make any answer, and his mother interrupted by a question as to Dona Rosita.

'Like all the rest. Eyes and feet, that's all. Foolish business! But what possessed Ormersfield to make such a blunder? I never saw Ponsonby in such a tantrum, and his are no trifles.'

'It was all the fault of your clerk, Robson,' said James; 'he would not refute the story.'

'Sharp fellow, Robson,' chuckled Oliver; 'couldn't refute it. No; as he told me, he knew the way Ponsonby had gone on ever since his wife went home, and of late he had sent him to Guayaquil, about the Equatorial Navigation—so he had seen nothing;—and, says he to me, he had no notion of bringing out poor Miss Ponsonby—did not know whether her father would thank him; and yet the best of it is, that he pacifies Ponsonby with talking of difficulty of dealing with preconceived notions. Knows how to get hold of him. Marriage would never have been if he had been there, but it was the less damage. Mary would have had more reason to have turned about, if she had not found him married.'

'But, Oliver,' said his mother, 'I thought this Robson was an honest man, in whom you had entire confidence!'

'Ha! ha! D'ye think I'd put that in any man? No, no; he knows how far to go with me. I've plenty of checks on him. Can't get business done but by a wide-awake chap like that.'

'Is Madison under him?' asked Louis, feeling as if he had been apprenticing the boy to a chief of banditti.

'The lad you sent out? Ay. Left him up at the mines. Sharp fellow, but too raw for the office yet.'

'Too scrupulous!' said James, in an undertone, while his uncle was explaining to his mother that he could not have come away without leaving Robson to manage his affairs, and Mr. Ponsonby, and telling exultingly some stories of the favourite clerk's sharp practice.

The party went down together in a not very congenial state.

Next to Mrs. Frost's unalloyed gladness, the most pleasant spectacle was old Jane, who volunteered her services in helping to wait, that she might have the delight of hovering about Master Oliver, to whom she attended exclusively, and would not let Charlotte so much as offer him the potatoes. And Charlotte was in rather an excited state at the presence of a Peruvian production, and the flutter of expecting a letter which would make her repent of the smiles and blushes she had expended over an elaborate Valentine, admired as an original production, and valued the more, alas! because poor Marianne had received none. Charlotte was just beginning to repent of her ungenerous triumph, and agitation made her waiting less deft and pretty than usual; but this mattered the less, since to Oliver any attendance by women-servants was a shock, as were the small table and plain fare; and he looked round uneasily.

'Here is an old friend, Oliver,' said his mother, taking up a curious old soup-ladle.

'I see. It will take some time to get up the stock of plate. I shall give an order as I pass through London. To be engraved with the Dynevor crest as before, or would you prefer the lozenge, ma'am?'

'Oh, my dear, don't talk of it now! I am only sorry this is nothing but mutton-broth; but that's what comes of sudden arrivals, Oliver.'

'It shall be remedied at home,' said Oliver, as if he considered mutton-broth as one degree from famine.

'I know you had it for me,' said Louis. 'If Jane excels in one art before all others, it is in mutton-broth.'

Oliver darted a glance as if he imagined this compliment to be mere derision of his mother and Jane.

Things went on in this style all the evening. Oliver had two ideas—Cheveleigh, and the Equatorial Steam Navigation Company—and on these he rang the changes.

There was something striking in his devotion of a lifetime to redeem his mother's fortunes, but the grandeur was not easily visible in the detail. He came down on Dynevor Terrace as a consequential, moneyed man, contemptuous of the poverty which he might have alleviated, and obtruding tardy and oppressive patronage. He rubbed against the new generation in too many places for charity or gratitude to be easy. He was utterly at variance with taste, and openly broached unworthy sentiments and opinions, and his kindness and his displeasure were equally irksome. If such repugnance to him were felt even by Louis, the least personally affected, and the best able to sympathize with his aunt; it was far stronger in James, abhorring patronage, sensible that, happen what might, his present perfect felicity must be disturbed, and devoid of any sentiment for Cheveleigh that could make the restoration compensate for the obligation so unpleasantly enforced; and Isabel's fastidious taste made her willing to hold aloof as far as might be without vexing the old lady.

There was no amalgamation. Fitzjocelyn and Isabel were near the window, talking over her former home and her sisters, and all the particulars of the society which she had left, and he had entered; highly interesting to themselves and to the listening Clara, but to the uninitiated sounding rather like 'taste, Shakspeare, and the musical glasses.'

Oliver and his mother, sitting close together, were living in an old world; asking and answering many a melancholy question on friends, dead or lost sight of, and yet these last they always made sure that they should find when they went home to Cheveleigh—that home to which the son reverted with unbroken allegiance; while the whole was interspersed with accounts of his plans, and explanations of his vast designs for the renovation of the old place.

James hovered on the outskirts of both parties, too little at ease to attach himself to either; fretted by his wife's interest in a world to which he was a stranger, impatient of his uncle's plans, and trebly angered by observing the shrewd curious glances which the old man cast from time to time towards the pair by the window. Fortunately, Mrs. Frost was still too absolutely wrapt in maternal transport to mark the clouds that were gathering over her peace. To look at her son, wait on him, and hear his voice, so fully satisfied her, that as yet it made little difference what that voice said, and it never entered her mind to suppose that all her dear ones were not sharing her bliss.

'You were the first to tell me,' she said, as she bade Louis good night with fondness additional to her messenger of good news; but, as he pressed her dear old trembling hand, his heart misgave him whether her joy might not be turned to pain; and when he congratulated Jane, and heard her call it a blessed day, he longed to be certain that it would prove so.

And, before he could sleep that night, he wrote a letter to Tom Madison, warning him to let no temptation nor bad example lead him aside from strict justice and fair dealing; and advising him rather to come home, and give up all prospects of rising, than not preserve his integrity.

James and Isabel were not merciful to their uncle when they could speak of him without restraint; and began to conjecture his intentions with regard to them.

'You don't wish to become an appendage to Cheveleigh?' said James, fondly.

'I! who never knew happiness till I came here!'

'I do not know what my uncle may propose,' said James, 'but I know you coincide in my determination that he shall never interfere with the duties of my office.'

'You do not imagine that he wishes it?'

'I know he wishes I were not in Holy Orders. I knew he disliked it at the time of my ordination; but if he wished me to act according to his views, he should have given himself the right to dictate.'

'By not neglecting you all your youth.'

'Not that I regret or resent what concerns myself; but it was his leaving me a burden on my grandmother that drove me to become a clergyman, and a consistent one I will be, not an idle heir-apparent to this estate, receiving it as his gift, not my own birthright.'

'An idle clergyman! Never! never!' cried Isabel. 'I should not believe it was you! And the school—you could not leave it just as your plans are working, and the boys improving?'

'Certainly not; it would be fatal to abandon it to that stick, Powell. Ah! Isabel,' as he looked at her beautiful countenance, 'how I pity the man who has not a high-minded wife! Suppose you came begging and imploring me not to give any umbrage to the man, because you so doted upon diamonds.'

'The less merit when one has learnt that they are very cold hard stones,' said Isabel, smiling.

Isabel was a high-minded wife, but she would have been a still better one if her loving admiration had allowed her to soften James, or to question whether pride and rancour did not lurk unperceived in the midst of the really high and sound motives that prompted him.

While their grandmother could only see Oliver on the best side, James and Isabel could only see him on the worst, and lost the greatness of the design in the mercenary habits that exclusive perseverance in it had produced. It had been a false greatness, but they could not grant the elevation of mind that had originally conceived it.

The following day was Sunday, and nothing worse took place than little skirmishes, in which the uncle and nephew's retort and rejoinder were so drolly similar, that Clara found herself thinking of Miss Faithfull's two sandy cats over a mouse; but she kept her simile to herself, finding that Isabel regarded the faintest, gentlest comparison of the two gentlemen almost as an affront. All actual debate was staved off by Mrs. Frost's entreaty that business discussion should be deferred. 'Humph!' said Oliver, 'you reign here, ma'am, but that's not the way we get on at Lima.'

'I dare say,' said James.

Mrs. Frost's joy was still undimmed. It was almost a trance of gladness, trembling in her smile, and overflowing in her eye, at every congratulation and squeeze of the hand from her friends.

'Dear Jemmy,' said she, taking his arm as they went home in the evening, 'did not that psalm seem meant for us?—'If riches increase, set not your heart upon them.''

James had been thinking it meant for some one; but, as he said, 'certainly not for you, dear granny.'

'Ah! snares of wealth were set far enough from me for a time! I never felt so covetous as when there was a report that there was to be an opposition school. But now your dear uncle is bringing prosperity back, I must take care not to set my heart even on what he has gained for me.'

'I defy riches to hurt you,' said James, smiling.

'Ah! Jemmy, you didn't know me as a county grandee,' she said, with a bright sad look, 'when your poor grandpapa used to dress me up. I'm an old woman now, past vanities, but I never could sit as loose to them as your own dear wife does. I never tried. Well, it will be changed enough; but I shall be glad to see poor old Cheveleigh. It does me good to hear poor Oliver call it home. If only we had your dear father!'

'To me Dynevor Terrace is home,' said James.

'A happy home it has been,' said the old lady.

''Goodness and mercy have followed me all the days of my life!' And now, Oliver, whom I never thought to see again—oh! what can I do to be thankful enough! I knew what he was doing! I knew he was not what you all thought him! And roughing it has been no harm to you or Clara, and it is all over now! And the dear old place comes back to the old name. Oh, James, I can sometimes hardly contain myself—that my poor boy has done it, and all for me, and his brother's children!'

James could scarcely find it in his heart to say a single word to damp her joy, and all his resolution enabled him to do was to say gently, 'You know, dear granny, we must not forget that I am a clergyman.'

'I know. I have been telling your uncle so; but we can do something. You might take the curacy, and do a great deal of good. There used to be wild places sadly neglected in my time. I hope that, since it has been given back to us, we may feel it more as a stewardship than I did when it was mine.'

James sighed, and looked softened and thoughtful.

'Your uncle means to purchase an annuity for Jane,' she added; 'and if we could only think what to do for the Faithfulls! I wonder whether they would come and stay with us. At least they can never vex themselves again at not paying rent!'

After a pause—'Jem, my dear, could you manage to give your uncle the true account of your marriage? He admires Isabel very much, I can tell you, and is pleased at the connexion. But I fancy, though he will not say so, that Mr. Ponsonby has desired him to find out all he can about Louis; and unluckily they have persuaded themselves that poor Louis courted Isabel, supposing that she was to have Beauchastel, and, finding his error, betook himself to Mary.'

'Turning Isabel over to me! Extremely flattering.'

'Now, Jem, don't be angry. It is only foolish talk! But unluckily I can't persuade your uncle not to think the real story all my partiality; and you might do much more, if it be not too unpleasant to you.'

'Thank you, granny, it is out of the question. If it were as he does us the honour to imagine, I should be the last person to confess it. My evidence could be of no service to Fitzjocelyn, when my uncle's maxim is to place confidence in no one. The sole refutation in my power is the terms on which we meet.'

'Now, I have vexed you. I wish I had said nothing about it; but when dear Louis's happiness may depend on his report—'

'If I were base enough to have acted as he supposes, I should be base enough to deny it. There is not enough to be hoped to make me speak with unreserve on such a subject.'

He saved himself from saying—to such a man; but the shrewd, suspicious old bachelor was not an inviting confidant for the vicissitudes of delicate and tender feelings of such recent date, and Mrs. Frost reproached herself with asking too much of her proud, sensitive grandson.

The black gown and trencher cap by no means gratified Oliver, when James set off to school on Monday morning; but he consoled himself with observing, 'We shall soon put an end to that.'

'James is quite devoted to the school,' said Isabel, and she was answered by the dry growl.

'It will be a hard thing to transplant our young people,' said Mrs. Frost, 'they have managed to be very happy here.'

'So hard of transplantation that I doubt the possibility,' said Isabel. 'You have made us take very deep root here.'

'Have you ever seen Cheveleigh, Mrs. Dynevor?'

'Never.'

'Poor Oliver! you and I think no place equal to our birthplace,' said Mrs. Frost.

'I should think Mrs. Roland Dynevor would find it compensation. How many beds did we make up, mother, the year my father was sheriff?'

'You must go to Jane for that,' said his mother, laughing. 'I'm sure I never knew.'

'I believe it was twenty-seven,' said Oliver, gravely. 'I know there were one hundred and eighty-five persons at the ball, and that the room was hung with blue brocade, mother; and you opened the ball with Lord Francis. I remember you had violet satin and white blonde.'

'My dear, how can you remember such things! You were a little bit of a schoolboy!'

'I was sixteen' said Oliver. 'It was the year '13. I will have the drawing-room hung with blue brocade, and I think Mrs. Roland Dynevor will own that nothing can exceed it.'

'Very likely,' said Isabel, indifferently; and she escaped, beckoning with her Clara, who was rather entertained with the reminiscences over which granny and Uncle Oliver seemed ready to linger for ever; and yet she was rather ashamed of her own amusement and interest, when she heard her sister-in-law say, 'If he did but know how weary I am of that hateful thing, a great house!'

'I hope Cheveleigh is not grander than Ormersfield,' said Clara, in an odd sort of voice.

The ladies, for the first time, did not sit together this morning. Clara practised, and Isabel took the Chapel in the Valley out of her desk, and began a process of turning the Sir Roland into Sir Hubert.

Oliver and his mother were in the sitting-room, and, on James's return from school in the middle of the day, he was summoned thither. Mrs. Frost was sitting by the fire, rather tearful and nervous, and her son stood full in the front, as dignified and magnanimous as size and features would permit, and the same demeanour was instantly and unconsciously assumed by his nephew, who was beyond measure chafed by the attempt at a grand coup.

'I have requested your presence,' began Oliver, 'as the eldest son of my elder brother, and thus, after my mother, the head of our family. You are aware that when unfortunate circumstances involved my mother's property, it was my determination to restore the inheritance to her, and to my dear brother Henry. For this object, I have worked for the last thirty-four years, and a fortunate accident having brought our family estate into the market, I have been enabled to secure it. I am now ready to make it over to my mother, with entail to yourself and your heirs, as representatives of my brother Henry, and settling five thousand pounds on your sister, as the portion to which the younger children of our family have always been entitled. If you are willing to reside at our family seat with my mother, I will assure you of a suitable allowance during her lifetime, and—'

Nothing was more intolerable to a man like James than a shower of obligations; and his spirit, angered at the very length of the address, caught at the first opening for avoiding gratitude, and beheld in the last proposal an absolute bribe to make him sacrifice his sacred ministry, and he burst forth, 'Sir, I am much obliged to you, but no offers shall induce me to forsake the duties of my calling.'

'You mistake, if you think I want anything unclerical. No occasion to hunt—Mr. Tresham used in my day—no one thought the worse of him—unlucky your taking Orders.'

'There is no use in entering on that point,' said James. 'No other course was left open to me, and my profession cannot be taken up nor laid down as a matter of convenience.'

'Young men are taught to think more seriously than they were in our day,' said Mrs. Frost. 'I told you that you must not try to make him turn squire.'

'Well! well! good living may be had perhaps. Move to Cheveleigh, and look out for it at leisure, if nothing else will content him. But we'll have this drudgery given up. I'll not go home and show my nephew, heir of the Dynevors, keeping a third-rate grammar-school,' said Oliver, with his one remaining Eton quality of contempt for provincial schools.

The Northwold scholar and master were both roused to arms in James.

'Sir,' he said, 'you should have thought of that when you left this heir of the Dynevors to be educated by the charity of this third-rate grammar-school.'

'Is this your gratitude, sir!' passionately exclaimed Oliver; 'I, who have toiled my whole life for your benefit, might look for another return.'

'It was not for me,' said James. 'It was for family pride. Had it been from the affection that claims gratitude, you would not have left your mother in her old age, to labour unaided for the support of your brother's orphans. For ourselves, I thank you; the habits nurtured by poverty are the best education; but I cannot let you suppose that a grand theatrical restoration can atone to me for thirty years' neglect of my grandmother, or that my gratitude can be extorted by benefactions at the expense of her past suffering.'

'Jem! dear Jem! what are you saying!' cried Mrs. Frost. 'Don't you know how kindly your uncle meant? Don't you know how happy we have been?'

'You may forgive. You are his mother, and you were injured, but I can never forget what I have seen you undergo.'

'You foolish boy, to forget all our happiness—'

'Nor,' proceeded James, 'can I consent to forego the career of usefulness that has been opened to me.'

'But, Jem, you could be so useful in the parish! and your uncle could not wish you to do anything unhandsome by the trustees—'

'I wish him to do nothing, ma'am,' said Oliver. 'If he is too high and mighty to accept a favour, it is his own loss. We can do without him, if he prefers the Fitzjocelyn patronage. Much good may it do him!'

James deigned no answer, looked at his watch, and found it time to return to the school.

Oliver broke out into angry exclamations, and his mother did her utmost to soothe him. He had no turn for being a country-gentleman, he was fit for nothing but his counting-house, and he intended to return thither as soon as he had installed his mother at Cheveleigh; and so entirely did all his plans hinge upon his nephew, that even now he was persuaded to hold out his forgiveness, on condition that James would apologize, resign the school, and call himself Dynevor.

Mrs. Frost hoped that Isabel would prevail on her husband to listen favourably; but Isabel gloried in his impracticability, and would have regarded any attempt at mediation as an unworthy effort to turn him aside from the path of duty. She replied, that she would never say a word to change his notions of right, and she treated poor Oliver with all the lofty reserve that she had formerly practised upon possible suitors.

When Fitzjocelyn came in the afternoon to take leave, before his return to London, Mrs. Frost begged him to use his influence with James. 'Who would have thought it would have so turned out?' she said. 'My poor Oliver! to be so met after all his generous plans! and yet Jem does want to do right!'

Unfortunately, Louis felt that, to own Oliver's generosity, it was necessary to be out of sight of him; and finding that there was silence and constraint in the drawing-room, he asked Isabel to walk with him to meet James.

'One breathes freely!' said she, as they left the house. 'Was there ever a more intolerable man?'

'Never was a man who made a more unlucky error in judgment.'

'And that is all you call it?'

'The spurious object warped the mind aside,' said Louis. 'The grand idea was too exclusive, and now he suffers for the exclusiveness. It is melancholy to see the cinder of a burnt-offering to Mammon, especially when the offering was meant for better things.'

In this strain he chose to talk, without coming to particulars, till, near the corner of the old square, they met the shouting throng of boys, and presently James himself, descending the steps of the grim old grey building.

'I thought you would forgive me for coming to meet you under such an escort,' said Isabel, 'especially as it was to escape from our Peruvian relative.'

'Poor man! it was a great pity he did not come last year!' said Louis.

'I am glad I have no temptation to bend to his will,' returned James.

'Ha! I like the true core of the quarrel to display itself.'

'Fitzjocelyn, you do not mean that you do not fully approve of the course I have taken!'

'Extremely magnanimous, but not quite unprecedented. Witness St. Ronan's Well, where the younger Scrogie abjures the name of Mowbray.'

'Pshaw! Louis, can't you understand? Frost is a glorious name to me, recording my grandmother's noble exertions on our behalf, but I can imagine it to be hateful to him, recalling the neglect that made her slaving necessary.'

'For which amiable reason you insist on obtruding it. Pray, are the houses henceforth to be Frost Terrace or Arctic Row?'

'Are you come to laugh or to remonstrate?' exclaimed James, stopping.

'Oh! you want to put on your armour! Certainly, I should never tell if I were come to remonstrate, nor should I venture in such a case—'

'Then you are come to approve,' said Isabel. I knew it!'

'Little you two care—each of you sure of an admiring double.'

'I care for your opinion as much as ever I did,' said James.

'Exactly so,' said Louis, laughing.

'I desire to have your judgment in this matter.'

'If I could judge, I would,' said Louis. 'I see you right in principle, but are you right in spirit? I own my heart bleeds for Aunt Kitty, regaining her son to battle with her grandson.'

'I am very sorry for her,' said James; 'but it can't be helped. I cannot resign my duties here for the sake of living dependent on a suitable allowance.'

'Ah! Jem! Jem! Oliver little knew the damage his neglect did you.'

'What damage?'

'The fostering an ugly little imp of independence.'

'Aye! you grandees have naturally a distaste for independence, and make common cause against it.'

'Especially when in a rabid state. Take care, Jem. Independence never was a Christian duty yet—'

'Then, you want me to go and live on the hoards for the sake of which my grandmother was left to toil. You would like to see me loitering about, pensioned to swell the vanity of Cheveleigh, neglecting my vows, forsaking my duties—'

'You unreasonable man! Is there no way in this whole world for you to do your duty as a clergyman, but hearing Northwold boys the Latin grammar?'

'Then, what do you want me to do?'

'I don't want you to do anything. You are the man to know what is right; only, Isabel, don't help him to hate people more than can possibly be avoided; and don't break dear Aunt Kitty's heart amongst you. That's what I care most about!'

When Louis bade his aunt farewell, he threw his arm round her neck, looked fondly at her, and said, 'Dear aunt, you won't let them tease you?'

'No, my dear, I am getting past being teased,' she said. 'Vexations don't hurt me as much as love does me good, and they'll not forget their affection. It is all goodness in Jem, and poor Oliver will understand it when I have got him into our home ways again; but he has been so long away from home, poor fellow!'

'That's right. I won't be uneasy for you. Squabble as they will, they won't hurt you. But, oh! Dynevor Terrace without you!'

'Ah! you must come to me at home!'

'Home! I'm like Jem, jealous for this old house.'

'It is odd how little I feel these things,' said his aunt. 'If any one had told me, when I tore myself away from Cheveleigh, that I should have it back, how little I should have thought that I could take it so easily! I wonder at myself when I wake in the morning that I am not more moved by it, nor by leaving this dear old place. I suppose it is because I have not long to stay anywhere. I can keep nothing in my head, but that I have got my Oliver!'

'I believe it is the peace that is not of this world!' said Louis.

CHAPTER VII.

ROLAND AND OLIVER

'Twas old ancestral pride,
'Twas hope to raise a fallen house
From penury's disgrace,
To purchase back from usurers
The birthright of his race.
The Lump of Gold—C. MACKAY.

Mary's letter arrived not long after Louis's return to London; and her calm, serious, beautifully-expressed farewell came upon him at last like a blow which had been long impending, but of which preparation had failed to lessen the weight.

'Ah!' said the Earl, when the chief part had been read to him, 'she is admirable and excellent as ever. It is a great disappointment that she is unattainable, but I am glad she writes so sensibly, and sees that it is right you should think no more about her. After all, the connexion with that fellow Ponsonby might have been very troublesome, and it is well, as she says, that it was all over while you are so young.'

'Young or old, there is no other Mary in the world,' said Louis, sadly.

'We will say no more about it now. I understand you, but you will think differently by-and-by.'

Louis did not answer. He knew that others might have been deceived by the tardiness and uncertainty of his attachment, but that it had taken such deep root, that he believed he could no more detach himself from Mary than if she were his wife. His heart fainted as he thought of years without the strength and soothing which her very letter breathed forth; as he pictured to himself alternations between his chill and stately home and the weary maze of London, foresaw persuasions from his father to induce him to form some new attachment, and dreaded to think of the facility with which, perhaps, he might still be led out of his own convictions. Yet he still believed that patience and perseverance would win the day, and tried to derive encouragement and energy from the thought that this might be a trial sent for the very purpose of training him in steadfastness.

A strong impulse drew him to Bryanston Square, where Miss Ponsonby was very kind and warm, the more so because she had discovered how much easier it had been to say than to unsay, and strongly regretted the injustice she had done him. He had the satisfaction of talking for a good hour about Mary, and of sending a message, that he did not write because he wished to be guided by her in everything, and that he was striving to work so as to please her. The conversation ended with some good auguries as to the effect of Oliver's return to Peru; and Louis went away cheered, bearing the final dismissal better than his father had expected. Lord Ormersfield attributed his tranquillity to having his mind settled; and so it was, though not quite as his lordship imagined.

Meantime, there was a lull at Dynevor Terrace. Oliver was gone to take possession and furnish the mansion, and Mrs. Frost's great object was to keep the subject from irritating her grandson, so as to save him from binding himself by any rash vows. Cheveleigh was treated in the domestic circle with judicious silence, Oliver's letters were read by his mother in private, and their contents communicated to Jane alone, whose happiness was surpassing, and her contempt for Dynevor Terrace quite provoking to poor Mrs. Martha.

'Really,' said Charlotte one day, 'I don't think a catastrophe is half so pretty as it ought to be. Mr. Oliver is but a poor little puny man, and I never knew Mr. James so hard to please.'

Charlotte and Marianne had begun to merge their rivalry in honest friendship, cemented by Marianne's increasing weakness, and difficulty in getting through even the light work her mistress required. Jane petted her now still more than Charlotte, and was always promising her the delightful air and the luxuries of Cheveleigh.

'See here, Charlotte,' said Marianne, one afternoon when they sat down together to their sewing; Marianne's eyes were brighter, and her cheeks pinker, than for many days—'See here; it is for your good I show it you, that you mayn't build on no false expectations. It was marked private; but I think it but fair you should see.'

'Mine was marked private too,' said Charlotte, slowly, as she fixed her eyes on the envelope Marianne held out to her, and putting her hand into her pocket, pulled out a similar one, directed to Miss Arnold.

Marianne scarcely suppressed a shriek, gasped, and turned pale. Each lady then proceeded to unfold a pink sheet of note-paper, containing an original copy of verses, each labelled, 'On a hair of ——.' Then came a scented shining note, requesting to be informed whether the right construction had been put on some words that had dropped from the Miss Conways, and if it were true that the reverend and respected Mr. F. Dynevor had come into a large fortune. In that case, Mr. Delaford, mercenary considerations apart, would take the earliest opportunity of resigning his present position, and entering the family which contained his charmer.

The Merry Wives were parodied by the hysterical maids. Charlotte might afford to laugh, but Marianne's heart was more in the matter, and they struck up such a chorus that Jane broke upon them, declaring that they would frighten Mrs. James Frost out of her senses. When Charlotte told her what was the matter, her comment was, 'And a very good thing, too, that you should find him out in time! A pair of silly girls you! I always was thankful I never could write, to be deluded with nonsense by the post; and I am more so than ever now! Come, leave off crying, Marianne; he ain't worth it.'

'But how shall we answer him, Mrs. Beckett?' said Charlotte.

'Never demean yourself to answer him,' said Jane; 'let him never hear nought about you—that's the best for the like of him. I can tell him he need not be in no hurry about giving warning to Lady Conway. At Cheveleigh we'll have a solemn, steady butler, with no nonsense, nor verses, nor guitars—forty years old—and a married man.'

Charlotte took the advice, and acted with dignified contempt and silence, relieved to imagine that Tom had never been in danger from such a rival. Marianne did not divulge the tender and melancholy letter of reproach that she posted privately; but she grew paler, and coughed more, all that bright summer.

Mrs. Frost had refused to let any cause remove her from Northwold, until after an event which it was hoped would render James less disdainful of his inheritance. But—'Was there ever anything more contrary?' exclaimed Jane, as she prepared to set out the table for a grand tea. 'There's Master James as pleased and proud of that there little brown girl, as if she was as fine a boy as Master Henry himself. I do believe, upon my word, it is all to spite poor dear Master Oliver.'

Poor Jane, she was almost growing tart in her partizanship of Oliver.

The little brown girl was no dove of peace. Her father decidedly triumphed in the mortification that her sex was to others of the family; and though he averred that the birth of a son would not have made him change his mind, he was well satisfied to be spared the attack which would have ensued. Oliver, like Jane, appeared to regard the poor child as a wilful offence, and revenged himself by a letter announcing that Clara would be his heiress, information which Mrs. Frost kindly withheld from her granddaughter, in the hope of a reconciliation.

Lord Ormersfield took James in hand, undertaking to make him hear common sense; but the sense was unfortunately too common, and the authoritative manner was irritating, above all when a stately warning was given that no Church-preferment was to be expected from his influence; whereupon James considered himself insulted, and they parted very stiff and grand, the Earl afterwards pronouncing that nothing was so wrongheaded as a conscientious man. But they were too much accustomed to be on respectfully quarrelsome terms to alter their regard for one retort more or less; and after all, there were very few men whom Lord Ormersfield liked or esteemed half so much as the fearless and uncompromising James Frost—James Frost—as he curtly signed himself, in spite of all Louis's wit on Rolands and Olivers—and yet those soft satirical speeches did more than all direct attacks to shake his confidence in his own magnanimity; more especially because Fitzjocelyn always declared himself incompetent to judge, and never failed to uphold that he was so far right, that his ministry must stand above all worldly considerations.

The breach had become so wide, that Oliver would not have accepted the terms he had formerly offered. His object seemed to be to pique his nephew and niece, by showing them what they had lost. He wrote the most magnificent descriptions of Cheveleigh, and insisted that his mother and Clara should come and take possession on the eightieth birthday of the former, the 14th of September; and Isabel was recovering so rapidly, that there was nothing to oppose to his project, although the new Catharine would be scarcely three weeks old by that time.

Thereupon came down, addressed to Clara, a case of Peruvian jewels, newly set in London—intended doubtless to excite great jealousy in her sister-in-law. Poor Oliver! could he but have known that Isabel only glanced at them to tell Clara the names of the ornaments, and to relieve her mind by assurances that the whole of a set need not be worn at once! Next arrived an exceedingly smart French milliner, who, by the help of Jane and Marianne, got Clara into her toils, and pinned and measured her for a whole mortal morning; and even grandmamma ordered a black velvet gown and accompaniments.

Lastly, there descended on Clara's devoted head a cheque for a sum which terrified her imagination, and orders to equip herself suitably as Miss Dynevor of Cheveleigh, who was to enjoy the same allowance half-yearly. Her first idea was what delightful presents could be made to every one; but as she was devising showers of gifts for her niece, James cut her short,—'I am sorry to give you pain, Clara, but it must be understood that neither directly nor indirectly can I nor mine receive anything bought with my uncle's money.'

'That was the only thing to make me not hate it.'

'It is best you should hate it.'

'I do! Why did he come home to bother us? Oh, Jem, can't I still live here, and only visit there?'

'No, Clara. The care of granny is your first duty; and during her life, so long as you are single, her home must be yours.'

The edict was given in stern self-abnegation; but James was very kind to her, treating her as a victim, and spending his leisure in walking about with her, that she might take leave of every favourite haunt. He was indulgent enough even to make no objection to going with her to Ormersfield, where she wandered about the park, visited old scenes with Louis, and went over all his improvements. His cottages had as yet the sole fault of looking too new, and one of his tenants would not shut up his pigs; but otherwise all was going on well, and Inglewood was in the excitement of Louis's first harvest. He walked about with ears of wheat in his hand, talked knowingly of loads and acres, and had almost taught his father to watch the barometer. It added to Clara's regrets that she should miss the harvest-supper, for which he and Mr. Holdsworth had wonderful designs; but it was not to take place until Fitzjocelyn's return from Cheveleigh. Oliver had invited him and his father to conduct Mrs. Frost thither, and add eclat to her reception; and this, as Clara said, 'was the only comfort in the business.'

James had effectually destroyed all pleasure on her part, and had made the change appear an unmitigated misfortune, even though she did not know what she would have thought the worst. Congratulations were dreadful to her, and it was all that Isabel could do to persuade her to repress her dislike so as not to distress her grandmother.

To Mrs. Frost it was pain to leave what she owned, with thankful tears, to have been a happy, peaceful refuge for her widowhood and poverty; she grieved over each parting, clung to the Faithfulls, reiterated fond counsels to Isabel, and could hardly bear to detach herself from the great-grandchild. But still it was her own son, and her own home, and Oliver and Cheveleigh were more to her than even James and Dynevor Terrace; so that, though she was sorry, it was not with a melancholy sorrow, and she could still hope against hope, that uncle and nephew might be brought together at last, and that a son of James would yet reign in the dear old place.

Besides, she had not time to be unhappy. She was fully employed nursing Isabel, doing honour to the little one, answering Oliver's letters, superintending Clara's wardrobe; choosing parting gifts for innumerable friends, high and low; and making arrangements for the inexperienced household.

Jane's place was to be—not exactly supplied, but occupied by a cook. Miss Dynevor was to have 'a personal attendant;' and Mrs. Beckett begged that Marianne might be chosen, since she could not bear to see the poor thing sent away, when in so much need of care. The diamonds, the French millinery, and Jane's motherly care, came in strong contrast to the miserable lodging, or the consumptive hospital, which poor Marianne had begun to anticipate; and weeping with gratitude, she declared that she had never seen nor thought of such kindness since her mother died.

Isabel seldom roused herself to understand anything about her servants; but she liked Marianne, and was glad Clara should have her, since she was not strong enough to undertake nursery cares. She believed it had not agreed with her to sit up late. Compunction for having been the cause had never dawned on Isabel's mind.

Charlotte was to remain at Dynevor Terrace; James and Isabel wished to keep her, and Mrs. Beckett thought her sufficiently indoctrinated with her ways to have some chance of going on well. 'Besides,' as Jane said, 'I can't be accountable for taking her into that large family, until I see what company there may be. She's a well-behaved girl enough, but she's too pretty and too simple-like for me to have her among the common run of servants. I'll see what I can do for her, when I see what sort of a housekeeper it is.'

And Jane gave Charlotte infinite injunctions, varying from due care of the 'chaney images' to reserve with mankind. 'Because you see, Charlotte' she said, 'you'll be terribly forsaken. Mrs. James, poor dear!—she would not know if the furniture weren't rubbed once in ten years; but you must make it a pride to yourself to be faithful.'

'I am faithful!' cried Charlotte. 'I never cared for that traitor, Delaford, and his guitar; but I could not get rid of him. And I'll tell you what—I'll seal up his fine red book, and all his verses; and you shall leave them in London as you go through, with my compliments. I think that will be proper and scornful.'

'Hoity-toity! That's what she's at! The best thing you can do too, Charlotte; and I'm glad that you've too much spirit to pine like poor Marianne. I'd take my affidavit that if the crowner could sit upon her when she dies—and die she will—that there fine gentleman and his guitar will be found at the bottom of her chest. But don't go off about that now—though 'tis the reason I won't part from the poor thing till I can help—the better luck for you that you'd got more in your head than vanities and furbelows. What I meant was not being faithful to him out in Peru—that's your own affair, but the being faithful to your duty to your mistress, whether she's after you or not. You know what a good servant is, and you've got to show it ain't all eye-service.'

Charlotte cried heartily. No one else was allowed that privilege when the 13th came, excepting Mrs. Frost herself. James, afraid that a scene would hurt his wife, severely forbade Clara to give way; and the poor girl, mute and white, did as she was told, and ventured not a word of farewell, though her embraces were convulsive, and when she went down stairs she could not help kissing Charlotte.

James handed his grandmother to her seat in the carriage which was to take her to the station.

'Good-bye, my dear,' she said; 'I know the day will come when all this will be made up. You know how I have loved you both.'

'I wish my uncle all good.'

'I see it now,' she said, holding his hand between both of hers. 'It is my fault. I fostered our family pride. May God take away the sin from us both!'

The words were hardly articulate through tears, and perhaps James did not hear. He hurried Clara down the garden and into the carriage, and she had her last nod from Miss Faithfull at the open window. Miss Mercy was at the station, whither school-hours had hindered James from accompanying them, but where they found Lord Ormersfield and Louis.

The warm-hearted little woman was all tears and smiles. 'Oh! dear Mrs. Frost, I am so sorry, and yet it is selfish. I am so happy! but where shall we find such another neighbour?'

'Come and see us. You know you are to persuade your sister.'

'Ah!' She shook her head. 'Salome is hard to move. But you—you are such a traveller—you will come to see Mr. James?'

'I'm eighty to-morrow: I little expect to make any more journeys except one, Mercy. I never look to see poor Northwold more; but it has been a place of blessings to me, and you have been one of them. Don't think I'm too glad to go away, but I cannot but be thankful that my dear boy is bringing me home to lay me down where my father and his father lie.'

It was said with that peculiar cheerfulness with which happy old age can contemplate the end of the pilgrimage, and she looked at Louis with a sunny smile.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE RESTORATION.

When silent time, wi' lightly foot,
Had trod on thirty years,
I sought again my native land
Wi' mony hopes and fears.
As I drew near my ancient pile,
My heart beat a' the way;
The place I passed seemed yet to speak
Of some dear former day.
Some pensy chiels, a new-sprung race,
Wad next their welcome pay;
* * * * *
But sair on ilka well-kenned face
I missed the youthful bloom.
Miss Blamire

Oliver had sent orders to his mother to sleep in London, and proceed the next morning by a train which would arrive at about two o'clock.

On that eventful morning, Clara was the prey of Mrs. Beckett, Marianne, and the French milliner, and in such a flounced glace silk, such a lace mantle, and such a flowery bonnet was she arrayed, that Lord Ormersfield bowed to her as a stranger, and Louis talked of the transformations of the Giraffe. 'Is it not humiliating,' she said, 'to be so altered by finery? You might dress Isabel for ever, and her nobleness would surmount it all.'

'If you are not the rose, at least you have lived near the rose,' said Louis. 'You don't fall quite short of the character of Miss Dynevor.'

'I wish I were going to school,' said Clara, as they passed along familiar streets; 'then, at least, some one would pity me.'

After two hours spent on the railroad, the train entered a district with the bleakness, but not the beauty, of the neighbourhood of mountains; the fresh September breeze was laden with smoke, and stations stood thick upon the line. As the train dashed up to one of these, a flag was seen waving, and the shout of 'Cheveleigh, Cheveleigh road!' greeted them.

On the platform stood a tall footman, in the most crimson of coats, powdered hair, and a stupendous crimson and white shoulder-knot, auch as Clara had only seen going to St. James's. She would never have imagined that she had any concern with such splendour; but her grandmother asked him if the carriage were there, as a mere matter of course, and Jane devolved on him all luggage cares, as coolly as if she had been ruling over him all his life.

As they issued from the station, a thin, uncertain, boyish cheer rang out, and before them stood a handsome open carriage and four chestnut horses, with crimson postillions, and huge crimson-and-white satin rosettes.

'Wont they all turn to rats and pumpkins?' whispered Clara to Louis.

'Bless the poor boy!' cried Mrs. Frost, between laughing and crying, 'what has he been about? Does he think I am the Sheriff's lady still?'

The party entered the carriage, and the crowd of little boys and girls, flymen and porters, got up another 'hurrah!' as the four horses went thundering off, with Mrs. Frost apologizing—'Poor Oliver's notions were on such a grand scale!—He had been so long absent, that he did not know how much these things had been disused.' But no one could look at her bright tearful eyes, and quivering mouth, without seeing that she exulted in her son's affection and his victory; and after all it was natural to her, and a resumption of old habits.

They drove through two miles of brown flat heath, with far-away mountain outlines, which she greeted as dear friends. Here and there the engine-house of a mine rose up among shabby buildings, and by-and-by was seen a square church-tower, with lofty pinnacles, among which floated forth a flag. The old lady caught hold convulsively of Clara's hand—'The old church!—My old church!—See, Clara, that is where your dear grandfather lies!—My last home!'

With brimming eyes Mrs. Frost gazed on it as it came forth more distinctly, and Clara looked with a sense of awe; but rending her away from grave thoughts, shouts burst upon her ears, and above them the pealing crash of all the bells, as they dashed under a splendid triumphal arch, all evergreens and dahlias, forming the word 'Welcome!' and were met by a party on horseback waving their hats, while a great hurrah burst out from the numbers who lined the street. Mrs. Frost bowed her thanks and waved her hand. 'But oh!' she said, almost sobbing, 'where am I? This is not Cheveleigh.'

Lord Ormersfield showed her a few old houses that they both recognised, looking antiquated in the midst of a modern growth of narrow, conceited new tenements. The shouting crowd had, to Fitzjocelyn's eyes, more the aspect of a rabble than of a genuine rejoicing peasantry. What men there were looked beer-attracted rather than reputable, and the main body were whooping boys, women, nurse-girls, and babies. The suspicion crossed him that it was a new generation, without memories of forty years since, wondering rather than welcoming, in spite of arches, bells, and shouts.

After another half-mile, a gate swung wide beneath another arch, all over C. D., the F. studiously omitted; and the carriage wheeled in amid a shower of tight little nosegays from a squadron of school-children. They drove up the long approach, through fir plantations, which drew from Mrs. Frost a cry of friendly recognition—for her husband had planted them; but they had not taken kindly to the soil, and fifty years had produced but a starveling growth. Beyond lay an expanse of parched brown turf, here and there an enclosure of unprosperous trees, and full in front stood the wide space of stuccoed wall, with a great Gothic window full in the midst, and battlements in the castellated style of the early years of the nineteenth century.

No one spoke. After the first glance, Mrs. Frost shut her eyes to restrain the hot tears that arose at the thought of the wintry morning, when ice-drops hung hoary on the fir-trees, as she had driven away from the portal, whence music was now pealing forth a greeting, and where Oliver was standing on the very spot where, with clenched hand, he had vowed that all should be restored.

Alas! how much was in his power to restore?

Gaily-dressed people surrounded the entrance, and, amid triumphant strains from the band, the carriage stopped, and Oliver held out his hand, saying, 'Welcome home, mother!'

She leant forward, kissed his brow, and suffered him to lead her up the steps to the hall-door, Lord Ormersfield conducting Clara. At the door Mrs. Frost paused, to turn, curtsey, and sign her thanks to the throng who had followed. Her noble aspect and demeanour, so full of dignity and feeling, obtained a fresh and more genuine acclamation; but throughout there was a strange sense of unreality; she seemed like one performing a part to gratify her son. Clara asked her cousin if it were not like acting a play; and it was plain to him that the spectators beheld it with more curiosity than sympathy.

They were a new race. Property had changed hands rapidly in a region of trade and manufacture, and the old Dynevor name had been forgotten past recall, amid the very population who were thriving upon the identical speculations which had swamped Mr. Frost's fortune. If the crowd without looked like a mob, the assembly within had a parvenu appearance; and as Oliver handed his mother across the hall, he muttered something, as if he were disappointed both in the number and consequence of his guests.

He led her into a magnificent apartment, all gilding, blue brocade, and mirrors, as far as might be after the model of the days of the Shrievalty; but the bare splendour could ill recall the grace and elegance that had then reigned there without effort. Peru had not taught Oliver taste either of the eye or of the mind, and his indefatigable introductions—'My mother, Mrs. Dynevor, my niece, Miss Dynevor, Lord Ormersfield, Lord Fitzjocelyn,' came so repeatedly as quite to jingle in their ears.

Sir Andrew Britton, a burly cotton lord, with a wife in all the colours of the rainbow, seemed to be the grand guest. His lady seated herself beside Mrs. Frost, and began to tell her, with a tone of patronage, how good a neighbourhood it was, and how much pleasure she should have in introducing Miss Dynevor.

In vain did Mrs. Frost look for a face she knew, and inquire from her new acquaintance after familiar old names of places and people. The places were either become factories, or some charming new family lived there; and for the people, it seemed as if she might as well ask for antediluvians; Lady Britton had seldom heard their names, or if any trace survived, they had never been on her visiting list.

At last Oliver came up to her, saying, 'Here, ma'am, Mr. Henderson claims an early acquaintance with you.'

'Mr. Henderson!' and she eagerly started up, but looked baffled.

'Little George Henderson,' said the grey-headed gentleman—for once a real gentleman—'I assure you I have not forgotten the happy days I have spent here.'

'Little George!' as she took him by both hands—'who would have thought it! You were little George with the apple cheeks. And are no more of you here?'

He shook his head sadly. 'They would have been even more glad than I am to welcome you home; they were older, and knew you better.'

'Ah! I must learn to ask no questions. And yet, that dear sister Fanny of yours—'

'Gone many years since, ma'am. She died in India. I hope my daughter Fanny may put you a little mind of her.'

'Is she not here?'

'Why, no. I wished to bring her, but she is but fifteen, and mamma will not trust her out without herself. We are quiet people, and the world is growing too gay for us.'

'Clara and I must come to find you out. Can you believe this tall creature is poor dear Henry's daughter?' as Clara hastened to greet her father's playfellow, with an alacrity which piqued Lady Britton into a supercilious aside to Lord Fitzjocelyn that the Hendersons were in poor circumstances, and no one visited them.

'And is no one here whom I know? Not one of the old set, George?' asked the old lady, mournfully.

'I fear there is hardly any one,' said Mr. Henderson. 'All seem even to me new people. Stay, do you recollect old Mrs. Golding?'

After a little confusion, Mr. Henderson's old Mrs. Golding proved to be Mrs. Frost's young Mrs. Golding; and, on the eager inquiry whether she were present, ensued the melancholy answer that she was deaf and infirm, only just able to smile with pleasure at the tidings of her old friend's restoration; and the daughter, whom she could only just believe to be grown up, was a worn, elderly woman. Not even the one heartfelt greeting was without sadness; and Clara likewise met with one solitary satisfaction, and that a very mixed one. Mr. Danvers, the young curate, whom Oliver had not thought worth presenting, was hailed by Fitzjocelyn as if their slight Oxford acquaintance had been an intimacy, and was by him introduced to Clara as belonging to James's college. She frankly held out her hand, but was discomfited by his inquiry for her brother, whom he had hoped to meet. Louis said something about not expecting the schoolmaster abroad in the half-year, and Clara was not at all grateful to him for relieving her from the embarrassment, but regarded the reply as a shabby prevarication, and was much inclined to speak out; but Louis was drawing the curate into conversation about the population, and hearing but a desponding history. It was interrupted when Oliver, after waiting in vain for more distinguished company, began to marshal his guests to the grand hall, paved with black and white marble, and with a vast extent of wall and window, decked with evergreens, flags, and mottoes. Here a cold collation was prepared, with a band in a music-gallery above, and all the et ceteras dear to county papers. Oliver himself handed in Lady Britton, his mother fell to the lot of the Earl, and Fitzjocelyn received orders to conduct a handsome, young, giggling Mrs. Smithers, who, never having been in contact with a live Lord, wanted to make the most of him, and, before she had arrived at her place, was declaring that it was a most interesting occasion, just like a scene at the Opera.

Louis glanced back to see what became of Clara, and, finding her following with Sir Andrew Britton, contrived to sit immediately opposite to her, at the long, narrow table, with nothing between them but a couple of cold chickens and a tongue garnished with transfixed crayfish. His eyes were, perhaps, a greater support to her than even conversation, for she gathered a little philosophy and charity from their cheering smile and arch twinkling, and she managed to listen civilly to her neighbour, while she saw that her cousin was being very polite to Mrs. Smithers. She was a great way from all other friends, for the table had been spread for a more numerous assembly, and the company sat in little clusters, with dreary gaps between, where moulds of jelly quaked in vain, and lobster-salads wasted their sweetness on the desert air. Her uncle could just be seen in the far perspective at the head of the table, and, between him and the Earl, Louis descried his Aunt Catharine, looking bright, with a little embellishing flush on her withered cheek.

Sir Andrew was not a lady's man; and, after he had heard how far Miss Dynevor had come to-day, that she had never ridden, and had not seen the Menai tubular bridge, he discontinued the difficult task; and she, finding that he had not even seen the cathedral, which she had passed only fifteen miles off, gave him up, and occupied herself with watching the infinite variety of affectations which Mrs. Smithers was playing off, and the grave diversion with which Louis received them. The lady was evidently trying to discover what had been the intermediate history of Mrs. and Miss Dynevor; and Louis was taking pleasure in baffling her, with cool, quiet answers, especially when she came to the question whether Miss Dynevor had not a brother, and why he was not present. It appeared that Oliver had made almost as if his mother had been buried and dug up again; involving the thirty-four years of her exile in such utter mystery, that people had begun to make all sorts of wild stories to account for her proceedings; and Lord Fitzjocelyn's explanation that she had lived in her own house in Northwold, and taught him the Latin grammar, seemed quite a disappointment from the simplicity and want of romance.

The weary banquet had arrived at ices, and Clara hoped the end was near, when the worse trial of speeches began. Mr. Henderson was declaring how strongly he felt the honour which had been devolved on him, of expressing the universal joy in having so excellent and much-beloved a neighbour restored by the noble exertions of her son. He said all that the rest of the world ought to have felt, and so heartily and sincerely as to make every one imagine the whole the general sentiment, and the welcoming hurrah was cordial and joyous. Mrs. Frost was deeply touched and gratified, and Lord Ormersfield congratulated himself on having instigated Oliver to give this toast to Mr. Henderson. If Clara could have driven James from her mind, she would have been delighted, but there could be no triumph for her where he was excluded.

The Earl returned thanks on behalf of his aunt, and said a great deal that could have come from the mouth of no one 'unaccustomed to public speaking,' ending by proposing the health of 'Mr. Oliver Frost Dynevor.' In the midst of 'the fine old English gentleman,' while Louis was suppressing a smile at the incongruity, a note was brought to him, which he tossed to Clara, purporting that he was to return thanks for her. She bent over the table to say, 'You will say nothing I cannot bear to hear,' folded her hands, and shut her eyes, as if she had been going to stand fire.

Oliver's clear, harsh tones, incapable of slowness or solemnity, began to return thanks for himself, and pronounce this to be the happy day to which he had been looking throughout his life—the day of restoring the family inheritance to his mother, and the child of his elder brother; he faltered—he never could calmly speak of Henry. Failing the presence of one so dear, he rejoiced, however, to be able to introduce to them his only daughter, and he begged that his friends would drink the health of the heiress of Cheveleigh, Miss Dynevor.

Never did toast apparently conduce so little to the health of the subject. Unprepared as Clara was for such a declaration, it was to her as if she had been publicly denounced as the supplanter of her brother. She became deadly white, and sat bolt upright, stiff and motionless, barely stifling a scream, and her eyes fixed between command and entreaty on her cousin without seeing, far less acknowledging, the bows levelled at her. Louis, alarmed by her looks, saw that no time was to be lost; and rising hastily before any one was ready, perilled his fame for eloquence by rapidly assuring the gentlemen and ladies that Miss Dynevor was truly sensible of the kindness of their welcome, and their manner of receiving the toast. Then pushing back his chair, with 'never mind,' to Mrs. Smithers and her scent-bottle, he was at the back of Clara's chair almost before her confused eyes had missed him in her gasps for breath, and impulse to do something desperate; and so she might, if his voice had not been in her ear, his hand grasping hers, both to console and raise her. 'Clara, come, take care.' She obeyed, but trembling so much that he was obliged to support her. Others would have risen in alarm, but he silenced them by signs, and entreaties that no one would frighten her grandmother. There was a large glass door standing open under the Gothic window, and through it he led her out upon a wide green lawn. She drew her breath in sobs, but could not speak. Louis asked her to untie her bonnet, and touched the string, which was merely a streamer. This brought a kind of laugh, but she unfastened the bonnet herself, and the first use she made of her breath was fiercely to exclaim—'How could you! Why did you not tell them I never will—'

'Sit down,' said Louis, gently. 'Let me fetch some water.'

'No—no—let me get away from this place!' and she almost dragged him along, as fresh cheers and peals of music broke out, till they had entered a lonely walk in a sort of wilderness of shrubs. Still she hurried on, till they came out on a quiet little garden, where the tinkling of a little fountain was the only sound; the water looked clear and fresh with the gold-fish darting in it, and the sun shone calmly on the bright flowers and wavy ferns adorning the rockwork.

'What are you doing, Clara? You must rest here,' said he, drawing her down on a rustic bench, intended to represent a crocodile.

'I can't rest here! I must go home! I'm going home to Jem!' she exclaimed, obeying, however, because, though she could run, she could not stand.

'Dear Clara,' he said, affectionately, 'it was much worse than I expected. I never believed he could have committed himself to such an open declaration, especially without warning.'

'I'll not stay!' cried Clara, with all the vehemence of her Dynevor nature. 'I'll go straight home to Northwold to-morrow morning—to-night if I could. Yes, I will! I never came here for this!'

'And what is to become of my poor Aunt Kitty?'

'She has her Oliver! She would not have me put Jem out of his birthright.'

'James will not be put into it.'

She wrenched away her hand, and looked at him with all her brother's fierceness. 'And you!' she cried, 'why could not you speak up like a man, and tell them that I thank none of them, and will have nothing to say to any of them; and that if this is to belong to any one, it must be to my noble, my glorious, generous brother; and, if he hasn't it, it may go to the Queen, for what I care! I'll never have one stone of it. Why could you not say so, instead of all that humbug'!'

'I thought the family had afforded quite spectacles enough for one day,' said Louis; 'and besides, I had some pity upon your grandmother, and on your uncle too.'

'Jem told me grandmamma claimed my first duty; but he never knew of this wicked plan.'

'Yes, he did.'

'Knew that I was to supplant him!'

'Yes; we all knew it was a threat of your uncle; but we spared you the knowledge, thinking that all might yet be accommodated, and never expecting it would come on you in this sudden way.'

'Then I think I have been unfairly used,' cried Clara; 'I have been brought here on false pretences. As if I would have come near the place if I had known it!'

'A very false pretence that your grandmother must not be left alone at eighty, by the child whom she brought up.'

'Oh, Louis! you want to tear me to pieces!'

'I have pity on my aunt; I have far more pity on your uncle.' Clara stared at him. 'Here is a man who started with a grand heroic purpose to redeem the estate, not for himself, but for her and his brother; he exiles himself, he perseveres, till this one pursuit, for which he denies himself home, kindred, wife or child, absorbs and withers him up. He returns to find his brother dead; and the children, for whom he sacrificed all, set against him, and rejecting his favours.'

This was quite a new point of view to Clara. 'It is his own fault,' she said.

'That a misfortune is by our own fault is no comfort,' said Louis. 'His apparent neglect, after all, arose from his absorption in the one object.'

'Yes; but how shameful to wish James to forget his Ordination.'

'A strong way of putting it. He asked too much: but he would have been, and may yet be, contented with concessions involving nothing wrong. His way of life can hardly have taught him to appreciate James's scruples, as we do; and even if right and wrong were more neatly partitioned between them than I think they are, it would still be hard on him to find this destined heir spurning his benefits.'

'What are you coming to, Louis! You think James right?

'I would give the world to think so, Clara. One motive is too high for praise, the other—No, I will say nothing of it. But I could wish I had not precipitated matters last year.'

'What, would you have robbed us of our few happy months?'

'It was your uncle whom I robbed; he would otherwise have come home like a good genius; but he found you all happy without him, and with no gratitude to spare for him. And there he sits at the head of that long melancholy table, trying to bring back days that have gone too far ever to be recalled, and only raising their spectres in this mocking finery; scarcely one man present, whose welcome comes from his heart; his mother past the days of heeding the display, except for his sake; his nephew rejecting him; you indignant and miserable. Oh, Clara! I never saw more plainly money given for that which is not bread, and labour for that which satisfieth not. Empty and hollow as the pageant was, I could better bear to take my part in it, so far as truth would let me, than tell that poor man that the last of his brother's children rejects him and his benefits.'

'At this rate, you will make a hero of Uncle Oliver.'

'It is because he is one of this world's heroes that he is distasteful to you.'

'I don't understand.'

'Exclusive devotion to one object, grand though it was, has made him the man he appears to us. Think what the spirit must have been that conceived and carried out such a design! Depend upon it there is a greatness in him, which may show, when, as dear granny says, she has cured him of all he learnt away from home. I think that must be the work for which you are all brought together here.'

'But I can't thrust out Jem. I won't stay here on those terms. I shall protest—'

'It is not graceful to make an uproar about your own magnanimity, nor to talk of what is to happen after a man's death. You don't come here to be heiress, but to take care of your grandmother. There is no need to disturb the future, unless, to be sure, you were obliged to explain your expectations.'

'Ah! to be sure, any way I could restore it all to James.'

'Or, better still, you may yet be able to draw the uncle and nephew together, and bring back peace and union.'

'Then I must stay and bear all this, you think?'

'As a mere matter of obedience, certainly.'

Clara's countenance fell.

'That may deprive it of the brilliance of a voluntary sacrifice; but, after all, it is what makes your course safe and plain.'

'And very dismal, just because no one will believe so.'

'So the safer for humility,' said Louis. 'Perhaps the dear old Terrace did not offer training and trial enough. I try to believe something of the kind in my own case. If choice had been mine, I should hardly have been exactly what I am; and you know how my chief happiness has been put far from me; but I can imagine that to be at the summit of my wishes might foster my sluggishness, and that I might rest too much on better judgment than my own, if it were beside me. Probation maybe safer than joy; and you may do more good to yourself and others than even under Isabel's wing. Only think of the means in your hands, and all the wretched population round! There will be some hope of help for the curate now—besides, I shall know where to come for subscriptions next time I run crazy about any wonderful charity.'

Clara smiled. 'I suppose I must bear it,' she said.

'For shame, Clara! With Aunt Kitty, who would make a palace of a dungeon, in the glorious glow of such a sunset, turning each cloud to red and purple radiance by the very force of love and faith, who could regret the being beside her? My own dear and precious aunt, to see her so happy, with bliss and peace so undisturbed, so far above these toys, and these distresses, gives me a sort of fear—'

'Oh, don't, Louis—'

They were interrupted by approaching voices. Clara hastily started up, as her uncle and Lady Britton appeared in the green alley.

'Oh, must I go back to them all! My head does ache!'

Louis gave her his arm, pursued the path in the opposite direction, and emerged at the lower end of the bowling-green, with the battlemented front of the house rising before them. Presently, he met his father searching for him. 'Poor Clara has been overcome,' he said, in explanation. 'The speechifying has been too much for her.'

It was the first time that Clara had appeared to the Earl in any light but that of an idle school-girl, and he said, kindly, 'It must have been very trying. There should have been more preparation. Your uncle would have shown better taste in sparing your grandmamma so obtrusive a reception, and I was much pained both for her and for you during some of the speeches.'

Sympathy from Lord Ormersfield nearly overthrew Clara again, and she involuntarily squeezed Louis's arm. He asked for his aunt, and was told, 'She is in the house, entertaining these people. They do not know when to go away. How could Oliver inflict such a party on her and such a style of people!'

'I must go and help her,' said Louis.

Clara was in no condition to appear, but Louis caused Mrs. Beckett to be summoned, and committed her to her care. Her transport was one of the few pleasant things of that day. 'Oh, Miss Clara! Oh, my Lord! Was there ever the like? Isn't Master Oliver the most blessed boy? Missus in her own home again! Eight men, and a French man-cook! If ever I thought to see the day! Her old room just as it was, only grander! Oh, if poor Mr. James was but here!'

'Ay, Jane, and here's Clara thinking herself ill about Mr. James. Take her up and give her some tea, and make her fit to behave prettily by-and-by, that granny may not be vexed.'

Having seen her safe under Jane's fondling care and infectious exultation, he betook himself to the drawing-room, relieved his aunt's anxiety by a whisper, and won golden opinions from the whole company, before they were fairly got rid of; and Oliver begged to conduct his mother to her apartment. 'Yes, my dear, I must go to poor little Clara.'

'I've no fears for Clara,' said Oliver, as he led her upstairs. 'Knowing young fellow to wait for my announcement! I can give her near double what Ponsonby could. I'd not object—old Dynevor blood—'

'My poor Oliver, you have so learnt to think of money, that you can't believe others live for anything else. You'll learn your mistake.'

'You think the young chap meant nothing? I shall look sharp after him, then. I look on Clara as my own. I'll have no trifling.'

'You may save yourself the trouble,' said his mother. 'They understand each other—they have always been like brother and sister, and I cannot have the children teased, or things put into their heads.'

Oliver laughed his scornful chuckle, and said he did not understand that sort of brother and sister, but happily he became absorbed in showing his mother the fittings of her splendid bedroom.

Clara had the comfort of clinging round her grandmother's neck, and being told that it was all nonsense. Jem should have his rights, and Uncle Oliver would learn to love and honour him at last; and she was a good child, and ought to have been prepared, if granny could have guessed he would do it so publicly and suddenly, but she must forgive him, for he was beside himself at having got them home again, and he could not make enough of her because she was poor Henry's child. So she saw granny must not be grieved, and she let herself be dressed for a constrained dinner in the vast dining-room, where the servants outnumbered the diners, and the silver covers bore the Dynevor dragon as a handle, looking as spiteful as some of the race could do.

Oliver was obliged to conclude that no offer had passed between the two young people; but on the way home next morning the Earl observed, 'Clara Frost has a fine figure, and is much improved by dress. She shows excellent feeling, and does credit to her education.'

'The Pendragon blood never had a finer development,' said Louis.

'Even supposing justice done to poor James, she will have a handsome portion. Oliver will have far more to dispose of than the five thousand pounds guaranteed to her.'

'Poor child!' said Louis.

'Yes, I pity her for being exposed to his parading. He forgot the gentleman in his merchant's office. If you should ever have any thoughts of rescuing her from him, my approval would not be wanting, and it would be the easiest way of restoring her brother.'

'My dear father, if Clara and I were always sister and brother when she was poor, we certainly shall be no more now.'

Lord Ormersfield mentally execrated Mr. Ponsonby, and felt that he had spoken too soon.

Jane's felicity was complete when, a few days after, she received, addressed in Lord Fitzjocelyn's handwriting, an Illustrated News, with a whole page containing 'the reception of Mrs. Dynevor of Cheveleigh,' with grand portraits of all the flounces and veils, many gratuitous moustaches, something passing for Oliver standing up with a wine-glass in his hand, a puppy that would have perfectly justified Mr. Ponsonby's aversion representing Lord Fitzjocelyn, and no gaps at the banquet-table.

That picture Mrs. Beckett caused to be framed and glazed, kept it as her treasure for life, and put it into her will as a legacy to Charlotte Arnold.

CHAPTER IX.

THE GIANT OF THE WESTERN STAR.

Come, let us range the subterranean vast,
Dark catacombs of ages, twilight dells,
And footmarks of the centuries long past,
Which look on us from their sepulchral cells.

Then glad emerge we to the cheering day,
Some sun-ranged height, or Alpine snowy crown,
Or Chimborazo towering far away
O'er the great Andes chain, and, looking down,
On flaming Cordilleras, mountain thrown
O'er mountain, vast new realms.
The Creation—REV. I. WILLIAMS.

The same impression of the Illustrated London News which delighted Jane Beckett's simple heart in England, caused no small sensation at Lima.

Dona Rosita cast one glance at El Visconde there portrayed, and then became absorbed in Clara's bonnet; Mr. Robson pronounced Lord Ormersfield as good a likeness as Mr. Dynevor, Mr. Ponsonby cast a scornful look and smile at the unlucky figure representing Fitzjocelyn; and not a critical voice was heard, excepting Tom Madison's, who indignantly declared that they had made the young Lord look as if he had stood behind a counter all his life.

The juxtaposition of Lord Fitzjocelyn and Mr. Dynevor's niece, was not by any means forgotten. It looked very like a graceful conclusion to Oliver's exertions that he should crown their union, and the county paper, which had likewise been forwarded, very nearly hinted as much. Mr. Ponsonby took care that the paragraph should be laid in his daughter's way, and he offered her the sight of Oliver Dynevor's own letter.

Mary suspected that he regarded it as something conclusive, and took care to read it when there were no eyes to mark her emotions. 'Ormersfield and his son were there,' wrote Oliver. 'The young man is not so soft as he looks. They tell me he is going to work sensibly at the estate, and he has a sharp eye for the main chance. I hear he played fast and loose till he found your daughter had better prospects than Miss Conway, whom my fool of a nephew chose to marry, and now he is making up to my niece. My mother dotes on him, and I shall make no objection—no extravagance that I can see, and he will take care of the property. You will take no offence, since you refuse the tender altogether.'

Of this Mary believed two sentences—namely, that Aunt Catharine doted on Fitzjocelyn, and that he was not so soft as he looked, which she took as an admission that he was not comporting himself foolishly. She was quite aware that the friendship between him and Clara might deceive an uninitiated spectator; and, though she commanded herself to think that an attachment between them would be equally natural and desirable, she could not but look with great satisfaction at the easy unsuspicious tone of Mrs. Frost's letter, which, after mentioning with much affection and gratitude all Oliver's attempts to make her happy, in spite of the many sad changes around, ended by saying that poor Clara felt the separation from her brother so much, that without dear Louis she did not know how she would have gone through the festivities. 'You can guess how he is everything to us all,' said Aunt Kitty, 'and I brightened up his looks with giving him your last letter to read. I dare say, Miss Mary, you would like to scold me.'

Aunt Kitty! Aunt Kitty! you dearly loved a little kindly mischief! Let that be as it might, Mr. Ponsonby thought that Mr. Dynevor's letter had certainly not had much effect, for Mary was more lively and cheerful than he had seen her since her first arrival. Mary's cheerfulness was becoming the more necessary to him, since he was beginning a little to weary of the childish charms of his young Limenian wife. Rosita had neither education nor conversation; and when all her pretty ways had been tried on him in succession, they began to grow tedious. Moreover, the playful submission which she had brought from her convent was beginning to turn into wilfulness. Her extravagances in dress were appalling. She refused to wear the same dresses twice, and cried, stamped her graceful foot, and pouted when he remonstrated. She managed to spend every evening in amusement, either at the Opera, or at evening parties, where her splendid eyes, and scraps of broken English, made great havoc among young lieutenants and midshipmen visiting Lima. Mr. Ponsonby was growing tired of these constant gaieties, and generally remained at home, sending Mary in his stead, as a sort of guard over her; and Mary, always the same in her white muslin, followed Rosita through all the salas of Lima—listened to the confidences of Limenian beauties—talked of England to little naval cadets, more homesick than they would have chosen to avow—and felt sure of some pleasure and interest for the evening, when Mr. Ward came to stand by her chair.

One afternoon, as Mary sat in her window reading, a gay voice exclaimed, 'Beso las manos a Usted;' and looking up, she saw one of the prettiest figures imaginable. A full dark purple satin skirt just revealed the point of a dainty white satin shoe. It was plaited low on the hips, and girded loosely with a brightly striped scarf. The head and upper part of the person were shrouded in a close hood of elastic black silk webbing, fastened behind at the waist, and held over the face by the hand, which just allowed one be-ringed finger and one glancing dark eye to appear, while the other hand held a fan and a laced pocket-handkerchief. So perfectly did the costume suit the air and shape of the lady, that, as she stood among Mary's orange trees, it was like an illusion, of the fancy, but consternation took away all the charm from Mary's eyes. 'Tapada, she cried; 'you surely are not going out, tapada?'

'Ah, you have found me out,' cried Rosita. 'Yes, indeed I am! and I have the like saya y manto ready for you. Come, we will be on the Alameda; Xavier waits to attend us. Your Senor Ouard will be at his evening walk.'

But Mary drew back. This pretty disguise was a freak, such as only the most gay ladies permitted themselves; and she had little doubt that her father would be extremely displeased at his wife and daughter so appearing, although danger there was none; since, though any one might accost a female thus veiled, not the slightest impertinence was ever allowed. Mary implored Bosita to wait till Mr. Ponsonby's views should be known; but she was only laughed at for her English precision, and the pretty creature danced away to her stolen pleasure.

She came in, all glory and delight at the perplexity in which she had involved the English officers, the guesses and courtesies of her own countrymen, and her mystification of Mr. Robson, who had evidently recognised her, though pretending to treat her as a charming stranger.

The triumph was of short duration. For the first time, she had aroused one of Mr. Ponsonby's gusts of passion; she quailed under it, wept bitterly, and made innumerable promises, and then she put on her black mantilla, and, with Xavier behind her, went to her convent chapel, and returned, half crying over the amount of repetitions of her rosary by which her penance was to be performed, and thereby all sense of the fault put away. Responsibility and reflection never seemed to be impressed on that childish mind.

Mary had come in for some of the anger, for not having prevented Rosita's expedition; but they were both speedily forgiven, and Mary never was informed again of her using the saya y manto.

Their minds were diverted by the eager desire of one of the young officers to visit the silver mines. It had been an old promise to Mary from her father to take her to see them; but in her former residence in Peru, it had never been fulfilled. He now wished to inspect matters himself, in order to answer the numerous questions sent by Oliver; and Rosita, eagerly catching at any proposal which promised a variety, a party was made up for ascending to the San Benito mines, some days' journey from Lima. Mary and Rosita were the only ladies; but there were several gentlemen, three naval officers, and Mr. Ward, who was delighted to have an opportunity of visiting the wonders which had been, for many years, within his reach without his rousing himself from his business to see them. Tents, bedding, and provisions were to be carried with them, and Mary had full occupation in stimulating Dolores to bring together the requisite preparations; while Mr. Ward and Robson collected guides, muleteers, and litters.

It was a merry party, seated on the gaily-trapped mules, with an idle young midshipman to make mischief, and all in spirits to enjoy his nonsense, in the exhilaration of the mountain air blowing freshly from the snowy summits which seemed to rise like walls before them. The steaming, misty, relaxing atmosphere of Lima was left behind, and with it many a care and vexation. Mr. Ponsonby brought his mule to the side of his wife's litter, and exchanged many a joke in Anglo-Spanish with her and the lieutenant; and Mr. Ward, his brow unfurrowed from counting-house cares, walked beside Mary's mule, gathered each new flower for her, and listened to her narrative of some of the causes for which she was glad, with her own eyes, to see Tom Madison in his scene of action.

The first day of adventure they slept at a hacienda, surrounded with fields where numerous llamas were pasturing. The next began the real mountain work; the rock looked like a wall before them, and the white summits were sharply defined against the blue sky. The sharper air made Rosita shiver; but the English travellers congratulated themselves on something like a breeze, consoling them for the glow with which the sunbeams beat upon the rocks. The palms and huge ferns had given place to pines, and these were growing more scanty. Once or twice they met a brown Indian, robed in a coloured blanket, with a huge straw hat, from beneath which he gazed with curious, though gentle eyes, upon the cavalcade. By-and-by, looking like a string of ants descending a perpendicular wall, Mary beheld a row of black specks slowly moving. She was told that these were the mules bringing down the metal in panniers—the only means of communication, until, as the lieutenant promised, a perpendicular railroad should be invented. The electricity of the atmosphere made jokes easily pass current. The mountain was 'only' one of the spurs of the Andes, a mere infant among the giants; but, had it been set down in Europe, Mont Blanc must have hid his diminished head; and the view was better than on some of the more enormous neighbours, which were both further inland, and of such height, that to gaze from them was 'like looking from an air-balloon into vacancy.' Whereas here Mary had but to turn her head, as her mule steadily crept round the causeway—a legacy of the Incas—to behold the expanse of the Pacific, a sheet of glittering light in the sunshine, the horizon line raised so high, that the first moment it gave her a sense of there being something wrong with her eye, before the feeling of infinity rushed upon her.

They were turning the flank of the mountain, and losing the sunshine. The evening air was almost chill, and the clearness such that they already saw the ragged height whither they were bound rising in craggy shattered grandeur, every flat space or gentler declivity covered with sheds and huts for the work-people, and cavernous mouths opening on the cliff-side. Dark figures could be distinctly seen moving about; and as to the descending mules, they seemed to be close on the other side of a narrow ravine. Rosita, who, now it came to the point, was not without fears of sleeping on the bare mountain-side, wanted to push on; she was sure they could arrive before night, but she was told that she knew nothing of mountain atmosphere; and she was not discontented with the bright fire and comfortable arrangements on which they suddenly came, after turning round a great shoulder of rock. Mr. Robson and the sumpter-mules had quietly preceded them, and the gipsying on the Andes was likely to be not much less luxurious than an English pic-nic. The negro cook had done his best; Mary made her father's coffee, and Rosita was waited on to her satisfaction. And when darkness came on, too early for English associations with warm days, the lights of the village at the mine glittered merrily, and, apparently, close at hand; and the stars above shone as Mary had never seen them, so marvellously large and bright, and the Magellan clouds so white and mysterious. Mr. Ward came and told her some of the observations made on them by distinguished travellers; and after an earnest conversation, she sought her matted bed, with a pleasant feeling on her mind, as if she had been unusually near Louis's world.

Clear, sharp, and cold was the air next day; the snow-fields glistened gloriously in the rising sun, and a rose-coloured mist seemed to rise from them. Rosita was shown the unusual spectacle of hoar frost, and shiveringly profited by Mary's ample provision of wraps. The hill-sides were beyond conception desolate and bare. Birds were an almost unknown race in Peru; and here even green things had departed, scarcely a tuft of blossom looking out on the face of the red and purple rock; and the exceeding stillness so awful, that even the boy-sailor scarce dared to speak above his breath. Rosita began to repent of having come near so horrible a place; and when she put her head out of her litter, and beheld herself winding along a ledge projecting from the face of a sheer precipice, she would have begged to go back instantly; but her husband spoke in a voice of authority which subdued her; she drew in her head into her basket-work contrivance, and had recourse to vows to Sta Rosa of Lima of a chaplet of diamond roses, if she ever came safely down again.

Mary had made up her mind that they should not have been taken thither if there were any real danger; and so, though she could have preferred her mule taking the inner side of the ledge, and was not too happy when it climbed like a cat, she smiled, and answered all inquiries that she did not think she ought to be frightened. The region was in general more stern than beautiful, the clefts between the hills looking so deep, that it seemed as if an overthrown mountain could hardly fill them; but now and then came sudden peeps of that wonderful ocean; or almost under her feet, as if she could throw a stone into it, there would lie an intensely green valley, shut in with feathering pines, and the hacienda and grazing llamas dwindled, so that they could have been taken for a Swiss farm and flocks of sheep.

Not till the middle of the day did they meet the line of mules, and not until the sunset did they find themselves close before the wonderful perforated San Benito summit. It was, unlike many other metalliferous hills, an isolated, sharply-defined mass of rock, breaking into sudden pinnacles and points, traversed with veins of silver. These veins had been worked with galleries, which, even before the Spanish conquest, had honeycombed the solid rock, and had been thought to have exhausted its riches; but it had been part of Oliver Dynevor's bold speculations to bring modern science to profit by the leavings of the Peruvians and their destroyers. It was a marvellous work, but it might still be a question whether the profit would bear out the expense.

However, that was not the present consideration. No one could feel anything but admiring astonishment at the fantastic craggy height of peaks and spires, rising against the darkening sky, like the very stronghold of the Giant of the Western Star; and, with the black openings of the galleries, here and there showing the lights of the workmen within. Mary remembered the tales, in which Louis used vainly to try to interest her, of metal-working Dwarfs within the mountains; and would have been glad to tell him that, after all, reality was quite as strange as his legends.

The miners, Indians and negroes, might truly have been Trolls, as, with their brown and black countenances, and wild bright attire, they came thronging out of their rude houses, built of piled stones on every tolerably level spot. Three or four stout, hearty Cornish miners, with picks on their shoulders, made the contrast stranger; and among them stood a young man, whose ruddy open face carried Mary home to Ormersfield in one moment; and she could not but blush almost as if it had been Louis, when she bent her head in acknowledgment of his bow.

He started towards her as if to help her off her mule; but Mr. Ponsonby was detaining him by questions, and Mr. Ward, as usual, was at her rein. In a wonderfully brief time, as it seemed to her, all the animals were led off to their quarters; and Robson, coming up, explained that Madison's hut, the only habitable place, had been prepared for the ladies—the gentlemen must be content to sleep in their tent.

'The hut was at least clean,' said Robson, as he ushered them in; and Mary felt as if it were a great deal more. It was rudely built, and only the part near the hearth was lined with matting; the table and the few stools and chairs were rough carpentry, chiefly made out of boxes; but upon the wall hung a beautiful print from Raffaelle, of which she knew the giver as surely as if his name had been written on it; and the small bookcase suspended near contained, compressed together, an epitome of Louis's tastes—the choicest of all his favourites, in each class of book. Mary stood by it, reading the names, and trying to perceive Louis's principle of selection in each case. It jarred upon her when, as the gentlemen loitered about, waiting for the evening meal, they came and looked at the titles, with careless remarks that the superintendent was a youth of taste, and a laugh at the odd medley—Spenser, Shakspeare, 'Don Quixote,' Calderon, Fouque, and selections from Jeremy Taylor, &c.

Mary would hear no more comments. She went to the fire, and tried to persuade Rosita they would come safe down again; and then, on the apology for a mantelshelf, she saw some fossils and some dried grasses, looking almost as if Fitzjocelyn had put them there.

She did not see Madison that night; but the next morning he presented himself to act as their guide through the wonders of the extraordinary region where his lot had been cast. She found that this was only the first floor of the wondrous castle. Above and above, rose galleries, whence the ore was lowered down to the buildings here placed, where it underwent the first process of separation. The paths above were fit for none, save a chamois, or a barefooted Indian, or a sailor—for the midshipman was climbing aloft in such places, that Tom's chief work was to summon him back, in horror lest he should involve himself in endless galleries, excavated before the days of Atahualpa.

Much of the desperate scrambling which Madison recommended as plain-sailing, was beyond Mr. Ponsonby; but where he went, Mary went; and when he stopped, she, though she had not drawn since the master at her school had resigned her, as a hopeless case, applied herself to the perpetration of an outline of the rocks, that, as she said, 'her aunts might see what sort of place it was.' Her steady head, and firm, enterprizing hand and foot, enabled her to see the crowning wonder of the mountain, one of the ventanillas or windows. Mr. Ward, having visited it, came back bent on taking her thither; there was no danger, if she were not afraid. So, between him and Tom Madison, she was dragged up a steep path, and conducted into a gallery cut out in the living rock, growing gloomier and gloomier, till suddenly there was a spot of light on the sparkling floor, and Mary found herself beneath an opening through the mountain crown, right up into the sky, which, through the wild opening, looked of the deepest, most ultra-marine, almost purple blue, utterly beyond conception in the glory of intense colour, bringing only to her mind those most expressive, yet most inexpressive words, 'the body of heaven in His clearness.' She felt, what she had often heard said, that to all mountain tops is given somewhat of the glory that dwelt on Sinai. That ineffable blue was more dazzling than even the fields beyond fields of marvellous white that met her eye on emerging from the dark gallery.

'I never wish so much that Lord Fitzjocelyn should see anything as that,' said Tom Madison, when Mary, in her gratitude, was trying to say something adequate to the trouble she had given, though the beauty was beyond any word of admiration.

'He would—' she began to answer, but the rest died away, only answered by Tom with an emphatic 'He would!' and then began the difficulties of getting down.

But Mary had the pleasure at the next pause of hearing Mr. Ward say, 'That is a very fine intelligent young fellow, worthy of his library. I think your father has a prize in him!'

Mary's eyes thanked Mr. Ward, with all her heart in them. It was worth going up the Andes for such a sentence to put into a letter that Aunt Kitty would show to Louis.

Robson seemed anxious to monopolize the attention of the gentlemen, to the exclusion of Madison; and while Tom was thus thrust aside, Mary succeeded in having a conversation with him, such as she felt was a sort of duty to Louis. She asked him the names of the various mountain-peaks in sight, whose bare crags, too steep to support the snow, here and there stood out dark in salient contrast to the white scenery, and as he gave them to her, mentioning the few facts that he had been able to gather respecting them, she was able to ask him whether he was in the habit of seeing anything approaching to society. He smiled, saying that his nearest neighbours were many miles off—an engineer conducting some far more extensive mining operations, whom he sometimes met on business, and an old Spanish gentleman, who lived in a valley far down the mountain side, with whom he sometimes smoked his cigar on a Sunday, if he felt inclined for a perpendicular promenade on a Peruvian causeway for nearly four miles. Mary asked whether he often did feel inclined. No, he thought not often; he had generally worked hard enough in the week to make his book the best company; but he liked now and then to see something green for a change after these bare mountains and rocks, and the old Don Manrique was very civil and agreeable. Then, after a few minutes' conversation of this kind, something of the old conscious abruptness of tone seemed to come over the young man, and looking down, he said bluntly, 'Miss Ponsonby, do you think there would be any objection to my coming into Lima just for Christmas?'

'I suppose not; I cannot tell.'

Tom explained that all the miners would be making holiday, and the senior Cornishman might safely be left in charge of the works, while he only wished to spend Christmas-day itself in the city, and would be a very short time absent. He blushed a little as he spoke, and Mary ventured to reply to what she gathered of his thought, 'No other day would suit you as well?'

'No, ma'am, it hardly would,' he answered, gravely.

'I will try what can be done,' said Mary, 'unless you would speak to Mr. Ponsonby yourself.'

He looked inquiringly at Mr. Ponsonby's figure some paces distant, and shook his head.

'I will try,' repeated Mary; and then she added, 'These grand hill-tops and blue sky almost make a church—'

'Yes, ma'am,' said Tom, his black eyes lighting at the thought; 'I've felt so sometimes, but 'tis a mighty lonely one after a time. I've taken my book, and got out of earshot of the noise the blacks make; and I do assure you, Miss Ponsonby, the stillness was enough to drive one wild, with nothing but savage rocks to look at either! Not a green plant, nor a voice to answer, unless one got to the mountain echoes, and they are worse—'

'But surely you have the Cornishmen! What do they do on a Sunday?'

'They lie about, and smoke and sleep, or go down to the valley,' said Tom. 'I never thought of them.'

'I think you should,' said Mary, gravely. 'If you are in any authority over them, it must give you a charge over their souls. I think you should, at least, give them the choice of reading the service with you.'

'I'll think about it,' said Madison, gruffly.

'I will send up some books for them to make an opening,' said Mary. 'I should not like to think of men living in such scenes, without being the better for them.'

Robson was here obliged to call Madison to refer some question to him; but Mary had another talk with him, when he begged to know if there were likely soon to be an opportunity of sending to England. He had some fossils which he wished to send to Lord Fitzjocelyn; and he fetched them, and explained his theories with regard to them as if he had almost forgotten that she was not his young Lord. She carried his request to her father, and was answered that of course he might take a holiday if he could leave the works with safety; he had better spend a few days in the town when he did come. With this answer she made him happy; and they set off, to the extreme joy of Rosita, who had engrossed much less attention than she had expected, and declared she would never have come into these horrible places if she could have imagined what they were like. Certainly, no one wished to have her company there again.

When Mr. Ponsonby mentioned the permission which he had accorded to Madison, Robson coughed and looked annoyed. Mary could not help suspecting that this was because the request had not been preferred through himself. 'So the young fellow wants to be coming down, does he? I thought his ardour was too hot to last long.'

'Very natural that the poor lad should want a holiday,' said Mr. Ponsonby. 'It must take a tolerable flow of spirits to stand long, being so many feet above the level of the sea, in caves fit for a robber's den at the theatre.'

'Oh, I am making no objection, sir,' returned Robson; 'the young man may take his pleasure for what I care, so he can be trusted not to neglect his business.'

Here the path narrowed, and Mary had to fall back out of hearing; but she had an unpleasant suspicion that Robson was telling her father something to Tom's disadvantage, and she had to consider how to avoid rousing a jealousy, which she knew might be dangerous.

Mr. Ward, however, came up to interrupt her thoughts and watch the steps of her mule. The worst difficulties of the descent had precluded all conversation; and the party were just beginning to breathe freely, think of terra firma as not far off, and gaze with easier minds on the marvellous ocean. Mary went on in very comfortable discussion of the wonders they had seen, and of Madison's remark that the performances of the Incas made one quite ashamed of the achievements of modern science—a saying in which Mr. Ward perfectly agreed; and then he began to say something rather long, and a little disconnected, and Mary's mind took an excursion to Aunt Kitty, and the reading of the letter that she was going to write, when suddenly something in Mr. Ward's voice startled her, and recalling her attention, she discovered, to her dismay, that he was actually making her an offer! An offer! She would as soon have expected one from her father! And oh! how well expressed—how entirely what it ought to be! How unlike every one of those three of her past experience!

In great distress she exclaimed, 'Oh, Mr. Ward, pray do not—indeed, I cannot!'

'I feared that I was but too likely to meet with such an answer,' said Mr. Ward; 'and yet your father encouraged me to hope, that in course of time—'

'Then papa has told you what he thinks?' said Mary.

'I applied to him before I could venture to join this party. Mary, I am aware that I can bring none of the advantages which have'—his voice faltered—'which have forestalled me; but the most true and earnest affection is already yours.'

'I am very sorry for it, Mr. Ward,' said Mary, gravely, though much touched. 'It is very kind of you, but it is only fair and candid to tell you that papa has probably led you into a mistake. He thinks that the—the object was weak and unworthy, and that my feelings could be easily overcome. He does not know—'

'He assured me that all was at an end—'

'It is,' said Mary; 'but I am certain that I shall never feel for any one else the same as'—and the tears were coming last. 'You are very kind, Mr. Ward, but it is of no use to think that this can ever be.'

'Forgive me for having harassed you,' said Mr. Ward, and they went on so long in silence that Mary hoped it was over, and yet he did not go away from her. She was sorry to see the grieved, dejected expression on his good, sensible, though somewhat worn countenance; and she esteemed him highly; but who could have thought of so unlucky a fancy coming into his head? When, at length, he spoke again, it was to say that he begged that she would forget what was past, and allow him to continue on his former footing. Mary was glad to have something grateful to say, and answered that she should have been very sorry to lose him as a friend; whereupon his face cheered up, he thanked her, and fell back from her rein. In spite of her past trials of the futility of the attempt to live with a rejected suitor as if nothing had happened, she had hopes of the possibility when her own heart was untouched, and the gentleman nearly doubled her years; but when she talked to her father, she gathered that it was considered by both gentlemen that the proposal had been premature, and that her final detachment from Louis was reckoned on as so certain that Mr. Ward was willing to wait, as if it were only a matter of time. He was so wealthy and prosperous, and a connexion with him would have been so useful to the firm, that Mary was grateful to her father for forbearing to press her on what he evidently wished so earnestly. Mr. Ward had exactly the excellent, well-balanced character, which seemed made to suit her, and she could have imagined being very happy with him, if—No, no—Mr. Ward could not be thought of at the same moment.

Yet, whatever she might say, no one would believe her; so she held her peace, and wrote her history of the silver mines; and Mr. Ward haunted the house, and was most kindly forbearing and patient, and Mary found at every turn, how good a man he was, and how cruel and mistaken his sister thought her.

And Christmas came, when the churches were perfect orange-groves, and the scene of the wanderers of Bethlehem was acted from house to house in the twilight. The scanty English congregation met in the room that served as a chapel in the Consul's house—poor Mary alone of all her household there to keep the feast; and Mr. Ward was there, and Madison had come down from his mountain. There were hearts at home that would rejoice to hear that.

Mary saw him afterwards, and he thanked her for her suggestion respecting the miners. Two had been only as shy as Tom himself; they had been reading alone, and were glad to join company, a third was beginning to come, and it had led to a more friendly intercourse. Mary sent him away, very happy with some books for them, some new Spanish reading for himself, an astronomical book, and her little celestial globe—for the whole firmament of stars had been by no means lost on him. That interview was her Christmas treat. Well for her that she did not hear Robson say, 'That young man knows how to come over the ladies. I shall keep a sharper look-out after him. I know no harm of him, but if there's one man I trust less than another, it is one that tries the serious dodge.'

CHAPTER X.

THE WRONG WOMAN IN THE WRONG PLACE.

Give me again my hollow tree,
My crust of bread, and liberty.
The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse—POPE.

The new cook's first compliment to Charlotte was, 'Upon my word, you are a genteel young woman, I dare say you have a lot of sweethearts.'

The indignant denial of the Lady of Eschalott was construed into her being 'sly,' and Mrs. Cook promised herself to find her out.

Those were not happy days with the little maiden. The nurse looked down on her, and the cook filled the kitchen with idlers, whose looks and speeches were abhorrent to her. Sometimes the woman took offence at her for being high; at others, she forced on her advice upon her dress, or tried to draw out confidences either on lovers or the affairs of the family. Charlotte was sadly forlorn, and shut herself up in her pantry, or in her own little attic with Jane's verbenas which cook had banished from the kitchen, and lost her sorrows in books hired at the library. She read, and dreamt, created leisure for reading, lived in a trance, and awoke from it to see her work neglected, reproach herself, and strain her powers to make up for what was left undone. Then, finding her efforts failing, she would be distressed and melancholy, until a fresh novel engrossed her for a time, and the whole scene was enacted over again.

Still, it was not all idleness nor lost ground. The sense of responsibility was doing her good, she withstood the cook's follies, and magnanimously returned unopened a shining envelope of Mr. Delaford's. At Christmas, when Mr. and Mrs. Frost went to pay a visit at Beauchastel, and the cook enjoyed a course of gaieties, the only use she made of her liberty was to drink tea once with Mrs. Martha, and to walk over to Marksedge to see old Madison, who was fast breaking, and who dictated to her his last messages to his grandson.

James and Isabel spent a pleasant lively Christmas with their hospitable old friends, and James returned full of fresh vigour and new projects. His first was to offer his assistance to the Vicar, so as to have a third service on the Sunday; but there were differences of opinion between them, and his proposal was received so ungraciously, that a coolness arose, which cut him off from many openings for usefulness.

However, he had enough to occupy him in his own department, the school. He was astonished at his boys' deficiency in religious instruction, and started a plan for collecting them for some teaching for an hour before morning service. Mr. Calcott agreed with him that nothing could be more desirable, but doubted whether the parents would compel their sons to attend, and advised James to count the cost, doubting whether, in the long run, he would be able to dispense with one day of entire rest. This was the more to be considered, since James expended a wonderful amount of energy in his teaching, did his utmost to force the boys on, in class and in private, drilled his usher, joined in the games, and gave evening lectures on subjects of general information.

Some responded to his training, and these he strenuously encouraged, asking them to dinner and taking them to walk; and these were enthusiastically fond of him, and regarded his beautiful wife as a being of a superior order. Fitzjocelyn and James used to agree that intercourse with her was a very important element in their training, and the invitations were made as impartial as possible, including the intelligent and well-conducted, irrespective of station. Isabel's favourite guest was a good, well-mannered lad, son to Mr. Ramsbotham's follower, the butcher, but, unluckily, Mrs. Richardson and her friends did not esteem it a compliment when their sons were asked to meet him, and, on the other hand, James did not always distinguish real merit from mere responsiveness to his own mind. Dull boys, or such as had a half sullen, half conservative dislike to change, did not gain notice of an agreeable kind, and while intending to show strict justice, he did not know how far he was affected by his prepossessions.

His lectures had emancipated him from evening parties; and, after Mrs. Frost's departure, visiting gave Isabel little trouble. The calm, lofty manners that had been admired in Miss Conway, were thought pride in Mrs. James Frost, and none of the ladies of Northwold even wished to do more than exchange morning calls with her, and talk among themselves of her fine-ladyism. She recked nothing of their keeping aloof; her book and her pen were far pleasanter companions on her alternate evenings of solitude, and in them she tried to lose her wishes for the merry days spent with granny and Clara, and her occasional perceptions that all was not as in their time. James would sometimes bring this fact more palpably before her.

The separation of the families had not diminished the income of the household, but the difference in comfort was great. Isabel knew nothing of management, and did not care to learn. She had been willing to live on a small scale, but she did not understand personal superintendence, she was careless of display, and perfectly happy as long as she was the guest of the grandmother, but she had no comprehension of petty tidinesses or small economies. Now James, brought up on a very different scale, knew in detail how the household ought to live, and made it a duty not to exceed a fixed sum. He had the eye for neatness that she wanted; he could not believe it a hardship to go without indulgences to which his grandmother and sister had not been accustomed. Thus, he protested against unnecessary fires; Isabel shivered and wore shawls; he was hurt at seeming to misuse her, resigned his study fire, and still found the coals ever requiring to be renewed, insisted that his wife should speak to the cook, and mystified her by talking about the regulation of the draught of the kitchen fire; and when Isabel understood, she forgot the lecture.

He was a devoted and admiring husband, but he could not coolly discover innumerable petty neglects and wasteful habits. Impatient words broke out, and Isabel always received them so meekly that he repented and apologized; and in the reconciliation the subject was forgotten, but only to be revived another time. Isabel was always ready to give warm aid and sympathy in all his higher cares and purposes, and her mild tranquillity was repose and soothing to him, but she was like one in a dream. She had married a vision of perfection, and entered on a romance of happy poverty, and she had no desire to awaken; so she never exerted her mind upon the world around her, when it seemed oppressive; and kept the visionary James Frost before her, in company with Adeline and the transformed Sir Hubert. It was much easier to line his tent with a tapestry of Maltese crosses, than to consider whether the hall should be covered with cocoanut matting.

How Christmas passed with Clara, may be seen in the following letter:—

'Cheveleigh, Jan. 1851.

'Dearest Jem,—I can write a long letter to-night, for a fortunate cold has spared me from one of Sir Andrew's dinner-parties. It is a reminiscence of the last ball, partly brought on by compunction at having dragged poor granny thither, in consideration of my unguarded declaration of intense dislike to be chaperoned by Lady Britton. Granny looks glorious in black velvet and diamonds, and I do trust that her universal goodwill rendered the ball more tolerable to her than it was to me. She, at least, is all she seems; whereas I am so infested with civilities, that I long to proclaim myself little Clara Frost, bred up for a governess, and the laughing-stock of her school. Oh! for that first ball where no one danced with me but Mr. Richardson, and I was not a mere peg for the display of Uncle Oliver's Peruvian jewels! I have all the trouble in the world to be allowed to go about fit to be seen, and only by means of great fighting and coaxing did I prevail to have my dress only from London instead of Paris.

'And no wonder I shivered all the way to the ball. Fancy Jane insisting on my going to display my dress to that poor dying Marianne; I was shocked at the notion of carrying my frivolities into such a scene, but Jane said her mind ran on it, and it was 'anything to take off her thoughts from that man.' So I went into her room, and oh! if you could have seen the poor thing, with her short breath and racking cough, her cheeks burning and her eyes glistening at that flimsy trumpery. One bunch of the silver flowers on my skirt was wrong; she spied it, and they would not thwart her, so she would have the needle, and the skeleton trembling fingers set them right. They said she would sleep the easier for it, and she thanked me as if it had really set her more at rest; but how sad, how strange it seems, when she knows that she is sinking fast, and has had Mr. Danvers with her every day. He thinks all is well with her; but it was a melancholy, blank, untaught mind, to begin to work on. Louis would call her life a mournful picture of our civilization. She has told it all to Jane: she was of the mechanic class, just above the rank that goes to Sunday-schools; she went to a genteel weekly school, and was taken out pleasuring on Sunday—no ground-work at all. An orphan at fifteen, she never again knew tenderness. Then came dressmaking till her health failed, and she tried service. She says, Isabel's soft tones made a paradise for her; but late hours, which she did not feel at the time, wore her out, and Delaford trifled with her. Always when alone he pretended devotion to her, then flirted with any other who came in his way, and worry and fretting put the finish to her failing health. She had no spirit to break entirely with him, and even now is pining for one kind word, which he seems to be too hard and selfish to send to her, in answer to a letter of forgiveness that she wrote a fortnight back. What a wretch he must be! Jane says, he tried flirting with poor little Charlotte, and that she was a little 'took up' with his guitar and his verses; but then, Jane says, 'Charlotte has somewhat at the bottom, and knows better than to heed a man as wasn't real religious.' I suppose that is the true difference between Charlotte and Marianne, and even if we looked into Delaford's history, most likely we should find him another nineteenth-century victim to an artificial life. At least, I trust that Jane has been the greatest blessing, Marianne herself speaks of her as more than a mother to her; and I believe I told you of the poor girl's overpowering gratitude, when she found we would not turn her out to die homeless. We read, and we talk, and Mr. Danvers comes; but I believe dear old Jane does more for her than all.

'Poor Jane! when her task of nursing is over, I do not know what she will turn to. The grand servants only keep terms with her because Uncle Oliver gave notice that no one should stay in the house who did not show respect to his friend Mrs. Beckett. It takes all her love for Missus and Master Oliver to make her bear it; and her chief solace is in putting me to bed, and in airing Master Oliver's shirt and slippers. You would laugh to hear her compassionating the home minced-pies! and she tells me she would give fifty pounds rather than bring Charlotte here. My uncle wished grandmamma to manage the house, and she did so at first, but she and the servants did not get on well together; and she said, what I never knew her say before, that she is too old, and so we have an awful dame who rules with a high hand.

'You ask whether the dear granny is happy. You know she is all elasticity, and things are pleasanter here to her than to me, but I do not think she enjoys life as she did at home. It is hard to have her whole mission reduced to airing those four horses. We have tormented my uncle out of making us use more than two at a time, by begging for six and the Lord Mayor's coach; but aired alternately they must be, and we must do it, and by no road but what the coachman chooses; and this does not seem to me to agree with her like trotting about the town on her errands. There is no walking here, excepting in the pleasure-ground, where all my grandfather's landscape-gardening has been cut up so as to be a mere vexation to her. The people round are said to be savage and disaffected, and the quarter of a mile between the park and the village is subject to miners going home. They did once holloa at me, and orders were issued that I should walk no more. I believe that if they saw me fearless, and coming among them for friendly purposes, they would leave off hooting; but the notion frightens granny, so I am a prisoner. They are the people to think it a mockery to be visited by a lady bedizened as I am, and stuck up in a carriage; so we can do very little except through Mr. Danvers, and my uncle is always discontented at the sight of him, and fancies he is always begging. A little sauciness on my part has the best effect when anything is wanted, for my uncle is very kind to me in his own fashion, which is not mine.

'We have made something of a nest in the last of the suite of rooms, the only one habitably small; but it is wonderful where all the time in the day goes. My uncle likes me to ride with him in the morning, and I have to help granny air the horses in the afternoon; and in the evening, when we are lucky enough to dine alone, I play them both asleep, unless they go to backgammon. Think of granny reduced to that! We should be very happy when he is detained in his study, but that granny thinks it is bad for him. Dear granny!

I see the object of her life is to win him back to serious thoughts. She seems to think of him like a schoolboy who must be lured to find home pleasanter than idle ways; and she begs me quite sadly to bear with him, and make him happy, to prevent him from longing after his counting-house at Lima. She tried to make him promise never to go back, but he has only promised never to go while she lives, and she seems to think it would be fatal, and to charge all his disregard of religious matters upon herself for having sent him out. If you could see her pleased smile when we extort a subscription, or when she gets him to church; but when those South American mails come in on Sundays—alas! Those accounts are his real element, and his moments of bliss are over the 'Money-market and City intelligence,' or in discussing railway shares with Sir Andrew. All the rest is an obstinate and dismal allegiance to the days of Shrievalty, about as easy to recall as the days when the Pendragons wore golden collars and armlets. Imitated hospitality turns into ostentation; and the people who seek after silver covers and French cookery are no more to my taste than they are, in good earnest, to Uncle Oliver's. The nice people, if there are any, won't come in our way, except Mr. Henderson; and when we do pluck up courage to disgust Mr. Coachman by calling on Mrs. Henderson, we are very happy. But she is a wise woman, and will not bring her pretty Fanny into our world; and when I press her, behold! I remember what I used to think of patronage.

'But Louis has promised to come at Easter, and he will teach me a little more charity, I hope; and, what is better (no, I don't mean that), will tell me about the dear, dear, trebly dear Terrace and all the doings. I hope you will begin your Sunday scheme; but granny fears the bad set will not care, and the good will prefer having their families together. It is worse than I expected even of Mr. Purvis to refuse the afternoon service, when you offered to take all the trouble off his hands; granny hopes you will take care what you are about with him. Tell Louis we have a famous letter from Mary to show him if he will bring us all news of every one, and especially of his godchild. Contrary to custom, you tell us more about her than her mamma does.

'Your most affectionate Sister,
'CLARA.'

Before Easter, Charlotte's poor rival was lying at rest in Cheveleigh churchyard, and Jane's task of love was at an end.

CHAPTER XI.

AUNT CATHARINE'S HOME.

The lady sleeps—O may her sleep,
As it is lasting, so be deep!
Heaven have her in its sacred keep!
This bed being changed for one more holy,
This room for one more melancholy,
Some tomb, that oft hath flung its black
And wing-like panels fluttering back,
Triumphant o'er the fluttering palls
Of her grand family funerals.
E. A. POE.

The summer was nearly over, when, one morning at breakfast, Louis surprised his father by a sound, half consternation, half amusement, and handed him a note, containing these words:—

'DEAR F.,—There were three of us last night; there are five this morning. Isabel and the twins are doing well. Heaven knows what is to become of us!

'Yours,
J. F.'

'What would you have?' said Lord Ormersfield, calmly. 'The poorer people are, the more children they have!'

He went on with his own letters, while Louis laughed at the enunciation of this inverse ratio; and then took up the note again, to wonder at the tone of anxiety and distress, so unlike James. He went to call on Lady Conway, and was better satisfied to find that James had written in a lively strain to her, as if proud of his little daughters, and resolved not to be pitied. Of this he was in no danger from his sisters-in-law, who looked upon twin-girls as the only blessing needed to complete Isabel's felicity, had devised three dozen names for them, and longed to be invited to Northwold to see them.

Nothing was heard of James for more than a week, and, as London grew hotter, dustier, and drearier than ever, Fitzjocelyn longed, more than he thought wholesome to confess, after Ormersfield turf, the deep ravines, and rushing brooks. The sun shone almost through the blind of the open window on the large library table, where sat Louis at his own end, writing to his Inglewood bailiff, and now and then solacing himself by lifting with the feather of his pen one of the bells of a delicate lily in a glass before him—a new spectacle on the Earl's writing-table; and so was a strip of vellum, with illuminations rich and rare—Louis's indulgence when he felt he had earned an hour's leisure. There was a ring at the door, a step on the stairs, and before the father and son stood James, his little black bag in his hand, like himself, all dust, and his face worn, heated, and tired.

'Then you have not heard from Cheveleigh?' he said, in answer to their astonished greetings, producing a note, which was eagerly read:—

'Dearest Jem,—My uncle says I may write to you, in case you can leave Isabel, that he will be glad to see you. I told you that dear grandmamma had a cold, and so we would not let her come to Isabel; but I little guessed what was coming. It only seemed a feverish cold, and Jane and I almost laughed at my uncle for choosing to send for a doctor. He was not alarmed at first, but yesterday she was inert and sleepy, and he asked for more advice. Dr. Hastings came to-day, and oh! Jem, he calls it a breaking up of the constitution, and does not think she will rally. She knows us, but she is almost always drowsy, and very hard to rouse. If you can come without hurting Isabel, I know you will. We want you all the more, because my uncle will not let me send for Mr. Danvers. Poor Uncle Oliver is dreadfully troubled.
'Your most affectionate CLARA.'

'Transplantation has killed her—I knew it would!' said James, as Louis stood, with the note in his hand, as if not yet understanding the blow.

'Nay,' said the Earl, 'it is an age at which we could hardly hope she would long be spared. You could leave Mrs. James Frost with comfort?'

'Yes, Miss Mercy undertakes her—she is doing well—she would not hear of my staying. I must go on, the train starts at two,' he added, hastily, looking at the time-piece.

'We will send you,' said Lord Ormersfield. 'Take time to rest. You look very ill! You should have some luncheon.'

'No, thank you!' said James, at first with the instinct of resistance; but yielding and confessing, 'Charlotte went into hysterics, and I had nothing to eat before I came away.'

Louis came forward from the window where he had been standing as in a dream, he laid his hand on James's shoulder, and said, 'I will go!' His voice was hardly audible, but, clearing it, and striving to recall his thoughts, he added, 'Father, I can be spared. The division is not coming on to-night, or you could get me a pair.'

The Earl looked doubtfully at James.

'Yes, let me go,' said Louis. 'I must see her again. It has been mother and son between us.' And, hiding his face in his hands, he hurried out of the room.

'Let him come,' said James. 'If duty and affection claim a right, none have such as he.'

'I hesitate only as to acting unceremoniously by your uncle.'

'This is no moment for ceremony—no time to deprive her of whatever she loves best.'

'Be it so, then. His own feelings are his best passport, and well has she deserved all that he can ever feel! And, James, if she should express any desire to see me, if I can be of any use in settling matters, or could promote any better understanding with your uncle, I am ready at a moment's notice. I would come at once, but that many might be burdensome to your uncle and sister.'

The two cousins were quickly on their way. James took a second-class ticket, the first time he had ever done so in travelling with his cousin. Fitzjocelyn placed himself beside him without remark.

James dozed as well as the narrow seat would permit, and only woke to chafe at each halt, and Louis mused over the associations of those scenes, and last year's triumphant return. Had the change of habits truly hastened the decay of her powers? had her son's toil and success been merely to bring her home to the grave of her fathers, at the expense of so many heartburnings, separations, and dissensions? At least, he trusted that her last hours might be crowned by the peacemaker's joy, and that she might see strife and bitterness laid aside between Oliver, and Henry's only surviving son.