self, if I ring," and Mr. MacAndrew disappeared.

"Glad to see you," said the manager, entering the small room in which Guy had been deposited by the boy

Mr. MacAndrew was a man somewhat below the middle size, but of considerable girth and weight. A florid, somewhat handsome face, with a round bullet head and short cropped hair, was rather spoiled by a constant trick of elevation of the eyebrows, which gave the impression of a suspicious temperament. His dress was a suit of glossy black, with a sort of wisp of white muslin round the neck. His hands were fat, white, and well-formed, and he occasionally glanced at them with satisfaction, although their cleanliness was not such as altogether to correspond to the splendid diamond ring, which was the only ornament of any description in which Mr. MacAndrew indulged.

"Glad to see you.

you come?"

How did

"In a gig from Plumport." "The Bear gig."

"Yes."

"I suppose the wheel came off." "Well, it certainly did," said Guy, rather surprised.

"Ha, ha," laughed the manager, "it does nine times out of ten. I suppose Mr. Pierce fully instructed to the nature of your you as duties?"

"Mr. Pierce merely referred me to you, sir."

"Quite right, quite right," said the manager, "My time is so excruciatingly occupied to the minutest fraction that I think the shortest plan will be for you to keep accompanying me for the next few days, through the works, observe all that you see, and if that don't instruct you, I don't know what will. You come at nine."

"Very well."

"Time to the minute," said the manager, "I always do. Order and regularity above all things, Mr." (he glanced at the note) "CarringBest take up your quarters

ton.

with Mrs. Dodds."

"I beg pardon," said Guy. "Dear me!" shouted the manager, "I hope you are not deaf. You had best make arrangements to be accommodated with lodging and with board under the roof of the widow of your predecessor, the defunct Mr. Dodds. She is an excellent woman, and the house is within half a minute's walk of the works.

"Mr. Pierce arranged for my residing at Plumville Park.

"At Plumville Park-whew," whistled the manager, "why you'll waste at least an hour and a half per diem in unprofitable walking. Know Lady Frances?" added he, with great rapidity.

"No; I have not been presented to Lady Frances."

Well, it is no possible concern of mine," said the manager. "It strikes me as a bit of intolerable idiocy in Pierce, and as highly detrimental to yourself; but, of course, that is nothing to me. Pierce told you as to the wages?" "Mr. Pierce left all details to you."

"I should think so. Well, I like to do things handsomely, what do you ask?"

"I leave it quite to you."

"Keen hand," said the manager. "Don't try to take me on the blind side. A man should take his own part. Well; as you're rather green, I'll do it for you. You shall have Dodd's wages, if you do Dodd's work. Three pound a week. It's guineas, in fact, but three bob comes off for sick fund and insurance. All right?"

"I suppose so."

"Very well. Now you just stick to my coat-tails till dinner time, and then, if you'll jump into my phaeton,

PLUMVILLE PARK evinced in one respect that the power of wealth is not illimitable. In one respect alone was this apparent. Wealth cannot force forest trees. And in the absence of ancient timber, in any place that deserves the name of grounds, lies the sure sign of the absence of what La Grande Mademoiselle meant, when she said, sent son antiquité de longue main. In fact, shocking as it may seem, Plumville Park, the laying out of which, together with the building of the house, had cost considerably more than a hundred thousand pounds, bore the impress of being the abode of a parvenu. Sir Robert, first baronet of the name, with an income of at least as much as that large sum per annum, was the son of a man who had risen at four in the morning to earn his daily bread, and thought himself happy at night if he had earned a loaf more than he had eaten. Early in life, that is, for old Robert Plum had laid sure and deep, in frugality, in sleepless industry, and in consistent, persistent, unwavering selfishness, the basis of that fortune which had been nursed by the astute intelligence of Robert Plum the second; by the grace of an outgoing minister converted into a baronet, after "assuming," the letters patent said, "the name of Plumville." By persevering in the family tradition, Sir Robert Baker Plumville, first baronet of that name, had so far risen upon and above the shoulders of his father, that if his seventy-two

years of life could have been doubled, or even extended to the modest term of a century, the same rate of progress would have seen him, if not the Duke of Plumsomething, at least the owner of good part of South Wales. Even as it was, at the period of his death, his infant son was the heir to one of the oldest English baronies, with a further contingent claim on an earldom (the marquisate of his maternal grandfather being limited to heirs male).

-

Wanting in timber a want made more cruelly evident by the conscientious, and truly laudable efforts of the landscape gardener to supply the deficiency by the time the second baronet should come of age

Plumville Park enjoyed all that can be formed by art in the way of garden, without that essential setting. For flowers, indeed, it was better that the trees were absent. Cataracts and jets, in unexpected places, shaven lawns, stately terraces, broad gravel paths, furlongs of hot walls, acres of glass, pineries, and India houses, and conservatories of every clime, and of every form, were among the attractions of the estate.

The house itself was an admirable structure. If its builder had been able to invest it so far with the mantle of antiquity as to enable the man of taste to explain, with "the fashion of those days you know," any slight deviations from the severity of the canon of his criticism, it would have been noble. A broad flight of steps ascended to the principal entrance, and lofty Corinthian columns adorned the centre, or body of the house. On either side wings stretched away, and the castellated bell turret of the stables rose to the right behind a nascent shrubbery. The pillars only projected for half their diameter from the building,

and the pediment did not afford the shadow of a porch; but lofty glazed doors gave access to the entrance hall, a room sixty feet by forty, and reaching to the top of the second storey of the three that the façade contained. At one end of this hall a projecting gallery showed that the presence of an orchestra might readily convert it into a ball-room. At the other end a full-sized mounted knight, a magnificent bronze casting, bore the arms, and achievements of Plumville (né Plum). The blazon borne on the shield, on the person, and on the surcoat of the bronze knight, had been definitely settled by the authority of the Heralds College, at a great expense of their investigating or their inventive powers. Correctly blazoned the bearings were as follows:Quarterly-first and fourth sinople, on a saltire or, five Orleans plums of the first, with the augmentation of a chief argent charged with a castle, with three turrets sable for ville-PLUMVILLE. Second -Sable, on a chevron or, between three anvils argent, three marteaux gules-SMITHERS. ThirdGules, three pedes in pale argent, between six manchets or-Baker. Over all, in chief, the badge of the baronet of Nova Scotia, and on a scutcheon of pretence argent a chief azure-BARTON DE RAVILLE. Crest, a boar's head, sinople tusked argent, langued or, gorged with a ducal coronet or, having in its mouth an Orleans plum of the first. Motto, QUOD FECI FECI.

worship of Plumville, the door above referred to gave the visitor admission to the great drawingroom, second only in dimensions to the hall-being some thirty feet by forty. From either end of the hall opened passages, or corridors, right and left. White stone staircases rose at each end of this block of building, giving access to the rooms on the second storey over the apartments flanking the hall. A glass door, at the end of the corridor lying to the right as you entered, showed the prolongation of the gallery through the wing, while a massive scagliola gateway, under the corresponding staircase, shut off the private rooms of the master, quite an independent house, occupying the left wing. of the building. When this door was flung open, and the whole suit of rooms was illuminated, a grand gallery of two hundred and fifty feet in length, pierced the pile from end to end.

The main entrance fronted towards the north. The drawing room looked out on the gardens. The great dining room was to one side of the hall. Northwards a corresponding apartment was fitted up as a library. A smaller drawing room lay eastward of the larger one, and a reading room, a boudoir, and one or two other apartments occupying the angle of the building, were there set apart for Lady Plumville's own.

It was only one of those minor, and justly absorbed, opponents to the triumphant extension of the great Plumville interest, who had said that Plumville Hall was built upon the curses of the poor and the pillaged. It was not a common sense remark, for so stately a pile would never have have rested on so floating and freshly renewed a base. And it was the fault of the architect-or of the age-not of Sir Robert, that the chapel was

quite forgotten. Sir Robert would have beens hocked if the omission had been pointed out, and if moreover, it had been once driven into his head that it was an omission. Sir Robert would have been extremely annoyed to have been thought wanting in such a proper mark of respect for Divine Providence as ought to have been thus architecturally displayed. And if anyone had dared to force Sir Robert to listen to the positing of his syllogism," The houses of the old gentry have chapels, Plumville Hall has no chapel. Therefore, etc. etc.!!" Sir Robert would probably have pulled down the house

-or he would have compromised the matter, with his usual astuteness, by putting an organ and a set of prie-dieux in the Billiard Hall. It has been done by persons more religiously trained than was Sir Robert.

Lady Frances Plumville, however, on the completion of the contract of alliance between the only daughter of Reginald Plantagenet Fulque Archambaud Branksea, second Marquis and fifth Earl Branksea, by his first wife, the sole daughter and heiress of Francis Lord Barton de Raville, and the son of Bobby Plum, and Betty Smithers, had bent her strong will, clear sense, and good taste, which qualities were never known to fail her, save in that one little matter of the alliance in question (as to the means of inducing which strange tales were told) to the best method of supplying that unintentional oversight of the existence of the Almighty. A very perfect early English Church, under the invocation of SS. John the Evangelist, and John the Baptist, Apostle and Martyr, rose in the precincts of the newly extended park, replacing a small, ancient, and dilapidated structure, half way between a barn and a pigsty, with a cross of the pigeon

house, which formerly occupied the consecrated site. The old village graves, or rather their contents, under a faculty obtained from the Lord Bishop of the Diocese, had been carted into some newly consecrated and out of the way spot. The little village of Brierly, which reared its gables around the old church, not requiring any faculty for its destruction other than that supplied by the bankers of Sir Robert, had been carted away also. What had become of the villagers was not written in the chronicles of the house of Plumville. The parsonage for the church of the Saints John, nestling in a copse which skirted the park, was yet unfinished. The grant of this was in the hands of the lay impropriator. The vicar of Brierly, now nominis umbra, was the Reverend Samuel Splatt, D.C.L., chaplain to the most noble the Marquis of Branksea. The curate of Dr. Splatt was the Reverend Lucius Blaise Reredos, A.M.

The viceroy over all this magnificence of the house and Park, in the absence of Lady Frances Plumville and the infant Sir Robert, then newly completing his third year, was one Mrs. Watkins, the housekeeper. Mrs. Watkins was a very little woman, with a delicate complexion; the pattern of neatness and the pink of cleanliness. Never was pin or plait out of place in her attire, never did a speck of dust dare to rest on her silken

apron, or snowy cap. Her small features, a little pointed it may be, wore a bland and contented expres sion, only marked at times by a slight sense of responsibility. Not that her sense was slight, for of all exact and conscientious stewards, Mrs. Watkins was a brilliant example, but that the expression was slight. Yet if anyone should presume on all this patience

and gentleness of demeanour, to try and ride roughshod over Mrs. Watkins, they would find that they had reckoned without their host. Somehow or other, that mild little woman always had her own way. At Plumville, where she arrived only at the period of change in all domestic arrangements that immediately preceded Sir Robert's marriage, she ruled supreme. Even had, which is inconceivable, any difference of opinion arisen between her Ladyship and the housekeeper, a man of judgment would have betted on the latter. Appeal against her mild dicta there was simply none. One weak point, or it may be thought strong point, was remarkable in the character of Mrs. Watkins. Though good-looking, and, indeed, unusually pleasantlooking herself, she had an extreme intolerance of good looks in her own sex. A pretty housemaid

of

would have been a thorn in her flesh. The maidens over whom she ruled, by some process natural selection proper to her sphere, were stout, cleanly, hardworking, well-conducted lasses, but all unexceptionably, and even remarkably, plain. This feeling that, because she was virtuous, there should be no more cakes and ale for persons of different taste, reached its utmost intensity, it may almost be said acerbity of expression, when any mention was made in the hearing of Mrs. Watkins of a certain Betsy Jenkins, an itinerant fish-woman, well-known in South Wales. Betsy was a person who might well have been the heroine of a romance, had there been any more romantic incidents in the poor creature's life than her trudging backwards and forwards from the little fishing village where she lived, to the market town, laden with a heavy creel of fish, or of oysters. But she was simply and perfectly

beautiful. She had skin like a lily, brown eyes and hair, carnation cheeks and lips, the carriage of a duchess, and the voice of an angel. A native of the birth-place of the lovely Nell Gwynn, she shared the magical charms of that famous orange-girl. But while poor Nelly had only one frailty, although that was a royal one, Betsy was never accused of any. She was as good and as simple as she was beautiful. Yet her approach to the hall, especially if any gentlemen were staying there, seemed to effect the whole demeanour and plumage of Mrs. Watkins, as a turkeycock is affected by the display of a piece of scarlet, or by the imitation of his arabic gobble.

It was about seven o'clock in the evening when Guy Carrington, a little fatigued, and perhaps more than a little discomfited, by some hours of the society of Mr. MacAndrew, rang at the hall door. It was promptly opened by a servant in the Plumville livery, not the state dress, green and gold, but the half dress, green and yellow. "Am I expected here-Mr. Carrington," said Guy. "Yes, sir. Please to walk this way, sir," said the man.

The servant piloted Guy across the lofty hall into an apartment connected with the drawing-room suite which was intended for a card room, and saying: "Will you please to take a seat while I go and tell Mrs. Watkins," withdrew. He shortly reopened the door, and Mrs. Watkins, smoothing down her unruffled apron, entered with a civil little curtsey.

Mrs. Watkins had expected Mr. Carrington since the morning. She knew it would be her ladyship's desire that Mr. Carrington should find himself comfortable at the Hall. She had not sent Mr. Carrington's portmanteau into a chamber, because Mr. Carrington