A servant threw open the door of the morning-room. For a moment Mark faltered, his whole face working with strong emotion, in another instant he sprang forward, and I followed him into the room.

"My darling! My poor darling!" he cried wildly.

And there in the light of the clear morning sun stood Valentia with her child in her arms.

She lifted to him a terrible face. The remorseless sunbeams were streaming over her crown of russet hair, every fine thread turned to red gold; her face was deadly white, and out of her strange pallor her eyes blazed like live fires.

She appeared to my excited fancy taller than she had ever done before-majestic, transfigured, like some statue of avenging fate. She looked towards Mark steadily, her singular regard meeting his eager eyes without one flash of recognition. And when she spoke her voice sounded low and hollow:

"Who speaks?"

Mark stood spell-bound, but here he dashed forward.

"It is I! Mark! Your husband!"

His passionate cry broke off, frozen by the cold apathy of her face.

"My husband?" she murmured incredulously. "My husband? You forget! I have no husband. I am an outcast."

A sob broke from Mark, and with a sudden impulse he caught her in his arms.

"My darling!" he cried. "Look at me! Listen to me! I have come back to beg your forgiveness, to love you, to comfort you, to live only for you. Give me one word, one look, to say you will forgive me."

Valentia slowly disengaged herself, her frozen face unrelenting. "It is too late," she said gravely; "do you not see it is too late? I have hungered for your voice—your look-your touch. I would have died of sheer joy for the sight of your face all these weary weeks. But you left me to hunger in vain, and now I am starved -starved to death."

There was no vehemence in her words. They dropped like icicles upon the stillness, and my heart misgave me.

"Death!" she echoed, with a strange smile. "Is it that which is so near me? I am drifting out somewhere-no man knows where I was never religious, you know," she added simply. "You have said so yourself. My religion was love! And that failed me!"

Mark groaned in an agony of self-reproach.

The child had struggled to its feet, and stood, a little uncertain

figure, watching all our faces in much wonder, and almost on the verge of tears.

Suddenly, attracted by some glittering thing that hung to Mark's watch-chain, it staggered towards him, holding out one little hand, and smiling a confident baby smile.

In a moment Mark lifted it in his arms. His poor little child! He had forgotten it till that moment, in his pleading with its mother.

Valentia watched her child with a look of infinite love. I saw that her only chance was through her child.

Do

Valentia," I said, "Mark's whole heart is breaking for you. you not see your child in his arms to draw you towards him? For his sake, and for the little one, go to him, and give him back your love."

'My love!" she cried with sudden passion,-" my love! where is it? Who will give it back to me? Do you suppose I would not love him now if I could? But it is dead-dead! There is no answer here," striking her clenched hand against her heart"all this is dead."

But out upon her miserable words broke the child's bright laugh. He had found some wonders on his father's chain, and his laugh was one of sheer delight.

"Give him to me," she said, holding out her arms to Mark. “I shall be here so short a while, I cannot spare him yet. When I am gone you will be happy with him, and he will comfort you, but now let him come to me."

She sank into a chair, and I knew she was dying. The little boy, all unconscious, laid his gold head against her breast, and over those two faces the relentless sun streamed like the glory of transfiguration.

Slowly, with her last look yearning on her child, the heavy lids fell, closing for ever those wonderful eyes. One sigh, and she was gone.

Mark fell on his knees beside her with a terrible cry, and out of his dead wife's arms he lifted his living child.

The doctor called it neuralgia of the heart. I called it heartbreak.

A Lover of Leisure.

In this pitilessly busy nineteenth century the very name of leisure has a soothing sound. Most people have a beautiful dream, a mirage of a state of perfect leisure. They may never realise it, or reach it themselves, save in the great world of books, where some of us spend the best part of our lives, and wherein it is the delight and solace of so many tired and sad people to wander, finding there all they had longed for, and more besides. "Wings have we," says Wordsworth,

and he adds:

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'Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good:

Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow."

Leisure has its especial literature; a very rich and charming one, to which belong Charles Lamb's Essays,' Cowper's poems and letters, "The Imitation of Jesus Christ,' Bacon's 'Essays,' John Evelyn's works, Izaak Walton's 'Lives,' The Vicar of Wakefield,' Addison's 'Sir Roger de Coverley,' Sir Philip Sidney's 'Arcadia,' and a thousand more books to be read reverently in the long winter evenings, before a fragrant wood fire, with drawn curtains, while the hungry wind is crying softly round the house; or on summer days, beneath the shadowy boughs of lime-trees, where bees are drowsy with honey.

There is something very pathetic in the story which tells us how Charles Lamb, in his dingy office, longed piteously to have a pension "on this side of absolute incapacity and infirmity," so that he might walk out in the "fine Izaak Walton mornings, careless as a beggar, and walking, walking, and dying walking; " but "the hope is gone. I sit like Philomel all day (but not singing) with my breast against this thorn of a desk." And then one day, suddenly his wishes were granted, and "all being holidays, I feel as if I had none, as they do in Heaven, where 'tis all red-letter days." "Would I could sell you some of my leisure!" he says to his friend. "Positively the best thing a man can have to do is nothing: and next to that perhaps good works." His words are so vivid that they bring before us, who are his literary lovers, the little spare figure clad in black, and the

harsh features of the kindly face; the sweet childlike nature and the quaint delicate humour; all of which, indeed, we love none the less dearly for having met them only in the world of books and fancies. And as I write these words there rises before me the image of another lover of leisure, evoked by the beautiful old book 'Reliquiæ Wottonianæ,' that is lying open on my writing-table. And this copy of 'Reliquiæ Wottoniana' in Hurstbourne Library is in itself a thing to be handled with peculiar reverence and tenderness, for it belonged to Izaak Walton himself, the author of part, and the compiler of the other part of the book; and in it he has written his own name, and some notes, in his delicate, scholarly handwriting. There is a tiny smudge on the fly-leaf opposite his name; all these little details seem to make it more real, and to bring one closer to the dear old worthies who still live and speak and move in those pleasant pages.

Sir Henry Wotton was born, in 1568, at Bocton Hall, in Kent. His father, Thomas Wotton, married first, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir John Rudstone; by whom he had three sons, Sir James, Sir Edward (Lord Wotton) and Sir John. Thomas Wotton was often begged by his friends to marry again, and, says his biographer, "he was seriously resolved to avoid three sorts of persons, namely those that had children, that had lawsuits, that were of his kin;" and as might be expected after such a declaration, he married a lady (Mrs. Elionora Morton) who united these several disadvantages. She was the mother of Sir Henry. Henry was sent to Winchester, and thence to New College, Oxford, where, Izaak Walton tells us, "Albericus Gentilis, then Provost of Civil Law at Oxford," was wont "to call him Henrice mi ocelle; which dear expression of his was also used by divers of Sir Henry's dearest friends, and by many other persons of note during his stay in the University.'

He is described to us as being "of a choice shape," and "tall of stature," and as possessing "a most persuasive behaviour." His picture as an old man shows us a sweet studious face; a high forehead, and kindly intelligent eyes, lit up by a grave smile.

Sir Henry spent the greater part of his early life on the Continent, partly by choice and partly by necessity. For soon after he had returned to England (after an absence for his own pleasure of nearly nine years) he was compelled to leave it again. He had been a friend and companion of Essex; and "therefore did he, so soon as the Earl was apprehended, very quickly, and as privately, glide through Kent to Dover," and thence across the Channel, where he lived, until "the sweet trouble of kingly government" fell upon James I. He was kindly received by the King, and after a time of loyal service to James, Charles I., and Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, he was finally, to his great satisfaction, made Provost of Eton.

Here Sir Henry lived a life of ideal leisure, reading, and thinking, entertaining hospitably his friends and neighbours, and those Eton boys who seemed to him the most promising. "Nor did he forget his innate pleasure of angling, which he would usually call 'his idle time, not idly spent."" He had lived in stirring times, and had seen the wonderful growth of thought and the development of literature of his century, which was the century of Shakespeare and Bacon, Spenser, and Raleigh. He had lived in foreign Courts, and had wandered over Europe. He had watched the march of events,-" so nimble were the times;" he had seen the kings of the earth gather and go by together, and the Invincible Armada prove "but a morrice dance upon our waves." Now, in his old age, he was well content to retire into the cloistered quiet of the college, which to him was a quiet harbour to a seafaring man after a tempestuous voyage.'

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To my mind his leisure was of all leisure the most perfect. Cowper's leisure was darkened and distraught by terrible doubts and fears; Charles Lamb's leisure was tainted by ennui, until he himself grew weary of the "land, in which it seemed always afternoon." Ducis, the French poet, who had "wedded the Desert, as the Doge of Venice wedded the Adriatic Sea," and had "cast his ring into the forests," was saddened by the remembrance of the wife and child he had lost in bygone years. But Sir Henry, until the last few months of his life, kept "the blessing of a cheerful heart."

When he had, as he tells us himself, "arrived near those years which lie in the suburbs of oblivion," he went to revisit Winchester, where he had been at school as a little lad; and on his way home he said to his companion :

"How useful was that advice of a holy monk who persuaded his friend to perform his customary devotions in a constant place, because in that place we usually meet with those very thoughts which possessed us at our last being there; and I find it thus far experimentally true: that, at my now being in that school, and seeing that very place where I sate when I was a boy, occasioned me to remember those very thoughts of my youth which then possessed me; sweet thoughts, indeed, that promised my growing years numerous pleasures, without mixture of cares; and those to be enjoyed, when time (which I therefore thought slow-paced) had changed my youth into manhood; but age and experience have taught me that those were but empty hopes: for I have always found it true, as my Saviour did foretell, Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. Nevertheless, I saw there a succession of boys using the same recreations, and questionless possessed with the same thoughts that possessed me. Thus one generation succeeds another, both in their lives, recreations, hopes, fears and death."

And again, a little later, Sir Henry's biographer repeats for us his words to his friend John Hales: