sister's quiet love down in these quiet, unemotional, stagnant parts of the earth!" I thought this in the first burst of my young, untutored inability to stand anything to which custom had not calmed me down. In truth, the knowledge that I was to live this country life, so far away from all that habit had made dear to me in London, would have been insupportable to me, had I not been taking this mental tonic the whole time-namely, that he would be here to share it with me!

There are certain epochs in every woman's existence which ought to be marked with a note of interrogation and a blot. The note of interrogation is for the "reason why" she is ready to make an example of weakness of herself; the blot is-for pity's sake!

The first few days of my stay in Byrne Pomeroy's house were spent -unwillingly enough, as far as I was concerned-apart from him. He was a hard hunter, a man who really meant riding when he went out, and who, therefore, did not care to be hampered with the care of a couple of girls like Ella and myself, who were all very well in the saddle on the highway, but were cumbersome when it came to anything like cross-country work.

But happily for me, as I thought at the time, at the expiration of those few days, a hard frost set in, and scores of mighty hunters in that district were compelled to sulk at home. To his sister's great surprise, Byrne bore his privation unrepiningly. He threw himself heart and soul into the household amusements wherewith his sister and I sought to beguile our time. He wrote charades for us, and acted them too, and even devised and carried out a scheme for having penny readings at the village institute every week, at which Ella and I were to sing and play, and he was to recite, and to imitate, and to generally make an exquisitely intellectual buffoon of himself, whenever he had nothing better to do.

As might have been anticipated by "many far older than we-by many far wiser than we" (if there had been any such matured sages around or about us) the consequences of these philanthropic reunions, in which humour and humanity had equal shares, resulted in an intimacy of the frankest and most dangerous kind between Byrne and myself. He got into the habit of coming to me for counsel and advice-not that he ever dreamt of acting on the former, or accepting the latter; but I was delighted to give it, though sometimes it left me poor indeed, without materially enriching him.

I had lived in my fool's paradise for some three or four weeks, when I began to detect the shadow of a change in Ella. I had loved Ella for herself, from the time I had first met her at school, years ago, until

the hour I met Byrne Pomeroy at the railway station. From that hour I loved her for her brother, and I am bound to confess that the second love was considerably stronger than the first.

It must have been that she was so accustomed to Byrne herself-so very much in the habit of loving him, and thinking it natural that he should be loved-that she took no heed for several days of my rapidly growing infatuation. But one morning a sudden light seemed to dawn upon her, and I saw that her brother and myself were alternately the objects of her most scrutinizing regard. She followed him quietly out of the room, when he went out to take his customary stroll through the stable-a stroll in which I had been wont to join him for some time— and stopped me from joining her with the words

"Wait here, Maggie, till I come back. I want to speak to Byrne alone."

I obeyed her injunction without a protest, but my spirit chafed at what I considered her unjust interference with a privilege of mine which custom had transformed into a right in my estimation. However, I waited for Ella with a degree of outward patience that was exemplary, and when she did return to me, I greeted her with a smile that was far more genuine than my momentary feeling of anger against her had been.

"Where is Byrne?" I asked confidently.

"Gone out for the day," she answered, and there was a slight confusion in her manner which roused an indefinable dread in me.

"Gone out for the day, without a word to me?" I ejaculated. "My dear Maggie! why should Byrne tell you of his outgoings and incomings; one would think--"

She paused abruptly, and I asked-"One would think what?" "That you were Byrne's sister."

"I am very glad I'm not Byrne's sister," I laughed out.

"Come,

Ella, confess the truth; fond as you are of me, you don't like to see that I am becoming number one with Byrne, and that you are number two."

I said it in a laughing, foolishly vain-glorious, but not malicious way, and I was startled to see Ella's face darken and lower ominously.

"Pray don't utter such ridiculous nonsense, even in jest," she said earnestly. "We can never, either of us, be number one with Byrne; he has a wife-he has gone to see her to-day."

All my womanly pride, all my girlish passion, all my hopes for the future, and joy in life, fell down battered and bruised at my feet as she spoke. But the instinct of my respect for her feelings as his sister saved

VOL. I.

9

me from showing her what his treachery had done for me. With the iron eating into my soul, the habit of my class enabled me to speak without a tremor, and to keep the muscles of my face steady, although I felt myself whitening under the conviction that Ella was stabbing me to death out of sheer necessity, and not out of a malicious desire to wound.

All I said was- "Why has he not been to see his wife before?"

"Don't question me too closely about Byrne's wife," she answered impatiently;" she is a subject on which I cannot speak temperately. I will leave it to him to tell you about her-if he can bring himself to do it. Poor child," she added impulsively, coming over to kiss me, and the kindness broke me down.

Kneeling at her feet, with my head on her lap, I sobbed out a mournful plea, that she would tell me why he had deceived me so, why he had tried to make me love him so well, when the love, as he must have known from the first, could never result in anything good for me. But to all my entreaties for an explanation she turned a deaf ear. "Byrne

will tell you all that it is possible for you to know," she kept on repeating, "and he must extenuate his conduct towards you as best he can ; I can't do it for him."

What a miserable day that was! Long, weary, humiliating, memoryracked hours intervened of necessity between the moment when the fatal truth was made manifest to me and the time when he came back to meet me, the girl he had injured, and to clear himself with me if he could.

He came in about half an hour before dinner, and found me waiting alone in the fire-lighted drawing-room. Ella had advised me not to shun a tête-à-téte with him, and, painful as I knew the ordeal would be, I was only too glad to face it as soon as possible.

He came up to me, and placed his hand on my shoulder very gently, and stooped down to kiss me as was his wont. I had taken it so completely for granted that he was to be my husband in due course of time, that I had never dreamt of refusing him the caress, and even now when his lips met mine, and the recollection shot through my mind that he was a married man, I felt that his unknown wife did me a far greater injury by existing, than I could ever do her by manifesting any amount of affection for her husband. All my anguish, all my misery, all my despair and love rose up in arms against the horrible injustice of everything, and I moaned out his name in the tone in which a fallen angel might utter the word Paradise.

"Ella has told you? It's a wretched business, isn't it?" he interrogated.

"She has told me nothing more than that you have a wife," I sobbed, freeing myself from his embrace, and he rose up and stood away from me in evident resentment.

"You're just like the rest of the world," he said, complainingly. "I was all very well while there was nothing difficult, nor detrimental in the acquaintanceship; now you're aware that there is a place in my life that it may be disagreeable or impossible to explore, and so you're going to let me slide, as the Yankees say. Well, I must put up with it, I suppose; but to tell the truth, Maggie, I'm disappointed; I thought you were made of stauncher stuff."

I looked at him in utter bewilderment. Was this the explanation Ella had promised me on his behalf that Byrne would give me? This attempt to shuffle off the burden of the sense of wrong-doing from his own shoulders to mine was a stroke of meanness in my hero for which, dearly as I loved him, I despised him. Moreover, his manner of preparing to relinquish me without evincing very much pain hurt my ' vanity, and wounded my heart.

"Your disappointment can't equal mine. All this time you have been living a lie to me, Byrne, and I have been so loyal to you."

The reproach seemed to sting him, for he came nearer to me with an expression of such mingled pain and tenderness in his face that all my soul swayed round to the side of sympathy with him again.

"It's all the fault of my horrible position," he said, complainingly. "I told Ella when you were coming here, that we should drift into a flirtation unless she let me tell you about little Minnie."

"Who is little Minnie?" I asked in a heart-broken tone, for intuition told me what his answer would be.

"My wife," he answered, unhesitatingly; and then I nerved myself to ask

"Do you love her, Byrne?"

"I should have kept the love I had for her. I should have kept my honour towards you unstained; I should not have been the fellow I am, in fact, if nature's greatest curse had not been laid upon her. From the day of our marriage she has been mad."

hann Hermans (wollige