according to the embarrassed usage of Englishmen, and then they distributed themselves. Sir Thomas fell to Frances' share. He turned to her eagerly, and took her hand and pressed it warmly. We have done it,' he said in an excited whisper. So far, all is victorious; but still there is a great deal more to do.' 'I think it is Constance that has done it,' Frances said. 'She has worked for us-without meaning itno doubt; but I am not going to give up the credit to Constance; and there is still a great deal to do. You must not lay down your arms, my dear. You and I, we have the ball at our feet, but there is a great deal still to do.' Frances made no reply. The corner which she had chosen for herself was almost concealed behind a screen which parted the room in two. The other group made a picture far enough withdrawn to gain perspective. Waring stood near his wife, who from time to time gave him a look, half watchful, half wistful, and sometimes made a remark, to which he gave a brief reply. His attitude and hers told a story; but it was a confused and uncertain one, of which the end was all darkness. They were together, but fortuitously, without any will of their own; and between them was a gulf fixed. Which would cross it, or was it possible that it ever could be crossed at all? The room was very silent, for the conversation was not lively between Constance and Claude on the sofa; and Sir Thomas was silent, watching too. All was so quiet, indeed, that every sound was audible without; but there was no expectation of any interruption, nobody looked for anything, there was a perfect indifference to outside sounds. So much so, that for a moment the ladies were scarcely startled by the familiar noise, so constantly heard, of Markham's hansom drawing up at the door. It could not be Markham; he was out of the way, disposed of till next morning. But Lady Markham, with that presentiment which springs up most strongly when every avenue by which harm can come seems stopped, started, then rose to her feet with alarm. It can't surely beOh, what has brought him here!' she cried, and looked at Claude, to bid him, with her eyes, rush to meet him, stop him, keep him from coming in. But Claude did not understand her eyes. As for Waring, seeing that something had gone wrong in the programme, but not guessing what it was, he accepted her movement as a dismissal, and quietly joined his daughter and his friend behind the screen. The two men got behind it altogether, showing only where their heads passed its line; but the light was not bright in that corner, and the new-comer was full of his own affairs. For it was Markham, who came in rapidly, stopped by no wise agent, or suggestion of expediency. He came into the room dressed in light morning-clothes, greenish, grayish, yellowish, like the colour of his sandy hair and complexion. He came in with his face puckered up and twitching, as it did when he was excited. His mother, Constance, Claude, sunk in the corner of the sofa, were all he saw ; and he took no notice of Claude. He crossed that little opening amid the fashionably crowded furniture, and went and placed himself in front of the fireplace, which was full at this season of flowers, not of fire. From that point of vantage he greeted them with his usual laugh, but broken and embarrassed. 'Well, motherwell, Con: you thought you were clear of me for to-night.' Is any I did not expect you, Markham. thing has anything?' 'Gone wrong?' he said. 'No-I don't know that anything has gone wrong. That depends on how you look at it. I've been in the country all day.' 'Yes, Markham; so I know.' 'But not where I was going,' he said. His laugh broke out again, quite irrelevant and inappropriate. I've seen Nelly,' he said. Markham!' his mother cried, with a tone of wonder, disapproval, indignation, such as had never been heard in her voice before, through all that had been said and understood concerning Markham and Nelly Winterbourn. She had sunk into her chair, but now rose again in distress and anxiety. Oh,' she cried, 'how could you? how could you? I thought you had some true feeling. O Markham, how unworthy of you now to vex and compromise that poor girl!' He made no answer for a moment, but moistened his lips, with a sound that seemed like a ghost of the habitual chuckle. 'Yes,' he said, 'I know you made it all up that the chapter was closed now; but I never said so, mother. Nelly's where she was before, when we hadn't the courage to do anything. Only worse: shamed and put in bondage by that miserable beggar's will. And you all took it for granted that there was an end between her and me. I was waiting to marry her when she was free and rich, you all thought; but I wasn't bound, to be sure, nor the sort of man to think of it twice when I knew she would be poor.' "Markham! no one ever said, nobody thought' 'Oh, I know very well what people thoughtand said too, for that matter,' said Markham. I hope a fellow like me knows Society well enough for that. A pair of old stagers like Nelly and me, of course we knew what everybody said. Well, mammy, you're mistaken this time, that's all. There's nothing to be taken for granted in this world. Nelly's game, and so am I. As soon as it's what you call decent, and the crape business done with-for she has always done her duty by him, the fellow, as everybody knows' 'Markham!' his mother cried almost with a shriek-why, it is ruin, destruction. I must speak to Nelly-ruin both to her and you.' He laughed. Or else the t'other thing-salvation, you know. Anyhow, Nelly's game for it, and so am I.' Journal 'Here's the little one approves. She's the one to judge, the sort of still small voice-eh, mother? Come; I've got far better than I deserve; I've got little Fan on my side.' Lady Markham wrung her hands with an impatience which partly arose from her own better instincts. The words which she wanted would not come to her lips. 'The child, what can she know!' she cried, and could say no more. 'Stand by me, little Fan,' said Markham, holding his little sister close to him.- Mother, it's not a small thing that could part you and me; that is what I feel, nothing else. For the rest, we'll take the Priory, Nelly and I, and be very jolly upon nothing. Mother, you didn't think in your heart that YOUR son was a base little beggar, no better than Winterbourn?' Lady Markham made no reply. She sank down in her chair and covered her face with her hands. In the climax of so many emotions, she was overwhelmed. She could not stand up against Markham; in her husband's presence, with everything hanging in the balance, she could say nothing. The worldly wisdom she had learned melted away from her. Her heart was stirred to its depths, and the conventional bonds restrained it no more. A kind of sweet bitterness-a sense of desertion, yet hope-of secret approval, yet opposition, disabled her altogether. One or two convulsive sobs shook her frame. She was able to say nothing, nothing, and was silent, covering her face with her hands. Waring had seen Markham come in with angry displeasure. He had listened with that keen curiosity of antagonism which is almost as warm as the interest of love, to hear what he had to say. Sir Thomas, standing by his side, threw in a word or two to explain, seeing an opportunity in this new development of affairs. But nothing was really altered until Frances rose. Her father watched her with a poignant anxiety, wonder, excitement. When she threw herself upon her brother's arm, and, all alone in her youth, gave him her approval, the effect upon the mind of the father was very strange. He frowned and turned away, then came back and looked again. His daughter, his little white spotless child, thrown upon the shoulder of the young man whom he had believed he hated, his wife's son, who had been always in his way. It was intolerable. He must spring forward, he thought, and pluck her away. But Markham's stifled cry of emotion and happiness somehow arrested Waring. He looked again, and there was something tender, pathetic, in the group. He began to perceive dimly how it was. Markham was making a resolution which for a man of his kind was heroic; and the little sister, the child, his own child, of his training, not of the world, had gone in her innocence and consecrated it with her approval. The approval of little Frances! And Markham had the heart to feel that in that approval there was something beyond and above everything else that could be said to him. Waring, too, like his wife, was in a condition of mind which offered no defence against the first touch of nature which was strong enough to reach him. He was open not to everyday reasoning, but to the sudden prick of a keen ! unhabitual feeling. A sudden impulse came upon him in this softened, excited mood. Had he paused to think, he would have turned his back upon this scene and hurried away, to be out of the contagion. But fortunately, he did not pause to think. He went forward quickly, laying his hand upon the back of the chair in which Lady Markham sat, struggling for calm-and confronted his old antagonist, his boy-enemy of former times, who recognised him suddenly, with a gasp of astonishment. Markham,' he said, ‘if I understand rightly, you are acting like a true and honourable man. Perhaps I have not done you justice, hitherto. Your mother does not seem able to say anything. I believe in my little girl's instinct. If it will do you any good, you have my approval too.' Markham's slackened arm dropped to his side, though Frances embraced it still. His very jaw dropped in the amazement, almost consternation of this sudden appearance. 'Sir!' he stammered, your-your-support-your-friendship would be all I could'- And here his voice failed him, and he said no more. Then Waring went a step further by an unaccountable impulse, which afterwards he could not understand. He held out one hand, still holding with the other the back of Lady Markham's chair. 'I know what the loss will be to your mother,' he said; but perhaps perhaps, if she pleases: that may be made up too.' She removed her hands suddenly and looked up at him. There was not a particle of colour in her cheek. The hurrying of her heart parched her open lips. The two men clasped hands over her, and she saw them through a mist, for a moment side by side. At this moment of extreme agitation and excitement, Lady Markham's butler suddenly opened the drawing-room door. He came in with that solemnity of countenance with which, in his class, it is thought proper to name all that is preliminary to death. If you please, my lady,' he said, 'there's a man below has come to say that the fever's come to a crisis, and that there's a change.' 'You mean Captain Gaunt,' cried Lady Markham, rising with a half-stupefied look. She was so much worn by these divers emotions, that she did not see where she went. 'Captain Gaunt!' said Constance with a low cry. (To be concluded.) 'OLD FOLKS WILL SERVE YOU BEST!' WE once heard of a boy who described his aunt as 'past thirty, but still active ;' and certainly mental and bodily activity are not attributed to the sex if they want to earn a livelihood much after that period. The matter of premature superannuation affects both sexes, however, and we cannot do better than make as a text of our discourse the following wise saw, culled from a volume of epigrams lately published by the poet William Allingham: Old folks, though weak, will serve you best; of late, Conscience in work is gone quite out of date. Never were words more appropriately spoken, and never was the truth they convey more painfully brought home to our minds than in the present day! Not only in the humbler walks of life, where the breadwinner's chances depend mainly upon sinews and muscle, but in superior callings, where experience and tested aptitude should be the first requisites, qualities with which bodily prowess has nothing to do, we find the same premium put upon inexperience and incapacity. The man of fifty, from the admiral down to the city clerk, who, without any fault of his own, is compelled to seek employment, is set aside simply because he happens not to be ten or fifteen years younger. One might suppose, indeed, that at fifty a human being's intellectual faculties in the natural order of things fail him altogether, and that, like the unfortunate Immortals in Gulliver's Travels who were despised at eighty, he is 'held incapable of any employment of trust or profit.' The case of women is harder still. A woman's youth, from a business point of view, is shortlived indeed. Working women may be past thirty but still active, for all employers care! Female assistants must be younger than that wonderful boy's aunt, for instance, since we rarely by any chance find any but quite young women behind a counter. Older ones could do the necessary work as well, and even better. They are, how ever, less ornamental, and contribute less to the agreeable aspect of the place. But the question arises, unless these superannuated shopwomen marry, what becomes of them? What is the future of these discarded ones 'past thirty, but still active? We are driven into the belief that as the openings for them are fewer even than their contemporaries of the other sex, large numbers drift away on the sea of misery and destitu tion. Rich ladies, the wealthy spinsters, who, as we are told, are to constitute such a force in English society fifty years hence, could hardly spend their money better than in opening shops and business houses for which the qualification should be past thirty, but still active." Here, also, is a hint for our Postmaster-general. Why should female clerks in the postal service consist of pert giglets hardly out of their teens? Here is an occupation for women till eyesight and bodily strength begin to fail, and this is not often the case till they have attained their fiftieth or even sixtieth year. Many women, indeed, can achieve as much mental and bodily work at sixty-five as in the heyday of youth. without truth: Jugend hat keine Tugend (Youth has no virtue); and true it is that, for certain virtues, it would be unreasonable to look to youth; yet these are some of the very qualities most needed in the conduct of human affairs, such as experience, disinterestedness, assiduityin short, that conscience in work which our poet tells us is out of date. Later A certain measure of indifference, selfishness, insensibility to the interests of others, general indifference, is inseparable from that period of existence, when all is expectation and looking forward. Duty, in the larger sense of the word, the measure of justice one human being is bound to deal out to another in the least as well as the most trifling transaction, the sense of responsibility only age can give-these are lessons of life not to be learned at once. on, during those brief years allotted to both sexes, by custom and general opinion, as their prime, men, no more than women, are likely to do their work better than when, from a business point of view, they are set aside as incapable. the contrary, the daily discharge of routine duties, however irksome, will be easier to those who have learned, perhaps by bitter experience, the value of time, of money, and of conscience. Granting that a man or woman of sixty may not be able to get through so much work in the same time as those half their age, is not the conscience put into the work to be taken into consideration? True enough is it, as our poet says: On Conscience in work is quite grown out of date. Never were wages so high, never expectations of work-people so exalted as now, and never was it more difficult to get any piece of manual work efficiently done. The job is got through somehow, paid for, and there is an end of the matter. Old servants, too, are rapidly running out of date. The time-honoured retainers of former years are now replaced by pretty girls and smart young men, who stay with each employer just till they can improve their position, and no more; whereas serving-folks who have grown gray in their master's service, naturally have their interests at heart, and prevent that spoliation in the kitchen which goes well-nigh to ruin so many families. Youth has charms. 'A pretty girl is the poetry of the work-a-day world,' says one of our novelists. Unfortunately, the greater part of human affairs has to do with bare prose; and for the daily transactions of business, bright eyes, rosy cheeks, and a slim figure, are less necessary than steadiness, rectitude, and unswerving devotion to work-a-day duty. AT TREVENNA COTTAGE. A STORY IN EIGHT CHAPTERS.-CHAP. IV. The short-sightedness of this undue deference paid to youth is self-evident. Perhaps in no age was youth so self-asserting, arrogant, and wanting in respect, as now. Our young men and young women, especially those who have had exceptional advantages in the matter of education and culture, wholly fail to realise their proper place in society, and what they owe to their forerunners and elders; so true are these NOTWITHSTANDING their late vigil, Captain Avory wise words of Goethe: There is one thing no and his wife were up betimes next morning, and one brings with him into the world, and it is had breakfasted by nine o'clock. Then Susan a thing on which everything else depends; that was sent to the Crown Hotel for a fly, which thing by means of which every man that is presently drove up to the gate. Then the capborn into the world becomes truly manly-tain and his wife appeared, equipped to encounter namely, Reverence.' Our German neighbours, indeed, have a proverb, which, cruelly ironic as it sounds, is not the weather, which was still broken and stormy, and were driven away. But when the fly had climbed the slope on which the scattered houses Journal of Boscombe are built, and had reached the highroad which skirts its summit, the captain alighted. His road lay one way, and that of his wife the other. Mrs Avory's destination was Alvebury, a small town some half-dozen miles away, at which place there was no one to whom she was known. Her object in going there was to post her husband's reply to his cousin's letter. It would scarcely have been judicious to post at the Boscombe office a letter addressed to 'Edward Saverne, Esq.,' seeing that every one in the place was aware that a gentleman of that name had died and been buried there only a few weeks previously. search of was not at home, and was nowhere to be found! The thought turned him sick and dizzy, and he was obliged to come to a stand for a few moments, with his hand resting against the trunk of a tree. If Bosy Groote had one of his wandering fits on him-and what more likely?-then would Mrs Avory's cunningly elaborated scheme collapse as at a breath, leaving behind it nothing save ruin black and irretrievable. He took a flask of brandy from his pocket, and administered to himself a liberal dose of its contents. It brought back a little colour to his pinched features, and nerved him with Captain Avory's answer to his cousin's letter a sort of dogged courage to face whatever the was written from his wife's dictation. It was next half-hour might have in store for him. couched in judiciously affectionate terms, and Still deeper dipped the road, while the growth expressed the writer's pleasure at the prospect of timber on either hand broadened out into of meeting again his long-absent relative. The a gloomy plantation, through whose intricacies captain then went on to say that he would not nothing could be discerned. Another quarter fail to meet his cousin at Mumpton Junction of a mile, as the captain was aware, would have at the time stated; but should anything mean- brought him to the end of the plantation and while intervene to delay his journey, he was on a level with the shore. After about a mile requested to send a telegram informing the cap- of this level sandy road, with the sea full in tain on what day and by what train he might view on the right, it began to climb again and be looked for. wind its way over the shoulder of the easternmost of the two headlands which shut in Boscombe Bay. On the other side of this headland, and almost in its shadow when the sun was drawing toward the west, lay the little fishing hamlet of Cawdray. When husband and wife parted at the point where their roads diverged, the captain turned up the collar of his waterproof, pulled his hat more firmly over his brows, and set his face eastward. He had the wind and rain in his teeth as he walked, and at another time he But not so far as this would Captain Avory's would have felt the discomforts of the weather footsteps take him to-day. While still in the keenly; but this morning he had far other food deepest shadow of the plantation, he slackened for his thoughts. He was bound on an errand his pace, and keeping his eyes on the hedge of such as none but a desperate man would think blackberry bushes which bordered the road on of undertaking. So long as the influence of the right, he went slowly forward till he his wife's presence was upon him, so long as apparently found the sign for which he was the magnetism of her stronger will made itself looking. What that sign was, was best known felt, the task before him, although beset with to himself; in any case, his face brightened dangers and difficulties, had yet seemed feasible a little; and having first given a glance up and full of promise; but now that he was left to himself, his hopes and his courage at once sunk to zero. Just then, he felt as if he would gladly have given all that he had ever possessed if he could have put back the hand of timeif he could have been again as he was twelve months ago, before his wife's voice had whispered the first syllable of temptation in his ear. Ah! how readily he had yielded to it. What a golden vista her words had conjured up! Of his own free-will, he had woven the net mesh by mesh around him, till now there only remained one last desperate chance of escape. Fool, fool that he had been! With such and other bitter thoughts gnawing at his heartstrings, he trudged doggedly forward, the whips of rain lashing his face unheeded. When he had gone about a couple of miles, the road began to trend downwards. He was nearing one end of the long irregular stretch of cliff fronting the bay, in the midst of whose green luxuriant lap bask the white villas of Boscombe Regis. So far, he had encountered no one, except a country carrier jogging slowly along on his hooded cart, and two drenched, woe-begone tramps. For this he was thankful; the fewer people he met by the way the better. But now that he was nearing his destination, a new fear gripped him like a vice. What if the man he was going in the road, then down it, and seeing no one coming either way, he pushed through a small gap in the prickly hedge, and proceeded to thread the mazes of the plantation with the air of a man to whom they were not altogether unfamiliar. Five minutes' walking brought him to the further edge of the wood and in full view of a broad reach of sandy shore, with the gray, heaving waters of the Channel widening out beyond till they lost themselves in the rain-smitten horizon. But Captain Avory had no eyes this morning save for one object, and that object was the ruinous and blackened remains of what had once been a two-storied dwelling, which stood at a point where the trees had gone down to meet the sands, or it might be where the sands had crept up to meet the trees. The house was roofless except one corner of it, and only one chimney was left standing. But when from that chimney the captain saw a thin spiral of smoke slowly crawling, his heart gave a great throb of relief. It was the sign and signal that Bosy Groote was at home, and he felt as if one-half of his errand were already accomplished. As Captain Avory picked his way, first along the sand, and then over a scattered heap of stones which had once formed part of the boundary-wall of the house, he became aware of the sound of music. 'It's Bosy with his fiddle,' he muttered. After pausing for a moment to listen, he crossed a paved courtyard, the pavement of which was now buried inches deep under the ever-shifting sand; and unceremoniously opening a door made of boards roughly nailed together, he halted on the threshold and surveyed the scene before him. The room into which he now peered had originally been the kitchen of the burned-out house, and was the only part that was left with a roof on it; but even here the intermediate flooring between the upper and the lower stories had been burned away, so that when you looked up, you saw nothing above you but half-charred rafters and the slates of the roof. That this roof was by no means weather-proof was proved by three or four patches of rain-water on different parts of the floor. The wide old-fashioned window, in which not a single pane was left, was roughly boarded up, except a space of a few inches at the top. Such daylight as there was in the place found its way through this aperture. The room was furnished, if furnished it could be called, in the simplest possible style. A couple of three-legged stools, an empty cask for a table, a low rough pallet in one corner covered with a bag of straw and a couple of horserugs, a fryingpan, a kettle, and a tin teapot, together with a plate and mug of the same ware, comprised the whole of the visible effects. The fireplace was low and wide; but the grate had been torn away years ago, and its place was now filled by a dozen or so of loose bricks, in the midst of which smouldered a few dying embers. The sole occupant of this wretched domicile was a man who was sitting cross-legged on the pallet in the corner playing the fiddle, and whose age might have been anything between thirty and fifty. As he sat there, he looked like a man who at the least would stand six feet in height, so broad were his shoulders, so long and muscular his arms. But when he stood up it was seen that, large as his body was, his lower extremities were those of a dwarf. To add to the incongruity of his appearance, his shrunken legs bowed out below the knees, as if unable to sustain the weight above them, and when he walked, or rather waddled, he turned his feet inward. He had a large head, and a long thin face seamed and lined through much exposure to the weather. He had a long vulturine nose, the end of which came to within a quarter of an inch of his mouth. His eyes were as keen and rapacious as those of some bird of prey. His long black hair hung in tangled locks round his shoulders, and his head was crowned with a high conical hat of soft black felt, much the worse for wear. At the moment of Avory's entrance, this singular being was scraping away at some nightmare improvisation of his own, which seemed to have neither beginning, middle, nor end; but which, lacking all method though it did, was not devoid of a certain weird originality. He looked up and nodded as the captain's figure darkened the doorway. How do, cap'en?' 'How do you do, Bosy? How's the world using you by this time?' About as well as I'm using it, cap'en, I reckon; and that ain't no great shakes.' 'Well, cease that caterwauling, there's a good fellow. I've a matter of business to talk to you about.' 'Caterwauling? Oh! It's a little thing of my own, cap'en, as sweet as early dewdrops, and as pathetic as the lowing of a bull-calf.' As he spoke, he put away the fiddle on a shelf behind him and slid to the ground. Be seated, my noble prince,' he said, indicating one of the stools with a wave of his arm. With that, he stirred up the dying embers; and seating himself on the other stool, he crossed one crooked leg over the knee of the other and glanced up keenly at his visitor. Captain Avory's first proceeding was to bring out his flask-it held a quart-and place it on the head of the empty cask. Bosy's eyes sparkled, and he smacked his lips involuntarily. The captain's next proceeding was to produce a small canvas bag, half full of gold; this, after a preliminary chink, he placed beside the flask. At sight of this, Bosy's eyes seemed to strike fire. Next he brought out his meerschaum and tobaccopouch, and having filled the former, he passed the pouch to Bosy, who produced a short black pipe from his waistcoat pocket and proceeded to follow his visitor's example. No sooner were the pipes fairly under way, than the captain helped Bosy and himself to a liberal supply of brandy. Bosy drank his, undiluted, out of the tin pannikin. 'It's good enough for me without water,' he said, as again he smacked his lips. 'Now for business,' said the captain. 'Ay, now for business,' responded Bosy, drawing his stool a little nearer that of the other. It is not needful to set down all that passed at the interview between these two strangely assorted companions; what resulted from it we shall learn later on. Hoogies-how it came by its name no one seemed to know-might with reason be termed the ancestral home of Bosy, or Ambrose Groote, seeing that it had been built by his great-greatgrandfather a century and a half ago, and that each succeeding generation had made it their home. Originally, there had been fifty or sixty acres of land attached to the house, but that had got into other hands long ago. Then, the Grootes had always kept up a connection with the fishing-trade, and time out of mind had owned two or three of the Cawdray smacks. But, more than all else, they had been noted smugglers at a time when smuggling was a lucrative and semi-respectable profession. It was Bosy's father who first squandered the property, which had come down to him from three generations of thrifty ancestors. He was a lazy, drunken ne'er-do-weel, who attended every race within a circuit of fifty miles, and was fleeced by men as unscrupulous as himself, but far more cunning. At length the last fishingboat had to be sold to pay creditors who would no longer be denied; and after that, Marvel Groote would seem to have gone rapidly from bad to worse. There were dark whispers afloat respecting a pedlar who had been seen going towards Hoogies in the dusk of an autumn evening and who from that hour had disappeared. It was even said that the fever which little Bosy Groote had about this time-he was then five or six years old-which left him with a warp of the mind from which he never recovered, |