Randal's).--"Pooh!  the young fellow we are talking of?  Nonsense.  He
would not be so foolish as to give five times the percentage he otherwise
might.  Not sign post-obits!  Of course he has signed one."

RANDAL.--"Hist! you mistake, you mistake!"

SQUIRE (leaving Randal's arm and seizing Levy's).--"Were you speaking of
Frank Hazeldean?"

BARON.--"My dear sir, excuse me, I never mention names before strangers."

SQUIRE.--"Strangers again!  Man, I am the boy's father Speak out, sir,"
and his hand closed on Levy's arm with the strength of an iron vice.

BARON.--"Gently; you hurt me, sir: but I excuse your feelings.  Randal,
you are to blame for leading me into this indiscretion; but I beg to
assure Mr. Hazeldean, that though his son has been a little
extravagant--"

RANDAL.--"Owing chiefly to the arts of an abandoned woman."

BARON.--"Of an abandoned woman;--still he has shown more prudence than
you would suppose; and this very post-obit is a proof of it.  A simple
act of that kind has enabled him to pay off bills that were running on
till they would have ruined even the Hazeldean estate; whereas a charge
on the reversion of the Casino--"

SQUIRE.--"He has done it then?  He has signed a postobit?"

RANDAL.--"No, no, Levy must be wrong."

BARON.--"My dear Leslie, a man of Mr. Hazeldean's time of life cannot
have your romantic boyish notions.  He must allow that Frank has acted in
this like a lad of sense--very good head for business has my young friend
Frank!  And the best thing Mr. Hazeldean can do is quietly to buy up the
post-obit, and thus he will place his son henceforth in his power."

SQUIRE.--"Can I see the deed with my own eyes?"

BARON.--"Certainly, or how could you be induced to buy it up?  But on one
condition; you must not betray me to your son.  And, indeed, take my
advice, and don't say a word to him on the matter."

SQUIRE.--"Let me see it, let me see it with my own eyes!  His mother else
will never believe it--nor will I."

BARON.--"I can call on you this evening."

SQUIRE.--"Now, now!"

BARON.--"You can spare me, Randal; and you yourself can open to Mr.
Egerton the other affair respecting Lansmere.  No time should be lost,
lest L'Estrange suggest a candidate."

RANDAL (whispering).--"Never mind me.  This is more important."  (Aloud)
--"Go with Mr. Hazeldean.  My dear kind friend" (to the squire), "do not
let this vex you so much.  After all, it is what nine young men out of
ten would do in the same circumstances.  And it is best you should know
it; you may save Frank from further ruin, and prevent, perhaps, this very
marriage."

"We will see," exclaimed the squire, hastily.  "Now, Mr. Levy, come."

Levy and the squire walked on, not arm in arm, but side by side.  Randal
proceeded to Egerton's house.

"I am glad to see you, Leslie," said the ex-minister.  "What is it I have
heard?  My nephew, Frank Hazeldean, proposes to marry Madame di Negra
against his father's consent?  How could you suffer him to entertain an
idea so wild?  And how never confide it to me?"

RANDAL.--"My dear Mr. Egerton, it is only to-day that I was informed of
Frank's engagement.  I have already seen him, and expostulated in vain;
till then, though I knew your nephew admired Madame di Negra, I could
never suppose he harboured a serious intention."

EGERTON.--"I must believe you, Randal.  I will myself see Madame di
Negra, though I have no power, and no right, to dictate to her.  I have
but little time for all such private business.  The dissolution of
parliament is so close at hand."

RANDAL (looking down).--"It is on that subject that I wished to speak to
you, sir.  You think of standing for Lansmere.  Well, Baron Levy has
suggested to me an idea that I could not, of course, even countenance,
till I had spoken to you.  It seems that he has some acquaintance with
the state of parties in that borough.  He is informed that it is not only
as easy to bring in two of our side as to carry one, but that it would
make your election still more safe not to fight single-handed against two
opponents; that if canvassing for yourself alone, you could not carry a
sufficient number of plumper votes; that split votes would go from you to
one or other of the two adversaries; that, in a word, it is necessary to
pair you with a colleague.  If it really be so, you of course will learn
best from your own Committee; but should they concur in the opinion Baron
Levy has formed, do I presume too much on your kindness to deem it
possible that you might allow me to be the second candidate on your side?
I should not say this, but that Levy told me you had some wish to see me
in parliament, amongst the supporters of your policy.  And what other
opportunity can occur?  Here the cost of carrying two would be scarcely
more than that of carrying one.  And Levy says the party would subscribe
for my election; you, of course, would refuse all such aid for your own;
and indeed, with your great name, and Lord Lansmere's interest, there can
be little beyond the strict legal expenses."

As Randal spoke thus at length, he watched anxiously his patron's
reserved, unrevealing countenance.

EGERTON (dryly).--"I will consider.  You may safely leave in my hands any
matter connected with your ambition and advancement.  I have before told
you I hold it a duty to do all in my power for the kinsman of my late
wife, for one whose career I undertook to forward, for one whom honour
has compelled to share in my own political reverses."

Here Egerton rang the bell for his hat and gloves, and walking into the
hall, paused at the street door.  There beckoning to Randal, he said,
slowly, "You seem intimate with Baron Levy; I caution you against him,
--a dangerous acquaintance, first to the purse, next to the honour."

RANDAL.--"I know it, sir; and am surprised myself at the acquaintance
that has grown up between us.  Perhaps its cause is in his respect for
yourself."

EGERTON.--"Tut."

RANDAL.---"Whatever it be, he contrives to obtain a singular hold over
one's mind, even where, as in my case, he has no evident interest to
serve.  How is this?  It puzzles me!"

EGERTON.--"For his interest, it is most secured where he suffers it to be
least evident; for his hold over the mind, it is easily accounted for.
He ever appeals to two temptations, strong with all men,--Avarice and
Ambition.  Good-day."

RANDAL.--"Are you going to Madame di Negra's?  Shall I not accompany you?
Perhaps I may be able to back your own remonstrances."

EGERTON.--"No, I shall not require you."

RANDAL.--"I trust I shall hear the result of your interview?  I feel so
much interested in it.  Poor Frank!"

Audley nodded.  "Of course, of course."

CHAPTER XIV.

On entering the drawing-room of Madame di Negra, the peculiar charm which
the severe Audley Egerton had been ever reputed to possess with women
would have sensibly struck one who had hitherto seen him chiefly in his
relations with men in the business-like affairs of life.  It was a charm
in strong contrast to the ordinary manners of those who are emphatically
called "Ladies' men."  No artificial smile, no conventional, hollow
blandness, no frivolous gossip, no varnish either of ungenial gayety or
affected grace.  The charm was in a simplicity that unbent more into
kindness than it did with men.  Audley's nature, whatever its faults and
defects, was essentially masculine; and it was the sense of masculine
power that gave to his voice a music when addressing the gentler sex, and
to his manner a sort of indulgent tenderness that appeared equally void
of insincerity and presumption.

Frank had been gone about half-an-hour, and Madame di Negra was scarcely
recovered from the agitation into which she had been thrown by the
affront from the father and the pleading of the son.

Egerton took her passive hand cordially, and seated himself by her side.

"My dear marchesa,'I said he, "are we then likely to be near connections?
And can you seriously contemplate marriage with my young nephew, Frank
Hazeldean?  You turn away.  Ah, my fair friend, there are but two
inducements to a free woman to sign away her liberty at the altar.  I say
a free woman, for widows are free, and girls are not.  These inducements
are, first, worldly position; secondly, love.  Which of these motives can
urge Madame di Negra to marry Mr. Frank Hazeldeani?"

"There are other motives than those you speak of,--the need of
protection, the sense of solitude, the curse of dependence, gratitude
for honourable affection.  But you men never know women!"

"I grant that you are right there,--we never do; neither do women ever
know men.  And yet each sex contrives to dupe and to fool the other!
Listen to me.  I have little acquaintance with my nephew, but I allow he
is a handsome young gentleman, with whom a handsome young lady in her
teens might fall in love in a ball-room.  But you, who have known the
higher order of our species, you who have received the homage of men,
whose thoughts and mind leave the small talk of drawing-room triflers so
poor and bald, you cannot look me in the face and say that it is any
passion resembling love which you feel for my nephew.  And as to
position, it is right that I should inform you that if he marry you
he will have none.  He may risk his inheritance.  You will receive
no countenance from his parents.  You will be poor, but not free.  You
will not gain the independence you seek for.  The sight of a vacant,
discontented face in that opposite chair will be worse than solitude.
And as to grateful affection," added the man of the world, "it is a
polite synonym for tranquil indifference."

"Mr. Egerton," said Beatrice, "people say you are made of bronze.  Did
you ever feel the want of a home?"

"I answer you frankly," replied the statesman, "if I had not felt it, do
you think I should have been, and that I should be to the last, the
joyless drudge of public life?  Bronze though you call my nature, it
would have melted away long since like wax in the fire, if I had sat idly
down and dreamed of a home!"

"But we women," answered Beatrice, with pathos, "have no public life, and
we do idly sit down and dream.  Oh," she continued, after a short pause,
and clasping her hands firmly together, "you think me worldly, grasping,
ambitious; how different my fate had been had I known a home!--known one
whom I could love and venerate; known one whose smiles would have
developed the good that was once within me, and the fear of whose
rebuking or sorrowful eye would have corrected what is evil."

"Yet," answered Audley, "nearly all women in the great world have had
that choice once in their lives, and nearly all have thrown it away.  How
few of your rank really think of home when they marry! how few ask to
venerate as well as to love! and how many, of every rank, when the home
has been really gained, have wilfully lost its shelter,--some in
neglectful weariness, some from a momentary doubt, distrust, caprice,
a wild fancy, a passionate fit, a trifle, a straw, a dream!  True, you
women are ever dreamers.  Commonsense, common earth, is above or below
your comprehension."

Both now are silent.  Audley first roused himself with a quick, writhing
movement.  "We two," said he, smiling half sadly, half cynically,--"we
two must not longer waste time in talking sentiment.  We know both too
well what life, as it has been made for us by our faults or our
misfortunes, truly is.  And once again, I entreat you to pause before
you yield to the foolish suit of my foolish nephew.  Rely on it, you will
either command a higher offer for your prudence to accept; or, if you
needs must sacrifice rank and fortune, you, with your beauty and your
romantic heart, will see one who, at least for a fair holiday season (if
human love allows no more), can repay you for the sacrifice.  Frank
Hazeldean never can."

Beatrice turned away to conceal the tears that rushed to her eyes.

"Think over this well," said Audley, in the softest tones of his mellow
voice.  "Do you remember that when you first came to England, I told you
that neither wedlock nor love had any lures for me?  We grew friends upon
that rude avowal, and therefore I now speak to you like some sage of old,
wise because standing apart and aloof from all the affections and ties
that mislead our wisdom.  Nothing but real love--how rare it is; has one
human heart in a million ever known it?--nothing but real love can repay
us for the loss of freedom, the cares and fears of poverty, the cold pity
of the world that we both despise and respect.  And all these, and much
more, follow the step you would inconsiderately take, an imprudent
marriage."

"Audley Egerton," said Beatrice, lifting her dark, moistened eyes, "you
grant that real love does compensate for an imprudent marriage.  You
speak as if you had known such love--you!  Can it be possible?"

"Real love--I thought that I knew it once.  Looking back with remorse, I
should doubt it now but for one curse that only real love, when lost, has
the power to leave evermore behind it."

"What is that?"

"A void here," answered Egerton, striking his heart.  "Desolation!--
Adieu!"

He rose and left the room.

"Is it," murmured Egerton, as he pursued his way through the streets--"is
it that, as we approach death, all the first fair feelings of young life
come back to us mysteriously?  Thus I have heard, or read, that in some
country of old, children scattering flowers preceded a funeral bier."

CHAPTER XV.

And so Leonard stood beside his friend's mortal clay, and watched, in the
ineffable smile of death, the last gleam which the soul had left there;
and so, after a time, he crept back to the adjoining room with a step as
noiseless as if he had feared to disturb the dead.  Wearied as he was
with watching, he had no thought of sleep.  He sat himself down by the
little table, and leaned his face on his hand, musing sorrowfully.  Thus
time passed.  He heard the clock from below strike the hours.  In the
house of death the sound of a clock becomes so solemn.  The soul that we
miss has gone so far beyond the reach of time!  A cold, superstitious awe
gradually stole over the young man.  He shivered, and lifted his eyes
with a start, half scornful, half defying.  The moon was gone; the gray,
comfortless dawn gleamed through the casement, and carried its raw,
chilling light through the open doorway into the death-room.  And there,
near the extinguished fire, Leonard saw the solitary woman, weeping low;
and watching still.  He returned to say a word of comfort; she pressed
his hand, but waved him away.  He understood.  She did not wish for other
comfort than her quiet relief of tears.  Again, he returned to his own
chamber, and his eye this time fell upon the papers which he had hitherto
disregarded.  What made his heart stand still, and the blood then rush so
quickly through his veins?  Why did he seize upon those papers with so
tremulous a hand, then lay them down, pause, as if to nerve himself, and
look so eagerly again?  He recognized the handwriting,--those fair, clear
characters,  so peculiar in their woman-like delicacy and grace, the same
as in the wild, pathetic poems, the sight of which had made an era in his
boyhood.  From these pages the image of the mysterious Nora rose once
more before him.  He felt that he was with a mother.  He went back, and
closed the door gently, as if with a jealous piety, to exclude each ruder
shadow from the world of spirits, and be alone with that mournful ghost.
For a thought written in warm, sunny life, and then suddenly rising up to
us, when the hand that traced and the heart that cherished it are dust,
is verily as a ghost.  It is a likeness struck off of the fond human
being, and surviving it.  Far more truthful than bust or portrait, it
bids us see the tear flow, and the pulse beat.  What ghost can the
churchyard yield to us like the writing of the dead?

The bulk of the papers had been once lightly sewn to each other; they had
come undone, perhaps in Burley's rude hands, but their order was easily
apparent.  Leonard soon saw that they formed a kind of journal,--not,
indeed, a regular diary, nor always relating to the things of the day.
There were gaps in time--no attempt at successive narrative; sometimes,
instead of prose, a hasty burst of verse, gushing evidently from the
heart; sometimes all narrative was left untold, and yet, as it were,
epitomized by a single burning line--a single exclamation--of woe or joy!
Everywhere you saw records of a nature exquisitely susceptible; and,
where genius appeared, it was so artless, that you did not call it
genius, but emotion.  At the onset the writer did not speak of herself
in the first person.  The manuscript opened with descriptions and short
dialogues, carried on by persons to whose names only initial letters were
assigned, all written in a style of simple innocent freshness, and
breathing of purity and happiness, like a dawn of spring.  Two young
persons, humbly born, a youth and a girl, the last still in childhood,
each chiefly self-taught, are wandering on Sabbath evenings among green
dewy fields, near the busy town, in which labour awhile is still.  Few
words pass between them.  You see at once, though the writer does not
mean to convey it, how far beyond the scope of her male companion flies
the heavenward imagination of the girl.  It is he who questions, it is
she who answers; and soon there steals upon you, as you read, the
conviction that the youth loves the girl, and loves in vain.  All in this
writing, though terse, is so truthful!  Leonard, in the youth, already
recognizes the rude imperfect scholar, the village bard, Mark Fairfield.
Then there is a gap in description; but there are short weighty
sentences, which show deep ening thought, increasing years, in the
writer.  And though the innocence remains, the happiness begins to be
less vivid on the page.

Now, insensibly, Leonard finds that there is a new phase in the writer's
existence.  Scenes no longer of humble, workday rural life surround her,
and a fairer and more dazzling image succeeds to the companion of the
Sabbath eves.  This image Nora evidently loves to paint,--it is akin to
her own genius; it captivates her fancy; it is an image that she (inborn
artist, and conscious of her art) feels to belong to a brighter and
higher school of the Beautiful.  And yet the virgin's heart is not
awakened,--no trace of the heart yet there!  The new image thus
introduced is one of her own years, perhaps; nay, it may be younger
still, for it is a boy that is described, with his profuse fair curls,
and eyes new to grief, and confronting the sun as a young eagle's; with
veins so full of the wine of life, that they overflow into every joyous
whim; with nerves quiveringly alive to the desire of glory; with the
frank generous nature, rash in its laughing scorn of the world, which it
has not tried.  Who was this boy? it perplexed Leonard.  He feared to
guess.  Soon, less told than implied, you saw that this companionship,
however it chanced, brings fear and pain on the writer.  Again (as
before, with Mark Fairfield), there is love on the one side and not on
the other; with her there is affectionate, almost sisterly, interest,
admiration, gratitude, but a something of pride or of terror that keeps
back love.

Here Leonard's interest grew intense.  Were there touches by which
conjecture grew certainty; and he recognized, through the lapse of years,
the boy-lover in his own generous benefactor?

Fragments of dialogue now began to reveal the suit of an ardent,
impassioned nature, and the simple wonder and strange alarm of a listener
who pitied but could not sympathize.  Some great worldly distinction of
rank between the two became visible,--that distinction seemed to arm the
virtue and steel the affections of the lowlier born.  Then a few
sentences, half blotted out with tears, told of wounded and humbled
feelings,--some one invested with authority, as if the suitor's parent,
had interfered, questioned, reproached, counselled.  And it was evident
that the suit was not one that dishonoured; it wooed to flight, but still
to marriage.

And now these sentences grew briefer still, as with the decision of a
strong resolve.  And to these there followed a passage so exquisite, that
Leonard wept unconsciously as he read.  It was the description of a visit
spent at home previous to some sorrowful departure.  He caught the
glimpse of a proud and vain, but a tender wistful mother, of a father's
fonder but less thoughtful love.  And then came a quiet soothing scene
between the girl and her first village lover, ending thus: "So she put
M.'s hand into her sister's, and said, 'You loved me through the fancy,
love her with the heart,' and left them comprehending each other, and
betrothed."

Leonard sighed.  He understood now how Mark Fairfield saw, in the homely
features of his unlettered wife, the reflection of the sister's soul and
face.

A few words told the final parting,--words that were a picture.  The long
friendless highway, stretching on--on--towards the remorseless city, and
the doors of home opening on the desolate thoroughfare, and the old
pollard-tree beside the threshold, with the ravens wheeling round it and
calling to their young.  He too had watched that threshold from the same
desolate thoroughfare.  He too had heard the cry of the ravens.  Then
came some pages covered with snatches of melancholy verse, or some
reflections of dreamy gloom.

The writer was in London, in the house of some high-born patroness,--
that friendless shadow of a friend which the jargon of society calls
"companion."  And she was looking on the bright storm of the world as
through prison bars.  Poor bird, afar from the greenwood, she had need of
song,--it was her last link with freedom and nature.  The patroness seems
to share in her apprehensions of the boy suitor, whose wild rash prayers
the fugitive had resisted; but to fear lest the suitor should be
degraded, not the one whom he pursues,--fear an alliance ill-suited to a
high-born heir.  And this kind of fear stings the writer's pride, and she
grows harsh in her judgment of him who thus causes but pain where he
proffers love.  Then there is a reference to some applicant for her hand,
who is pressed upon her choice; and she is told that it is her duty so to
choose, and thus deliver a noble family from a dread that endures so long
as her hand is free.  And of this fear, and of this applicant, there
breaks out a petulant yet pathetic scorn.  After this the narrative, to
judge by the dates, pauses for days and weeks, as if the writer had grown
weary and listless,--suddenly to reopen in a new strain, eloquent with
hopes and with fears never known before.  The first person was abruptly
assumed,--it was the living "I" that now breathed and moved along the
lines.  How was this?  The woman was no more a shadow and a secret
unknown to herself.  She had assumed the intense and vivid sense of
individual being; and love spoke loud in the awakened human heart.

A personage not seen till then appeared on the page.  And ever
afterwards this personage was only named as "He," as if the one and sole
representative of all the myriads that walk the earth.  The first notice
of this prominent character on the scene showed the restless, agitated
effect produced on the writer's imagination.  He was invested with a
romance probably not his own.  He was described in contrast to the
brilliant boy whose suit she had feared, pitied, and now sought to shun,
--described with a grave and serious, but gentle mien, a voice that
imposed respect, an eye and lip that showed collected dignity of will.
Alas?  the writer betrayed herself, and the charm was in the contrast,
not to the character of the earlier lover, but her own.  And now, leaving
Leonard to explore and guess his way through the gaps and chasms of the
narrative, it is time to place before the reader what the narrative alone
will not reveal to Leonard.

CHAPTER XVI.

Nora Avenel had fled from the boyish love of Harley L'Estrange,
recommended by Lady Lansmere to a valetudinarian relative of her own,
Lady Jane Horton, as companion.  But Lady Lansmere could not believe it
possible that the lowborn girl could long sustain her generous pride,
and reject the ardent suit of one who could offer to her the prospective
coronet of a countess.  She continually urged upon Lady Jane the
necessity of marrying Nora to some one of rank less disproportioned to
her own, and empowered that lady to assure any such wooer of a dowry far
beyond Nora's station.  Lady Jane looked around, and saw in the outskirts
of her limited social ring a young solicitor, a peer's natural son, who
was on terms of more than business-like intimacy with the fashionable
clients whose distresses made the origin of his wealth.  The young man
was handsome, well-dressed, and bland.  Lady Jane invited him to her
house; and, seeing him struck with the rare loveliness of Nora, whispered
the hint of the dower.  The fashionable solicitor, who afterwards ripened
into Baron Levy, did not need that hint; for, though then poor, he relied
on himself for fortune, and, unlike Randal, he had warm blood in his
veins.  But Lady Jane's suggestions made him sanguine of success; and
when he formally proposed, and was as formally refused, his self-love was
bitterly wounded.  Vanity in Levy was a powerful passion; and with the
vain, hatred is strong, revenge is rankling.  Levy retired, concealing
his rage; nor did he himself know how vindictive that rage, when it
cooled into malignancy, could become, until the arch-fiend OPPORTUNITY
prompted its indulgence and suggested its design.

Lady Jane was at first very angry with Nora for the rejection of a suitor
whom she had presented as eligible.  But the pathetic grace of this
wonderful girl had crept into her heart, and softened it even against
family prejudice; and she gradually owned to herself that Nora was worthy
of some one better than Mr. Levy.

Now, Harley had ever believed that Nora returned his love, and that
nothing but her own sense of gratitude to his parents, her own instincts
of delicacy, made her deaf to his prayers.  To do him justice, wild and
headstrong as he then was, his suit would have ceased at once had he
really deemed it persecution.  Nor was his error unnatural; for his
conversation, till it had revealed his own heart, could not fail to have
dazzled and delighted the child of genius; and her frank eyes would have
shown the delight.  How, at his age, could he see the distinction between
the Poetess and the Woman?  The poetess was charmed with rare promise in
a soul of which the very errors were the extravagances of richness and
beauty.  But the woman--no!  the woman required some nature not yet
undeveloped, and all at turbulent, if brilliant, strife with its own
noble elements, but a nature formed and full-grown.  Harley was a boy,
and Nora was one of those women who must find or fancy an Ideal that
commands and almost awes them into love.

Harley discovered, not without difficulty, Nora's new residence.  He
presented himself at Lady Jane's, and she, with grave rebuke, forbade him
the house.  He found it impossible to obtain an interview with Nora.  He
wrote, but he felt sure that his letters never reached her, since they
were unanswered.  His young heart swelled with rage.  He dropped threats,
which alarmed all the fears of Lady Lansmere, and even the prudent
apprehensions of his friend, Audley Egerton.  At the request of the
mother, and equally at the wish of the son, Audley consented to visit at
Lady Jane's, and make acquaintance with Nora.

"I have such confidence in you," said Lady Lansmere, "that if you once
know the girl, your advice will be sure to have weight with her.  You
will show her how wicked it would be to let Harley break our hearts and
degrade his station."

"I have such confidence in you," said young Harley, "that if you once
know my Nora, you will no longer side with my mother.  You will recognize
the nobility which nature only can create, you will own that Nora is
worthy a rank more lofty than mine; and my mother so believes in your
wisdom, that, if you plead in my cause, you will convince even her."

Audley listened to both with his intelligent, half-incredulous smile; and
wholly of the same opinion as Lady Lansmere, and sincerely anxious to
save Harley from an indiscretion that his own notions led him to regard
as fatal, he resolved to examine this boasted pearl, and to find out its
flaws.  Audley Egerton was then in the prime of his earnest, resolute,
ambitious youth.  The stateliness of his natural manners had then a
suavity and polish which, even in later and busier life, it never wholly
lost; since, in spite of the briefer words and the colder looks by which
care and power mark the official man, the minister had ever enjoyed that
personal popularity which the indefinable, external something, that wins
and pleases, can alone confer.  But he had even then, as ever, that
felicitous reserve which Rochefoucauld has called the "mystery of the
body,"--that thin yet guardian veil which reveals but the strong outlines
of character, and excites so much of interest by provoking so much of
conjecture.  To the man who is born with this reserve, which is wholly
distinct from shyness, the world gives credit for qualities and talents
beyond those that it perceives; and such characters are attractive to
others in proportion as these last are gifted with the imagination which
loves to divine the unknown.

At the first interview, the impression which this man produced upon Nora
Avenel was profound and strange.  She had heard of him before as the one.
whom Harley most loved and looked up to; and she recognized at once in
his mien, his aspect, his words, the very tone of his deep tranquil
voice, the power to which woman, whatever her intellect, never attains;
and to which, therefore, she imputes a nobility not always genuine,--
namely, the power of deliberate purpose and self-collected, serene
ambition.  The effect that Nora produced on Egerton was not less sudden.
He was startled by a beauty of face and form that belonged to that rarest
order, which we never behold but once or twice in our lives.

He was yet more amazed to discover that the aristocracy of mind could
bestow a grace that no aristocracy of birth could surpass.  He was
prepared for a simple, blushing village girl, and involuntarily he bowed
low his proud front at the first sight of that delicate bloom, and that
exquisite gentleness which is woman's surest passport to the respect of
man.  Neither in the first, nor the second, nor the third interview, nor,
indeed, till after many interviews, could he summon up courage to
commence his mission, and allude to Harley.  And when he did so at last
his words faltered.  But Nora's words were clear to him.  He saw that
Harley was not loved; and a joy, which he felt as guilty, darted through
his whole frame.  From that interview Audley returned home greatly
agitated, and at war with himself.  Often, in the course of this story,
has it been hinted that, under all Egerton's external coldness and
measured self-control, lay a nature capable of strong and stubborn
passions.  Those passions broke forth then.  He felt that love had
already entered into the heart, which the trust of his friend should
have sufficed to guard.

"I will go there no more," said he, abruptly, to Harley.

"But why?"

"The girl does not love you.  Cease then to think of her."

Harley disbelieved him, and grew indignant.  But Audley had every worldly
motive to assist his sense of honour.  He was poor, though with the
reputation of wealth, deeply involved in debt, resolved to rise in life,
tenacious of his position in the world's esteem.  Against a host of
counteracting influences, love fought single-handed.  Audley's was a
strong nature; but, alas! in strong natures, if resistance to temptation
is of granite, so the passions that they admit are of fire.

Trite is the remark that the destinies of our lives often date from the
impulses of unguarded moments.  It was so with this man, to an ordinary
eye so cautious and so deliberate.  Harley one day came to him in great
grief; he had heard that Nora was ill: he implored Andley to go once more
and ascertain.  Audley went.  Lady Jane Horton, who was suffering under a
disease which not long afterwards proved fatal, was too ill to receive
him.  He was shown into the room set apart as Nora's.  While waiting for
her entrance, he turned mechanically over the leaves of an album, which
Nora, suddenly summoned away to attend Lady Jane, had left behind her on
the table.  He saw the sketch of his own features; he read words
inscribed below it,--words of such artless tenderness, and such unhoping
sorrow, words written by one who had been accustomed to regard her genius
as her sole confidant, under Heaven; to pour out to it, as the solitary
poet-heart is impelled to do, thoughts, feelings, the confession of
mystic sighs, which it would never breathe to a living ear, and, save at
such moments, scarcely acknowledge to itself.  Audley saw that he was
beloved, and the revelation, with a sudden light, consumed all the
barriers between himself and his own love.  And at that moment Nora
entered.  She saw him bending over the book.  She uttered a cry, sprang
forward, and then sank down, covering her face with her hands.  But
Audley was at her feet.  He forgot his friend, his trust; he forgot
ambition, he forgot the world.  It was his own cause that he pleaded,--
his own love that burst forth from his lips.  And when the two that day
parted, they were betrothed each to each.  Alas for them, and alas for
Harley!  And now this man, who had hitherto valued himself as the very
type of gentleman, whom all his young contemporaries had so regarded and
so revered, had to press the hand of a confiding friend, and bid adieu to
truth.  He had to amuse, to delay, to mislead his boy-rival,--to say that
he was already subduing Nora's hesitating doubts, and that with a little
time, she could be induced to consent to forget Harley's rank, and his
parent's pride, and become his wife.  And Harley believed in Egerton,
without one suspicion on the mirror of his loyal soul.

Meanwhile, Audley, impatient of his own position,--impatient, as strong
minds ever are, to hasten what they have once resolved, to terminate a
suspense that every interview with Harley tortured alike by jealousy and
shame, to pass out of the reach of scruples, and to say to himself,
"Right--or wrong, there is no looking back; the deed is done,"--Audley,
thus hurried on by the impetus of his own power of will, pressed for
speedy and secret nuptials,--secret, till his fortunes, then wavering,
were more assured, his career fairly commenced.  This was not his
strongest motive, though it was one.  He shrank from the discovery of his
wrong to his friend, desired to delay the self-humiliation of such
announcement, until, as he persuaded himself, Harley's boyish passion was
over, had yielded to the new allurements that would naturally beset his
way.  Stifling his conscience, Audley sought to convince himself that the
day would soon come when Harley could hear with indifference that Nora
Avenel was another's.  "The dream of an hour, at his age," murmured the
elder friend; "but at mine the passion of a life!"  He did not speak of
these latter motives for concealment to Nora.  He felt that to own the
extent of his treason to a friend would lower him in her eyes.  He spoke
therefore but slightingly of Harley, treated the boy's suit as a thing
past and gone.  He dwelt only on reasons that compelled self-sacrifice on
his side or hers.  She did not hesitate which to choose.  And so, where
Nora loved, so submissively did she believe in the superiority of the
lover, that she would not pause to hear a murmur from her own loftier
nature, or question the propriety of what he deemed wise and good.

Abandoning prudence in this arch affair of life, Audley still preserved
his customary caution in minor details.  And this indeed was
characteristic of him throughout all his career, heedless in large
things, wary in small.  He would not trust Lady Jane Horton with his
secret, still less Lady Lansmere.  He simply represented to the former
that Nora was no longer safe from Harley's determined pursuit under Lady
Jane's roof, and that she had better elude the boy's knowledge of her
movements, and go quietly away for a while, to lodge with some connection
of her own.

And so, with Lady Jane's acquiescence, Nora went first to the house
of a very distant kinswoman of her mother's, and afterwards to one that
Egerton took as their bridal home, under the name of Bertram.  He
arranged all that might render their marriage most free from the chance
of premature discovery.  But it so happened on the very morning of their
bridal, that one of the witnesses he selected (a confidential servant of
his own) was seized with apoplexy.  Considering, in haste, where to find
a substitute, Egerton thought of Levy, his own private solicitor, his own
fashionable money-lender, a man with whom he was then as intimate as a
fine gentleman is with the lawyer of his own age, who knows all his
affairs, and has helped, from pure friendship, to make them as bad as
they are!  Levy was thus suddenly summoned.  Egerton, who was in great
haste, did not at first communicate to him the name of the intended
bride; but he said enough of the imprudence of the marriage, and his
reasons for secrecy, to bring on himself the strongest remonstrances; for
Levy had always reckoned on Egerton's making a wealthy marriage,--leaving
to Egerton the wife, and hoping to appropriate to himself the wealth, all
in the natural course of business.  Egerton did not listen to him, but
hurried him on towards the place at which the ceremony was to be
performed; and Levy actually saw the bride before he had learned her
name.  The usurer masked his raging emotions, and fulfilled his part in
the rites.  His smile, when he congratulated the bride, might have shot
cold into her heart; but her eyes were cast on the earth, seeing there
but a shadow from heaven, and her heart was blindly sheltering itself in
the bosom to which it was given evermore.  She did not perceive the smile
of hate that barbed the words of joy.  Nora never thought it necessary
later to tell Egerton that Levy had been a refused suitor.  Indeed, with
the exquisite tact of love, she saw that such a confidence, the idea of
such a rival, would have wounded the pride of her high-bred, well-born
husband.

And now, while Harley L'Estrange, frantic with the news that Nora had
left Lady Jane's roof, and purposely misled into wrong directions, was
seeking to trace her refuge in vain, now Egerton, in an assumed name, in
a remote quarter, far from the clubs, in which his word was oracular, far
from the pursuits, whether of pastime or toil, that had hitherto
engrossed his active mind, gave himself up, with wonder at his own
surrender, to the only vision of fairyland that ever weighs down the
watchful eyelids of hard ambition.  The world for a while shut out, he
missed it not.  He knew not of it.  He looked into two loving eyes that
haunted him ever after, through a stern and arid existence, and said
murmuringly, "Why, this, then, is real happiness!"  Often, often, in the
solitude of other years, to repeat to himself the same words, save that
for is, he then murmured was!  And Nora, with her grand, full heart, all
her luxuriant wealth of fancy and of thought, child of light and of song,
did she then never discover that there was something comparatively narrow
and sterile in the nature to which she had linked her fate?  Not there
could ever be sympathy in feelings, brilliant and shifting as the tints
of the rainbow.  When Audley pressed her heart to his own, could he
comprehend one finer throb of its beating?  Was all the iron of his mind
worth one grain of the gold she had cast away in Harley's love?

Did Nora already discover this?  Surely no.  Genius feels no want, no
repining, while the heart is contented.  Genius in her paused and
slumbered: it had been as the ministrant of solitude: it was needed no
more.  If a woman loves deeply some one below her own grade in the mental
and spiritual orders, how often we see that she unconsciously quits her
own rank, comes meekly down to the level of the beloved, is afraid lest
he should deem her the superior,--she who would not even be the equal.
Nora knew no more that she had genius; she only knew that she had love.

And so here, the journal which Leonard was reading changed its tone,
sinking into that quiet happiness which is but quiet because it is so
deep.  This interlude in the life of a man like Audley Egerton could
never have been long; many circumstances conspired to abridge it.  His
affairs were in great disorder; they were all under Levy's management.
Demands that had before slumbered, or been mildly urged, grew menacing
and clamorous.  Harley, too, returned to London from his futile
researches, and looked out for Audley.  Audley was forced to leave his
secret Eden, and reappear in the common world; and thenceforward it was
only by stealth that he came to his bridal home,--a visitor, no more the
inmate.  But more loud and fierce grew the demands of his creditors, now
when Egerton had most need of all which respectability and position and
belief of pecuniary independence can do to raise the man who has
encumbered his arms, and crippled his steps towards fortune.  He was
threatened with writs, with prison.  Levy said "that to borrow more would
be but larger ruin," shrugged his shoulders, and even recommended a
voluntary retreat to the King's Bench.  "No place so good for frightening
one's creditors into compounding their claims; but why," added Levy, with
covert sneer, "why not go to young L'Estrange, a boy made to be borrowed
from!"

Levy, who had known from Lady Jane of Harley's pursuit of Nora, had
learned already how to avenge himself on Egerton.  Audley could not apply
to the friend he had betrayed.  And as to other friends, no man in town
had a greater number.  And no man in town knew better that he should lose
them all if he were once known to be in want of their money.  Mortified,
harassed, tortured, shunning Harley, yet ever sought by him, fearful of
each knock at his door, Audley Egerton escaped to the mortgaged remnant
of his paternal estate, on which there was a gloomy manor-house, long
uninhabited, and there applied a mind, afterwards renowned for its quick
comprehension of business, to the investigation of his affairs, with a
view to save some wreck from the flood that swelled momently around him.

And now--to condense as much as possible a record that runs darkly on
into pain and sorrow--now Levy began to practise his vindictive arts; and
the arts gradually prevailed.  On pretence of assisting Egerton in the
arrangement of his affairs, which he secretly contrived, however, still
more to complicate, he came down frequently to Egerton Hall for a few
hours, arriving by the mail, and watching the effect which Nora's almost
daily letters produced on the bridegroom, irritated by the practical
cares of life.  He was thus constantly at hand to instil into the mind of
the ambitious man a regret for the imprudence of hasty passion, or to
embitter the remorse which Audley felt for his treachery to L'Estrange.
Thus ever bringing before the mind of the harassed debtor images at war
with love, and with the poetry of life, he disattuned it (so to speak)
for the reception of Nora's letters, all musical as they were with such
thoughts as the most delicate fancy inspires to the most earnest love.
Egerton was one of those men who never confide their affairs frankly to
women.  Nora, when she thus wrote, was wholly in the dark as to the
extent of his stern prosaic distress.  And so--and so--Levy always near--
type of the prose of life in its most cynic form--so by degrees all that
redundant affluence of affection, with its gushes of grief for his
absence, prayers for his return, sweet reproach if a post failed to bring
back an answer to the woman's yearning sighs,--all this grew, to the
sensible, positive man of real life, like sickly romantic exaggeration.
The bright arrows shot too high into heaven to hit the mark set so near
to the earth.  Ah, common fate of all superior natures!  What treasure,
and how wildly wasted!  "By-the-by," said Levy, one morning, as he was
about to take leave of Audley and return to town,--"by-the-by, I shall be
this evening in the neighbourhood of Mrs. Egerton."

EGERTON.--"Say Mrs. Bertram!"

LEVY.--"Ay; will she not be in want of some pecuniary supplies?"

EGERTON. "My wife!--Not yet.  I must first be wholly ruined before she
can want; and if I were so, do you think I should not be by her side?"

LEVY.--"I beg pardon, my dear fellow; your pride of gentleman is so
susceptible that it is hard for a lawyer not to wound it unawares.  Your
wife, then, does not know the exact state of your affairs?"

EGERTON.--"Of course not.  Who would confide to a woman things in which
she could do nothing, except to tease one the more?"

LEVY.--"True, and a poetess too!  I have prevented your finishing your
answer to Mrs. Bertram's last letter.  Can I take it--it may save a day's
delay--that is, if you do not object to my calling on her this evening."

EGERTON (sitting down to his unfinished letter).--"Object! no."

LEVY (looking at his watch).--"Be quick, or I shall lose the coach."

EGEPTON (sealing the letter).--"There.  And I should be obliged to you if
you would call; and without alarming her as to my circumstances, you can
just say that you know I am much harassed about important affairs at
present, and so soothe the effects of my very short answers--"

LEVY.--"To those doubly-crossed, very long letters,--I will."

"Poor Nora," said Egerton, sighing, "she will think this answer brief and
churlish enough.  Explain my excuses kindly, so that they will serve for
the future.  I really have no time and no heart for sentiment.  The
little I ever had is well-nigh worried out of me.  Still I love her
fondly and deeply."

LEVY.--"You must have done so.  I never thought it in you to sacrifice
the world to a woman."

EGERTON.--"Nor I either; but," added the strong man, conscious of that
power which rules the world infinitely more than knowledge, conscious of
tranquil courage, "but I have not sacrificed the world yet.  This right
arm shall bear up her and myself too."

LEVY.--"Well said!  but in the mean while, for heaven's sake, don't
attempt to go to London, nor to leave this place; for, in that case,
I know you will be arrested, and then adieu to all hopes of parliament,
--of a career."

Audley's haughty countenance darkened; as the dog, in his bravest mode,
turns dismayed from the stone plucked from the mire, so, when Ambition
rears itself to defy mankind, whisper "disgrace and a jail,"--and, lo,
crestfallen, it slinks away!  That evening Levy called on Nora, and
ingratiating himself into her favour by praise of Egerton, with indirect
humble apologetic allusions to his own former presumption, he prepared
the way to renewed visits; she was so lonely, and she so loved to see one
who was fresh from seeing Audley, one who would talk to her of him!  By
degrees the friendly respectful visitor thus stole into her confidence;
and then, with all his panegyrics on Audley's superior powers and gifts,
he began to dwell upon the young husband's worldly aspirations, and care
for his career; dwell on them so as vaguely to alarm Nora,--to imply
that, dear as she was, she was still but second to Ambition.  His way
thus prepared, he next began to insinuate his respectful pity at her
equivocal position, dropped hints of gossip and slander, feared that the
marriage might be owned too late to preserve reputation.  And then what
would be the feelings of the proud Egerton if his wife were excluded from
that world whose opinion he so prized?  Insensibly thus he led her on to
express (though timidly) her own fear, her own natural desire, in her
letters to Audley.  When could the marriage be proclaimed?  Proclaimed!
Audley felt that to proclaim such a marriage at such a moment would be to
fling away his last cast for fame and fortune.  And Harley, too,--Harley
still so uncured of his frantic love!  Levy was sure to be at hand when
letters like these arrived.

And now Levy went further still in his determination to alienate these
two hearts.  He contrived, by means of his various agents, to circulate
through Nora's neighbourhood the very slanders at which he had hinted.
He contrived that she should be insulted when she went abroad, outraged
at home by the sneers of her own servant, and tremble with shame at her
own shadow upon her abandoned bridal hearth.

Just in the midst of this intolerable anguish, Levy reappeared.  His
crowning hour was ripe.  He intimated his knowledge of the humiliations
Nora had undergone, expressed his deep compassion, offered to intercede
with Egerton "to do her justice."  He used ambiguous phrases, that
shocked her ear and tortured her heart, and thus provoked her on to
demand him to explain; and then, throwing her into a wild state of
indefinite alarm, in which he obtained her solemn promise not to divulge
to Audley what he was about to communicate, he said, with villanous
hypocrisy of reluctant shame, "that her marriage was not strictly legal;
that the forms required by the law had not been complied with, that
Audley, unintentionally or purposely, had left himself free to disown the
rite and desert the bride."  While Nora stood stunned and speechless at a
falsehood which, with lawyer-like show, he contrived to make truth-like
to her inexperience, he hurried rapidly on, to re-awake on her mind the
impression of Audley's pride, ambition, and respect for worldly position.
"These are your obstacles," said he; "but I think I may induce him to
repair the wrong, and right you at last."  Righted at last--oh, infamy!

Then Nora's anger burst forth.  She believe such a stain on Audley's
honour!

"But where was the honour when he betrayed his friend?  Did you not know
that he was entrusted by Lord L'Estrange to plead for him.  How did he
fulfil the trust?"

"Plead for L'Estrange!"  Nora had not been exactly aware of this,--in the
sudden love preceding those sudden nuptials, so little touching Harley
(beyond Audley's first timid allusions to his suit, and her calin and
cold reply) had been spoken by either.

Levy resumed.  He dwelt fully on the trust and the breach of it, and then
said: "In Egerton's world, man holds it far more dishonour to betray a
man than to dupe a woman; and if Egerton could do the one, why doubt that
he would do the other?  But do not look at me with those indignant eyes.
Put himself to the test; write to him to say that the suspicions amidst
which you live have become intolerable, that they infect even yourself,
despite your reason, that the secrecy of your nuptials, his prolonged
absence, his brief refusal, on unsatisfactory grounds, to proclaim your
tie, all distract you with a terrible doubt.  Ask him, at least (if he
will not yet declare your marriage), to satisfy you that the rites were
legal."

"I will go to him," cried Nora, impetuously.

"Go to him!--in his own house!  What a scene, what a scandal!  Could he
ever forgive you?"

"At least, then, I will implore him to come here.  I can not write such
horrible words; I cannot!  I cannot!  Go, go!" Levy left her, and
hastened to two or three of Audley's most pressing creditors,--men, in
fact, who went entirely by Levy's own advice.  He bade them instantly
surround Audley's country residence with bailiffs.  Before Egerton could
reach Nora, he would thus be lodged in a jail.  These preparations made,
Levy himself went down to Audley, and arrived, as usual, an hour or two
before the delivery of the post.

And Nora's letter came; and never was Audley's grave brow more dark than
when he read it.  Still, with his usual decision, he resolved to obey her
wish,--rang the bell, and ordered his servant to put up a change of
dress, and send for post-horses.

Levy then took him aside, and led him to the window.  "Look under yon
trees.  Do you see those men?  They are bailiffs.  This is the true
reason why I come to you to-day.  You cannot leave this house."

Egerton recoiled.  "And this frantic, foolish letter at such a time!" he
muttered, striking the open page, full of love in the midst of terror,
with his clenched hand.  O Woman, Woman!  if thy heart be deep, and its
chords tender, beware how thou lovest the man with whom all that plucks
him from the hard cares of the workday world is frenzy or a folly!  He
will break thy heart, he will shatter its chords, he will trample out
from its delicate framework every sound that now makes musical the common
air, and swells into unison with the harps of angels.

"She has before written to me," continued Audley, pacing the room with
angry, disordered strides, "asking me when our marriage can be
proclaimed, and I thought my replies would have satisfied any reasonable
woman.  But now, now this is worse, immeasurably worse,--she actually
doubts my honour!  I, who have made such sacrifices,--actually doubts
whether I, Audley Egerton, an English gentleman, could have been base
enough to--"

"What?" interrupted Levy, "to deceive your friend L'Estrange?  Did not
she know that?"

"Sir!" exclaimed Egerton, turning white.

"Don't be angry,--all's fair in love as in war; and L'Estrange will live
yet to thank you for saving him from such a misalliance.  But you are
seriously angry: pray, forgive me."

With some difficulty and much fawning, the usurer appeased the storm he
had raised in Audley's conscience.  And he then heard, as if with
surprise, the true purport of Nora's letter.

"It is beneath me to answer, much less to satisfy, such a doubt," said
Audley.  "I could have seen her, and a look of reproach would have
sufficed; but to put my hand to paper, and condescend to write, 'I am not
a villain, and I will give you the proofs that I am not'--never!"

"You are quite right; but let us see if we cannot reconcile matters
between your pride and her feelings.  Write simply this: 'All that you
ask me to say or to explain, I have instructed Levy, as my solicitor, to
say and explain for me; and you may believe him as you would myself.'"

"Well, the poor fool, she deserves to be punished; and I suppose that
answer will punish her more than a lengthier rebuke.--My mind is so
distracted, I cannot judge of these trumpery woman-fears and whims;
there, I have written as you suggest.  Give her all the proof she needs,
and tell her that in six months at furthest, come what will, she shall
bear the name of Egerton, as henceforth she must share his fate."

"Why say six months?"

"Parliament must be dissolved, and there must be a general election
before then.  I shall either obtain a seat, be secure from a jail, have
won field for my energies, or--"

"Or what?"

"I shall renounce ambition altogether, ask my brother to assist me
towards whatever debts remain when all my property is fairly sold--they
cannot be much.  He has a living in his gift; the incumbent is old, and,
I hear, very ill.  I can take orders."

"Sink into a country parson!"

"And learn content.  I have tasted it already.  She was then by my side.
Explain all to her.  This letter, I fear, is too unkind--But to doubt me
thus!"

Levy hastily placed the letter in his pocketbook; and, for fear it should
be withdrawn, took his leave.

And of that letter he made such use, that the day after he had given it
to Nora, she had left the house, the neighbourhood; fled, and not a
trace!  Of all the agonies in life, that which is most poignant and
harrowing, that which for the time most annihilates reason, and leaves
our whole organization one lacerated, mangled heart, is the conviction
that we have been deceived where we placed all the trust of love.  The
moment the anchor snaps, the storm comes on, the stars vanish behind the
cloud.

When Levy returned, filled with the infamous hope which had stimulated
his revenge,--the hope that if he could succeed in changing into scorn
and indignation Nora's love for Audley, he might succeed also in
replacing that broken and degraded idol,--his amaze and dismay were great
on hearing of her departure.  For several days he sought her traces in
vain.  He went to Lady Jane Horton's,--Nora had not been there.  He
trembled to go back to Egerton.  Surely Nora would have written to her
husband, and in spite of her promise, revealed his own falsehood; but as
days passed, and not a clew was found, he had no option but to repair to
Egerton Hall, taking care that the bailiffs still surrounded it.  Audley
had received no line from Nora.  The young husband was surprised,
perplexed, uneasy, but had no suspicion of the truth.

At length Levy was forced to break to Audley the intelligence of Nora's
flight.  He gave his own colour to it.  Doubtless she had gone to seek
her own relations, and, by their advice, take steps to make her marriage
publicly known.  This idea changed Audley's first shock into deep and
stern resentment.  His mind so little comprehended Nora's, and was ever
so disposed to what is called the common-sense view of things, that he
saw no other mode to account for her flight and her silence.  Odious to
Egerton as such a proceeding would be, he was far too proud to take any
steps to guard against it.  "Let her do her worst," said he, coldly,
masking emotion with his usual self-command; "it will be but a nine
days' wonder to the world, a fiercer rush of my creditors on their
hunted prey"

"And a challenge from Lord L'Estrange."

"So be it," answered Egerton, suddenly placing his hand at his heart.

"What is the matter?  Are you ill?"

"A strange sensation here.  My father died of a complaint of the heart,
and I myself was once told to guard, through life, against excess of
emotion.  I smiled at such a warning then.  Let us sit down to business."

But when Levy had gone, and solitude reclosed round that Man of the Iron
Mask, there grew upon him more and more the sense of a mighty loss.
Nora's sweet loving face started from the shadows of the forlorn walls.
Her docile, yielding temper, her generous, self-immolating spirit, came
back to his memory, to refute the idea that wronged her.  His love, that
had been suspended for awhile by busy cares, but which, if without much
refining sentiment, was still the master passion of his soul, flowed back
into all his thoughts,--circumfused the very atmosphere with a fearful,
softening charm.  He escaped under cover of the night from the watch of
the bailiffs.  He arrived in London.  He himself sought everywhere he
could think of for his missing bride.  Lady Jane Horton was confined to
her bed, dying fast, incapable even to receive and reply to his letter.
He secretly sent down to Lansmere to ascertain if Nora had gone to her
parents.  She was not there.  The Avenels believed her still with Lady
Jane Horton.

He now grew most seriously alarmed; and in the midst of that alarm, Levy
secretly contrived that he should be arrested for debt; but he was not
detained in confinement many days.  Before the disgrace got wind, the
writs were discharged, Levy baffled.  He was free.  Lord L'Estrange had
learned from Audley's servant what Audley would have concealed from him
out of all the world.  And the generous boy, who, besides the munificent
allowance he received from the earl, was heir to an independent and
considerable fortune of his own, when he should attain his majority,
hastened to borrow the money and discharge all the obligations of his
friend.  The benefit was conferred before Audley knew of it, or could
prevent.  Then a new emotion, and perhaps scarce less stinging than the
loss of Nora, tortured the man who had smiled at the warning of science;
and the strange sensation at the heart was felt again and again.

And Harley, too, was still in search of Nora,--would talk of nothing but
her, and looked so haggard and grief-worn.  The bloom of the boy's youth
was gone.  Could Audley then have said, "She you seek is another's; your
love is razed out of your life; and, for consolation, learn that your
friend has betrayed you"?  Could Audley say this?  He did not dare.
Which of the two suffered the most?

And these two friends, of characters so different, were so singularly
attached to each other,--inseparable at school, thrown together in the
world, with a wealth of frank confidences between them, accumulated since
childhood.  And now, in the midst of all his own anxious sorrow, Harley
still thought and planned for Egerton.  And self-accusing remorse, and
all the sense of painful gratitude, deepened Audley's affection for
Harley into a devotion as to a superior, while softening it into a
reverential pity that yearned to relieve, to atone; but how,--oh, how?

A general election was now at hand, still no news of Nora.  Levy kept
aloof from Audley, pursuing his own silent search.  A seat for the
borough of Lansmere was pressed upon Audley, not only by Harley, but his
parents, especially by the countess, who tacitly ascribed to Audley's
wise counsels Nora's mysterious disappearance.

Egerton at first resisted the thought of a new obligation to his injured
friend; but he burned to have it, some day, in his power to repay at
least his pecuniary debt: the sense of that debt humbled him more than
all else.  Parliamentary success might at last obtain for him some
lucrative situation abroad, and thus enable him gradually to remove this
load from his heart and his honour.  No other chance of repayment
appeared open to him.  He accepted the offer, and went down to Lansmere.
His brother, lately married, was asked to meet him; and there also was
Miss Leslie the heiress, whom Lady Lansmere secretly hoped her son Harley
would admire, but who had long since, no less secretly, given her heart
to the unconscious Egerton.

Meanwhile, the miserable Nora--deceived by the arts and representations
of Levy, acting on the natural impulse of a heart so susceptible to
shame, flying from a home which she deemed dishonoured, flying from a
lover whose power over her she knew to be so great that she dreaded lest
he might reconcile her to dishonour itself--had no thought save to hide
herself forever from Audley's eye.  She would not go to her relations,
to Lady Jane; that were to give the clew, and invite the pursuit.  An
Italian lady of high rank had visited at Lady Jane's,--taken a great
fancy to Nora; and the lady's husband, having been obliged to precede her
return to Italy, had suggested the notion of engaging some companion; the
lady had spoken of this to Nora and to Lady Jane Horton, who had urged
Nora to accept the offer, elude Harley's pursuit, and go abroad for a
time.  Nora then had refused; for she then had seen Audley Egerton.

To this Italian lady she now went, and the offer was renewed with the
most winning kindness, and grasped at in the passion of despair.  But the
Italian had accepted invitations to English country-houses before she
finally departed for the Continent.  Meanwhile Nora took refuge in a
quiet lodging in a sequestered suburb, which an English servant in the
em ployment of the fair foreigner recommended.  Thus had she first come
to the cottage in which Burley died.  Shortly afterwards she left England
with her new companion, unknown to all,--to Lady Jane as to her parents.

All this time the poor girl was under a moral delirium, a confused fever,
haunted by dreams from which she sought to fly.  Sound physiologists
agree that madness is rarest amongst persons of the finest imagination.
But those persons are, of all others, liable to a temporary state of mind
in which judgment sleeps,--imagination alone prevails with a dire and
awful tyranny.  A single idea gains ascendancy, expels all others,
presents itself everywhere with an intolerable blinding glare.  Nora was
at that time under the dread one idea, to fly from shame!

But when the seas rolled, and the dreary leagues interposed between her
and her lover; when new images presented themselves; when the fever
slaked, and reason returned,--doubt broke upon the previous despair.  Had
she not been too credulous, too hasty?  Fool, fool!  Audley have been so
poor a traitor!  How guilty was she, if she had wronged him!  And in the
midst of this revulsion of feeling, there stirred within her another
life.  She was destined to become a mother.  At that thought her high
nature bowed; the last struggle of pride gave way; she would return to
England, see Audley, learn from his lips the truth, and even if the truth
were what she had been taught to believe, plead not for herself, but for
the false one's child.

Some delay occurred in the then warlike state of affairs on the Continent
before she could put this purpose into execution; and on her journey
back, various obstructions lengthened the way.  But she returned at last,
and resought the suburban cottage in which she had last lodged before
quitting England.  At night, she went to Audley's London house; there was
only a woman in charge of it.  Mr. Egerton was absent, electioneering
somewhere; Mr. Levy, his lawyer, called every day for any letters to be
forwarded to him.  Nora shrank from seeing Levy, shrank from writing even
a letter that would pass through his bands.  If she had been deceived, it
had been by him, and wilfully.  But parliament was already dissolved; the
election would soon be over.  Mr. Egerton was expected to return to town
within a week.  Nora went back to Mrs. Goodyer's and resolved to wait,
devouring her own heart in silence.  But the newspapers might inform her
where Audley really was; the newspapers were sent for and conned daily.

And one morning this paragraph met her eye:--

     The Earl and Countess of Lansmere are receiving a distinguished
     party at their country seat.  Among the guests is Miss Leslie, whose
     wealth and beauty have excited such sensation in the fashionable
     world.  To the disappointment of numerous aspirants amongst our
     aristocracy, we hear that this lady has, however, made her
     distinguished choice in Mr. Audley Egerton.  That gentleman is now a
     candidate for the borough of Lansmere, as a supporter of the
     Government; his success is considered certain, and, according to the
     report of a large circle of friends, few new members will prove so
     valuable an addition to the ministerial ranks.  A great career may
     indeed be predicted for a young man so esteemed for talent and
     character, aided by a fortune so immense as that which he will
     shortly receive with the hand of the accomplished heiress.

Again the anchor snapped, again the storm descended, again the stars
vanished.  Nora was now once more under the dominion of a single thought,
as she had been when she fled from her bridal home.  Then, it was to
escape from her lover,--now, it was to see him.  As the victim stretched
on the rack implores to be led at once to death, so there are moments
when the anuihilation of hope seems more merciful than the torment of
suspense.

CHAPTER XVII.

When the scenes in some long diorama pass solemnly before us, there is
sometimes one solitary object, contrasting, perhaps, the view of stately
cities or the march of a mighty river, that halts on the eye for a
moment, and then glides away, leaving on the mind a strange, comfortless,
undefined impression.

Why was the object presented to us?  In itself it seemed comparatively
insignificant.  It may have been but a broken column, a lonely pool with
a star-beam on its quiet surface,--yet it awes us.  We remember it when
phantasmal pictures of bright Damascus, or of colossal pyramids, of
bazaars in Stamboul, or lengthened caravans that defile slow amidst the
sands of Araby, have sated the wondering gaze.  Why were we detained in
the shadowy procession by a thing that would have been so commonplace had
it not been so lone?  Some latent interest must attach to it.  Was it
there that a vision of woe had lifted the wild hair of a Prophet; there
where some Hagar had stilled the wail of her child on her indignant
breast?  We would fain call back the pageantry procession, fain see again
the solitary thing that seemed so little worth the hand of the artist,
and ask, "Why art thou here, and wherefore dost thou haunt us?"

Rise up,--rise up once more, by the broad great thoroughfare that
stretches onward and onward to the remorseless London!  Rise up, rise up,
O solitary tree with the green leaves on thy bough, and the deep rents in
thy heart; and the ravens, dark birds of omen and sorrow, that build
their nest amidst the leaves of the bough, and drop with noiseless plumes
down through the hollow rents of the heart, or are heard, it may be in
the growing shadows of twilight, calling out to their young.

Under the old pollard-tree, by the side of John Avenel's house, there
cowered, breathless and listening, John Avenel's daughter Nora.  Now,
when that fatal newspaper paragraph, which lied so like truth, met her
eyes, she obeyed the first impulse of her passionate heart,--she tore the
wedding ring from her finger, she enclosed it, with the paragraph itself,
in a letter to Audley,--a letter that she designed to convey scorn and
pride--alas! it expressed only jealousy and love.  She could not rest
till she had put this letter into the post with her own hand, addressed
to, Audley at Lord Lansmere's.  Scarce had it left her ere she repented.
What had she done,--resigned the birth-right of the child she was so soon
to bring into the world, resigned her last hope in her lover's honour,
given up her life of life--and from belief in what?--a report in a
newspaper!  No, no; she would go herself to Lansmere; to her father's
home,--she could contrive to see Audley before that letter reached his
hand.  The thought was scarcely conceived before obeyed.  She found a
vacant place in a coach that started from London some hours before the
mail, and went within a few miles of Lansmere; those last miles she
travelled on foot.  Exhausted, fainting, she gained at last the sight of
home, and there halted, for in the little garden in front she saw her
parents seated.  She heard the murmur of their voices, and suddenly she
remembered her altered shape, her terrible secret.  How answer the
question,

"Daughter, where and who is thy husband?"  Her heart failed her; she
crept under the old pollard-tree, to gather up resolve, to watch, and to
listen.  She saw the rigid face of the thrifty, prudent mother, with the
deep lines that told of the cares of an anxious life, and the chafe of
excitable temper and warm affections against the restraint of decorous
sanctimony and resolute pride.  The dear stern face never seemed to her
more dear and more stern.  She saw the comely, easy, indolent, good-
humoured father; not then the poor, paralytic sufferer, who could yet
recognize Nora's eyes under the lids of Leonard, but stalwart and
jovial,--first bat in the Cricket Club, first voice in the Glee Society,
the most popular canvasser of the Lansmere Constitutional True Blue
Party, and the pride and idol of the Calvinistical prim wife; never from
those pinched lips of hers had come forth even one pious rebuke to the
careless, social man.  As he sat, one hand in his vest, his profile
turned to the road, the light smoke curling playfully up from the pipe,
over which lips, accustomed to bland smile and hearty laughter, closed as
if reluctant to be closed at all, he was the very model of the
respectable retired trader in easy circumstances, and released from the
toil of making money while life could yet enjoy the delight of spending
it.

"Well, old woman," said John Avenel, "I must be off presently to see to
those three shaky voters in Fish Lane; they will have done their work
soon, and I shall catch 'em at home.  They do say as how we may have an
opposition; and I know that old Smikes has gone to Lonnon in search of a
candidate.  We can't have the Lansmere Constitutional Blues beat by a
Lonnoner!  Ha, ha, ha!"

"But you will be home before Jane and her husband Mark come?  How ever
she could marry a common carpenter!"

"Yes," said John, "he is a carpenter; but he has a vote, and that
strengthens the family interest.  If Dick was not gone to Amerikay, there
would be three on us.  But Mark is a real good Blue!  A Lonnoner, indeed!
a Yellow from Lonnon beat my Lord and the Blues!  Ha, ha!"

"But, John, this Mr. Egerton is a Lonnoner!"

"You don't understand things, talking such nonsense.  Mr. Egerton is the
Blue candidate, and the Blues are the Country Party; therefore how can he
be a Lonnoner?  An uncommon clever, well-grown, handsome young man, eh!
and my young Lord's particular friend."

Mrs. Avenel sighed.

"What are you sighing and shaking your head for?"

"I was thinking of our poor, dear, dear Nora!"

"God bless her!" cried John, heartily.

There was a rustle under the boughs of the old hollow-hearted pollard-
tree.

"Ha, ha!  Hark! I said that so loud that I have startled the ravens!"

"How he did love her!" said Mrs. Avenel, thoughtfully.  "I am sure he
did; and no wonder, for she looks every inch a lady; and why should not
she be my lady, after all?"

"He?  Who?  Oh, that foolish fancy of yours about my young Lord?  A
prudent woman like you!--stuff!  I am glad my little beauty is gone to
Lonnon, out of harm's way."

"John, John, John!  No harm could ever come to my Nora.  She 's too pure
and too good, and has too proper a pride in her, to--"

"To listen to any young lords, I hope," said John; "though," he added,
after a pause, "she might well be a lady too.  My Lord, the young one,
took me by the hand so kindly the other day, and said, 'Have not you
heard from her--I mean Miss Avenel--lately?' and those bright eyes of his
were as full of tears as--as--as yours are now."

"Well, John, well; go on."

"That is all.  My Lady came up, and took me away to talk about the
election; and just as I was going, she whispered, 'Don't let my wild boy
talk to you about that sweet girl of yours.  We must both see that she
does not come to disgrace.'  'Disgrace!' that word made me very angry for
the moment.  But my Lady has such a way with her that she soon put me
right again.  Yet, I do think Nora must have loved my young Lord, only
she was too good to show it.  What do you say?"  And the father's voice
was thoughtful.

"I hope she'll never love any man till she's married to him; it is not
proper, John," said Mrs. Avenel, somewhat starchly, though very mildly.

"Ha, ha!" laughed John, chucking his prim wife under the chin, "you did
not say that to me when I stole your first kiss under that very pollard-
tree--no house near it then!"

"Hush, John, hush!" and the prim wife blushed like a girl.

"Pooh," continued John, merrily, "I don't see why we plain folk should
pretend to be more saintly and prudish-like than our betters.  There's
that handsome Miss Leslie, who is to marry Mr. Egerton--easy enough to
see how much she is in love with him,--could not keep her eyes off from
him even in church, old girl!  Ha, ha!  What the deuce is the matter with
the ravens?"

"They'll be a comely couple, John.  And I hear tell she has a power of
money.  When is the marriage to be?"

"Oh, they say as soon as the election is over.  A fine wedding we shall
have of it!  I dare say my young Lord will be bridesman.  We'll send for
our little Nora to see the gay doings!"

Out from the boughs of the old tree came the shriek of a lost spirit,--
one of those strange, appalling sounds of human agony which, once heard,
are never forgotten.  It is as the wail of Hope, when SHE, too, rushes
forth from the Coffer of Woes, and vanishes into viewless space; it is
the dread cry of Reason parting from clay, and of Soul, that would wrench
itself from life!  For a moment all was still--and then a dull, dumb,
heavy fall!

The parents gazed on each other, speechless: they stole close to the
pales, and looked over.  Under the boughs, at the gnarled roots of the
oak, they saw--gray and indistinct--a prostrate form.  John opened the
gate, and went round; the mother crept to the road-side, and there stood
still.

"Oh, wife, wife!" cried John Avenel, from under the green boughs, "it is
our child Nora!  Our child! our child!"

And, as he spoke, out from the green boughs started the dark ravens,
wheeling round and round, and calling to their young!

And when they had laid her on the bed, Mrs. Avenel whispered John to
withdraw for a moment; and with set lips but trembling hands began to
unlace the dress, under the pressure of which Nora's heart heaved
convulsively.  And John went out of the room bewildered, and sat himself
down on the landing-place, and wondered whether he was awake or sleeping;
and a cold numbness crept over one side of him, and his head felt very
heavy, with a loud, booming noise in his ears.  Suddenly his wife stood
by his side, and said, in a very low voice,

"John, run for Mr. Morgan,--make haste.  But mind--don't speak to any one
on the way.  Quick, quick!"

"Is she dying?"

"I don't know.  Why not die before?" said Mrs. Avenel, between her teeth;
"but Mr. Morgan is a discreet, friendly man."

"A true Blue!" muttered poor John, as if his mind wandered; and rising
with difficulty, he stared at his wife a moment, shook his head, and was
gone.

An hour or two later, a little, covered, taxed cart stopped at Mr.
Avenel's cottage, out of which stepped a young man with pale face and
spare form, dressed in the Sunday suit of a rustic craftsman; then a
homely, but pleasant, honest face bent down to him, smilingly; and two
arms emerging from under covert of a red cloak extended an infant, which
the young man took tenderly.  The baby was cross and very sickly; it
began to cry.  The father hushed, and rocked, and tossed it, with the air
of one to whom such a charge was familiar.

"He'll be good when we get in, Mark," said the young woman, as she
extracted from the depths of the cart a large basket containing poultry
and home-made bread.

"Don't forget the flowers that the squire's gardener gave us," said Mark
the Poet.

Without aid from her husband, the wife took down basket and nosegay,
settled her cloak, smoothed her gown, and said, "Very odd!  they don't
seem to expect us, Mark.  How still the house is!  Go and knock; they
can't ha' gone to bed yet."

Mark knocked at the door--no answer.  A light passed rapidly across the
windows on the upper floor, but still no one came to his summons.  Mark
knocked again.  A gentleman dressed in clerical costume, now coming from
Lansinere Park, on the opposite side of the road, paused at the sound of
Mark's second and more impatient knock, and said civilly,

"Are you not the young folks my friend John Avenel told me this morning
he expected to visit him?"

"Yes, please, Mr. Dale," said Mrs. Fairfield, dropping her courtesy.
"You remember me! and this is my dear good man!"

"What! Mark the Poet?" said the curate of Lansmere, with a smile.  "Come
to write squibs for the election?"

"Squibs, sir!" cried Mark, indignantly.

"Burns wrote squibs," said the curate, mildly.

Mark made no answer, but again knocked at the door.

This time, a man, whose face, even seen by the starlight, was much
flushed, presented himself at the threshold.

"Mr. Morgan!" exclaimed the curate, in benevolent alarm; no illness here,
I hope?"

"Cott! it is you, Mr. Dale!--Come in, come in; I want a word with you.
But who the teuce are these people?"

"Sir," said Mark, pushing through the doorway, "my name is Fairfield, and
my wife is Mr. Avenel's daughter!"

"Oh, Jane--and her baby too!--Cood! cood!  Come in; but be quiet, can't
you?  Still, still--still as death!"

The party entered, the door closed; the moon rose, and shone calmly on
the pale silent house, on the sleeping flowers of the little garden, on
the old pollard with its hollow core.  The horse in the taxed cart dozed
unheeded; the light still at times flitted across the upper windows.
These were the only signs of life, except when a bat, now and then
attracted by the light that passed across the windows, brushed against
the panes, and then, dipping downwards, struck up against the nose of the
slumbering horse, and darted merrily after the moth that fluttered round
the raven's nest in the old pollard.

CHAPTER XVIII.

All that day Harley L'Estrange had been more than usually mournful and
dejected.  Indeed, the return to scenes associated with Nora's presence
increased the gloom that had settled on his mind since he had lost sight
and trace of her.  Audley, in the remorseful tenderness he felt for his
injured friend, had induced L'Estrange towards evening to leave the Park,
and go into a district some miles off, on pretence that he required
Harley's aid there to canvass certain important outvoters: the change of
scene might rouse him from his reveries.  Harley himself was glad to
escape from the guests at Lansmere.  He readily consented to go.  He
would not return that night.  The outvoters lay remote and scattered, he
might be absent for a day or two.  When Harley was gone, Egerton himself
sank into deep thought.  There was rumour of some unexpected opposition.
His partisans were alarmed and anxious.  It was clear that the Lansmere
interest, if attacked, was weaker than the earl would believe; Egerton
might lose his election.  If so, what would become of him?  How support
his wife, whose return to him he always counted on, and whom it would
then become him at all hazards to acknowledge?  It was that day that he
had spoken to William Hazeldean as to the family living.--"Peace, at
least," thought the ambitious man,--"I shall have peace!"  And the squire
had promised him the rectory if needed; not without a secret pang, for
his Harry was already using her conjugal influence in favour of her old
school-friend's husband, Mr. Dale; and the squire thought Audley would be
but a poor country parson, and Dale--if he would only grow a little
plumper than his curacy would permit him to be--would be a parson in ten
thousand.  But while Audley thus prepared for the worst, he still brought
his energies to bear on the more brilliant option; and sat with his
Committee, looking into canvass-books, and discussing the characters,
politics, and local interests of every elector, until the night was well-
nigh gone.  When he gained his room; the shutters were unclosed, and he
stood a few moments at the window, gazing on the moon.  At that sight,
the thought of Nora, lost and afar, stole over him.  The man, as we know,
had in his nature little of romance and sentiment.  Seldom was it his
wont to gaze upon moon or stars.  But whenever some whisper of romance
did soften his hard, strong mind, or whenever moon or stars did charm his
gaze from earth, Nora's bright Muse-like face, Nora's sweet loving eyes,
were seen in moon and star-beam, Nora's low tender voice heard in the
whisper of that which we call romance, and which is but the sound of the
mysterious poetry that is ever in the air, would we but deign to hear it!
He turned with a sigh, undressed, threw himself on his bed, and
extinguished his light.  But the light of the moon would fill the room.
It kept him awake for a little time; he turned his face from the calm,
heavenly beam resolutely towards the dull blind wall, and fell asleep.
And, in the sleep, he was with Nora,--again in the humble bridal-home.
Never in his dreams had she seemed to him so distinct and life-like,--
her eyes upturned to his, her hands clasped together, and resting on his
shoulder, as had been her graceful wont, her voice murmuring meekly, "Has
it, then, been my fault that we parted?  Forgive, forgive me!"  And the
sleeper imagined that he answered, "Never part from me again,--never,
never!" and that he bent down to kiss the chaste lips that so tenderly
sought his own.  And suddenly he heard a knocking sound, as of a hammer,
--regular, but soft, low, subdued.  Did you ever, O reader, hear the
sound of the hammer on the lid of a coffin in a house of woe,--when the
undertaker's decorous hireling fears that the living may hear how he
parts them from the dead?  Such seemed the sound to Audley.  The dream
vanished abruptly.

He woke, and again heard the knock; it was at his door.  He sat up
wistfully; the moon was gone, it was morning.  "Who is there?" he cried
peevishly.

A low voice from without answered, "Hush, it is I; dress quick; let me
see you."

Egerton recognized Lady Lansmere's voice.  Alarmed and surprised, he
rose, dressed in haste, and went to the door.  Lady Lansmere was standing
without, extremely pale.  She put her finger to her lip, and beckoned him
to follow her.  He obeyed mechanically.  They entered her dressing-room,
a few doors from his own chamber, and the countess closed the door.

Then laying her slight firm hand on his shoulder, she said, in suppressed
and passionate excitement,

"Oh, Mr. Egerton, you must serve me, and at once.  Harley!  Harley! save
my Harley!  Go to him, prevent his coming back here, stay with him; give
up the election,--it is but a year or two lost in your life, you will
have other opportunities; make that sacrifice to your friend."

"Speak--what is the matter?  I can make no sacrifice too great for
Harley!"

"Thanks, I was sure of it.  Go then, I say, at once to Harley; keep him
away from Lansmere on any excuse you can invent, until you can break the
sad news to him,--gently, gently.  Oh, how will he bear it; how recover
the shock?  My boy, my boy!"

"Calm yourself!  Explain!  Break what news; recover what shock?"

"True; you do not know, you have not heard.  Nora Avenel lies yonder, in
her father's house,--dead, dead!"

Audley staggered back, clapping his hand to his heart, and then dropping
on his knee as if bowed down by the stroke of heaven.

"My bride, my wife!" he muttered.  "Dead--it cannot be!"

Lady Lansmere was so startled at this exclamation, so stunned by a
confession wholly unexpected, that she remained unable to soothe, to
explain, and utterly unprepared for the fierce agony that burst from the
man she had ever seen so dignified and cold, when he sprang to his feet,
and all the sense of his eternal loss rushed upon his heart.

At length he crushed back his emotions, and listened in apparent calm,
and in a silence broken but by quick gasps for breath, to Lady Lansmere's
account.

One of the guests in the house, a female relation of Lady Lansmere's, had
been taken suddenly ill about an hour or two before; the house had been
disturbed, the countess herself aroused, and Mr. Morgan summoned as the
family medical practitioner.  From him she had learned that Nora Avenel
had returned to her father's house late on the previous evening, had been
seized with brain fever, and died in a few hours.

Audley listened, and turned to the door, still in silence.  Lady Lansmere
caught him by the arm.  "Where are you going?  Ah, can I now ask you to
save my son from the awful news, you yourself the sufferer?  And yet--
yet--you know his haste, his vehemence, if he learned that you were his
rival, her husband; you whom he so trusted!  What, what would be the
result?---I tremble!"

"Tremble not,--I do not tremble!  Let me go!  I will be back soon, and
then,"--(his lips writhed)--"then we will talk of Harley."

Egerton went forth, stunned and dizzy.  Mechanically he took his way
across the park to John Avenel's house.  He had been forced to enter that
house, formally, a day or two before, in the course of his canvass; and
his worldly pride had received a shock when the home, the birth, and the
manners of his bride's parents had been brought before him.  He had even
said to himself, "And is it the child of these persons that I, Audley
Egerton, must announce to the world as wife?"  Now, if she had been the
child of a beggar-nay, of a felon--now if he could but recall her to
life, how small and mean would all that dreaded world appear to him!
Too late, too late!  The dews were glistening in the sun, the birds were
singing overhead, life wakening all around him--and his own heart felt
like a charnel-house.  Nothing but death and the dead there,--nothing!
He arrived at the door: it was open: he called; no one answered: he
walked up the narrow stairs, undisturbed, unseen; he came into the
chamber of death.  At the opposite side of the bed was seated John
Avenel; but he seemed in a heavy sleep.  In fact, paralysis had smitten
him; but he knew it not; neither did any one.  Who could heed the strong
hearty man in such a moment?  Not even the poor anxious wife!  He had
been left there to guard the house, and watch the dead,--an unconscious
man; numbed, himself, by the invisible icy hand!  Audley stole to the
bedside; he lifted the coverlid thrown over the pale still face.  What
passed within him during the minute he stayed there who shall say?  But
when he left the room, and slowly descended the stairs, he left behind
him love and youth, all the sweet hopes and joys of the household human
life, for ever and ever!

He returned to Lady Lansmere, who awaited his coming with the most
nervous anxiety.

"Now," said he, dryly, "I will go to Harley, and I will prevent his
returning hither."

"You have seen the parents.  Good heavens! do they know of your
marriage?"

"No; to Harley I must own it first.  Meanwhile, silence!"

"Silence!" echoed Lady Lansmere; and her burning hand rested in Audley's,
and Audley's hand was as ice.

In another hour Egerton had left the house, and before noon he was with
Harley.

It is necessary now to explain the absence of all the Avenel family,
except the poor stricken father.

Nora had died in giving birth to a child,--died delirious.  In her
delirium she had spoken of shame, of disgrace; there was no holy nuptial
ring on her finger.  Through all her grief, the first thought of Mrs.
Avenel was to save the good name of her lost daughter, the unblemished
honour of all the living Avenels.  No matron long descended from knights
or kings had keener pride in name and character than the poor,
punctilious Calvinistic trader's wife.  "Sorrow later, honour now!"  With
hard dry eyes she mused and mused, and made out herplan.  Jane Fairfield
should take away the infant at once, before the day dawned, and nurse it
with her own.  Mark should go with her, for Mrs. Avenel dreaded the
indiscretion of his wild grief.  She would go with them herself part of
the way, in order to command or reason them into guarded silence.  But
they could not go back to Hazeldean with another infant; Jane must go
where none knew her; the two infants might pass as twins.  And Mrs.
Avenel, though naturally a humane, kindly woman, and with a mother's
heart to infants, looked with almost a glad sternness at Jane's puny
babe, and thought to herself, "All difficulty would be over should there
be only one!  Nora's child could thus pass throughout life for Jane's!"

Fortunately for the preservation of the secret, the Avenels kept no
servant,--only an occasional drudge, who came a few hours in the day, and
went home to sleep.  Mrs. Avenel could count on Mr. Morgan's silence as
to the true cause of Nora's death.  And Mr. Dale, why should be reveal
the dishonour of a family?  That very day, or the next at furthest, she
could induce her husband to absent himself, lest he should blab out the
tale while his sorrow was greater than his pride.  She alone would then
stay in the house of death until she could feel assured that all else
were hushed into prudence.  Ay, she felt, that with due precautions, the
name was still safe.  And so she awed and hurried Mark and his wife away,
and went with them in the covered cart, that hid the faces of all three,
leaving for an hour or two the house and the dead to her husband's
charge, with many an admonition, to which be nodded his head, and which
he did not hear.  Do you think this woman was unfeeling and inhuman?
Had Nora looked from heaven into her mother's heart Nora would not have
thought so.  A good name when the burial stone closes over dust is still
a possession upon the earth; on earth it is indeed our only one!  Better
for our friends to guard for us that treasure than to sit down and weep
over perishable clay.  And weep!---Oh, stern mother, long years were left
to thee for weeping!  No tears shed for Nora made such deep furrows on
the cheeks as thine did!  Yet who ever saw them flow?

Harley was in great surprise to see Egerton; more surprised when Egerton
told him that he found he was to be opposed,--that he had no chance of
success at Lansmere, and had, therefore, resolved to retire from the
contest.  He wrote to the earl to that effect; but the countess knew the
true cause, and hinted it to the earl; so that, as we saw at the
commencement of this history, Egerton's cause did not suffer when Captain
Dashmore appeared in the borough; and, thanks to Mr. Hazeldean's
exertions and oratory, Audley came in by two votes,--the votes of John
Avenel and Mark Fairfield.  For though the former had been removed a
little way from the town, and by medical advice, and though, on other
matters, the disease that had smitten him left him docile as a child (and
he had but vague indistinct ideas of all the circumstances connected with
Nora's return, save the sense of her loss), yet he still would hear how
the Blues went on, and would get out of bed to keep his word: and even
his wife said,

"He is right; better die of it than break his promise!"  The crowd gave
way as the broken man they had seen a few days before so jovial and
healthful was brought up in a chair to the poll, and said, with his
tremulous quavering voice, "I 'm a true Blue,--Blue forever!"

Elections are wondrous things!  No man who has not seen can guess how the
zeal in them triumphs over sickness, sorrow, the ordinary private life of
us!

There was forwarded to Audley, from Lansmere Park, Nora's last letter.
The postman had left it there an hour or two after he himself had gone.
The wedding-ring fell on the ground, and rolled under his feet.  And
those burning, passionate reproaches, all that anger of the wounded dove,
explained to him the mystery of her return, her unjust suspicions, the
cause of her sudden death, which he still ascribed to brain fever,
brought on by excitement and fatigue.  For Nora did not speak of the
child about to be born; she had not remembered it when she wrote, or she
would not have written.  On the receipt of this letter, Egerton could not
remain in the dull village district,--alone, too, with Harley.  He said,
abruptly, that he must go to London; prevailed on L'Estrange to accompany
him; and there, when he heard from Lady Lansmere that the funeral was
over, he broke to Harley, with lips as white as the dead, and his hand
pressed to his heart, on which his hereditary disease was fastening quick
and fierce, the dread truth that Nora was no more.  The effect upon the
boy's health and spirits was even more crushing than Audley could
anticipate.  He only woke from grief to feel remorse.  "For," said the
noble Harley, "had it not been for my passion, my rash pursuit, would she
ever have left her safe asylum,--ever even have left her native town?
And then--and then--the struggle between her sense of duty and her love
to me!  I see it all--all!  But for me she were living still!"

"Oh, no!" cried Egerton, his confession now rushing to his lips.

"Believe me, she never loved you as you think.  Nay, nay, hear me!
Rather suppose that she loved another, fled with him, was perhaps married
to him, and--"

"Hold!" exclaimed Harley, with a terrible burst of passion,--"you kill
her twice to me if you say that!  I can still feel that she lives--lives
here, in my heart--while I dream that she loved me--or, at least, that no
other lip ever knew the kiss that was denied to mine!  But if you tell me
to doubt that--you--you--"  The boy's anguish was too great for his
frame; he fell suddenly back into Audley's arms; he had broken a blood-
vessel.  For several days he was in great danger; but his eyes were
constantly fixed on Audley's, with wistful intense gaze.  "Tell me," he
muttered, at the risk of re-opening the ruptured veins, and of the
instant loss of life,--"tell me, you did not mean that!  Tell me you have
no cause to think she loved another--was another's!"

"Hush, hush!  no cause--none--none!  I meant but to comfort you, as I
thought,--fool that I was!--that is all!" cried the miserable friend.
And from that hour Audley gave up the idea of righting himself in his own
eyes, and submitted still to be the living lie,--he, the haughty
gentleman!

Now, while Harley was still very weak and suffering, Mr. Dale came to
London, and called on Egerton.  The curate, in promising secrecy to Mrs.
Avenel, had made one condition, that it should not be to the positive
injury of Nora's living son.  What if Nora were married after all?  And
would it not be right, at least, to learn the name of the child's father?

Some day he might need a father.  Mrs. Avenel was obliged to content
herself with these reservations.  However, she implored Mr. Dale not to
make inquiries.  What could they do?  If Nora were married, her husband
would naturally, of his own accord, declare himself; if seduced and
forsaken, it would but disgrace her memory (now saved from stain) to
discover the father to a child of whose very existence the world as yet
knew nothing.  These arguments perplexed the good curate.  But Jane
Fairfield had a sanguine belief in her sister's innocence; and all her
suspicions naturally pointed to Lord L'Estrange.  So, indeed, perhaps;
did Mrs. Avenel's, though she never owned them.  Of the correctness of
these suspicions Mr. Dale was fully convinced; the young lord's
admiration, Lady Lansmere's fears, had been too evident to one who had
often visited at the Park; Harley's abrupt departure just before Nora's
return home; Egerton's sudden resignation of the borough before even
opposition was declared, in order to rejoin his friend, the very day of
Nora's death,--all confirmed his ideas that Harley was the betrayer or
the husband.  Perhaps there might have been a secret marriage--possibly
abroad--since Harley wanted some years of his majority.  He would, at
least, try to see and to sound Lord L'Estrange.  Prevented this interview
by Harley's illness, the curate resolved to ascertain how far he could
penetrate into the mystery by a conversation with Egerton.  There was
much in the grave repute which the latter had acquired, and the singular
and pre-eminent character for truth and honour with which it was
accompanied, that made the curate resolve upon this step.  Accordingly;
he saw Egerton, meaning only diplomatically to extract from the new
member for Lansmere what might benefit the family of the voters who had
given him his majority of two.

He began by mentioning, as a touching fact, how poor John Avenel, bowed
down by the loss of his child and the malady which had crippled his limbs
and enfeebled his mind, had still risen from his bed to keep his word.
And Audley's emotions seemed to him so earnest and genuine, to show so
good a heart, that out by little and little came more: first, his
suspicions that poor Nora had been betrayed; then his hopes that there
might have been private marriage; and as Audley, with his iron self-
command, showed just the proper degree of interest, and no more, he went
on, till Audley knew that he had a child.

"Inquire no further!" said the man of the world.  "Respect Mrs. Avenel's
feelings and wishes, I entreat you; they are the right ones.  Leave the
rest to me.  In my position--I mean as a resident of London--I can
quietly and easily ascertain more than you could, and provoke no scandal!
If I can right this--this--poor--[his voice trembled]--right the lost
mother, or the living child, sooner or later you will hear from me; if
not, bury this secret where it now rests, in a grave which slander has
not reached.  But the child--give me the address where it is to be found
--in case I succeed in finding the father, and touching his heart."

"Oh, Mr. Egerton, may I not say where you may find that father--who he
is?"

"Sir!"

"Do not be angry; and, after all, I cannot ask you to betray any
confidence which a friend may have placed in you.  I know what you men
of high honour are to each other, even in sin.  No, no, I beg pardon;
I leave all in your hands.  I shall hear from you then?"

"Or if not, why, then, believe that all search is hopeless.  My friend!
if you mean Lord L'Estrange, he is innocent.  I--I--I--[the voice
faltered]--am convinced of it."

The curate sighed, but made no answer.  "Oh, ye men of the world!"
thought he.  He gave the address which the member for Lansmere had asked
for, and went his way, and never heard again from Audley Egerton.  He was
convinced that the man who had showed such deep feeling had failed in his
appeal to Harley's conscience, or had judged it best to leave Nora's name
in peace, and her child to her own relations and the care of Heaven.

Harley L'Estrange, scarcely yet recovered, hastened to join our armies on
the Continent, and seek the Death which, like its half-brother, rarely
comes when we call it.

As soon as Harley was gone, Egerton went to the village to which Mr. Dale
had directed him, to seek for Nora's child.  But here he was led into a
mistake which materially affected the tenor of his own life, and
Leonard's future destinies.  Mrs. Fairfield had been naturally ordered by
her mother to take another name in the village to which she had gone with
the two infants, so that her connection with the Avenel family might not
be traced, to the provocation of inquiry and gossip.  The grief and
excitement through which she had gone dried the source of nutriment in
her breast.  She put Nora's child out to nurse at the house of a small
farmer, at a little distance from the village, and moved from her first
lodging to be nearer to the infant.  Her own child was so sickly and
ailing, that she could not bear to intrust it to the care of an other.
She tried to bring it up by hand; and the poor child soon pined away and
died.  She and Mark could not endure the sight of their baby's grave;
they hastened to return to Hazeldean, and took Leonard with them.  From
that time Leonard passed for the son they had lost.

When Egerton arrived at the village, and inquired for the person whose
address had been given to him, he was referred to the cottage in which
she had last lodged, and was told that she had been gone some days,--the
day after her child was buried.  Her child buried!  Egerton stayed to
inquire no more; thus he heard nothing of the infant that had been put
out to nurse.  He walked slowly into the churchyard, and stood for some
minutes gazing on the small new mound; then, pressing his hand on the
heart to which all emotion had been forbidden, he re-entered his chaise
and returned to London.  The sole reason for acknowledging his marriage
seemed to him now removed.  Nora's name had escaped reproach.  Even had
his painful position with regard to Harley not constrained him to
preserve his secret, there was every motive to the world's wise and
haughty son not to acknowledge a derogatory and foolish marriage, now
that none lived whom concealment could wrong.

Audley mechanically resumed his former life,--sought to resettle his
thoughts on the grand objects of ambitious men.  His poverty still
pressed on him; his pecuniary debt to Harley stung and galled his
peculiar sense of honour.  He saw no way to clear his estates, to repay
his friend, but by some rich alliance.  Dead to love, he faced this
prospect first with repugnance, then with apathetic indifference.  Levy,
of whose treachery towards himself and Nora he was unaware, still held
over him the power that the money-lender never loses over the man that
has owed, owes, or may owe again.  Levy was ever urging him to propose,
to the rich Miss Leslie; Lady Lansmere, willing to atone, as she thought,
for his domestic loss, urged the same; Harley, influenced by his mother,
wrote from the Continent to the same effect.

"Manage it as you will," at last said Egerton to Levy, "so that I am not
a wife's pensioner."

"Propose for me, if you will," he said to Lady Lansmere,--"I cannot woo,
--I cannot talk of love."

Somehow or other the marriage, with all its rich advantages to the ruined
gentleman, was thus made up.  And Egerton, as we have seen, was the
polite and dignified husband before the world,--married to a woman who
adored him.  It is the common fate of men like him to be loved too well!

On her death-bed his heart was touched by his wife's melancholy
reproach,--"Nothing I could do has ever made you love me!"

"It is true," answered Audley, with tears in his voice and eyes; "Nature
gave me but a small fund of what women like you call 'love,' and I
lavished it all away."  And he then told her, though with reserve, some
portion of his former history; and that soothed her; for when she saw
that he had loved, and could grieve, she caught a glimpse of the human
heart she had not seen before.  She died, forgiving him, and blessing.

Audley's spirits were much affected by this new loss.  He inly resolved
never to marry again.  He had a vague thought at first of retrenching his
expenditure, and making young Randal Leslie his heir.  But when he first
saw the clever Eton boy, his feelings did not warm to him, though his
intellect appreciated Randal's quick, keen talents.  He contented himself
with resolving to push the boy,--to do what was merely just to the
distant kinsman of his late wife.  Always careless and lavish in money
matters, generous and princely, not from the delight of serving others,
but from a grand seigneur's sentiment of what was due to himself and his
station, Audley had a mournful excuse for the lordly waste of the large
fortune at his control.  The morbid functions of the heart had become
organic disease.  True, he might live many years, and die at last of some
other complaint in the course of nature; but the progress of the disease
would quicken with all emotional excitement; he might die suddenly--any
day--in the very prime, and, seemingly, in the full vigour, of his life.
And the only physician in whom he confided what he wished to keep
concealed from the world (for ambitious men would fain be thought
immortal) told him frankly that it was improbable that, with the wear and
tear of political strife and action, he could advance far into middle
age.  Therefore, no son of his succeeding--his nearest relations all
wealthy--Egerton resigned himself to his constitutional disdain of money;
he could look into no affairs, provided the balance in his banker's hands
were such as became the munificent commoner.  All else he left to his
steward and to Levy.  Levy grew rapidly rich,--very, very rich,--and the
steward thrived.

The usurer continued to possess a determined hold over the imperious
great man.  He knew Audley's secret; he could reveal that secret to
Harley.  And the one soft and tender side of the statesman's nature--the
sole part of him not dipped in the ninefold Styx of practical prosaic
life, which renders man so invulnerable to affection--was his remorseful
love for the school friend whom he still deceived.

Here then you have the key to the locked chambers of Audley Egerton's
character, the fortified castle of his mind.  The envied minister, the
joyless man; the oracle on the economies of an empire, the prodigal in a
usurer's hands; the august, high-crested gentleman, to whom princes would
refer for the casuistry of honour, the culprit trembling lest the friend
he best loved on earth should detect his lie!  Wrap thyself in the decent
veil that the Arts or the Graces weave for thee, O Human Nature!  It is
only the statue of marble whose nakedness the eye can behold without
shame and offence!

CHAPTER XIX.

Of the narrative just placed before the reader, it is clear that Leonard
could gather only desultory fragments.  He could but see that his ill-
fated mother had been united to a man she had loved with surpassing
tenderness; had been led to suspect that the marriage was fraudulent; had
gone abroad in despair; returned repentant and hopeful; had gleaned some
intelligence that her lover was about to be married to another, and there
the manuscript closed with the blisters left on the page by agonizing
tears.  The mournful end of Nora, her lonely return to die under the roof
of her parents,--this he had learned before from the narrative of Dr.
Morgan.

But even the name of her supposed husband was not revealed.  Of him
Leonard could form no conjecture, except that he was evidently of higher
rank than Nora.  Harley L'Estrange seemed clearly indicated in the early
boy-lover.  If so, Harley must know all that was left dark to Leonard,
and to him Leonard resolved to confide the manuscripts.  With this
resolution he left the cottage, resolving to return and attend the
funeral obsequies of his departed friend.  Mrs. Goodyer willingly
permitted him to take away the papers she had lent to him, and added to
them the packet which had been addressed to Mrs. Bertram from the
Continent.

Musing in anxious gloom over the record he had read, Leonard entered
London on foot, and bent his way towards Harley's hotel; when, just as he
had crossed into Bond Street, a gentleman in company with Baron Levy, and
who seemed, by the flush on his brow and the sullen tone of his voice, to
have had rather an irritating colloquy with the fashionable usurer,
suddenly caught sight of Leonard, and, abruptly quitting Levy, seized the
young man by the arm.

"Excuse me, sir," said the gentleman, looking hard into Leonard's face,
"but unless these sharp eyes of mine are mistaken, which they seldom are,
I see a nephew whom, perhaps, I behaved to rather too harshly, but who
still has no right to forget Richard Avenel."

"My dear uncle," exclaimed Leonard, "this is indeed a joyful surprise; at
a time, too, when I needed joy!  No; I have never forgotten your
kindness, and always regretted our estrangement."

"That is well said; give us your fist again.  Let me look at you--quite
the gentleman, I declare--still so good-looking too.  We Avenels always
were a handsome family.

"Good-by, Baron Levy.  Need not wait for me; I am not going to run away.
I shall see you again."

"But," whispered Levy, who had followed Avenel across the street, and
eyed Leonard with a quick, curious, searching glance--"but it must be as
I say with regard to the borough; or (to be plain) you must cash the
bills on the day they are due."

"Very well, sir, very well.  So you think to put the screw upon me, as if
I were a poor little householder.  I understand,--my money or my
borough?"

"Exactly so," said the baron, with a soft smile.

"You shall hear from me."  (Aside, as Levy strolled away)--"D---d
tarnation rascal!"

Dick Avenel then linked his arm in his nephew's, and strove for some
minutes to forget his own troubles, in the indulgence of that curiosity
in the affairs of another, which was natural to him, and in this instance
increased by the real affection which he had felt for Leonard.  But still
his curiosity remained unsatisfied; for long before Leonard could
overcome his habitual reluctance to speak of his success in literature,
Dick's mind wandered back to his rival at Screwstown, and the curse of
"over-competition,"--to the bills which Levy had discounted, in order to
enable Dick to meet the crushing force of a capitalist larger than
himself, and the "tarnation rascal" who now wished to obtain two seats at
Lansmere, one for Randal Leslie, one for a rich Nabob whom Levy had just
caught as a client, and Dick, though willing to aid Leslie, had a mind to
the other seat for himself.  Therefore Dick soon broke in upon the
hesitating confessions of Leonard, with exclamations far from pertinent
to the subject, and rather for the sake of venting his own griefs and
resentment than with any idea that the sympathy or advice of his nephew
could serve him.

"Well, well," said Dick, "another time for your history.  I see you have
thrived, and that is enough for the present.  Very odd; but just now I
can only think of myself.  I'm in a regular fix, sir.  Screwstown is not
the respectable Screwstown that you remember it--all demoralized and
turned topsy-turvy by a demoniacal monster capitalist, with steam-engines
that might bring the falls of Niagara into your back parlour, sir!  And
as if that was not enough to destroy and drive into almighty shivers a
decent fair-play Britisher like myself, I hear he is just in treaty for
some patent infernal invention that will make his engines do twice as
much work with half as many hands!  That's the way those unfeeling
ruffians increase our poor-rates!  But I 'll get up a riot against him,
I will!  Don't talk to me of the law!  What the devil is the good of the
law if it don't protect a man's industry,--a liberal man, too, like me!"
Here Dick burst into a storm of vituperation against the rotten old
country in general, and Mr. Dyce, the monster capitalist of Screwstown,
in particular.

Leonard started; for Dick now named, in that monster capitalist, the very
person who was in treaty for Leonard's own mechanical improvement on the
steam-engine.

"Stop, uncle, stop!  Why, then, if this man were to buy the contrivance
you speak of, it would injure you?"

"Injure me, sir!  I should be a bankrupt,--that is, if it succeeded; but
I dare say it is all a humbug."

"No, it will succeed,--I 'll answer for that!"

"You!  You have seen it?"

"Why, I invented it!"

Dick hastily withdrew his arm from Leonard's.

"Serpent's tooth!" he said falteringly, "so it is you, whom I warmed at
my hearth, who are to ruin Richard Avenel?"

"No; but to save him!  Come into the City and look at my model.  If you
like it, the patent shall be yours!"

"Cab, cab, cab," cried Dick Avenel, stopping a "Ransom; "jump in,
Leonard,-jump in.  I'll buy your patent,--that is, if it be worth a
straw; and as for payment--"

"Payment!  Don't talk of that!"

"Well, I won't," said Dick, mildly; "for 't is not the topic of
conversation I should choose myself, just at present.  And as for that
black-whiskered alligator, the baron, let me first get out of those
rambustious, unchristian, filbert-shaped claws of his, and then--but jump
in! jump in! and tell the man where to drive!"

A very brief inspection of Leonard's invention sufficed to show Richard
Avenel how invaluable it would be to him.  Armed with a patent, of which
the certain effects in the increase of power and diminution of labour
were obvious to any practical man, Avenel felt that he should have no
difficulty in obtaining such advances of money as he required, whether to
alter his engines, meet the bills discounted by Levy, or carry on the war
with the monster capitalist.  It might be necessary to admit into
partnership some other monster capitalist--What then?  Any partner better
than Levy.  A bright idea struck him.

"If I can just terrify and whop that infernal intruder on my own ground
for a few months, he may offer, himself, to enter into partnership,--make
the two concerns a joint-stock friendly combination, and then we shall
flog the world."

His gratitude to Leonard became so lively that Dick offered to bring his
nephew in for Lansmere instead of himself; and when Leonard declined the
offer, exclaimed, "Well, then, any friend of yours; I'm all for reform
against those high and mighty right honourable borough-mongers; and what
with loans and mortgages on the small householders, and a long course of
'Free and Easies' with the independent freemen, I carry one--seat
certain, perhaps both seats of the town of Lansmere, in my breeches
pocket."  Dick then, appointing an interview with Leonard at his
lawyer's, to settle the transfer of the invention, upon terms which he
declared "should be honourable to both parties," hurried off, to search
amongst his friends in the City for some monster capitalist, who alight
be induced to extricate him from the jaws of Levy and the engines of his
rival at Screwstown.  "Mullins is the man, if I can but catch him," said
Dick.  "You have heard of Mullins?---a wonderful great man; you should
see his nails; he never cuts them!  Three millions, at least, he has
scraped together with those nails of his, sir.  And in this rotten old
country, a man must have nails a yard long to fight with a devil like
Levy!  Good-by, good-by,--Goon-by, MY DEAR, nephew!"

CHAPTER XX.

Harley L'Estrange was seated alone in his apartments.  He had just put
down a volume of some favourite classic author, and he was resting his
hand firmly clenched upon the book.  Ever since Harley's return to
England, there had been a perceptible change in the expression of his
countenance, even in the very bearing and attitudes of his elastic
youthful figure.  But this change had been more marked since that last
interview with Helen which has been recorded.  There was a compressed,
resolute firmness in the lips, a decided character in the brow.  To the
indolent, careless grace of his movements had succeeded a certain
indescribable energy, as quiet and self-collected as that which
distinguished the determined air of Audley Egerton himself.  In fact, if
you could have looked into his heart, you would have seen that Harley
was, for the first time, making a strong effort over his passions and his
humours; that the whole man was nerving himself to a sense of duty.
"No," he muttered,--"no!  I will think only of Helen; I will think only
of real life!  And what (were I not engaged to another) would that dark-
eyed Italian girl be to me?--What a mere fool's fancy is this!  I love
again,--I, who through all the fair spring of my life have clung with
such faith to a memory and a grave!  Come, come, come, Harley L'Estrange,
act thy part as man amongst men, at last!  Accept regard; dream no more
of passion.  Abandon false ideals.  Thou art no poet--why deem that life
itself can be a poem?"

The door opened, and the Austrian prince, whom Harley had interested in
the cause of Violante's father, entered, with the familiar step of a
friend.

"Have you discovered those documents yet?" said the prince.  "I must now
return to Vienna within a few days; and unless you can arm me with some
tangible proof of Peschiera's ancient treachery, or some more
unanswerable excuse for his noble kinsman, I fear that there is no other
hope for the exile's recall to his country than what lies in the hateful
option of giving his daughter to his perfidious foe."

"Alas!" said Harley, "as yet all researches have been in vain; and I know
not what other steps to take, without arousing Peschiera's vigilance, and
setting his crafty brains at work to counteract us.  My poor friend,
then, must rest contented with exile.  To give Violante to the count were
dishonour.  But I shall soon be married; soon have a home, not quite
unworthy of their due rank, to offer both to father and to child."

"Would the future Lady L'Estrange feel no jealousy of a guest so fair as
you tell me this young signorina is?  And would you be in no danger
yourself, my poor friend?"

"Pooh!" said Harley, colouring.  "My fair guest would have two fathers;
that is all.  Pray do not jest on a thing so grave as honour."

Again the door opened, and Leonard appeared.

"Welcome," cried Harley, pleased to be no longer alone under the prince's
penetrating eye,--"welcome.  This is the noble friend who shares our
interest for Riccabocca, and who could serve him so well, if we could but
discover the document of which I have spoken to you."

"It is here," said Leonard, simply; "may it be all that you require!"

Harley eagerly grasped at the packet, which had been sent from Italy to
the supposed Mrs. Bertram, and, leaning his face on his hand, rapidly
hurried through the contents.

"Hurrah!" he cried at last, with his face lighted up, and a boyish toss
of his right hand.  "Look, look, Prince, here are Peschiera's own letters
to his kinsman's wife; his avowal of what he calls his 'patriotic
designs;' his entreaties to her to induce her husband to share them.
Look, look, how he wields his influence over the woman he had once wooed;
look how artfully he combats her objections; see how reluctant our friend
was to stir, till wife and kinsman both united to urge him!"

"It is enough,-quite enough," exclaimed the prince, looking at the
passages in Peschiera's letters which Harley pointed out to him.

"No, it is not enough," shouted Harley, as he continued to read the
letters with his rapid sparkling eyes.  "More still!  O villain, doubly
damned!  Here, after our friend's flight, here is Peschiera's avowal of
guilty passion; here, he swears that he had intrigued to ruin his
benefactor, in order to pollute the home that had sheltered him.  Ah, see
how she answers! thank Heaven her own eyes were opened at last, and she
scorned him before she died!  She was innocent!  I said so.  Violante's
mother was pure.  Poor lady, this moves me!  Has your emperor the heart
of a man?"

"I know enough of our emperor," answered the prince, warmly, "to know
that, the moment these papers reach him, Peschiera is ruined, and your
friend is restored to his honours.  You will live to see the daughter, to
whom you would have given a child's place at your hearth, the wealthiest
heiress of Italy,--the bride of some noble lover, with rank only below
the supremacy of kings!"

"Ah," said Harley, in a sharp accent, and turning very pale,--"ah, I
shall not see her that!  I shall never visit Italy again!--never see her
more,--never, after she has once quitted this climate of cold iron cares
and formal duties! never, never!"  He turned his head for a moment, and
then came with quick step to Leonard.  "But you, O happy poet!  No Ideal
can ever be lost to you.  You are independent of real life.  Would that I
were a poet!"  He smiled sadly.

"You would not say so, perhaps, my dear Lord," answered Leonard, with
equal sadness, "if you knew how little what you call 'the Ideal' replaces
to a poet the loss of one affection in the genial human world.
Independent of real life!  Alas! no.  And I have here the confessions of
a true poet-soul, which I will entreat you to read at leisure; and when
you have read, say if you would still be a poet!"

He took forth Nora's manuscripts as he spoke.

"Place them yonder, in my escritoire, Leonard; I will read them later."

"Do so, and with heed; for to me there is much here that involves my own
life,--much that is still a mystery, and which I think you can unravel!"

"I!" exclaimed Harley; and he was moving towards the escritoire, in a
drawer of which Leonard had carefully deposited the papers, when once
more, but this time violently, the door was thrown open, and Giacomo
rushed into the room, accompanied by Lady Lansmere.

"Oh, my Lord, my Lord!" cried Giacomo, in Italian, "the signorina!  the
signorina!  Violante!"

"What of her?  Mother, Mother! what of her?  Speak, speak!"

"She has gone,--left our house!"

"Left!  No, no!" cried Giacomo.  "She must have been deceived or forced
away.  The count! the count!  Oh, my good Lord, save her, as you once
saved her father!"

"Hold!" cried Harley.  "Give me your arm, Mother.  A second such blow in
life is beyond the strength of man,--at least it is beyond mine.  So, so!
I am better now!  Thank you, Mother.  Stand back, all of you!  give me
air.  So the count has triumphed, and Violante has fled with him!
Explain all,--I can bear it!"