hedge, winding lane, distant hill, and woodland, shone before him like a picture too divine for earth.

"And I am to leave all this, and to leave her!" he thought. "I am to be self-banished from a home that Horace might have loved, and from the tranquil life which is a poet's best education. If such a sacrifice as this is duty, it is very hard."

For the first time in his life this young man found himself before the altar on which he was to sacrifice his happiness. In the existence of every man there comes the hour in which he must needs sacrifice his firstborn, or live inglorious with the remorseful consciousness that he has shrunk from the performance of a duty. The altar is there, and Isaac, and the knife is given to him. Heaven help him if his courage fail the weak wretch in that awful moment, and he refuse to complete the propitiatory sacrifice!

Eustace Thorburn approached his altar resolute, but very sorrowful; and the voice of the tempter pleaded with the casuistry of an Escobar.

"Why not stop at least till the book is finished?" said the tempter. "You will be doing your kind employer a disservice by depriving him of your labour. Your mighty secret can do no harm so long as it is securely locked in your own breast; and are you so weak a fool that you must needs betray yourself?"

And hereupon the stern voice of Duty came to the rescue.

"What warranty can you give for the preservation of your secret ?” asked the cold calm matron. "A word, a look, from that foolish chit Mademoiselle de Bergerac, and the story would be told. As for the great book, which is no doubt predoomed to be the ruin of some tooconfiding publisher, you may give M. de Bergerac almost as much assistance in London as you can give him in Berkshire.”

Eustace heard voices and gay laughter in the garden as he drew near the gate in the holly-hedge, and amongst other voices the low gentlemanlike tones of Harold Jerningham. Hephaestus bade a noisy welcome as the young man opened the gate. M. de Bergerac and Mr. Jerningham were sitting by a tea-table under the chestnut-trees, deep in a learned dispute upon the history of Islamism; while Helen busied herself with the cups and saucers, and looked up every now and then to join in the argument or to laugh at the acrimony of the disputants.

"So Mr. Jerningham has not left Berkshire, although he talked of starting for a yachting expedition to Norway last week," thought Eustace, not too well pleased to see the master of Greenlands so completely at home in that dear abode which he was himself so soon to leave.

Helen started up from the tea-table with a little exclamation of delight as the returning traveller came across the lawn. She blushed as she welcomed him; but blushes at eighteen mean very little. Mr.

Jerningham stopped in the middle of a sentence and watched the young lady with attentive eyes as she shook hands with her father's secretary.

"We are so pleased to see you back again, Mr. Thorburn," she said. "We have missed you so much-haven't we, papa?"

"Yes, my dear, I have been very much at a loss for my kind assistant," answered M. de Bergerac. "Would you imagine it possible, Thorburn, that any man can pretend to doubt the original genius and creative power of Mahomet ?"

And hereupon M. de Bergerac entered upon a long disquisition on the subject that was dearest to his heart, and Eustace had to listen in reverential silence, while he was languishing to tell Helen about the little commissions he had executed for her in town, or to inquire into the health of her song-birds, or the economy of the poultry-yard to which she devoted so much care. He wanted some excuse for looking at her sweet face and hearing her beloved voice, and all the poetry of Mohammedanism seemed dull and prosaic for him when compared with the magical charm of the commonest observation this young lady could utter. It is given to youth and beauty to drop pearls and diamonds from her lips unconsciously-pearls and diamonds invisible to common eyes, it is true, but the most precious of all gems for that one person to whom the speaker seems at once an angel and a goddess.

For that one evening Eustace Thorburn permitted himself to be unutterably happy. So magical a light is the glamour which true love sheds on the scene it shines upon, that the lover's eye is blinded for the moment to all that lies beyond the scene thus glorified. The future scarcely existed for the mind of Eustace Thorburn that happy midsummer evening. He lived in the present; and this quaint old garden, these chestnut-trees, this white-robed maiden seated under their shadow, dim and ghostlike in the twilight, constituted the world. The great canopy of heaven and the young moon and all the stars, the murmuring river, and shadowy woods and distant hills, had been created for those two. She was Eve, and he was Adam, and this was Paradise. The tones of the two sages disputing about the Sheeahs and the Soonnees might have been the murmurings of the west wind for any consciousness that Eustace had of their neighbourhood when once he was released from the duty of listening to M. de Bergerac, and free to converse with Helen.

And yet in the breast of one of these sages there beat a heart from which the pains and passions of youth had not yet been banished,-a heart that ached with a keen anguish as its owner watched those two figures seated in the shadow of the chestnut-tree. Mr. Jerningham had lived in society, and had learned the difficult art of conducting one argument with skill and judgment while another argument was being silently debated in his heart. He talked about Islamism, and did battle

for his own convictions, and missed no chance of putting his opponent in the wrong; and yet all the time that silent inner monitor was debating that other question.

"If I had been as free as this young man, could I have won that girl, with him for my rival?" he asked himself. "What gift has he that I do not possess except youth? And is there really a charm in youth more divine than any grace of mind or polish of manner that belongs to a riper age? Is it only a physical charm-the charm of a smoother cheek or brighter eyes, or is it an indefinable freshness of mind and heart that constitutes the superiority? I do not think Helen de Bergerac the kind of woman to like a man less because there are a few lines across his forehead and a few silver threads in his hair; but I know that there is a sympathy between her and this young man that does not exist between her and me. And yet I doubt if any ambitious lad of five-and-twenty can love as devotedly as a man of my age. It is only when we have proved the hollowness of everything else in life that we are free to surrender ourselves entirely to the woman we love.”

Again and again during the six months of his lingering at Greenlands, Mr. Jerningham had told himself that his case would have been utterly hopeless, even if he had been free to woo his old friend's daughter. And yet he pined for his freedom; and there were times when he felt somewhat unkindly disposed towards the harmless lady at Hampton.

"What are we to each other but an incumbrance?" he asked himself. "If she had been more guilty, we might be free, she to marry Desmond, and I-"

And then Mr. Jerningham reflected upon the Continental manner of marrying and giving in marriage. If he had been at liberty to ask for Helen's hand, what more likely than that the priceless boon would have been granted by the friend who loved him and believed in him? Theodore de Bergerac was of all men the most likely to bestow his daughter on a husband of mature age; since he himself had married a woman twenty years his senior, and had found perfect happiness in that union.

Mr. Jerningham fancied himself blest with this fair young wife, and pictured to himself the calm and blameless existence which he might have led with so sweet a companion. O, what a tranquil haven would this have been, after the storms that he had tempted, the lightnings he had invited and defied!

"Of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble-bush gather they grapes," said the Divine Teacher. Mr. Jerningham remembered that solemn sentence. There are some precepts of Holy Writ that a man cannot put out of his memory, though he may have outlived by a quarter of a century the hour in which he ceased to respect the creed they teach.

"I suppose I had my chance of perfect happiness, at some moment of my life, and forfeited it," he said to himself. "Destiny is a bitter schoolmistress, and has no pity on the mistakes of her scholars."

CHAPTER XXIV.

"L'OISEAU FUIT COMME LE BONHEUR."

EUSTACE refrained from opening the parcel given to him by his uncle until he found himself in his own room, in the solemn quiet of a rural midnight. Then, and then only, did he feel himself at liberty to enter upon a task which had a certain sanctity. It was but a mixed record of truth and fiction, this book which his guilty father had given to the world; but some part of his mother's life was interwoven with those pages, her brief dream of happiness was shut, as it were, between the leaves of the volume, like flowers that have once been bright with colour and rich with perfume, and which one finds pale and scentless in a long-unopened book.

The book was called "The Disappointments of Dion: a Sequel to Dion, a Confession. By the same Author." This preservation in the second book of the name that had figured in the first seemed to indicate the autobiographical nature of both works. The hero of the Disappointments was the same being as the hero of the Confession-the same being, hardened and degraded by ten years of selfishness and dissipation. The Dion of the Confession had the affectation of cynicism, the tone of an Alcibiades who apes the philosophy of Diogenes. The Dion of the Disappointments was really cynical, and attempted to disguise his cynicism under an affectation of bonhomie.

Eustace sat till late into the night reading-with unspeakable pain, with sorrow, anger, sympathy, mixed in his mind as he read. Yes, this book had been written by his father-there could be no doubt of that. The first volume contained his mother's story. It fitted into the record of the letters, and to the story told by Mrs. Willows. Idealised and poetised by the fancy of the hero, he read the history of a girl's daydream, and recognised in this poetised heroine the woman whose pensive face had been wont to brighten when it looked upon his. The story of a young student's passion for a tradesman's daughter was told with a certain grace and poetry. It is but an old story at best. It is always more or less the legend of Faust and Gretchen, and it needs a Goethe to elevate so simple a fable from the commonplace to the sublime.

The author of Dion described his Gretchen very prettily. It was a portrait by Greuse, with an occasional touch of Raffaelle.

To the study of this book Eustace Thorburn applied himself with intense earnestness of thought and purpose. The Sibylline volumes were not more precious to the sage who purchased them so dearly than was this egotistical composition to the man who had found a leaf from his mother's life in the heart of the book.

How much written here was the plain unvarnished truth? how much the mere exercise of a romantic fancy? That was the question upon which depended the whole value of the volumes.

On the one hand, it would seem scarcely likely that any man would

publish to the world the story of his own transgression, or anatomise his own heart for the pleasure of a novel-reading public. On the other hand, there was the fact that men have, in a perverted spirit of vanity, given to the press revelations of viler sins and more deliberate baseness than any transgression confessed by the author of Dion. Eustace remembered the Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau; and he told himself that there is no crime which the profoundly egotistical man does not think interesting when the criminal is himself. But the strongest evidence in support of the idea that this Disappointments of Dion was throughout a narration of real events lay in the fact that those pages which described the author's courtship of a tradesman's daughter formed an exact transcript of his mother's story as Eustace had learned it. The quiet sea-coast town, gayer in those days than now; the bookseller's shop; the stretch of yellow sand beyond the rocks; the dull commonplace companion of the author's "divine C. ;" the time of year; the interval that elapsed between the brief courtship and the elopement-all corresponded exactly with the data of that sad history whose every detail was written upon Eustace Thorburn's heart.

Throughout the book, places and persons were indicated only by initials; and this alone imparted somewhat of an obsolete and Minerva-Press appearance to the volumes. This circumstance also gave further ground for the idea that there was in this book very little of absolute invention.

Eustace read the two slender volumes from beginning to end at a sitting. He began to read before midnight. The broad summer sunlight shone upon him, and the birds were singing loud in the Berkshire woodland, when he closed the second volume. For him every page had an all-absorbing interest. The reading of this book was like the autopsy of his father's mind and heart; and there was something of the surgeon's scientific scrutiny in the deliberate care with which he read.

If there were any good to be found in this book, he was prepared to set that good as a per-contra in the dread account of debtor and creditor which he had kept against his unknown father. But he wanted to fathom the depths of evil in the mind of that nameless enemy. He wanted to ascertain the uttermost wrong this man had done him in the person of that dearer part of himself, his dead mother.

He read the book steadily through, pausing only to mark the passages which seemed to tell Celia Mayfield's story, and all passages which bore, however indirectly, upon that story.

It was half-past six when he read the last page; and half-past seven was M. de Bergerac's breakfast-hour. Happily, Mr. Thorburn was at that privileged age when a man can do without sleep, and find as much refreshment in a few pails of cold water as ponderous middle age can derive from a long night's rest. So he made his toilet, and went downstairs to the bright pretty breakfast - room, little the worse for the studious occupation of his night.

Mr. Jerningham had wandered down by the water-side after leaving