both the Baronet and Colonel Canteen to the tête-à-tête on the bank below.

"What was that?" said Sir James, who, as it has been mentioned, did not understand one word of Italian. "What did the man say?"

"Oh, nothing," said Mrs. Mechlin, "only this pastoral Pistrucci was inspired by this garden of Eden to improvvisare a paraphrase of Milton. He has found, it seems, an Adam and Eve there:

The loveliest pair

That ever since in love's embraces met.'

I am at best but a bad hand at a quotation. There is something, I know, about sons and daughters, which don't signify-but

• Under a tuft of shade, that on a green Stood whispering soft; by a fresh fountain side They sat them down.'

That's appropriate enough, you must

own."

"It's all d-d nonsense," said Sir James, a little sharply, and much to the astonishment of his female companion, who could not but be a little surprised at any appearance of emotion on his part, at her playful allusion to a flirtation which had long been so obvious to her scandal-seeking eyes, that she had given him credit for fashionable indifference on the subject; otherwise, though not ever partial to Lord Ormsby, nor so fond of Matilda as formerly, she would have been the last to have risked any thing that might by possibility tend to an escalandre, which would endanger the permanence of an establishment that was so convenient to herself.

But if jealousy is sometimes "light as air," it is also as unaccountable as the wind, as to "whence it cometh." From an unintelligible calm upon the

subject of Matilda's and Ormsby's intimacy, Sir James seemed suddenly as causelessly agitated by a rising storm of passion, without any apparent provocation; and, when they joined them on the green below, and he was informed by Lady Matilda, that the invalid had suffered much from over-exertion, he could not contain himself sufficiently to return a tolerably civil answer; but, hurrying Matilda away under pretence that it was late, and they had long been looking for them, he insisted upon Mrs. Mechlin and Colonel Canteen accompanying them home in his carriage, and left Ormsby alone in the other to find his way to his solitary lodgings.

CHAPTER XXIII.

HEAVILY hung the hours, as Matilda, without the accustomed charm of Ormsby's society, was left a prey to Sir James's increasing peevishness, which was doubly irritating to a mind not entirely free from feelings of self-reproach as to her recent conduct. On the morning immediately succeeding the scene which was last described, being somewhat relieved by the temporary absence of Mrs. Mechlin, who was gone. with a party to Frascati; she had, in the course of her solitary rambles, sought in Saint Peter's an escape from the world and from herself.

It is just at that hour when all is

bustle and business without, that these splendid solitudes are most imposing. In the interval of the pomp of fixed religious observances, nothing is heard from aisle to aisle but the muttered prayer of the lonely penitent.

I have said that Matilda's religious education had been neglected. Her family had formerly been Catholics. Her uncle was the first who, for political purposes, had renounced the creed of his fathers. Left in early infancy to his exclusive management, she had been ostensibly brought up in the tenets of the Church of England; but, though Lord Wakefield always declaimed with the redoubled zeal of a convert upon the inseparable union of Church and State, Matilda observed, that he found in practice this union utterly incompatible; for not only did the State entirely monopolize his attention six days in every week,