mother's claim cannot be quite proved. It would be a disadvantage to the boy. And hear me, you Dark Squire, with your bloodhounds. The boy has got to love me again, with a new fresh love overlying the mere old love which lives in his memory. He has been painting my face, and the new love showed itself in his eyes a hundred times." "Was there no recognition ?"

"A dim stirring of memory only, which made him more strangely beautiful than ever. Once or twice there was such a fixed stare in his glorious eyes that I thought I was betrayed. But I was not. It was only the old love of memory wedding itself to the new love of respect and admiration. Would you be loved better than that?"

"Confound the woman!" said the Squire to himself, and then sat quite silent-she going on mending shirts.

At last he said, "The boy wants to go to Italy and study art. I have had bother enough with Italy, but I won't stand in his way. I recognise him as my grandson, and I like the boy. But is there any promise in these drawings of his ? We must not make a fool of the lad. I have seen nothing of his as yet."

Mrs. Silcote rose, and brought from a bureau a small canvass with a head, painted in oils, upon it. It was the likeness of herself which James had done. She said,

"Will that do?"

"Do!" said Silcote, "I should think it would. There is genius in every line of it.”

"So I thought, thinking at the same time that I might be blinded by my love. Let him go, Silcote. Did you ever know what it was to love, Silcote? —not to love with the old love and the new love with which my boy and I love one another; but to love blindly and foolishly, from an instinct more powerful than reason? I loved so once, and believed myself loved still more deeply in return; and one fine day, I found that I had never been loved at all, and had only been tricked and deceived by words sweet as angels, falser than devils. I found that out one day, Silcote, and my heart withered utterly up within me. And I was desperate and mad, and only saved from the river by a gentle brother, who believed me lost-in one sense of

the word. And he and I went back to the fields and the fallows, and fought nature for bread together, as we had been used to do when we were children together, and when mine was only a child's beauty."

A very long silence, during which she sat as calm as Memnon.

When she found her voice again, she went on

'Do you begin to understand me? Are you capable of understanding the case of one who would have given up everything in this world, ay, and God forgive me if I blaspheme-would have given up all hopes in the next, for the love of one being, and then found that that love never existed at all?-that she had been a dupe and a fool from the first, and that, even while his hand was in her hair, he was laughing at her? I went through this, and did not die. Could you dare to warrant the same for yourself?"

A very long pause here. Buttons stitched on shirts, and shirts dextrously folded and placed away, Silcote sitting with his hands before his eyes the whole time. At last he spoke.

"You speak of my son Thomas, whom I loved once. Do you love him still?"

"I cannot say," she answered.

"Do you?" "And I cannot say either," replied Silcote.

"He is your son," she urged.

And he is the father of yours," he replied.

"You have the quickness of your family in answer," she said. "Leave this question."

'You have told me part of your story, and I will not ask for details to-night. You ask me if I know what it is to awake from a dream of love, and find that that love never existed. I do! May I tell you my story? I have gone through all that you speak of, and am still alive. Men with my frame and my brain don't die, or go mad. But I warn you solemnly that, if you allow me to tell you my story, you must prepare your nerves. It is so ghastly, so inconceivable, so unutterably horrible, that I can only hope that the telling of it to you will not kill me."

"You have been abused, Squire. And, may I ask, have

you never told it before? The High Church people, among whom I have been lately, and who have done me goodalthough I don't go with them, I will allow that-urge confession. It is capable of any amount of abuse, this confession: but, looking at it in the light of merely a confidential communication of a puzzling evil, it generally does good. You have, with your jealous reticence, kept some great evil to yourself for many years, I fear. Why have you never told it before?"

"Why?-Temper, I suppose. I seem like the Ancient Mariner. I can't tell my story to any one whose face does not invite me; and your face was the first one which ever did invite me."

"Then Silcote, let me hear this story of yours." And so Silcote told his story.

CHAPTER XXXI.

—AND THEN, HAVING MADE CONFESSION, BUT
GETTING NO ABSOLUTION—

"I WAS, my dear Mrs. Sugden, an ambitious, handsome young fellow,-very popular; with an intention of enjoying life, and in every way fitted for enjoying it. I was sole heir to a very large fortune; and, beside that, came from a family of attorneys: another fortune. No part of my scheme was idleness or luxury. I believed myself to have (nay, I had) considerable talent, not a mean share of wit, and a ready tongue; and I determined-don't laugh at a shipwrecked man-to follow my career as a barrister until I sat upon the bench. My family connexions started me very quickly in a fine practice; but bless you, I could have made my fortune without them. Ask any of my contemporaries. I am only telling you the plain truth, I assure you. Who am I that I should boast?

"I suppose that at twenty-five I was one of the most fortunate men that ever lived. With my talents and

knowledge of law, I would have booked myself for six or seven thousand a year by my practice at forty. I loved my profession intensely; I was a lawyer in my very blood, and all that fate asked of me was to go on and make a noble fortune by the pursuit I loved best in the whole world. And I must marry, too: and a young lady, beautiful, well-born, rich, and highly educated, was ready to marry me. And she had ninety thousand pounds No, I loved her, my

of her own.

"Did I love her or her money? dear madam, ever since she was a child. And she loved me at one time. Look at me."

Mrs. Thomas Silcote looked at him very steadily indeed. "Do I look mad?"

"No," she said very quietly; "you look perfectly sane." "Hah!" said Silcote. "And yet I sit here and tell you as a solemn truth, that I know that at one time she did love me."

"I have no doubt she did. You had better go on," said Mrs. Thomas Silcote.

"I loved her when she was a child; more deeply yet when I was courting her; still more deeply as a bride; until my whole soul merged into hers as a wife. There never was a woman loved as that woman was by me."

66 'Well?"

"My sister Mary, whom you know as the Princess, had been a great deal in Italy, principally at Venice, and a great deal also in Vienna; for, next to Italian life, she loved the free and easy life of South Germany. My wife had a son, Algernon, now a master in this very college, and was a long time in recovering her health afterwards. The doctors strongly recommended change of air and

scene.

"At this conjunction of circumstanoes, my sister came back to England from Italy or Austria (she was always travelling between the two), and, finding my wife in ill health, proposed to take her to Florence to spend the winter. I was loth to part with my darling, still more loth to let her go with my foolish sister. But the doctors were all for it, and old Miss Raylock (you know her) was going

also, and so I consented. It was term time, and I could not follow them for six weeks. I let her go, against my better judgment.

"For I knew my sister well. She is one of the most foolish and silly women that ever walked the earth. And she is very untruthful withal: but probably her most remarkable quality is her perfectly donkeyish obstinacy. Like most weak and foolish women, she has a love of mystery and of mysterious power, and she had got herself, before this, mixed up in an infinity of Austro-Italian plots, having no idea of their merits, but getting herself made a fool of alternately by both parties. I had argued with her on this matter often, but you might as well have argued with the pump. She believed herself trusted by both parties, whereas the fact was that she was merely used as a disseminator of false intelligence.

"When term was over, I followed them to Italy. The state of things which I found there was deeply displeasing to me. I found a coterie of English living in a free and easy manner in one another's houses; the leading members of which were my sister, Miss Raylock, a certain Sir Godfrey Mallory, and my wife. My wife and Miss Raylock seemed to be the only people who were living in the least degree up to the English standard of propriety, as it went in those days. As for my sister, she had succeeded in surrounding the whole party with all the political scum of Europe, as it seemed to me. I never saw such a parcel of cut-throat villains, before or since, as were gathered every evening in my sister's house: nay not only in my sister's house, but in my wife's-that is, my own. I wondered how they dared assemble there, and expected a descent of police immediately. There were two people about my sister, however, to whom I took a stronger objection than to any other two. The one was a man at that time acting as her major-domo, a German, called Kriegsthurm; the other was my late brother-in-law, the Prince of Castelnuovo.

"How they were allowed to talk the rank sedition they did was a puzzle to me. I am, like most Englishmen, perfectly liberal, rather seditious, about foreign politics, but