of her life-both from this in the midst of which she walked and from that other yet more difficult to bear at home.

She walked up the avenue with a strange sense of possible drifting out of present pain into temporary safety and future danger. She felt like a person slipping down a smooth and pleasant decline instead of continuing on a rugged, toilsome ascent. The motion was soothing and she shut her eyes to the rest. The storm raged without and her mother's house was even more inhospitable than the elements; she was on the Colonel's arm, making for the shelter of his home; and she knew that it rested only with her to hold that shelter as her own for ever if she would.

Nothing was said between them as they went up the avenue. Like a wise man who knows how to take care of himself, the Colonel objected to opening his mouth in such weather as this. He suffered not infrequently from neuralgia; and he and the dentist at Lingston knew a few secrets which the world at large did not even suspect. But when they came to the house, he led her in with the same fine mingling of courtesy and tenderness as before; checked only by the presence of his man from showing perhaps too openly what pleasure her

crossing his threshold thus gave him. He did really love her, as much as a man naturally selfish and arbitrary, a little mean and very irritable, can love any one outside himself; and his hesitation, both before her marriage and now when she was again free, was but the ordinary hesitation of a man who has stiffened in his widower's groove, and who has more things to think of than one before he finally resolves to break the spell and renew his past in a second marriage.

He looked on this odd meeting at his own gates as a kind of sign-a correspondencewhat some would call "a leading;" and he was excited and elated. That fellow whose presumption had so disturbed him had suddenly slipped like a snake out of his path, and he was master of the situation. There was no one else in Highwood or any other place who, so far as he knew, disputed with him the ground which he had marked out for his own. Sandro Kemp off the field, he had the course to himself. As for Mrs. Morshead's ferocious constancy to the dead, that was a simple absurdity

a brutum fulmen which hurt no one. If Augusta loved him he had almost resolved that he would marry her. And he had money enough to secure her future, though

she

would not perhaps be quite so well off as if she inherited from her mother. The old woman lived on about half her income, if so much, and invested the other. He lived up to the last farthing of his. There was too, this little son of his dead rival to be thought of; and perhaps others whose claims would be greater and their share larger. He would not make his heir of the Professor's son, if he had his own to endow; but he could give the lad a good education and see him through the first sterile years of his profession. Pecuniarily it would not be so good for Augusta to marry him and be disinherited by her mother, as to remain where she was, waiting for that weary wearing of the dead woman's shoes. Still it would not be poverty; and she would make him happy.

Even at this moment of a lover's exaltation and a lover's keen appraisement of the value of the thing he wants, Colonel Moneypenny did not say to himself that he would make Augusta happy. That came as of course-as the corollary, the reflection, the inevitable sequence to his own state of content. Or rather it did not enter into his calculations at all, one way or the other. When we hire a servant or buy a horse we do not think of the servant's happiness under our mastership, of the horse's pleasure

under our guidance. If we give sufficient wages to the one, good food to the other, we are quit of all obligation; but our own advantage remains, as the rope on which the whole value of the transaction depends. The Colonel was not the only man in England who, courting a woman with delicate devotion while she holds herself mistress of the situation, free to grant and able to withhold, keeps her as a caged creature, fairly caught and trapped, when once she has come down from her height to his lure; and in keeping her thus forgets to ask if she likes her fate-and would not stop for the answer if she did.

The drawing-room at Bellevue was, as is so often the case in the houses of unmarried men, reserved for state social occasions when there were dinner-parties on hand, or one of those pleasant little dances with supper to follow, for which the Colonel was famous. He himself lived in the dining-room and library, both of which were comfortable enough; and now, as he and Augusta came in from the wind and the snow outside, the bright blazing fire and not ungraceful litter of occupancy were as a welcome to Home. Without doubt the library was essentially masculine in its circumstances, and wanted the graceful touch of a woman's hand,

the fringe of pretty nothings which she always adds. But it was full of the substantial luxury which a man finds pleasanter to his senses than those spots of colour and sparkle which are known by the general term of ornaments. And if the books were not what is called drawingroom books, they were handsome and solid and gave one the impression of stores of latent learning in the Colonel's mind, and a kind of colossal literary digestion. It was all very warm and strong and ample; and the Colonel himself seemed to gain in breadth from the comfortable stability of his surroundings.

By this time Augusta had recovered herself. The question had formed itself clearly in her mind:-Should she? or :-Should she not? He had enough to make her future safe if not brilliant-enough for her son, who must be the only heir. And she could if she would. The house was full of capabilities if once she put her hand to it; her social position as his wife would be unexceptionable; she might even in time win her mother over to forgiveness; and this fire was so comforting! It was with a sense of real bien-être that she sank down in the easy chair which he pulled up for her close to the fender. It was not his own special chair. That was sacred even against Augusta