gaucheries, when, after all, this patrician lady

whom he loved so tenderly, could shed tears of pity for him, and could come near to loving him, if even for a moment only?

But it is rare to meet with one's deserts in this world, and Kimberley never knew of these things.

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CHAPTER VI.

IF Ella had a tear or two to bestow on Kimberley's sorrows, it was still natural that she should remember her own good fortune, and the happiness which lay before her and her lover. There really are people in the world, however much the pessimist may be disposed to disbelieve it, whose only road to happiness lies through the happiness of others, and Ella thought a great deal more of seeing her lover happy than of her own content. The sweet and only half-conscious egotism which assured her that it was in her. power to make him happy furnished her with a rich reward for all the sorrows of the past. The thought never once crossed her mind, "Now I am going to be happy!" but that other

thought, infinitely more delightful, "Now Jack will be happy!" made very music in her heart. It is not unreasonable, surely, that at times events should be so ordered, that this sort of unselfish and generous nature should be happier than any selfish nature has the power to be.

So if over poor Kimberley some natural tears she shed, she dried them soon, and when Alice saw her a half-hour later, she was amazed at her radiant and tender looks. It must needs be sorrowful that so good a creature as the little Bolsover had after all proved to be should suffer as he suffered, but it must needs be a glad thing that her hero and man of men was saved from loveless exile, and that after all the rainy days he had known the sun was at last to shine upon him. Perhaps in the course of this history it has never been made quite clear that Jack was much of a hero, but it might go hard with Lady Ella's suitor if it were imperatively demanded

that he should be in all respects worthy of her. Goodness is not the sole prerogative of women. There are manly virtues which few women own, but women are better than we are, and there are few amongst us who are really worthy of a good woman's love. A good woman is beyond rubies. Think of her life-how pure and blameless! Set your own beside it, and you can scarce do less than feel a twinge of shame. It is a thousand to one that you show like a raven on a snowbank. In that tender domestic purity we have all seen and known there is something almost terrible, and the angel of the flaming sword might well seem to stand between us and it, warning us back from a trespass on that paradise of goodness.

But Ella was at least provided with a husband, chaste, honourable, and manly, and in this imperfect world perhaps even the best sort of women could scarcely ask for more. Jack, awaiting the happy moment when he should

VOL. III.

L

rejoin her, could as yet hardly find it in his heart to credit his own good fortune, and certainly never presumed for a moment to think himself worthy of it. But the whole thing at present was a wonder and a miracle. The cruellest of conceivable fates had changed, without a moment's warning, into the happiest. That wicked ogre of an Earl had suddenly become a good father, with his daughter's welfare the one thing nearest to his heart, and the Kimberley goblin had somehow vanished into the outer darkness, had made himself air, like the foul figures in Macbeth.

Jack was attired cap-à-pie a good three hours. before the time appointed, and paced his room like a prisoner awaiting the moment of release. Half an hour before he dared presume to start, he despatched a waiter for a cab, and he looked at his watch a thousand times at a moderate computation. Before this, the weather had cleared pretty much as his own prospects had done, and