she resolutely demanded to see his patient, that, as Sir James was not at home, and there was nobody who had any right to controul her, the medical man did not feel himself authorised to refuse.

Upon entering the apartment, taking Ormsby's cold and clammy hand within hers, and fixedly gazing on his motionless features, she resisted all attempts at removal, with an unvarying repetition of "No, no, not yet:" so that upon the revival of nature's efforts, when he showed signs of returning animation, his eyes first opened on that loved form whose beauteous grief betrayed an intensity of interest, the inestimable knowledge of which he felt cheaply purchased at the price he was then paying for it.

Whether in virtue of this "medicine for a mind diseased," or his natural

strength of bodily constitution, the surgeon before he left him made an unexpectedly favourable report; upon receiving which, all Matilda's sense of propriety returned; she consigned the care of him to a more appropriate nurse; and had retired from the room before her husband came home from his

long and unsatisfactory search after justice.

CHAPTER XX.

WE have of late, gentle reader, rather dropped the acquaintance of the Hobson family. But though it would be hard to expect, now that you are better acquainted with their characters, that you should submit to continuing on an intimate footing with them, yet they are too nearly connected with one, in whose fate I am particularly anxious that you should be interested, for me to allow you altogether to cut them.

On the morning in which you were first made acquainted with their arrival in Rome, by the interference of their courier Pierre, in the gunsmith's shop, the female members of the Hobson

family were, as usual, assembled in rather a dark, dingy-looking salone of an old-fashioned palazzo, armed with netting-needles, paper, cutting scissars, tambour-frames, and sundry other ancient and primitive weapons, generally employed in all amazonian attempts to kill time. But old Father Time made a very good fight of it with them; and they had already shown, by sundry yawns, how much, in spite of all their efforts, they felt his power, when they were relieved by the arrival of two auxiliaries, who had of late frequently been very useful in enabling them to get the better of a troublesome half hour or two.-These were our Milan acquaintances, the Rev. Mr. Simperton, and his pupil, young Squire Woodhead. Mr. Simperton, as has been hinted before, was very anxious to cultivate the intimacy of the Hobson family;

which fact must now be explained to have arisen from its having occurred to him that a wife with twenty thousand pounds, would be a very pretty addition to his present income, arising from a small college living, the tithes of which he considered as quite inadequate, even to wash his surplice and buy his sermon. This gilding of the matrimonial pill, reconciled him to swallowing even such a bouncing bolus as Miss Betty Hobson.

But could he also persuade his pupil to pay due homage to the charms of the younger sister, Miss Anne, what prospects might then be open to him!—In meditating on this, indistinct visions. floated before his eyes, in which were traced the festive board at Woodhead Hall, at the bottom of which, he was himself bending over a well-filled tureen, with a bottle of iced champagne at his