make Ravensdale turn out something better. He has run through such a lot of money, with so little to show for it. I suppose, though, he'll be wiser now that he has bought his experience he's too selfish to come to grief. Quæ virtus et quanta, boni, sit vivere parvo; It was what my uncle used to tell me when he gave me a shabby tip at school. It's all very well... I'm his best man, and I made an ass of myself in a speech, and all that; but I wish he had been at the devil before he married her. I've a great regard for Ernsford, and I don't like the business at all." Lord Sevenoaks. "Nor I. I never was more sorry for anything. The county has lost the best man there was to stand for it." Sir John Campion. "Was he going to stand ?" Lord Sevenoaks. "Yes; and he threw it up when this happened; and I'm very sorry, though it would have prevented my standing myself. However, he wouldn't have held it long, in all human probability, if what I heard this morning is true. I heard that Lord Elfintower's two grandsons have died of the scarlet-fever, at a private tutor's. Now their father has been dying some time, the grandfather is past ninety, and Ernsford is the next heir; so that he must be Lord Elfintower, and probably soon." Sir John Campion. "And about five-andtwenty thousand a year. 'There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come."" Exit. 6 CHAPTER II. "I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well; they imitated nature so abominably."-Hamlet. AND SO thought Caterina Guarini, when she found herself established at Lady Goodwin's, surrounded by an aggregate of ugliness such as had never entered into her inexperienced speculations on men and manners. Sir John Campion had fulfilled his promise with a scrupulous exactness, in spirit as well as in letter, that puzzled Caterina, and, in some degree, himself. The journey so dramatically begun at the corner of the lane, ended at the London Terminus of the Midland Coast Railway, where he left her, and getting into a Hansom cab, drove at once to Lady Goodwin's, telling his servant, who was waiting on the platform, that he was to remain with her, and see to her luggage till Lady Goodwin's carriage came for her. Caterina was becoming more mystified every moment by his manner of acting; and this order to his servant made her really begin to fear that grief and the excitement of fatigue had caused her mind to wander. It was not so, however, but as follows: Caterina's maid had seen her rush wildly upstairs after her interview with Sir John in the library; and suspecting something from her manner, and from certain rumours, such as always forerun evil, followed her, half curious, half fearful, to observe what she was doing. Suspecting, by her movements, that she was meditating some desperate act, she ran to Sir John, and asked him what she ought to do. Sir John told her to do nothing at present; but, when Caterina had actually left the house, he called the maid back, and directed her to pack up as much as she could do in the time, and send them on after her to the station. Sir John and Caterina had to wait three hours at the station for a train; therefore the luggage had come with them, and was now actually before her eyes on the platform. She caught sight of the boxes, and her cheek flushed hotly. A few hours sooner she would have refused to take them; and even now the struggle was fierce and long between the instinct of self-preservation and the impulse of trampled sensibility goaded by wounded pride. Maternal love turned the scale to the side of reason. In the meantime Sir John Campion was driving in a Hansom to No. 160, Cadogan Place, where lived Lady Goodwin, of whom, |