gone, and the brick was covered with ivy, and looked very dark under the spreading branches of the tall trees that overhung the outer wall. She turned aside to peep into this ruin. She had expected to find it empty; but it was no such thing. Inside was a thin old gentleman, with stooped and narrow shoulders, and a very long and melancholy face; he had a conical fur cap on, and large tortoise-shell spectacles, and was seated at a table, with an enormous inkbottle beside him, totting up figures in a mighty book like a ledger. There were innumerable sheaves of papers, neatly folded and docketed, placed in order, upon the table at each side; and under it, and beside him, on the ground, was a huge litter, consisting chiefly of files stuck up to the very hooks with papers, and several leather bags stuffed, no doubt, with old balance-sheets and account-books. On a row of nails along the wall were hanging a series of "stock-lists," with the sparrows twittering above, and bees and flies buzzing about them in the ivy. With a grimace as if he had suddenly crunched a sour gooseberry, this sage rose, with a stamp on the ground, and, jerking his pen behind his ear, gazed angrily at Maud, and muttered: "Is not the garden wide enough for you and for me, madam? Saints and angels! How is it possible for an overworked old man to get through his business, interrupted as I am? Pray don't go for a moment; on the contrary, wait; the mischief is done. I claim this, because I want to prevent this occurring again. It is something to keep the complicated and never-ending accounts of this enormous house. It is something to make and direct all the prodigious investments that are going on, and to be able at an instant's notice to tell to a fractional part of a farthing what the entire figure is, and each item stands at, every day of the week. It requires an arithmetical secretary such as England does not see every day, to get all that within the circle of his head, madam. But when you are ordered to make up a tot of forty years' figures on pain of losing your splendid rights, at a single voyage, between morning light and setting sun, it screws too tight, you see, on an old fellow's temples." He pressed three fingers of each hand on his temples, and turned up his eyes. "It is enough to make them burst in or out, by Heaven, like a ship. I remember the time I could have done it like that" (he snapped his fingers), “but we grow old ma'am, non sum qualis eram; and always interrupted, never quiet. Some one looks in; just as I have it, some one laughs, or a cock crows, or the light goes out; and I, simple as you see me, entitled to all that stock, unclaimed dividends, if I could only finish it, and bring my tots into court. It is a hard, hard thing with all that, and so exquisitely near it, to be still doomed at my years to a life of slavery! Always so near it, always so near; always interrupted. Here I came out to-day to take the fresh air in this place a little; shut up perpetually in my office, and just as I had got midway in the tot you look in, and-immortal gods! blessed patience! hell and Satan!-all is lost in one frightful moment of forgetfulness! Always so near. It makes one's thumbs tremble! Always blasted. It makes one squint. It is enough to make a man stark, staring mad! Pray make no excuses, madam. They waste time; you looked in; do so no more, and I'll forgive you." He made her a short bow, placed his finger on his lip, turned up his eyes, and shook his head, with a profound groan, and addressed himself forthwith to his work again. With a mixture of compassion and amusement, she left the den of this old humorist, into which she had unwittingly intruded, and continued her search. A prepossessing young lady, dressed in very exquisite taste, walking slowly, and looking about her with an air and smile of quiet enjoyment and hauteur, hesitated as Maud approached, stood still, looking on her with a gracious and kind expression, and a countenance so riant that Miss Vernon hesitated also in the almost irresistible attraction. The Back Numbers of the PRESENT SERIES of ALL THE YEAR ROUND Also Cases for Binding, are always kept on sale. The whole of the Numbers of the FIRST SERIES of ALL THE YEAR RO U N D, CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS, Are now in print, and may be obtained at the Office: 26, Wellington-street, Strand, W.C., and of all Booksellers The Right of Translating Articles from ALL THE YEAR ROUND is reserved by the Authors. Published at the Office. 26, Wellington St Strand Printed by C. WHITING, Beaufort House, Duke St., Lincoln's Inn Fields. his round of visits; an old school friend of the deceased, who had come down from town, jumped into a cab to catch the return train, and Philip and the lawyer got into the mourning-coach to return together. On their way back the lawyer told the boy that Mrs. Vane was not well enough to see him, but that he was to go back to school that evening as soon as he had had his dinner; then, to Philip's great wonderment, asked him whether he had read Robinson Crusoe and Philip Quarll, and whether he did not think he should like to be a great traveller like those heroes. The meaning of these questions was explained a few days afterwards, when the schoolmaster called him into the apartment which was alternately a reception-room and a torture-chamber, and instead of, as the boy expected, bidding him prepare for immediate punishment, told him that he was to leave school the next day for Plymouth, where his passage had been taken in one of the steamers immediately starting for the West Indies, he having been bound apprentice to a cousin of Mrs. Vane's, who was a merchant and planter in the island of St. Vincent. leading physician of the place. Doctor Vane Philip remembered as a quiet little man with white hair and a thoughtful face, who used to pat the boy's head, and surreptitiously give him half-crowns surreptitiously, that is to say, as far as concerned Mrs. Vane, a full-blown handsome woman, whom Philip always remembered with flowers in her cap, and a very red complexion. From the first, Philip had a dim, childish notion that the doctor was afraid of Mrs. Vane, whom, as the child learned in the course of time, he had married when a widow, and who had two sons, one with very large whiskers, and the other with a black and white dog. When the child came back for the next holidays, he learned that the dog-owning son had gone to Spain, which was a long way off, as he understood, to fight for something or somebody not clearly defined; but the other son with the whiskers was still there, and took Philip up to his bedroom, which was at the top of the house, and made him very sick by insisting upon his smoking a pipe, a proceeding which seemed fraught with great delight to the whiskered gentleman. When Philip came home six months afterwards, at Christmas, he found the house in sad tribulation, for the son with the dog was dead, and the son with the whiskers had gone to Australia, not, as the boy gathered from the talk among the servants and the visitors to the house, without having distinguished him-tered at Jamaica; and by whose aid the self by squandering a vast amount of money and running very deeply into debt. The doctor, Philip noticed, was thinner, whiter, and more thoughtful than ever; and though Mrs. Vane wore as many flowers in her cap, she seemed to have dropped suddenly into an old woman, and shed her teeth as he had heard of deer shedding their horns, while her fresh complexion was, he noticed, muddled and streaky. Philip Vane went to Plymouth, and to the West Indies, but not to St. Vincent. Indeed, he carefully avoided that island, having, while on board the royal mail steamer Shannon, made the acquaintance of several young gentlemen who were going out to join Her Majesty's land forces, then quar lad, quick at games of skill and lucky at games of chance, turned the fifty pounds, with which he had been presented by Mrs. Vane's agent on sailing, into a sum worth four times the original amount. For two or three years he remained in the colonies enjoying the hospitality invariably extended there to every one who makes himself agreeable, living at the different messes, riding races for the officers, staying with the merchants at their up-country villas, The boy never saw his uncle alive again; and providing himself with pocket-money he was sent home from school to attend by bold and lucky card-playing. By the the funeral, and formed one of a very small time that the desire to return to his native procession, which, in the roaring wind and country became too strong to be denied, drifting rain, struggled up one of the back Mr. Philip Vane had mixed so much with streets of the town to the little evangelical the military, and was so thoroughly conchapel, at which, at his wife's command, versant with their manners and customs, the kindly old doctor had given regular that, on his arrival in England, he deemed attendance, and in the burying-ground it expedient to announce himself as Capattached to which his remains were laid. | tain Vane. It was as Captain Vane, After the ceremony the little funeral party ostensibly fly-fishing for his amusement broke up, the well-known yellow carriage at Chepstow, but in reality hiding from of the physician who had paid the last the officers of the sheriff of Monmouth, respects to his old friend, stood at the acting in conjunction with their brother churchyard gate, ready to bear him off on officers of Middlesex, that he made the acquaintance of Miss Pierrepoint, who at the time was acting in that ancient town. His intentions toward that young lady were at first strictly dishonourable, but finding that she was not to be won by anything short of the marriage ceremony, and believing that he saw in the development of her talent the foundation of a future income for himself, he honoured her by making her his wife. Captains becoming somewhat common, he gave himself a kind of billiard-room brevet, and appeared as Major Vane, under which title he was favourably known in a shady fifth-rate little club, composed of adventurers like himself, and their victims, calling itself by the high-sounding name of the Craven, and locating itself in a dingy little street in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly: had his presence “remarked” by the reporters of sporting newspapers as a regular attendant at the principal turf meetings, and led that odd sort of flashy, swindling, disreputable existence which has so many votaries in the present day. Though two years had passed since his marriage, he had never introduced his wife to any one, and had insisted upon her keeping their connexion secret, even from the little sister who was her sole relative. From time to time he appeared at places where she was acting, as he had just appeared at Wexeter, giving her the benefit of his society sometimes for a longer, sometimes for a shorter period, but invariably insisting, whether present or not, on receiving two-thirds of the salary which she earned by her exertions, and leaving her and her sister to subsist on the remainder. Had the salary thus earned been tolerably large, it is not improbable that Major Vane's conjugal attentions might have been greater than they actually were, but the major confessed to himself that his matrimonial speculation, as a speculation, had been a failure. In confidential communication with himself, the major did not scruple to own that he had not much regard for his wife. Even when he perpetrated marriage, it was from the commercial aspect that he regarded the step, and from that point of view it had been a decided failure. It ought to have turned out right; he himself could check off a score of instances in which worthy gentlemen, friends of his own, were deriving large sums from the theatrical earnings of ladies who were their acknowledged or unacknowledged partners: but these ladies were spirited persons, with little clothing and less grammar, whose portraits were in the photographers' windows, and whose Christian names, affectionately diminished, were in the mouths of London generally. More than once he had suggested to his wife that an equally glorious career lay before her if she only chose to embrace the opportunity and accept an engagement which, without his connexion with her being at all known, he could procure for her, but she invariably shook her head and refused, remaining at Wexeter, or some such dreary place, "doing her spouting," as he pleasantly but ironically called it, for a salary of three pounds a week and a benefit, which did not realise more than forty pounds. Major Vane, however, was a philosopher. His marriage had been a mistake; he owned it to himself, but to no one else. And by the time that he had descended to the coffee-room to breakfast on the morning after the meeting in the lane behind the turnpike, he had thoroughly determined on ridding himself of the connexion at the first available opportunity. Meantime, he should receive the money for the benefit and the two-thirds of the week's salary, and when an opportunity offered itself, he should grasp it, and Miss Pierrepoint would hear of him no more. While the omnibus containing this largesouled gentleman was moving towards the railway station, Miss Pierrepoint emerged from her lodging and made the best of her way towards the theatre. It was very early for a rehearsal, even at such an unconventional theatre as that of Wexeter, but with a view to see whether she could not make some effect in other than merely "spouting" parts, and thus please her husband, Miss Pierrepoint had determined on playing for her benefit the part of Phoebe in Paul Pry, one of those waiting-maids known only to the stage, who carry their hands in the pockets of their little black silk aprons, who are the chosen recipients of their young mistresses' secrets, and the terror of the lives of the elderly gentlemen, their masters. Phoebe has songs to sing, and the leader of the band, who like every other person in the theatre would have done anything for Miss Pierrepoint, was coming early to try them over with her; Phoebe has a certain amount of interchange of repartee with the principal character, and the low comedian, whose notion of repartee consisted in making faces at the gallery, and whose "dry humour," so often lauded, resolved itself into forgetting his part, and substituting the slang sayings of the day, was coming to "go through their scenes." After that there was a full rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet, which was to be the leading piece on the benefit evening, so that it was tolerably late in the day before Miss Pierrepoint's work was over. Just as she was moving toward the stage-door, she felt her arm touched, and a low voice said in her ear: 66 'Won't you speak to me ?" Turning round she saw Gerald Hardinge; he was dressed in his working garb, a loose canvas jacket and trousers, spotted here and there with great daubs of paint. "Mr. Hardinge!" she cried, putting out her hand. "No," he said, drawing back, "I cannot shake hands with you now; I have been at work and have not had time to wash the traces of it off. I looked down from the flies' and saw you were going away, so hurried down to stop you, as I have something to say to you. "I am very glad you did; I was sorry to have missed you last night "Yes," interrupted the young man, "but we cannot talk here in this passage with the wind blowing in, and old Gonnop listening to every word. Come down on to the stage, there is no one there now, and we can have it all to ourselves." She turned back, and passing through the littered mass of disused scenery stacked up against the walls, they went down on to the stage, now but very partially illumined by a faint gleam of light, coming through the window at the back of the distant gallery. For a minute neither of them spoke, then Miss Pierrepoint said: "What has kept you at work so late today, Mr. Hardinge? I have heard of no new piece in preparation." "No," he said, "there is nothing new, only I think it would be a disgrace to the theatre if we put on that worn and ragged old pair of flats for the garden scene in Romeo and Juliet, and I persuaded old Potts to let me touch it up afresh." "Was it only for the credit of the theatre that you did that ?" asked Madge, looking softly at him. Well, no, perhaps not," he said. "I petulantly; "it is very little I am able to do, but even that don't meet with much return." do "Gerald !" said Miss Pierrepoint, "what you mean "Where were you last night ?" asked he, turning suddenly on her; "where did you go to after you had finished here?" "You have not the slightest right to ask me that question at all, Mr. Hardinge," said Miss Pierrepoint, drawing herself up and looking straight at him, "and certainly not to ask it in that tone." "I know I have no right," interrupted Gerald. "But as I have no reason to be ashamed of what I did," continued Miss Pierrepoint, without heeding him, "I do not mind telling you that I went to meet a person on important private business of my own." And you did not get back until nearly midnight," said Gerald. "How do you know that ?" "How do I know it? Because I saw you return. I walked up and down the street in front of your door, from the time Rose told me you were out, until I saw you safe once more within the house." What, were you there during all that terrible storm ?" asked Miss Pierrepoint. "Yes, I was! I did not mind that; there was far too great a storm going on within my breast for me to pay much attention to the thunder and lightning; I thought, perhaps, you had gone to meet some man, and I was nearly mad." 66 'My poor boy," said Madge, soothingly. Oh, Madge! Madge! if you only knew what I suffer through jealousy; all this morning I have been like a lunatic, looking down on to the stage, and seeing that old Boodle make love to you at rehearsal." "But Mr. Boodle plays Romeo, Gerald !” Yes, I know all about that; of course he must do it; and he is fifty years old, and wears a wig and false teeth, but still I hate to see him or any one else come near you, or touch you.' "But why are you so jealous, Gerald ?" 'Why? Because I love you. You know it, Madge, you know this, you are certain of it, and yet you ask me why I am jealous." dare say 66 I should not have done it if it had been Miss Delamere's benefit, or if Miss Montmorency had been playing Juliet. You know well enough why I did it.” You are a kind, good boy, Gerald," said Miss Pierrepoint, softly laying her hand on his arm, 66 and never mind giving up your time, or taking trouble for me." Kind, good boy, am I?" said he, "Yes, Gerald," she said, in a low voice, her hand again falling softly on his arm, "I think you are fond of me; you have shown that you are, indeed, more than once." 'No, I have not!" he burst out; "I have no chance or opportunity of doing so! I only want to prove to you how much I love you! I hate the life you are leading, |