He vanished, and Jocelyn replaced the Cap in the cabinet. It was with anxious heart that he lay down to sleep, nor did sleep come readily. He was quite sure, now, that the engagement would be broken off somehow, but he could not possibly understand how or why. There had been between them no quarrel nor the slightest disagreement-in fact, Jocelyn always agreed to everything there was nothing, on either side, that was not perfectly well known; nothing, that is, as sometimes happens with young men, which might "come out and have to be explained." HowBut, after all, it was the business of his servant to find out the way. He went asleep.

In the afternoon, next day, a note came to him at the Foreign Office. It was from Caroline, begging him to call upon her as soon as possible.

"I have," she said, " a very important communication to make to you-a confession-an apology if you please. Pray come to me." He received this strange note with a feeling of the greatest relief. He knew that she was going to release him. Why or with what excuse he neither knew nor cared.

Caroline was in her own room, her study. She gave him her hand with some constraint, and when he would have kissed her, she refused. "No, Jocelyn," she said, "that is all over."

"But-Caroline-why ?" A smile of ineffable satisfaction stole over his face which she did not see. He would have been delighted to fall on his knees in order to show the depth of his gratitude. But he refrained and composed himself. At all events he would play the lover to the end, as he had begun. It was due, in fact, to the lady as well as to himself.

66

Jocelyn," she said frankly, yet with some confusion in her eyes, "I have made a great mistake. Listen a moment, and forgive me if you can. It is now eight years since a certain man fell in love with me-and I with him. My poor boy! I have never felt I know it now-towards you as I did towards him. We could not marry because neither of us had any money. And then he went abroad. But he has come back-and-and--I have money now, if he has not-and-oh! Jocelyn-do you understand, now ?"

"You have met him"-oh! rare and excellent Slave!-"you have met him, Caroline, and you love each other still." He wanted to dance and jump, but he did not he spoke slowly, with a face of extraordinary gravity.

:

"Oh! Jocelyn." Could this be the same Caroline? Why, she was soft-eyed and tearful, her cheeks were glowing, and her lips trembled. "Oh! Jocelyn. Can you forgive me? You loved me, too, poor boy, because you thought me, perhaps, better and wiser than many other women. Better, you see, I am not, though I may be wiser than some."

He gave her his hand.

Caroline," he said heroically, "what does it matter for me, if only you are happy?"

66

"Then you do forgive me, Jocelyn? I cannot bear to think that you will break your heart over this-that I am the causeForgive you? Caroline, you are much too good for me. I should never have made you happy. As for me-"he gulped a joyful laugh and choked-" as for me, do not think of me. I shall -in time-perhaps. Meantime, Caroline, we remain friends."

"Yes-always friends-yes," she replied hurriedly. Then she burst into tears. "I did not know, Jocelyn, I did not know! I thought I had forgotten him, indeed I did."

He lifted her hand and kissed it with reverence.

Then he left

her, went to the Club, and had a pint of champagne to pull himself together. As for what people said, when it became known, that mattered nothing, because, whatever they said, they did not say openly to him.

It may be mentioned that no alteration was made in the date of the double wedding, only that one of the bridegrooms was changed. It was a beautiful wedding, and nobody noticed Sir Jocelyn, who was up in the gallery, his countenance wreathed with smiles.

When he left Caroline, Jocelyn went back to his chambers and prepared a little ceremony. He first lit the fire; then he took out the Cap and wrapped it in his uncle's letter. Then he solemnly placed both Cap and letter in the flames.

“You are free, my friend," he said. “An old Cap and an old Slave are more trouble than they are worth. Perhaps, now that the Cap is burned, you will recover your youth."

There was no answer or any sign. And now nothing remains to Jocelyn of the family heirloom, except the picture of Sir Jocelyn de Haultegresse and Ali Ibn Yûssûf, otherwise called Khanjar ed Dîn, or the Ox Goad of Religion.

A GLORIOUS FORTUNE.

I.

JOHNNY OF OREGON.

THE road, which is little more than a rough track-in the open parts, during the summer, dust; in the winter, mud-runs at this place through the virgin forest, untouched, for the most part, by axe, and almost untrodden by foot of man. It is a very remote and untrodden track; it has not yet even advanced, like a young ploughboy, to the dignity of corduroy; it runs along slopes of hills and across the valleys between them. When the way is clear of trees, which is not often, one gets a view of the blue Pacific far away in the west; every evening the sun sinks into it, making a glorious double rose of evening in the sky above and the sea beneath. Yet every half-dozen miles or so one may, perhaps—or may not, perhaps come across a clearing or farm cut out of the solid forest, the stumps of the trees still sticking dolefully out of the ground, and the fields divided and staked out by rough snakefences. In a few years, when the stumps have quite disappeared, and beautiful green things have grown over the ugly fences, this farm, with its backing of wood and hill, will be as perfectly beautiful as it is now unkempt, ragged, and unsightly.

You never meet anybody walking along this road, for it runs straight up into the hills, where it is presently lost; but in the fields and upon the new farms you may sometimes see a man at work. It is, in fact, on the other side of the Rocky Mountains, which seems a great way off to all except those philosophers who find the world so small; in the land of Oregon, on the borders of the great Pacific, where, as yet, men are scarce.

The most untidy, most uncared-for clearing along this road was one in the wildest and most solitary part of it, high up among the slopes of the hills. It seemed as if the settler had begun with immense energy, stubbing up brushwood, sowing timothygrass, hewing the fir-trunks, and laying down log-fences, as if he

intended to live a thousand years there, but had then lost heart, and so suffered the weeds to grow, stubbed up no more brushwood, and left his fences unfinished.

The house belonging to the farm was nothing but a little logcabin, grey-coloured and weather-beaten, with two windows and a door in the middle opening to a narrow stoop or veranda. A little beyond the hut there ran babbling and sparkling in the sun (where it was not overhung with alder, wild-cherry, and syringa), quite the most beautiful little brook in the world. At the back of the house rose steeply a great hill covered with oak, maple, hemlock, and fir; where the trees had been cut down, but the ground not further cleared, there grew every kind of underwood, bush, briar, and climbing-plant; the wild cucumber trailing its long shoots; blackberries as big as English mulberries; huckleberries; thimbleberries; yellow salmon berries; and sweet sal-lal; for this is the country where the King of Berry-land holds his court.

Under the trees, and wherever there is a glade or opening, there are huge ferns: it is a land of greenery and sunshine; a land where everywhere trickling streams make carpets of spongy moss, and the air is soft like unto the air of England. On the right hand, looking east, are the great mountains, and on the left, if you can see it, the broad Pacific.

High up among the hills at this time of year, which is autumn (or else the berries would not be ripe), the farmers and their families camp out-the girls sleeping in tents and the boys in the open; they shoot, fish, gather berries, and make jam-buckets of jam, casks of jam, hogsheads of jam-breathe as sweet and pure an air as there is anywhere in the world (except, of course, Dartmoor, Hexham Common, and the top of Malvern Hill), and presently go home again, ready for the winter's dances, flirtations and sledging and skating and fun. Also on the slopes of those mountains live herdsmen, mostly eremites or solitaries, who doubtless meditate on things holy and spiritual among their cattle; and, just as the holy men of old were continually troubled by devils permitted to assume the forms of men or women-especially the latter so these herdsmen are hindered in their spiritual musings by bears, grey wolves, and coyotes. And they do not go away in the winter like the campers-out, but abide upon the hills and endure hardness and frost, snow and hail, rain and wind, in their

season.

The clearing and cabin of which I speak stood quite alone, and at least ten miles from any other farm. In Europe a man would be afraid to live in so solitary a fashion; in Oregon, loneliness is not so much felt, because there is nothing to be afraid of. Very few of these hermits in log-huts have got anything to lose, and if they had there would be no one to rob them. Wayfarers by day are few and far between; wayfarers by night exist not; while as

for ghosts, phantoms, wraiths, dames blanches, and spectres, they belong to old settled places, and have not yet had time to get farther west than New England; and have their origin in what we fondly call the Romance of History, meaning the murders, robberies, piracies, cruelties, tortures, abductions, fratricides, revenges, wraths, and violences of which, in a new country, there have been as yet comparatively few. In the matter of ghosts, the county of Northumberland, little though it be, would, I am convinced, prove a match for the whole of the United States taken together (with Canada thrown in), excepting only Alaska, which is a grisly and a creepy country, and haunted by troops of devils, in honour of whom the belles of Alaska blacken their faces-a thing done in no other country, and a compliment which must be received as at once delicate and unexpected.

It was a warm afternoon in late September; there was a feeling in the air as if, after four months-nay, six-of splendid sunshine, one ought to be satisfied and contented. Even of warmth and clear skies, there cometh satiety in the end, and certain hymns which speak hopefully concerning everlasting sunshine were written by poets imperfectly acquainted with human wants, and ignorant of the tropics. I believe an expurgated edition of the hymn-book has been prepared, in which a Paradise with occasional clouds is dwelt upon, for the use of our equatorial brethren. Nature, in fact, was saying as plainly as she could speak: 'I could now, thank you, enjoy a little coolness, with clouds and rain, in order to turn my green leaves into red, and crimson and gold, for the delight of humans. After that I will trouble you for the customary frost and snow; but all in moderation.' Everybody who can hear the voice of Nature should immediately make haste to be in harmony with her. Then they will be strong and sturdy in the winter; hopeful in the spring, and brimming over with love for everybody, especially for those who are still young and beautiful; in the summer, they will be meditative, drowsy, and slumberous; and in the autumn, whether or no a man wears that blue ribbon about which they make nowadays such a coil, he should feel the vinous mystery of the season, and grow drunk, if only in imagination, upon the fruits and harvest of the year.

There were two men outside that log-hut on the shady-side, which was the front; between them was a table (home-made), on which were cards, tobacco, a pannikin, and a whisky-bottle. One had a chair; the other sat on an empty keg turned bottom upwards. The man on the keg was the squire or owner of the clearing, and lived alone in the hut. A man of five-and-forty, or perhaps fifty, about the middle height, and spare; he wore a long beard, and his hair was long. Both beard and hair were brown, touched with grey; he had regular features, which had been once, probably, handsome, but weak; and blue eyes, which wandered as he spoke, and were unsteady. His fingers were long and delicate;