have reason to believe that the engagement between my niece and Mr. Forde is at an end.'

'What!' cried Reginald Paulyn; 'she has thrown him off. She has served him as she serves everybody else, blown hot one day and cold the next.'

'I have reason to believe that they have quarrelled,' Mrs. Chevenix said mysteriously.

'What, has she seen him lately?'

She has; and since I have gone so far,-on the impulse of the moment, prompted only by my sympathy with your depth of feeling, I must still go farther. The quarrel was about you. Mr. Forde had seen some paragraph associating your nanes— a marriage in high life-something absurd of that kind.'

'Yes, I know; Cinqmars showed me the newspaper. It was his doing, I fancy. Mrs. Cinqmars has taken me under her wing, and no doubt inspired the paragraph, with the notion that it might bring matters to a crisis.'

'It has produced a crisis,' said Mrs. Chevenix solemnly, 'and a very painful one for Elizabeth. The poor girl is utterly crushed."

'She was so fond of that beggar,' muttered Lord Paulyn gloomily.

'Perhaps not so much on that account as for the

humiliation involved in such an idea. To be accused of having played fast and loose, of having encouraged your attentions while she was engaged to him. And now, between you both, she finds herself abandoned, standing alone in the world, perhaps the mark for slander.'

'Abandoned! standing alone? cried Lord Paulyn, starting up from his low chair as if he would have rushed off at once in quest of a marriage license. Why, she must know that I am ready to marry her to-morrow!'

This was just the point at which Mrs. Chevenix could afford to leave him.

'My dear young friend,' she exclaimed, moderate your feelings, I entreat. She is not a girl to be taken by storm. Let her recover from the shock she has received; then, while her heart is still sore, wounded, weary with a sense of its own emptiness, then urge your suit once more, and I have little doubt that you will conquer; that the contrast between your generous all-confiding affection and Mr. Forde's jealous tyranny will awaken the purest and truest emotions of her heart.'

This was a more exalted style of language than Reginald Paulyn cared about—a kind of thing which, in his own simple and forcible vocabulary, he de

nominated humbug'-but the main fact was pleasing to him. Elizabeth had dismissed, or had been deserted by, her plighted lover. The ground was cleared for himself.

CHAPTER VIII.

'She weeps alone for pleasures not to be;
Sorely she wept until the night came on,
And then, instead of love, O misery!

She brooded o'er the luxury alone:
His image in the dusk she seem'd to see,

And to the silence made a gentle moan,
Spreading her perfect arms upon the air,
And on her couch low murmuring, "Where? O

where ?"

No flicker of colour brightened the pallid cheeks, no ray of their accustomed light shone in the dull eyes, and yet Elizabeth was not ill. She was only intensely miserable.

'I only wish I were ill,' she said impatiently, when her aunt urged the necessity of medical advice, change of air-some speedy means by which blanched cheeks and heavy eyes might be cured. For in that case there might be some hope that I should die. But I am not ill; I don't believe my pulse beats half-a-dozen times more in a minute since Malcolm Forde renounced me. I eat and drink, and sleep even, more or less. There are a good many

hours in every night in which I lie awake staring at the wall; but before the maid comes to get my bath ready, I do manage to sleep, somehow. And I dream that Malcolm and I are happy, walking on the common just beyond our house at Hawleigh. I never dream of our quarrel; only that I am with him, and utterly happy. I think the pain of waking from one of those lying dreams, and finding that it is only a dream, is sharper agony than the worst vision of his unkindness with which sleep could torture me. Το dream that he is all my own, to feel his hand locked in mine, and to wake and remember that I have lost him-yes, that is misery.'

Whereupon Mrs. Chevenix would dilate upon the childishness of such regrets, and would set forth the numerous deprivations which her niece would have had to endure as Mr. Forde's wife; how she could never have kept her carriage, or at best only a ponychaise or one-horse wagonette, the hollowest mockery or phantasm of a carriage, infinitely worse than none, as implying the desire for an equipage without the ability to maintain one-a thing that would be spoken of timorously as a conveyance;' how, as a clergyman's wife, she could not hope to be on a level with the county families; how all her natural aspirations for 'style' and 'society' would be nipped in the bud;