this that I have sat night after night in my father's study, poring over the books that were too difficult for him? What have I made of myself in my pride of intellect? What reward have I won for my patience?"

Olivia Arundel looked back at her long life of duty,—a dull, dead level, unbroken by one of those monuments which mark the desert of the past; a desolate flat, unlovely as the marshes between the low Rectorywall and the shimmering gray sea.

CHAPTER VIII.

TEMPTATION.

MR. RICHARD PAULETTE, of that eminent legal firm, Paulette, Paulette, and Mathewson, coming to Marchmont Towers on business, was surprised to behold the quiet ease with which the sometime copyingclerk received the punctilious country gentry who came to sit at his board and do him honour.

Of all the legal fairy-tales, of all the parchment-recorded romances, of all the poetry run into affidavits, in which the solicitor had ever been concerned, this story seemed the strangest. Not so very strange in itself, for such romances are not uncommon in the history of a lawyer's experience; but strange by reason of the tranquil manner in which John Marchmont accepted his new position, and did the honours of his house to his late employer.

friend

"Ah, Paulette," Edward Arundel said, clapping the solicitor on the back, "I don't suppose you believed me when I told you that my here was heir-presumptive to a handsome fortune."

The dinner-party at the Towers was conducted with that stately grandeur peculiar to such solemnities. There was the usual round of country-talk and parish-talk; the hunting squires leading the former section of the discourse, the rectors and rectors' wives supporting the latter part of the conversation. You heard on one side that Martha Harris's husband had left off drinking, and attended church morning and evening; and on the other that the old gray fox that had been hunted nine seasons between Crackbin Bottom and Hollowcraft Gorse had perished ignobly in the poultry-yard of a recusant farmer. While your left ear became conscious of the fact that little Billy Smithers had fallen into a copper of scalding water, your right received the dismal tidings that all the young partridges had been drowned by the rains after St. Swithin, and that there were hardly any of this year's birds, sir.

Mary Marchmont had listened to gayer talk in Oakley Street than any that was to be heard that night in her father's drawing-rooms, except indeed when Edward Arundel left off flirting with some pretty girls in blue, and hovered near her side for a little while, quizzing the company. Heaven knows the young soldier's jokes were commonplace enough; but Mary admired him as the most brilliant and accomplished of wits.

"How do you like my cousin, Polly?" he asked at last. "Your cousin, Miss Arundel?"

"Yes."

"She is very handsome."

"Yes, I suppose so," the young man answered carelessly. "Every body says that Livy's handsome; but it's rather a cold style of beauty, isn't it? A little too much of the Pallas Athene about it for my taste. I like those girls in blue, with the crinkly auburn hair,-there's a touch of red in it in the light, and the dimples. You've a dimple, Polly, when you smile."

Miss Marchmont blushed as she received this information, and her soft brown eyes wandered away, looking very earnestly at the pretty girls in blue. She looked at them with a strange interest, eager to discover what it was that Edward admired.

"But you haven't answered my question, Polly," said Mr. Arundel. "I am afraid you have been drinking too much wine, Miss Marchmont, and muddling that sober little head of yours with the fumes of your papa's tawny port. I asked you how you liked Olivia."

Mary blushed again.

"I don't know Miss Arundel well enough to like her-yet," she answered timidly.

"But shall you like her when you've known her longer? Don't be jesuitical, Polly. Likings and dislikings are instantaneous and instinctive. I liked you before I'd eaten half a dozen mouthfuls of the roll you buttered for me at that breakfast in Oakley Street, Polly. You don't like my cousin Olivia, miss; I can see that very plainly. You're jealous of her."

"Jealous of her!"

The bright colour faded out of Mary Marchmont's face, and left her ashy pale.

"Do you like her, then?" she asked.

But Mr. Arundel was not such a coxcomb as to catch at the secret so naively betrayed in that breathless question.

"No, Polly," he said, laughing; "she's my cousin, you know, and I've known her all my life; and cousins are like sisters. One likes to tease and aggravate them, and all that; but one doesn't fall in love with them. But I think I could mention somebody who thinks a great deal of Olivia."

"Who?"

"Your papa."

Mary looked at the young soldier in utter bewilderment.

"Papa!" she echoed.

"Yes, Polly. How would you like a step-mamma? How would you like your papa to marry again?"

Mary Marchmont started to her feet, as if she would have gone to her father in the midst of all those spectators. John was standing near Olivia and her father, talking to them, and playing nervously with his slender watch-chain when he addressed the young lady.

"My papa-marry again!" gasped Mary. "How dare you say such a thing, Mr. Arundel?"

Her childish devotion to her father arose in all its force; a flood of passionate emotion that overwhelmed her sensitive nature. Marry again! marry a woman who would separate him from his only child! Could he ever dream for one brief moment of such a horrible cruelty?

She looked at Olivia's sternly handsome face, and trembled. She could almost picture that very woman standing between her and her father, and putting her away from him. Her indignation quickly melted into grief. Indignation, however intense, was always short-lived in that gentle nature.

"Oh, Mr. Arundel!" she said piteously, appealing to the young man; papa would never, never, never marry again,—would he?”

"Not if it was to grieve you, Polly, I dare say," Edward answered soothingly.

He had been dumbfounded by Mary's passionate sorrow. He had expected that she would have been rather pleased, than otherwise, at the idea of a young stepmother,—a companion in those vast lonely rooms, an instructress and a friend as she grew to womanhood.

"I was only talking nonsense, Polly darling," he said. "You mustn't make yourself unhappy about any absurd fancies of mine. I think your papa admires my cousin Olivia; and I thought, perhaps, you'd be glad to have a stepmother."

"Glad to have any one who'd take papa's love away from me?" Mary said plaintively. "Oh, Mr. Arundel, how could you think

so ?"

In all their familiarity the little girl had never learned to call her father's friend by his Christian name, though he had often told her to do

so.

She trembled to pronounce that simple Saxon name, which was so beautiful and wonderful because it was his; but when she read a very stupid novel, in which the hero was a namesake of Mr. Arundel's, the vapid pages seemed to be phosphorescent with light wherever the name appeared upon them.

I scarcely know why John Marchmont lingered by Miss Arundel's chair. He had heard her praises from every one. She was a paragon of goodness, an uncanonised saint, ever sacrificing herself for the benefit of others. Perhaps he was thinking that such a woman as this would be the best friend he could win for his little girl. He turned from the county matrons, the tender, kindly, motherly creatures, who would have been ready to take little Mary to the loving shelter of their arms, and looked to Olivia Arundel-this cold, perfect benefactress of the poorfor help in his difficulty.

"She who is so good to all her father's parishioners could not refuse to be kind to my poor Mary?" he thought.

But how was he to win this woman's friendship for his darling? He asked himself this question even in the midst of the frivolous people

He was

about him, and with the buzz of their conversation in his ears. perpetually tormenting himself about the future of his darling, which seemed more dimly perplexing now than it had ever appeared in Oakley Street, when the Lincolnshire property was a far-away dream, never to be realised. He felt that his brief lease of life was running out; he felt as if he and Mary had been standing upon a narrow tract of yellow sand, very bright, very pleasant under the sunshine, but with the slow-coming tide rising like a wall about them, and creeping stealthily onward to overwhelm them.

Mary might gather bright-coloured shells and wet seaweed in her childish ignorance; but he, who knew that the flood was coming, could but grow sick at heart with the dull horror of that hastening doom. If the black waters had been doomed to close over them both, the father might have been content to go down under the sullen waves, with his daughter clasped to his breast. But it was not to be so. He was to sink in that unknown stream while she was left upon the tempest-tossed surface, to be beaten hither and thither, feebly battling with the stormy billows.

Could John Marchmont be a Christian, and yet feel this horrible dread of the death which must separate him from his daughter? I fear this frail, consumptive widower loved his child with an intensity of affection that is scarcely reconcilable with Christianity. Such great passions as these must be put away before the cross can be taken up, and the troublesome path followed. In all love and kindness towards his fellow-creatures, in all patient endurance of the pains and troubles that befel himself, it would have been difficult to find a more singlehearted follower of Gospel-teaching than John Marchmont; but in his affection for his motherless child he was a very Pagan. He set up an idol for himself, and bowed himself before it. Doubtful and fearful of the future, he looked hopelessly forward. He could not trust his orphan child into the hands of God; and drop away himself into the fathomless darkness, serene in the belief that she would be cared for and protected. No; he could not trust. He could be faithful for himself; simple and confiding as a child; but not for her. He saw the gloomy rocks lowering black in the distance; the pitiless waves beating far away yonder, impatient to devour the frail boat that was so soon to be left alone upon the waters. In the thick darkness of the future he could see no ray of light, except one, a new hope that had lately risen in his mind; the hope of winning some noble and perfect woman to be the future friend of his daughter.

The days were past in which, in his simplicity, he had looked to Edward Arundel as the future shelter of his child. The generous boy had grown into a stylish young man, a soldier, whose duty lay far away from Marchmont Towers. No; it was to a good woman's guardianship the father must leave his child.

Thus the very intensity of his love was the one motive which led

John Marchmont to contemplate the step that Mary thought such a cruel and bitter wrong to her.

It was not till long after the dinner-party at Marchmont Towers that these ideas resolved themselves into any positive form, and that John began to think that for his daughter's sake he might be led to contemplate a second marriage. Edward Arundel had spoken the truth when he told his cousin that John Marchmont had repeatedly mentioned her name; but the careless and impulsive young man had been utterly unable to fathom the feeling lurking in his friend's mind. It was not Olivia Arundel's handsome face which had won John's admiration; it was the constant reiteration of her praises upon every side which had led him to believe that this woman, of all others, was the one whom he should win to be his child's friend and guardian in the dark days that were to

come.

The knowledge that Olivia's intellect was of no common order, together with the somewhat imperious dignity of her manner, strengthened this belief in John Marchmont's mind. It was not good woman only whom he must seek in the friend he needed for his child; it was a woman powerful enough to shield her in the lonely path she would have to tread; a woman strong enough to help her, perhaps, by and by to do battle with Paul Marchmont.

So, in the blind paganism of his love, John refused to trust his child into the hands of Providence, and chose for himself a friend and guardian who should shelter his darling. He made his choice with so much deliberation, and after such long nights and days of earnest thought, that he may be forgiven if he believed he had chosen wisely.

Thus it was that in the dark November days, while Edward and Mary played chess by the wide fireplace in the western drawing-room, or ball in the newly-erected tennis-court, John Marchmont sat in his study examining his papers, and calculating the amount of money at his own disposal, in serious contemplation of a second marriage.

No

Did he love Olivia Arundel? No. He admired her and respected her, and he firmly believed her to be the most perfect of women. impulse had prompted the step he contemplated taking. He had loved his first wife truly and tenderly; but he had never suffered very acutely from any of those torturing emotions which form the several stages of the great tragedy called Love.

But had he ever thought of the likelihood of his deliberate offer being rejected by the young lady who had been the object of such careful consideration? Yes; he had thought of this, and was prepared to abide the issue. He should, at least, have tried his uttermost to secure a friend for his darling.

With such unloverlike feelings as these the owner of Marchmont Towers drove into Swampington one morning, deliberately bent upon offering Olivia Arundel his hand. He had consulted with his land