found his life unendurable without her; that she must needs be as necessary to his existence as he was to hers. Poor deluded fool! she had taken no account of his one supreme ambition when she made that calculation; she had thought of him only as a weak creature like herself, the slave of an earthly passion.

Throughout that eloquent sermon she had hardly taken her eyes from his face; but not often had his glance shot downwards to the dusky corner where she sat, a white still figure, phantom-like in the uncertain light. His gaze, for the most part, was directed far beyond her, to the mass of shabbily-dressed listeners who crowded the other end of the church, his peculiar flock, those English heathens he had found in the lanes and byways of Hawleigh and its neighbouring villages, some of whom had walked half-a-dozen miles to hear his farewell.

There had been a good deal of quiet crying among the women, but no dramatic or oratorical display of emotion on the part of the preacher. Yet every one felt that he was deeply moved; that it was not without profound sorrow he bade them such a long goodbye. There was a solemn hush as he came down from the pulpit, and for some breathless moments the people stood motionless, looking after him. Then came a favourite hymn, 'From Greenland's icy mountains,'

a hymn which the congregation sang with faltering voice; tremulous sopranos among the young-ladyhood of Hawleigh testifying to the esteem in which the Curate had been held. No sound of Elizabeth's voice mingled with that psalmody; Gertrude sang in a high soprano, with a tremolo which she affected at all times, and the air of a martyr making melody as she marched towards the stake; and it seemed as if that shrill peal drew Mr. Forde's attention to the Vicar's pew. He looked that way, and saw Elizabeth standing like a statue, with a face as white as her gown.

6

CHAPTER X.

'O last love! O first love!

My love with the true, true heart!
To think I have come to this your home,

And yet we are apart.'

A SLEEPLESS night; a night of tossing to and fro, and mental fever and doubt and uncertainty, half-formed resolves, a long struggle between love and pride; and the early summer light shines on a pale eager face and tired eyes that have been watching for the dawn.

When that laggard morning comes, Elizabeth Luttrell has made up her mind to do something very desperate, very mad perhaps; she does not shrink from confessing as much to herself; but something without doing which she feels she cannot endure her life.

She will see him once more, face to face; hear his voice speaking to her, and her only, once more in their lives; touch his hand, perchance, in friendly farewell, and then resign herself to their inevitable parting.

Of the reversal of that decree, or that any influ

ence she can bring to bear can make him waver in his purpose, she cherishes no hope. There was that in his speech and manner last night which spoke of a resolve no earthly forces could shake. What could her selfish passion, her narrow love, do against a purpose so high, a scheme that involved the eternal wėlfare of millions? For who shall assign the natural limits of the missionary's work, or gauge the width of that new world over which his influence shall extend?

No; she deluded herself with no hope that he might be turned aside even at the last moment, by the witchery of her smiles, by the pathos of her tears. She knew now that his world was not her world; that wide as the east is from the west were his thoughts from her thoughts. She hoped nothing, except that he would hear her patiently when she sought to exonerate herself from the charge of inconstancy, or any flagrant wrong against him; hear her while she told him the true history of her acquaintance with Lord Paulyn; hear and believe her, and carry away with him at least the memory of a woman who had loved him dearly, and had never wronged him by so much as a thought.

And then they would shake hands calmly, and he would give her his blessing, the blessing of a possible

saint and martyr; and so he would fade for ever from her bodily eyes, leaving only that image of him which she must carry in her heart to the grave.

'I have no pride where he is concerned,' she thought, as she paused to consider how vast an outrage against the conventionalities she was about to perpetrate.

The up-train by which most London-bound travellers of the superior or first-class rank were accustomed to depart from Hawleigh was a nine-o'clock express. She thought it more than probable that Mr. Forde would go to London as the preliminary stage of his journey, and it was just possible that he might go by that train. If she called at his lodgings at eight o'clock, she would secure her desired interview; she knew his early habits, and that he had generally breakfasted and begun his day's work by that hour. Of what Mrs. Humphreys, the carpenter's wife, might say about this untimely visit, she thought nothing; being indeed, at all times, too impetuous for profound consideration of consequences.

She dressed herself quietly while Blanche was still asleep. They had a slip of a bath-room, converted from the oratory of some mediaval châtelaine, on one side of their tower; here Elizabeth made her toilette, and then crept softly out of the bedchamber