her do it, and said not one word. Call me coward, knave, selfish villain, what you will, but don't taunt me with rhetorical flourishes. I am Erne Hillyar's murderer."

The Secretary looked execedingly grave. Seventeen years, passed partly in money-making, and partly in official life, had not deadened the sentimental part of him one bit; he still hated to inflict pain; but he had learned to say a hard word, when he thought that word was deserved, and when it did not interfere with any political combination. The sentimental third of his soul was enlisted on Emma's side most entirely since Joe's explanation; he bore very hard on Joe, and was angry with him.

"You have been much to blame," he said, and would have gone on, but there was a crackling of wheels on the gravel, and he paused. "Keep it from her," he said hurriedly. "This may not be true. Keep the papers from her. They are coming. If it is true, let her hear it from my wife."

They went quickly into the next room to join Mrs. North, and immediately after Mrs. Oxton and Emma came in. Both were changed since we made their acquaintance a few years ago. Mrs. Oxton had faded rapidly, like most Australian beauties, and there was nothing left of the once splendid ensemble but the eyes and the teeth; they were as brilliant as ever; but her complexion was faded into a sickly yellow, and her beauty had to take its chance without any assistance from colour, which was a hard trial for it, to which it had somewhat succumbed. Still, she had gained a weary and altogether loveable expression, which was, perhaps, more charming than her old splendid beauty. Emma also was very much changed.

She had always been what some call "young of her age." She had been a long while in developing, but now she had developed into a most magnificent woman. The old, soft, and childish roundness of her face was gone, and out of it there had come, as it were, the ideal of the soul within-gentle, patient

endure. Her look was one of continual and perfect repose; and yet, now that the face was more defined, those who knew her best could see how clearly and decisively the mouth and chin were cut; one could see now how it was that she could not only endure, but act.

She was tall, but not so tall as her mother. Her carriage was very easy and graceful, though very deliberate.

During her residence in Palmerston she had taken care to watch the best people, and was quite clever enough to copy their manners without caricaturing them, which is being very clever indeed. This evening she was dressed in white crape, with a scarlet opera-cloak; her wreath was of dark red Kennedya, and she had a considerable number of diamonds on her bosom, though no other jewels whatever. Altogether she was a most imperial-looking person, and deserved certainly what she had had that night the attention of the whole theatre.

"I am so sorry you did not go with us, Mrs. North," she said in her quiet old voice, not altered one bit. "Catherine Hayes has been singing more divinely than ever. My dear brother, you have lost something. Will you come home now?"

"I cannot let you go till you have had supper, my love," put in Mrs. Oxton; and Emma willingly assented, and talked pleasantly about the opera, until they came into the light of the diningroom. After she had seen Joe's face she was quite silent.

66

They drove home, and the instant they were alone in their house she spoke. My own brother, I have not spelt at your face for so many years without being able to read it; but there is a look in it to-night which I have never seen there before. Something terrible has happened."

Joe remained silent. "Is Erne dead?"

Joe tried to speak, but only burst into tears.

"I can bear it, dear, if you tell me quickly at least, I think I can bear it, or I will try, God help me! Only tell

"I must see it, or I shall die. I must know the worst, or I shall die. I must see that paper."

Joseph was forced to give it to her, and she read it quickly through. Then she sat down on a chair, and began rocking her body to and fro. Once, after a long time, she turned a face on Joseph which frightened him, and said, "Eagle-hawks and wild dogs," but she resumed her rocking to and fro once more. At last she said, "Go to bed, dear, and leave me alone with God." And to bed he went; and, as he saw her last, she was still sitting there, with her bouquet and her fan in her lap, and the diamonds on her bosom flashing to and fro before the fire, but tearless and silent.

She in her white crape and diamonds, and Erne lying solitary in the bush, with the eagle-hawks and wild dogs riving and tearing at his corpse. It had come to this, then!

Why had Joe brought away the old sampler he had found in the great room at Chelsea, the sampler of the poor Hillyar girl, and hung it up over the fireplace in the drawing-room? What strange, unconscious cruelty! In her solitary, agonized working to and fro on that miserable night, never impatient or wild, but ah! so weary; that old sampler was before her, and her tearless eyes kept fixing themselves upon it, till the words, at first mere shreds of faded worsted, began to have a meaning for her which they never had before. That poor crippled Hillyar girl, she thought, had stitched those words on the canvas two hundred years agone, that they might hang before her on this terrible night; before her who might have borne the dear name of Hillyar, but who had driven her kinsman to his death by her obstinacy, hung there by her crippled brother, for whose sake she had refused this gallant young Hillyar, who had wooed her so faithfully and so truly.

Burtons ever allowed to meet," she asked herself, "if nothing but misery is to come of their meeting? He said once, when we were children, that our house was an unlucky one to the Hillyars. He spoke truth, dear saint. Let me go to him-let me go to him!"

So her diamonds went flashing to and fro before the fire, till the fire grew dim, till the ashes grew dead and cold, and the centipedes, coming back from under the fender to seek for the logs which had been their homes, found them burnt up and gone, and rowed themselves into crannies in the brickwork, to wait for better times.

Yet as the morn grew chill she sat, with her diamonds, and her fan, and her bouquet; with the old sampler over the chimneypiece before her, reading it aloud

"Weep not, sweet friends, my early doom, Lay not fresh flowers upon my tomb; But elder sour and briony,

And yew-bough broken from the tree."

"Let me go to him! Dead-alone in the bush, with the eagle-hawks and wild dogs! Let me go to him!""

CHAPTER LXII.

HUSBAND AND WIFE.

ALL this time there was a Sir George Hillyar somewhere. But where? That is a question which will never be answered with any accuracy, even were it worth answering. What an utterly dissipated and utterly desperate man does with himself in London I do not know; at least, I am unacquainted with the details, and, even were I not, I should hesitate to write them down. No decent house would allow my book to lie on the drawing-room table if I dared put in a tale what one reads every day in the police reports of the newspapers.

One thing Mr. Compton found out very easily all his letters bore the London post-mark. Mr. Compton could not make it out. Why did he not come

he a defaulter, or had he made another engagement, and didn't dare to face his wife? The old man suspected the latter was the case, and there is every reason to believe that he was right.

Reuben saw him sometimes; but he never told any one. Their appointments were always made at Chelsea. Reuben found that Sir George's practice of creeping into the old house had become habitual, and he taxed him with it; and so by degrees he discovered this that Sir George had discovered that this was one of Samuel Burton's former haunts, and that he had conceived an idea that he would somehow or another return there. This notion, originally well founded, seemed to have grown into a craze with the unhappy man, from certain words which occasionally escaped him. Reuben came to the conclusion that he waited there with a view to murdering him, should he appear. He therefore held his tongue on the fact, so well known to him, that Samuel Burton was safe in Australia-the more, as Sir George never permitted him on any account whatever to share his vigil.

Enough about Sir George Hillyar for the present. I am almost sorry I ever undertook to tell such a story as the history of his life. I suppose that, I suppose that, even in a novel, telling the bare and honest truth must do good somehow; but at times the task felt very loathsome. I had some faint pleasure in writing about the miserable man as long as there was some element of hope in his history; but I sicken at the task now. Knowing the man and his history, I knew what my task would be from the beginning. I undertook it, and must go on with it. The only liberties I have taken with fact have been to elevate his rank somewhat, and to dwell with an eager kindness on such better points as I saw in him. But writing the life of a thoroughly ill-conditioned man, from first to last, is weary work.

But his story sets one thinkingthinking on the old, old subject of how far a man's character is influenced by education; which is rather a wide one.

to Laleham instead of to Mr. Easy's, would the Doctor have done anything with him?

I declare, à propos des bottes, if you will, that there is a certain sort of boy with a nature so low, so sensual, so selfish, so surrounded with a case-hardened shell of impenetrable blockishness, that if you try to pierce this armour of his, and draw one drop of noble blood from the body which one supposes must exist within, you lose your temper and your time, and get frantic in the attempt. I don't say that these boys all go to the bad, but in an educational point of view they are very aggravating. If you miss them from the Sunday-school and want to see anything more of them, you will find them in Feltham Reformatory: among the upper classes the future of these boys is sometimes very different. "Now this vice's dagger has become a squire. Now he hath land and beeves."

I do not say that George Hillyar had been one of the lowest of that kind of boys; that he was not, makes the only interest in his history. But we have nearly done with him. It will be a somewhat pleasanter task to follow once more the fortunes of his quaint little wife, and see what an extraordinary prank she took it into her head to play, and to what odd consequences that prank led.

As soon as the summer came on, and the gardeners had filled the great bare parterres all round the house with geraniums, calceolarias, lobelias, and what not, then Gerty took revenge for her winter's imprisonment, and was abroad in the garden and the woods, or on the lake, nearly all day. About this time also she began baby's education, and had lessons every morning for about five or six minutes. At this time also Mrs. Oxton began to notice to her husband that Gerty's letters were getting uncommonly silly.

"Let me look at one," said the Secretary, from his easy chair.

When he read it his brow grew clouded. "She never was so silly as this before, was she, my love?"

about George? He is neglecting her. I wish she was here." "So do I, by Jove! But she seems pretty happy, too. I can't make it out."

Old Sir George had got the works of that great clock called Stanlake into such perfect order that, once wind it up, and it would go till the works wore out. The servants were so old and so perfectly drilled that really Gerty had but little to do. Her rambles never extended beyond the estate, but were always made with immense energy, for some very trivial object. At first it was the cowslips, and then Reuben taught the boy the art of birds'-nesting, and the boy taught his mother; and so nothing would suit her but she must string eggs. However, as the summer went on, she got far less flighty. And the Secretary and his wife noticed the change in her letters, and were more easy about her.

The next winter passed in the same total seclusion as the last. Mr. Compton saw a little change for the worse in her towards the end of it. He now gathered from her conversation that she had somehow got the impression that George was gone away with Mrs. Nalder. He elicited this one day after that affectionate woman had, hearing for the first time Gerty was alone, come raging over to see her. Gerty told him that she thought it rather bold on the part of that brazen-faced creature to come and ring at the door in a brougham, and ask if she was dead, after taking away her husband from her. She did not seem angry or jealous in the least. Mr. Compton did not know, as we do, that

her suspicions of Mrs. Nalder were only the product of a weak brain in a morbid state if he had, he would have been more disturbed. But, assuming the accusation to be true, he did not half like the quiet way in which she took it. "She will become silly, if she don't mind," he said.

The summer went on, and Gerty went on in the same manner as she had done in the last. It happened that on the 17th of August Mr. Compton went and stayed with her at Stanlake, and settled a little business, to which she seemed singularly inattentive. Nay, she seemed incapable of attention. She talked to him about a book she had taken a great fancy to, "White's History of Selborne," which Reuben had introduced to the boy, and the boy to his mother; indeed, all her new impressions now came through her boy. She told him about the migration of the swallows,how that the swifts all went to a day, were all gone by the 20th of August. Some said they went south; but some said they took their young and went under water with them, to wait till the cold, cruel winter was over, and the sun shone out once more.

This conversation made Mr. Compton very anxious. He thought she was getting very flighty, and wondered how it would end. He thought her eye was unsettled. On the evening of the 21st of August the Stanlake butler came to him, called him out from dinner, and told him that her ladyship and the young gentleman had been missing for twentyfour hours.

To be continued.

LORD STANLEY not many weeks ago delivered a speech far more remarkable than the majority of so-called parliamentary utterances. It was an essay upon modern politics, touching upon many topics which interest statesmen and thinkers. Among many striking passages, none deserved greater attention than that in which his Lordship described his feelings as to the Italian movement. He fully recognised the fact that the Italian people desired above every other object the possession of Rome. He wished them success in the attainment of their desires. He expressed genuine sympathy with the material benefits which flowed from the progress of Italian unity, and showed plainly enough that he was not inclined to offer any opposition to the schemes of Victor Emmanuel and his people. But Lord Stanley (and this is the point

that he could scarcely understand why it was that the Italian people should be prepared to run all risks in order to force their way into Rome. "If they like," was the tone of his remarks, "to pay an immense price for an old town with a venerable name, let the Italians pay their price and get their bargain; but to myself, as a calm and sensible lookeron, the bargain seems a bad one. Rome is not a good military position, and is never likely to be an important commercial city; it is certainly a little strange that a whole nation should incur the enmity of popes and emperors to get hold of a mass of old ruins."

It is no part of our purpose to discuss either the Roman question or the correctness of Lord Stanley's estimate of the worth of Rome to Italy. The tone of his criticisms, his frank avowal of inability to enter into the ideas which