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Grenadier Guards; had sold out on his marriage, and had spent three fortunes. I have observed since this period that a ruined spendthrift has never spent less than three fortunes: the number is as arbitrary as the traditional half-crown which a millionaire carries in his pocket when he drops down worn and tired, a friendless boy, in the streets of London. After his wife's death, Harold Catheron had served under Don Carlos, and his daughters had spent the brightest days of their girlhood in Spain. For the last five years my friends had been wanderers in England and on the Continent, never staying very long any where, as I made out from their reminiscences of different places. What did it matter to me how or where my divinity's girlhood had been spent? It was enough for me to know that she was beautiful, and that it was my privilege to worship her. The time slipped by. The first cool breezes of autumn found me wandering in the stubbled fields beyond Weldridge with Caroline and her brother for my companions. I had been nearly three months an inmate of my lodging in the little villageinn. Long ago my health and strength had come back to me, and I had been backwards and forwards to the Temple, and had brought my law-books into the country, having argued with myself that it was almost as easy to pursue my studies at Welldridge as in London. But alas for my boyish dreams of greatness! The shades of Bacon and Coke had vanished out of my life. I tried to invoke them, but Caroline Catheron appeared to me in their stead; and after sitting over my books late into the quiet night, I found myself in the morning with no better fruit of my study than the vague remembrance of dreams in which her image had shone upon me. Still I did try honestly to work -still I held steadfastly to the hope of a great future. At the end of every week I wrote a long letter to my mother, in which I told her a good deal about my studies and my improving health, and a very little about my new friends. I meant to write to her at length upon this subject, and to confide entirely in her before I avowed myself to Miss Catheron. But I deferred the composition of this important letter from day to day, and from week to week; and the declaration which I had intended to be such a very formal business burst almost involuntarily from my lips one day while Caroline and I were gathering blackberries in the leafy hollow of a little wood, with Gervoise somewhere in attendance upon us.

"She was standing on a bank that raised her a little above me. She was looking down at me out of a framework of branches that closed around her as she stood there. It was one of her cloudy days, and her capricious temper had kept me in a state of torture all the afternoon. But she had melted suddenly at last, and had complained to me of the wretchedness of her life, the unkindness of her father, the daily degradations to which her poverty exposed her. She had complained to me with tears in her eyes-the peevish tears of a selfish woman who bemoans her own troubles, and has no consciousness of any thing upon this earth

beyond herself and her personal pains and pleasures. But to me those tears were more afflicting than the aspect of a Niobe's anguish. Of all unreasoning passions, a boy's love is the most entirely unreasoning. And is a man's love so much better? Ah, Marcia! Even now, when I fancy myself so wise, do I love you because you are good and pure and holy? or do I love you only because I love you? By my life and soul, I cannot answer that question. But if I heard to-morrow that you had poisoned every one of those poor village children amongst whom I have seen you sitting, so sweet and saintly a creature, that I have wondered not to see a halo of supernal light shine out from among the shadows round your head, I scarcely think that I could love you less, so little within my own volition is the one absorbing sentiment that has become the first principle of my life. Forgive me for introducing your name into this record, which I had intended to make only an unvarnished statement of my miserable history; but your image and the madness of the present thrust themselves every now and then between me and the images of the past, and I forget that I have no right to tell you all I feel and suffer; I forget that I have no right to sully your name by inscribing it upon these pages.

"The sight of Miss Catheron's distress put all my prudent resolutions to flight. She was very unhappy with her father, she said; he did not care for her properly; when he was kindest he only treated her like a favourite spaniel; when he was out of temper he treated her worse than any dog was ever used since this world began. She said this in little snatches of words between passionate sobs, as she stood above me plucking pettishly at the leaves and brambles in the hedge about her. She talked to me with her face half-turned away, and I doubt if she was conscious of my presence. It was a relief to her to complain, and she complained. She showed me a scar across her plump white arm, the mark of a red-hot poker with which her father had struck her one day in his passion; but she acknowledged that he had not known the poker was hot. Her brother was rude and tiresome, she said; her sister had married well, and had gone away to India, to enjoy life amongst all sorts of delightful people, without one thought about leaving her to poverty and wretchedness, and cross landladies and shabby dresses. Her sister was a selfish creature, and had never loved her properly. No one loved her properly-no one-no one-no one!

"She beat her foot upon the ground, passionately moved by some deeper emotion than I had ever seen in her yet, as she reiterated those last words.

"Oh, Miss Catheron!' I cried; 'oh, Caroline, you must know how much I love you! you must know how much I-IDOLISE you!'

"I blushed as I uttered the big word, I believed so implicitly in myself and my own emotion. Caroline Catheron turned and looked down at me; her peevish frown vanished, and a half-amused smile lighted her face.

"You are such a boy compared to me,' she said. 'I don't believe you know what you are talking about.'

"Of course I told her that the passion which reigned in my heart of hearts was eternal as the sky that overarched us that autumn afternoon. Alastor and the Revolt of Islam were terribly familiar to my lips in those days; and I blush even now when I think of the rhodomontade in which I set forth my feelings for Miss Catheron. She was pleased with the romantic nonsense. It was her nature to be delighted with admiration and flattery, whencesoever it came. She forgot all about her troubles for the moment, and graciously condescended to stroll through the wood by my side, listening to my rhapsodies with drooping eyelids and a faint blush upon her cheeks. But if Caroline was forgetful of the evils she had so lately bewailed, I was not. I told her that if she would only accept the devotion of my life, she might be rescued at once from all the miseries of her existence, removed for ever from the ill-treatment of her father. It was true that I was for the moment by no means a rich man, having only a hundred a-year from my uncle, independent of my labour; but in a few years I should be called to the bar. And then I gave the reins to my ambitious imaginings, and informed my divinity of the glorious career I had mapped-out for myself; a career which I must certainly achieve if she were by my side, the sweet companion of my toils, the idolised wife for whose dear sake the labours of a Hercules would seem the lightest tasks that ever man performed victoriously. I told her how, through the influence of my father's old friend the recluse of the Temple, I had already earned a good deal of money by writing certain learned essays for a quarterly review, and how I could rely on doubling my income from this source. And then the future! I had very little to offer my divinity in the present; but there are few grander prizes on this earth than those I promised her in the glorious days that were to come. She listened to me always with the same half-smile upon her rosy lips.

"Papa wouldn't much care whom I married, so long as he got rid of me,' she said, when I begged her to let me speak to her father. 'He used to talk very grandly about my making a great marriage, if I-if I did as he wished; but girls who wear washed-out muslin, and live in stupid lodgings in out-of-the-way villages, don't marry dukes or millionaires every day in the year; and I think papa begins to understand that.'

"I accepted this as a kind of permission to declare myself to her father; and then I implored her to answer the one grand question on which my future depended. Did she love me? Ah, no! I called back the presumptuous words the moment they were uttered. Was it not the wildest folly to imagine that she could love me? Would she tolerate my love? would she graciously permit me to be her slave? would she kindly consent to my lying prostrate in the dust at her feet? would she generously condescend to set her foot upon my neck? It was in some

such phraseology as this that I asked Caroline Catheron to be my wife. It is not thus, Marcia, that, were I a free man, I would ask you the same solemn question. I could win no decided answer from the capricious beauty. She tortured me by coquettish little speeches about her own heartlessness; her unfitness to be the wife of a struggling man; the difference between our ages; the incompatibility of our tempers. But her words and her manner were utterly at variance. On the one hand, she threw every imaginable obstacle in the way of my suit; while, on the other, she gave me every encouragement to go on suing.

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"I don't suppose I shall ever marry at all,' she said. 'You know what a dreadful temper mine is, and how I have been spoiled by indulgence. If you want a submissive wife, you should marry some little fair-haired person with pink cheeks and white eyelashes. Dumpy people with freckles are generally amiable, I believe. You don't know how tired you would be of my temper after a week or two. Papa and I are always quarrelling. I give you fair warning, you see, of what you have to expect.'

"What I had to expect! That phrase sounded as if I was accepted. And for the warning, what warning would have stayed me in that mad folly of my boyhood? If a hand had come down from heaven to write the character of this woman in letters of fire across her brow, I would have believed in her beauty, and not in the writing that defaced it. I asked that night for a private interview with Mr. Catheron, and my request was granted. When I offered him my humble supplications to be received as the suitor of his daughter, he smiled graciously upon me, pleased, he said, by my boyish fervour, so refreshing in our degenerate days. He would not say no; he would not say yes. He would only say Wait! I was such a mere lad, he told me, that it would be foolish to depend too much upon the endurance of an affection whose highest charm was its youthful poetry. These boyish passions have sometimes withstood the wear and tear of a lifetime, and have endured in all their freshness to the grave; but, on the other hand, your early attachments are so apt to be fleeting; and of all the millstones you can tie round a man's neck, when you want to sink him effectually, a long engagement is the heaviest.

"You say my daughter is disposed to look kindly on your suit,' Mr. Catheron said in conclusion. She is older than you by a year or two; but in character she is a mere child, and I should doubt her power to understand her own feelings. I can only say again, Wait! Go back to your studies; remember that the future you talk of can only be won by unremitting work; but come and see us now and then-every Sunday if you like. A quiet day in the country will re-fit you after your week's labours. Treat my daughter as if she were your friend or your sister, and by and bye, when you are a year or two older and wiser, we will begin to think of a marriage. In the mean time there shall be no

engagement whatever between you and Carry; and if you see any one you like better, you will be quite free to change your mind.'

"I had no argument to oppose against this very reasonable arrangement, and I gladly accepted it. Mr. Catheron gave me his blessing at parting, and further bestowed upon me a miniature of his two daughters, painted for him by an artist of some distinction before Leonora's marriage, and, as I have since had reason to believe, never paid for. With this treasure in my possession I went back to London at the end of the week, and set to work once more amongst my books in the dreary chambers under the tiled roof that had sheltered so many generations of briefless barristers. But the mighty shadows of the past had utterly deserted me, and the image of a beautiful woman was the only presence that kept me company in the long night-watches.

"When I went back to Weldridge to pay my first Sunday visit I wore a deep band of crape upon my hat, and I carried in my pocket a black-edged letter containing the news of my youngest cousin's death. The boy had been removed from Eton to fade slowly at Pierrepoint— the first victim to the hereditary taint that poisoned the blood of my uncle Weldon's race. Nothing could have been more sympathetic than Mr. Catheron's manner when I told him how the child had been the pet and darling of his household and our own. I looked to Caroline for sweeter consolation than any her father could give me; but she received my sad tidings very coolly, and said the little boy was no doubt much happier where he had gone, and it would be absurd to grieve for him. I wish I had died when I was a child,' she said; 'I'm sure I should have escaped all kinds of worry and trouble, and people would have been sorry for me, and would have said all manner of sentimental things about me; while as it is, I daresay every body will be very glad when I die.'

"Of course I told her that desolation and despair would attend her death, let it come when it would. I have prayed since that time-fervent passionate prayers-that I might be saved from the sin of wishing for her death, and yet have wished it in spite of my prayers.

"I wrote to my mother as often as ever; but not as frankly as of old. My heart always failed me when I wanted to tell her of Caroline and my love. There would be so much for me to explain. I should have to answer so many questions. And then Captain Catheron was not in the position he had a right to occupy, and there would be the dreary story of a spendthrift's downfall to tell; and the story might prejudice my mother against Caroline. On the other hand, I argued that as I had entered into no positive engagement, there was really very little worth telling. There would be plenty of time for explanations by and bye. I worked steadily every week, rarely leaving my chambers except for an hour's walk in the dusk of the evening, or for a day's work in the reading-room of the British Museum. I extended my literary connections after my return from Weldridge, and was a