With such simple knowledge as he possessed, he stuped the patient's face with cold water and offered him that most masculine panacea, a glass of brandy from his private flask, which poor old Wertley did not refuse; but the bleeding was not stanched.

Then David, much alarmed, summoned the nurse-tender in haste, and bade her continue the stuping, whilst he ran off breathlessly to the dispensary in Hampstead. Not twenty minutes had elapsed when he came dashing up the avenue in a cab with a doctor at his side, whom he led upstairs to the bed-side of the patient. On the way he had been able to give the doctor some history of the old gentleman's constitutional affection; and it required no great skill to arrive at the source of this sudden attack and its treatment. The bleeding they found to be stopped, and danger for the present seemed over. David was complimented upon his judgment in administering a dose of brandy, which was, in fact, suggested to him by mere rude instinct. But there was one injunction which the medical man laid down with emphasisthe patient must be spared the smallest excitement or disturbance.

To David's question, whether it would be possible to have Mr. Wertley quietly removed to his own house, not two miles distant, the doctor replied briefly:

"It might be fatal; by quiet and great care, there is hope. If he has any near relations I should communicate with them at once."

This latter advice was spoken impressively to David in the hall, as the doctor shook hands with him ere departing.

As David stood alone, a second time he took counsel with himself. The cab had not yet left the door, and the doctor was returning to Hampstead on foot, when David came to his resolution.

"There is but one course here," he thought; "it is false delicacy to hesitate. I wish it, but it is also right."

He went out, and entering the cab drove to London post-haste, stopped at the first telegraph-office, and telegraphed the news to Miss Wertley. Having done it, he emerged bewildered into the sunlight. The man was so lucky as to have done a virtuous act, and at the same time worked his will.

When Beldame Duty and Siren Desire point the same way, what a noble little animal is man! he ties the token of the former in his helmet, and charges home with a flourish of trumpets, amplifying on his conduct with an unctuous zeal; nothing can withstand him, when he holds such high warrant to delight.

The next consideration which assailed him in his bewildered counsel with himself was, how to lodge her; how to feast her; how to welcome her; since it was fated she should be his guest. He stood still like a wax-figure opposite a fragrant sausage-shop, debating with himself in a sort of suppressed rapture, which passers-by mistook for gross appetite.

There was a good room adjoining that in which old Wertley lay, and this he dedicated as her abode; but he was profoundly perplexed as

to how a young lady's room ought to be furnished. Upon this question there was need of immediate decision. Glaring at the frying sausages, at the potman's shining face, and the gilded letters on the wall, he strove to recall to his mind the arrangement of his mother's bedroom when she lived. Some of the furniture, he knew, was still extant; but many indispensables were long ago broken up or sold. He thrust his hand into his pocket and felt his purse. With the assurance communicated by that grasp, he set off to a neighbouring perennial auction; and there he had knocked down to him a pretty oval glass with a gilt frame, a plated candlestick, and a fancy glass ewer and basin, a pair of lustre ornaments for the chimney-piece, and such useless trifles, chosen with all the jealous selection of a child furnishing its baby-house.

With this upholstery he returned home in a cab, and transported it to the room which was to be so highly honoured. In the lumber-room he foraged among the wreck of furniture which once belonged to their large town-house; and a marble dressing-table turned up, and was immediately washed and repaired; an old drawing-room carpet came to light, from which he cut the freshest piece, all roses and rhubarb-leaves and brown arabesques: this he noiselessly laid down without tacks, so as not to disturb the patient within. With the aid of a neighbouring carpenter he contrived to erect a sort of French bed with snowy curtains and coverlid, artistically applied by the laundress. The arrangement of the table, the glass, the lustres, and other superfluities came about like fairywork, till he could not recognise the room; till a sort of awe began to seize him, as if the room were consecrated already to the coming tenant. It was a shrine for his patron saint; it was a woman's room, and he retired from it. In fact, once he had called it in his mind Miss Wertley's room, our young Quixote would not have put his foot within it again for a ten-pound note.

He calculated the hour of her arrival on the ensuing day, and still with chivalric delicacy he arranged that her own maid should meet her at the station, and accompany her to the house. He laid down a strict code of conduct for himself, actuated by a perverse yet noble pride, by scruples which steady, sensible, worldly folk can scarcely appreciate.

"One thing I am resolved on," thought he, "of one thing let her be sure, I shall take no advantage of her situation by word or act to forward my own wishes. I will wait upon her with zeal out of sight; but I will never tax her gratitude, or by a moment's unnecessary intrusion add to her humiliation. That is fixed and sure."

That evening Mr. Wertley gave him some trouble by his contempt for the doctor's directions, evidenced in his expressed determination to get home somehow.

"My dear friend," he said feebly, "if I were to be trundled in a wheelbarrow, I would go. I cannot remain in your father's house.”

Here David urged that it was his house, that he paid the rent, that his name was in the lease, and that he had a long debt of hospitality to

repay. He then told him that his daughter would probably arrive in the morning, having been telegraphed for by the doctor's advice. This intelligence seemed to place his illness before Mr. Wertley's mind in an alarming point of view. It implied that he was in danger, and the extreme faintness he experienced from the endeavour to rise completed the impression. He suffered David, therefore, and the nurse-tender to undress him gently, and put him comfortably beneath the clothes.

David sat by him for an hour or so, and reassured him, as far as was prudent, by foretelling a speedy recovery with common care and quiet; for the old gentleman had begun to whine and fuss a little, and to talk tremulously of his worldly affairs.

Eventually he grew calm, and settled into a sound sleep, which was unbroken till the morning, when old Chantrey was civil enough to knock at his door and make a good-natured inquiry from without, how he felt himself. Then came David, carrying a breakfast-tray himself, drowsy-eyed and languid after his night's watch. He had made the toast himself, and, not forgetful of the doctor's compliment, had brought a small glass of brandy to flavour the tea withal. He sat by the patient's side and read the newspaper to him in a low voice, following it up with words of cheer and solicitous hospitality, till the sound of wheels upon the gravel startled him; and he hastened from the room and nervously down to the hall, in supreme doubt whether he should show himself so as to give her the welcome that was in his heart to give, or whether it would be kinder to her to keep out of her sight, and let the maid show her up.

When once, however, he saw through the window-slit of the hall a cab standing at the door with a valise on top-when once he beheld a lady's figure get hastily out, he manned himself, and all that boyish fluttering of anticipation departed. He felt what he ought to be to her, and his course of conduct seemed on that instant to stand clear before him.

A Rescue.

IN TWO CHAPTERS.

CHAPTER I.

WHEN I first came to London, and arrived at the dignity of possessing chambers of my own, I led the sort of life which perhaps scarcely bears telling on paper, but I am very much afraid the sort of life that most young men of two- or three-and-twenty, who are not utterly milksops, do lead when similarly circumstanced. I hope I was not more vicious than the rest-I certainly was not much better. I was supposed to be reading for the bar; but I fear it was only a supposition. My legal books were readily laid aside on the slightest prospect of an hour or two's amusement, and my conscience soon eased by the conviction that "the proper study for mankind was man." Of course I lived in the Temple, as sucking barristers should do. London life presented to me all the attractions with which most novices invest it, and with good reason; for the streets of London have great attractions, even when the charms of novelty are gone. In large assemblies of human kind, adventures of the most romantic nature happen at times when they are least expected, and in places where you would little think of looking for them. So strangely does chance occasionally help us to our ends, that there are times when it would be more easy to believe some mighty magician had waved his magic wand, and called up the individual whose name has just been on our lips, or whose image has just crossed our mind, rather than that the commonest accident had brought about the actual presence. Unexpected coincidences constantly occur, at which mothers and sisters might shake their heads, if sons and brothers ever detailed them at home, but which they would be fain to admit were quite as interesting as many a tale read with thrilling excitement, and pronounced too strange to be true.

Being essentially of a gregarious nature, fond of my species, and generally convivial and light-hearted, I could never get over my constitutional, but most un-English, tendency to talk to the people who happened to be near me, whether in places of amusement, an omnibus, on board a steamboat, in fact, any where where I got a fair opportunity for holding converse with my species.

I led a careless rambling life for three years before I began to settle down steadily to work; the time, however, was fast approaching when I should be called to the bar, and have to show what had been the results of my residence within the precincts of the learned in the law. As I was resolved not to disgrace myself, I seriously made up my mind to

go in for some hard reading. I took this resolution the more readily, as I began to find that theatres, casinos, club-dinners, even Vauxhall, then in its last struggles for existence and with the thousand additional lamps, did not quite satisfy the highest aims of life. One fine morning, Balzac and Paul de Kock were replaced by Blackstone and Coke upon Lyttleton. I turned a deaf ear to many an entreaty to brush my hat and take a stroll; I worked hard and late to make up for lost time, and really did not find the change unpleasant, although it was effected in the spring of 1851, the year of the first Great Exhibition, when London offered more than its usual inducements to the idler and the pleasureseeker.

This condition of affairs had continued uninterruptedly for about two months, when, in one of the hottest of July afternoons, I went as usual for my quiet dinner to the Cock in Fleet Street, where newspapers have not yet gained a footing, or carpets superseded sanded floors; as the waiter is known to have said, "We don't go there to read newspapers!" Well, after the due consumption of my repast, and my usual chat with my neighbour, or random flow of observation to any one who might be about, I returned to chambers, a short pipe, and a grind at my books; but on this occasion it would not do. My rooms were pleasantly situated in Paper Buildings, the windows opening into the Temple Gardens; but not a breath of air stirred this sultry evening, and the glowing heat became all but intolerable. In spite of my energetic and enthusiastic application to master some knotty point of law, and see my way through any number of comments on the same, I felt a frightful craving for fresh air, which seemed just then the most precious, as well as the most unattainable, of nature's gifts in my locality. My mind began to drift away to longings for breezy downs, sheltering woods, sea-side cottages, and pebbly beaches, quiet evenings by the Thames at Medenham, or a pipe on some shady lawn,-until the thoughts of London and my work became odious to me; even Cremorne had lost its attractions, and loomed up hot and dusty in my recollections.

The noise and rattle of Fleet Street had sunk from a roar to a murmur; few other sounds disturbed the leaden overpowering stillness. I felt I could no longer resist the frantic desire that possessed me to go out and gain a breath of air. Black clouds, slowly gathering up the river, indicated a coming storm, which promised to bring rain, and with it moisture and coolness to the sultry atmosphere. I closed my books, took my hat, and lighting a pipe, determined on a cruise. It was nearly ten o'clock as I passed through the Temple Gate; I exchanged a confidential nod with the porter, and remarked that "To-night really the heat was too much." Fleet Street was almost deserted; a late omnibus, or a stray cab going to or from the Eastern-Counties terminus, were pretty well all the conveyances astir. Dust settled thick on the pavement; torn papers, broken strawberry-baskets, and sweepings from shops lay in the causeway, testifying to that general disregard for the