thing, I am told, is quite fascinated by his dashing manners and station in society. We shall see how it will end-I fear ill; her father might pardon a runaway match with a lover of her own age; but he will never forgive the coldblooded villany, excuse me, of a man of three times her age; who for gain, and gain only, is seeking to steal her from him. Such is the sum of what I am told by a friend of mine, just arrived from Cheltenham. The whole thing is the farce of the day, and the stolen interviews of the lovers, and the loud, vulgarly-spoken denunciations of her father, vary the scene from a travestie of Romeo and Juliet to the comedies of Plautus or Molière. I beg your pardon, Edward, for my frankness, but I am angry. I have been used as a cat's-paw-I have been treated unfairly-I was told that the marriage wanted but your signature-my representations induced you to offer to Miss Fitzhenry, and now you are a ruined man. I am hampered by my own family, and cannot come forward to your assistance. My advice is, that you wait a little, and see what turn matters take; once decided, however they conclude, strong representations shall be made to your father, and he shall be forced to render proper assistance; then if politics take a better turn, I may do something for you—or you can live abroad till better times.' advice, and made no He saw his own fate made him strong to Villiers thanked Lord Maristow for his remarks either on his details or promises. stretched drearily before him; but his pride bear without any outward signs of wincing. He would suffer all, conceal all, and be pitied by none. The thought of Ethel alone made him weak. Were she sheltered during the storm which he saw gathering so darkly, he would have felt satisfied. What was to be done? To go abroad, was to encounter beggary and famine. To remain, exposed him to a thousand insults and dangers from which there was no escape. Such were the whisperings of despair-but brighter hopes often visited him. All could not be so evil as it seemed. Fortune, so long his enemy, would yield at last one inch of ground-one inch to stand upon, where he might wait in patience for better days. Had he indeed done his utmost to avert the calamities he apprehended? Certainly not. Thus spoke his sanguine spirit: more could and should be done. His father might find means, he himself be enabled to arrange with his lawyer some mode of raising a sum of money which would at least enable him to go on the continent with his wife. He spent his thoughts in wishes for the attainment of this desirable conclusion to his adversity, till the very earnestness of his expectations seemed to promise their realization. It could not be that the worst would come. Absurd! Something must happen to assist them. Seeking for this unknown something which, in spite of all his efforts, would take no visible or tangible form, he spent weary days and sleepless nights, his brain spinning webs of thought, not like those of the spider, useful to their weaver-a tangled skein they were rather, where the clue was inextricably hid. He did not speak of these things to Ethel, but he grew sad, and she was anxious to go out of town, to have him all to herself, when she promised herself to dispel his gloom; and, as she darkly guessed at the source of his disquietude, by economy and a system of rigid privation, to show him how willing and able she was to meet the adversity which he so much dreaded. CHAPTER XXXII. The pure, the open, prosperous love, Into one knot of happiness. LALLA ROOKH. ANOTHER month withered away in fruitless expectation. Villiers felt that he was following an ignis fatuus, yet knew not how to give up his pursuit. At length, he listened more docilely to Ethel's representations of the expediency of quitting town. She wished to pay her long-promised visit to her aunt, and Villiers at last consented to accompany her. They gave up their house, dispersed a tolerably numerous establishment, and left town for their sober and rural seclusion in Essex. Taken from the immediate scene where care met him at every turn, Edward's spirits rose ; and the very tranquillity and remoteness of Longfield became a relief and an enjoyment. It was bright October weather. The fields were green, the hedges yet in verdant trim. The air was so still that the dead leaves hung too lazy to fall, from the topmost boughs of the earlier trees. The oak was still dressed in a dark sober green-the fresh July shoot, having lost its summer hue, was unapparent among the foliage; the varying tints of beach, ash, and elm, diversified the woods. The morning and evening skies were resplendent with crimson and gold, and the moonlight nights were sweeter than the day. Fatigued by the hurry of town, and one at least worn out with care, the young pair took a new lease of love in idleness in this lonely spot. A slight attack of rheumatism confined Aunt Bessy to her chimney-corner, but in spite of her caution to Ethel not to incur the same penalty from all the array of wet walks and damp shoes, it was her best pleasure each morning to tie on her bonnet, take her husband's arm, and they wandered away together, returning only to find their horses ready, and then they departed for hours, coming back late and unwillingly after the sun was down. Mrs. Elizabeth wondered where all the beautiful spots were, which Ethel described so enthusiastically as to be found in the neighbourhood. The good lady longed to go out herself to see if she could not reap equal delight from viewing the grouping of trees, whose various autumnal tints were painted in Ethel's speech with hues too bright for earth, or to discover what there could be so extraordinarily picturesque in a moss-grown cottage, near a brook, with a high bank clothed with wood behind, which she believed must be one Dame Nixon's cottage, in the Vale of Bewling, and which she knew she must have passed a thousand times, and yet she had never noticed its beauty. Very often Ethel could give no information of whither they had been, only they had lost themselves in majestic woods, lingered in winding lanes, which led to resplendent views, or even reached the margin of the barren sea, to behold the enveloping atmosphere reflected in its fitful mirror-to watch the progress of evanescent storms, or to see the moon light up her silvery pathway on the dusky waste. Villiers took his gun with him in his walks, but, though American bred, Ethel was so unfeignedly distressed by the sight of death, that he never brought down a bird: he shot in its direction now and then, to keep his pointer in practice, and to laugh at his wife's glad triumph when he missed his feathery mark. Ethel was especially delighted to renew her acquaintance with Longfield, her father's boyhood home, under such sunny circumstances. She had loved it before with anguish in her heart, and heavy sadness weighing on her steps, she had loved it for his sake. But now that it became the home, the dedicated garden of love, it received additional beauty in her eyes from its association with the memory of Lord Lodore. All things conjoined; the season, calmed and brightened, as if for her especial enjoyment; remembrance of the past, and the undivided possession of her Edward's society, combined to steep her soul in happiness. Even he, whose more active and masculine spirit might have fretted in solitude and sloth, was subdued by care and uncertainty to look on the peace of the present moment as the dearest gift of the gods. Both so young, and the minds of both open as day to each other's eyes, no single blot obscured their intercourse. They never tired of each other, and the teeming spirit of youth filled the empty space of each hour as it came, with a new growth of sentiments and ideas. The long evening had its pleasures, with its close-drawn curtains and cheerful fire. Even whist with the white-haired parson, and Mrs. Fitzhenry in her spectacles, imparted pleasure. Could anything duller have been devised, which would have been difficult, it had not been so to them; and a stranger coming in and seeing their animated looks, and hearing their cheerful tones and light-hearted laugh, must have envied the very Elysium of delight, which aunt Bessy's usually so sober drawing-room contained. Merely to see Ethel leaning on her husband's arm, and looking up in his face as he drew her yet closer, and, while his fingers were twined among her silken ringlets, kissed so fondly her fair brow, must have demonstrated to a wordling the irrefragable truth that happiness is born a twin, love being the parent. The beauty of a pastoral picture has but short duration in this cloudy land, and happiness, the sun of our moral existence, is yet more fitful in its visitations. Villiers and his young wife took their accustomed ride through shady lanes and copses, and through parks, where, though the magnificent features of nature were wanting, the eye was delighted by a various prospect of wood and lawny upland. The soft though wild west wind drove along vast masses of snowy clouds, which displayed in their intervals the deep stainless azure of the boundless sky. The shadows of the clouds now darkened the pathway of our riders, and now they saw the sunlight advance from a distance, coming on with steps of light and air, till it reached them, and they felt the warmth and gladness of sunshine descend on them. The various coloured woods were now painted brightly in the beams, and now half lost in shadow. There was life and action everywhere-yet not the awakening activity of spring, but rather a vague, uneasy restlessness, allied to languor, and pregnant with melancholy. Villiers was silent and sad. Ethel too well knew the cause wherefore he was dispirited. He had received letters that morning which stung him into a perception of the bitter realities which were |