It might have been a long or a short time that had elapsed while the old man and the young girl each sat still and silent. But at length Mr Hesketh spoke in a tone that startled her, it was at once so distinct and so tremulous-" Caroline! teach me teach me a prayer.”

She looked up at him almost wildly; then she drooped her head, hid her face, clasping her hands tightly before it. The cry of her newly-stirred heart arose a yearning, entreating cry-from the very depths of the agony of a vague remorse, remorse she hardly knew for what, but none the less rending and terrible. Was it only now, that for the first time in all her life, the desire, the longing to pray came upon her, to be thus strangely echoed? The set words of many a prayer familiar to her lips rose to them, but her heart rejected them all. The sense of her ignorance, her impotence, her unworthiness, overwhelmed her-ay, and saved her.

"Caroline!"

again.

entreated the tremulous voice

It could not-must not be denied. But faint,

low, so that the listener bent his head to catch the

accents, came the first utterances.

"Our Father-Our Father, oh, help us!"

And with a great cry Caroline fell upon the old

man's neck.

Chapter xii.

VAUGHAN HESKETH made a second pilgrimage to Beacon's Cottage the next morning. The crisis of the previous day was safely past. He breathed freely. And now he might turn again to the thought of Madame de Vigny. A restless night had caused his ideas, only confusedly rebellious before, to arrange themselves in the most compact ranks of mutiny. Made courageous by a belief in his own immunity, he had now given the reins to those frantic steeds his thoughts-his wishes; and they dragged him where they would. He was desperately resolved, with the indomitable resolution of a selfish man to win that which he covets, let what will stand between. His own interests, he said to himself, did not stand between. He was secure. The will was signed, and safely in the keeping of the family lawyer. Redwood, he

argued, was virtually his-he had no more now either to gain or to lose from Mr Hesketh. If the young man did not consciously calculate, among the other advantages of his position, the fact that his uncle could not, as the doctors said, linger many days, most assuredly it did unconsciously, and as a matter of instinct, weigh with him very forcibly.

So, nothing "stood between." Nothing but the pale face-paler than ever that morning-with the eyes looking unnaturally large, and the some-time rosy lips drawn closely together, in a strange sort of painful calm. The only thing that seemed to have power to affect that curious calm was, when Caroline looked at Vaughan's clouded brow and deeply-meditative aspect, or heard his voice, hasty and querulous, beyond all the transient impatience she had ever noted in it before. Then her look would soften, and her eyes would fill with sudden tears; then the cry of her heart would almost rise to her lips-"Oh, Vaughan, Vaughan! If I could only comfort him if I could only help him a little!" But she dared not try. She dared not,

for she felt the solemn sense of the duties that were before her duties for which all her quietest composure, her steadiest thought and courage, would be needed. No passionate indulgence of emotion must risk breaking down the floodgates of that heart of hers, where even now heaved and swelled the tumultuous tides of overwrought feeling. Caroline was learning a new lesson of control; till now she had hardly required it. In the free joyousness of her youth, she had experienced few feelings that she might not avow. All shades and degrees of concealment had ever been unnatural and obnoxious to her careless, innocent spirit. Where she loved, she had been loving, of look, gesture, tone; where displeased, voice and manner had told it too. Sorrowful, she appeared sad; mirthful, she was merry. The conventional hypocrisies of the world, and those sublimer and more heroic (as it is supposed), of modern novel and romance literature, each were alike unknown to Caroline. But now she guarded herself jea

lously. The few words she exchanged with

Vaughan were quietly uttered. He would have