with a miserable cowardly shrinking, from the sacrifice. I knew that for you and me together there could be no such thing as happiness, either in the present or the future; but I was capable of chaining you to my wretchedness rather than of seeing you happy with another. All that is most base and selfish in my nature was in the ascendant that day. No words can tell how I struggled with my wickedness. I was not strong enough to vanquish it. I knew that it was my duty to surrender every claim upon you; but I could not bring myself to face that duty. From the maze of my perplexities extrication seemed impossible. Happily for all of us, Providence has given me a means of escape. I may keep you my prisoner to the end of my life, Laurence, and yet be guilty of no supreme selfishness, for my days are numbered."

"My dear Emily, why imagine this ?"

"I know it, Laurence. I did not need to read it in the faces of my doctors, as I have read it. For a long time I have felt a sense of age creeping upon me; a weariness of life which is not natural to a woman of thirty. Death has approached me very slowly, but his hold is so much the more sure. Comfort me as much as you like, Laurence, but do not delude me. I know that I have a very short time to spend upon this earth; let me spend some of it with you." "I will be your slave, dear."

"And when I am gone you will forget how sorely I have tried you? You will remember me with tenderness? Yes, I know you will. And your young wife shall be no loser by my friendship, Laurence. I have the power to will away some of the money settled on me by Mr. Jerningham, and I shall divide it between my aunt and Lucy. My aunt has a very good income of her own, you know, and needs nothing from me, except as a proof of my affection for her. Your young wife shall not come to you dowerless, Laurence! Your wife. How sweet that word 'wife' can sound! I can fancy you in your home. You will not marry very soon after I am gone, Laurence ?"

"My dearest," cried Laurence with a sob, "do you think old ties are so easily broken? No, Emily, the love I have borne for you is a part of my manhood. It cannot be put away. That innocent girl, with her tender homelike sweetness, stole my heart before I was aware it could change; but she cannot blot out the past. If ever she is my wife, I shall love her dearly and faithfully, and a home shared with her will be very pleasant to me; but in a sacred corner of my heart must for ever remain the image of my first love. forget these things, Emily; nor is the second love the same as the first; and the man who outlives the faith of his youth feels that 'there hath passed away a glory from the earth.""

Men do not

"You will remember me, and there will be some regret in the remembrance. I ask no more of Fate. O, Laurence, we have had some happy hours together! Try to remember those. My life within

the past year or two has been a long disease. Try to forget how I have worried you with my causeless jealousies, my selfish exactions."

Very tender and reassuring were the words which Laurence Desmond spoke to his first love after this. An almost extinguished affection revives in such an hour as this. As the candle of life burns brightest at the close, so too Love's torch has its expiring splendour, and flames anew before we turn it downwards for ever.

When Lucy and Mrs. Colton returned from their walk they found the invalid unusually cheerful. The voyage to Madeira was discussed, and Emily talked with delight of that distant island. Mr. Desmond was well up in the topography of the remote settlement, and planned everything in the pleasantest manner for the avoidance of fatigue to the invalid.

"I wish Potter were more used to travelling," said Mrs. Colton of the River-Lawn butler. "We shall have to take him with us, I think; but he will be quite lost among Spaniards and Portuguese, and I don't know how he will be able to arrange affairs for us with regard to hotelaccommodation, and so on."

"I will relieve Potter from all responsibility upon that question," said Mr. Desmond.

"You!" cried Emily.

"Yes, if you will permit me to be your escort. I spent a week in Madeira when I was on my Spanish wanderings."

"And you will leave London and your literary work in order to make our journey pleasant for us ?"

"I would hazard more important interests than those I have at stake."

Mrs. Jerningham's eyes grew dim, and she had no words in which to thank the faithful slave from whom a few months before she would have haughtily demanded such allegiance, and bitterly resented its refusal.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

A FINAL INTERVIEW.

MR. JERNINGHAM was prompt to comply with his wife's request. On the second morning after the despatch of Emily's letter, the master of Greenlands appeared at River Lawn; and this, allowing for time lost in the reposting of the letter, was as soon as it was possible for him to arrive there.

The change in his wife was painfully obvious to him, and shocked him deeply.

"I am sorry to see you looking so ill, Emily," he said, concealing his surprise by an effort.

"Do you think I should have sent for you if I had not been very ill? It was very good of you to come so promptly. I have to thank

VOL. V.

HH

you for much generosity, for much thoughtful kindness, during the years of our separation. Believe me, I have fully appreciated your kind feeling, your delicacy. But since my illness, there has come upon me the feeling that something more was due to me than kindness or delicacy; something more due from me to you than quiet submission to your wishes. Do not think that I have entrapped you into this visit in order to reproach you, or to exalt myself. Justification for my conduct there is none. I can never hope to rehabilitate myself in your eyes or in my own; all I desire is that you should know the whole truth. Will you kindly listen to me and believe me? I have kept silence for years; I speak now under the impression that I have but a few weeks to live; you cannot think that I shall speak falsely."

"I am not capable of doubting your word even under less solemn circumstances. But I trust you overrate your danger; convalescence is always a period of depression."

"We will not talk of that; my own instinct and the sentence of my doctors alike condemn me. They talk about the restorative effect of a sea-voyage, and send me to Madeira for the autumn and winter; and that, for a woman of my age, is a sentence of death."

"Let us hope it is only a precautionary measure."

"I have no eager desire for life; I can afford to submit to Providence. And now let me speak of a subject which is of more importance to me than any question as to the time I have to live. Let me speak to you of my honour-as a woman and as a wife. When you decreed that all ties between us except the one legal bond should be severed, your decree was absolute. There was no room left for discussion. You sent me your solicitor, who told me, with much delicate circumlocution, that your home was no longer to be my home. There was to be neither scandal, nor disgrace, nor punishment for me, who had sinned against my duty as a wife. I was only to be banished. I was too much in the wrong to dispute the justice of this sentence, Harold; too proud to sue for mercy. I let judgment go by default. You banished your wife from the fortress of home; you deposed her from an unassailable position to a doubtful standing; and you did this upon the strength of a packet of letters, which a bolder offender would have received at her own address, and which a more experienced sinner would have burned. I want you to grant me one favour, Harold,-read those letters before I die."

"I will read them when you please. Yes, I daresay I did wrong in cancelling our union upon such trifling evidence of error; but I acted from my own instinct. I have been a Sybarite in matters of sentiment; and to live with a woman whose heart and faith were not all my own would have been unutterably hateful to me. I jumped at no conclusions. I did not suffer my thoughts to condemn you unheard. But you had been living under my roof in secret correspondence with a man who called himself my friend. What could I do? Could I come to you

one.

and say, 'Please do not receive any more secret letters from Desmond; that is a kind of thing which I object to'? You would of course have promised to oblige me, and Desmond would have addressed his letters to another office. Having deceived me once, you see, I could hardly hope you would not deceive me again. That sort of thing grows upon On the other hand, why should I make a foolish scandal, read Desmond's letters,-which would have been an ungentlemanly thing to do, subpoena your maid, your footman, make myself ridiculous, and humiliate you, for the profit of lawyers and the amusement of newspaper readers; and, failing in convicting you of the last and worst of infamies, take you back to my home and heart a spotless wife? seemed to me that there could be no course for us but a tranquil and polite separation."

"If you had read the letters you might have thought differently."

It

"My dear girl, with every wish to be indulgent, I can scarcely admit that. To my mind there are no degrees in these things. A woman is faithful or unfaithful. If the letter she receives contain but a few lines about an opera-box, they should be lines which she can show her husband without a blush. There must be no lurking treason between the lines. She must not pose herself en femme incomprise, and call herself a faithful wife, because her infidelity does not come under the jurisdiction of the Divorce-court. You will say, perhaps, that this comes with a bad grace from me, whose life has been far from spotless. But, you see, spotlessness is not a man's speciality; and however vile he may be himself, he has a natural belief in the purity of woman. She seems to him a living temple of the virtues, and he scarcely expects to find a pillar-post lurking in the shadow of the sacred portico."

"I was very weak, very wicked," murmured Emily; "but I have some excuses for my error which other women cannot claim. If I had thought that you loved me,—if I had seen reason for believing that our marriage had brightened your life in the smallest degree, or that my affection, howsoever freely given, could ever have been precious to you, -it might have been otherwise with me. O, believe me, Mr. Jerningham, you might have made me a good wife, if you had cared to do so. Men have a power to mould us for which they rarely give themselves credit. It was not because of the twenty years' difference between our ages that I grew weary of my home, and sighed for more congenial society, for sympathy I had never found there. That was not the gulf between us. It was because you did not love me, and did not even care to pretend any love for me, that I welcomed the friendship of my father's old friend, and forgot the danger involved in such a friendship. Your marriage was an act of generosity, a chivalrous protection of a helpless kinswoman, and I ought to have been grateful. I was grateful; but a woman's heart has room for something more than gratitude. A man who marries as you married me is bound to complete his sacrifice. He must give his heart as well as his home and fortune. You gave me

your cheque-book, but you let me see only too plainly that in the bargain which made us man and wife there was to be no exchange of hearts. What a union! How many times did we dine tête-à-tête in the two years of our wedded life?-once-twice-well, perhaps half-adozen times; and I can recall your weary yawns, our little conventional speeches, on those rare occasions. For two years we lived under the same roof, and we never even quarrelled. You treated me with unalterable generosity, unchanging courtesy, and you held me at arm'slength; yet if you had wished to make yourself master of my heart, the conquest would have been an easy one. I was wounded by Mr. Desmond's silence; I was melted by your kindness. It would not have been difficult for me to give you a wife's devotion."

"I daresay you are right, Emily," Mr. Jerningham answered, with a little languid sigh. His wife's earnestness had taken him by surprise, and a new light had broken in upon his mind as she spoke.

It was possible that there was some truth in these earnest passionate words. He admitted as much to himself. Something more might have been required of him than a gentlemanly toleration of the woman he had chosen to share his home, to bear his name. The higher Christian idea of man's accountableness for the soul of his weaker partner was quite out of the region of Mr. Jerningham's ethics; but, on purely social grounds, he felt that he had done his cousin and his wife some wrong.

"I had exhausted my capacity for loving before I married," he thought; "and I gave this poor creature a handful of ashes instead of

a human heart."

After a few minutes' silence he addressed his wife with an unaccustomed tenderness of tone:

66

Yes, my dear Emily, you have just ground for complaint against me. My error was greater than yours; and now we meet after a lapse of years both of us older, possibly wiser-I can only say, forgive me." He held out the hand of friendship, which his wife accepted in all humility of spirit.

"No, no," she exclaimed, "there can be no question of forgiveness on my part. You have been only too good to me, and my complaints are groundless and peevish. I suppose it is natural to a woman to try to excuse herself by accusing someone else. But, believe me, I have been no stranger to remorse. I could not die until I had thanked you for your indulgent kindness during the years of our separation, and asked you to forgive me. But before I ask for pardon, I beg you to read those letters."

She took a little packet from her work-basket and handed it to her husband.

"I will do anything to oblige you," said Mr. Jerningham kindly; "but I assure you it is very unpleasant to me to read another man's letters."