Lady Wedderburn's wish, Vol. I (of 3)

"The Colonel has written to the effect, that the regiment has received 'letters of readiness' for foreign service, and that the route for the East may come at any moment."

"My dear boy, Cyril, and you will be leaving us."

"For old Gib or Malta in the first place, and the Crimea after," continued Cyril, glancing again at the letter he had just opened; "but the Colonel adds, that until I am telegraphed for, my leave of absence may remain intact—it is a little anomalous; but he is a thorough good fellow, the Colonel!"

"And what of Horace?"

"There is no word of Horace, dear mother; but he will probably be detailed for the depôt."

"My darling Cyril!" exclaimed the anxious mother, as her eyes filled with tears, and her upper lip quivered.

The "darling" referred to was a handsome young fellow of five feet ten or so, with a thick curly brown head of hair, shorn short to the regimental pattern, and most unexceptionable whiskers; one who rather considered himself as the model officer of the Royal Fusileers, in which distinguished corps he—Cyril Wedderburn, then on leave of absence—held the rank of Captain; and now having laid the Colonel's letter beside his plate—for the family were at breakfast—he forthwith, and with appetite unimpaired by the prospect of a speedy and too surely perilous change of scene, attacked the drumstick of a devilled turkey.

Gervase Asloane, the family butler—a portly individual, in an ample white waistcoat and suit of black—had but a few minutes before placed the Russia leather despatch box, with its brass plate, bearing the family arms, &c., beside Sir John Wedderburn, who had unlocked it, and distributed the contents among the party at table, which consisted only of Lady Wedderburn, Miss Flora M'Caw, her companion, a Highland maiden of doubtful age but undoubted pedigree; her two sons, Cyril and Robert; her nephew. Horace Ramornie, son of a deceased sister, and who was junior lieutenant in Cyril's regiment; and a visitor, Chesters of Chesterhaugh, a gentleman of whom the reader may hear, perhaps, too much in future.

There were no missives for Miss M'Caw; there never were any, so she had long since ceased even to affect that one might come.

"One letter for Horace," said Cyril, while decapitating an egg. "Well, old fellow, what says your despatch—'to amount of account rendered,' eh?"

"It is only some mess-room gossip from Probyn of ours."

"A kind fellow is Probyn."

"No word of the war as yet, Cyril, so our leaves are safe," added Horace Ramornie.

"And our lives too, for a time—eh, mamma of mine! A pink cocked hat for Bob, or invitation, or a love letter, of course? But what is up with you, Chesters? You look disturbed, as they say on the stage."

"Perhaps I do," whispered Chesters. "I have again backed the wrong horse, and lost a pot of money, at the last Liverpool Spring Meeting. The rain fell in torrents."

"And the course was soft?"

"Soft as butter," replied Chesters, filling his mouth with toast to check a rising malediction.

"How can you talk so gaily and so lightly, Cyril?" urged his mother, reproachfully, with her fine eyes more full of tears than ever.

"Why, mother dearest, any way, both Horace and I must have had to leave you soon; the spring drills, the bore of coaching up for the half-yearly inspection, will soon begin, and then quit we should, inevitably."

"In May?"

"Yes."

"And this is March: it is hard—very hard! I had formed such pleasant plans for you."

"Why don't you forward them to the Horse Guards—they might soften the hearts of the Commander-in-Chief and Adjutant-General?" said Cyril, laughing. "Another cup of coffee, Miss M'Caw, at your leisure," he added to that demure personage, who daily officiated at the magnificent silver urn and Wedgwood breakfast equipage.

"My dear Sir John," exclaimed Lady Wedderburn, suddenly, as her eyes now fell on her husband, who had remained perfectly silent, "what is the matter? You look quite pale, and—and—the letter you have read is wafered with black!"

"And edged with black, too," added Robert Wedderburn, a thoughtless, but rather pretty looking lad, about eighteen, with curly yellow hair and dark grey eyes. "What's up, papa—'whose mare is dead?'"

But the Baronet did not answer immediately; he permitted the hand retainiug the letter to drop upon his knee, and his chin sank upon his breast as his head drooped forward, and he seemed to become lost in thought. Then all eyes, including those of old Gervase, the butler, were turned inquiringly towards him.

"Sir John Wedderburn, Bart, of Nova Scotia, and Willowdean, in the Merse—creation, 1628," as the heralds have it, was a remarkably good-looking man, and fully six feet in height, though he did stoop a little now, being past his sixtieth year. His features were cleanly cut, and very noble in contour, and benign in expression, his eyes a clear grey, and his white hair started in spouts from his forehead to fall back wavily like a lion's mane. His hands, though brown—for he never wore gloves—the whip, the gun, the rod, or the weeder, seldom being out of them—were well shaped and aristocratic in form, while his costume—a suit of coarse grey tweed and long brown leather leggings, as he sat at table, with a silver whistle at his button-hole, and a dogwhip in his pocket, only required his old wide-awake hat, with its row of flies and fish-hooks, to complete it; but the aforesaid hat hung in the hall without.

"My letter contains most mournful and sudden news, Katharine," said he, as a tear started to each of his eyes—an emotion all the more painful, as he was a man quite unused to the melting mood.

"You will perhaps permit me, dear Wedderburn," said she; on which Cyril took the letter from his father's passive fingers and handed it to his mother, who lifted her gold eye-glass, and, after a pause, read as follows; but not without great difficulty, as the handwriting was tremulous, and in some places degenerated to an almost illegible scrawl:—

"The Choultry, Madras.

"MY DEAR BROTHER JOHN,—My physician and old friend, of the Palmacottah Light Infantry, worthy Doctor Chutnay, who has just left me (and who will forward this to you), has told me that my hours are numbered now. Before this heavy fever fell upon me, I had fondly hoped to be with you once again, to inhale the pure, cool breeze that sweeps over the purple Lammermuir and all down bonnie Lauderdale; but God has willed it otherwise. I cannot live more than two or three days at the utmost, and have only strength to write, that I bequeath to you my most valuable possession on earth—my only child, Gwendoleyne—whom I know that you and dearest Katharine will love and cherish, even as your own boys, for the sake of her mother, who, to the hour of her death, loved you all so well.

"The impulsive blood of her mother's old Welsh race is in my girl's veins, and she is a warm and enthusiastic creature; so I pray you, as one so soon to face his God as I, alone can pray, that you will be her guide and protector. She will be rich; see that she marries worthily; guide and watch over her lonely steps, dear John, and love—love to——but my head swims. I cannot pen another line. Be a father to my little Gwenny, and believe me your affectionate brother, "WILLIAM WEDDERBURN."

While all listened to this in respectful silence, and the letter was passed between the brothers for re-perusal, Sir John had thrust aside his breakfast, and with his chin resting on one hand, sat gazing into the far vista of the sunny lawn, lost in sad thoughts; but Lady Wedderburn very deliberately examined the letter in which it was enclosed, and a document which came with it.

The letter was from the physician, Doctor Chutnay, and was dated from the cantonments of the 3rd Madras N.I. It stated that "the deceased expired on the second day after the letter was written, and that his daughter, Miss Gwendoleyne Wedderburn, would leave Madras for Europe by the next P. and O. liner that came into the Roads, and that herewith he begged to enclose a copy of her poor father's will."

William Wedderburn, the younger brother of Sir John—younger by six or seven years at least—had spent half his life in the Indian Civil Service, and had realized a handsome fortune by his lucky speculations in the staple produce of India, such as cotton, indigo, rice, and coffee; and by his will it would appear that, save a few thousands bequeathed to Sir John, he left the bulk of his property, more than three hundred thousand pounds, to his orphan daughter, including a "garden-house" like an Oriental palace on the Choultry Plain, shares in the Agra Bank, Indian Stock, and—Heaven only knew all what more!

The contents of this letter affected all at the table in various degrees.

Lady Wedderburn had scarcely—and her sons had never—seen, though they had heard so much of this rich Indian uncle, who yearly sent home such magnificent and graceful (because suitable) presents to the family. He had been a kind of myth to all, save Sir John; so personally his death stirred no deep or tender chord in their hearts.

Her first idea was that the thousands now so suddenly bequeathed would be a seasonable aid in pushing on Robert at college and bringing him out for the bar; also in purchasing a majority for Cyril in some regiment that was not going to the East; and then, if the orphan cousin was handsome, who could say what might happen? the Madras heiress would make an excellent wife for one of them.

Her next thoughts ran on the fashion and expense of mourning, for the whole household, even to the lodge gatekeepers, would require to be put in black. Was a black hammer-cloth necessary for the carriage? Gaiety, they could have none of it for a time—a confounded bore, Robert thought, "when a fellow had so many invitations on hand and in prospect." Then as the little heiress would be here anon; which rooms was she to have? The best of course, after her own. All these ideas swept in quick succession through her busy brain.

Chesters of Chesterhaugh thought of the heiress's thousands and his own ugly betting-book. He played with his knife and fork; wondered what she was like, and ventured to inquire her age.

"She will be eighteen in May. Poor girl! and quite an orphan; but so rich, Captain Chesters!"

The poor companion sighed, for she too had been long friendless; but no lacs of rupees ever fell to the great Celtic line of the M'Caw.

Horace Ramornie remembered that eight years before this he too had come an orphan to Willowdean, but "so poor;" and now he had no thought or interest in the matter, save surprise to see tears falling silently over the bronzed cheek of bluff and jolly Sir John Wedderburn. But the memory of the latter was wandering away into the past, and he could recall the lithe, supple, and handsome figure of that dead brother, a blue-eyed and golden-haired lad, as he went forth to seek his fortune in the sunny East, with mingled hope and sorrow in his heart, and their mother's tears and kisses lingering on his cheek; and he could recall many a happy, happy hour they had spent together under yonder old trees, under the roof of Willowdean—days of nutting and bird-nesting in the summer woods, of trouting in the Leader and Whitadder; or wandering, truant-like, by many a harvest-field and lone burn-brae; of tricks they had played upon their tutor; of depredations committed in the vineries and hot-houses; and their awful fear of discovery, which was more than half the charm of the whole adventure; of all their rides and rambles, their boyish hopes and mutual aspirations; and now—now he was dead and buried, far, far away in an Indian grave, an old, shattered, fever-stricken man.

It seemed so difficult to think when he looked across the room to where hung a portrait of the little Willie of the vanished years, a laughing and golden-haired boy; and Sir John muttered, with something between a sigh and a sob in his throat—

"Yes, Willie, I shall be a kind father to your orphan girl, whatever betide!"

"Gwendoleyne is a pretty name," said Cyril, approvingly.

"I am so glad you like it," observed his mother, following her own ambitious thoughts.

"Rather romantic though. There is one I like that is more simple."

"Her mother was a Welsh lady—one of the Ap-Rhys of Llanchillwydd," added Lady Wedderburn, in an explanatory tone. "But she died, poor thing, at Madras, when Gwenny was about three years old, and I wonder that uncle William did not send her home to Europe long ago; but then she was his only child, and he would have missed her so much!"

As the conversation was now taking a domestic turn, and Sir John Wedderburn was evidently disturbed by the tidings—for, instead of his brother's death, his final return had been anticipated,—Chesters, who hated the dark or gloomy side of anything, thought he had better go, as he had only ridden over to see a horse of Cyril's; yet he lingered for a time, smoking a cigar with him and Robert on the terrace before the mansion, while Lady Wedderburn was engaged in family council with her husband.

The manor house of Willowdean is situated in the Merse, which, with Lauderdale and Lammermuir, forms one of the three great subdivisions of Berwickshire, each of which possesses distinct natural features; but the former has been long celebrated in Scottish annals for its rich scenery, its industrious population, and plentiful harvests, while the sterner Lauderdale is bold and rugged, and Lammermuir is lone, bleak, and dreary, all purple morass or pastoral hill, being, in fact, a vast sheepwalk.

Built on the site of an old Bastile-house, that had many a time been burned or stormed, restored and stormed again, by English armies and Warden raiders in the times of old; lastly, when the Bandes Françaises under D'Esse d'Epainvilliers were in full retreat from Haddington during the wars of Mary of Lorraine, Willowdean we may describe as a handsome modern house, of aristocratic appearance, with a peristyle of eight Ionic pillars, in the pediment above which were the Wedderburn arms—a chevron between three mullets; while their motto—Fortiter et recte—was carved in large Roman letters on the frieze. The rooms were lofty, the double drawing-room, when its folding doors were slid into the wall, forming a stately salon for dancing, when all its rich furniture was removed, and the Karl Harrgs, Fosters, and Gilberts, that adorned its walls, were alone left behind.

There was, of course, a noble billiard-room, where many a game was played by Cyril and Chesters, not always to the advantage of the former; and a great conservatory filled with the rarest exotics, where more than one graceful acacia drooped over statues and fountains, was lit at night with roses of gas made at the home farm.

The park had been under grass for centuries, if it was ever ploughed at all. Tradition said that Leslie's six thousand cavalry had grassed there a night or two before the battle of Philiphaugh; and there, as its vista stretched far away to where the purple Lammermuir bounded the distance, far beyond the invisible fence that marked its actual limits, the brown fallow deer might be seen in summer browsing or lying under the ancient oaks and beeches, half hidden among the green fern and pink foxglove; and that nothing might be wanting in effect, some stately peacocks spread their spotted plumage over the white balustrades of the terrace before the façade of the mansion, to which the gravelled carriage-drive approached by a semicircular sweep on each side, through the smooth and velvet grass.

Every comfort were there, and every luxury—ice-pit, vineries and forcing-houses, stables and kennel—yet the means of the worthy Baronet were far from adequate to his expenses in this aspiring age, and in Willowdean, as in many a less pretentious dwelling, there was too often a struggle to "keep up appearances."

Perhaps no part of the house was furnished more luxuriously and elegantly than Lady Wedderburn's boudoir, the hangings and furniture of which were blue satin and silver; but few objects there were more treasured than certain Burmese idols, three-headed gods, triple-trunked elephants, and other hideous little monsters, in bronze and ivory, which her beloved Cyril had picked up amid the "loot" at Moulmein, and brought home for "dear mamma," when he was a boy ensign, in his first red coat.

And now for a little account of some of our dramatis personæ.

Captain Weddcrburn, though a frank, honest, and good-hearted young fellow, was and ever had been a spoiled child of fortune. Pronounced by aunts and nurses "a love of an infant" when crowing and nestling in his silk berceaunette, he had gone to Rugby a bold and beautiful schoolboy, and left college to join his regiment a dangerously handsome man. He had been pretty successful in all the little undertakings of the gay life he led—the career of a soldier in the flirting times of peace. The horse he backed was pretty sure to win; he could keep his wicket against the prime bowler of the garrison, and march off the field with his bat on his shoulder; he won the prize at every pigeon match, rode straight to hounds, pulled a capital stroke oar, and was deemed one of the best round-dancers in the Royal Fusileers. There was one thing he had never been able to do, viz., to beat his acquaintance Chesters at cards or billiards, "and thereby hangs a tale." Few men among those distinguished Fusileers had been more petted, spoiled, fallen-in-love-with, or so lucky among the ladies as handsome Cyril Wedderburn, who became rather fastidious in consequence.

A prime hand he was in arranging picnics, or a social "spread" on the roof of a drag at race or review, and he affected to dabble in music too, for he had a fine voice, and many a mysterious air he had bribed the band-master to "fudge out of another," and dedicate to some pretty girl about whom he dangled till the route came; and it was his great—yet most ungrateful—boast, in mess-room parlance, that "no bit of white muslin had ever hooked him yet."

There was one sweet, pale face, however—but of that anon.

His cousin and brother-officer, Horace Ramornie, though nearly as much petted and admired, was much less a man of pleasure than Cyril. He was by no means so showy an officer or so fashionable a man, yet he was a lad of very striking and interesting appearance, now in his twenty-second year; slender, graceful, and gentle-mannered, with nearly regular features, and skin of an olive tint; yet with bat and foil he had held his own against the best at Sandhurst. He had wonderful dark hazel eyes, eyes that, as Cyril said, "were bright enough and soft enough for a girl, and were quite thrown away upon a fellow like Horace."

The lad had been a hard student, for he knew—and had perhaps been taught to know from his boyhood—that he was dependent on the Wedderburn family for his commission, in the first place, and for his little yearly allowance in the second; therefore, he was chiefly vain of having won a step in the regiment, that he was a lieutenant, and that three letters, p.s.c., after his name in the Army List, showed that he had already passed his final examination at the Staff College, and was fit for any appointment the Commander-in-Chief might bestow upon him.

Though amid the expense which their household and Cyril's allowance—especially when on home service—entailed, together with Robert's prospects, Lady Wedderburn did sometimes deem Horace somewhat of "a drag," she could not forget that he was her dead sister's only son; and as she doted on the tomes of Douglas, Burke, and Debrett, she was vain of his direct descent from an old, old Scottish line, that stretched far beyond the Wedderburns of the Merse into remote antiquity; for the lad was descended from fierce Sir John Ramornie, the audacious and implacable, the companion and false friend of the helpless Duke of Rothesay, whom, as history tells us, he seized near Strathtyrum, and starved to death in the Castle of St. Andrew's in 1402, and from Alexander de Ramorgny, who had a free gift of Pitglassie in Fife from Robert Duke of Albany, and so forth; so Horace, though only a subaltern in Her Majesty's service, enjoyed an historical name, one among the best of many of Scotland's "unlanded gentry," though Pitglassie and all had gone in recent bank failures, very little store he set thereon, as he walked to and fro on the terrace on that breezy March morning, enjoying a pipe of Cavendish and listening to Chesters, who was descanting most fluently on the merits of certain horses and dogs, and on certain races that were on the tapis, but descanting in vain, for Horace was not a betting man.

Ralph Rooke Chesters, of Chesterhaugh, a neighbouring proprietor, whose lands were deeply dipped in debt, enjoyed the local rank of Captain, having once been a cornet in a cavalry corps, which he had left "somehow under a cloud," as the phrase went. He was not without a certain amount of good looks, and had undoubtedly a gentlemanly exterior. Yet he was a blasé man, of some forty or five-and-forty years, who had seen and known a vast deal of the world ere half that time was past. His nose was very red, his cheeks were blotchy, and his sandy-coloured hair was already thickly seamed with grey. There was a perpetual sinister and watchful expression in his pale grey eyes, and usually a compression about his thin, cruel lips, the secret workings of which his sandy moustache, luckily for himself, concealed.

On this morning he wore a rough suit of heather-coloured tweed, with leather gaiters and baggy knickerbockers, a round jacket, scarlet shirt, and Glengarry bonnet, the vile composite costume of the fast Scotchman "of the period" whose limbs will not pass muster in the kilt; and on the left side of the said Glengarry he wore a huge and pretentious silver badge, the crest of the Chesters (a tower), to whose line he certainly was no ornament; and Cyril Wedderburn, who was very fastidious in his own toilette, disliked this style of dress intensely, and even when shooting or fishing never adopted it.

His new horse—a fine bay hunter, with dark legs—had fully met Chesters' approval. The stables, the dog-kennel, and the loose box had been duly visited; they had tried a stroke or two in the billiard-room, with a glass of Madeira and a biscuit, ere the Captain again announced his intention of going.

"I daresay, Wedderburn," said he, "you must feel it a thundering bore, this death of an old uncle you scarcely ever saw? It will spoil all your fun, having to play propriety here till your leave is up."

Cyril, like Robert, was perhaps thinking so, but had not the coarseness to put his thoughts in words.

"Uncle William was my father's favourite brother," said he, evasively.

"Order my horse, Asloane," said Chesters, as the butler was leaving the billiard-room with the salver and decanters.

"Are you going already?" asked Cyril, in a tone of equal indifference and politeness.

"Yes, if you will allow me. I am rather de trop here—family grief, house of mourning, and all that sort of thing," said Chesters, smiling as much as he ever smiled; "but perhaps you will look me up at Chesterhaugh to-morrow, and pot with me at six, and then we'll have a little mild play; not extravagant, remember; only guinea points."

"All right, I'll be there; thanks," replied Cyril, but in a tone of more indifference than cordiality.

Cyril Wedderburn courteously accompanied Chesters to the nearest gate-lodge on the verge of the park, and then he galloped off.

"That is not the way to Chesterhaugh," said Cyril to the lodgekeeper.

"No, Maister Cyril," replied that official, with a leer; "but the Captain gangs as often by the road that leads to Lonewoodlee."

The man did not speak unthinkingly, for his tone and manner made the brow of Cyril contract, and he felt his cheek flush with anger, for the inference to be drawn from these simple words was far from being a pleasant one to him.

"Chesters at Lonewoodlee! By Heaven, I must look to this!" he muttered, as he turned and walked slowly back to the house.

Dinner at Willowdean, even when only the family were present, was rather a stately and cumbersome meal; yet Cyril and Horace, accustomed latterly to the splendour and glitter of the regimental mess, perhaps liked that it should be so. A service of plate covered the great walnut-wood sideboard. The damask cloths, the elaborately cut crystal, the blue and gold china with the Wedderburn arms—crest, an eagle in full flight, with the motto, Fortiter et recte—which figured on everything from the ice-pails to the salt-spoons, all betokened taste, luxury, and moderate wealth; while candelabra lit with gas shed a flood of brilliant light over all. Save a few feet of polished wainscot round the room, the floor was entirely covered by a rich deep Turkey carpet. Long and narrow, the apartment had four lofty windows at one end; these opened towards the Lammermuir Hills, but were now, at six P.M. in the month of March, shrouded by heavy maroon-coloured hangings with broad gold binding.

The three servants in attendance were each a perfect "Jeames" of the most approved order, so far as calves, whiskers, and livery went; for the traditional good old-fashioned servants who lived and died in their masters' household, and were as hereditary as the family pictures and plate, like many other Scottish things of the best kind, exist only in romance, and are gone with the past.

The party which assembled at table when Asloane rang the house-bell at six, was of course somewhat reserved and taciturn for a time. They conversed but little, or in low tones, till the cloth was removed, and that little ran chiefly on the weather, or consisted of the courtesies of the table, till Mr. Asloane had placed the elaborately cut decanters in a row before his master, bowed, and withdrawn.

Sir John, though grave and even sad in expression, had already been able to think calmly over his "poor brother's" death, in conjunction with certain long projected improvements on the property—more particularly the erection of a new wing to the stable-court, and a central clock tower; and yet ever and anon he would come forth with some fond or kind reminiscence of Willie, for he seemed at times to live in the past, and could scarcely realize the idea that he had died an elderly man at last.

Cyril's thoughts rose chiefly upon what the gatekeeper had said so casually; thus he was taciturn, almost morose, and fidgetted with his cuffs and studs or whiskers, viciously cracking walnuts as if in the shell of each he crushed an enemy.

His brother Robert was probably thinking that if their uncle William had left him something out of his lacs of rupees, he might have cut the Bar, for which he had no great fancy, and betaken himself to the profession of a man of pleasure; while young Horace Ramornie had no thoughts of the matter, for he was the least considered in that small family circle, and so made, perhaps, a more substantial dinner than any of them.

Lady Wedderburn (née Katharine Douglas, daughter of a poor but ancient family in one of the Wards of Lanarkshire) was no longer young; she was past the prime even of middle age, but still had great remains of beauty. Her cast of features and the brilliance of her dark grey eyes were unchanged, though wrinkles had taken the place of dimples, and her once black hair was streaked with silvery white.

Her small and ladylike hands showed the minute wrinkles and blue veins of time; yet they were well-shaped and beautiful hands still; and though she had several rings on them, fully a half of these were black enamel and pearls—the rings in memory of friends and relations she had survived.

The great remains which she possessed of a high class of beauty rendered her still pleasing, and Cyril, a very fastidious connoisseur in fine faces, always admired his mother's more than that of any other woman. She was his model, yet men rarely fall in love with their imaginary models. Her dresses were always rich, the colours well chosen, and in fashion adapted to her years, for she had the art which so few possess—that of growing gracefully old. A fall of rich white lace pinned prettily over her stately head fell with lappets at each side, finishing a coquettish demi-toilette that somehow became her matronly character.

"Pass the wine, Cyril; you are very silent," said Sir John: "and let us drink kindly to the memory of your poor uncle Willie."

"My dear Sir John," said Lady Wedderburn, still pursuing her own secret thoughts, after this little ceremony was over, "on again looking over our dear William's will, I observed that his property is conveyed away to certain trustees, of whom you are the chief, for the behoof of that darling child Gwenny, whom I already begin to love—quite as a daughter, indeed."

A grave kind of smile spread over Sir John's face, and Cyril, after a swift but furtive glance at his mother, proceeded to crack more nuts; but no one replied.

"I do so long to see her," resumed Lady Wedderburn, toying the while with some grapes, her head pensively on one side, and her eyes cast down. "If like her mother, she will be a very beautiful girl, Cyril."

"Indeed—I never saw her mother," replied Cyril, with provoking indifference, as he played with his long whiskers.

"I don't think there were many girls who in the bloom of their twentieth year surpassed Gwendoleyne Ap-Rhys!" observed his mother, emphatically.

"Pass the port, Horace," said Cyril; "that Madeira is like our mess tap, rather heady, but makes a capital 'whitewasher,' however."

"Makes a what?" asked Lady Wedderburn, with a tone of pique. "But a girl with three hundred thousand pounds will prove a serious responsibility to us."

"Get her married offhand," said Robert, bluntly.

"That is the very kind of marriage to be guarded against," replied his mother. "Thus we must be careful whom we introduce to her. She will prove a great comfort to us, however, Wedderburn, when the dear boys are back to their regiment and Robert is at College."

"I quite concur with you, Katharine, about the introductions," said Sir John. "One thing is clear, that after Cyril goes I shall not have that person Chesters coming about Willowdean."

"He is no particular friend of mine," retorted Cyril, almost haughtily, while he coloured with annoyance. "I only met him at the Lothian Racing Club: he knew Probyn and other fellows of ours, and so we came to talk of horses, and turn a card or two, that is all."

"A card or two to your loss, as I am aware; but he is a bad style of man, and not the kind of companion I wish you or Horace to make."

"My dear papa," replied Cyril, who, when in his father's presence, never forgot the influences of boyhood, "after a fellow has been eight years in the line, been round the Sand Heads at the mouth of the Hooghly, and marched all through Central India, if he can't take care of himself, he never will."

"I know that Chesters got into a scrape in his regiment, and then into the hands of the 'Chosen People,'" said Horace, laughing.

"An easy matter to do so," added Sir John. "Chesterhaugh, with its rents, wont stand a stud of horses, a pack of harriers, a yacht on the Clyde——"

"Besides a French danseuse," interrupted Cyril, under his breath and with a swift glance at his cousin.

"He rooked that young French officer who was travelling here," said Sir John—"what was his name?"

"The Captain De la Fosse," said Miss M'Caw, softly, for the flatteries of the Frenchman were still deep and soft in her memory, when he spent a week at Willowdean.

"Thank you—yes, De la Fosse. He rooked him so completely that, but for my assistance, he would have had serious difficulty in getting home to France."

"Ah, well; don't let him marry cousin Gwenny," said Cyril, once more applying himself to the port. "But here is a chance for you young fellows, Bob and Horace. Why don't you toss up for who is to enter stakes for the heiress?"

"Fie, Cyril! How can you talk thus—how make a jest so unseemly at such a time—of your own cousin, too?" exclaimed Lady Wedderburn, with heightened colour and unusual asperity of tone.

"Why, mother dearest——" began Cyril, with surprise.

"You might give yourself the preference."

"The right of the first-born," added Robert, sententiously.

"Nay, nay, I am not a marrying man. What the deuce should I do with a wife, when the regiment has got its 'Letters of Readiness,' too?" asked Cyril, again having recourse to the nuts, with a gloom in his dark blue eyes.

"Or Horace either, if it comes to that," said Lady Wedderburn, a little pointedly. "But under all the circumstances, I do not see why you should now go to the East at all, Cyril."

"Why now more than yesterday?" asked Cyril, who seemed to be in a cynical mood of mind. "I daresay you think me far too fine and handsome a fellow to be shot or bayonetted by some filthy Russian linesman, and then flung into a hole or a trench by the wayside, as better men have been."

"Oh, Cyril, what a horrible idea!" exclaimed his mother, while tears started to her eyes; "but there is our neighbour, Lady Juliana Ernescleugh, on the first rumour of war she had her son, the Master, transferred to the Scots Fusileer Guards, and I don't see why I should be worse treated than she is."

Cyril and Horace laughed on hearing this, and the former said, contemptuously—

"I do not think Lady Juliana made much by that move, as the Brigade of Guards are also under orders for European Turkey."

"At all events, when Gwenny comes home—for this house is of course her home, Sir John being her nearest kinsman and chief trustee—I trust that you two boys will do all in your power to soothe and console her after the terrible loss and affliction she has undergone."

Horace Ramornie coloured, for he felt himself omitted in this charge; but then she was no relation of his.

"Of course," replied Cyril, who, after a pause, began now for the first time to perceive how the current of these remarks tended; "but our time for all that sort of thing—at least, mine and Horace's—will be short, and a telegram from the Colonel may whisk us off by the first train at any moment. Gwenny—Gwendoleyne—the name is pretty enough, smacks of Mudie's, and the novel in three volumes octavo—we must leave the care and the reversion of her to you, Bob."

"She won't have any tinge of colour about her, I hope?" said that personage, simply.

"What a griff you are! Come out for the Scotch Bar; you would certainly shine there, Bob, if nowhere else," said Cyril.

"Well, a Welsh girl," persisted Bob, who was at the age when most young men are flippant; "she'll have black eyes, of course, with the proverbial cheek bones of the Celt and the Cymri—a high-crowned hat, and a scarlet handkerchief."

"A nice costume to wear at the Choultry, when the thermometer is at 108° in the shade. Bob, you are the veriest griff I have met since I left Chowringee."

"I am getting utterly provoked by this tone and the tenor of these remarks. Really the young men of the present day are becoming quite insufferable!" said Lady Wedderburn, actually darting an angry glance at poor Horace, who had scarcely spoken. "Cyril, and you especially, Robert, seem to forget that her mother was a lady of one of the best families in Wales, and that her father was your uncle."

"Yes," added Sir John, stiffly; "Ap-Rhys of Llanchillwydd is a name second to none in the annals of the old Principality."

"Then, papa," continued Bob, "when Gwenny comes home, we'll all have to go in for Burke, Debrett, and pedigree?"

"Reared in India, and away from all home influences, the girl will too probably place such things at their true value," said Cyril, still more unwittingly shocking his aristocratic mother; "though of course she may, if she please, go far beyond the Wedderburns up to the first Prince of Wales, or Howel Dha, at least."

"Come, come; no quizzing," said Sir John, a little severely. "Remember that she is an orphan."

"And so rich," added Lady Wedderburn, plaintively. "Miss M'Caw," she continued, with a bow understood by that lady, who, when no other was present, always sat on Sir John's right hand; and then the four gentlemen rose as ceremoniously as if they were all strangers, while she retired to the drawing-room with her companion.

The latter, who had been pretty when young, was now well past her fortieth year, and having a pedigree—as what Highlander has not?—she had sighed with secret impatience and envy, perhaps bitterness, while listening to much that we have recorded; for she too, as well as the heiress, had come of an old Celtic line that had furnished its patriotic victims for the field and scaffold; and among her private lares she treasured an old locket of red gold, containing a lock of "the Prince's" golden hair, given by his own hand, on the retreat from Derby, to her great-grandsire, the great M'Caw of the '45, who died like a hero in the human shambles at Carlisle.

She had resided some ten years of an aimless and hopeless life at Willowdean, and had not been without secret thoughts on one or two occasions of entangling Cyril in a matrimonial affair; but he had seen too much of the world even as a boy, and was daily seeing too many fresh young faces to be caught so easily—so all such hopes were past and vanished now.

She was a calm, quiet person, who, under a tolerably ladylike exterior, concealed much of that discontented pride, fawning, and subservience, which are too often the leading characteristics of the modern Celt.

"I do beg that you will not consider Ralph Chesters as in any way a friend of mine," said Cyril, resuming a thread of the past conversation, after his brother and Horace had betaken them to the billiard-room; "for I fully agree with you that he is not the style of man to meet ladies."

"Especially one who is such a monetary prize as your cousin," said Sir John, pointedly.

"But he talks of going to the army of the East."

"In what capacity?"

"An officer of the Bashi Bozooks, or some such distinguished force," said Cyril, with a hearty fit of laughter.

"And a good riddance his absence will prove to the Merse," added Sir John, as he rose to join Lady Wedderburn, leaving Cyril to smoke on the terrace, where he walked to and fro in the clear, cold starlight, with his eyes fixed on a dark spot that was barely distinguishable on the hill side, two or three miles off. It was a dense grove of trees, which seemed to have a peculiar attraction for him, and its outline became more distinct when the moon arose.

"Have you been talking to Cyril?" asked the lady, as her husband entered her boudoir, and, not without some doubt and hesitation, deposited his burly person in his rough tweed suit on one of her blue and silver fauteuils.

"Yes," said he, rubbing his forehead with an air of perplexity.

"Seriously, I hope?"

"About Chesters—oh, yes."

"Tush! I mean about Gwendoleyne."

"No; but it seems to me that you are already—even on the first day our melancholy news has come—disposed to press your views or wishes too plainly upon Cyril."

"How so?" asked Lady Wedderburn, curtly.

"In the choice of a wife, most men like to please themselves, not other persons."

"But surely, Wedderburn, you would wish to see this alliance brought about?" said she, earnestly.

"Undoubtedly; but Cyril is just the style of young fellow to run rusty—to kick over the traces—if worried about the matter. I know that I should have done so."

"He can have no previous attachment, for never a letter comes here, save from some of his regimental friends, and Horace and Robert see them all."

"But, my dear Katharine," urged Sir John, gently, as he stirred his cup of coffee, "we must consider also the girl's inclinations, her tastes, her sympathies."

"What right has she to have any at her years? I am sure I had none!"

"Complimentary, Kate, for you were just about her age when you married me."

"Ah, but that was a very different thing. I did not possess three hundred thousand pounds."

"You possessed much that had far more value in the eyes of John Wedderburn," said the old gentleman, as he stooped, kissed her upturned forehead gallantly, and to end this matter, went forth to have a look at his horses, and think over the proposed additions to the already magnificent stable-court.

Within a few miles of this splendid and luxurious modern mansion a very different scene was passing in another dwelling.

In a bleaker part of the Merse, more immediately adjoining the Lammermuir range of hills, was situated the house of Lonewoodlee, a fine example of what a Scottish fortalice required to be in the troublesome times of the sixteenth century. "It grotesquely associated with its rude strength the fantastic ornaments of a more powerful and civilized people—a type of what the French alliance must often have produced among the gentlemen of the age—the rugged nature of the Scot, with the style and manners of the mercurial Frank."

It was a small square tower, with round corbelled turrets at the angles; but as it has changed hands since then, and been strangely modernized within the last three years, the reader may look for it in vain as we shall describe it.

Numerous loopholes, designed for arrows or arquebuses, were in the angles of these four turrets, in the sills of the windows, and round the floridly carved entrance-door, over which were the arms of the family, with the legend, in quaint letters, in bold relief—

"Yis tovr finished be Oliver Levenox, 10th Aprile, 1560, is ovr inheritance."

It was grey, gaunt, lichen spotted, and solitary, and was surrounded by a grove of ancient trees on the pastoral slope, from whence it took its most characteristic name of the Lonewoodlee. It was more immediately girt by a massive wall, which had once been for defence, but was ruinous now, for the long-tufted grass and fragrant wallflower flourished along its cope, and the iron gate had long since fallen from its hinges, while the proud court was almost covered by the grass that sprung up between the stones.

Even prior to the period of which we write, some fifteen years ago, an attempt had been made to modernize the tower a little, by removing the rusted iron gratings from the windows and enlarging them; but still the dwelling was gloomy, in consequence of the enormous thickness of the walls and the vaultings of the lower basement.

Among the wood around it were many trees that had sprung from seedlings of the ancient ash, which, by the law of an early Scottish king, every man who built even a cottage was bound to plant near his dwelling for shafts, when the "spear, six Scottish ells in length," was required to bear back alike the Norman knights and Saxon infantry of England.

Many a gloomy old Border legend was connected with the Tower of Lonewoodlee, and like some other ancient families, the proprietors had their warning when fate was nigh—an unpleasant, however romantic, adjunct; for it was said that when a Lennox was to die, as the moon rose above a certain quarter of the Lammermuir hills, the shadow of a large human hand—the hand of Destiny—was cast on the eastern wall, with the forefinger pointed at length; and the local papers actually asserted that such a shadow was visible before Major Lennox was killed at the battle of Waterloo.

Within all was gloomy, dilapidated, and darkened by time; the furniture was fully forty years old, and some of it was still older.

In the dining-room, or hall, the sofas were square-elbowed, of horsehair, and furnished with back-squabs; the chairs were of dark blue leather, and in the corners were circular stands for curious china, large shells, and so forth. With cotton furniture, or coloured calico, a meagre attempt had been made by a neat female hand to render gay the apartment that passed as a drawing-room, where the chiffounières of wood, painted white and gilded, the white marble girandoles (minus half their crystal pendants), and everything else, were old-fashioned, shabby, and worn, for they had been the new furnishing of the mansion when George III. was King, and the mother of the present proprietor had come home a blooming bride.

Here and there, in oval frames, or bordered only by black oak mouldings, were portraits of a far older period than any of the Georges, as the black wigs and breastplates of the subjects evinced. Every way it was an old and worn-out establishment, where everything looked mouldy and fading away.

On the same March evening when the maroon-coloured curtains were drawn at Willowdean, and the pompous old butler was placing the row of glittering decanters before Sir John Wedderburn, an old man was seated in a high-backed leather chair, which was studded with rows of brass-headed nails, seeking to warm his limbs at the fire, which blazed cheerily enough in the great stone chimney of the dining-hall at Lonewoodlee. The grate was old-fashioned, like everything else there; it was a mere iron basket, adorned with four brass knobs, and placed upon two square stones, quite unsuited to the form of the fireplace. Thus the heat of the roaring pile of coals, turf, and bog-oak roots, went all up the great tunnel-like vent, with a column of sparks.

Oliver Lennox of Lonewoodlee looked much older than his years warranted, for his wasted figure, clad in a well-worn Indian dressing-gown, or robe-de-chambre of the shawl pattern, tied by a cord and tattered tassel, was bent severely, and his face was furrowed by disease and the emotions of the mind, rather than time, for he was not more, perhaps, than fifty-five years of age.

His right elbow rested on the arm of his chair; his chin was placed in the hollow of his hand, and his keen, restless, yet clear blue eyes were fixed dreamily on the ruddy flame that lighted up his sharp aquiline features, and turned to threads of glittering silver his thin white hair that had once been a rich dark brown.

Seated on a tabouret or little stool by his side, was his daughter Mary, a girl not quite of twenty years; perhaps the only true friend whom many reverses of fortune left him; his sole attendant, save a couple of female domestics; others seldom remained long at the Tower, as a querulous master and a gloomy house, which had moreover the steady reputation of being haunted, rendered service unattractive at Lonewoodlee.

Mary knew he was dying of some internal and mysterious disease with which the doctors had totally failed to grapple—that, in spite of her affection and their skill, of her prayers and their potions, he was slowly and surely passing away from her; and she left nothing unsaid or undone to soothe, by sweet devotedness, what she knew to be too probably the few months of his last year on earth.

He had survived the winter, but might never live to see the summer ripen into autumn, and the golden corn waving on the upland slopes that were his own no more.

To God and herself alone were known the terrible thoughts of Mary Lennox in the long, sleepless hours of the weary nights she passed; yet unswerving in her filial duty, tenderly nursing and ministering as only a woman—only a daughter or wife—can nurse or minister to the wants of a querulous patient; springing from her pillow with cheerful and affectionate alacrity, to anticipate his every wish, and smiling to hide the sorrow that preyed upon her own heart.

Pale and sad usually, her face was beautiful; yet sadness had not been its normal expression, but rather the result of local influence. Her features were not quite regular, but there was a divine delicacy about them; her finely lidded eyes were of that blue-grey which is aptly termed violet colour, and her mouth and chin were beautifully formed, so were her tiny ears and hands. Her whole figure, which was petite rather, and the contour of her head, with its masses of rich brown hair, were eminently lady-like and indicative of high breeding and tender culture; and a charming picture she would have formed, as she sat then, with her father's passive left hand locked caressingly in hers, and her soft little face upturned to his, every feature teeming with affectionate solicitude.

Her dress was plain, inexpensive, and simple, for their means could not afford her many luxuries; but her starched cuffs and collar—made and dressed by her own hands—and the tiny velvet riband around her slender white neck, made it quite a pretty toilette, while, save an old ring or two that had been her mother's, she was destitute of ornament; and there the father and daughter sat long in silence, while the blustering March wind soughed in the old wood without, and the flood of red and wavering light from the capacious fireplace fell upon their faces, and fitfully too upon the portraits of those ancestors, who, if their exchequer had been as low as that of Oliver Lennox, would have chosen just such a moonless night for a quiet ride among the beeves on the southern side of the Border.

Oliver Lennox had once been a man of considerable influence in the Merse, and had even contrived to shine, for a short season, in London society. But deep play, some unlucky bets at Newmarket, one or two vexed law pleas with Sir John Wedderburn, in which he had been nonsuited with great loss, domestic cares of many kinds, particularly the deaths of his wife and several children, all combined to break him down in health and spirit.

Much of his land had gone, piecemeal, to satisfy the creditors his London career had raised around him, and now the little that remained of Lonewoodlee was mortgaged to the utmost; and having but a bare annuity, he knew too surely that when he died there would be neither home nor shelter for his Mary.

He was a proud, fiery, and irritable man, who would brook neither the pity of his friends nor the scorn of his enemies; and the knowledge that his only child—his gentle and delicate daughter—would be left to the mercy of the world, or to support herself by the accomplishments she possessed, maddened him, so that there were times when his mind wandered, and then it was that the soul of Mary Lennox seemed to die within her with sorrow and terror!

"Shall I play to you, dear papa?" said she softly.

There was a wonderful chord in Mary's voice that made it very seductive, but she had to repeat the offer three times before the sense of it fell upon his drowsy ear.

"Shall I play to you, dear papa?" she repeated for the third time.

"No, Mary, no," said he, peevishly. "Your piano, child, is in that shabby chintz-covered den you call a drawing-room."

"Oh, papa; what served poor mamma may very well do for me."

"And I fear we can't afford a fire there as well as here."

"But if I keep the doors open you could hear me. The cold is not great to-night," she urged.

"No—no, child, thank you; but I wish to think."

"To-morrow, papa, I shall have my poor old piano brought here, and then I shall play to you some of the airs you love so well."

"Pet Mary—but music makes me sad."

"But it soothes you too, papa."

"Your voice, my darling, would soothe anything, even the rage of a lion," said he, as he drew her head upon his knee and held it caressing there between his tremulous hands; "but it sounds so like your mother's, that—that—even while I love to listen my heart grows sad and sick within me! Music possesses such vast power, especially over a shattered nervous system, and more than anything else can conjure back the past, the lost, and the dead! But," he added, suddenly, with a louder tone and a strange gleam in his eye, "where is your brother Harry; why is he not here to-night?"

Then a kind of wail escaped the lips of poor Mary, and the tears started to her eyes, for she knew that his mind was wandering again.

"Oh, papa!" she moaned, and looked at him imploringly.

"Where is he?" demanded Mr. Lennox, impetuously, and his eyes flashed in the red light of the fire; then he struck his hand upon his brow as a gleam of memory came to his aid, and he said, in a choking voice, "I forgot myself! God help me—God help me! True, Mary—true; my boy is lying in his Indian grave, far, far away, where the bones of the Briton and Sikh lie thick on the battle-field. But you must remember the night I saw him here—here, in this very room!"

"I was but a child of eight years when poor Harry died."

"Yes; and when I saw him."

"Oh, papa, that is a wild idea; as absurd as—as——"

"What, girl?"

"The shadowy hand."

"It is not so, and it was not so! It is not impossible, Mary, when death, more especially a violent one, strikes at a distance one who is dear to us—dear as your brother Harry was to me—that some intuition, some mysterious presentment announces the event. How often have I told you that as I sat here in the twilight of evening in this chair, and on this very spot, reading the Gazette of the killed and wounded on that disastrous Indian field, some secret impulse made me glance towards the end of the room, and there I saw the figure, the form, the face of your brother, regarding me mournfully and tenderly for a moment, and then all faded away. I was terror-struck, but deemed it fancy! Again I turned to the fatal Gazette, and the next name that caught my eye among the killed—the killed in action—was that of my own boy, Harry Lennox!"

"Hush, papa, oh hush!" said Mary, looking round anxiously; for it was this story to which her father was fond of referring from time to time, that had won the Tower, among the vulgar, the reputation of being haunted, so that domestics were terrified to remain, though the place was within a mile or two of the rail to Berwick.

After a long pause he drew a deep breath and spoke again.

"Did I not hear, or was it a dream—for I have strange dreams sometimes—that Wedderburn's son buried him—buried my boy?" said he, in a tremulous voice.

"Yes, papa;" said Mary, eagerly; "Cyril Wedderburn buried poor Harry, and stood by his grave in that distant land. He did more, papa: he cut off a lock of his hair for—for you."

"I could bless him for that, but for his father's sake. I hate that elder Wedderburn. I hate his flaunting wife," he continued, raising his voice and his clenched hand. "I hate the whole brood of them, and shall never cease to curse——"

"Oh, dearest papa, do not—do not speak thus!" cried Mary, imploringly, as she placed a hand upon his mouth, and saw with growing terror the fire, as if of incipient insanity, flashing in his eyes.

The paroxysm of rage into which he lashed himself when he thought of his lost law suits, especially one in which Sir John Wedderburn asserted and made good his right of pasturage upon a certain part of the Lee, which the Lennox family had claimed as theirs alone for several generations, weakened him so much that Mary was glad to give him a soothing draught, and get him to his bedroom for the night.

After this he became more seriously ill, and there were more frequent aberrations of intellect. Sometimes he imagined himself in the hunting-field, and then he would shout in a quavering and childish treble—

"Tally ho! tally ho! Hallo, my Lord Wemyss, what's up at the high fence yonder? By Jove, John Wedderburn's brown mare is at fault—her off forefoot is caught in the wires—and over they go, nag and rider! I hope the young scoundrel's neck is broke at least!"

And Mary wept as she heard the fierce wish, which referred to some sporting adventure years ago, when her father and Sir John were much younger men, but seemingly no better friends.

Next night she had her piano moved close to the drawing-room door, so that she might play to him as he lay abed in his own room. She had a magnificent voice, and it had been highly cultivated. She exerted herself to the utmost to please, and played and sang him to sleep, as one might do a fretful child. Then when she was assured that his slumber was sound, she kissed him softly, assumed her hat and veil, her cloak and muff, and hastened from the Tower and its desolate court, to where some one she well knew was awaiting her, at an angle of the wood—but in this we are somewhat anticipating our story.

Two or three dreary days and nights followed his last outburst of mental fury, and a certain revulsion of spirit and corresponding bodily weakness followed it. Then he became more calm and coherent, after some opiates had been administered by his medical attendant, the young parish doctor, whom the charm of Mary's presence rather than her father's necessity, rendered a pretty regular visitor at Lonewoodlee; but in the hours of her tearful watching, the querulous old man unwittingly stuck many a barb in his daughter's heart.

"I feel weaker every day, Mary dear. I won't be long a burden or a trouble to you," he would say; "for something whispers to me that I cannot last long now. Old and weak—old and weak—half blind and wellnigh toothless!"

"Papa," said she, imploringly, "do not talk thus! You are not yet sixty years of age."

"I know, darling; but the poor human machine is worn out for all that. Look at Wedderburn! How hale and strong he is, for fortune has ever favoured him and his family, child; while with me—with me—oh, how is it with me? Ah, truly says Ossian, that 'age is dark and unlovely, and that the race of men are like the leaves of woody Morven; they pass away in the rustling blast, and other leaves lift their green heads on high.' So—so shall I soon pass away, Mary; but dearest, you are weary?"

"I am not, papa," sighed the girl.

"Your eyes are red and dim. To bed, Mary—to bed. Place the sleeping draught at hand, then kiss me and leave me. Good night."

Then she would slip away to her room, the door of which was always left ajar, so that no sound might elude her ear in the night; and she would pray and sigh herself to sleep.

A day came anon when her father was too weak to leave his bed, and from thenceforward he became more than ever a confirmed invalid.

The sturdy but shambling old shooting pony, on whose broad back he had been latterly able to take a little exercise by a trot to Polwarth or Prestonhaugh, enjoyed a complete holiday; and time, as marked by the old-fashioned repeater at Mr. Lennox's bed-head, passed slowly indeed!

And as he lay there, day after day, and too often night after night, wakeful, and filled with keen and anxious thoughts, he strove to picture—to fashion out—the future of that lonely daughter whose life was, he hoped, to extend far beyond his own. He had plenty of time for this profitless employment, for, save Captain Chesters or perhaps the parish clergyman, no one ever dropped in to talk with or enliven him now, for his ailments and complaints against friends and fortune, his whims and fancies, rendered his society unpalatable to all save poor Mary.

There was no rousing him to take an interest in anything; and news of the coming war fell dull upon his ear. In vain did Mary read to him of our preparations for the Crimean war; that already the Russians and Turks had come to blows, and the former been defeated at Oltenitza, with the loss three thousand seven hundred killed and wounded; that a Turkish squadron had been destroyed by the Russians, and the town cruelly bombarded; and that the British fleet, under Sir Charles Napier, had sailed for the Baltic from Spithead; that the destruction of Cronstadt was confidently expected, and so forth.

Oliver Lennox deemed the worthy minister an utter bore, and viewed his attempts to soothe or console him as simply impertinence, which his proud and fiery spirit resented.

Of Chesters he felt doubtful, and knew enough of the world to fear such a visitor and such a friend for his unprotected daughter. He knew his own debts and difficulties, his own poverty, and that the annuity he possessed would die with himself, and then what would be left for her—work—starvation—death!

It was horrible to lie there—helpless, fettered hand and foot as it were, weak, powerless, and inert, weaving such dark, bitter, and distracting fancies! He writhed and wept on his pillow, and muttering, "Mary—Mary! my daughter—my daughter!" would press his thin, wan hands on his burning breast, as if to stifle thoughts that would not be stifled.

"I have been rash, wasteful, and unfortunate," he would often say, "but what have you done, my poor Mary, that you should be stripped of your inheritance? for this Tower, built by Oliver Lennox, and all the land around it, even to the Whitadder, form your inheritance; but it must pass away to others—others—oh, my God! while such people as those Wedderburns live on, surrounded by every earthly blessing!"

"Calm yourself, papa," said the hopeless girl, in a choking voice; "all may yet be well. Your health will revive with the warmth of spring."

"The spring grass will be sprouting on the sod that wraps me, Mary; and there I would lie in peace could I but see your future, child—if God would only in His kindness lift the veil that hides it from me! But, from the land of shadows, perhaps I may so see it—I may see it, and be a guide and a watch over you."

Though Mary heard much of this querulous grief, she never became accustomed to it; but seemed always to suffer the agony of his death by anticipation when he spoke thus.

"Fear not, papa; fear not for me," she was wont to reply, while caressing his head on her bosom. "If I lose you, I must trust then to God only."

"To God and yourself, darling; but there are times when I think with fear that—that——"

"What, papa?"

"That Ralph Chesters seems to love you."

Mary trembled and grew pale as she said—

"Do not speak of this again, I implore you, dearest papa."

"I am glad you don't like him; but what brings him here so often?"

"To see you, of course, papa," said Mary, as her pale cheek reddened.

"An old man sick and ailing! I don't believe it; but when was he here last?"

"Three days ago."

"Did you see him?"

"No; when alone with him, his presence becomes intolerable to me."

"Why—how?" asked Lennox, eagerly, and half-raising himself in his bed.

"There is an expression in his eye I do not like; moreover, I never leave your room save when you are asleep."

"Thanks, my darling; that is kind and good; but beware of Chesters, for he is a dog that bites but does not bark."

"Have no fear for me so far as he is concerned," said Mary, emphatically.

"It is well. Kiss me, child, and then I shall try to sleep."

The girl kissed him tenderly, restraining her tears as she did. Then with tremulous gentleness, her pretty, small hands adjusted the pillow and coverlet, ere she glided noiselessly away.

Often had Mary pictured—for she was a sensitive creature and full of imagination—how utter her helplessness and loneliness would be when her father was gone; and, notwithstanding all the love which another had succeeded in kindling in her heart, she longed and prayed that in the hour her father was taken, she might be taken too!

"Been fishing to-day, Cyril?" asked Robert Wedderburn, with a quizzical expression in his face, as his brother assumed his hat, gloves, and whip in the hall prior to riding out.

"No," replied Cyril, curtly, and colouring with some reason, as he had gone forth for four consecutive days with his rod, and returned with his basket empty; the fishing was merely a pretext to be alone, for he would have been clever indeed to have found trout or perch on the upland slopes of the Lammermuir, where Horace and Robert had seen him, while shooting hares and rabbits near Lonewoodlee. "I dine with Chesters to-day," he added.

"You go betimes?" said Robert, suspiciously.

"I want to give my new bay nag a breather—to have a few miles' gallop ere I go to Chesterhaugh," replied Cyril, as he rode off.

It was one of those dull March evenings when the sun sets at six o'clock, as Captain Wedderburn dashed on at a rapid pace towards Lonewoodlee. The more fertile part of the Merse was soon left behind, and after a ride of three or four miles among heathy and grassy slopes, striped here and there with bright green where the track of the Lammas floods had run towards the Leader or the Whitadder rivers, he saw the old grey Tower, whose four round turrets, cope-house, and chimneys stood clearly defined against the evening sky, overtopping even the ancient timber that grew around it.

Thatched cottages with whitewashed walls, and the ruddy firelight glowing through their small square windows; hedgerows that were in process of being lopped and trimmed; gardens where the fragrant earth had been newly turned up, and where tufts of the white snowdrop and rows of the yellow crocus or purple violets were appearing, had all gradually vanished, and Cyril found himself amid a voiceless and pastoral solitude, dotted only by black-faced sheep, or huge round boulder-stones, and where here and there a sable gled or raven hung aloft in mid air—a black speck amid the amber glory of the twilight sky—as if on the outlook for the dead wedder or other carrion that might be lying in some moss-hole or mountain burn.

"By Jove, this place is well named the Lonewoodlee, for it could not well be lonelier!" thought Cyril, as he rode into the thicket of trees. There was no obstruction, for the enclosure or boundary, once a dry stone dyke, had fallen down, and all the place was bare and open. He threw the bridle of his horse over a branch, and, as the twilight deepened, he turned very deliberately towards the mansion on foot, and as he did so, the rabbits and hares flitted before him from among the deep rank grass.

In spite of the coldness—almost amounting to hostility—between their families, Cyril Wedderburn and Mary Lennox loved each other dearly. He had met her from time to time at races and country balls, occasionally in the houses of mutual friends. These meetings had not always been pleasant, for latterly they were at times the result of contrivance, as Mr. Lennox, from the peculiarities of his temper, would not have heard of this intimacy with patience.

On the other hand, Cyril was dependent on his father for his allowance—no man can live on his pay in any regiment now, so least of all was it possible in the Royal Fusileers;—and while her father lived, Mary, under any circumstances, could not think of marriage, and so some three years of a secret and undecided engagement between these young people had slipped away at the period when this story opens.

Cyril did not enter the desolate looking courtyard, lest he might be seen by either of the two female domestics who now composed the sorely reduced household of Oliver Lennox. All was silent in the empty stables and ruined coachhouse, and the entire place looked gloomy in the extreme to the eyes of the young officer, accustomed to his father's more spacious and magnificent mansion, with its great oriels of plate-glass, and he sighed when he thought of Mary.

Suddenly, through an open window on the second story, there came the swelling notes of a beautiful and tender soprano voice—a girl's—as she sang the grand old Christmas hymn, accompanying herself upon a piano, which, though a fine one, was nevertheless somewhat old-fashioned and not exactly a grand trichord.

"Poor thing! God bless her kind heart! she is singing to the old man," said Cyril, while he listened intently, with his head reclined against the wall, as if to absorb every sound. "So my little fairy sings in Latin!"

        "Adeste fideles,
        Læti triumphantes;
Venite, venite in Bethlehem:
        Natum videte
        Regem angelorum:
        Venite adoremus,
        Venite adoremus,
Venite adoremus Dominum."

It was a strange song for a young girl; but, in fancy, Cyril could see the old man listening, and perhaps beating time with his fingers on the coverlet or pillow of his bed, as he was soothed away to sleep. The notes pealed out on the calm evening air with a startling effect, each one stirring a chord in the loving heart of the listener without; for as his own soul—yea, and dearer than his own soul—did he love the singer, who, after a pause, dashed into a plaintive little Scottish song, and then, quite as suddenly, into the beautiful solo, Cujus animam, from the "Stabat Mater" of Rossini.

At last she ceased. He heard, or thought he heard, the piano closed softly; and in a minute more, with her eyes beaming, her damask cheek glowing with pleasure, as she threw up the veil of her smart little hat, Mary Lennox glided round the corner of the Tower, with her cloak on and her little hands in her muff.

"At last, my darling—at last we meet!" said Cyril, as he drew one of her hands through his arm, and believing that no human eye saw or ear heard them, led her into a denser and darker portion of the grove that grew about her old paternal home.

"I have been singing to poor papa."

"So I thought, Mary; and he is now asleep?"

"Yes," replied Mary Lennox, with a bright smile; for her meetings with Cyril, though stolen and hasty, were the only bright spots in the usually dreary tenor of her life, and she looked up at her lover admiringly and tenderly. His rough suit of tweed, his grey round felt hat, and scarlet shirt, very open at the neck, became his style of manly beauty well, and showed that he belonged to the class of society which can affect and afford so simple and careless a mode of costume.

"There is no word of your leave being cancelled?"

"None, dearest."

"Thank God for that!" exclaimed the girl, as she clasped her hands.

"Four whole days have passed, my Mary, and yet I have not seen you!" said Cyril, half reproachfully, while he drew her close to him, gathering her fondly and gracefully to his breast.

"My poor papa has been so ill," she urged, as her eyes filled with tears, and her head sank wearily, yet confidently, on his shoulder.

"I regret to hear it. Poor old man! I wonder if he will ever receive me?"

"It would madden him, the very thought of doing so, Cecil."

"This sentiment is very foolish."

"He has neither forgotten nor forgiven that last unhappy dispute about your claim of pasturage on the lower part of the Lee."

"Bother the Lee! The basket of grapes and peaches I sent from the hothouse——"

"They came; thanks, darling Cyril; but papa suspected some friend's kindness—pity he called it—and the fruit was thrown to the dog in the yard."

"Folly again!"

"It is restless pride, Cecil; the pride that fights with poverty," pleaded Mary, with a sigh.

Cyril regarded her anxiously. He could perceive that much of her girlish simplicity was passing away; that there was a sadness in her eyes, and about her whole demeanour a more womanly grace perhaps; but she was growing paler and thinner in her battle with life—a life that would have been utterly cold, hard, and cheerless, but for the ray of light his love was shedding on it.

"Our households imagine us to be but cold and distant acquaintances, if even so much as that. Could they but peep in here and see us now," said he, as he covered her little face with kisses; for Cyril was merely supposed to lift his hat in the simplest courtesy to Mary, if he passed her on the highway or at church, where she could go but seldom now, in consequence of her father's ill-health, and as for their carriage and horses, they had long become things of the past.

"Oh, it is a great horror to me, Cyril, to be separated as we are," she began.

"As we are supposed to be, you mean, Mary dear."

"And to meet as we do by stealth, practising such dissimulation."

"It is intensely absurd that I, a Captain in the Line, a fellow who has been eight years in the service, should stoop to it."

"Unless for my sake, love?"

"True, Mary, true. What would I not do for your sake, my sweet pet?"

"But it is degrading to us both, and where will it end?" she said, plaintively.

"It shall end when we are married, darling. Oh, Mary! nightly my dreams are of you, and daily my thoughts. You seem thus to be ever near me, with me, and by me!"

"Oh, Cyril, it is very good of you to love me so."

"Who could help loving you?" was the enthusiastic response.

"Your mamma does not," said she, smiling; "and neither does Sir John; so how much would they hate me did they really know all."

A gesture of impatience escaped Cyril.

"I must and shall end all this by declaring our engagement; and should my allowance be cut off, which I can scarcely anticipate, I can exchange into an Indian regiment, and maintain my wife as other men do."

"But my poor papa?"

"True; and then, I am under orders now for the East!"

"We are very unfortunate," said Mary, while her tears fell fast.

"How unlucky that Mr. Lennox and Sir John have been at cross-purposes so often, in courts of law, at public meetings, elections, and county matters, actually about the very mode of hunting with the county pack. Never were two men more antagonistic; yet is it not strange that—that——"

"We should love each other so tenderly. Is that what you were about to say, Cyril?"

"Yes, Mary darling."

"But what would they say if they knew of our meeting thus?"

"Why torment yourself by thinking of it? Your father would storm finely, I doubt not; mine be loftily indignant; and as for my lady mother, it would be a case of hysterics and sal-volatile. But I do not see why their silly views should ruin our peace, Mary."

"Ah, did Sir John but know how weak and feeble my poor papa is now, that his ebbing life is only a matter of time, he would surely come over and forgive him all."

Cyril scarcely thought so, all the more when he remembered the rich young cousin who was to arrive so shortly at Willowdean; but he looked silently into Mary's eyes of violet-blue, they were brimming with tears, and her face wore a sad and wistful expression. Perhaps she was marvelling how it would be with her when all was over—when Cyril was before the enemy, and that parent, so beloved, had passed away.

"Our engagement seems wrong without the consent of our parents," she murmured, in a low voice; "and times there are, Cyril, when—when I seek to school myself to the task of releasing you."

A dark and startled expression shot over the fine face of Captain Wedderburn for a moment, for somehow he connected this innocent speech with the idea of Chesters; but shrinking from putting his thoughts in words, he merely said—

"Your father might well forgive me for loving you, Mary, if he would remember how I carried off your brother's body in the face of the enemy, after making a rally and charge with the bayonet at the head of my own company, or rather the survivors of it, at a terrible risk and under a fire of grape from the brass guns of the Sikhs. He might remember, too, how I laid the poor lad in his last home, a lonely grave under a palm tree, near the banks of the Sutledge."

"Alas! he remembers nothing coherently; and there are periods when he actually thinks that Harry yet lives, and in moaning terms he entreats him to approach the bed and take his hand."

"And you have neither seen nor met any of my family during my last absence with the regiment, Mary?"

"No; and it is better that I have not done so."

"Oh! why, Mary?"

"Fearing your return, I suppose, or that your brother Robert might fall in love with me——"

"Why, Mary, Robert is a mere boy!"

"He is about nineteen; and boys of nineteen fall in love sometimes," said Mary, smiling.

"Well, darling, well?"

"Fearing the result of these contingencies, your mother has slighted and put many an affront on me. Pardon me for saying so, dearest Cyril, but I cannot forget that my father, though poor, is Lennox of Lonewoodlee."

Cyril Wedderburn struck his heel upon the ground angrily.

"My own Mary," said he, "this style of thing is utterly absurd; it is like the romance of a family feud, Romeo and Juliet—Montague and Capulet, reproduced by an irritable old gentleman and a match-making woman who thinks no woman good enough for her eldest son.

"You don't know my papa," said Mary, plaintively, and yet resentfully.

"I do. I know him to be rash, extravagant, fiery, and passionate; but pardon me, dearest, I must not forget how dearly I love his daughter."

"Cyril," said the girl, earnestly, "reared as you have happily been amid the ease and affluence of your own family, you know not the curse of being a poor gentleman."

"Don't I, by Jove! when bits of blue paper come back, protested or unaccepted, and the Colonel and Paymaster look grave!"

"As I said before, I know not how all this will end. I only know, that irritated by losses, by poverty, and quarrels, how unforgiving my poor papa has become; how implacable; and that without some reconciliation with Sir John, I never could dare to speak of—of——"

"Of me?"

"Of that which is the only happiness of my life—our engagement; and my heart bleeds and upbraids me for deceiving him, when lying thus on what may prove his deathbed!"

Cyril did not reply, for his lips were pressed to those of Mary, and her tears were mingled with their kisses.

"Situated as we are, Cyril, our engagement may be a long one; that I don't mind, as I could never leave papa in his present state; but then it may be a hopeless one for me—that is, papa and I are so poor, so very poor! You do not know the struggle we have with the world, for all his land is gone, save the patch the old Tower stands on."

"It is a cruel and bitter world," said Cyril (though he, a favourite of fortune, had not found it so), "and you, my tender Mary, are a deuced deal too good for it."

"All are not bad or bitter though; there, even Chesters of Chesterhaugh——"

"What of him?" asked Cyril, sharply.

"Finding me weeping one day about a bill of papa's that had become due when we had not a shilling to meet it, he—he——"

"Took it up, I suppose?"

"Yes, Cyril; he lifted a load off my heart by doing so; but I dislike being under an obligation to any one—to him least of all."

"And this bill, what was the amount?" asked Cyril, gloomily.

"A two hundred pounds bill, Cyril?"

"Why did you not write to me?"

"I did not like to do so," she replied, blushing.

"Had you not faith in me?" he asked, impetuously.

"Yes, love; but not in myself. What sound is that?" she added, starting from his arms.

"Only the hoofs of a horse on the highway," said he, and as they listened the sound died rapidly away on the evening air.

They had been quite unaware, so absorbed were they in each other, that in the twilight gloom and under the shadow of a great larch-tree, a third person had been lurking and listening; one who, when he saw their lips meet, had involuntarily raised his hand and loaded hunting-whip, and with an unuttered malediction—all the deeper for being voiceless, on his cruel white lips—had stolen away, mounted his horse, which, like Cyril's, was concealed in the thicket, and galloped off.

This lurker was no other than Ralph Rooke Chesters, who, intending to visit Mary in passing homeward from the county town, had been compelled to depart, with his heart full of jealousy and his head scheming vengeance.

And now, after a few more tendernesses, Cyril bethought him of his dinner engagement.

"I shall get that bill out of Chesters' hands, if I can," said he; "one never can tell the use to which he may put such a document, and now good-bye, my darling. At noon to-morrow look for me here; and at twelve to-night look at your ring and think of me, for at the same moment of time I shall turn to mine and think of you."

They separated, and Mary lingered by the Tower-gate till the last sound of the bay hunter's hoofs died away in the distance, and then she stole on tiptoe back to the bedside of her sleeping father. She had been with Cyril barely an hour, and as if it had been five minutes only, had that delightful hour sped away.

* * * * *

Punctually at twelve that night the girl looked at her ring and murmured the name of her lover, while a beautiful smile spread over her soft pale face, for she was full of romance and enthusiasm.

"The dear fellow; he is now thinking of me!" she whispered to herself, as she laid her tiny watch on the table in the dressing closet, one of the four little turrets, and proceeded to let down the masses of her rich brown hair prior to arranging it for the night; but ere the minute hand had gone many seconds beyond the hour of twelve a distant sound came to her ear—a sound that rapidly grew louder.

It was the clanking of hoofs, as a horse in mad career swept along the hard beaten pathway near the Tower. The heart of Mary beat faster, she scarcely knew why; she threw open the little window of the turret and looked out upon the starry but moonless night, and as she did so the cry of a man in distress or terror came plainly upward to her listening ear, and when dying away on the wind it sounded strangely like the voice of Cyril Wedderburn.

But after a time she put aside that idea as too absurd! Would he, a finished horseman, ride like a madcap at that break-neck pace, and utter a shout like a tipsy brawler on passing Lonewoodlee?

And yet, she knew not why, she felt unhappy about the circumstance; and this anxiety increased when the following day passed, and the subsequent evening; and yet she saw or heard nothing of Cyril Wedderburn.

At noon on the morrow, the time he had promised to come, she looked for Cyril from the turret window of her room, which commanded an extensive view of the road that wound through the grassy and pastoral district. From that turret window and along the same road had more than one ancestress of Mary looked for her husband returning from the Scottish wars, in the times of Cromwell, Montrose, and Dundee, and looked in vain.

Through her lorgnette Mary studied every figure that approached on foot or horseback; there were not many, perhaps three or four only, during the entire day; but there was no appearance of Cyril Wedderburn, either mounted on his favourite bay hunter or afoot with rod and gun.

So for that day the thicket was unvisited; no fond whispers were uttered under the old larch-tree, and when midnight came she looked at her ring as on the preceding night in the vague hope that he might be doing the same, and thinking of her, wherever he might be.

Three days—to Mary, long, anxious, and dreary days—passed away. Knowing that his leave of absence from the Fusileers was so short, she grudged every hour he spent with others, when he passed so few with her, and now a new source of terror occurred. Had the war broken out suddenly, and Cyril's leave been cancelled? But surely he would have written, and however sudden his departure, should have made an effort to see and to bid her farewell.

Was he ill? That was not improbable, as for three days now the parochial Sangrado, Doctor Squills, had not been near Lonewoodlee; but then she knew that such rich folks as those at Willowdean would depend more on the greater medical talent, for which they could telegraph at any moment to the metropolis.

She was in an agony of suspense; their residence was not a cheerful place, so visitors were few and far between, and she could learn no tidings of the only other being whom, beside her father, she loved on earth.

On the fourth day, one of her domestics, Alison Home, an elderly woman, who had noticed her feverish anxiety without suspecting its cause, announced that a person on horseback was approaching the house—coming indeed at a gallop over the Lee. Then Mary rushed to her window, only to be disappointed, as she recognised at once, not Cyril Wedderburn on his long-stepping hunter, but the rather awkward figure of Doctor Squills, on his barrel-shaped Galloway cob.

The Doctor was a suave, well-meaning, fair, florid, and passably good-looking man, about thirty-five or forty years of age, anxious to please all, and to spread the practice in a district where the people were so healthy, that, save for his parochial salary, and one or two retired Bengalees with large livers and purses, he must have starved, his patrons being as few as his patients. Mr. Lennox was certainly a permanent, but far from a lucrative one; yet the Doctor was kind and attentive, all the more so that he had naturally a secret desire to stand well in Mary's estimation, and whenever he visited Lonewoodlee, he almost unconsciously made a more careful toilette than usual.

She received him with a genuine smile of welcome in the gloomy little dining-room, with its deeply embayed windows, its dingy old family portraits, the two great horsehair sofas and veteran chairs and tables, of the shabbiness of which, by long use and wont, she had ceased to be ashamed, though the pretentious coat-armorial of the Lennoxes was carved in stone above the fireplace, at the richly moulded jambs of which there still hung on each side those steel chains by which the fireirons were secured in the good old Scottish times, when guests would quarrel over their cups, and if their swords were left in the hall, were wont to enforce their arguments with the poker and shovel, if not thus secured to the wall.

"By that bright smile I augur well of my patient, Miss Lennox?" said Doctor Squills, taking Mary's hand between his own, patting it the while, and seeming very much disposed to retain it as he seated himself, for it was a lovely little hand indeed.

"Thanks, Doctor Squills—papa has been singularly easy and free from pain for three days past," replied Mary, making an effort to retain her impatience for some news of the outer world.

"That is good—very good. The composing draught taken as usual, I suppose?"

"All according to your orders. I am a good little nurse, I hope," said Mary, with a smile and a sigh.

There was a pause, and then the Doctor said,

"You have heard the great news, of course, Miss Lennox? but we'll talk of it after I have seen your papa. Is he awake just now?"

"Yes," said Mary, in a breathless voice, for the idea of "news" terrified her, and she seemed as one frozen, while the Doctor, after leisurely depositing his hat and gloves on the table, where with trembling hands she was placing a decanter of wine, and cake of her own making, from an antique buffet—with his bland smile of professional sympathy and jaunty step, took the way which he knew so well, to the bedchamber of Mr. Lennox.

What "news" had the Doctor? was it of war and peril, of hasty departure, of sickness or sorrow, of joy and triumph, or what? The Doctor knew nothing of her interest in Cyril; so, could he be referred to?

Poor girl! she was not left long in suspense, for the Doctor soon came sidling in with the same jaunty air, saying—

"Pulse regular, head cool, breathing good. Complaining of appetite too; capital! Give him any reasonable thing he may wish. Strength must be kept up at his years, you know, Miss Lennox—at his years especially."

"And you think papa better to-day?"

"Indubitably so—beyond my expectations."

"Thank God for that!" said Mary, fervently.

It was only a brief rally before the great catastrophe; but the good-hearted Doctor had not yet the courage to tell her so.

"You spoke of news, Doctor?" said she.

"Ah—sad—sad—very sad, indeed! Those poor folks are greatly to be pitied."

"Who—where?"

"The family at Willowdean."

"Pitied for what?" exclaimed Mary, starting as she grasped with a white and trembling hand the arm of the sofa on which she sat.

"The awful loss which they have too evidently sustained," said the Doctor, pouring out a glass of poor Mary's indifferent sherry, as he remembered that he had a ten miles ride over the hills before him.

"What loss? What has happened? Oh, tell me, tell me, Doctor, for the love of Heaven!"

"Is it possible that you have not heard what, now, all in the county know?"

"No—no—no; I have heard nothing," said Mary, wringing her hands piteously, while her dilated eyes, her blanched visage, and quivering lip betrayed a depth of emotion for which the Doctor, who knew of the coolness between the families, totally failed to account. "What do you mean?" she added.

"The disappearance—the death, no doubt—of young Captain Wedderburn, Sir John's heir apparent, the heir to so fine a property, and a title among the oldest of our Nova Scotian baronets—and with a rich wife in prospect too—one we hear worth half a million of money. It is a great and unparalleled calamity, and his family are plunged, as you may well suppose, in the profoundest affliction—the affliction of the wealthy and noble is always profound, it would seem, to judge from editorial sympathy—and to be in depth far beyond anything that the middle class or poor folks can have any idea of," added the Doctor, with a sigh, which was perhaps induced more by cynical repining than pure sympathy, as he drank his sherry, and then turned to Mary, and saw, with some amazement and alarm, her crushed and wobegone aspect.

"Disappearance—death?" she thought. "Oh, what does this mean? Do I hear aright? Am I mad, asleep, or dreaming?"

"I see, my dear Miss Lennox, that your tender susceptibilities are greatly shocked; but I can only tell you what I heard, and what the local papers of this morning contain; but first, take a glass of wine, and then listen to me. Take it, pray—nay, you must," and the kind Doctor forced her to swallow that which nearly choked her, and then resumed in his chirruping, gossipy manner, "the terrible catastrophe, happened thus—on Wednesday last—let me see, was it Wednesday or Thursday?"

"Wednesday, I suppose. Go on, in the name of mercy!" said Mary, in a voice all unlike her own; the rich chord was gone, and a cracked unearthly sound now remained.

"Yes, my dear Miss Lennox, it was on Wednesday, for the Berwick Warder has it so—Captain Wedderburn dined with that gay man of the world (rather too gay he is), Captain Chesters, at the Haugh, but did not return home. His non-appearance at breakfast next morning—though Mr. Asloane rang the great house-bell thrice—created no alarm among the family, as it was supposed he had remained overnight with his new sporting friend, and would probably turn up about luncheon time; though as Chesters was only a recent acquaintance, it excited a little surprise at Willowdean that Captain Wedderburn would tax his hospitality. That I learned from Mr. Asloane himself, as I had to ride over to see one of the laundry-maids who had a whitlow, which I treated successfully by——"

"Oh, go on—go on, I implore you!"

"It was on her right thumb—well, you are impatient, I see. After a time, a whisper came of his having left Chesterhaugh before midnight on Wednesday. This was alarming. If so, where had he been for these twelve hours past? The butler came to Lady Wedderburn at the usual hour about orders for the carriage, or horses for riding; they were both postponed, and the luncheon was delayed. Master Robert, his cousin, Lieutenant Ramornie, old Asloane, all the gamekeepers, gardeners, and grooms; even Sir John, and the Master of Ernescleugh, with all his people, proceeded to beat the woods, shrubberies, the park, and all the roads, but did so in vain. No traces of the Captain were discovered until yesterday, when a hat—a grey felt wide-awake, known to be his—was found at Buncle-edge, and his silver-mounted whip at Falaknowe, about a mile further eastward. There were no traces of blood, however. Pardon me, for I seem to shock you: but last night the darkest tidings of all came from Lady Juliana Ernescleugh. A horse known to be his, a fine bay hunter with black fetlocks, which he had purchased from her son the Master, was found by some of the Dunbar fishermen sorely bruised, battered, and drowned, with saddle-girths reversed, beside the rocky cleugh or beach, somewhere near Fast Castle. So what has happened, how he has perished or by what means, and as to where his body may be lying, whether on the land or in the sea, we are as yet helplessly and hopelessly in the dark. It is a terrible and melancholy catastrophe, and affects you deeply, I see, my dear young lady. I know not whether you ever saw Captain Wedderburn, but he was one of the finest young men in the Merse."

As the Doctor concluded this harrowing story, calmly and quietly, but unwittingly dealing death-stabs in her heart, poor Mary Lennox sank quietly back with eyes closed into a recess of the sofa; she was icy cold, and but for his presence and the means he took to recover her, by forcing her to take more wine, she must have fainted.

A stupor or torpor seemed to come over her. She became stunned, blind, and almost deprived of the power of volition. She knew not what to think or believe, or what to do. Aware of the stern necessity for keeping up appearances and for preventing the secrets of her heart from becoming patent to a stranger, she made a vehement essay to start up and question the Doctor again, only to find that he had been gone for nearly an hour and she had known it not. Neither she knew or cared what instructions regarding herself he had left with her two startled and dismayed domestics.

She only knew and could only realize that her lover, her affianced husband, the secret husband of her heart, had perished by some miserable death, whether the result of foul play or some terrible accident she might never know; and now she recalled with grief and terror how she had heard a horse galloping madly past, when she looked at her watch on that fatal Wednesday at midnight; and the wild cry, the prompting, as it seemed, of fear or of despair, that came upward to her ear; and how she had associated that cry with the voice of Cyril Wedderburn!

And his horse had been found at Ernescleugh, near Fast Castle (the Wolf's Craig of Scott's romance), and she knew how frightfully steep the rocks are there!

Her kind, her handsome, and her loving Cyril! Never again would his strong arm caress her slender waist, or his love-lit eyes gaze tenderly into hers; and now all his soft and loving ways came vividly before her, mingled with a dreadful sense of calamity and loss, till the very tears—tears which she longed to mingle with those of his haughty mother—almost choked her as she lay on her bed, prostrate on her face.

On Wednesday she had seen him last, and this was Sunday forenoon: she could hear the bells for service ringing in the village church about a mile distant to remind her of the fact, and that four days—four days in this age of steam and telegraphy had elapsed without trace or tidings of her lost one!

Then she became suddenly aware that her father was ringing his hand-bell furiously, and was querulously, even peevishly, demanding her presence for something.

Her tears, and the cause of them, she was alike compelled to conceal; so, after bathing her eyes hurriedly, she tottered away to attend him as usual.

She regretted that she had permitted her emotions to overpower her so much in the presence of the Doctor, and that hence he had been allowed to depart without further questioning when she had so many inquiries to make. From Alison Home and her other domestic she could gather nothing, save that on the same Wednesday, at midnight, they had both heard the swiftly-ridden horse pass along the roadway, and also the strange cry of the rider.

Could it be possible, she was ever asking of herself, that they would meet no more? Never more in the thicket, never more at the stile in the lane at the end of the Lee? that she should never again be gathered to his breast so kindly and so tenderly?

Cyril's love had made her very happy; so much so that it often inspired her with gratitude to God for blessing her so, and no shadow had ever rested upon it, save the secrecy they were compelled to practise, as they hoped, for a time only, and being both proudly spirited, they had felt that necessity a degradation and source of irritation. Now all that and the love itself had passed away, and a cloud of thought and gloom black as midnight, seemed to envelop the pale girl as she sat alone in the little chamber, gazing listlessly at the sunlit scenery, and with no sound in her ears save the beating of her heart.

Oh, had her brother Harry been spared to her, thought she, Cyril's friend and comrade in India, how differently might she have been situated! How she longed to rush to Willowdean and prosecute inquiries there, but dared not even give expression to the thought!

Only lately she had been anticipating in dread the withdrawal or expiry of his short leave of absence, and his departure to Turkey with the proposed Allied Army. Now she felt that to see him going forth even to face the perils and chances of the threatened Russian war would be a welcome exchange for the present doubt and horror she endured.

All that day no food passed her lips, and as evening drew on the dread of enduring another night without some further intelligence proved too much for her grief and impatience; so the craving to go forth and inquire personally—she could not trust to the discretion of her servants, and shrunk instinctively from their morbid surmises—became so strong, that on finding her father sleeping calmly and peacefully after the slight repast he deemed a dinner, she dressed herself in haste to go out—but for where and to whom were her next thoughts?

The nearest house was Chesterhaugh; it was little more than four miles distant, and though she shrunk from the idea of seeing or being seen by Captain Chesters, she resolved, come what might, to question his gatekeeper, as if casually, about the last he had seen of Cyril Wedderburn; for as the coldness between the two families was pretty well known in that secluded district, she felt assured that the man would imagine her to be prompted by the merest curiosity.

As she set forth on foot, she sighed when passing the empty coachhouse and the stables where the hoofs of horses and the rattle of their stall collars were heard no more. She was young, active, and would walk the distance in an hour; yet not to repine a little when she thought of all that should and might have been, was perhaps impossible.

She did not anticipate that the gatekeeper could add much to the alarming details already furnished by the Doctor, yet she longed to see him as one who, however humble, had been the last who looked on Cyril's winning face and heard his cheerful voice; moreover, the utter solitude of her home had proved on this day intolerable. She dared not speak of the occurrence to her father, for he would be the last perhaps to express genuine sympathy; so the desire to move abroad, to speak to some one, to be doing anything but sitting still and brooding, became an irresistible impulse.

Full of her own thoughts as she walked on, she did not perceive how stormy clouds had enveloped the afternoon sun; that the dull grey mist was rolling swiftly along the grassy glens and upward to the slopes of the Lammermuirs, and with how melancholy a sound the wind shook in gusts the leafless trees of the old wood near the Tower, while on the hill sides the shepherds were driving fast their flocks to the thatched bughts, or sheepfold in sheltered places. Neither was she aware that her chief domestic, old Alison Home, looked after her with mingled admiration and compassion, as if reading something of her secret, when she passed out upon the highway; for Mary Lennox, though charming at times, was looking unusually handsome, graceful, and compact in her smart velvet hat and plume—the wing of a golden pheasant shot for her by Cyril—her cuffs and muff of grey Iceland duck, her jacket of sealskin (imitation, we are sorry to say), her veil drawn tightly over her pretty face and ears, and her skirts looped up, less to show the scarlet petticoat, taper ankles, and balmorals, than for activity, as she set forth.

Which of all those hoof-marks she could trace upon the road were those of Cyril's fatal horse? How often had she walked along that road to church and to the nearest market town since they had lost their carriage, but never with a heart so heavy, and with such a sensation of being benumbed and stupefied with grief.

"Sorrow, misery, and horror!" she muttered from time to time. "Oh what a life is before me now! Cyril, Cyril!" and at the sound of his name, even on her own lips, the tears rolled forth beneath the closely drawn veil, and the little hands were wrung convulsively within her muff.

Every moment she thought that she must see him coming to meet her; it seemed impossible that he could be thus blotted out of existence! All appeared chaos and confusion to Mary as she walked on; the order of events and the course of time seemed to be alike inverted.

It appeared as if years had elapsed since she had last seen Cyril—last stood in his close embrace in yonder thicket, and heard his loving voice, while the events of years ago seemed to have happened yesterday; even his arrival from India, when she was much younger, with her dead brother's sword and watch, his rings and lock of hair, and the happy subsequent time when his and her secret intimacy began. How much had passed since then; they were lovers, and engaged, so solemnly too—and now—the mass of unuttered thoughts seemed to rend her heart!

Circumstances had given her few friends, and now she sorely felt the want of one.

School companions, girls from town and elsewhere, with gay and happy home circles, had occasionally broken the monotony of her life by becoming her guests; but she grew painfully conscious that owing to the dreary seclusion of the old Tower, where few sounds met the ear save the bleating of sheep or the whistle of the curlew, and also from her father's querulous eccentricity, they curtailed their visits, and seldom or never came again. Then, as he ailed so frequently and aged so fast, she could not accept invitations in return, even those given by neighbours so near as Lady Ernescleugh and others, who were disposed to be kind to the lonely little Chatelaine of Lonewoodlee.

Ere long she reached the handsome iron gate and grotesque little lodge of Chesterhaugh, beyond which she could see the sweep of the gravelled approach that led to the house. The park was perfectly bare and open now, as the thriftless Captain had long since converted into cash every tree on the estate; and the park itself, once his father's pride, was now let to a grazier of cattle.

Mary was flushed and breathless as she approached the gate. She had walked very quick that she might the sooner return, and she had not been insensible to the fast increasing coldness of the temperature, the howling of the March wind, and the gathering of dark masses of cloud in the east, hastening, or anticipating by nearly an hour, the shades of evening.

She was in the act of questioning old Tony Heron, the lodgekeeper, who approached her respectfully with a hand at his hat, "if the tidings were true that Captain Wedderburn"—how her voice faltered as her quivering lips pronounced the name—"had really suffered by some accident after leaving Chesterhaugh," when the sound of hoofs struck her ear, and before the man could fully reply, Captain Chesters—in nearly the same costume in which he had breakfasted at Willowdean—dashed up, accompanied by his favourite and only groom, Billy Trayner, to whom he at once threw the reins of his horse on dismounting.

"Good morning, Miss Lennox," said he, lifting his hat with profound courtesy.

"It is evening, rather," said Mary, covered with confusion and annoyance by this unexpected rencontre, "and I must not delay, lest poor papa——"

"Ah! to be sure; but the old gentleman was all right, fast asleep, Alison told me, as I stopped for a moment at the Tower to inquire for you in passing. But to what good fairy is the humble house of Chesterhaugh indebted for the honour of a visit from you, Miss Lennox, and alone too?" he added, as he led her very deliberately inside the gate, which the keeper shut; "and you have no demon of a duenna or chaperon. It beats cock-fighting, 'bangs Banagher,' as O'Grady of ours used to say."

"You make me feel more and more the extreme awkwardness of my situation by this banter, Captain Chesters," said Mary; "but—but——"

"Out with it. You came to ask about young Wedderburn!" exclaimed Chesters, bluntly.

"Yes, sir," said the lodgekeeper, officiously; "she was just asking me when you rode up, and I was about to tell her——"

"That according to our old Scottish proverb, 'a fu' man and a fasting horse go quickly home'—but, by Jove! Cyril Wedderburn went rather further than he quite reckoned on."

"I ask pardon, sir, but I think you are wrong," said the man, touching his hat; "the Captain was not the worse of wine, though his horse seemed mad."

"How the devil should you know anything about it? Silence, Tony!"

"I let him out, and shut the gate."

"Then shut your mouth now, or speak only when you are spoken to," said the Captain, furiously, on which the man slunk into his lodge, abashed.

"Poor Cyril Wedderburn!" said Mary, biting her nether lip to control her emotion.

"He left Chesterhaugh quietly enough, but his horse was disposed to be restive, straining hard on the curb, and so forth, and would seem to have run away with him. It is a very mysterious and melancholy affair," added Chesters, drawing off one of his riding gloves; "but if you will permit me to lead you into the house I shall then tell you all about it, at least, all that I can pretend to know."

"Thanks, no, excuse me," replied Mary, hurriedly, as she was nearly swept away by a sudden gust of wind, while hail and snow came on suddenly with great force and density "Good Heavens!" she exclaimed, "it is quite a storm. I must take shelter here a few minutes, if you will permit me."

"In my gate-lodge? Impossible! Absurd! Come with me into the house, and if the blast does not lull in a few minutes, I shall have the pleasure of driving you over to Lonewoodlee."

Mary looked rather despairingly through the bars of the handsome iron gate, and saw the bleak wide moorland waste she had traversed whitening fast, and that the road was becoming more and more obscure, as the snow covered and the darkness overshadowed it; and while her tears and her repugnance to accept the invitation increased, she said—

"Thank you, Captain Chesters; you are very kind. I was most rash to come; but I could scarcely walk back now, and alone too."

"To walk alone; the thing is not to be thought of. And do not talk of thanks, you owe me none. Do permit me." And taking her hand with all the suavity he could assume—for Chesters was harassed in aspect, having been questioned and cross-questioned by the Procurator Fiscal and the constabulary till he was sickened by the name of Cyril Wedderburn—he conducted Mary into the house of Chesterhaugh, where she had not been for several years, since she was a little girl and led by her father's hand.

Through the marble-floored and oak-panelled entrance-hall, which was hung with spoils of the field and chase—trophies of arms brought by Chesters from India, tiger skins, skulls and horns, with a multitude of whips and spurs, cloaks and riding-boots; thence through a long corridor, that in his father's time had been furnished by magnificent cabinets of buhl and marqueterie, and hung with fine old paintings, all of which had gone, like the trees of the park—he led her into a handsome and well-appointed dining-room.

Though the assurance given by Chesters that he had left her father asleep but a short time before was not strictly true, it tended to soothe Mary's mind a little till the shower of hail that crashed on the windows of the room disturbed her, all the more that the closely-drawn curtains, and the twelve waxlights in the chandelier of Florentine bronze, suggested ideas of nightfall, though the hour was barely six o'clock.

Chesters courteously drew a chair for her near the fire, and led her to it.

"Permit me to relieve you of your muff and hat. Wont you even lift your veil?" he entreated, as he leant, half caressingly, over her chair; but Mary was determined to remain in all her walking gear, to be ready for departure, and said—

"Captain Chesters, do kindly order Trayner to drive me home without delay."

"Why such haste?"

"I perceive that you are just going to dine."

"And will you not share my poor bachelor fare, and by your presence shed a light over my lonely board for an hour or so, and then I shall drive you home in person?"

But Mary was resolute. No food had passed her lips; but she had dined, she said, long ago, by her papa's bedside. Go she must, and at once, she added, and was only pleased that her tears and her blushes of irritation were hidden by her tightly drawn veil, as with a very peculiar expression in his face, Captain Chesters languidly rang the bell for Trayner.

Unlike her gloomy paternal residence, and unlike the more elegant and modern mansion of Willowdean, the house of Chesterhaugh had been built in the reign of George II., when art was at its lowest ebb in Scotland, and taste was studied less than solid comfort. It was a great square block, three stories in height, with all its chimneys clustered in the centre; the roof sloped down from them in the pavilion form, and the outside walls were roughcast with gravel and lime; and poor Mary thought sadly of her own older-fashioned and more sordid home, and of the few comforts that surrounded the declining days of her father, as she surveyed and contrasted with a rapid glance all the details of the spacious and lofty dining-room of Chesterhaugh—the walnut-wood furniture so elaborately carved, the chairs of green morocco, the crimson damask window-curtains with their gilded cornices, the many pictures in which horses seemed to predominate in place of men; the brilliant plate console mirrors, in which all these objects were reproduced in two endless perspectives; the elegant ironstone dinner-service of pink and gold, laid for Chesters; the massive plate; the claret airing near the fire—and she marvelled how all this luxury was supported, when remembering that the Captain had the reputation of being a spendthrift, a bankrupt, and worse.

She little knew that Cyril Wedderburn, when last he had been in that room, had sat in the very chair she now occupied; but Chesters remembered the circumstance, and a disdainful smile crossed his face as he did so.

Again and again he pressed her to take wine; but Mary steadily declined; and at last, after being rung for thrice, Mr. Bill Trayner appeared—a very good specimen of a smart but unscrupulous groom, small in stature, with a long body and short bandy legs, a mean and narrow forehead, sleek black hair, shorn short, with a circular lock or curl plastered on each prominent cheek-bone, and with sharp, cunning eyes.

Bill was a Scotchman of Newmarket growth, and to all the worst points of the national character, added the roguery that may be so easily gained in the atmosphere of the betting-house, the stable-yard, and training-ground. He kept a betting-book as well as his master, whom he was always ready to second in mischief, and to betray, if it suited his private interests to do so.

A perfect oracle on all matters pertaining to the turf, he knew by heart or rote all the entries and engagements made at the various race meetings throughout the country; and knew shrewdly which horses were the best to back and which were likely to be scratched.

"How about the waggonette, Trayner?" said Chesters. "You know I have no other carriage, Miss Lennox," he added, parenthetically, to Mary.

"The waggonette, sir," repeated Trayner, trying to fathom the meaning of a peculiar glance his master gave him.

"Yes, the waggonette with the patent springs," resumed Chesters, with a remarkably knowing wink.

"The springs is broke, sir," replied Trayner, with a similar mode of telegraph, when he glanced at Miss Lennox, and took in the whole situation.

"Broken—the devil they are!"

"All to smash, sir."

"Then the waggonette won't be in working order for——"

"Not for ever so long, sir."

"Then I must walk, and at once!" said Mary, rising from her chair. "I have not a moment to lose."

"Walk? Listen to the rising blast and the crash of the hailstones," urged Chesters.

"Ah, there's more there than hailstones, Miss," said Trayner. "It is a regular feeding storm. The snow is some inches deep already."

"Oh, my poor papa!" exclaimed Mary. "If he is awake and calling for me! Surely the lodgekeeper will accompany me?"

"The two old women at Lonewoodlee will surely suffice as attendants for a couple of hours."

"Hours! Impossible, Captain Chesters!"

"That will do, Trayner. You may go," said Chesters, and his fidus Achates vanished with a leer, which he conveyed to the servants in the hall below, together with the information that "the master had been and gone and done it again. Here's a lark! He's got that girl of old Lennox's, and means to keep her in Chesterhaugh all night if he can—only she seems spirited, and likely to kick over the traces."

Mary had seen something of the man's expression of face as he retired, and she felt that in her anxiety and grief for Cyril Wedderburn she had made a mistake it was too late to remedy now; but it was destined to have a fatal effect upon her interests and happiness at a future time.

She rushed to the window and drew back the heavy damask curtains. Snow—snow and hail on the bitter blustering wind of March had whitened all the moorland waste, and was deepening fast there.

She permitted the curtain to drop from her tremulous hand, and returned in a kind of despair to her seat; for although the distance between her and home was short, the night was too wild for her to venture forth alone.

"It will serve no purpose your taking this little delay so much to heart," said Chesters. "You must have patience. Pray compose yourself, and do lay aside your wraps."

"Excuse me, I cannot," replied Mary, in a choking voice.

"And so you came to ask about young Wedderburn?"

"Yes," faltered Mary; "but only of the gatekeeper as I was passing."

"That young muff, the Master of Ernescleugh, is making himself excessively busy in the affair."

"But they are—alas! must we say were—neighbours—friends," urged Mary, with surprise at his tone.

"That is no reason why he should have come to me thrice with the people of the Procurator Fiscal in the prosecution of inquiries. He should join his regiment in London, or his papa, my Lord Ernescleugh, at his government in the Ionian Isles, and leave Cyril Wedderburn and his fate to the family and the local authorities; but he'll linger on here no doubt, and enter stakes for the heiress."

"What heiress?"

"Haven't you heard about her?" asked Chesters, with a languid but malevolent smile.

"No."

"Sir John Wedderburn's brother William has died lately at Madras, and left his whole fortune, some three hundred thousand pounds at least, with a palace in the Choultry, to his only daughter—a girl, who is coming to Willowdean as her new home. She is a great beauty, they say; and Mamma Wedderburn," he added, a little spitefully, "had an eye on her as a wife for Cyril."

"I know nothing of it," sighed Mary.

"Ah, but I do. I was at breakfast with the family on the morning the news came, and I read the whole intention in Lady Wedderburn's face and manner; but now, as Cyril has gone, that legal prig Bob will very likely have a chance of making her a prize."

Mary only answered these surmises so slangily expressed by her silent tears; but while he spoke she remembered, as one in a dream—for she had not slept since she heard them—the words of the Doctor about a rich bride in prospect for her lost Cyril.

But the rumour excited neither jealousy nor fear. Oh, what did it matter now!

She looked so exquisitely lady-like as she sat with her little hands folded in her tiny muff which rested on her knees, and her veiled face upturned to Chesters, that he—no bad judge of breeding in women or horses—thought what a creditable-looking wife she would make for him or any man; but she was poor, and he was up to the ears in debt; thus neither her poverty nor her beauty excited his pity, though they gave quick suggestion to his worst passions. He loved Mary in a fashion of his own: but he knew that the wife for him must have money, and poor Mary had none.

Full of grief as he saw she was for the terrible and mysterious disappearance of Cyril Wedderburn, Captain Rooke Chesters was far too judicious, or far too cunning, to press any suit of his own just then. He could wait his opportunity; but he thought that if by luring or detaining her under any pretence in his own house for a few hours, he could compromise, or place her in a false position, it would achieve all he wanted at the time.

All that day, we have said, she had not taken food, yet he pressed her in vain to join him at dinner. She felt weak, ill, and giddy. The room seemed to become larger and larger still; its further end appeared to recede as if to a vast distance; all around her became like a species of phantasmagoria, and only by a violent effort of her own will did she resist the faintness that was stealing over her.

She was in an agony of mind as the hours of the stormy night wore on.

She pictured to herself her ailing and querulous father asking for her, in an alarm that might prove detrimental to his shaken system—missing the poor wan girl, who, in her faded dressing-gown, was at all hours of the weary night ever at hand to give him the medicines or soothing draughts prescribed for him by Doctor Squills; ever ready to arrange the pillows; to caress him and bathe his hot and tremulous hands or aching head with cold water, with Rimmel or other aromatic vinegar; and she was here—here at Chesterhaugh, imprisoned by the darkness, the hail, and the snow!

Chesters had his own dark purpose to achieve, and as he forsook champagne for claret, and idled over his walnuts, he viewed her impatience and her mental agony with perfect composure, though treating her with well-bred sympathy the while.

But, as the night wore on, Mary felt more and more the awkwardness, the ultimate doubt and danger of her position, in being thus alone, without a lady friend or chaperon, in the house of a bachelor; and more than all, one who bore such a local reputation as Ralph Rooke Chesters! She was conscious that the very servant—he of the inevitable calves and plush—who removed the dinner and brought in maraschino and coffee, inspired by some of Mr. Bill Trayner's knowing remarks and cruel inferences in the servants' hall below, regarded her with curious eyes.

It has been said that "even bad men have some good traits in them, and that selfish men are capable of feeling."

Perhaps it may be so; but Chesters was incapable of sensibility or caring for any one but himself, and was destitute of a single good trait or generous emotion; so even while watching Mary's restlessness, agitation, and her evident dread of the detention she was undergoing, he muttered, inwardly—

"Pshaw! women can't help loving those who love them; so I'll make a bold attempt to cozen, if I cannot crush or win her!"

It was perhaps a little dangerous for Mary that, though she often expressed and displayed a great aversion of Chesters, there were times when she did not altogether feel it; for few women can hate a man who professes to love and consequently admire them: yet, seeing the full sense of her false position, she began to hate and fear him now.

Should the story get abroad that she had spent some hours in his house, under any circumstances, it was a contretemps that might cost her dear; for how would the censorious world interpret her conduct or acknowledge her reason? That she had come to inquire about the fate of Cyril Wedderburn, and been storm stayed, few would believe, for what vital interest was she supposed to have in the lost heir of Willowdean?

Alas, alas! for secret loves.

Secluded though her life had been at Lonewoodlee, she knew quite enough of the world to be aware that a young lady could not, with propriety, visit a gay young bachelor as she appeared to have done—one to whom she was neither related nor engaged—and it was this consciousness, together with the craving desire to be again by her father's side, that made her so steadily resist taking any refreshment, even coffee, or doffing any part of her costume, and which made her writhe under the well-bred commonplaces uttered by Chesters, such as that he "hoped she wouldn't fret. What the deuce was the good of it! The storm must soon abate; indeed, it was abating now. It is very unfortunate, no doubt," and all that sort of thing; adding, "but it is very stupid work this, and we should do something to amuse each other."

Yet he could neither soothe nor amuse her; he could not leave her for the smoking-room; neither could he smoke in her presence, and so betook him to champagne dashed with brandy, a perilous mixture, through the influence of which some very daring ideas began to form in his cunning brain.

Bad, bold, and daring as he was, Rooke Chesters would scarcely have ventured to trepan a girl of Mary Lennox's undoubted rank in the county into a false position, but for his perfect knowledge of her father's helplessness, his poverty, and the bill he possessed. Moreover, the only man who would have protected her—the lover whose arms he had seen around her in the thicket—was gone, no one knew where or how.

"There is a climax in this life," says a writer, with stern truth, "a climax in mental and bodily pain, after which we can feel no more, and after it all other sources of emotion appear tame by comparison." And this climax had poor Mary passed already.

Cyril was gone; her father she knew was dying; and when he went, who would she have to care for, to study, or to love? Hence for a time, perhaps, she cared less what happened to herself, till the massive black marble clock on the mantelpiece struck the alarming hour of eleven.

"Eleven! I have been here five whole hours! Oh, I shall go afoot, if I die on the moor! I cannot and must not stay here another moment!" she exclaimed, starting from her chair and moving towards the door. "Oh, papa—my own papa—how much you may have missed me!"

"Be not in such a hurry, pray. I had a pleasant surprise for you," said he, laughing.

"How, Captain Chesters?"

"Trayner must have patched up the springs of the waggonette by this time. He is a clever fellow, Trayner, and if the horses are put to, I shall take you over in a few minutes."

"Oh, thanks—a thousand times thanks!"

"No thanks are necessary."

Again he rang the bell, and said, with perfect calmness, to the servant who answered the summons—

"Trayner to get out the waggonette, if it is ready; trace the horses, and bring it round to the front door."

Without perceiving in the least the intelligent glance that passed between Chesters and his domestic, Mary could know that she had been deluded and drawn into a species of snare, the object of which she did not then quite clearly comprehend.

In a few minutes more the tramp of horses' hoofs and the muffled sound of wheels amid the snow without were heard, and Mary rose, her face almost beaming with delight through her veil, as she took his proffered arm to be led forth on her way home at last.

The waggonette, a very handsome "bang-up affair," as Chesters deemed it, was drawn up close to the flight of steps which led to the entrance door; and the long lines of radiance from its two silver lamps shone far amid the white waste of snow in the now treeless park. The storm had ceased, the wind had passed away, and the clouds were divided in Heaven overhead; the stars shone out with frosty brilliance, and the night was calm and clear. The steam from the quivering nostrils of the impatient horses curled up in white wreaths above their heads.

Chesters lifted Mary—somewhat lingeringly, even caressingly perhaps, as he did so—upon the front seat, and carefully folded a warm railway-rug over her shoulders; then buttoning the leather apron across her knees as he took his seat beside her. Mr. Bill Trayner vaulted up behind, and away they went, yet it was close on the hour of twelve (midnight) ere they were clear of the lodge-gates, the drowsy keeper of which observed with surprise the lady who was still his master's companion—Miss Lennox of Lonewoodlee!

As Chesters bent his face close to hers, he thought the time had come when he might venture to say something tender, and the champagne he had imbibed caused him to do it bluntly.

"Women, like men, may love many times in life; but none, Miss Lennox, as I now love you—believe me, I speak from my heart."

"At this time I entreat you not to torment me in that way," said Mary; "in Heaven's name, I implore you!" she continued.

"Ah, you think only of Cyril Wedderburn!" was the spiteful rejoinder.

"I do," said Mary, a dash of anger mingling with her grief, as her tears fell fast again.

"I am a lover as well as he was."

"Of mine, do you mean?"

"Yes."

"No, sir—no," replied Mary, firmly. "I cannot permit you to talk thus, and take advantage of my situation."

"What the deuce do you mean?" he asked, bluntly.

"That you are no lover, though a love-maker."

"Are they not the same?" asked Chesters, with unaffected surprise.

"Nay, Captain Chesters, the difference between them is great."

"As you please," said he, biting his nether lip, while he lightly touched the horses with the lash about the ears.

The lodge-gate had scarcely closed behind them when a mounted gentleman, wearing an Inverness cape of rough material (which, like his half-bullet hat, was well coated with snow), and long black overalls, came up at a hard trot, accompanied by a diminutive groom. On passing the waggonette, he curbed his horse abruptly back upon his haunches, and half looking round, cried, cheerily—

"Hallo, Chesters, old fellow, where are you going? A bitter night for March!"

"Very. Good night," replied Chesters, without stopping; for the speaker was young Everard Home, the Master of Ernescleugh, who was very much surprised to see a young lady leaving the gate of Chesterhaugh at that time of night, and alone with Rooke Chesters! But in a few minutes he was perfectly enlightened on the subject by his groom, who rang the lodge-bell on pretence of wanting a light for his cigar.

A terror seized Mary lest she might have been recognised by these men. She said nothing of it to Chesters, for the deduction was humiliating; but her tears fell again, and she whispered in her heart—

"Oh, what matter is it. I have no Cyril now!"

She was soon deposited, with great politeness on the part of Chesters, at her own door, and in her anxiety and irritation she darted in and closed it, forgetting even to thank him for his escort.

Her father had slept soundly for hours; but now he was awake, and calling alternately for her and his dead son Harry, upbraiding them both for neglect, and threatening that he would break his own neck when next he rode to the hounds, "even as he once hoped that fellow Wedderburn had done;" and Mary's heart died within her, when she found his intellect thus wandering. But the brave girl cast aside her wrappings, took his old head carefully in her tender arms, and strove to forget, what might be nervous fancy only, that her two drowsy domestics who had seen her arrive in Chesters' equipage, looked somewhat oddly on her, and at each other.

Let us now recur to a few nights ago, for the unravelling of much of this mystery.

With the soft memory of a minute and delicate little face that had been for nearly an hour so close to his own in the dark thicket, and all unaware that he had been observed or watched, Cyril Wedderburn rode at a hard gallop from Lonewoodlee, and ere long had reined up at Chesterhaugh, tossed his bridle to the obsequious Bill Trayner, who tugged his forelock as he led admiringly away the bay hunter, and then Cyril was ushered into the same dining-room in which Mary Lennox was afterwards to spend the weary and anxious hours we have described.

"Glad to see you, Wedderburn," said the host, taking his proffered hand; "punctual to a minute nearly."

"Nay, scarcely. I'm a quarter of an hour late," replied Cyril, who was flushed by the rasping pace at which he had ridden the few miles that lay between Chesterhaugh and Willowdean.

"The salmon won't be spoiled, I daresay," said Chesters, with an imperceptible smile; "but it takes one some time to get round that thicket at Lonewoodlee, if one's horse don't clear the stile. After your ride, have a B and S."

"Thanks; no. I suppose you mean brandy and soda?" said Cyril, who disliked slang, and who coloured a little at the reference to the thicket at Lonewoodlee.

"A glass of Madeira then, or a nip of Rimmel?"

"Neither. I have an excellent appetite, and don't wish it spoiled."

"Cautious!" muttered Chesters, under his moustache, as he eyed with covert malevolence and suspicion the open and handsome countenance of his guest, who sat in a lounging yet elegant attitude in one of the soft elbow-chairs.

"Covers for two only, I perceive; so we dine alone?"

"Yes. I wanted Home of Ernescleugh to join us; but he is engaged. By-the-bye, I should have asked your cousin Ramornie, and your brother Bob, but——"

"Robert is not a player, neither is Horace, and we meant to turn a card to-night," said Cyril, coldly, and evidently disliking the assumption of familiarity in the other, who was but a recent acquaintance.

"I knew that—hence my omission."

The real reason was, that when Chesters played he disliked to have spectators.

"And now let us to dinner," he added, as they seated themselves at table.

The viands were all that could be desired, and the wines also were unexceptionable. Cyril was not a toper, so the suggestions of Chesters to try various heady vintages fell flatly on his ear, as he contented himself with pale dry sherry, an occasional glass of Sauterne, and after dinner adhered rigidly to claret, greatly to the disgust, apparently, of his entertainer.

Their conversation ran for a time on the topics of the day; the increasing prospects of a war in the East; the departure of our fleet for the Baltic, with hopes that "old Charlie Napier would knock Cronstadt to pieces;" and the chances of the "sick man at Stamboul being," as Chesters phrased it, "snuffed out by the Russians," unless France, Britain, and Sardinia were prompt in succouring him.

Then came local matters, the pack of harriers, the master of the foxhounds, and his new mode of hunting the country; race meetings and sporting news of various kinds, till after the claret jug had travelled pretty often between the two, Chesters, with his own secret purposes and his own ends in view, began to talk on matters more nearly concerning themselves; but not until the cloth had been removed and the servants had withdrawn.

"When does your Indian cousin arrive?"

"Don't exactly know," replied Cyril, curtly.

"Ah! when you are in Turkey, Lady Wedderburn will have to play the duenna closely with the heiress—three hundred thousand pounds, by Jove!"

"Her fortune is said to exceed that."

"Fellows will swarm round her like flies round a honey-pot."

Cyril made no reply, but toyed with the embossed grape scissors.

"Will your family winter in Edinburgh or London?" asked Chesters.

"In London, of course; if they don't remain at Willowdean."

"Edinburgh is a seedy place, after all, with its legal prigs and tradesmen's daughters—'merchants,' as Dr. Johnson laughingly said they called themselves. What would she do amid its 'upper ten dozen?' No suitable match would be there, and small amusement among its dreary gaieties."

"You talk bitterly of the Athens of the North," said Cyril, smiling.

The truth was, that Chesters had been blackballed at one or two of the clubs there; his proposal, that character was estimated at a low figure indeed. After a pause, he said, abruptly—

"Why don't you cut the service now——"

"On the eve of a war!" exclaimed Cyril.

"Yes; and cut in for the heiress. I should if I were you, and I think Lady Wedderburn would like it."

"I trust, Captain Chesters, and I doubt it not, that Lady Wedderburn will leave me to choose for myself," said Cyril, with considerable hauteur at what he justly deemed presumption in the other.

"Don't take it up that way, my dear fellow. Pardonnez moi, and let us say no more about it. Will you try a glass of my port? I have some that has been thirty years in the cellar; it belonged to my father when he was master of the foxhounds, and he was as good a judge of wine as of horses."

"Thanks; no. I'll adhere to the claret. It is one of the curses which attend the heir to a fortune or a title—even a baronetcy," resumed Cyril, with reference to Chesters' advice, and feeling considerably ruffled, "to have his matrimonial views or intentions made the subject of debate and speculation among aunts, matchmaking mothers, and meddling friends. This or that girl will be suggested to him, and perpetually thrown in the way till he shudders at her name; while the one he might prefer—the one whom perhaps he loves in secret—is deemed unsuitable, and is sedulously kept from him.

"Ah, yes—very true," said Chesters; and as the voice of Cyril grew gradually tremulous, the memory of the former recurred to the recent scene in the thicket, and a pang of jealousy shot through his heart.

Chesters and Cyril alike loved the pure and simple-minded Mary, and it was perhaps strange they should both do so, as they were so different in their habits, tastes, and nature. The former was a man without soul or heart—selfish and sensual. The latter was innately refined, so his love was as full of delicacy, tenderness, compassion, and spirituality, as that of Chesters was mere earthly passion, amid which he could calmly see with satisfaction that ere long death, debt, difficulties, and utter friendlessness, with the loss of Cyril by separation, would cast the hapless girl completely at his mercy!

The same image filled the minds of both these men at the same time, but each viewed it from a very different point.

"You know Oliver Lennox of Lonewoodlee, I presume, being so near a neighbour?" said Cyril.

"Of course; all in the Merse know him for a crotchety old pump."

"That is not what I mean; do you know him personally?" asked Cyril, with marked annoyance.

"A little."

"You visit there, probably?"

"Well—no—I cannot be said to do so," drawled Chesters, while he watched Cyril with half-closed eyes. "Who the deuce would go there, unless——"

"Unless what?"

"One went after the girl."

"Do you mean his daughter?" asked Cyril, swelling with secret anger.

"Certainly. I don't mean either of his two old female domestics. Pass the claret jug, please."

"I was a fool to accept this fellow's invitation," thought Cyril; "I shall have a row with him yet, and I must forbid his visiting Lonewoodlee at all hazards, even if I declare myself to the old gentleman. I must take care of Mary, and watch over her if he cannot do so. That bill, too—Chesters would never be so liberal as to take it up without some ulterior purpose."

After a minute's silence, during which each had been covertly eyeing the other.

"You took up a bill of old Mr. Lennox's, I have heard," said Cyril, as if casually; "that was most kind and generous of you."

"Not at all—not at all; but who told you of it?"

"I forget—heard it incidentally somehow. Have you destroyed it?"

"No," replied Chesters, as he stuck his glass in his right eye and looked Cyril full in the face. "I have it here," he added, drawing from his breast pocket a handsome Russian leather case (girt with an elastic band), wherein he kept various odds and ends, IOU's, memoranda of races and coursing matches, with veterinary recipes, &c.; and taking the fatal slip of blue paper, showed it to Cyril, and replaced it in the pocket-book.

"It has been noted and protested!" exclaimed Cyril, as a flush crossed his face. "Why did you not destroy it—what piece of cunning is this?"

"Come, come, Wedderburn, that is rather a harsh term. I had it noted and protested, because, although I took it, I cannot afford ultimately to lose the money. Have some more wine?"

Cyril Wedderburn shook his head.

"Come—one glass of Madeira, as a 'white-washer,' and then I ring for coffee."

But Cyril rose from the table and would drink no more. His mind had become imbued by mistrust and suspicion; yet he felt a desire to obtain that bill if possible, and he might do so amid the play he had promised to have with Chesters; so after the bay hunter's good points had been fully discussed, after the stables, the gun-room, the billiard and smoking-rooms, had all been lounged through, in a snug little parlour, with a box of cigars and some brandy-and-water beside them, they sat down to cards—an act of folly on the part of Cyril Wedderburn.

The monetary difficulties of Rooke Chesters were nearly as great as those of the so-called "proprietor" of Lonewoodlee; but he possessed the skill and the means of supplying his exchequer which the other had not. His carefully studied betting-book, his intimacy with most of the horsey men on the turf, his means of getting secret information, his sharp practice and dexterous hand with cards, billiards, and dice, seldom failed to keep him in tolerable funds, though most of his land was mortgaged, and he had more than once sought the sanctuary of Holyrood when his difficulties had been greatest; and it was with this clever schemer that Cyril Wedderburn sat down to be regularly "plucked."

Like many other apartments—even the bedrooms—at Chesterhaugh, the little parlour was hung with pictures of lean, bony, gaunt horses, with little particoloured jockies perched on them; and Cyril, as he cast a glance at them, thought by contrast of the soft and tender works by Greuze, the sombre Titians, the Raphaels, the Canalettis, and Correggios, which adorned the walls of Willowdean, interspersed with stately and creditable looking portraits of his forefathers, who had been all good men and true in the times of old.

Several packs of new cards, a dice-box, &c. were produced, and while carefully selecting a cigar each, cutting the ends thereof, and so forth, Cyril reverted to the subject of his favourite new horse.

"And so you like my bay hunter?"

"Amazingly! he has all the fine points of thoroughbred—an ample chest, compact body, broad loins, a small head and thin neck, the legs all bone and muscle; if with these he has the requisites of courage and temper——"

"I am sure he has both, though I have never tried him yet; but what the deuce shall I do with him if we go on foreign service?"

"You should have thought of that before buying him; but as the night is so cold, I would give him a warm mash with some nitre in it."

"A warm mash—why?"

"You came here at a rasping pace, and the animal may cool too much. I would have his eyes and nose spunged too, after your return."

"Do you think such necessary?" asked Cyril, with great simplicity. "I know you are a judge."

"Rather."

"I am somewhat ignorant of horses."

"Shall I ring for Trayner?"

"If you please."

Chesters lit his cigar and rang the bell, but on hearing steps approaching, he rose, and said—

"I'll speak to Trayner myself about it: excuse me for a moment," and quitting the room he gave some instructions to the groom in an undertone. Cyril afterwards remembered hearing an expression of surprise escape the man, but little suspecting the vile trickery to which his horse and himself were about to be subjected; he began to think, that could he reconcile or explain away the affair of the bill, Chesters was perhaps "not such a bad style of fellow, after all;" and no doubt the brandy-and-water he was imbibing went far to strengthen this conclusion.

"I've made it all right about your nag," said Chesters, reseating himself at the table and fixing his glass in his right eye; "and now for a little mild play—what is it to be, écarté or casino, or five-card cribbage?"

"What say you to écarté?"

"Well, Wedderburn, écarté be it—the regular gambler's game."

Chesters arranged the pack into thirty-two cards, withdrawing the twos, threes, fours, fives, and sixes.

"How many points shall we have?" asked Chesters.

"Five. Cut for the deal."

They did so, and it fell to Chesters.

"Take another jorum of the brandy-and-water. Do you like those cigars? I could spare you a hundred or so. Oh, no thanks at all: they are quite at your service. Three cards to you, and three to me."

While Chesters chatted thus, to throw the victim off his guard, the latter played in a careless manner that was usual with him, talking and smoking all the time, and quite unaware how the whole faculties of Chesters were absorbed in the game, which is one of a nature wherein foresight and nice calculation are of a necessity so requisite, and thus he was no match for his host, who, after permitting him to win two or three games at guinea points, proposed to increase the stakes to five guineas.

Now flushed with play, Cyril rashly assented, and the game went on.

"I mark the king!" said he. "By the way, that ring of yours, Chesters, is a splendid one."

"An onyx."

"So I see. Are those arms yours?"

"No; it belonged to that Frenchman, Louis De la Fosse, whom your father befriended. We played for it, and I won it."

"Did you actually take the poor fellow's ring? A family relic, perhaps!"

"Well, I might have lost mine but for my superior play. Bravo! that card plays out the four tricks."

"The world is apt to shake its head at such gaming as yours and his was."

"Pass the decanter. Deuce take the world and its head too; though it shake till palsied, what is it to me!" cried Chesters, laughing bitterly.

"But the world is censorious."

"So are all one's goodnatured friends—'d—d goodnatured friends,' as Scott, I think, calls them. The Frenchman, De la Fosse, lost some thousands to me by backing no less than three losing horses at the Derby."

Cyril found that he had rapidly lost nearly two hundred pounds, and declined to play more.

"Not even to have your revenge?" asked Chesters, with feigned surprise, in which something of disdain was mingled.

"No," was the curt reply.

"Why, man alive, what do you mean?" asked Chesters, in a slightly bullying tone, with his glass shining in his eye.

"Simply that somehow, Captain Chesters, I do not like your mode of playing."

"Then we'll drop this and try casino: it is a good game for two."

"Agreed—five guinea stakes, as before."

They cut for the deal, which fell to Cyril; but though he won several games, which only served still further to flush and excite him, in the end he found that he had no better luck than before; and ere long, instead of getting up Mr. Lennox's bill, he rose from the table minus two hundred and fifty pounds and had given his IOU for three hundred more. The time was close on midnight then, and he insisted on having his horse brought from the stables; so once more the acute Mr. William Trayner was summoned.

Already repenting deeply the extreme folly into which he had been lured by a man for whom he felt at heart only contempt, and resolving never more to pass the threshold of Chesterhaugh, Cyril—already pondering whether he would get the money lost from Robert or his doting mother—put on his riding gloves, took his whip, and descended the steps to where his bay horse stood in the starlight, champing on the bit and pawing the gravel with impatience.

Had he looked round at that moment, he might have detected a strange and unfathomable smile on the face of Chesters.

The horse seemed very restive, swaying away when he put his foot in the stirrup, so that he mounted with difficulty, and gathered up and shortened the reins.

"Allow me, for a moment," said Chesters; "there is something wrong about the curb chain, I think."

"The bridle's all right, sir," urged Trayner, who still held it in his hand, while Chesters very deliberately lengthened the straps a hole or two. "You'll do now, Wedderburn. Touch him with the spur. Good night."

"Good night; thanks," cried Cyril, and away his horse went like the wind; and he was barely clear of the lodge-gate before he found that the animal was totally unmanageable, and moreover had got the bit firmly between its teeth!

"He is rightly named Rooke Chesters," muttered Cyril, as his horse began to caracole sideways along the high road, "for he has rooked me to some purpose. By Jove! I can never confess my folly to my father, after all his warnings too. Halloa, old nag, what is the matter with you?"

He now became sensible that his horse was becoming extremely restive; something was wrong with the bridle he knew, but the conduct of the animal rapidly became so outrageous that he feared to dismount lest it should kick him or run away, in which case he felt that he would cut a ridiculous figure before his own household, by arriving on foot and whip in hand without his nag. His father and brother he knew would quiz him unmercifully. Dismount! Pshaw! the idea was not to be thought of. So being a good horseman he kept his saddle, and endeavoured by every means, first to soothe, and then by the whip to control, the growing fury of the bay hunter, but strove in vain.

It was swelling, trembling, and panting with rage; its quivering ears lay backward flat, its head was outstretched, and its bloodshot eyes turned back, till at times he could see the white of them in the darkness.

After plunging and rearing, and endeavouring by every means to throw the rider, and after twice attempting to crush him against the park wall of Chesterhaugh, he suddenly flung out his forefeet, and with a fierce snort of rage, galloped at a terrible pace along the high road. The beautiful bay of which Cyril was so proud, as showing all the best points of a fine English hunter, seemed now changed into a tearing devil!

The curb chain was loose, the bit was clenched between its teeth, the reins were powerless, and Cyril Wedderburn could no more control its actions than he could rule a whirlwind.

Ploughed fields and gates, stackyards and farm steadings, houses and cottages, all sunk in darkness, even as their inmates in sleep, were all passed with frightful speed, and seeking only to keep his seat till the animal became exhausted, Cyril trusted to his skill as a rider, and let the hunter take its way.

The open waste of Lonewoodlee, the dark thicket, and the quaint old Tower with its corner tourelles, were quickly at hand. As he swept past, Cyril saw the light in Mary's window: nay more, he saw her figure for an instant, and then it was that the irrepressible cry which Mary heard escaped him; for he had begun to fear that there was more than the warm mash fermenting in the interior of his maddened nag; that the animal had been drugged, as there were few "horsey" tricks of which Ralph Rooke Chesters, and his man Bill Trayner, were ignorant.

As this exasperating conviction forced itself upon him, he conceived the idea of stunning the horse by a blow between the ears.

His riding whip had a ponderous silver handle, and with the thong twisted round his right hand, he dealt upon the hunter's head a downward stroke that might have felled an ox; but instead of finding it sink beneath him, as he confidently expected, so that he might leap from the saddle, a fresh gust of rage seemed to inspire the horse, which actually bounded from the earth, and snorting, panting, and quivering afresh, it went blindly and madly thundering onward in its fierce career.

This was at Falaknowe, where the whip which had dropped from his hand was afterwards found.

For a time he had thought that the horse might know its way home, and stop at the park-gate of Willowdean; but gate and lodge had long been left behind, the woods and house of Renton too; the rising ground beyond was soon devoured by the rapid hoofs, and Cyril might have said, with Mazeppa, as alarm gathered in his heart—

"All behind was dark and drear,
And all before was night and fear.
How many hours of night or day
In those suspended pangs I lay
I could not tell; I scarcely knew
If this were human breath I drew—"

for before him were the impending bluffs of a rocky shore, and the dashing billows of the German Sea!

By stern use of his spurs, burying the sharp rowels in blood, he had forced the animal to clear by a flying leap more than one closed toll-gate; but the idea pressed upon him, that if he lost his seat or was dashed on the hard road, to be found a bleeding mass of broken bones, of what the emotions of the mother who doted on him, of his tender Mary, of his ambitious father, and of all his friends would be, if he were brought home to Willowdean an unsightly corpse; and now, as death seemed close and nigh, innumerable episodes of his past life—good, bad, and foolish—came thronging fast upon him, as he rode this terrible race. With these came a longing for vengeance upon Chesters, and a loathing of the infuriated brute that bore him. How he longed for a loaded pistol, that he might put a bullet through its head.

Cyril was an excellent horseman, and had always been a little vain of his riding; but now he was becoming worn out.

After a twenty miles run, the horse had now left the highway, and was traversing one of those large fields (of some forty Scottish acres or so) that are peculiar to the Merse and West Lothian. It had been recently ploughed, and as the hunter's small hoofs and slender fetlocks sank deep amid the soft and loamy soil, while its panting and breathing grew harder, Cyril hoped that it was weary and would soon stop; but the hope was vain.

Cyril's fingers were powerless with grasping the twisted reins of the useless bridle, and his arms ached and tingled to the shoulders with the long strain upon them; his whole body trembled, and he felt that little now would dismount him, so fast and furious had been the career of his runaway steed, so many the leaps he had made over gates and walls of turf and stone, over high hedges and deep water-courses; a regular steeplechase over everything that came in his way. The roughest hurdle-race was as nothing compared with it; and now, we have said, before him lay the sea.

He knew the ground well, and the whole locality; he had too often rambled there birdnesting when a happy, heedless boy, and while hunting or shooting in manhood; and he knew also every foot of that terrible shore from Eymouth to the Bridge of Dunglass; and he was aware that at the end of the field he traversed there was no enclosure, no wall or hedge, no boundary but the giddy verge which overhung the sea that foamed some forty feet below. So now the time had come when he must cast himself from his saddle or perish.

He released his right foot from the stirrup-iron, but somehow omitted to clear the left so readily. In a moment he was on his back among the soft loamy furrows, and dragged furiously along; the next, he felt himself shot fearfully through the air, which seemed to whiz upward past him.

"God—oh, God save me!" escaped him, while his mother's face, and Mary's too, flashed on his memory, with Mary's gentle voice and tender eyes, as he fell through space; and ere he could again respire he found himself headlong in the midnight sea, with the black water closed above his head.

Panting he rose to the surface, but to sink again and again, for he was weak, powerless, and breathless; yet being a good swimmer, when he rose the third time he kept himself afloat and looked around.

He was free from the fatal bay hunter now.

High over him towered a ridge of those black, beetling rocks which bound the shore and culminate in the cliffs of Fast Castle and those of St. Abb, covered with sea fowl, and with the foam of the German Ocean rolling against them. The moon, which had been hitherto veiled by a mass of clouds, now emerged from them, and as she was waning from amid the ragged edges of the floating vapour, her light, cold, pale, and ghastly, shone along the tossing sea.

Even if he could have protracted his existence by swimming, in the end he must perish; for all along that shore no footing place or sandy beach was nigh, and the waves, he feared too surely, would dash him on the bluffs a battered corpse.

Already his horse, with true instinct, had turned to the shore and swam through the billows, which dashed it again and again upon the wall of rock, the slippery face of which it beat and pawed with its hoofs in vain to find a footing.

A mass of weedy and isolated rock some yards from that perilous shore caught the eye of Cyril in the moonlight. The waves boiled and seethed around but not over it. There he would find footing he hoped for a time, till daylight broke and his situation might be seen from the land or the sea; and with a prayer of thankfulness to Heaven in his heart and on his lips, he swam boldly and reached its slippery apex by grasping the seaweed that covered it.

Cold and drenched he sat there with the white waves seething round him; and he could remember that many a time when a boy he had striven, by tossing stones from the cliff above, to hit this identical rock which now afforded him a temporary place of safety.

Ere long he felt sensible that the water was rising, that the tide was flowing inshore, and might in time, perhaps, cover the rock, in which case he was certain to be washed off and drowned.

The moon soon disappeared behind that stupendous rock which is crowned by the ruins of Fast Castle, and is inaccessible on all sides, save by a narrow neck of land, and then a double gloom seemed to fall upon the sea. About a mile off he could see a solitary light in the window of a house upon the shore, the light too probably of some watcher by a sick bed; and wistfully and yearningly he regarded it, as he sat, or crouched rather, on that isolated rock, perishing miserably within a few miles of his splendid home.

There he knew that by this time all would be a-bed, after his father, his brother, and Horace Ramornie had had a few amicable strokes at billiards, and after his mother had grown weary of weaving out the future of the coming heiress; and he knew that Gervase Asloane, the old butler, would be sleepily awaiting his return from Chesterhaugh.

One other light was visible for a time; it was on board a large steamer about eight miles distant in the offing, where gradually it passed out of sight as she sped on her way to England or Holland.

To shout, Cyril knew was worse than useless; few craft ever ventured near that iron shore, and there his voice would be heard by sea birds only.

Poor Cyril Wedderburn! He had not been much given to prayer since he became a man of the world, or since he had last lisped his childish orisons at his mother's knee; but now, in his hour of desperate need, he invoked God earnestly for deliverance from a death so early and so terrible as that which menaced him: and by some strange idiosyncrasy of the human mind, amid these pious thoughts, and amid the bewildering horrors of his situation, there occurred to his ear and his memory scraps of mess-room songs, of frivolous banter, and operatic airs, as if in grotesque mockery, till he feared he was growing mad!

Suddenly a terrible cry—a cry that seemed to belong neither to Heaven nor earth—a cry altogether dissimilar to any other sound he had ever heard before, pierced his ears. Its singularity of tone made the pulses of his heart stand still. Were the tales he had heard of the water kelpy, and his shrieks of triumph over the drowning, true after all?

No other sound followed but the monotonous dashing of the waves, the hiss of the surf upon the rocks, and the voices of the now startled sea birds as they were roused from their nests by that unearthly yell.

It was the death scream of his drowning horse; for a horse, when in extremity of terror, can utter a dreadful cry at times; and now its body floated passively in the eddy round a wave-beaten promontory, the sport of the billows, and Cyril, with little regret certainly, saw it tossed to and fro in the starlight, till it disappeared, and that was the last he saw of his fatal bay hunter!

And now another deep invocation of God escaped him, for he became assured that slowly, but steadily and terribly, the rising tide was closing round him!

In his exciting conversation with Mary, worthy Squills, the village doctor, had not over-rated the grief and consternation which the great catastrophe excited among the bereaved family at Willowdean. "There are days in some lives which are so full of pain that no term of after years, no joy or peace of after-granting, can enable us to think of them without a shudder, even to the last hour of existence." So was it with Lady Wedderburn then, on that black fatal day, and for many a day after, when memory went back to the terrible shock her nervous system had received.

Accustomed from her infancy to all the perfect repose and care that wealth, position, and prosperity so frequently inspire, this calamity seemed beyond all her power of realization as a fact!

The absence of Cyril from the formal morning prayer read by Sir John (the Wedderburns were rather High Church), and from breakfast, excited no great surprise; and when it was reported from the stable-yard that neither he nor his horse, the famous bay, had come home last night, the natural conclusion of the family circle was that he had been pressed to remain at Chesterhaugh, and would doubtless ride home in time for the family luncheon; but Sir John, who disliked some of Rooke Chesters' proclivities, particularly his proneness to gamble, was surprised that his son (usually so careful and fastidious in his acquaintanceships) should so far tax that person's hospitality.

When Lady Wedderburn, in her gay little dressing-room, was in deep consultation with Miss Flora M'Caw about her style of mourning for Uncle William, of Madras, and the proper sets of jewellery, jet, silver, or gold, to be worn therewith, and also when the season for second mourning arrived, the startling tidings came, in the form of a vague rumour at first, that her son Cyril had left Chesterhaugh about midnight, and had now been absent, unaccounted for, none knew where or how, for twelve hours!

For one so extremely regular in all his habits and so temperate in conduct, this seemed incomprehensible, and every hopeful, vague, and wild surmise was indulged in only to culminate at last in the fear of some terrible accident or outrage, and yet the people of the district were peaceful and orderly.

Then, as the Doctor had related to Mary, Horace Ramornie, and all the household, assisted by friends and neighbours, set forth to search the country. His hat was found at Buncle-edge, and his whip at Falaknowe, five miles nearer the sea; but Lady Juliana Ernescleugh sent her son, the Master, with the darkest tidings of all, that Cyril's well-known bay hunter had been discovered drowned, and fearfully bruised and battered, among the rocks eastward of Fast Castle, and then the conviction that a dreadful calamity, the details of which were incomprehensible, had taken place.

The Coastguard were set to work, the shore was searched, and, save where the rocks were impassable or inaccessible, every creek and cranny were examined between Broxmouth and the Redheugh shore; a fleet of fisherboats dragged all the water in the vicinity, but all their seeking was vain.

No further trace was found of Cyril.

The telegraphs were at work, with descriptions of his person and clothing, and rewards were offered for information, with no better success, and thus four days of agonizing suspense and horror were passed by the family at Willowdean.

All the servants sorrowed for Cyril, the feminine portion especially; he was so handsome, and always so smiling and suave; and old Gervase Asloane, on whose back he had ridden many a time when a boy, wept for him, and Miss Flora M'Caw wept too. Solitary, and of a necessity selfish though her life had been, she felt genuine grief for the loss of so fine a young man, and recalled the secret hopes and tender passion in which she had once ventured to indulge when the heir of Willowdean was in his mere boyhood, in the time that seemed so long past now.

Messages and cards of condolence poured in from friends and neighbours; and among others came a black-edged note, per Mr. Bill Trayner, from Rooke Chesters, expressing profound sorrow for the untoward event, and enclosing Cyril's IOU for three hundred pounds, which "he hoped Sir John Wedderburn would find it convenient to liquidate, as he was just about to travel."

"Oh, detestable taste!" exclaimed Horace Ramornie, with a flush of anger and contempt on his handsome face; but Sir John, though his brown, manly hand trembled the while, signed a cheque for the amount, and enclosed it to Chesters without a word of comment.

He then looked sadly at the IOU, the last words, no doubt, his son's hand had traced, and with a sigh threw it into the fire.

When the second and third day passed, Lady Wedderburn was too ill to leave her bed, and it required all the skill of Doctor Squills, and all the solace of Miss M'Caw, with the aid of camphor, sal-volatile, and Rimmel's vinegar, to save her from a succession of fainting fits.

Cyril was gone—gone for ever!

These words seemed ever in her heart and on her lips, and to be written, as it were in letters of fire upon the wall, and this feeling seemed to fill the air around her. The stunning sense of her bereavement was most keen in the wakeful hours of the night and of the early morning. Then it seemed to rush like a flood upon her. Never more would her slender fingers run caressingly through his rich dark hair; never more would his soft and beautiful, yet manly eyes, turn affectionately to hers: never again would his voice, always so sweetly modulated when addressing her, fall upon her listening ear.

A lonely girl at Lonewoodlee was full of exactly similar thoughts, sorrows, and memories; yet those of the bereaved mother were perhaps the deepest—the most keen and the hardest to bear. Cyril was her firstborn—the apple of her eye. To her he was beautiful as Absalom was to David, and as she thought of that, she repeated in her heart—

"O, Absalom, my son, my Absalom,
Would to God my life would ransom thine!"

Had Lady Wedderburn seen Mary Lennox then, and known the common cause of their grief, she might have forgiven and even loved her; but she had never yet connected the idea of Mary with her son.

When Cyril was absent with his regiment—the Fusileers—the sight of his empty chair, his vacant place at table, always inspired her with sadness; but she knew that he was no longer a boy, and could not be kept for ever by her side. Now his place would ever more be vacant, or filled by a terrible shadow—an unseen presence only. Even his grave she would never look upon; and every relic of Cyril—the portrait painted of him, as a cherry-cheeked boy ensign, in his first red coat and epaulettes, with pipe-clayed belt and black bearskin; the lock of his hair which had never left her bosom since he joined his regiment, then warring on the banks of the Sutledge; his unused books, his bed, the soft cambric pillow-case his cheek had touched, his favourite meerschaum pipe, lying where he had last left it—all became as something sacred in her eyes, and inspired her with bursts of the most passionate grief.

The schemes she had been so fondly forming for his aggrandizement, by marriage with his rich cousin who was coming home, were all forgotten now; and in the bewilderment of her grief she almost forgot to pray. Poor Lady Wedderburn was stupefied; and the snow of that sudden storm which imprisoned Mary Lennox at Chesterhaugh added, while it lasted on hill and moor, double desolation to her heart, for the gloom of the weather adds keenly to the grief of the imaginative and impressionable.

Where was now the future she had pictured, with Cyril's children crowing and nestling upon her knee? Robert, her younger son—the future Baronet—yet was left to her; but at present all her sorrow, tears, and regrets were for the lost one.

"The fifth day, and no news of him yet—no trace, save the dead horse! By Jove! what can have happened? I meant only to break a few of his bones, or spoil his pretty face, perhaps, for Mary, and nothing more. Where the devil can he have drifted to—the coast of Holland perhaps? Handsome of the old boy to cash up the IOU. Wish it had been for six hundred, though!"

Thus thought Ralph Rooke Chesters, when on the afternoon of the fifth day—the Monday—after the disappearance of Cyril he dismounted at Lonewoodlee, under the door which bore the quaint legend, and presenting his card, asked for Miss Lennox.

"Miss Lennox was at home," Alison said, and ere long she received him in the gloomy apartment which passed for her drawing-room, with its chintz-covered furniture, its chiffounières of painted wood, its old-fashioned girandoles, and the meagre finery of her mother's bridal days, to which her own eyes had become accustomed. Her piano stood open, for though her heart was full of grief, she had been compelled to sing and play to amuse her father.

"To what do I owe the—the pleasure of this visit?" said Mary, politely yet coldly, for the memory of yesterday's snare haunted her unpleasantly, and secretly she resented it.

"My anxiety lest you should have suffered from the snow (now nearly gone, by-the-bye) and the cold drive in an open waggonette," replied Chesters, with as soft a smile as his face could assume.

"Thanks; I am well," said Mary, still more coldly, for there was something in the manner of Chesters which inspired doubt and dislike. Yet he placed his hat on the table, brushed a speck off his tweed knickerbockers with his handkerchief, and quietly seated himself with the air of a man who meant to remain.

"And the old gentleman. How is he?"

"As usual," sighed Mary; "very weak and ailing. I know not with what; and I don't think that Doctor Squills knows either."

"Get some other skill than this cub of a parish doctor possesses. Send to town—to London or Edinburgh."

But Mary shook her head and sighed again as she thought of their slender means; and there was a pause, during which she hoped that he would soon go, as she had to be at the railway station at a certain hour to receive certain medicines which the Doctor had ordered from Edinburgh for her father's use.

She was conscious that Chesters was regarding her earnestly; indeed, he had been unable to get out of his evil mind the effect of her pretty and ladylike little figure while she sat so many hours in his dining-room last night; so he had come in the prosecution of his nefarious suit; but old as he was in the ways of the world he lived in, he felt an awkwardness in his mode of advancing it; for Mary looked so provokingly calm and composed; and so exquisitely ladylike; her beautifully dressed hair so gorgeous in colour and quantity, with her plain but perfect toilette, and her only ornament, a simple brooch, nestling at her pretty neck.

To Mary's eye he looked older to-day and less careful in his costume; his nose was certainly redder, and the blotches on his cheeks were deeper in colour; his watchful and sinister grey eyes were more restless in expression, and it soon became evident that he had been imbibing freely, though the day was yet young. Wine, or something worse, alone could have made him depart from his policy of yesterday and blunder on as he did while the young girl's grief was so fresh and keen.

He rose, and coming close to the chair in which she was seated, laid his hand on the back of it, touching her rounded shoulder as he did so; and lowering his voice, he said—

"Miss Lennox; or may I call you Mary?"

"Yes, if you choose. You have known me since I was a mere child."

"I have served in India since then," said he, with an ill-concealed grimace; for he winced at the remark, or what it inferred; and oblivious of the tender scene he had witnessed in the thicket, and the grief which filled her heart, he said—

"I am come to ask you if you will allow me to love you, Mary Lennox?"

"I can neither prevent people from loving or hating me," she replied, evasively; for she remembered the bill which he possessed; the power it gave him over her father, and she trembled in her heart.

"Ah, Mary, who could hate you?" he whispered, bending still nearer her face.

"But I beg that you will not speak of love to me."

"Why?"

"For a reason I care not to give. Pray let that suffice," urged Mary, as she bit her lip and kept her pale face averted to hide the tears with which her eyes were filled.

"Then you love another?" said Chesters, bluntly.

"That is my affair, sir."

"But you do; or shall I say, did?"

"As you please," replied the girl, wearily, shrugging her shoulders, and her words seemed to come from her heart.

"At least, I have a kind of admission from your own lips," he resumed, with a half-muttered imprecation under his sandy grey moustache, and with a dangerous gloom in his false and sinister eyes. "But do you know your own mind?"

"I trust that I do," was the gentle reply.

"You are right to speak doubtfully."

Mary changed her seat to the other side of the fireplace; for, as his face came nearer hers, a kind of shiver passed over her.

"I do not understand you, Captain Chesters," said she, haughtily, as she erected her pretty head, and looked at him intently and steadily.

"I say you are right to speak doubtfully, for at your years a girl scarcely knows her own mind," he resumed more tenderly, again drawing near her and attempting to take her hand. "It is quite possible to love one person at one time, and another much more at a future time; and thus you might love me. Who is the writer that says, 'we may love with but a part of our nature—for the heart must love something—until we chance upon a being our every nature sympathizes with; one that will awaken new faculties to love with; one that we can love with all the love we gave the first, with still more added—a being made for us, and us alone.'"

Chesters poured out this quotation at a breath, for he was sensible that his utterance was becoming thicker, and a smile of disdain passed over Mary's face.

"I don't know who the writer is," said she, with growing irritation, as she rang the bell, "but it all sounds very French—like some of the maxims of Jean Jacques Rousseau. One thing I am sure of, Captain Chesters; my nature would never sympathize with yours, and I could never—pardon me for saying so—marry a man old enough to be my father."

Chesters ground his teeth at this reply, and a little hollow and bitter laugh escaped him; for with all his open and secret admiration of Mary, which was genuine enough—as the charms of her person and manner were undeniable—a marriage with her formed no part of his plans. He was about to renew the subject, when old Alison appeared, in answer to the summons of her young mistress, who said—

"Ask, please, if my papa feels well enough to see Captain Chesters."

"He has just been inquiring for him, Miss."

"Good. Come with me, Captain Chesters, if you are so disposed. Papa sees so few, that your visit will be quite an event."

Now Chesters, with all his suavity and plausibility, when he had an object in view, could rarely give much sympathy to any one or anything, and above all, he hated the boredom of illness or sickness in himself or others, felt just then only anger at the quick mode in which Mary cut short his intrusive love-making; but he bowed, and followed her into the room where poor Oliver Lennox lay in the bed from which, it was too probable, he never would rise. The oppressive odour of the sick room in such a chill season, and in such a house, where the walls were of such enormous thickness, was unpleasantly perceptible to Chesters, and had the result of making his recent potations more seriously affect his brain.

However, being withal a well-bred man, he shook the thin wan hand of Mr. Lennox with apparent cordiality, made the usual polite but conventional inquiries about his health, and received the same unmeaning and querulous replies, which he had heard a score of times in the same place.

Weak and worn though he was, could Oliver Lennox but have seen into Chesters' heart, and read the plans he cherished there, he would have smote him by his bedside!

Propped on pillows which his daughter's tender hand had arranged, Mr. Lennox, looking twenty years older than his time of life warranted, had been lying the whole forenoon with his clear blue restless eyes bent on the muirland scene that stretched for miles away before his window—the acres upon acres that were no longer his own; acres won and held by his forefathers in the old stirring times of Scottish raids and wars.

The snow of the unexpected storm had already disappeared; the day really looked like one in spring; the sky a deep blue; the air soft and ambient. The bulb roots were expanding amid the prepared mould in Mary's little garden on the southern side of the Tower; the primroses and wild violets were cropping up beneath the sprouting hedgerows; the grass looked greener on the lonely hill sides and in the meadows, over which the shadows of the clouds were passing quickly; and even the bleak Lammermuir looked less bleak than was its wont; for the day was of a kind to make one feel content for the present, hopeful for the future, and prayerful to God.

Oliver Lennox felt its genial influence in his own fatuous way; but not so his daughter, for her heart was rent by anguish for the loss of Cyril, and mortification for the annoyance which the suit of Chesters occasioned her.

"How kind of you to come and see an old broken-down fellow such as I am," said the invalid, turning his sharp aquiline face to his visitor, and presenting his hand for a second time.

"Not at all, my good friend. Glad to see you looking so well. Egad! I shouldn't wonder to see you in the saddle again, scouring across the country—the leading man in the field."

But Mr. Lennox only shook his head and sighed despondingly, while Mary felt disgust for the untrue sympathy of Chesters, who stood sucking the ivory handle of his whip, while she rearranged with her quick hands the pillows under her father's head.

"It was just on such a breezy March day as this I hunted last, Chesters," said the invalid, with a sad smile. "We all came at a slapping pace through Oxendean, and round Buncle-edge, till, oddly enough, a bed of sweet violets and primroses—only think of it!—in Renton Wood quite threw the hounds off the scent, and the fox escaped! Since that day Oliver Lennox has never been in the hunting field, or backed aught but an old Galloway cob."

"Take courage. There is a good time coming, as the song has it."

"My Mary is the veritable 'Brownie' of Lonewoodlee, who cooks and watches in the night, and all that, so I should not repine," said Mr. Lennox, with a fond smile, as he played with her snowy and statuesque fingers; "but her unwearying love, and all her tender kindness cannot avert fate, or hide the out-stretching of the Shadowy Hand."

"Oh, papa, do not—do not pierce my heart!" implored the girl.

"How much more of life is there in this old grumbler yet?" thought Chesters, as he actually gnawed the whip-handle with his teeth, while watching admiringly the contour of Mary's bust, the taper form of her white arms, and the high arch of her instep, as she hung about her father's bed.

"You will be kind to her, Chesters, when I am gone," said Lennox, in his usual querulous way; and the request was so much in unison with Chesters' own thoughts, that the blotches deepened to scarlet in his face.

"Kind to her, Mr. Lennox?" he faltered.

"Yes. I leave so few friends behind me now, that Mary's future fills my heart with intense anxiety."

"Papa dearest, fear not for me," said Mary becoming deeply agitated.

"Had your brother Harry but been spared—"

"Don't talk of poor Harry, papa," urged Mary, as her father's mind was apt to wander then, and to confound the past and the present together; "do not talk thus, papa, when strangers are present. You may live I hope and trust for many years to come. 'God alone decides who shall live to suffer, or who shall suffer and die.' I, perhaps, may be one of the latter."

A scarcely perceptible gesture of impatience escaped Chesters; but slight though it was, the quick eye of the invalid detected it.

"Well, I daresay I weary you. Take Chesters into the dining-room, Mary, and give him a glass of Madeira, or brandy-and-water, after the ride. I always took a horn after a gallop in my day—the day that will never come again. Lonewoodlee had ever a name for hospitality, and it shall not lose it while I am above the turf, lassie."

"Thanks: then we shall adjourn to the dining-room," said Chesters, and glad to escape from the sick chamber, he shook the hand of Oliver Lennox, and ere long found himself in the sombre little dining-hall, seated on one of the square-elbowed haircloth sofas, and looked down upon by a few faded and gloomy portraits of the Lennoxes of past times, in wigs, wide cuffs, and pasteboard skirts, or breastplates of steel, just as Lely, Ramsay, or Medina had depicted them; and somehow he thought that in all the faces of these dead men he could read something of scorn and scrutiny, so his eye avoided them, and he applied himself to mixing a stiff glass of brandy-and-water, while Mary hovered irresolutely near. She was all anxiety that he should depart, for in an hour now the train would be in, and she wished to receive in person the medicines that were coming for her father. She dreaded also to mention her errand or purpose, lest he might offer to accompany her, and give the affliction of yet more of his society.

But Chesters found himself perfectly comfortable. His dinner-time was three hours distant yet; the brandy-and-water proved quite to his taste—so, too, was Mary—thus he at once resumed the thread of their conversation, but in a more jocular, or as Mary justly deemed it, more insolent tone; for helplessness and friendlessness encouraged this vaurien, while her rare beauty inspired his worst passion.

"Ah, Mary, we might be so jolly if you would only learn to love me a little." Then becoming maudlinly sentimental, he proceeded to quote Shelley—

"See the mountains kiss high Heaven,
    And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower will be forgiven,
    If it disdain its brother.
And the sunbeams kiss the earth:
    And the moonbeams the sea.
What are all those kissings worth,
    If thou kiss not me?"

"The order of that line should be reversed; but, by Jove, my voice is getting quite feathery!"

He was becoming inarticulate, and almost tipsy.

"Captain Chesters," said Mary, gravely, "do not go on thus, I implore you! You would pity me if you knew all—the horror of living alone, or nearly alone, in this dreary house; my sole occupation the sad, sad one——"

"Of what?" said he, as tears choked her utterance.

"Soothing and amusing a dying father."

"Oh bosh! my dear girl," was the coarse response; "the old fellow may live long enough yet; and I am sure that he would rather have me for a son-in-law—I who know so thoroughly the points of a horse and the secrets of the turf—a thoroughbred sportsman, who could take the county pack in hand, and, had I the means, would hunt the Merse and Lauderdale as they never were hunted before—than yonder mooning fellow from whom you parted in the thicket on the night he disappeared. Ah, you sly puss, you little knew that I saw you there!"

Mary felt herself grow deadly pale, and then she flushed to the temples with anger, as these rude and almost fiercely spoken remarks, so wounding to her delicacy, fell on her sensitive ear. Again her hand went to the bell for the purpose of having Chesters shown to the door at all hazards of the future, but ere she could ring Alison Home's hard and wrinkled visage appeared, and she announced that "Captain Chesters' servant, Trayner, wished to speak with him immediately."

"Send him up then," said Chesters, sulkily. "Most singular, this! What the deuce can the fellow want with me? I left him in the stables."

"He says, sir, that he has something for your private ear," replied the greyhaired domestic.

Now Chesters had so many strange involvements, and so many secrets to keep, that he very palpably changed colour on hearing this, and felt compelled to go to his servant, who had dismounted at the door, and was now dressed in livery, with an orthodox cockade and brown leather belt.

Mary only heard Chesters utter a fierce exclamation of astonishment in reply to a communication made by Trayner, who was coolly smoking one of his master's cigars, concerning "Willowdean and a telegram;" and then, without the courtesy of returning to bid her adieu, or making any explanation whatever, her unwelcome visitor rode off towards Chesterhaugh, accompanied by his servant; and Mary could see from her window that as they galloped along the road they were side by side and in close and rapid conversation.

About what?

Ere the night fell and the moonlight paled out on the Lammermuirs and on the sea, Mary was fated to hear what this secret communication was!

"What had happened at Willowdean—what was the nature of the telegram?" she asked of her own heart and of Alison in vain; the discovery of Cyril's body in the sea, or cast upon the shore perhaps, and even she who loved him so, yea as her own soul, dared not ask permission to look upon his pallid face again!

This conviction was a great, a bitter, and a mortifying grief! Well, well, if the world were going to pieces, she knew that she must attend to the health and wants of her father, and on looking at her watch, she found that she had not a moment to lose if she would be at the station when the train from the North came in. She tied on her smart hat and veil, took her tiny muff, and set forth.

She might have sent Alison Home, but she had a craving to be a little abroad in the open air, for the atmosphere of the house seemed to stifle her, and there were times when the clamorous fluttering of her heart amounted to agony, and when she felt as one in a dream—one enduring sorrows not her own, but those of another.

She passed the thicket and the stile where she had been wont to meet him in the evening, and she glanced at both wistfully. No need was there now to wait with anxious heart to watch the clock, or wonder whether papa would be asleep, awake, or fretful when the time for trysting came. All was ended now! and yet as she looked at the rude steps of the stone stile, grey and spotted with lichens, it seemed to her as if she could, in her mind's eye, trace the outline of her handsome and winning lover's figure, waiting for her as of old—as he had waited only five days ago—her lost Cyril!

Never more! Oh, how much of sadness, of bitterness, and hopelessness, do these two words contain!

Save in a few hollow places on the hill sides, the snow of the preceding night had totally disappeared. The sunset deepened with a warm and russet glow on the summits of the pastoral hills, the air was balmy, and the chirping of the birds came clearly upon it, with the voices of children from a distance. The green buds were swelling in the hedgerows, and near a cottage which had once been a lodge of Lonewoodlee (now let to a cottar) she saw a group of rosy, barelegged "bairns" peeping with wonder into the first bird's nest of the season, which some unwary sparrow had built in the cleft of an open bush. The rooks were cawing aloft, the brown hares were gliding among the glistening furrows of the freshly ploughed fields, or "mains" as they are named in the Merse; there was a fragrance and odour of verdure in the air, and though the month is usually a rude and boisterous one, Mary, as she walked rapidly on, could not be insensible of the genial influence of spring.

Pausing at times, she looked fondly and sadly back to the gloomy old Tower, the tourelles, bartizan, and stone roof of which stood out so darkly against the bright blue evening sky. There, in the stirring times of old, by the Border Laws, or Leges Marchiarum, her forefathers had been compelled to keep a watch with alarm-bell and fire-pan, to give warning to the North, to Soltra and Dunpender, when the English crossed the Tweed or entered the Merse, and now their descendants trembled at the approach of an angry creditor! How long would her dwelling be there, and where would be her home when—but she thrust that thought aside as too painful, and hastened on.

She passed ere long the handsome modern gate and Grecian lodge of Willowdean, the pillared peristyle and white façade of which she could see at a distance between the trees of the park (or chase, it might be called in England), and an irrepressible sob escaped her for one who would never more be under its roof; and thus, with the tears welling but unseen beneath her closely tied veil, she entered the market town of Willowdean, which owed its existence and prosperity to the Wedderburns.

It is a quaint old Scottish Burgh of Barony, and was so long before the union of the kingdoms, remaining very much unchanged for more than a century after, and singularly so, as in Scotland nothing stands, for there whatever fails to "go ahead" must decline and pass away, like many of the burghs of Fife. It has stood almost unchanged, even by the railway, save for the erection of a few gayer shops and taverns—unchanged in its general aspect since Queen Mary made her famous ride to Hermitage, and from its aspect, its cross—a slender shaft of stone surmounted by a mouldered unicorn—its kirk, and crow-stepped gables abutting on the street, its quaint outshots and turnpike stairs, one might expect to see the mailed knights of Mary, or buff-coated troopers of Leslie, fresh from Marston Moor, drinking at the market well, or "chaffing" the girls at the grated windows of the houses, some of which still show the iron crosses of St. John of Jerusalem.

The town once boasted of a castle, but after being burned by some Northumberland raiders in the time of Charles II., it has dwindled down to a few vaults and a green mound, the favourite resort of the children for games and play. Willowdean still boasts of a parochial barn, called a kirk, where God is worshipped according to the cold and stern form ordained in 1559 by the Lords of the Congregation, when Mary of Guise was Regent of the realm, enlightened Scottish lords who could barely make their mark like an Irish navvy, and who (could such an investment have been made) would have sold their fathers' skins to Queen Elizabeth.

This church had, however, attached to it the Gothic fragment of an older fane, still called the Lennox Aisle, and there lay most of the forefathers of her who now entered the street afoot, and sick and sad at heart.

To many of the "burgh merchants" in that little town was her father in debt, yet everywhere did Mary meet with respect; all touched their hats to her, for the memory of her father's openhanded youth was a popular one: and in a place so sequestered and out of the route of the tourist, even in fast-changing and radical Scotland, some more respect is paid at times to the representative of an old family than might be accorded to a wealthy parvenu, and all the more readily when the said representative is a lovely young girl like Mary Lennox.

In the middle of the street—the town has but one, with a few thatched closes or alleys diverging therefrom—she encountered a group of little children dancing hand-in-hand and singing in chorus one of those local rhymes which are so peculiar to the Lowlands, as they came merrily along, enumerating, to an air of their own, several localities, thus—

"Braw Bughtrig and braw Belchester,
    Leetholm and the Peel;
The lad wha gets a wife frae there
    Will ever do weel;
But better far in Willowdean,
    And bonnier will he see,
If he'll ride further up the muir,
    Unto the Lonewoodlee."

Then, as they suddenly perceived and recognised Miss Lennox, the little creatures blushed and curtseyed; and, but for the chronic sadness of her heart, Mary could have smiled at the old rhyming compliment to the alleged beauty of the ladies of her family.

At last she reached the railway station, of which no description is necessary, as such edifices bear a strong family resemblance all over Europe. There were the same liveried porters loitering about that one sees everywhere; passengers with labelled luggage awaiting the up-train or the down-train; the book-stall, with its inevitable rows of yellow, green, or red novels, Punch, and the Illustrated News.

Mary had not long to wait. With a shrill and vicious whistle, the train for England swept out of the tunnel, a long pennant of smoke streaming behind, and its crimson lamps flaming like the eyeballs of a demon in front, for the twilight had deepened to the gloaming now. Clang went the bell, the engine "slowed," and, amid the bustle, the opening and slamming of doors, the production and notching of tickets, the choice of seats and stowal of luggage, the darting of the thirsty into the refreshment-room, and so forth—for all had to be adjusted and the train off in five minutes, if it would avoid the express for Berwick—Mary looked in vain for the familiar face of the friendly guard who frequently did her little services, and who was to bring her the important packet from town.

The man on duty this evening was a total stranger to her.

"A packet for you, Miss?" said he, in reply to her inquiries. "What is the name?"

"For Mr. Lennox, of Lonewoodlee."

"It was given to a gentleman in the train; he offered to take charge of it."

"By whom?"

"The other guard, to whom he seemed well known, and to whom he offered in person to deliver it."

"Singular; a gentleman!" exclaimed Mary, in vague alarm that the long-expected packet might be lost or stolen.

"Yes, Miss; a regular gentleman, for he gave me a crown when smoking in the van."

"But where is he?"

"Yonder, on the platform, Miss. Seats, gentlemen, seats!" and cutting short the conversation, the bustling official hurried away, touching the brass-lined peak of his cap.

Clang went the doors and the bell; the engine panted and screamed, the train glided away, and Mary went towards the gentleman indicated by the guard. He was speaking in an animated manner to a few of the loiterers on the platform, who had formed a group about him, and Mary fancied that he had a small sealed packet in his hand.

Irresolute about addressing him, she lingered for a moment, till something in his air and manner stirred a secret chord in her heart, which vibrated painfully, and a low cry escaped her lips, when the handsome face, with the well-known moustache and tender loving eyes of the lost one, was turned towards her!

"Cyril!" she exclaimed, and would have fallen, but that his arm was instantly around her.

"Mary—Mary Lennox!"

It was he, but looking paler and thinner, and strangely attired; and they met thus abruptly amid a group of people on the open and most prosaic of places—a railway platform!

Great though his excitement, Cyril Wedderburn had that horror of a "scene" natural to every well-bred Briton, and rapidly recovering his consciousness of the necessity for appearing calm and unmoved, he lifted his hat, and said—

"Take my arm, Miss Lennox: allow me to see you out of this place. I have here the packet addressed to your father. I hope to hear that he is better. Good evening, gentlemen and friends; thanks for all your kind wishes and congratulations."

He drew Mary's arm through his, waved his hat to the people who had recognised and crowded about him on the platform, welcoming his return—resuscitation, what you will—with a genuine cheer that died away in a buzz of speculation and wonder, for the Wedderburns were deservedly popular in the district; and then he led away Mary, who was in a state of intense bewilderment, for much of utter terror was mingled with her joy, so that her steps tottered as they left the station and proceeded through the street of Willowdean, where the windows of the little shops were beginning to be lit with feeble gas, or still more feeble candles, and from thence out upon the familiar highway that stretched beyond.

"Cyril," exclaimed Mary, in a low but piercing voice, while she clung to her lover's arm; "in the name of mercy and for the love of blessed Heaven, explain all this terrible mystery!"

"Oh, my darling, my darling, how pale and wan you look!" he exclaimed, as he lifted her veil and kissed her tenderly.

"And you too, Cyril. But speak of yourself, not me," she added, dropping her head wearily on his breast, and giving way to a passionate fit of weeping. "What has happened to you, where have you been, and how have you returned in so sudden and unexpected a manner, from the grave—from the very grave, as it seems to me? I have wept and mourned for you as one who was numbered with the dead! Oh, the horror, the black, indescribable horror of those days and nights now past!"

"My tender, loving Mary!"

"Oh, Cyril, hold me up. I feel as if I could die just now—the shock of joy is so, so great to see you again; to hear your voice, for the sound of which I have longed in a species of silent, gasping yearning, that no words can describe, and which God alone knows!"

"So have I longed for you, Mary," said he, in a broken accent, for her words and the tone of her voice moved him deeply, as it had in it that wonderful tremolo which added so much to its power.

Oh, was it real, and not a dream?—each asked of their hearts—this clinging and gasping embrace in which they both indulged for a time, in a happy, happy silence, too deep for words.

After a pause, Cyril said—

"I telegraphed to my brother Robert that I should arrive by this train, and asked him or Horace Ramornie to meet me with the trap or carriage, and drive me home; but there must have been some mistake, for neither are here, which is lucky, as I shall have the unexpected joy of a walk home with you, my darling Mary, my wee wifie, who, strange to say, has been the first to greet me!"

So this must have been the telegram referred to by Trayner in his rapid communication to Chesters, who, in the true spirit of jealousy, fear, or malevolence, had ridden off, without mentioning it to her.

"Surely you would not have left me another night in grief and suspense?" said Mary, plaintively.

"Not another hour! I telegraphed to the family at Willowdean, first, of my safety; and again that I was to be home by the evening train. I meant to have gone to Lonewoodlee by the way, my excuse for doing so being this packet, which I should have left for you, with a sufficient message, if we had failed to meet.'"

"But the mystery, Cyril—the mystery of your story; tell me all!" she implored, with a heart full of love and natural curiosity.

In a few words he rapidly sketched all the adventures of the night on which he disappeared—adventures he would yet have to detail to many a listener, but to few that would listen so lovingly and breathlessly as poor Mary Lennox—horrors that were to come back in many a dream! He told of his dining at Chesterhaugh; of the night spent in rash gambling there; of his desire, but failure, to get possession of her father's bill; and then how his horse had proved first restive and afterwards mad, and completely ungovernable; of the fierce race by Buncle-edge and Falaknowe—a ride like that of the Wild Huntsman of German renown—till he was borne right into the sea; of the narrow escape he had from being dashed to pieces; but how, by the aid of kind Providence, he had reached the fragment of isolated rock, and sat there in cold and misery, with the moon waning, the night deepening, and the tide rising round him, while all hope of reaching the land by swimming was futile, as the cliffs rose sheer like a wall from the sea, which was rolling with a mighty force against them; and Mary heard all this, with hands clasped upon his arm, with exclamations of compassion and dismay, with her eyes full of tears, and her parted lips revealing her closely set little teeth.

He described, that around him there wheeled nights of the snow-white solan goose, the black guillemot, the grey gull, and other sea birds; and that once there came a seal—a seadog, as the Scottish fishermen name it—which swam in circles round the rock, with its bullet-shaped head, black glittering eyes, and two fore-paws alone visible, as it paddled about; and often the memory of that incident came back in dreams, for he had envied the animal its amphibious nature, while the rising tide flowed over his feet and legs; and often, in the same visions of night, came back the sounds he had heard when there—the gurgling, the hissing, and the surging of the sea, as the ridgy waves succeeded each other in unvarying rage, round the rock on which he sat and against the cliffs that beetled over him.

Mary shuddered and shed many a tear while she listened, though Cyril appeared to speak somewhat lightly of the affair, as "a devil of a spill—an awful mess—a narrow escape," and so forth.

The strange weird scream of his dying horse was ultimately the means of saving him. It had been heard to seaward on board of a small fishing smack, the skipper of which lay to, and sent his little boat in shore to discover whence that unearthly cry proceeded; and two men who rowed it, and whose superstitious fears inspired them with the utmost unwillingness for the duty, fortunately descried Cyril by the starlight, and were just in time to save him. He swam off towards them, and was taken on board the smack, speechless with cold and exhaustion.

The kind fishermen took every means in their limited power to restore him; they placed him in one of the only two berths they possessed, for the entire crew consisted but of five men, and of these three were always on duty; they drew off his wet clothes, covered him cosily up, and gave him the only medicine they knew of—a totfull of hot stiff grog—and then he fell into a deep slumber.

When morning came, the smack was out at sea, on her homeward voyage to the coast of Angus. Cyril awoke feverish and ill. The atmosphere of the little den in which he lay was redolent of tar, stale herrings, and coarse tobacco, and every way was not conducive to a speedy recovery. His head ached fearfully; his whole frame felt as if bruised and battered; his senses wandered, and it was not until the evening of the second day that his preservers learned who he was; whence came the singular cry they had heard; how he chanced to be on that isolated rock, and that they would be well rewarded for having saved him.

The smack was light; they had sold their cargo of herrings to the French at Dunbar, and were anxious now to haul up for their own homes, somewhere about Montrose; but a head wind drove them into the North Sea, and four days elapsed before they succeeded in landing him at Lunan Bay, where he lost no time in telegraphing home, and starting by the first train for the Merse; and this was the solution of all that recent sorrow and mystery.

"Had my left foot not been freed from the stirrup in my fall, or had my horse not uttered that remarkable cry which attracted the attention of the fishermen, I had been lying now a drowned corpse in yonder sea, Mary," said Cyril, in conclusion.

Mary still sobbed, as she was terribly excited by the whole narrative; but joy made her face seem radiantly beautiful; and in a burst of confidence that was perhaps not overwise, she told him of Chesters' love-declaration to herself, and of his having been en perdue in the thicket on the night they had last met. Cyril's eyes sparkled with indignation; he knit his brows, gave his moustache a fierce twirl, and said—

"I see it all, Mary. His jealousy made me the victim of some foul revengeful trickery, which I shall yet have unravelled and punished!"

Mary omitted to speak of her detention at Chesterhaugh; for now the annoyance to which Chesters had subjected her more than ever by his address; her repugnance of him; the mortification she had occasionally felt as a high-spirited girl for the secresy of her love affair with Cyril himself, and the plans and precautions they were compelled to observe, were all forgotten in the joyous conviction of his safety—the charm of his manner and presence.

What delight to lean again upon his arm; to feel her hand pressed caressingly to his side; to look into his face and hear his voice; and, ah! how different were his tone and bearing from those of Chesters, when with genuine interest he asked about the health of her father. Was this evening walk not all a dream, a sudden madness?

"Oh, Cyril, you do not know my papa!" she exclaimed, in answer to some remark.

"Save by sight, as mere neighbours, and not very friendly ones now; but I wish I did know him."

"He is altering fast, and looking so fearfully wizened and pale, even I, who see him hourly, can perceive that."

"Poor old man!"

At last they were close to Lonewoodlee, where the old Tower and its dense thicket stood sharply defined in purple shadow against the last flush of light that lingered in the amber tinted west.

Mary still clung to Cyril, loth to part from one so recently and so suddenly restored to her, till he whispered softly in her ear—

"You forget, Mary dearest, that I have a fond mother at Willowdean, longing to see me too."

"True. I am most selfish in detaining you so long from all at home, and I have to read or sing papa asleep; for he cannot read now, and his nights are so dull and lonely. Oh, Cyril, how I shall sing to-night!"

"Would that I were there to hear you. Good-night, my sweet Mary, until the usual hour to-morrow. Good-night."

Another moment and he was gone, and Mary lingered at the gate until his rapid footsteps died away.

"Where was all this to end!" thought Cyril, as he walked hastily homeward. He felt, as a gentleman and man of honour, that this secret love for Mary Lennox was unjust to her, and might peril her good name; it was trifling with her undoubted position and with his own, and he resolved that, come what might, he must ere long declare it to his family, despite the mohurs, rupees, and thousands of cousin Gwendoleyne, and the ambitious views of his father and mother, the latter especially.

Mary had as yet but one thought, as she rushed with a happy heart into her room and threw off her hat and sealskin jacket; that the first kiss after his return had been on her cheek, even before that of his mother.

Was this a little bit of the superstition or the selfishness which exists with all love? Perhaps so; but then she had barely a bowing acquaintance with Lady Wedderburn, and situated as she was with her son, the humiliation of that circumstance was somewhat galling to Mary's pride.

But how wild was the joy of the impulsive girl! How she sang and played that night for hours, lost in happy, happy dreams! He had been restored to her again, her lover, the hope of her future life; he who to her was "gallant and gay as the young Lochinvar;" and yet, who in reality, was only a very good specimen of a gentlemanly officer of the Line. She forgot all about the tenor and brevity of his leave of absence, and that he might be summoned away at a moment's notice; she forgot all but that he had been restored to the world and to her, and that he loved her, oh, so truly! Of all fears she was oblivious for a time, till other thoughts than joyous ones stole gradually into her mind; and then her white fingers strayed mechanically over the ivory keys of the piano, and her tremulous voice, like the last faint notes, died away.

Alas! there can be no human happiness without some alloy!

She now recalled some of Rooke Chesters' malevolent hints and speeches about the wealth and beauty of the expected cousin, and of Lady Wedderburn's evident views concerning her and Cyril; though from what precise source he drew those deductions was quite unknown, unless the ready invention of a mind inflamed by jealousy.

When this Indian heiress came, rich and lovely—for Chesters had assured Mary that she was lovely—would there be any change in their destiny? Oh, she must not think of that; Cyril could never change, never forget all they had been to each other.

"Alas!" thought she, "this man—this Rooke Chesters, for whom I care nothing—can come openly to see me, to talk, and even, if I permitted him, to walk with me; while Cyril—Cyril Wedderburn, who is to be my husband, whom I love so; love as Heaven alone knows—I see only by stealth! It is hard; very hard! But this is not a night on which I should repine," and she lifted up her hands and her soft eyes, while her heart was full of prayerful thoughts and gratitude, to Heaven.

"Forsaking may be human, but betraying is the vice of devils;" and Chesters only sought to betray, to lure, and destroy. Yet Mary knew not of that, though aware of his terrible character, for he had actually, but somewhat jocularly, spoken of marriage; and Mary shivered at the thought.

In her small turret-chamber that night—the same from the window of which she had heard the wild cry and seen the galloping horse—she shed happy tears, as she prayed beside her little couch; for the gloom that once enveloped her soul had departed, and all the bitter past seemed now a vanished dream!

Great contentment and supreme happiness reigned at Willowdean, where long consultations were held by the gentlemen concerning Chesters, who had suddenly taken his departure to London. They had doubts of what to do, for suspicion was not proof, and Cyril had to conceal the espionage practised on himself at Lonewoodlee, and that jealousy had aught to do with the supposed treacherous trick played to his horse. Hence the whole affair seemed inexplicable to his father, his brother, and cousin, till in Cyril's mind there stole a kind of cloudy doubt even of Chesters' guilt.

"Could it be possible," he asked of himself, "that he could conceive and carry out a scheme so singularly infamous against an unsuspecting guest?"

For the next day or two, Cyril found some difficulty in keeping his appointments with Mary, for his doting mother could scarcely trust her tall, curly-pated and heavily-moustached captain of Fusileers out of her sight, she had so much to ask and to learn: and nobly were the poor skipper of Angus and the four fishermen of his smack rewarded. Cyril, however, wrote little notes to Mary, making his excuses, and expressing his love for her; and such notes were a great solace to her in her loneliness at home.

How trivial now seemed the adoption of mourning for Uncle William; the suits of black for the family and servants, the note-paper and cards with sable edges and crests, when compared with the gloom of such preparations for the loss of the heir of Willowdean!

Cyril knew that of course he was his father's heir; and that if God and the Russian bullets spared him in the expected war, he might in time become the Baronet of Willowdean; but with all his interest, personal and sentimental, in the old family estate, he felt bored when his father talked to him, as country gentlemen will talk, of the probable appearance of the crops and the face of the country, of the farm and pasture land, of top dressing, subsoil, and tile drainage, especially for the lower meadows and three great fields of the home-farm; the weight of pigs. "By Jove," Cyril would mentally exclaim, "the weight of pigs!"

He could feel an interest when the county pack was on the tapis, or when he heard that the covers would require looking to; the patent powder to feed the pheasants; the rooting out of weasels and foumarts; of the new stables, and so forth; but never in agriculture, which, in all its branches, he viewed and voted as an unqualified bore. Hunting after a night poacher, who occasionally visited the home-farm in "the glimpses of the moon," was more in Cyril's way than the alternation of green or white crops, and so forth; but his thoughts, if not with the regiment, were ever at Lonewoodlee.

Horace Ramornie felt some interest in Sir John's topics, for though he had not an acre of land, he repined occasionally at the loss of the old patrimonial estates of his family, and felt somewhat too keenly his dependence on his uncle.

Lady Wedderburn was now intent apparently on the arrangements necessary for the reception of the expected ward; but the chief thought of her mind was obvious to all, and she could not avoid recurring to it whenever she and Sir John were alone.

"I know that Cyril cannot quit his regiment with honour just now, when it has got letters of readiness," said she, on one occasion; "but, dear Sir John, I should so like him to sell out, and reside quietly at home. He is not obliged to pursue his career as a soldier, like Horace, who is penniless."

"Quit!" repeated Wedderburn, testily, "I should think not. Quit on the eve of a war! I would rather see the lad in his coffin than taunted with showing the white feather."

"In three days Gwenny will be here, and if she is so handsome as Doctor Chutnay of Madras assures us she is, she must be charming! And if Cyril must go soon, I should wish—wish that he were married, or at least, solemnly contracted to her. You understand me, Wedderburn?"

"Why such hasty hopes and plans, Kate?"

"Because, as I have already hinted, some one else may marry her, and it would be an act of injustice to Cyril and ourselves to permit all her wealth to pass out of the family. Besides, our neighbour Chesters, every way a bad style of man, may see and admire her, with views of his own."

"If he ever should meet her, which after recent events I think barely probable," said Sir John, somewhat angrily.

"Then there is the Master of Ernescleugh." "I don't envy your task as chaperon," said Sir John, laughing; "you will be in dread of every young fellow in the county! But suppose that the girl may have been foolish enough to fall in love with some enterprising subaltern on the overland route home—we hear of such results every day—some fellow in whose pleasant society she has been cast by sea and land for a month or more? She may come here engaged; married, perhaps!"

The bare suggestion of such a catastrophe filled Lady Wedderburn with unutterable dismay; all the more easily, perhaps, that the same fear had occurred to herself.

The three days glided away. By the evening train Miss Gwendoleyne Wedderburn was expected to arrive from London; and Cyril, who had not seen Mary Lennox for four consecutive days, resolved to take advantage of the incidental bustle at home to ride over to Lonewoodlee for an hour after dinner; but just as Gervase Asloane was removing the cloth, and placing the decanters before Sir John, Lady Wedderburn said—

"You are aware, Cyril, that your cousin will be at the railway station in two hours from this time?"

"Yes. Does she travel alone?" asked Cyril, with provoking indifference of manner.

"Alone. No. Could you imagine that she would do so?"

"How then—with whom? Has old Chutnay come all the way from Madras with her?"

"She travels with her maid. You will, of course, go over with the carriage to meet her, as your father has complained of a twinge or two of gout."

"Can't Horace or Robert go?" asked the Captain, bluntly, as he filled his glass with golden-coloured Château d'Yquem from a white crystal bottle.

"If Sir John cannot go, you should and must, as his representative."

"Why must the whole house be under arms because a little Indo-Briton is coming home?"

"Cyril!" she exclaimed, lifting up her plump white hands.

"Besides, mamma dear," said he, with something of his coaxing manner when a boy, "the fact is, I have a particular engagement."

"With whom?"

The Captain coloured slightly, gave his moustache a twirl, and said—

"Oh, what does it signify? To look at a horse I wish to take back with me to the regiment."

"Not a bay hunter, I hope," said his brother Robert.

"I have had enough of bay hunters," replied Cyril, with a short laugh; and then he added, "Horace, my man, as your superior officer, I order you to go upon this tour of duty."

"With pleasure," replied Horace; but Lady Wedderburn struck in—

"If Cyril is not courteous enough to go for his cousin, let Robert appear alone. Why trouble poor Horace?"

"Why not, mamma? What trouble can it be to look after a pretty girl? Let Horace go, by all means."

"But he is not her cousin!"

"What does that matter, Kate? Let him go also," said Sir John, while a droll but furtive smile was exchanged by Cyril and Horace Ramornie; "the carriage will surely hold three. I've known it come from a ball with six. Her maid may sit in the rumble with the servant—an arrangement which perhaps may be agreeable to them both. Asloane, order the carriage to be here punctually at seven."

Determined to have his own way, and no longer grieve Mary by his protracted absence, Cyril left the dinner-table early, while Lady Wedderburn had serious misgivings about him; and punctually at the hour ordered, the handsome family carriage, with its two bright coloured bays, with plated harness; its two resplendent lamps, and a pair of spotted Dalmatian dogs in attendance, departed with Robert and Horace Ramornie for the railway station, from whence, in less than an hour, it returned with the heiress and her half-caste Indian maid, a tawny woman, whose dress, as yet, was a strange but ample scarlet garment, enveloping her whole person; and the tall footmen were immediately in requisition to carry in her bullock trunks, portmanteaus, and a huge "overland," covered with black canvas and bound with iron.

More than ever provoked and piqued by the unaccountable absence of Cyril at this interesting juncture, Lady Wedderburn—though after her late terror she felt she must forgive him everything—started forward with all eagerness as the drawing-room door was thrown open by Asloane, and a wonderfully handsome, and evidently highly-bred young girl, attired in a fashionably accurate suit of deep mourning, and all in the most exquisite taste, was led in by Horace and Robert, who saw—as the latter afterwards said—his mother's "company smile" brighten into one of genuine affection and sympathy, as she embraced and kissed on both cheeks the young heiress, of whom she was now to be the custodian and chaperon.

"Welcome to Willowdean, my dear, dear girl," said Sir John, taking both her hands in his, and saluting her with great tenderness. "I am your old uncle Wedderburn; yet not perhaps so very old, after all," he added, with a smile, while she looked wistfully and earnestly in his face, as if seeking to trace there a likeness to her dead father; but though striving hard to do so, she failed, yet thought in her heart—

"I shall always love him, because he is my papa's only brother. And, dear Aunt Wedderburn, these are my cousins?"

"One is your cousin Robert. Cyril you shall see ere long, Gwenny."

"Doctor Chutnay, of Madras, who was so kind to poor papa and me, has seen my cousin Cyril at Chatham Barracks, and says he is so handsome!"

"He is, indeed, Gwenny!" said Lady Wedderburn, greatly delighted by this remark; "but now, dearest girl, you must be weary with your long journey, though you would stop at York and Berwick, of course. Permit me to see you to your room, or Miss M'Caw will do so, and take off some of your things, if your maid is too weary."

And with a bow of acquiescence, and a bright pleasant smile, the young lady, who had evidently made a most favourable impression on all, retired to her own apartments; while Lady Wedderburn turned to Sir John, and said—

"A delightful girl—so charming and winning! How provoked I am by Cyril's protracted absence—about a horse, too. Who goes to buy horses at night?"

Fortunately for his mother's peace of mind, Cyril arrived even before his cousin descended from her rooms, where her own maid, Zillah, and Lady Wedderburn's abigail had begun to unpack the huge overland and portmanteaus, which were filled with Indian marvels in the form of Delhi needlework and Champac jewellery of miraculous fabric; Dacca muslins, ivory fans and puzzle-balls; inlaid boxes of ivory and silver from Bombay, for essences and perfumes; and now, with memory of the sad and tender kiss of Mary Lennox lingering on his cheek—a kiss all the sadder and perhaps foreboding, as she had heard of the arrival of this terrible Indian heiress—he had to welcome and salute his cousin, to whom he tendered many "apologies for an absence that was so perfectly unavoidable;" and then came coffee, with a little repast for the fair traveller, who, though conscious that she was an object of undisguised interest, and as such, undergoing inspection, never betrayed the slightest confusion; for the mode of life in India, and the nearly total want of privacy peculiar to it, together with the number of persons, faces, places, and scenes she had met on the long route overland, rendered her perfectly self-possessed, without, however, the least over-confidence.

Gwendoleyne Wedderburn was more than a pretty girl. Though colourless—even pale—she was in fact remarkably beautiful, with a vast quantity of fine dark hair, and very dark hazel eyes, with long black lashes, which she inherited from her Welsh mother, "Gwendoleyne Ap-Rhys of Llanchillwydd," as Lady Wedderburn frequently reminded her. Her hands and feet were beautifully formed; she carried her head perhaps a little too haughtily; but she was conscious of her own appearance, and had been petted and treated with extreme deference in the sunny land she had come from. Her mouth was very perfectly curved, and when in repose and not smiling—which was seldom—the upper lip resembled a little Cupid's bow, while the under was like a tiny cherry.

She formed, Cyril thought (and he was no bad judge), a perfect picture, as she sat a little apart from all at a small tripod table, with a little hastily-prepared dinner before her, served on Dresden china. Her figure, slight and graceful, clad in a crape dress, the blackness of which contrasted so powerfully with the dazzling whiteness of her shoulders as they gleamed in the light of the gaselier which fell in a flood about her. Her dress was cut low about the neck and bust—Lady Wedderburn thought a little too low, especially when her black lace shawl fell off. A necklet of jet beads encircled her delicate and slender throat, and, save it and one magnificent ring of pearls and diamonds, other ornament she had none but her beautiful hair, which was dressed to perfection.

"Heavens! if that should be an engagement ring!" thought Lady Wedderburn, as she glanced nervously at the girl's hand.

Her face was expressive of innocence and sweetness, just suggestive a little of pride; and every moment she became more and more radiant as she became more familiar with those about her, and jested and chatted with her "three newly-found cousins," as she called them. Her manner and voice were sweet, and the girl was full of pretty ways; thus every action of her head or hands was graceful.

"Suppose all these three young fellows fall in love with her, my Lady Wedderburn will be in a nice dilemma then! And what is more likely to happen in a country house, where people have so little to do, and are so much thrown together?" thought Sir John Wedderburn, who was regarding her with a fond and fatherly smile, and seeking to trace out some memory of his brother, the Willie of other days—the days of rambling, riding, and bird-nesting in Renton Woods and Willowdean—but save a phrase or two which escaped her, he found none for a time.

Lady Wedderburn claimed nearly all the good points of Gwendoleyne, as inherited from the Wedderburns; but Sir John saw that the girl was more like what her beautiful Welsh mother had been when first she came to Willowdean on her happy bridal tour, ere she went to India, the land of splendid exile; and Cyril, while he hung over her chair, while he conversed with her and looked into the bright depths of her dark and liquid eyes, was thinking how different was the lot of this wealthy and beautiful cousin as contrasted with that of the lonely girl he had lately quitted, and who at that moment was probably hanging about her father's sick bed; and he felt that his genuine and growing admiration of Gwendoleyne's beauty was a species of treason to Mary Lennox.

Will he always think so? We shall see.

Though the death of her father was a recent event comparatively, Gwenny was neither sad nor sorrowful now, save when she spoke of him, and then would her voice become tremulous and her eyes suffuse with tears, for she was soft and, by nature, impressionable.

Since leaving Madras, she had been nearly six weeks on the route home, in a splendid Peninsular and Oriental liner, crowded with gay cabin passengers, officers of the Queen's and East Indian armies, Civil Service men, &c.—happy fellows, all coming home on leave or to retire altogether, as the case might be.

She had seen many marvels that were even glories to her Indian eyes, since she had watched with tears, from the lofty poop of the Rajah, the low, flat, sandy shore of Madras, so long her home, with the Castle of St. George and all the white minarets and gilded pagodas sinking into the blue sea, as the vessel steamed out of the roads. She had seen Aden, with its splintered rocks and arid shore of sand and ashes, where, according to Mohammedan fable, once the rose-garden of Irem bloomed; and she had seen the sun's rays shining like the Scriptural column of fire through the Gate of Tears, as she sailed past Perim into the Red Sea. Then she spoke of Suez, with its mosques and bazaars, and the exciting journey through the desert; and she clasped her pretty hands at the memory of some of the scenes she had witnessed there: its occasional horrors—camels, even men, lying dead, partly decayed or wholly skeletons, and half buried in the shifting sand, with the black vultures hovering over or perching on them, and for a background to the whole, the Pyramids rising in the distance, like purple cones against a sky of fire and amber. And then there was the awful thirst endured there—a thirst that rendered bitter beer, potass, and sherry, veritable nectar, however homely they may be deemed elsewhere.

Then came the Mediterranean, where she had encountered one of those sudden storms peculiar to that sea, when its waves changed from dark blue to pale green, and from thence to purple and silver, while the rain descended as if the windows of Heaven had been opened again. But old Gibraltar, its rock and town, its terraces and batteries, had filled her with delight, and so did everything else.

By that time, most of her compagnons du voyage were married ladies, old officers, or invalids—a statement which soothed some of Lady Wedderburn's fears—and so, chatting merrily, she told of all she had seen; and, in the energy of her manner, and full of her narrative, which, somehow, she addressed chiefly to Horace Ramornie—but then he too had recently come home by the P. and O. route—when she laid, quite involuntarily, her soft ungloved hand, with its white modelled fingers, on his arm, the young man felt a thrill run through him, though he was not "a cousin"—a circumstance on which their mutual Aunt Wedderburn placed so much weight.

Did this new friend, this lovely girl, possess some magnetic power, or what was it? for Horace felt himself grow giddy with delight whenever she touched him.

She heard Cyril's thrilling story of his late terrible adventure, which was so keenly fresh in his mind and in the minds of all the household, but while she listened, it seemed to Lady Wedderburn, who was nervously observant, that her eyes, "whose lids seemed to be fringed with feathers from a bird's wing rather than with ordinary lashes, so thick and soft lay their shadows on her cheek," from time to time sought, not those of Cyril, but of Horace Ramornie.

Gwenny was soon found to be generous to a fault, and, by the suitable presents she lavished on all sides, she made friends with all. Her poor papa's magnificent hookah, with its snaky coil of silk and gold, and its pure amber mouthpiece, she had brought carefully home, with many other mementos, for her uncle Wedderburn. To Lady Wedderburn she gave a beautiful diamond ring, and made poor little Miss Flora M'Caw radiantly happy by a set of gold Champac ornaments, necklace, rings, and bracelets, that the Begum Sumroo, or even the terrible Queen of Delhi, might have worn with credit.

Three days saw her perfectly domesticated and at home in her new abode; but many things there excited her surprise.

"How few servants you have, dear Auntie!" said she one day, "only the Kitmutgar Asloane—such a droll name he has!—a few bheesties, syces, and ayahs, a butler, coachman, two valets, and a few women. How on earth do you contrive to do with so few? We had nearly fifty at our house in the Choultry, besides six punka-wallahs."

"Fifty! where did you find beds for them all, Gwenny?"

"Oh, they slept on mats, everywhere or anywhere—on the stairs, in the corridors, on the roof, or in the verandahs, when the rainy season was over."

"Such arrangements would scarcely suit Willowdean," said her aunt, laughing.

The fireplaces, the carpeted floors, the total absence of a great dark punkah swaying noiselessly overhead, all filled her with a wonder that was almost childish. Horace and Cyril could both speak with her of India, having served there; the former two years, and the latter five. Poor Bob knew nothing about it, so, as he was rather ignored, he fumed a little in secret, and thought to himself, "when those fellows' leave of absence is up, I shall have it all my own way—patience till then."

All the ideas of the young heiress were odd for a time, being of course those of an Indo-Briton. The Indian summer had just ended when she left Madras, and the Scottish spring had just begun when she arrived at Willowdean, hence the verdure was not so great as she might have found it in Devonshire. The fruit and flowers in the conservatory seemed all strange, puerile, and meagre to her eyes. Luxury and splendour there appeared but little. There was no state kept, she thought, at Willowdean; no horde of half-nude native servants, obsequious to slavery; no camels, with gorgeous housings; no elephants, bearing gilded howdahs with silken curtains; no dhoolie or palanquin bearers, singing gaily as they trotted along. She woke at unearthly hours in the morning, to the astonishment and annoyance of the butler and house-maids, and wished to have a drive, as if she were still at the Choultry of Madras; and then, the perpetual clouds, and more than all the occasional mist from the German Sea—white, dense, and palpable—filled her with wonder, accustomed as she had been to the pure and deep blue sky of Hindostan.

She smiled, and even laughed with provoking playfulness, when Lady Wedderburn, who was fond of "talking peerage," expatiated on the historical and somewhat shady traditionary glories of the Welsh race of Ap-Rhys of Llanchillwydd; on the famous Dafydd-ap-Gwilym-ap-Rhys, who inherited all the virtues of Howel Dha, whose daughter had been his great-great-grandmother, and gave him the blood of the Pendragons. All this sounded odd to Gwenny—very odd—for her papa had been a man of the world, a thorough man of business, who stuck to his ledgers and counting-house, always looking forward, setting little store upon the past, and nothing at all upon a dead ancestry.

Gervase Asloane, the old housekeeper, and other domestics, she somewhat shocked by using the piano on Sunday, and by yawning, more than a young lady should, in church—the parochial barn—oh, good heavens! how unlike it was to the lofty, airy, and white chunam-coated cathedral of the Bishop of Madras! Then there was no organ, and, to her ears, the psalm-singing sounded but as a torrent of dissonant strains.

Her conversation for a time naturally enough ran on memories of the brilliant land she had left—the Choultry of Madras, with all its stately palaces, the black and the white towns, and the catamarans tossing amid the white and foaming surge, which there boils for ever on the shore; of chowries and mosquito curtains; of punka-wallahs and tattywetters; of bheesties and peons, and other persons and things incomprehensible to Lady Wedderburn, who, however, was greatly delighted that Cyril could talk with her on such mysterious matters, and understood what she meant. But then, unluckily, Horace Ramornie knew all about them too, and had been in garrison at Vellore; still Bob sulked, and when Sir John laughed, voted it all "a dreadful bore."

She was astonished to find that people slept in their beds, and not merely on them: that blankets and broadcloth were used even in summer; that the butter was neither poured out like cream nor thickened with dead flies. The state of the thermometer was a source of perpetual wonder to her, and she said to Horace—

"Is it as cool always at Willowdean as on the Blue Mountains of Madras in the wet season?"

But greater surprises were in store for her, when winter came with its frost and snow, its skaters and curlers on loch and river.

With all her kindness and goodness of heart, Lady Wedderburn, in pursuit of her secret wish, was singularly injudicious.

Gwenny had come among her relations, an orphan. Horace Ramornie, though now a soldier, a young lieutenant of the Line, could remember the time when he, too, came to Willowdean in the days of his early orphanage, and the lonely hours when he lay in his little bed at night, seeing, in fancy, his parents' faces amid the darkness, and longing, with all a childish longing and yearning, "for a touch of the vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that was still;" and these recollections made him very tender in his manner to Gwenny, though Horace had ever a gentle and a winning way with all women, old as well as young.

"Cousin Horace," said she, on one occasion, "and you have been an orphan like myself; how strange!"

"Horace is not your cousin, but Cyril is," said Lady Wedderburn, in a pointed manner, as she passed through the drawing-room into the conservatory.

Her words conveyed a volume, for Gwenny blushed scarlet, and the young man grew pale.

"I am not your cousin, Miss Wedderburn—would that I were," said he, with a low sigh.

"Why, what difference would it make?"

"For then I might—might claim something more than mere friendship."

"Not my cousin?" queried Gwenny, her dark eyes dilating as she spoke. "Oh, I know that you are not, though Lady Wedderburn is aunt to us both; but why call me Miss—say Gwenny, as Cyril and Robert do."

"Gwenny then," said Horace, tremulously and softly, for the girl's wonderful beauty bewildered, while her frank and candid manner charmed and entranced him; but he felt a secret consciousness that, before Lady Wedderburn, to call Gwenny by her abbreviated name would be rather injudicious.

While shrinking from the idea of rivalling his cousin Cyril, and earning thereby the anger of such benefactors as his uncle and aunt, Horace Ramornie was in love with all the deep strength of a young man's first and genuine passion. The girl, as we have said, was undoubtedly beautiful, and if love will glorify all it looks on, to his eyes the face and presence of Gwendoleyne became as something divine, and Horace was intoxicated by her!

Night after night he lay awake for hours, feeding his soul with the idea of Gwendoleyne; longing for and yet nervously dreading his recall to the regiment, amid this strange and fresh emotion that had grown in his heart, and which was alike his torment and delight.

He would sigh deeply and bitterly, clasping his hands in the dark, as he thought of his cousin Cyril's greater chances of success, his superior position, his attainments, and many genuine good qualities; and also of his aunt's too perceptible opposition; and then he would wring them like a love-sick girl, for Horace was by nature shy, impressionable, and enthusiastic.

Another was wringing her hands at times in Lonewoodlee, and weeping the silent tears of sad and bitter misgiving!

Lady Ernescleugh, a large, showy, and fashionable-looking woman, had driven to Willowdean with her son Everard, the Master of Ernescleugh, who was a lieutenant in the Household Brigade, on hearing of the new arrival; and though the future lord was so wealthy that money was no particular object to him, the beauty of Gwenny, and the piquancy that was in all she did and said, impressed him favourably; and now a series of dinners, picnics, drives to various places of interest, and even a pleasure excursion in his yacht, were schemed out; but, to some of the former, and more especially the latter, Lady Wedderburn was decidedly opposed; and the too recent death of Sir John's only brother afforded her a good pretext for doing so, and keeping Gwenny at home, while Cyril's leave of absence lasted, at least.

Lady Ernescleugh urged her to take Gwenny to London, and have her presented at the very first Drawing Room next season; adding, that if Lady Wedderburn cared not about going to town, she would herself only be too happy to act as chaperon to a girl so beautiful and so certain to make a sensation; but the watchful mother had no desire that the wealthy heiress should be lost to her Cyril in the splendid whirlpool of London society, while he, perhaps, was fighting the Russians. Heaven alone knew when, for as yet the scene of the expected war was vague indeed.

Her whole aim was to "bring the young people together," and in this instance it was overdone. Cyril saw through her scheme, though Gwenny did not; and he was both amused and bored by it, for the master-thought evinced itself in many trifling ways.

"Gwenny, my darling," said she, one evening in the drawing-room, "I am sure your cousin longs to hear you sing and play. Don't you, Cyril?"

"Of course," replied Cyril, who had been furtively looking at the French clock on the white marble mantelpiece, and thinking it was almost time he was drawing near the stile at Lonewoodlee. "Of course, if she will so far favour us," he added, hastening to open the piano, set up the music-frame, and adjust the stool; devoutly hoping the while that the performance would be as short as possible.

"I play little, and sing less now," said Gwenny.

"Gwendoleyne!" exclaimed Lady Wedderburn, as she shook her lace lappets and diamond pendants.

"Besides, dearest Aunt, Horace Ramornie is a critic, and I dislike to play before critics."

"You played and sang to him yesterday," said Robert Wedderburn, before Horace, who was about to deprecate being deemed a critic, could speak.

"True; but he pressed me so," said Gwenny, with the faintest blush.

"Come, Horace, and press her again," urged Cyril, with a nonchalant laugh.

"Will you, then, favour me—us, I mean," whispered Horace, leading her to the piano, while his cheek reddened.

She seated herself at the instrument, spreading all her crape flounces over the stool, and began at once the prelude to some little air she had picked up abroad. Her voice was sweet and tender; but neither the words of the song nor her execution were brilliant; and Cyril, while he listened, admiring the while her ivory neck and pretty hands, was thinking of another whose fine voice, a glorious soprano, could thrill his heart to the core.

Lady Wedderburn often found her eldest son and his cousin in the conservatory—in the library, and even in the billiard-room; and always left them discreetly, little thinking that Gwenny was in the first instance merely expatiating on the superior flora of Madras and the Carnatic; in the second, perhaps selecting a book or so by Cyril's suggestion; and in the third, that he, so far from talking of love when looking into the soft dark eyes of Gwendoleyne, was discussing most learnedly, cue in hand, on the screw and side-twist; of losing and winning hazards; of what a famous stroke Probyn of ours was; of winning no end of scores off the red ball running; of pool and pyramid; all of which were as Sanscrit and Oordoo to the fair listener.

Busy with his steward or ground bailie, riding about one day, or rambling the next, with weeder in hand, his sturdy legs cased in brown leather gaiters, and his wide-awake garnished with hooks and flies, Sir John spent most of his time out of doors, looking after his estate, seeing where trees were to be cut down or others planted, water courses to be changed, or little bridges to be built; and only once did he speak to Cyril of Gwenny, and even then at Lady Wedderburn's suggestion.

"If you mean to propose for your cousin, Cyril, you have my free consent. Do so, and do it at once. You know our maxim in hunting——"

"Never crane if you mean to take a leap?"

"Exactly. And now I am off to see how the tile-draining gets on."

"Is she not handsome, Cyril?" said Lady Wedderburn on one occasion, passing her arm through that of her son, as he stood, abstractedly, looking from the library window on the gravelled terrace, where Gwenny and Horace were feeding the peacocks with crumbs of biscuit.

"Of course she is handsome," replied Cyril, twirling his mustache; "but——" and he paused.

"But what?"

"One sees so many handsome girls in every garrison town. At such places as Canterbury they are thick as blackberries."

"But few garrison hacks have three hundred thousand pounds."

"Few indeed," replied her gay Captain, laughing. "And as for loving them, fellows only go in for that, mother dear, till the route comes. It is a very limited liability after all; and then we leave them little pink notes—perhaps a lock of hair; or simply send our servants with our august bits of pasteboard, scribbled P.P.C., for Dublin or Delhi, Brighton or Beloochistan, as the case may be; the mess plate is packed, the colours are cased, and away we go with the band playing, 'Good-bye, sweetheart, good-bye.'"

"Cyril, you will drive Gwenny to Coldingham to-morrow, and show her the ruins of the Priory."

"I don't think that a girl who has seen the vast rock-hewn temples of the Buddhists and the Pyramids of Egypt will care much about our old Priory. Besides, she is to be driven there by Horace. He knows all about these old places more than I do; and can tell her the whole story of how Edgar, King of Scotland, built it in the eleventh century, and gave it to the monks of Durham, and all that sort of thing."

"Horace! It is always Horace," said his mother, with undisguised annoyance.

"Besides, I am engaged."

"How—where, and with whom?" she asked, while the gloom deepened on her fair and open brow.

"Three questions, mother dear. You worry me! How am I engaged? By a previous arrangement. Where? At Ernescleugh to dinner. With whom? The Master. And now you have it all," said he, kissing her, as he used to do in boyhood.

Still she was dissatisfied, and taking his hand in hers, led him into her beautiful little boudoir—that toy chamber, with the blue satin and silver hangings, where she kept all Cyril's Indian presents to herself.

"Come," said she, as she closed the door, "I must speak with you seriously on the subject that is nearest my heart."

Cyril's love for Mary Lennox was great; all the greater that his heart was an honest one, and that so much of compassion was blended with his love. He knew that when he left her for the East she would be alone—most terribly alone—if her father died; for with his life her means would pass away. So Cyril had been thinking seriously of a secret marriage, and thus making for her such a provision or position as would compel his family to support her honourably, if he fell in action, or died of those diseases which follow an army into the field.

But he felt, on consideration, that proposing or effecting such a measure would perhaps be an act of injustice both to Mary and his family, placing her, perhaps, in a false position with them in particular and the world in general.

Too well he knew that to announce openly his engagement, or a resolution, to marry the poor and penniless Mary Lennox, the daughter of a bankrupt and spendthrift, would excite the greatest opposition—perhaps a quarrel with his father and mother, whom he justly loved and respected.

On the strength of his opposition, Sir John might take very high ground and cut off his allowance; without it, could he rejoin the regiment? and if he failed to do so, on the eve of a war, where would his honour be as a soldier and a man? He felt sure that even his brother Robert would open his eyes very wide with wonder at such a matrimonial scheme; for he had studied law long enough to have imbibed something of the caution peculiar to the legal tribe.

Cyril's monetary difficulties were not trivial. He had come on leave from an expensive regiment to retrench a little, and within a few days he had lost the bay hunter, just after paying Ernescleugh for him; and with what he had lost at cards with Chesters, this made over a thousand pounds. Then he had some gambling and other debts at headquarters; but no IOU's were permitted to circulate in the Royal Fusileers, by a mess regulation of that corps, where the word of a brother officer was always deemed sufficient.

He felt worried on every hand, and once or twice his evil angel whispered that, were Mary Lennox less winning, less sweet, and more than all, less helpless, he might listen to his mother's suggestions; but no sooner was the evil idea insinuated, than the honest fellow crushed it in his heart. He could never be false to his tender, true, and secret love!

With his mind thus agitated by conflicting thoughts, it may be imagined with what patience he listened to his mother, who still retained his hand confidingly and caressingly in hers, as she seated herself by his side on a blue satin fauteuil, and began thus sententiously—

"The whole of this beautiful estate of Willowdean, when it comes to you, as in the course of events it will, burdened as it is by sundry old debts, and the allowances to your brother and Horace Ramornie, will not yield——"

"And to you, mother dear."

"Don't talk of me; I have no wish to survive my dear husband. Will not yield, I was about to say, enough for one of your expensive tastes and habits; therefore, a wealthy marriage is necessary."

"You flatter me; but I love to be independent."

"And like many independent men, may end by making a fool of yourself," she added, with more bluntness of manner than was usual with her. "Pardon me, Cyril, but perhaps you have done so already."

"How?"

"By forming some unsuitable, if not unworthy, attachment."

Cyril's handsome face flushed and grew pale under her scrutiny.

"Mother dear," said he, gently, "you never spoke to me in this strange tone before. Oh, why adopt it now? I know what you mean and wish; but do not ask me now, at least."

"Then if you will not be so attentive to your cousin as I wish, promise me one thing, Cyril."

"Twenty, if you choose, mother."

"That you form no hasty attachment elsewhere, and enter into no engagement without consulting me?"

Again he coloured perceptibly, for he felt that the keen eyes of his mother were watching him, while the earnest grasp of her soft white hand tightened upon his; but he replied, evasively, and with a laugh—

"I shall engage the Russians only. There, will that suffice you? I beg your pardon, dearest mother," he urged, "but do let us cease this most unpleasant subject: and now I'll have a quiet weed in the conservatory."

But Lady Wedderburn was not yet done with him, and said, with growing excitement—

"Am I to conclude that you are a bad, or unnatural son, Cyril, who would repay my love and anxiety with banter?"

"Because I won't propose to a woman—a girl I don't care for, and who does not care for me? By Jove! it is too absurd."

"Your interjections are not choice. If Gwendoleyne is beautiful in her eighteenth year, what will she be some time hence, in the full development of womanhood?"

"Adorably lovely, I know; yet I am in no mood to marry."

"No mood to marry her, perhaps." said Lady Wedderburn, with a sudden flash in her eyes. "Think of her wealth."

"I am ashamed to say that I have thought of it," said Cyril, with a sigh; "all the more that I am pretty close run for money, both here and at headquarters; but, for Heaven's sake, don't let us have a row about Gwenny."

"A 'row!' How can you talk in this slangy mode to me? How dare you, Cyril!" she added, rising. "I thought that you rather boasted of your good taste over such men as Chesters of Chesterhaugh."

"'Pon my soul, you go beyond old Colonel Bahawder, of the depôt battalion! But, my lady mother," said he, kissing her hand with playful respect, and caressing the braids of her black hair, which was now becoming seamed with white, "like some of the well-fed perch in yonder pond, I am content to coquette with the sweets and crumbs that come my way, even as Gwenny is now throwing them in; but as for matrimony, that I leave to a sober-sided fellow like Robert, or a melancholy-eyed Romeo like Horace: and now that I think of it, she changes colour so visibly when Horace speaks to her, that I begin to suspect——"

"That he is in love with her?"

"No."

"What then?"

"By Jove! that she is in love with him," replied Cyril, quietly selecting a cigar from a handsome case (embroidered for him by some confiding garrison beauty), and preparing it for smoking by carefully biting off the end, and heedless that his mother's eyes were sparkling with resentment.

"Are you aware that what I urge is also your father's wish?" she asked.

"Likely enough," replied Cyril, with growing annoyance. "There are Baronets as well as Knights of the Golden Calf, and both are more numerous than the Knights of the Golden Fleece."

"Go on, sir, go on; though I never before heard you sneer at your good papa."

"How you pervert my words! I do not sneer; but in all this matter has poor Gwenny no right to be consulted?"

"Not much; she is so young, she is our ward, whom we are to see properly bestowed in marriage; and where could she be given more properly than to one whom we have known from his boyhood."

"And a little earlier," said Cyril, laughing outright.

"You may—nay, you must win her, if you will only try, Cyril."

"But I don't want her. By Jove! think of a fellow going in for matrimony and the corps having got its letters of readiness. I might be telegraphed away from the very altar—have to make a halt of it, a half-married man. There would be a little melodrama for you! The whole thing is absurd, mother."

"Well, when you return?"

"Who can count on returning? There are such things as shot and shell, shipwreck, camp-fever, frost and starvation, and so forth," was the gloomy response. "I may be taken prisoner by the Russians, and never heard of again."

"Do not talk so, Cyril, I implore you. Marry Gwenny and get on the staff. If you will still soldier, let it be at home."

"If I do, may I be—cashiered, that is all!"

Usually, Lady Wedderburn's manner had all the perfect serenity and unruffled calmness peculiar to good and gentle breeding, but now her brow, wont to be so smooth, became clouded over; wrinkles actually appeared where none had been visible before; her fine mouth became compressed, and an expression, almost of baleful spite, stole into her clear, dark grey eyes, as she drew herself up to her full height, and said, with half-averted face—

"I know to whom I am indebted for this steady opposition to my wishes."

"To whom, mother?"

"That artful girl at Lonewoodlee. Ah! servants will talk, and local gossips too!" and with a scornful sweep of her skirts, she glided from the boudoir, even as she did so repenting that she should leave in wrath the Absalom she had so nearly lost by a terrible fate!

"So, so, it's out at last! Local gossips have been busy with Mary's name—curse them!" muttered Cyril. "Mamma has opened the trenches with a vengeance! Well, I am not a boy, though she seems disposed to treat me as such. What is to be done now? See my poor Mary about it, at all hazards."

As he glanced round his mother's luxurious boudoir, with its blue satin and silver hangings, its Aubusson carpet of pale green studded with beautiful bouquets, its marble busts and alabaster vases, and tiny tables glittering with a crowd of handsome and elegant trifles, and thought of Mary's gloomy home, his heart felt sick and sore; he sighed deeply, and entering the lofty and stately conservatory, lit his cigar, and threw himself on a sofa, to think over his plans for the future.

At the close of a recent chapter, it is mentioned that Mary Lennox had been shedding silent tears, and had not been without secret misgivings or forebodings of coming sorrow.

Situated as she was with regard to Cyril, it was scarcely possible that she should feel otherwise than restless when the absence of her lover, and the circumstance of his having unavoidably broken some appointments with her, were coupled with the hints of Chesters, and the stories told her by her two gossiping old domestics, of the wealth and undoubted beauty of the new resident at Willowdean.

Without absolutely cutting her—for that was a solecism in good breeding of which she would be loth to be guilty—Lady Wedderburn had too plainly held aloof from Mary Lennox in the few public places where they met; and Mary had tolerated much of that "tabooing," but with a bursting heart, for she could not forget that the haughty offender was the mother of Cyril; though how little could that scheming matron then know what Cyril was to Mary—what they were to each other!

Though Mary mourned in her loneliness when he was absent with his regiment, and moving then, as she knew, in a gay and fashionable circle, his letters were a constant solace to her; and now that he was at home, though she trusted him—or strove to do so—to see him riding, driving, talking, and laughing with his cousin and other ladies, while he could only accord her a furtive smile or a polite bow, fretted, galled, and humilitated her; for she could not forget much of her father's teaching, or that she was a lady whose forefathers had a name among the Scottish Border Barons long before the Wedderburns had an acre of land in the Merse.

She began to recall, perhaps too much, the artful insinuations of Chesters, and to brood over them till they sank deep into her heart. She began also to repine and fear a little when she heard of all those things—of such gaieties at Willowdean as the season of conventional mourning permitted; and when she knew that he was constantly thrown in the society of this perilous beauty—when he was away for days with her and other ladies at race meetings and other places; and now, through Doctor Squills and the Minister's wife, almost her only other visitors, came a rumour that he and she were to have quite a little cruise in the Master of Ernescleugh's yacht, to the Isle of May, to Coquetmouth, to Lindisfarne Abbey, and other places. So when she thought of all the advantages of propinquity, and remembered all she had heard and read of the pleasant intercourse that cousinship permitted, and how much more a recently known cousin might be likely to impress him than one long known from infancy like a sister, her poor little heart trembled within her!

One day, however, she was made happy by Lady Wedderburn bowing to her pleasantly, and even stopping the carriage to ask for Mr. Lennox, but that was in the fulness of her heart after the restoration of her son.

"So your mamma is coming round to me by degrees, at least, Cyril," said Mary, with a hopeful smile.

But Cyril knew too well what his mother's secret aspirations were, and answered only with a sigh.

Three days after this, gossips had been at work, and when Lady Wedderburn saw her in the little street of Willowdean she looked straight at the ears of her horses as the handsome carriage bowled away on the Ernescleugh road, without according a glance of recognition to Mary, who felt crushed and hurt keenly, all the more so that she saw the dark eyes of Gwendoleyne remarking her with an expression of interest; and Mary could judge for herself how great was the girl's beauty.

Mary knew that it was tradition in her family that two ladies of it, both sisters, had died as nuns among the Cistertians at Lennel, and somehow, now she often thought of those two women, their reasons for becoming recluses, and wondered if they had found within their cells the peace she feared she would not find in the world. Then she smiled a bitter smile, as she thought that nothing lasted for ever; that all things passed away; that even Lennel was a shattered ruin, and its cemetery, where the sisters lay, had been swept away by the Tweed into the sea.

All unaware of the gloomy misgivings of her he loved, in the evening after the long and unpleasant conversation with his mother, Cyril, after riding from one of the gates of Willowdean as if going towards Greenlaw, the county town, turned off abruptly by a narrow bye way, and took that for Lonewoodlee, for he was to meet Mary at the stile, which quite as often as the coppice formed their place of tryst.

He was full of perplexing thoughts, and permitting the reins to drop on his horse's neck, let the animal proceed at a slow walk along the path which led only towards the residence of Mr. Lennox.

He felt that some explanation, some more open and more decided arrangement, were imperatively due to a girl of Mary's position and character; but, as already stated, he dreaded the opposition of his whole family; he dreaded the debts he had contracted in his folly, and to marry on his pay—if his father in his indignation reduced him to that—a pittance which barely paid for his messing, glazed boots and cigars—would be the act of a madman, even if Mary would consent to it; but then he knew that Mary, even were she as rich as his cousin Gwendoleyne, would not do so at present, as she was chained by filial love and duty to her father's sick-bed.

Well, that necessity freed him from one item of responsibility in the awkward position of their affairs.

Cyril drew from his portemonnaie a ring; it was a plain hoop, and so like a wedding one that it might have passed as such, but for a single diamond of great value that was set therein, and this altered its character. It was a tiny ring too, and he trusted it would fit the dear finger for which he intended it. With a fond smile he replaced it in his purse, and dismounting at the stile, threw the bridle of his horse over his arm, and looked around him.

The stile was old and well worn by the footsteps of many a wayfarer. It was simply formed by three great stones, projecting from an ancient wall, and stood in a sequestered place, secret and lonesome, where the pink and white hawthorn usually bloomed and scented the air ere the end of May; where the pendant cups of the bright foxglove and the blue-bell mingled with the brown autumn fern, among which the hare and rabbit lurked, and where hardy little thistles grew in every cleft, while over all towered the triple arms of a gigantic thorn of vast age, whereon many a Scottish outlaw and English moss-trooper had been hung "in his boots," as the phrase went, in the foraying times of old; for the whole Borderland is full of such dark memories.

Around the pastoral hills stood up grim and silent against the red sunset sky. As Cyril looked on all these objects, so long familiar to his eyes, he pondered on what other scenery they might be resting ere long, and where that day month might find him; too probably far away at sea, on board a transport crowded with troops, longing to be ashore and in front of the enemy.

And Mary too had often surveyed their meeting-place with wistful eyes and boding heart, thinking how lonely it would be when he should come no more, and how terribly desolate it seemed when he was supposed to be lost to her and all the world; and how often had she shuddered at the story of the midnight race, the plunge, and the narrow escape—the rescue of her Cyril from a terrible death!

His mother's taunt was yet tingling in his ears; and now, lest watchful eyes might be upon them, he almost dreaded to meet Mary at the accustomed stile or in the coppice; for had not Chesters basely condescended to spy upon their meeting there?

"Ah!" thought Cyril, "had I but known of such a circumstance on that terrible night, instead of sharing his sham hospitality, my hunting-whip and Rooke Chesters' shoulders had made an intimate and not to be forgotten acquaintance."

Cyril had but a minute or two to wait, when the slight figure of Mary, so lithe, graceful, and so compact, from her little round hat and feather to her brass-heeled Balmorals, came tripping down the pathway between two fields, and ascended the stile, from whence his ready hand now helped her down.

"Cyril, dearest Cyril, I have kept you waiting," said she, looking upward with a strange and earnest expression in her violet-blue eyes. Secure as she had been of his love, and familiar with it, there had always been a charming shyness in Mary's manner when with Cyril; now it was sad and gloomy, though visibly she sought to conceal it, affecting to smile, and with her tightly-gloved hand to twirl, nervously, her parasol upon her shoulder.

"And what of your papa to-day?" he asked.

"Kind Cyril, you always ask for him, my only and unfailing friend; papa is sleeping: he always takes an after-dinner nap; but when I watch him thus there always comes over me a horrible, an awful thought, Cyril!"

"What—which?"

"If he were dead—DEAD—my dear papa, instead of only sleeping, what should I do then?"

"Rely on me, darling," he whispered, and drew her close to him, and now he observed that Mary had her veil tied tightly over her face, to conceal her tears, perhaps.

"I can't kiss you through that thing, dearest," he urged, while endeavouring to remove it.

"Better not kiss me at all. Oh, would that you had never done so, Cyril!"

His fine dark blue eyes possessed usually a wonderful, a magnetic power of fascination in them; but on this occasion they failed to reassure Mary, who, despite all her efforts at self-control, began to weep, and Cyril, with his natural abhorrence of a scene, felt more of worry than wonder.

"What is the matter? Speak, darling Mary," he urged, tenderly; for he could see that she looked wan, and a dark tinge that lay under each of her eyes, was visible through the purity of her skin.

"Oh, forgive me, Cyril, forgive me!"

"For what?" he asked, with growing wonder.

"For having doubted your affection; but doubts did begin to steal into my head. I began to fear there was a change somewhere, and I have been praying humbly to God that you might not love me less now than before."

"Love you less! I do not comprehend!"

"Yes, yes," sobbed Mary, nestling her sad little face on the breast of his black velvet shooting coat; "for Chesters hinted to me——"

"What dared he to hint?" exclaimed Cyril, striking his spurred heel into the gravel.

"Oh, pardon me, Cyril. I know not what I am saying. I have slept so little for two or three nights past. I never do sleep when I have not seen you, and Cyril, you seem always so gay and happy with her—I mean—those people with whom I see you at times."

"Gay, Mary? Yes. I have to smile, like the Spartan boy, who had the fox under his mantle—the fox whose teeth devoured his vitals," replied Cyril, making rather a far-fetched simile. "One is not always happy when smiling. I think ever of you, when absent, of our coming separation, and the difficulties of our mutual position."

There was a pause, during which he looked tenderly and lovingly into the violet eyes of Mary, and thought how dovelike, sad, and sweet they were in expression.

Then he began to perceive her ruling thought by her leading question.

"Your new cousin seems to be a most attractive girl. Is she not so?"

"Very. Her eyes are gloriously beautiful, Mary."

"Oh, indeed," said Mary, while her nether lip quivered, her eyes drooped, and a pallor almost ghastly stole over her soft face.

"Yes, just like yours, except that the lids are not so finely formed, nor the lashes, though thick, so long."

"Am I to compare with her?" she asked, a little assured.

"Yes," said Cyril, smiling back at the wistful smile.

"Indeed!"

"Yes; but you would gain immensely by the comparison. But come, my dearest, there must be no pouting, no doubt of me, no jealousy of poor Gwenny. You know how dearly I love, and have ever loved you—ay, almost since you were a mere girl, when I came home from India, and brought your dead brother's sword and rings to Lonewoodlee; but listen to me now, I have much to say, and may not have so good an opportunity again."

His left arm was round her waist; their right hands were clasped together, and as Mary's head drooped on his shoulder, her words became sighs or only half-articulated tenderness. She looked helpless and beautiful, soft and ladylike; and once more, in the tumult of his heart, Cyril, with broken accents, urged a private marriage, for her further security, in case the worst should happen to him; but Mary was firm, and with tears and paleness—not blushes—spoke of her father's health, and how she would not and could not, with honour to herself, marry even Cyril (whom she loved as her own soul) in a fashion such as he proposed, as it would insure the contempt of his family and the doubt of society; and this she reiterated again, firmly, sadly, earnestly, and with her eyes full of tears, till Cyril became convinced that the idea was impolitic, unwise, and not calculated to conduce to their future happiness.

He drew the glove from her left hand, and while placing the diamond ring upon her wedding finger—a slender little finger it was—he drew her still closer to his breast.

"Mary," he whispered, "my darling Mary, you are the secret wife of my heart. Never let this betrothal ring—the ring that binds you to me—leave your finger until I replace it by one that shall be consecrated!" and he kissed her on the eyes, and then the hand that bore the symbol which was indicative of affection long before the days of Juvenal.

"As your wife, Cyril, I shall ever deem myself; as your widow, should we never meet again!" said Mary, in a soft, low, agitated voice.

And with something of a prayer in his heart, Cyril lifted his hat, as he kissed her once more. After this they became more composed, even more happy, perhaps, for their hearts became filled with a divine trust in themselves and in the future.

"Yet what shall I do when you are far away from me, Cyril?" asked Mary. "Men love so differently from women. They have their avocations, occupations—their friends and amusements. The lonely woman can but brood and weep in silence: her heart, thrust back upon herself as it were, for lack of the thousand little tendernesses and kindnesses that the man she loves can alone bestow."

"True, Mary; but do not repine thus, darling."

The twilight had deepened into the gloaming now, and even that was darkening fast; so leading his horse by the bridle, Cyril walked along the lonely hill-side path with Mary towards her home, and at last, with happy hearts, they parted at the end of the ancient thicket.

"Shall I see you to-morrow, Cyril?" she asked, as he mounted.

"It is impossible, Mary. I am engaged to dine at Ernescleugh, and that place lies in quite an opposite direction from this. Adieu till next evening. Adieu, with a thousand kisses to you."

And he galloped away.

Mary's heart misgave her; he was to dine at Ernescleugh, with Everard Home. She had, with a reticence that was unwise and unlike her, shrank nervously from speaking to Cyril of her enforced detention at Chesterhaugh; but now she trembled lest the young Master of Ernescleugh had recognised her in the waggonette, and might speak of the strange circumstance of her being there with Chesters, and at such an hour.

The demon of doubt had been removed from her heart; but fear now took his place, and a time came when Mary repented bitterly of the reticence in question.

She was alternately happy and fearful—longing intently for her next meeting with Cyril, and resolved to tell him openly of the only secret that haunted her; and she was never weary of kissing and looking at the ring, the solemn link which bound her fate to that of Cyril Wedderburn.

And now, when she thought of the place where it had been placed upon her finger—the old triple thorn tree—there came back to memory a quaint legend connected with her family. It was a little ominous, so far as regarded the ring, and yet Mary laughed.

For local tradition avers that, in the days when Mary of Lorraine was Regent of Scotland, Malcolm Lennox, younger brother of Oliver, who built the present Tower of Lonewoodlee, was a famous Border warrior, who caused an infinite deal of trouble and anxiety to the Governor of Berwick, the Captain of Norham, and other Wardens along the English Border. Like his compatriot, Sir William of Deloraine—

"A stark moss-trooping Scot was he
As ere couched Border lance by knee.
Blindfold he knew the paths to cross,
By Solway sands and Tarra Moss.
By wily turns and desperate bounds,
He baffled Percy's best bloodhounds."

But one night he had got more wine than usual, when supping with the Laird of Thirlstane, and lost his way in Dogden Moss, where he must have perished, had not a beautiful young woman, who suddenly appeared, become his guide to firm land, and before daybreak he had betrothed himself to her, and placed on a finger of her left hand a golden ring.

Some nights after this, he was assailed by a multitude of wild cats, who seemed to have been holding a species of "sabbatt," or Walpurgis festival, at the triple thorn tree, and had to defend himself with a sword. In the course of this strange mêlée he hewed the foreleg from one which had made itself particularly obnoxious in the assault; and on the yelling grimalkins taking to flight, he found that his trenchant whinger had amputated, not the limb of a cat, but the fair and handsome arm of a young woman; and on a finger of the hand he found his own ring, and knew thereby that he had betrothed himself to a witch!

He never recovered his horror of this adventure; he became more reckless of life than ever, and perished some years after in the famous Raid of the Redswire, on the green ridge of the Carterfells, pierced by three English arrows. This was the last conflict of any importance fought on the Borders prior to the union of the Crowns, and was chiefly remarkable from the circumstance that the Scots won the day by being well supplied with firearms, while the English had only the long-bow, with bill and spear.

Cyril found that a note had come from Lady Ernescleugh, inviting all at Willowdean to dine with her, en famille, to talk over their plans for the future season in London, when it came. "As for Edinburgh," she added, "with its eight assemblies, and a few club balls, all so mixed, it is not to be thought of in these railway times. What suited our grandmothers won't suit us, who have young folks to introduce in society."

So Cyril found that the carriage and pony-phaeton had been ordered, as all were going to the Cleugh, save poor little Miss M'Caw, whom Lady Ernescleugh had omitted, notwithstanding her long pedigree; but then it was only a Highland one, as her ladyship thought, "and those people all boast of such, whether they are Peers of the realm or street-porters."

Ere long we shall have more startling events to describe than dinners, drives, or luncheons, and so shall only say that the "festive board" at Ernescleugh, a fine mansion facing the sea, and perched on a lofty eminence, was like any other in a wealthy and noble family.

Before the windows, stretched away in distance the vast extent of the dark blue German Sea, with here and there a white sail, or the long wreathed smoke of a steamer visible; and just as the company sat down to dinner, they might have seen, had not the curtains been closely drawn, the light on the Isle of May, about five-and-twenty miles distant, at the mouth of the Firth of Forth, twinkling redly out upon the waste of waters.

Save the wines, everything on the table was Scotch: the fish were from the adjacent sea or the Leader; the beef and mutton bred and fed on the Lammermuir hills; the vegetables and flowers were reared by the gardener at Ernescleugh; but all these figured in the bill of fare under French names, as potages, poissons, relevés, and entrées—a source of sore bewilderment to plain folks like the Rev. Gideon M'Guffog, parish minister; Dr. Squills, the Lawyer, and the Baron Bailie of Willowdean, when once or so in the year they were invited to a state dinner at Ernescleugh.

Everard Home, the Master, a fashionable looking young man of a very good style, in absence of the Lord, his father, who was on diplomatic service in the Ionian Isles, placed Lady Wedderburn on his right. Sir John handed the hostess to her place, and Cyril, to his mother's satisfaction, led in Gwenny; but then no other lady was present.

When Cyril looked at the unexceptionable wife his mother urged upon him, with her delicate neck and arms, so snow-white when contrasted with her black dress and jet ornaments, her rich Indian shawl of alternate black, gold, and scarlet stripes, diamonds flashing out here and there, as bright as her own eyes, his mind wandered away involuntarily to little lonely Mary, in her plain stuff attire; her sole ornaments a brooch and collar.

Lady Ernescleugh, a more showy, dowager-looking, and though fair-haired, an older and haughtier style of woman than Lady Wedderburn, with very good taste, wore a black dress of the richest velvet, trimmed only with silver grey grebe, as all her guests were in mourning, and both families had been intimate for years.

As three of the gentlemen present belonged to the service, a little "shop" would creep into their conversation, which ran chiefly on the approaching war, and the mustering of armaments by sea and land; for by the London papers of the previous day it was fast becoming apparent, as the Master said, "that matters were looking less and less rosy in the East;" and Lady Ernescleugh, who had recently got him transferred from the Line to the Scots Fusileer Guards, in the hope that he might soldier only in London, and never encounter harder service than might be seen at Windsor, in the Wellington Barracks, at the Bank, or the Tower, was both alarmed and disgusted to find that several battalions of the Household Brigade were detailed to form a portion of the army of the East—the force destined to protect Turkey from the Russians; "those barbarous Russians!" she added, "whom she and Ernescleugh, when he was Ambassador at St. Petersburg, found to be little better than their forefathers are described to have been under Catharine."

"The Semiramis of the North," said Robert Wedderburn.

"And we all know how wicked her times were," said Lady Ernescleugh.

How little could Cyril foresee to what this conversation was to lead; when the young host said, laughing—

"By Jove, mother, there is more wickedness now in the world than ever existed then. Yes, even among ourselves," he added, wiping the champagne froth from his fair moustache, "only we don't always see it."

"How, Everard? I do not understand."

"It is more subtle, more refined, more cunning, and much better bred."

"The latter is certainly some advantage," said Cyril.

"Besides, Wedderburn, we don't call our little peccadilloes by such deuced hard names as our rough ancestors did—that is all."

"I do not quite understand you, Everard," said Lady Ernescleugh, smiling, but with a little air of pique; "you seem to be aiming at something or some one."

Cyril, who had been talking to Gwenny, now became aware that the Master was bending over his wine glass, and saying something to Horace Ramornie, in a low tone, but laughing and confidentially. He detected the name of "Mary Lennox," and after a time those alarming words, "By Jove, Ramornie, it could not be termed a summer flirtation, as he was driving her home through the snow, at midnight, too. Queer, is it not? for we all know the fellow's character: but then the poor girl is so left to herself, in that old house by her ailing father, that"—here his voice sank lower—"but it is a pity, for she is so pretty!"

What had happened? To whom was he referring? Cyril felt his ears tingling, his heart grow still, and his face turn pale; all the more so that the clear keen eyes of his mother were on him, and he remembered the conversation in her boudoir.

He burned with impatience until the three ladies withdrew to the drawing-room; and the moment they had been bowed out, and he and the other gentlemen resumed their seats, ere closing up towards their young host, he very plainly asked, "what they had been talking about?"

"The strangest thing in the world," replied Horace, with a serious expression in his quiet dark eyes; "a scandalous story concerning the daughter of old Oliver Lennox, of Lonewoodlee. Of course, you know the girl; by sight, at least."

"Scandalous!" repeated Cyril, making a violent effort to control himself, though there came a flash from his eye, lurid as that from a cannon's mouth, and there came a terrible frown from his brow, which he concealed by resting it on his hand. "And this story?"

"Is, that she spent a night in the house of Chesterhaugh."

"Take care, take care," said Sir John; "she represents one of the oldest families in the Merae."

"A fact!" persisted the Master of Ernescleugh, in a low tone; "she spent there a night, or nearly so, about the time you were so mysteriously missing, Wedderburn. I was riding home from Greenlaw, accompanied by a groom; there had been a severe fall of snow, and just as we drew near the gate of Chesterhaugh, it was opened by old Tony Heron, the keeper, and out came Rooke Chesters, in that bang-up waggonette of his, with Miss Lennox seated by his side. I could swear to her, though she was well muffled up in a railway-rug. The time was past twelve, and he was evidently driving her home! Now we all know that ladies, old or young, don't visit Rooke Chesters. It is an ugly story, and I would rather not have known it."

Cyril's voice sounded strange, even to himself; but he asked, calmly—

"Did you see her face, Home?"

"No. She was closely veiled; but I know her little hat with the golden pheasant's plume."

Cyril remembered that he had shot that pheasant.

"Did you speak with her?"

"No. We passed each other at a hard trot."

"Then what proof have you, beyond mere suspicion, that the lady was Miss Lennox at all?"

There was something categorical in Cyril's tone which made Everard Home tug his moustache; but he replied—

"My groom got a match for his cigar from the gatekeeper, Tony Heron, whose information put the matter beyond a doubt, and Chesters' groom, Trayner, confirmed the story next day, with many a joke Miss Lennox would not like to have heard. But pass the wine, the decanters stand with you, my Royal Fusileer."

What horrible mystery, worse even than that of his own disappearance, lay concealed under all this? Was Rooke Chesters ordained by fate to be the evil genius of them both? Heron, the gatekeeper, the groom of Chesters, and Ernescleugh were cognizant of the story, and Mary's name and honour were a joke and a source of vulgar and malevolent speculation in every servants'-hall and household in the Merse! A stunned sensation came over him. Even were the story utterly false it was a terrible one, and the most degrading deductions would be drawn from it; and even as he sat and thought over it, mechanically passing the decanter, and filling and emptying his glass, an age seemed to have elapsed since yester-evening by the stile—a mighty gulf to have opened between him and Mary Lennox.

"I usually make it a legal rule," said Robert Wedderburn, "only to believe the half of what I see, and nothing that I simply hear. These groom fellows may have been mistaken, after all; but it is passing strange!"

Cyril could have embraced his brother for these words; but still the story had gone abroad.

Cyril now remembered of Mary admitting that Chesters had addressed her in the language of love; and yet she had ventured to spend some hours—gossips said a night—in the house, the house of a man with a reputation so tainted.

He also remembered her strange emotion when they last met. Was it compunction for her own perfidy, or affected doubt of his love, or neither, or what was it? Alas! he knew not what or whom to believe in now.

Her doubts must have been of herself and of her own faith; not of him or his faith! His Mary, so pure and gentle in eye and manner, to be subjected even to the glances of a man like Rooke Chesters was exasperating. What then was he to think of the companionship of hours? He knew that Chesters visited occasionally her bedridden father, hence an interview could be nothing novel to either; but fast in his passionate and impulsive heart, the emotions of jealousy, doubt, and mortification became predominant.

He almost loathed the Master of Ernescleugh for his unwitting communication; but he concealed all he felt, for the bitter conviction forced itself upon him, that if Mary Lennox were unworthy of his love, there would then be more reason than ever to hide that love from all. So those who saw him, as he sat at table chatting of politics, the coming war, the points of this horse or that terrier or pointer, could little have dreamed of the volcano that was in his heart, through which a hundred varying emotions were sweeping.

There were utter perplexity and keen distress; shame and doubt, jealousy and wounded self-esteem. Could it really be the case that she had encouraged the advances of two—of Chesters and himself—as lovers, and on hearing of the loss of one had gone, actually gone to the house of the other? He had known of such things. There was his old flame at Canterbury, who had beaded the cigar-case; but, pshaw! she was a garrison-hack of ten years standing, and was known to every corps from Chatham to China.

What did it all mean, or what would it all mean? To be the rival of Chesters would be humiliation enough. He was grieved and maddened by the whole affair; for his secret love, the light and joy of his soul, was about to be quenched now.

His family—his mother, at least—had heard of it; and knowing, as they and she did, the reputation of Chesters, could he speak now of making her his wife; and yet he loved her so! Surely she would be able to explain it all; but still the ugly cause for explanation existed.

Why had she concealed the whole circumstance from him? Why such reticence? There was something in this fact that filled him with dire and dark suspicion, and but yesterday he had placed a ring on her wedding finger, a token of their solemn betrothal before God, and amid the silence of the starlight and the dewy evening he had tenderly taken her to his breast and called her his wife—"the wife of his heart;" and yet she had acted thus in the time of his absence—of his supposed death—and made her name and honour the sport of gossips, of grooms and gate-keepers!

If so artful, why decline on any terms or pretence the proposal of marriage he had made her? Chesters had insinuated something to her of himself (Cyril) and Gwenny, something to excite her jealousy and to pique her by her own admission; thus they must have been talking confidentially, and to what purpose?

So did he torment himself, viewing the circumstance in all its worst points. Glass after glass of strong, deep-coloured, and heady old Madeira did Cyril imbibe; and then others of Grande Chartreuse and Curaçoa, by way of chasse-café, ere the gentlemen took their coffee and joined the ladies; indeed Cyril, though invariably most temperate, on this night seemed not to care how much he drank, provided he drowned, or even deadened, care for the time.

On entering the drawing-room he was painfully conscious, by a peculiar expression, almost a radiant one, in his mother's face, that Lady Ernescleugh had told her the whole of this obnoxious story, this horrible esclandre, about the girl he had hoped or meant to marry; to whom he was solemnly but secretly plighted, and whom he loved with inexpressible tenderness.

There was a steady glitter in his mother's eye that provoked him, and he turned to Gwenny, who was idling over the keys of the piano, as if waiting for some one to speak with her.

He said something, he knew not what, and she replied without his seeming to hear or understand her; but she immediately began to play with more animation. How nimbly and gracefully her white fingers wandered over the ivory keys, making even them seem almost dull in colour by comparison; and he looked on, and turned the leaves of the music, as one in a terrible dream, ignorant or heedless whether Gwenny was playing a Highland Reel or the "Soldier's March" in Faust, for the soul of him he could not have told, as he heard only the voices of his mother and Lady Ernescleugh, as they lay back in a crimson satin fauteuil, with their heads stooped towards each other, and talking over their glittering fans.

"They are no doubt a strange set," said his mother, "that small family of Lonewoodlee" (small, indeed! thought Cyril). "The father, a quarrelsome old person, has had, as you know, endless law disputes with Sir John; but, luckily for us, has always lost them. A spendthrift, he is now a bankrupt; and his girl, though so quiet and modest in aspect and manner, must be a designing minx."

"But, my dear Lady Wedderburn, quiet ones are always the deepest. 'Smooth waters,' you are aware," said Lady Ernescleugh, with a little laugh.

"And who knows what she may be, if all were known?"

"The esclandre about visiting a bachelor of Captain Chesters' proclivities does not surprise me a bit; no doubt it is the result of her bringing-up, or rather the want of bringing-up."

"She has been motherless for years," urged Lady Wedderburn, gently.

"Hence the result," replied Lady Ernescleugh, a cold and haughty dame, who had never perhaps committed a solecism in her life, and never pardoned one in others. "I am so glad we have never had her here, though the girl is handsome and presentable enough."

"And now that Gwenny has come to Willowdean, my countenancing her, even by a casual bow, is impossible. I have already passed her at church and elsewhere before the story came out; and one cannot be too careful whom one knows, for you are aware, my dear Lady Ernescleugh, that——" and here his mother's voice sank to a whisper, but Cyril was nearly driven mad by what he had heard.

"Dear Aunt," said Gwenny, "I do not know the unfortunate young person of whom you are talking——"

"And must never do so."

"But I am reminded of a maxim of my poor papa's."

"Ah! and this maxim?"

"Was always, 'Sift news first, and swallow it afterwards.' Proverbs are bad taste, I believe; but he often said this when he heard wild stories of Thugs and Dacoits, of stranglings and poisonings, of men being carried off by tigers, and all the odd things that happen in Indian life."

"But, Gwenny," said Cyril, patting her white shoulder, and looking very much as if he would like to kiss her, "this is not India, but prosaic, self-righteous, and censorious Scotland."

"True, Cyril," added Horace Ramornie, who had also drawn near Gwenny: "the world here finds no fault with imprudence, or even wickedness; but great fault with either being found out. So with this girl's rash visit to Chesterhaugh, in which there may have been no harm; but I am sorry for her old father's sake, though I have rarely seen him, and sorry for her own."

"But the fact of spending four or five hours alone with an enterprising fellow like Chesters has an ugly sound about it," said Robert.

"You speak with the natural suspicion of a lawyer; Horace with the generosity of a soldier," retorted Cyril, on whom all these remarks fell like molten lead.

Thus, one of the very ends which Chesters had in view when he took advantage of the snowstorm, and by a special falsehood, framed between him and Trayner, contrived to detain the restless Mary in his house, seemed on the point of being achieved; for there are many men in the world like him—men who seek to blacken the reputation of the very girls they mean to betray, to forward their own purpose by dislocating them from the sympathy, protection, and even compassion of men.

As for the pity of their own sex, that is easily lost!

To Cyril the rest of the evening passed away like a nightmare; and at last, to his infinite relief, the carriage and phaeton came to the door, and Ernescleugh, the frowning rocks, the sea, and the distant light that twinkled on the Isle of May, were all left behind as they drove homeward inland.

Sir John wished to smoke; so he, Robert, and Horace were in the open phaeton, while Cyril sat in the carriage with his mother and Gwenny. Of what had they been arranging for the London season he knew nothing, and cared less. When that time came, he should be, he hoped, face to face with the Cossacks.

He was sternly moody and silent, and both failed to extract a word from him. His mother knew his secret; with her he was past acting, and endurance could endure no more.

She stole her soft hand into his—the hand that in infancy and youth had never tired of caressing him—and whispered in his ear—

"My beloved Cyril, a noble heart like yours was not meant to be wasted on a worthless girl like Mary Lennox of Lonewoodlee."

Cruel words, though she said them ever so softly and tenderly; but they put a finishing stroke to his misery, and he started as if stung by a wasp.

On arriving at home, he hastened to his own room, and desired Gervase Asloane, the butler, to bring him a bumper of champagne; and with the wine Asloane brought him a letter. He tore it open. It was from Chesters, the first he had ever received from him, and he rapidly perused it, with surprise and rage mingling in his heart. It ran thus:—

"Army and Navy Club,
    London.

"My Dear Wedderburn,—Glad to hear of your turning up again in this sublunary sphere; but sorry that I could not stay at home to congratulate you in person. I suppose we shall see all about it in the papers—Bell's Life, most likely? I had to leave in haste, as Bill Trayner put me up to a good thing or two, about to come off on the Turf. Sir John cashed up your IOU like a brick; but I mean to let Chesterhaugh—put it out to dry-nurse—and go abroad, or take service in one of the proposed foreign battalions. Have you made up your book? The City and Suburban is the next good handicap set for decision. Eugenie is said to be really a good thing. Those who back her won't regret it. 10 to 30 are taken for Varna; and 1000 to 10 against Baltic." ["What the devil is all this to me!" muttered Cyril. "Bah!"]

"Awful scrape yours was. What the deuce did you do to the bay hunter to render it unmanageable? How excited that little girl at Lonewoodlee was about the affair. I had no end of trouble, one night, before I got her consoled; but consoled she was in the end. And now, with best wishes, old fellow, believe me ever yours faithfully,

"R. R. CHESTERS."

"Insolent scoundrel!" exclaimed Cyril, before whom came in memory the mocking laugh, the sinister smile, and the green-grey, phosphorescent-like eyes of the writer, as he crushed up the jibing letter, and tossed it in the fire; but not before he observed that it was sealed with the onyx ring which bore the arms of Louis De la Fosse, the young French traveller whom Chesters had so unmercifully pillaged at play.

There was a tone of banter in Chesters' letter, and of insolent reference to Mary, that filled the heart of Cyril with fury.

What meant this sudden horror? Cyril asked in his heart: an intrigue with Chesters at the very time when he himself was supposed to have perished by a violent and mysterious death. How could he question her about it without degradation to them both? and yet, as their mutual relations stood, confidence between them was necessary, most necessary. If he should speak of it, what would her answer be, yea or nay? If the former, how was she to explain it away? If the latter, must he believe her? Oh, it was maddening! An intrigue with Chesters—of all men in the world, Chesters!

Perhaps it was about her father's protested bill she had visited him. If so, what terms might not Chesters have made with her for it? So, as jealousy makes the food it feeds on, he wove endless pictures of treachery and duplicity, and vowed to call out Chesters, and shoot him down like a dog, on the first available opportunity, forgetting that even then, in the year we were to storm the heights of Alma, duels had become out of fashion and forbidden.

He thanked Heaven for the prospect of a speedy war, and a hot one, too. Anything was better than enduring what he suffered. Would he resign his leave and rejoin the Fusileers at once, or remain till the last hour, and make fierce love to his cousin Gwenny?

Perhaps it was all some horrible mistake, which might be easily explained. But why had Mary so studiously avoided all reference to the circumstance? Desperately he clung to hope, and resolved himself to see about it. And now he, the heedless young officer, the man of pleasure and amusement, wealth and position, felt for the first time in his life that sickening and gnawing emotion of clamorous anxiety in his heart which Mary had endured during the suspense consequent to his disappearance, since Chesters had engendered in her heart a jealousy of Gwendoleyne Wedderburn, and never perhaps so keenly as on the evening she walked to Chesterhaugh.

Cyril knew that he should have no further opportunity of questioning the Master of Ernescleugh, as the leave of the latter was on the point of expiry, and he was to start by train on the morrow to rejoin his battalion of the Guards in the Wellington Barracks, London.

Prior to all this the intimacy between Horace Ramornie and Gwendoleyne Wedderburn had been ripening with a rapidity that her aunt, had she known of it, would have deemed "frightful" as well as fatal to all her hopes; but still love had never been spoken of between them.

Busy about his estate and the farms thereon; busy too about country matters, and the affairs of the little Burgh of Barony which owned him as patron and superior, Sir John Wedderburn spent much of his time out of doors, and a deal of it in his saddle. Cyril had been entirely occupied by his own secret passion, while Robert was sulky, and affected to be deep in his legal studies, reading up for a forthcoming examination, and frequently went alone fishing. As the household was in mourning there were few invitations given, and few visitors at Willowdean; hence, in spite of all Lady Wedderburn's plans, Horace—not Cyril—and Gwenny were generally thrown together; and what could be more natural than that the young people should learn to love each other?

Yet he dared not speak of the passion that was growing in his heart.

Lady Wedderburn had not been without a dread that the Master of Ernescleugh, young Everard Home, who was every way an agreeable and remarkably good-looking man, might "cut out" both her sons. Gwenny knew that he was the heir to a peerage, and rank would have much weight in the mind of an Indian-bred girl; so she was thankful when his leave of absence expired, and he was recalled to London. She did not speak again to Cyril of Mary Lennox, either tauntingly or otherwise; but once she said to her husband—

"Cyril has been looking pale and unhappy of late, and I know it must be caused by that artful girl at Lonewoodlee. What does the foolish fellow go on about? Absurd! It is only a girl's pretty face, after all."

"Have you forgotten the days of your own youth, and what your face was then to me as Kate Douglas? Ay, and is so still," said the good-natured Baronet, pinching her chin.

"True; but I didn't gad about the country alone on snowy nights with men like Rooke Chesters. Cyril is conscious of her unworthiness; so it is only the memory of a face that disturbs him."

"Don't worry poor Cyril; once with his regiment, he may forget all about her. Yet what does a poet say?—

"'Only the face of a woman;
    Only a face—nothing more!
But the memory of that sweet vision
    Comes back to my heart o'er and o'er.
Only a woman's soft eyes;
    Only a look, that was all;
A glance that I chanced to encounter
    Still binds my soul in thrall.'

It was at a ball of the Caledonian Hunt we first met, Kate. And never forget you were once young."

Gwendoleyne Wedderburn thought there was some analogy in the destiny of herself and Horace from the fact of his being so young, and having come, like herself, to Willowdean in his boyhood, without father or mother. Horace was a smart subaltern in the Line now, and had quite considered himself a man in all respects for a few years past; but Gwenny loved to think of him as the lonely boy he had been; for his manner was grave and gentle, and his voice and smile were ever sweet and pleasant to her.

Cyril, we have said, was pre-occupied, and Robert had enough of the student in him to be somewhat brusque, so Horace she preferred undisguisedly, to the infinite chagrin of Lady Wedderburn; and, if truth must be told, somewhat to the amusement of Sir John, who, though he would have been pleased enough to see his son with a bride so suitable and wealthy, was an enemy to all match-making.

The large and stately house of Willowdean, with its shady library, its galleried conservatory, its long corridors hung with valuable pictures, and its spacious garden, was a pleasant place for such sweet companionship; and whatever young Ramornie did, when not with Gwenny, was always done as if in a kind of dream to occupy the blank of time when he could not be with her.

How would time be occupied when they should be parted, perhaps to meet no more!

The garden was older than the house, having belonged to its predecessor, the ancient mansion, "the peel and fortalice of Willowdean;" thus its yew hedges and boxwood borders were thick and dense beyond any to be seen in gardens of more modern date; and in the centre stood the ancient sun-dial, by the gnomon of which Sir John's forefathers had set or regulated their round silver watches that were like turnips in shape, and had perhaps wooden wheels that were worked "by thorl and string."

As yet the garden was only in bud, and there for the first time Gwenny heard with wonder the voice of the cuckoo when she and Horace were planting some rare Indian seeds which she had brought from the Choultry; and she sighed when reflecting that he must be so far away when these seeds became flowers in all their tropical glory; and when (then so bleak and bare), with its famous ribbon-borders of every imaginable colour, the hedges of azaleas and drooping fuchsias under the shelter of the older rows of privet and yew, the clusters of beautiful shrubs and beds of geraniums, verbenas, and calceolarias were in all the bloom and splendour of summer.

And many a delightful drive they had in the park, when Gwenny usually took the reins of the pony-phaeton, for there the grass was smooth as a billiard-table, having been carefully rolled and mowed in season, ever since clover-seeds had first been sown in it, in 1708, by Sir Cyril Wedderburn—the same Baronet who drank the health of James VIII., sword in hand, at Greenlaw Cross, when the Comte de Fourbin's fleet, with the Scots and Irish Brigades on board, was off the Isle of May; who nearly rabbled out the Union Parliament, and played many other political pranks in his time.

The month was still March; but already the park—or "policy," as the Scots called it—was sheeted with pale yellow primroses, where, in the next month the Lent lilies would be in all their golden bloom.

But their drives were not confined to the park, for frequently they had the open carriage. Then Lady Wedderburn and Miss M'Caw were always present; and, as the large and handsome vehicle bowled along the smooth roads, Gwenny would laugh, and like a happy child, clap her hands to the two white-and-black spotted Dalmatian dogs, which bounded along on each side, caracoling amid the dust, and seeming to exult in the dignity of being outriders to such an equipage, reminding her of the bare-footed suwaries she had often seen running beside the elephant of a native prince on the plain of the Choultry.

Poor Horace, however, saw the views and wishes of his aunt pretty plainly, for she was unskilful enough to show her hand to all but Gwenny.

He knew, and felt keenly conscious, of all he owed to the uncle upon whom he had been cast in boyhood, a penniless orphan: his education, his commission and yearly allowance; and though loving Gwenny passionately, and with all his soul—for she seemed the realization of the wife he could love, the ideal of his dreamy hours—he shrank from any declaration that might, perhaps, mar the plans of those to whom he owed everything in the world, and also mar, it might be, the fortune of his relation, his brother officer and friend, for he was ignorant of the recent ties already formed by Cyril.

It was hard for Horace to know and feel that the love he had longed for, the wife he had pictured in many a vision of fervid fancy, was now daily by his side, and yet that he dared not look upon her as more than a friend; while, at the same time, it was impossible to resist the charm, the delight, the intoxication of her presence, and the craving to seek her society; to listen to her voice, to look into her softly-lidded eyes, that were by turns shy, passionate, and full of child-like surprise; to touch her hand timidly, and think of all that might have been.

Ah, what did it all matter! A little time, and it would be a thing of the past, this delightful companionship. Miles upon miles of land and sea must be between them, and the Russian hordes would be before him.

Yet often was the perilous secret, that he loved her, on the point of his lips, on certain occasions that suddenly seemed to invite it.

Attended by a groom they had ridden one day past the house, the park, and woods of Ernescleugh, to the verge of the cliff over which Cyril had been dragged by his horse. The tide was out, and the isolated rock from which he had been rescued by the crew of the fisher-smack was plainly visible, with the gulls wheeling in circles and the white waves boiling round it.

Gwenny was shuddering as she looked alternately down at the rock and upward at the ruins of Fast Castle, perched on the giddy verge of a tremendous cliff, the fragment of a baronial tower "'twixt cloud and ocean hung," with the blue sky visible through its fissures and gaping windows. Laying his right hand on her reins, as if to steady her horse, which the booming of the waves below and the screaming of the seabirds above had startled, he sought in reality but to touch the pretty bridle-hand, that was cased in its tight black leather riding gauntlet, as he said—

"I think you admire this sample of our grim Scottish scenery, Miss Wedderburn?"

"Before I answer you," said she, looking with a bright smile under her veil, which the wind was blowing out like a pennant, "you must tell me why you persist in calling me Miss Wedderburn? Did I not say once before that you were to call me Gwenny? Miss sounds so stiff! All the family at Willowdean, and even cold and hard Lady Ernescleugh, call me Gwenny."

"And by that name I always think of you—in my heart."

"Then call me Gwenny, I insist, as I once did before."

"I do not like to do so, when, when——"

"Is not the name pretty? It was my mamma's."

"Apart from itself, association will ever render it adorable to me."

"Well?"

"Somehow I don't like to do so when Lady Wedderburn is present; something tells me that she would not be pleased," replied Horace, blushing in spite of himself, and then the girl blushed too, for she began to see something of his meaning and the inferences to be drawn from what he said. "But," he added, retaining her reins and hand in his for a little way, "let us leave this giddy verge; it is dangerous with a shying horse."

The groom drew near to make the same remark, and so the occasion was lost.

At another time the news came that the Queen, in conjunction with the Emperor of the French, had at last declared war against Russia!

Gwenny's dark eyes were upon Horace as he read the Times aloud in the conservatory, with a flush on his cheek and a strange emotion in his heart.

"All leaves will be cancelled now!" said he.

"And you, cousin Horace, you will be quite anxious to find yourself in Turkey!"

"I was anxious," said he, in a low voice.

"And what has made you change your mind; surely not dread of danger?"

Her question was a home thrust; but he only answered curtly, while his heart beat quicker and his cheek grew pale—

"I am a soldier, Gwenny."

"Then what has caused the change?

"Dare I tell you?" he asked, in a low and tremulous voice, as he took her hand; "but no, I dare not," he added.

Nor could he have done so then, for Lady Wedderburn was not far from them, feeding a screaming parroquet, whose neck Horace could have wrung with stern joy. Still he was venturing to say something more in an incoherent and desponding way, when Gwenny came close to him, with her soft, serene, and loving eyes smiling into his, and placing her rapid little hand on his mouth, she said—

"Now, Horace, if you love me, silence; for sadness worries me, and I won't be worried or sad till you are gone; and then Heaven knows I shall be sad enough."

She joined her aunt, and again the secret remained untold.

"IF I love her!" thought Horace, with a choking sensation in his throat; but Gwenny had begun to suspect or feel all that he had left untold, through "that silent method of communion which no crowd can prevent persons who know each other well from interchanging."

To all the beauty we have described, a beauty that was dark and pale, yet sparkling, Gwendoleyne added a manner that came with her Welsh blood; it was full of those nameless and indescribable charms which the French, ever so happy in apt phraseology, term folâtre et caressante, winning and playful; but there is no perfection out of novels and romances, so Gwenny, with all her loveliness, was not perfect. She had a fiery little temper at times, which, like her dark eyes and their long lashes, she inherited with her Welsh blood; but she was all perfection to young Horace Ramornie, and in the core of his heart he idolized her!

In the dining-room at Lonewoodlee Mary was seated in the deep recess of a window. She was sewing, and singing merrily the while. She felt happy, light in heart, and high in spirit, unusually so for her; but ever and anon she paused in her work and even in her song to contemplate her new ring and recall the exact words of Cyril when he placed it on her finger, the expression of his eyes, and the tone of his voice.

The window was open, for the time was noon-tide, the day was warm and sunny, and the spring freshness in the atmosphere was delightful. The bleating of the sheep that browsed close by the Tower, the voices of the birds that twittered in the old trees and shrubbery, with the hum of insect life, all came pleasantly to the girl's ear, so, as we have said, at times her song died away, and her needle paused as she sank into happy thought, and abandoning herself to her day dreams, repeated, "Wife of my heart; ah, he called me so; the wife of his heart!"

So pre-occupied was Mary that she did not hear the hoofs of a horse approach the Tower, nor the ringing of the door-bell announce a visitor, till Alison Home, her face a little flushed with surprise and importance, placed in her hand the card of

CYRIL WEDDERBURN,
        Royal Fusileers.

"Where is he—this gentleman?" asked Mary, starting from her seat.

"In his saddle at the door; but he asks if he can see you, Miss Lennox."

"Show him in at once, Alison."

When their past mode of meeting and corresponding are considered, it may easily be supposed that a visit from Cyril, openly, formally, and at such an early hour as noon, filled Mary with anxiety, excitement, and alarm! To visit thus had long ceased to be his use and wont, after the quarrels ensued with his family; so what could it portend? With true feminine instinct she glanced at a mirror—one of those quaint, old-fashioned, carved plate glasses with bevelled borders, set in an ebony frame—gave a final smooth to her rich brown hair, and was not ill-pleased to find, that though she was scarcely dressed in a style to receive visitors, she wore a morning robe of spotted muslin that was very becoming, and from the frilled sleeves and neck of which her taper arms and slender throat came forth to the best advantage.

Save his ring, ornament she had none.

Cyril was ushered in with hat and whip in hand, and the moment their eyes met, her heart became filled with dismay. He did not approach her or take her hand, even the faint sickly smile that conventionalism or good-breeding had spread over his face passed away, and he stood looking at her irresolutely, and keeping the dining-table between them.

Grieved and exasperated as he was by the ugly story he had heard so recently, Cyril glanced sadly from Mary to the old faded portraits that hung on the walls—older they were than some of the ancestry at Willowdean—and much of sorrow and pity began to mingle with his indignation. And there, too, were the arms and monogram of Oliver Lennox, who had been a good man and true to his Queen in the stormy times of the Reformation, carved above the antique fireplace, which looked so quaint with its heavy Scoto-Italian mouldings of stone; but in the old-fashioned basket-grate there burned a cheerful fire, composed less of coal than of cuttings from the thicket without, roots, fircones, and peat.

"Oh, Cyril," exclaimed Mary, piteously, "what has happened—what is amiss? You have such a pale and tell-tale face! You neither take my hand nor seat yourself."

"Nor shall I do either until you have heard me—if I even do so then, Mary," said he, slowly, as if to gain time or arrange his perplexed thoughts, and doubtful in what terms to break the purpose of his unhappy visit, she looked so charming in that plain undress, so gentle-eyed and dove-like. "Things were said of you last night by Everard Home, my mother, and Lady Ernescleugh, that have rent my heart asunder. Long, long will their words haunt me. Oh, Mary, I shall not readily forget that dinner at Ernescleugh!"

Mary now knew all; the Master had recognised her on that fatal night, when, in her innocence and helplessness, she fell into the species of snare contrived, for her by Chesters and his roguish groom. Dropping her needlework, she grasped the back of a chair for support, and asked, with something of hauteur, nevertheless—

"And what did you say, Cyril, when those people dared to say hard things of me?'

"Say, girl! what could I say? I sat and smiled, I suppose. I was in good society, where people must hide every emotion, and had to smile like the Spartan boy I spoke of; and to smile thus is too often the hardest portion of the weary battle of life."

"To the point, Cyril—oh, of what do they accuse me?"

"On the night of the snow-storm, you visited the house of Chesterhaugh; you were there for hours, and Everard Home saw you leaving the gate, at midnight, in Chesters' waggonette, and seated by his side. Home's groom saw this, too! Was such a visit, in such a time of supposed grief, and to such a man, becoming in the girl whom I loved, and who I thought loved me? Even though I was believed to be dead, was it becoming in your father's daughter? He is, I know, a ruined man; but ruin or improvidence cannot blot out the past, or alter the fact that he is a gentleman descended from as good blood as any in Scotland—not that most folks set much store on that nowadays, but I do. Oh, that I had indeed been drowned—that I had perished on that night of terror, rather than have lived to hear this said of Mary Lennox, that she is no longer worthy of me!"

"Cruel, Cyril! Oh, how cruel is all this of you!" said Mary, wringing her hands.

"Oh, Mary, Mary! God alone knows how I have loved you, and how I love you still; but even were that story not true, that such should be said of you—my future wife—tears up my heart by the roots."

"But it is true," said Mary.

"What was your reason for such a visit and at such a time?"

"Oh, Cyril, the best," said Mary, with a bursting heart, while she stretched her trembling hands towards him, for his somewhat imperious manner chilled and scared her.

"Why were my informants of a circumstance so strange and improper first the Master of Ernescleugh, and then Chesters himself? What was your motive for concealment?"

"A good one. I felt assured that you might disapprove of it, and I was powerless; I had no control over my stay there. I was in Chesterhaugh certainly, but I did not go to visit Captain Chesters. I was lured in; the snow fell: I could not get away; and—and—and, oh, how can you speak to me thus, and think such things of me!"

Cyril bit his nether lip passionately, for the jesting words, the sneer of Chesters, that "she was consoled in the end," seemed burnt into his heart.

"I care not now for your motive, or even to inquire into it. Mary Lennox, we cannot undo the past; what I have to think of is the future."

"Oh, Cyril, bear with me, and hear a very simple explanation connected with yourself."

But he would listen to nothing, and exclaimed, in a hollow tone—

"Oh, has God no pity for love lost, for trust misplaced, and a heart wasted as mine has been on you!"

"I am innocent, Cyril, innocent of wrong, even of error," said Mary, with simple dignity; and had he not been goaded by his own angry thoughts and the galling words of others, he might have read the assurance of what she said in the expression of her face, in her clear earnest eyes, her parted lips, and her very attitude, as she stood with outstretched hands. "I am guiltless of all blame, and a day must come when God will clear me."

"The day may come—but too late," said he, hoarsely and gloomily.

"Never too late if we are both on this side of the grave, Cyril; yet, thank Heaven, this life does not last for ever."

"And your father's?" said he, reproachfully.

"Oh, Cyril, your rebuke is just!" said Mary, in a flood of tears; "but your anger is not so, and it makes me so miserable."

"You can have no explanation to give, and I seek nothing beyond the admission of the fact," said Cyril, with a cold severity that afterwards surprised himself; "and now I quit you. Thank fate, we are on the eve of a war. A few days—ay, perhaps but a few hours—and I shall leave you and all the folly of regret and love behind me, to enter on a stirring and a glorious career. Adieu! Never more shall we be as we have been; never more shall we meet where we have met so often! All is at end between us, Mary; and from this hour our paths in life must lie for ever apart!"

The door closed; she heard the clatter of his horse's hoofs die away in the distance, and then she knew that Cyril was gone—gone, without even asking, or learning the cause of her visit to Chesterhaugh.

She felt that he had treated her both harshly and unjustly, and the sense of that bore her up for a time; but a time only. As one in a dream, she still clutched the back of the chair to prevent herself from falling. The bleating of the sheep in the meadow, the voices of the birds in the trees and among the ivy that rustled on the old Tower wall, and the hum of the insects, were all in her ears as before. Her eyes wandered over the pastoral Lammermuir hills with something of a hunted and despairing expression in them; of wild anxiety, as though peace and rest lay somewhere far beyond, and the whole interview seemed like a dream—an unreality.

Nothing was distinct; she felt as if struggling with a nightmare.

After a time, and as the day wore on, she began to perceive the realities of her position, and to feel the imperative necessity for a complete explanation with Cyril; but she was overwhelmed by the false position in which she was placed, by shame, anger, and unmerited mortification, that such a story should have gone abroad in the fashion it had done, and she knew how it would be viewed by the severe and censorious.

She knew that "woman is woman's worst foe;" and to be pointed at by stern spinsters, with rigid religious and moral opinions—spinsters who never missed sermon or communion, or omitted their names in such lists as printed the names of the charitable, and who had in their hearts only a pretended horror for the mammon of unrighteousness—would be terrible and humiliating in the extreme.

From the dinner-table at Ernescleugh, she knew, or feared, the story in many exaggerated forms would spread like wildfire among the professing Christians and stern Church—we beg their pardon—Kirk-goers, and nasal-singing Pharisees of Willowdean; and that many hands and eyes would be uplifted in dismay at the "shortcomings of the daughter of Lonewoodlee."

She knew, also, how utterly merciless such local gossips were; but to be an object of speculation to the self-righteous on one hand, and to be pitied and misjudged by those who had loved her on the other, was a fear that proved bitter as the waters of Marah—yea, more bitter than death could be—to the sensitive Mary Lennox. She felt humbled, and seemed to have made acquaintance with degradation, she knew not why.

Oh; how in her heart she hated that man Chesters, who had caused all this misery!

But Cyril would come again to Lonewoodlee, to console and to comfort her.

"After all the vows we have exchanged—after all our hours of happiness together—Cyril, Cyril! how could you leave me thus cruelly and coldly?" she would exclaim, almost aloud, while wringing her poor hands in a paroxysm of grief.

Sometimes, when an emotion of anger at his determined injustice and assumption of her guilt got the better of her sorrow, she drew the betrothal ring almost off her finger, and as often kissed and slid it back again, loth, by removing it, entirely to break the spiritual link or tie between herself and Cyril Wedderburn.

"He will come to me again!" she often whispered in her heart, fondly. "Oh, yes: he must come to me once more."

But days went by, and Mary watched and wept, for the days became weeks and months; yet Cyril Wedderburn came no more to Lonewoodlee.

So infirm was he of purpose, notwithstanding his severity with Mary, that he had barely quitted her presence and ridden off, ere he began to relent towards her; and then the mocking story of Everard Home, and the cruel and stinging passage of Chesters' letter, came back to memory, tearing the wound afresh to exasperate him: and now events succeeded each other with considerable rapidity.

The whole of the afternoon subsequent, to his interview with Mary, Cyril secluded himself in his own room; there he wrote three letters to her, full of sorrow for what he termed her error, with the earnest advice and hope that, if ever she required a friend—oh, how cold seemed the word!—she should remember him; but each production in turn dissatisfied him. He knew not how the tenor of them might sound when read, so each in succession was concluded only to be torn up and committed to the flames; and in this state of indecision he remained until the first gong for dinner resounded in the lofty vestibule below.

Under his very window, as he wrote, he could hear his father's groom openly relating to one of the gardeners Mr. Bill Trayner's very coarse and freely-garnished account of the visit paid by "old Lennox's daughter to the Captain on the night of the storm."

It was evident to all how moody Cyril had become; and on this day he felt relieved rather than bored, as he usually was, by the presence of the Reverend Mr. M'Guffog, a prosy old man; the nervous, but good-natured Dr. Squills, and the Baron Bailie, whom Sir John had brought home with him, as he wished their conjunct advice about some local matter.

Cyril knew that the eyes of his mother, Horace, and Robert, were on him; and although the two last-named suspected that he had some little interest at Lonewoodlee, the former knew to a certainty the cause of that gloom and depression which, to do him justice, he endeavoured to conceal. He strove to interest himself in the minister's chief topics, an augmentation of his stipend and repairs of the manse; with the Doctor on the important subjects of compulsory vaccination, and his quarrels with the parochial board; and even with the Baron Bailie, who was a grocer in the Vennel of Willowdean, on the probable war-prices of butter and cheese; but he was glad, when he had done his duty thus, to turn to Gwenny, and rest his head thoughtfully on his hand, through the fingers of which his hair stole in dark and glossy brown locks, close, thick, and crisp; and Lady Wedderburn, as she saw their faces bent near each other, looked at them admiringly, and thought how handsome they were, and how admirably suited to each other.

But the world is full of cross-purposes, and while Cyril poured some good-natured nothings into Gwenny's ear, her eyes, from time to time, sought those of Horace Ramornie.

An unusually important ring at the hall-door bell reached the ears even of those at the dinner table, and made all exchange glances, just as Lady Wedderburn and Gwenny rose to retire; but the entrance of Gervase Asloane, with a suspicious looking yellow document on a silver salver, made them pause.

"A telegram for Mr. Cyril—for the Captain, I mean," said the old man, in a subdued voice, and, as Cyril tore it open, his mother grew pale as a lily.

"From whom is it, dearest?" she asked, drawing near.

"The Colonel."

A low exclamation escaped her.

"He telegraphs, 'We are to embark for the East on the 5th proximo, so you have not a moment to lose in rejoining. Provide yourself with a good six-chambered revolver. All ours have done so. Tell Ramornie he is detailed for the Depot, so his leave remains intact.'"

A bright flush spread over Cyril's face as he read. There in action, far away from Willowdean and Lonewoodlee, and from all his present bitter associations and mortifications, was a relief opened suddenly up; yet his eyes turned to the sad, the earnest and anxious look of his poor mother, who, instead of retiring to the drawing-room, reseated herself at the table for a little time, with her eyes full of tears.

Heartfelt and well-bred hopes were expressed by the Minister, the Doctor, and the Baron Bailie, that he and all his comrades might have a pleasant and prosperous voyage to the land of the Turk and the Heathen, "whither," added the Minister, "no Christian soldiery had gone since the Twelfth Crusade, so ours was an epoch in the world's history;" but there might be no actual war after all, for was not this an age of subtle diplomacy and peace-making at any price; and to these last expressions of hope, his mother clung desperately, with a sob in her throat and a prayer in her heart; but Sir John, who was a bitter enemy of Lord Aberdeen's Government, and was suspicious of his Russian sympathies, pretty broadly "d—d the notion of peace at any price, and hoped the day would never come when Britannia, if smitten on one cheek, would quietly turn the other!"

"You'll not be long behind me, Horace, I fear," said Cyril, gaily, as he took off his wine; "the service companies are barely the full strength, and we shall soon have gaps to fill. Gervase," he added, turning to the old butler, who lingered nervously behind his chair, with an expression in his face that indicated a desire to "whimper," and to pat Cyril on the head or back, as he had often done in boyhood, "you'll have all my traps packed and brought downstairs. Have the carriage brought round in time for the night train for England."

Before this, Cyril had been, perhaps, the most silent member of the company; now it was he who talked most and was the gayest; but his mother was voiceless, and even Gwenny felt crushed (and would have been more so had Horace been going), for all knew they were looking on a face they might never see again, and listening to a voice that never more might fall upon their ear.

The fatal telegram!

It lay on the polished table, like an executioner's warrant, to Lady Wedderburn's eyes—the ukase that was to tear her son from her—and she forgot all about her matrimonial schemes and fears of Horace; she only looked at her handsome and curly-haired Cyril, and thought of all that was before him; that terrible perspective; the long voyage in a comfortless hired transport, by the stormy Bay of Biscay, the Mediterranean and the Levant, the Bosphorus and the Black Sea; of the varied climates; and more than all—oh, more than all!—the chances of an unequal and disastrous war against the hordes of Russia. Then her maternal heart died within her: she could only lay her face on his breast and weep.

Many a wife and mother over all the British Isles felt the same emotion at that fatal time, when, after forty years of peace, and Waterloo had become as a tale that is told, the clouds of war began to gather in the North and East; and long, long in London, the mighty heart of the Empire, was remembered that early morning when the drum beat that summoned the Guards, the flower of our army, to the field; on that same morning when sixty thousand citizens of Edinburgh accompanied the departing steps of the King's Own to the ship that bore them away, for all the land was full of sympathy.

Now Cyril hated "a scene."

"What's the row, mamma?" asked he, indignantly. "How often have you seen me leave home to join the Fusileers, and always come back jollier than ever?"

"But you never left Willowdean at such a time of war and peril as this—going from me perhaps never to return, my boy!"

"Kate, my love, do be calm, be sensible," urged Sir John; and becoming less excited, she left the room, leaning on Gwenny's arm, and urging Cyril soon to join her.

All her future plans and minor considerations, even the dread of Mary Lennox, were merged now in one thought; and when she regarded his fine face and stalwart figure, her memory went back over the sunny days of his boyhood, and to the tenderer time beyond, when, "like the callow cygnet in its nest," he clung to her bosom, when merry bonfires were blazing redly on the Twinlaw and Earlston Hill, on Beimerside, and over all the Lammermuirs, from the beautiful vale of the Gala to the terrible rocks of St. Abb, for the birth of an heir to the beloved house of Willowdean.

And now, now, what might it all come to—the care, affection, education, and pride of past years?

A bullet shot from the musket of an unlettered Russian slave, and a tomb without a coffin or a stone!

So might the life of one so loved—the life she had hoped was to stretch out so far beyond that of his parents as God should will—pass away. Cyril, whom she had prayed and trusted might live to see his children's children, long after she had been laid in the family vault at Willowdean church. And as she skilfully tormented herself by dark anticipations like these, she turned to Gwenny (who, sooth to say, was somewhat scared by the suddenness of the summons, and her excessive and unwonted burst of grief), and said—

"Oh, Gwenny, why did I ever permit him to be a soldier—why? But regrets are useless now; yet I am very ill used, I think. Horace has neither father nor mother to regret him, and yet he remains with the Depot, as that provoking Colonel says, while Cyril goes abroad with the regiment!"

She glanced at the magnificent French clock, a miracle of sculpture and gilding, that stood on a white marble console table.

In two hours she knew he must be gone.

"Two hours only, Gwenny!" she said.

The gentlemen soon joined them, and then she was compelled to preserve an appearance of calmness. Cyril did not immediately come in with them, and her heart misgave her that perhaps he had started to Lonewoodlee, but he had only visited his own room for a moment to give it a farewell glance, and issue to Gervase some final instructions. His mother now, however, grudged every moment he was absent from her side. Sir John drew near and took her hands caressingly in his own, for their sympathies of course were one, though her emotions were the keener of the two.

The long-looked-for and dreaded day, yea, the very hour, had come when there was to be a final parting; when Cyril's place and chair would be vacant once more, and Willowdean a broken home! His sword-case and portmanteau were already strapped in the entrance-hall; and now the little family circle that had lived together in such close and pleasant companionship was to be severed.

The grief of Miss M'Caw was so noisy and uncontrollable that she had to retire to her own room; and Lady Wedderburn looked almost hostilely, certainly with envy, at her unconscious nephew, who "was detailed for the Depot," and whose home leave extended for nearly a month beyond that of Cyril, as the spring drills had not yet commenced.

"I would to Heaven that Horace's leave had been up too," said Lady Wedderburn through her tears, in a whisper to Sir John.

"Why, surely there is time enough for him to go, poor boy!"

"Because we should then have had but one leave-taking, and—and this rioting and romping about with Gwenny is scarcely proper."

"Oh, the old idea! A month will see it all over; a memory of the past, and Horace will have other and sterner work on hand than flying over the Merse with a pretty young girl."

"Yes; but the memory thereof may last with the lives of both."

"Scarcely. Where are now all the girls I flirted with when I was the age of Horace? Gwenny is only eighteen, at a time when love is often a mere illusion, Kate, that passes away or fixes on some other object, often with perilous rapidity; so Cyril may have the best chance after all when in a few months he comes back to us," said Sir John, with an external air of confidence and cheerfulness he was far from feeling, as he rose and crossed the room to bid farewell to their three guests, who, finding themselves rather de trop, after formally partaking of coffee, were bowed out.

Poor Cyril's heart had been sorely divided and torn since the arrival of the telegram. From that moment till the time of his final departure by train, four hours, he knew, would intervene; his horse would in a few minutes have taken him to Mary's presence, and so vacillating and unstable are the resolutions of a jealous lover, that there were times when he felt strongly impelled to visit her once again!

Had he done so, how much suffering might in the future have been spared to both; but the golden moments passed and never returned again.

"To what end or purpose should I go?" he asked of himself, almost fiercely. "Weakness, folly, disgrace! No—no! Once in the train for London, and then all is over!"

Yet his soul was full of compassion and dread for what might yet be the fate, the future, of this delicate girl, whom he had loved so truly and tenderly.

Cyril was sincerely attached to all the household at Willowdean, to his parents and family, and to none more than his mother, who had ever been, to his eyes, the belle ideal of all a lady and a mother ought to be; yet he was glad, as he had to go, that the telegram and the rail would whisk him off, as he said, "double quick," for the solemnity of leave-taking bored and worried him; so he shared not his mother's envy of poor Horace's more protracted visit.

He was now anxious only to have it all over, and be gone!

After the dark turn his love affair had taken, he felt inclined to thank God for the relief he should find amid the turmoil of war and foreign service with the Fusileers; he felt a gloomy joy, or grim satisfaction, in the idea that Mary might weep if she saw his name in the Gazette among the killed; but instantly thrust aside the morbid thought, as he reflected compassionately on his tender mother, his loving father, and all the friends by whom his loss would be lamented; and life certainly was more valuable than the tears of a false woman!

Already the carriage was at the door; his luggage, sword, and rugs were placed in it; he heard the horses' hoofs rasping impatiently among the gravel, as if they resented being harnessed out at such an hour, and the spotted dogs were gambolling about them. Then Cyril's lips quivered, as he drew on his kid gloves with singular but nervous accuracy. His father, brother, and cousin proposed to accompany him to the station; but he was affectionately peremptory, and would have no second leavetaking.

As his mother cut a parting lock from his thick brown hair, she fairly broke down again, and sobbing, fell upon his neck. By this Sir John, who had his emotions more under control, was greatly moved; for to see Cyril joining his regiment now was so different from what his departure had been on any previous occasion, save on his first appointment, when he was under orders for India.

"Mother darling," whispered Cyril, "when going now, I have but one favour to ask of you; be kind to that poor girl at Lonewoodlee, should aught happen. I have loved her well; and for my sake——"

"I shall, Cyril—if I can."

Some hurried salutes, tears, and shaking of hands, a murmured adieu from the assembled servants, and all was over like a dream. He was lying back in the recess of the well-cushioned carriage, and heard the budding branches of the old avenue—budding now as they had done for two hundred springs and more—sweeping its roof as he was driven away.

The old minister, Dr. Squills, with many more, were already at the railway station to see him finally off, with a farewell cheer; and as the departing train plunged with a mad shriek into the dark tunnel and vanished, the former lamented aloud that "once again the Merse had lost the best angler that ever dropped a line in the siller Tweed; the primest curler that ever shot a stone at the rinks; the boldest rider, the best sportsman, and the lightest dancer in a' the country side; but God's blessing and a' our gude wishes follow him!"

Until far on in the coming grey dawn, even till the sun rose on land and sea, his mother lay a-bed, sleepless, with watch in hand, reckoning with anxious heart the hours and pauses in his southern journey. Now she knew he must be at Berwick; now at York; now at Peterborough, and so on, until in fancy she saw the train rushing into the roar and bustle of King's Cross Station.

How long a period might elapse, and how much would he have to undergo, before he traversed that route homeward to her again?

After a little time poor Mary Lennox heard, and a dreadful shock it gave her, of his abrupt departure on the very night of the sorrowful day when last they met; and she knew that he had gone without a farewell word or letter of explanation, and that he still thought hardly and strongly, even bitterly, of her, and the girl's heart waxed sore with its great grief.

They could meet no more at the stile by the triple thorn, or under the old pine-trees; and for her own peace she meant in future to shun those places.

Did she repine, even enviously, a little, when Dr. Squills told her incidentally, that Cyril had telegraphed home (and not to her) "of his safe arrival at headquarters?" We fear she did.

Cyril's new line of conduct seemed so harsh! Had he wished to quarrel with her, and begun to love his cousin? It almost seemed so. Well, she had still her poor old father, who clung to her and her only, even as a helpless and querulous child might have done; but how long should he be spared to her?

God alone knew.

Some weeks elapsed after this, and yet Mary heard nothing of Cyril; even the lingering hope that he would write to her died away; she knew not where his regiment was stationed; where it was to sail from, when, or for where; and still full of deep and tender interest, as her heart was for him, this ignorance of all concerning him was most tantalizing, till one evening she was startled by a sudden visit from Captain Chesters, who had been for some time absent in London; and with all her horror of him, she hoped to glean in the course of conversation some tidings of the absent and the loved.

The month was April now, but the day had been rainy and gloomy, and Lonewoodlee, with its weather-beaten walls, its masses of dark green ivy and group of stern old pines, had worn its most grim aspect.

The live-long day the rain had been sowing moor and lea, gorging the watercourses and runnels, while masses of cold white vapour were rolling slowly upward from all the lower portions of the pastoral landscape. The desolate face of Nature around the Tower increased the desolation of Mary's heart, for she was at all times an impressionable creature, and the whole of that dreary day she had sat by her father's bed-side sewing, or reading to him, and thinking of Cyril Wedderburn; where was he—on the land or on the sea—and did he ever think of her now!

On this day it had seemed to Mary that when her father spoke, a strange brightness and smoothing out of wrinkles spread over his withered face; his brow became stern at times, his eyes sparkled with a new light, and she saw something of what his features must have been in the days of his youth, and in the time of her dead mother's bridal—in the happier years that had gone for ever.

Then as she watched and saw how the brow seemed to become broad and open, the cheek to flush, and a younger appearance to steal over all his face, she trembled in her heart lest the last great crisis and the Shadowy Hand were approaching, for most of the day he had raved of his dead son, and the now almost forgotten Indian war in which he fell. "It is always dreadful even to the accustomed watchers of the sick, when the mind wanders" writes the charming authoress of "Lost and Won;" "when the soul goes on some wild journey of its own, away from direct human associations, fighting with imaginary dangers, yearning for impossible delights, living among distorted shadows and amazing pictures that have their origin in some magic-lantern reflection of past or present life." So it was with poor Oliver Lennox. Sometimes he mistook Mary for her mother, who was in the grave; then came scenes in the hunting-field; for he had been a keen and fearless sportsman, mingled oddly with terror and hatred of duns, and the fancied presence of his dead son Harry, to whom he had been tenderly attached. To these occasional aberrations of intellect, Mary never became used, and they always filled her with the keenest anguish and dismay.

And so for a long and weary day Mary had been enduring all this, till she thought her own brain would turn, when Alison Home announced that Captain Chesters was in the dining-room, where she found him booted and spurred, and warming himself before the large fire of coal, roots, and peat, and perfectly dry, apparently, his overalls and ample Inverness cape, which he had left in the hall, having protected him completely from the rain.

The same old portraits that had looked down on Cyril Wedderburn—portraits of the Lennoxes of past times, "seeming ghostly, desolate, and dread," were looking down on him, but they suggested no other idea to his mind than that they were "uncommonly seedy, and were in appearance only fit for Wardour Street."

Her father was slowly, but surely, passing away, and Mary, in the utter loneliness of her heart—she had so few visitors and fewer friends—now felt compelled (despising herself the while therefor) to receive politely this unwelcome visitor, for, save her father, she knew no human being to care for, or who seemed to care for her; thus a kind of sullen desperation had been stealing over her since Cyril's sudden departure.

Aware that it was Chesters who had injured her with her betrothed, Mary regarded him with a secret fear, equalled only by her loathing, and summoned as she had been from the bedside of her ruined and impoverished parent, whom she knew to be in this man's power, made these emotions all the stronger.

To the roué Chesters there was something altogether delightful in the freshness and presence of this young girl, so plainly and modestly attired, and with her rich hair so beautifully dressed, as she came near him, and brought an odour of the dried lavender (from plants in the old garden), amid which all her handkerchiefs, collars, and cuffs were folded; and in her bosom, fastened by her solitary little brooch, were some of the first violets of the season, which Alison had gathered for her, singularly enough, near the stile at the old triple thorn.

Mary had not been without many a mortification since Cyril's departure, and since the story had gone abroad. Lady Wedderburn, Lady Ernescleugh and others—even the unpretending Mrs. M'Guffog, the minister's wife—had eyed her coldly and curiously from under their parasols; and some even had ventured to survey her more boldly than had been their wont—or she nervously fancied they did so—and all this she owed to the scheme and tongue of Ralph Rooke Chesters!

And now with the first glance, Mary discerned, to her alarm, that her visitor was, as the saying is, "flushed with wine," or too probably something more potent, as his face was almost purple in some places, his green eyes were bloodshot, and his utterance was somewhat uncertain. He held out his hand, without drawing his thick riding glove off, and regarded her with one of his cool, leering, and insolent smiles.

"Bravo, Miss Lennox! How goes it with you?" he asked. "Dull enough, I suppose, in this atrocious weather?"

"Pray be seated," said Mary, retreating back a pace, after barely touching his hand.

"Thanks," he replied, continuing to eye her smilingly, and to twirl and untwirl the lash of his short riding whip.

Ignorant of all that passed at Willowdean between Lady Wedderburn and Cyril, or knowing only that the latter was gone, the advent of Gwenny gave Chesters some courage to renew his attempts to gain a place in Mary's heart, or at least to bend her to his purpose; and when tired of her—for tire he knew he should—why, then in Cyril's absence, he might have a chance of winning the heiress, if he met her in London; for Chesters was a man of the most unbounded assurance.

"So Wedderburn is off to join his regiment at last—ha! ha!—after engaging himself to his pretty cousin?" said he, bluntly.

"You are surely misinformed," said Mary, faintly.

"I am not. He told me all about it in London."

This, of course, was utterly false; but Mary could not know that it was so, and he was resolved on making her miserable by inspiring her with jealousy and mistrust.

"And where is his regiment lying at present?" she asked.

"'Tisn't lying anywhere just now," he replied, in a mocking tone, which, like his smile, was replete with insolence.

"I do not understand you, sir," said Mary.

"You're dying to know all about it, though. Well, after our mutual friend Wedderburn had been going it, as usual, among the girls at Chatham and Rochester—oh, I know the style perfectly—the Fusileers sailed from Southampton on the fifth of this month."

"For where?" asked Mary, in a low, breathless voice.

"Oh, Malta, Turkey, or somewhere thereabout. What can it matter to you now? Come, Miss Lennox—or may I not call you Mary?

"'See the mountains kiss high Heaven,
And the waves clasp one another.'"

And he proceeded to quote again his favourite and almost only piece of poetry, drawing nearer her as he did so; but Mary arose, with lips compressed and eyes flashing, and so Chesters, whose ideas of love-making had not been acquired in the society of ladies generally, became correspondingly irritated.

"Well, if you won't be jolly, but are determined to be unpleasant," said he, with an insolent laugh, "suppose we talk about business?"

"I am more and more at a loss to understand you, sir."

"You can understand this, I presume, Miss Lennox, that I took up the old gentleman's bill—not for his own sake, but yours?"

"Though you have been so often his guest in better days? Yet, from whatever motive you freed my poor papa from the terror of it, you performed an act of great kindness and charity, for which I shall ever thank you and remember you in my prayers."

"Bah!" said he, with gloomy scorn, "who pray nowadays? You treat me more like a dog than a gentleman, Miss Lennox; but," he added, as the fumes of what he had taken were beginning to mount upward, "do you know that for all the grand airs you give yourself, I could have your father arrested and marched off to Greenlaw Gaol; and if you continue as obdurate as you are now, what the devil is to hinder me from doing so?"

Terror of the man, and of his new and unwonted bearing, got the better of Mary's anger, and compelled her to dissemble. But she said—

"You talk daringly, sir; for what reason could you, or any such as you, have Oliver Lennox of Lonewoodlee arrested?"

"Debt. Have you already forgotten the bill I took up for him?"

"Never shall I forget your kindness. But has not the bill expired? I think the phrase is."

"No; it can never expire. I had it protested and renewed; so it grows daily in value—interest upon interest. The world is divided into two classes—at least, I have found it so—fools and scoundrels, or dupes and despots. Now, by Jove! I prefer being the last named; anything is better than being a fool or a dupe."

Mary was speechless. The bill! that fatal bill! She remembered how she had bathed her father's trembling hand in Rimmel and iced water, before he had achieved the signing and indorsation of it, with a signature so all unlike what his own was wont to be, that the bank people had eyed it dubiously for a time.

"How did your father ever expect to meet this bill, unless some good-natured fellow like myself had come forward? He is a veritable old goose, who seems to have thought his pasture land of Lonewoodlee a perfect California, a Golconda, or El Dorado, that no end of money could be got out of."

"And what have you thought of Chesterhaugh?" retorted Mary.

"Pretty much the same, by Jove! But though Chesterhaugh is entailed, I have contrived to make all the timber march, and something more."

Amid all the difficulties, monetary and otherwise, that Mary had undergone, no man had ever before dared to address her in the tone and manner now adopted by this bold reprobate. A clamorous anxiety, a strong sense of weary confusion, a terrible, yet dull oppression of the heart and aching of the head, a sensation as if she was all pulse, pervaded her. She made a struggle to appear calm, and only after a time became conscious that Chesters was speaking again, but with thicker utterances than ever.

"Give me one kiss, Mary dear, and a promise of a little hope that you will love me in the time to come, and I shall be patient, though I want money horribly. Once I had only to draw upon my banker, now I have to draw upon my wits—a devil of a difference, you'll admit. So just one kiss, my sweet——"

"Stand back, sir, I command you!" exclaimed Mary, raising her hand to the bell.

"Why, hang it! you don't mean to mourn for ever about that selfish muff, Wedderburn, who has discarded you—cast you off for a richer engagement?"

"He could not well have made a poorer one," sighed Mary.

"Had he been a man of honour, he would never have concealed from his family the fact that he loved you."

This was perhaps the most stinging remark Chesters had made, and having some truth in it, Mary felt it more keenly; so if fear made her tolerate the presence of Chesters, wounded pride now caused her to loathe him more and more. Remembering all the trickery of which Cyril—her absent Cyril—had suspected him, hinting even at intended murder, perhaps; his sharping at cards, and the apparent snare into which he had lured herself, indignation for a moment got the better of her fear and policy, and with invincible hauteur in her face and manner, she said—

"I have to request, sir, that you never again mention the name of Captain Wedderburn to me. Indeed, I am astonished that you dare to speak of him to any one."

"Why? by Jove!"

"When you know that his horse was drugged on that terrible night."

"By whom?" he asked, with a frown.

"Your worthy groom, or yourself."

"Dare you say so to me—a gentleman?" he asked, making a stride towards her, and laying a hand heavily on her arm.

"I do. A gentleman? Take your hand away, Captain Chesters, or, though a girl, I shall——"

"Do what?"

"Summon aid, and have you expelled," replied Mary, feeling again all her own helplessness.

Her words and bearing had, however, the effect of completely sobering her tormentor, who took up his hat, and, while a cruel white glitter came into his green eyes, said, with a mocking bow, "As you please, Mary Lennox; as you please. But I warn you, that if you are not more complaisant when next we meet, my protested bill shall go into the hands of Grubb and Wylie, my solicitors. If you have no mercy on me, why the deuce should I have any on your father? And so I wish you good evening."

Mary made no reply to the unmanly threat of this would-be lover; but turned her back upon him and rang the bell, that Alison might usher him out. And as the sound of his horse's hoofs died away in the rain that lashed the windows, she felt as if her heart was dying within her, for never before had she undergone an interview so singular and insulting; and she felt, moreover, an intuitive foreboding that she had not seen the last of Rooke Chesters. "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," saith the old Scriptural proverb. But she could not help dreading evil and gloom, misery and desperation, beyond the present; and that Chesters might, in his baffled rage at herself, be infamous enough to attempt to arrest her father, place him in prison, and so kill him outright, came on her soul like a new and hitherto unforeseen terror.

But strange events were to happen ere Mary and her tormentor met again. And after a few weeks she learned, incidentally, from Dr. Squills, that Chesters had left the neighbourhood once more, and betaken himself to London. All that remained of Chesterhaugh, being entailed, had been put under trust for the behoof of his long-patient creditors; the house and grounds were advertised to be let by Messrs. Grub and Wylie; so Mary and the district were alike freed from the annoyance of his presence for a time.

But she found her home gradually growing more and more intolerable to her. Cyril's sudden and unwonted visit just before his departure, and her subsequent anxiety for letters which never came, all betokened some mystery. Her rather stormy interview with Chesters, overheard, doubtless, by vulgar ears that were at the keyhole, and the total cessation of his visits afterwards; together with the great local esclandre of the snowy night at Chesterhaugh, had been made subjects for discussion at the village tap, the blacksmith's forge, and even beside her own kitchen-hearth.

Mary could gather much of this from the manner of Alison Home and her other domestic; and they had seen much that Mary wist not of, for, like all their class, they could read the faces of their superiors as one may read a book; and in hers they saw only trouble and sorrow, distraction and care.

She felt that Cyril had deserted her, and she would say in her heart—

"His love for me was but one thought, one fancy, it may be, among many; while mine, alas! it was the die on which I staked my all—the chain whereon all the links of my life were strung."

END OF VOL. I.

LONDON:
SAVILL, EDWARDS AND CO., PRINTERS, CHANDOS STREET,
COVENT GARDEN.

[Transcriber's note: Inconsistent and archaic spelling is as printed.]