'I used to fancy she liked him a little once, but I thought Lord Paulyn had put all that out of her head, and that she had set her heart upon becoming a viscountess.'

'Elizabeth is a mixture,' said Blanche senten

6

tiously; one moment the most mercenary being in the world, and the next like that classic party, with a name something like Sophia, ready to throw herself off a rock for love. It'll be rather nice, though, to have Mr. Forde for a brother, won't it, Di?'

'It would have been nicer to have had a viscount,' responded Diana.

In the bleak garden once more, the March winds buffeting them, the daffodils waving at their feet, the world a paradise.

'Was papa very much surprised?' inquired Elizabeth.

"Yes, darling; more surprised than I had expected to find him, for he had evidently learned to consider Lord Paulyn almost your plighted lover.'

'How absurd!' cried the girl with a little toss of her head; such an idea would never have entered papa's mind of itself. He is not a person to have ideas. But aunt Chevenix talked such rubbish, just because Lord Paulyn came here a good deal. I sup

pose this was about the only place he had to come to, on the days he didn't hunt.'

'I think there would be a few more houses open to him within a radius of ten miles, although he does not bear a very high character,' said Mr. Forde gravely.

'Perhaps. However, he seemed to like coming here,' replied Elizabeth carelessly. I am sorry he has not a good character, for he is not at all a badnatured young man, although one is apt to get tired of his society after an hour or so. You are not going to be jealous of him, I hope ?'

'I should be very jealous of any farther friendship, of any farther acquaintance even, between him and my future wife. He is not a good man, believe me, Elizabeth. There are things I cannot possibly tell you, but he is known to have led a bad life. I think you must know that I am not a collector of scandal, but his character is notorious.'

'You were jealous of him that Sunday at lunch, Malcolm,' she said in her childish way, clinging to his arm with a timid fondness. I saw you scowling at us, and I was prouder of your anger than I was of his admiration; and then you kept away, and I saw no more of you for ages, and I thought you a monster of coldness and cruelty.'

'Yes, dear, I was savagely jealous; and, O, my darling, promise me that there shall be no more intimacy between that man and you. I hate the idea of this visit to your aunt's, for that reason above all. You will meet him in town, perhaps; you will have aunt Chevenix by your side, dropping her worldly poison into your ear. Will you be deaf to all her arguments? Will you be true and pure and noble in spite of her ?'

'I will be nothing that you disapprove,' said Elizabeth; and then with a little burst of truthfulness she went on, 'Do trust me, Malcolm. I only want just one little peep at the world before I bid it goodbye for ever the world about which I have dreamed so much. It will be only for a few weeks.'

'Very well, dear, I will trust you. If you could not pass scatheless through such an ordeal, you would be hardly worthy of an honest man's love. My dearest treasure, I will hazard you. I think I can trust you, Elizabeth. But if you cannot come back to me pure and true, for God's sake let me never look upon your face again.'

END OF BOOK THE FIRST.

Book the Second.

CHAPTER I.

'Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast: the one struggles to separate itself from the other. The one clings with obstinate fondness to the world, with organs like cramps of steel; the other lifts itself majestically from the mist to the realms of an exalted ancestry.'

A SUNNY afternoon in the second week of May, one of those brilliant spring days which cheat the dweller in cities, who has no indications of the year's progress around and about him-no fields of newly-sprouting corn, or hedges where the blackthorn shows silverywhite above grassy banks dappled with violets and primroses-into the belief that summer is at hand. The citizen has no succession of field birds to serve for his time-keepers, but he hears canaries and piping bullfinches carolling in balconies, perhaps sees a flower-girl at a street-corner, and begins to think he is in the month of roses.

It seemed the month of roses in one small drawing-room in Eaton-place-south-a back drawing-room

and of the tiniest, with a fernery of dark green glass, artfully contrived to shed a dim religious light upon the chamber, and at the same time mask the view of an adjacent mews—the daintiest possible thing in the way of back drawing-rooms, furnished with chairs and dwarf couches of the pouff species, covered with creamcoloured cretonne and befrilled muslin; a coffee-table or two in convenient corners; the clock on the maroon-velvet-covered mantelpiece, a chubby Cupid in turquoise Sèvres beating a drum; the candelabra, two other chubby blue bantlings struggling under their burden of wax-candles; curtains of maroon velvet and old Flemish lace half screening the fire in the low steel grate. Ensconced in the most luxurious of the pouffs, with her feet on the tapestried fender-stool (a joint labour of the four Luttrell girls), and a large green fan between her face and the glow, sat Elizabeth Luttrell. She was not alone. Aunt Chevenix was writing letters at her davenport in the front drawing-room; the swift flight of her quill pen might be heard ever and anon in the rearward chamber; and Reginald Paulyn was sitting à cheval upon a smaller pouff, rocking himself softly to and fro, to the endangerment of the castors, as he discoursed.

'Come now, Miss Luttrell, I want you to like Mrs. Cinqmars,' he said, in an argumentative