ingly, prefer Paul Whitmore to her darling Will.

She left off talking for a bit, and looked at her companion.

Nuna had grown very thin and pale; and there was a sad yearning in her eyes which stirred the widow's patience.

"It's all that husband, haughty, sallow-faced fellow! without one good feature, unless it's his eyes, and they have such a sudden way of blazing up, too, I feel sure he's awkward to live with. He must be, or she wouldn't have got so thin and anxious. Well," -the comely face smoothed away its creases; bond-fide wrinkles cannot come on faces like the widow's, there's no loose skin to spare for them,-" Nuna will take comfort when she sees Will; the very sight of his face must make anybody happy."

She looked round at Nuna.
The sad look had vanished.

They were crossing a bit of open country beyond the common, with a distance of wooded hills before them.

"This place takes me back years;" Nuna smiled. "There's the old nutwood, and there's the field where we used to find snake's-head lilies. I never shall forget tearing a frock all to bits in that wood because I quarrelled with Will, and wouldn't let him lift me over the brambles."

Mrs. Bright was radiant in an instant. "My dear, I quite forgot to say that Will would have driven in for you, himself: he fully intended it; but who should come down last night but Stephen Pritchard, and it was awkward, you know, to leave him alone." Nuna's heart leaped up with a sudden hope. She knew that Mr. Pritchard had gone back to Paris; he might have brought news of her husband. Paul had, perhaps, sent word by him where she could write to; for the impossibility of sending him a letter was almost as hard to bear as his silence.

Mrs. Bright saw the sparkle in Nuna's eyes, and her conscience smote her.

"Perhaps it's hardly right, throwing her in Will's way, poor thing! It may make her more unhappy with the other,

though he don't deserve to be happy. I've no patience with him, coming down into a quiet village like a great prowling wolf and upsetting the arrangements of generations."

Mrs. Bright kept an observant eye on the pair, when Will came forward as the carriage drove up; but it seemed to her that Nuna was far more at ease than the master of Gray's Farm was.

Nuna was glad to find Stephen alone in the drawing-room when she came downstairs.

He came up to her at once. He was curious to see how she bore her husband's desertion. Mr. Pritchard had a way of studying his fellow-creatures as if they were insects in a microscope; he liked to see men and women under what he called new prismatic influences. Nuna had lost much of her beauty. He thought that she had more physiognomy than he had ever remarked in her before.

"Whitmore is not the fellow to make a girl like that happy," thought Stephen. "Why did he take her? It's like the dog in the manger."

He told her he had seen Paul in Paris; but she turned so deathly pale when he confessed his ignorance of her husband's route that he was startled.

"Paul had only a moment, you see; we met at the railway station, and he was just leaving Paris. It was quite by chance I saw him. He had a lady with him, and two other men, I think." "he has

"Yes," said Nuna, faintly; only gone for a month." She tried to smile and look indifferent; she wanted Pritchard to think she was quite in her husband's confidence about this journey: and, if Pritchard had helped her, she would have succeeded in convincing him that she was happy; but Stephen was inquisitive, and curiosity makes people unfeeling.

He looked at her quietly, and then his whole face broke into a broad, incredulous smile.

"I wouldn't count on seeing him home at the month's end, Mrs. Whitmore; when folks get abroad time goes quickly." Nuna flushed, she was too angry to speak.

"Don't be vexed," he said. "I've known Paul far longer than you have, and no doubt I know him far better."

"I can't agree with you; husbands and wives must understand each other better than any one else what I mean is," she said proudly, "I am quite satisfied with the knowledge I have."

For an instant Pritchard thought he had never seen any woman look as lovely as Nuna looked now: her eyes sparkled with indignation, her face was in a glow; but a sudden consciousness of her own untruth quelled this mood. How could she say she was satisfied with the knowledge she had of her husband? Her eyes drooped, her whole figure relaxed from its attitude of indignant assertion; she felt crushed with shame and sorrow.

Pritchard kept his eye fixed on Nuna; he was not hard-hearted, he had no adequate conception of the agony he was inflicting on the girl's proud sensitive heart, and yet a pity for the misery to which he thought she seemed doomed, stirred strongly in him, and moved him out of his usual philosophic indifference.

"Don't you think life is full of mistakes?" he said gently-he wanted to get at her real thoughts.

"Yes, perhaps; "-she spoke in a dreamy, home-sick voice.

"And has not your experience of life taught you that, as a rule, marriage is the saddest of all mistakes?"

Nuna looked up at him. She had been living so much for others in these last weeks that she had gained the power of thinking for them too; literally she had been taken out of herself, out of the dreamy self-contemplation she had grown used to in St. John Street; she was able to look at this question without immediately fitting it to herself.

"No, I don't think so; and even if marriage does bring sadness in some cases, I should not have agreed with It seems to me every one may be you. happy who tries to be so; marriage may be like heaven on earth if people only try to make it so."

"But then it is not heaven on earth,

and people don't try to make it so," said Pritchard with a sneer, " or if they do, women that is to say-men have none of these sentimental fancies, Mrs. Whitmore, they are not so sure about a heaven as you are-a woman who believes this, only breaks her heart at the work, bruising it, poor tender thing, against the stony nature of some good fellow who has given all he's got to give in the way of kindness, and so on, and can't understand what more she wants. I grant you that here and there you find a couple specially fitted for each other, but these are the exceptions."

Nuna smiled; she had often argued this with herself, and she agreed in some ways with Pritchard, but the tendency of such a belief had not before shown itself so clearly.

"But then, what is to become of all the married people who are not among these favoured exceptions?" She did not know enough of Pritchard to comprehend his laxity of ideas, she only thought him exaggerated, and there was some mockery in her smile.

Pritchard saw it, and it irritated him out of all reticence; he hated a woman to put herself on an equal footing in conversation. In theory he was full of woman's rights and the restrictions laid on her freedom; but then, that had reference to other men.

"I see no difficulty at all in the matter; let them do as I advise you to do." She looked at him in surprise. "Suppose you and Paul don't make each other happy you give your husband his liberty again; he will be as thankful for release as you will be. You have gone back to your own home: we'll suppose that you stay there. You are angry now, Mrs. Whitmore; you look at me as if you thought I ought to be horsewhipped; in a year's time you will thank me for having had the courage to speak out. I have seen double the life you have, and I know you and Paul may go on and on together, hoping things will mend till you break your heart. Perhaps, I've gone beyond bounds, but I've done it with a good motive."

He stopped-there was something in her face which he could not read; the sudden flush of indignation and shame had faded. Nuna's eyes met his fearlessly.

"Then all your wisdom can teach you comes to this,"-there was a solemnity in her voice which startled him,-" that we are only to seek happiness for ourselves; and if we don't find it in the state in which we are placed, then we are to change that state to suit our own will and pleasure. God forgive me! I used to think something of the kind too; I am only just beginning to learn better." Her eyes swam as she went on, full of penitence for herself, and of pity for the blindness of the philosopher. No, Mr. Pritchard; God is far better and kinder than man is, and I won't believe, if we do our duty in the state in which He places us, and accept all as from Him, that He will fail us at the end."

66

Pritchard sneered, "You are getting altogether beyond me; you will". But Nuna felt her agitation was growing beyond her; she hurried past him, and was gone before he could stop her.

"Confound all women! Now, she's turning saint; I am not sure that's not worse than a vixen, because she'll always manage to be in the right now. I wish I had let her alone. Poor Paul, poor fellow, why it was more for his sake than hers I spoke at all!”

He pushed both hands into his hair and walked up and down the room: "Catch me marrying! Paul has never been half the fellow he was before he married; he's not happy, and she could not say she was, either. He talked a lot of bosh at Harwich. I knew what would come of it; I expect they quarrelled when he went home, and now he has gone off and left her ready to hang herself. If she weren't selfish, she must see he would be gladly rid of her, but then that is just where a woman is selfish."

Mr. Pritchard was singularly disturbed; even the smoking of two pipes one after another failed to restore him to his usual easy way of looking at life.

No. 144.-VOL. XXIV.

Nuna meantime was kneeling in her room, her face hidden by her hands; there were no tears streaming between the slender fingers; scarcely a sob stirred the calm stillness that had followed the first impetuous outburst of her sorrow and mortification.

Pritchard's words had cut through all the delicate reserve in which she fancied she had hidden her unhappiness; her secret was known then, as bare to the eyes of others as to herself. Nuna's agony was almost beyond endurance.

She had flung herself on her knees beside her table, more from a sort of despair than from any settled purpose; but as she knelt, her sobs grew less vehement, her tears less heavy and scalding, and, almost involuntarily, a cry went out of her heart for help. She was worse than helpless now; she was a subject of pitying talk for others. Every one knew her husband did not love her. A heavy sob burst from her, and again came tears.

But as she knelt, it seemed to Nuna that though the whole world might despise her sorrow, there was a love higher and deeper than any she had known, a love which hushed her poor fluttering heart, and soothed her by its presence. The hush deepened; it was as if her heart were freed from its heavy load of anguish, and was at last at rest.

She could never tell how long she knelt there, unconscious of outer sights and sounds. Quietly, slowly, as if she were gazing at it, her life spread itself out before her, and she saw herself as if with the eyes of a stranger.

It was one of those strange awakenings which come to us all; it may be once, often more than once, in our lives. We may pass it by, we may turn from its painful warning, for it seldom comes without probing the heart to its very centre; we may choke its remembrance by a succession of vain, frivolous thoughts and occupations, but it has been sent to us. It has left its mark; whether for good or evil is in our own power to determine.

G

443

I. THE

To most Oxford men, indeed to the common visitor of Oxford, the town seems a mere offshoot of the University. Its appearance is altogether modern; it presents hardly any monument that can vie in antiquity with the venerable fronts of colleges and halls. An isolated church here and there tells a different tale; but the largest of its parish churches is the church of the University, and that of St. Frides wide, which might suggest, even to a careless observer, some idea of its greatness before University life began, is known to most visitors simply as Christchurch Chapel. In all outer seeming, Oxford appears a mere assemblage of indifferent streets that have grown out of the needs of the University, and this impression is heightened by its commercial unimportance. It has no manufacture or trade. It is not even, like Cambridge, a great agricultural centre. Whatever importance it derived from its position on the Thames has been done away with by the almost total cessation of river navigation. The very soil of the town is, in large measure, in academical hands. As a municipality, it seems to exist only by grace or usurpation of prior University privileges. It is not long since Oxford gained control over its own markets or its own police. The peace of the town is still but partially in the hands of its magistrates, and the riotous student is amenable only to his own special jurisdiction. Within the memory of living men, the chief magistrate of the city, on his entrance into office, was bound to swear in a humiliating ceremony not to violate the privileges of the great academical body, which seemed supreme within its walls.

TOWN.

Historically, the very reverse of all this is really the case. So far is the University from being older than the city, that Oxford had already seen five centuries of borough life before a student appeared within its streets. Instead of

its prosperity being derived from its connection with the University, that connection has probably been its com mercial ruin. mercial ruin. The gradual subjection both of markets and trade to the arbitrary control of an ecclesiastical corporation was inevitably followed by their extinction. The University found Oxford a busy, prosperous borough, and reduced it to a cluster of lodging-houses. It found it among the first of English municipalities, and it so utterly crushed its freedom that the recovery of some of the commonest rights of self-government has only been brought about by recent legislation. Instead of the Mayor being a dependent on Chancellor or ViceChancellor, Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor have simply usurped the far older authority of the Mayor. The miserable broils which disgrace University discipline every fifth of November at any rate preserve the memory of the fierce struggle of Town and Gown, which ended in the ruthless triumph of the academic body. The story of the struggle and the usurpation is one of the most interesting in our municipal annals, and it is one which has left its mark, not on the town only, but on the very constitution and character of the conquering University. But to understand the struggle, we must first know something of the town itself.

At the earliest moment, then, when its academic history can be said to open, at the arrival of the legist Vacarius in