thinking of-nay, even hoping for-his coming; and when he came she was miserable, and felt her solitary hopeless position more keenly than in his absence.

"O, why did I ever see him?" she asked herself. "I should have struggled on, somehow, at such places as Market Deeping, and might in the end have succeeded in my profession. And now I have given up all my hopes to please him- and he does not care. What can it matter to him whether I am an actress or a governess? I am nothing to him."

He does not care! This was the note, the dominant of all Miss Alford's sad reveries. She toiled on patiently, always anxious to please her patroness; but it seemed to her very hard that in gaining this new friend, she should have so utterly lost that old sweet friendship which had begun in the days when she wore holland pinafores, and fished for bream and barbel with a wretched worm impaled upon a crooked pin.

Once, when her sad thoughts were saddest, a faint sigh escaped her lips as she bent over her work, in her accustomed seat by one of the windows, remote from the spot affected by Mrs. Jerningham; and, looking up some minutes afterwards, she saw Laurence Desmond's eyes fixed upon her with a look that penetrated her heart. Ah, what did it mean, that tender, deeply-mournful look? This inexperienced girl dared not trust her own translation of its meaning. gard touched her heart with a new feeling.

But that sad re

"He thinks of me; he is sorry for me," she said to herself. More than this she dared not hope; but in her dreams that night, and in her thoughts and dreams of many days and nights to come, the look was destined to haunt her. In the next minute she heard Mrs. Jerningham announce her desire for a game of chess, with the tone of an extremely proper Cleopatra to an unmartial Antony.

The weeks and months went by, and Mrs. Jerningham was still a kind and hospitable friend to the helpless girl whom Mr. Desmond had cast upon her compassion.

"I am very glad you introduced her to me," Emily said sometimes to the editor of the Pallas. "She is really a dear little thing; and I am growing quite attached to her."

"Yes, she is a good little girl," replied Mr. Desmond, in a careless tone.

"And as to jealousy," resumed Emily, "of course that is quite out of the question with such a dear harmless little creature."

"Of course."

And then Mrs. Jerningham looked at Mr. Desmond, and Mr. Desmond looked at Mrs. Jerningham, with the air of accomplished swordsmen on guard.

Was Mrs. Jerningham jealous of this "dear harmless little creature”? She watched Miss Lucy very closely when Laurence was present, and

VOL. V.

X

had a sharp eye for Laurence when he gave Miss Lucy good-day; but if she had been jealous, she would scarcely have kept Lucy at the villa, where Laurence saw her very often; on the other hand, if Lucy had not been at the villa Laurence might have seen her even more often, and Mrs. Jerningham could not have been present at their meetings; so there may have been some alloy of self-interest mingled with the pure gold of womanly kindness.

The spring ripened into early summer, and the Hampton villa looked its brightest; but neither spring nor summer saw the end of Emily Jerningham's family cough. She insisted upon making light of the matter, and as, unhappily, those about her were inexperienced in illness, the slight but perpetual cough gave little uneasiness. Before Laurence she made a point of appearing at her best. Excitement gave colour to her cheeks and light to her eyes. The outline of her patrician face was little impaired by some loss of roundness, and her elegant demie-toilettes concealed the fact that she was growing alarmingly thin. Her maid alone knew the extent of the change, which she and the housekeeper discussed, with much solemn foreboding of coming ill.

"I had to line the sleeves of her last dress with wadding," said the abigail; "such a beautiful arm as she had too, when I first came to her; but she's been going off gradual like for the last three years, pore thing! and as to talking to her about her 'ealth, it would be as much as my place is worth, for a prouder lady, nor a more reserved in her ways, I never lived with. You might as well stand behind a statue, and brush its hair, till you're ready to drop, for anything like conversation you can get out of her; and when I think of my last lady-which was a countess, as you know, Wilcox, and the things she'd tell me, and the way she loved a bit of gossip-it turns my blood to ice like to wait upon Mrs. Jerningham. And yet as generous a lady as ever I served; and as kind and civil-spoken, in her own cold way."

Mrs. Jerningham paid several visits to Dr. Leonards; but as she obstinately or apathetically ignored that distinguished physician's counsels, she was no better for those drives to Great George-street.

Laurence questioned her closely as to these interviews, and would fain have questioned Dr. Leonards himself, had his position authorised him to do so.

Lucy, who knew absolutely nothing of illness, believed her kind. patroness's cough to be the merest nervous irritation of the throat; nor was Mrs. Colton in any manner alarmed. No one but Mrs. Jerningham herself knew of her feverish nights, and daily hours of suffering and languor, endured in the solitude of her pretty morning-room. Even the patient herself had no apprehension of danger. The languor had crept upon her by such slow degrees, the fever had so long been a chronic disorder.

"If I were happy, I should soon be well, I daresay," she said to

herself; "the fever and the weakness are of the mind rather than the body."

In the first week of summer Mr. Desmond gave himself a brief respite from the cares of the Pallas, and secured bachelor lodgings at Sunbury, where he kept his boat, and whence he rowed to and from River Lawn.

"And this week you are really going to give to me?" said Mrs. Jerningham.

"To you and to Father Thames. I hope you are as fond of the river as you were last summer."

"O yes. The river has been my companion upon many a lonely summer day. I have reason to be fond of the river."

She glanced with something of sadness to her favourite seat under the drooping boughs of a Spanish chestnut. Her summer days had been very lonely, lacking all those elements which make the lives of women sweet and happy. For her had been no murmur of children's voices, no pleasant cares of household, no daily expectation of a husband's return from club or senate, office or counting-house; no weekly round of visits among the poor; no sense of duty done: only a dull listless blank, and the last new novel, and the last new colour in gros de Lyons, and the last new monster in scentless gaudy horticulture, a chocolate-coloured calceolaria, a black dahlia, a sea-green camellia japonica.

"You are going to give me the whole week," she said. "O Laurence, I will try to be happy!"

She said this with unwonted earnestness, and with eyes that were dim with unshed tears. And she kept her word. She did honestly try to be happy, and she succeeded in being-gay. If the gaiety were somewhat feverish, if her harmonious laugh bordered on that laughter whereof Solomon said "it was mad," she did for the moment. contrive to escape thought. This was something; for of late thought had been only another name for care.

Mr. Desmond had rowed stroke in the University Eight, and shared the Oxonian fallacy that to scull from ten to twenty miles under a broiling sun is the intellectual man's best repose. He rested his brain from the labours of the Pallas, and spent his days in pulling a roomy wherry to and fro between Hampton and Maidenhead, with Mrs. Jerningham and Lucy Alford for his passengers, and a dainty little hamper of luncheon for his cargo.

The weather was lovely. The landscape through which the river winds between Hampton and Chertsey, between Chertsey and Maidenhead, is a kind of terrestrial paradise, and a paradise peopled with classic shades; and all along those pastoral, villa-dotted banks nestled little villages and trimly-furnished inns, within whose hospitable shade the wanderers might repose, while the smart maple-painted boat bobbed up and down at anchor in the sun. These peaceful rovers kept no count