looked at her hard with her clear thoughtful eyes. A vision rose before her of Mr. Crockett, amiable, weak-eyed, feebly admiring, and of young Hans Lefevre as he had looked when he walked in among them that day, simple and erect, with his honest eagle face and the grand seigneur manner of people who have not lived in the world, but who instinctively hold their own among other men and women, and then Lady Stella took Lina's hand and kissed it. She could not say anything to her, for in her own kind heart of hearts she felt that the girl had a right to cry out against that strange superstition which condemned her. Stella being gone, Lina's burst of indignation over, the reaction having set in, she sat as I have said-shivering at the thought of her own bold speech. Had she saved Hans from any dangerous step? that at least she need not regret; for did she not owe thus much to him and to her friendship? and in all her perplexed regret it was peace to have seen him again-to have spoken her mind, not to a stranger, but to a friend. It was a sort of farewell, thought Lina, to the might-have-been that would never be hers. Good-by, said her heart; you have sown no grain, you can reap no harvest in life. There is no happiness anywhere, but perhaps there may be some work and a little courage to do it; and then came the old refrain.

"My poor papa, my poor papa," sighed Lina, looking in through the open window at the sleeping man, "I have been false to you, and to my friend and to myself, and yet I meant to be true;" and she hid her pale face in her hands. The sun-set had spread by this time, and Lina's golden hair was burning in a sort of sunset aureole, lighting that shadowy corner. She heard a step fall on the stones, and looking round with her tear-dimmed face she saw Hans standing erect in the full blaze of light, smiling and undismayed.

"You here?" she cried, faltering. 66 Oh, why have you come?" and she started up half frightened, and held out her hand, saying, "Go. Papa

is there; he will hear you."

But Hans did not move, and stood holding her hand. know why I have come back?" he said.

"Don't you

The sight of her tears gave him strange courage. "I have come back because I could not keep away. And now that I am here you must know that I love you."

“Oh, no, no!" said poor Lina, passionately; "this is the last time; the last time."

"Listen," he said, with some decision; "I must speak now. Can't you love me better than all these things which do not make you happy? I love you well enough not to be afraid that you will ever regret them."

What a strange love-making was this, flashing into the last sunset minutes of this dying day-love-making to the sinking of the sun, in its burning lights, its sumptuous glooms and sombre flashes! The distant

lights seemed to call to her, his voice and looks seemed to call, and for one instant Hans' arm was round her, and she did not move or speakonly her eyes spoke.

Jack of the Bean-stalk carried his precious golden harp boldly away, notwithstanding its piteous outcries. There is a picture of him wielding his prize in one hand, and warding off the giant with the other. To-night it was no giant awakening—but an old man still asleep in an arm-chair by the window-and, for all his cruelty and harshness, Lina was the only person he loved: how could she forget it?"Yes, I do love you," she said; "but I can't-I can't leave him so. Don't ask it-oh, don't ask it. Papa! papa!" she called, in a shrill, pitiful voice, suddenly clasping Hans in her arms.

Then Sir George, hearing his daughter's voice, woke up, and in his stupid, half-tipsy sleep, he started from his chair, and came staggering out into the garden. And as he came, his foot caught in some mat in the window, and with one more oath he fell, with a heavy thud, upon the ground, where he lay senseless. His daughter shrieked, and ran to help him. Hans helped her to raise him from the ground. "I had better go for a doctor," he said, for he saw the case was serious.

The frightened servants coming in presently, found Miss Gorges alone, kneeling on the ground, and trying to staunch the blood that was flowing from the wound in her father's head.

XVIII.

He rallied a little, but the Baronet was never himself again. The shock brought on paralysis, which had long been impending, and he died within a year. This paralysis may (as doctors will tell us) perhaps have been the secret of his mad furies and ravings. During his illness the story of the negotiation with Butcher came out, and cost Jasper his election. Tom Parker disclosed the transaction. The Duke and his son Lord Henry were indignant beyond words. "It was a shabby plot; the Gorges tried to get up a Radical diversion, and were to pay half the expenses," Lord Henry told every one. "Bridges suspected the whole affair, and refused to have anything to do with it, and so did young Lefevre, whom they tried to bring forward. He is a very fine fellow," said Lord Henry, who could afford to be generous; "I hear he has cut the whole concern since then."

"But they tell me he is engaged to Miss Gorges," said the Duchess. "It seems a strange affair altogether."

When the Baronet died, it was found that he had not signed his will. Lady Gorges took her jointure, Lina only received her great-aunt's inheritance; it was little enough, but it came in conveniently for her

housekeeping when the "strange affair came off. There was no strangeness for Lina on the day when Hans brought her home. After her father's death she wrote to him, and he came and fetched her away. For the first time in her life Lina felt satisfied and at peace. Not the less that sweet Lady Stella's fears were over, and she had only brightest sympathies to give. Lady Gorges had no opinion on the subject; now that Sir George was dead, she subsided utterly, and agreed with everything and everybody. Mrs. Lefevre lived in one wing of the house, and spoilt her grandchildren. Hans rose in the world: his joint farming company flourished, and his writings became widely known, and one day his name appeared at the head of the Hillford poll, and the Radical member was returned at last. Then Emelyn felt that in some mysterious way an answer had come to the problems of her own life. She had failed, but she had lived, and here was her son who had done some good works, and who seemed in some measure to be the answer to her vague prayers for better things. She had scarcely known what she wanted, but whatever it was, her life had unconsciously influenced this one man towards right-doing; and there are few women who would not feel with Emelyn Lefevre, that in their children's well-doing and success there is a blessing and a happiness even beyond the completeness of one single experience.

457

Sunset on Mont Blanc.

I PROFESS myself to be a loyal adherent of the ancient Monarch of Mountains, and, as such, I hold as a primary article of faith the doctrine that no Alpine summit is, as a whole, comparable in sublimity and beauty to Mont Blanc. With all his faults and weaknesses, and in spite of a crowd of upstart rivals, he still deserves to reign in solitary supremacy. Such an opinion seems to some mountaineers as great an anachronism as the creed of a French Legitimist. The coarse flattery of guide-books has done much to surround him with vulgarising associations; even the homage of poets and painters has deprived his charms of their early freshness, and climbers have ceased to regard his conquest as a glorious, or, indeed, as anything but a most commonplace exploit. And yet Mont Blanc has merits which no unintelligent worship can obscure, and which bind with growing fascination the unprejudiced lover of scenery. Tried by a low, but not quite a meaningless standard, the old monarch can still extort respect. He can show a longer list of killed and wounded than any other mountain in the Alps, or almost than all other mountains put together. In his milder moods he may be approached with tolerable safety even by the inexperienced; but in angry moments, when he puts on his robe of clouds and mutters with his voice of thunder, no mountain is so terrible. Even the light snow-wreaths that eddy gracefully across his brow in fine weather sometimes testify to an icy storm that pierces the flesh and freezes the very marrow of the bones. But we should hardly estimate the majesty of men or mountains by the length of their butcher's bill. Mont Blanc has other and less questionable claims on our respect. He is the most solitary of mountains, rising, Saul-like, a head and shoulders above the crowd of attendant peaks, and yet, within that single mass, there is greater prodigality of the sublimest scenery than in whole mountain districts of inferior elevation. The sternest and most massive of cliffs, the wildest spires of distorted rock, bounding torrents of shattered ice, snow-fields polished and even as a sea-shell, are combined into a whole of infinite variety and yet of artistic unity. One might wander for days, were such wandering made possible by other conditions, amongst his crowning snows, and every day would present new combinations of unsuspected grandeur.

Why, indeed, some critics will ask, should we love a ruler of such questionable attributes? Scientifically speaking, the so-called monarch is but so many tons of bleak granite determining a certain quantity of aqueous precipitation. And if for literary purposes it be permissible

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to personify a monstrous rock, the worship of such a Moloch has in it something unnatural. In the mouth of the poet who first invested him with royal honours, the language was at least in keeping. Byron's misanthropy, real or affected, might identify love of nature with hatred of mankind and a savage, shapeless and lifeless idol was a fitting centre for his enthusiasm. But we have ceased to believe in the Childe Harolds and the Manfreds. Become a hermit-denounce your species, and shrink from their contact, and you may consistently love the peaks where human life exists on sufferance, and whose message to the valleys is conveyed in wasting torrents or crushing avalanches. Men of saner mind who repudiate this anti-social creed, should love the fertile valleys and grass-clad ranges better than these symbols of the sternest desolation. All the enthusiasm for the wilder scenery, when it is not simple affectation, is the product of a temporary phase of sentiment, of which the raisond'être has now ceased to exist. To all which the zealot may perhaps reply most judiciously, Be it as you please. Prefer, if you see fit, a Leicestershire meadow or even a Lincolnshire fen to the cliff and glacier, and exalt the view from the Crystal Palace above the widest of Alpine panoramas. Natural scenery, like a great work of art, scorns to be tied down to any cut and dried moral. To each spectator it suggests a different train of thought and emotion, varying as widely as the idiosyncrasy of the mind affected. If Mont Blanc produces in you nothing but a sense of hopeless savagery, well and good; confess it honestly to your self and to the world, and do not help to swell the chorus of insincere ecstasy. But neither should you quarrel with those in whom the same sight produces emotions of a very different kind. That man is the happiest and wisest who can draw delight from the most varied objects: from the quiet bandbox scenery of cultivated England, or from the boundless prairies of the West; from the Thames or the Amazon, Malvern or Mont Blanc, the Virginia water or the Atlantic Ocean. If the reaction which made men escape with sudden ecstasy from trim gardens to rough mountain sides was somewhat excessive, yet there was in it a core of sound feeling. Does not science teach us more and more emphatically that nothing which is natural can be alien to us who are part of nature? Where does Mont Blanc end, and where do I begin? That is a question which no metaphysician has hitherto succeeded in answering. But at least the connection is close and intimate. He is a part of the great machinery in which my physical frame is inextricably involved, and not the less interesting because a part which I am unable to subdue to my purposes. The whole universe, from the stars and the planets to the mountains and the insects which creep about their roots, is but a network of forces eternally acting and reacting upon each other. The mind of man is a musical instrument upon which all external objects are beating out infinitely complex harmonies and discords. Too often, indeed, it becomes a mere barrel-organ, mechanically repeating the tunes which have once been impressed upon it. But in proportion as it is