will be a good many strong points of difference between Mr St Quentin and me. As to your entertaining any idea of leaving me, it is simply impossible. Our faith is pledged to Walter on that head. We must both be more cautious, and you must keep out of his way as much as possible.' Florence assented, with a heavy heart. 'It never was right,' she thought, and it never can be made right, and it never can come right. Oh, if it were but over! If my Walter could but come back to me !'

This first quarrel was made up, of course, but the reconciliation afforded an illustration of the influence of the disparity of age between Miriam and her husband. There was an awkward slurring over of mutual offence, there was a cold set courtesy, but there was no heartiness, no genuine unrestrained feeling of regret and reparation; and ever afterwards there was an indefinable difference in their mutual relation. Mr St Quentin admired Miriam as much as ever, was as proud of her beauty and brilliancy, and as tiresomely anxious that both should be recognised to his glorification; but he distrusted her, and betrayed it. The torture of jealousy was making havoc with him. He had genuinely disbelieved Miriam's statement about the letter, and the circumstance had set his suspicious mind off on a tormenting tack of imaginary grievance. What was the tie between her and this insolent servant, who so far outstepped her place? Of course, Rose Dixon's knowledge of a previous love-affair of Miriam's. They were conspirators, these two, against his happiness and his honour. What did he know of Miriam's girlhood? Miss Monitor's testimony-the testimony of the most interested witness-being the person responsible for Miriam's good behaviour. Neglect at home, and eight years in a London boarding-school, comprised the history of his wife, so far as he knew it. He felt the full import of this reservation, and his self-tormenting faculty set itself to work. He began to think of his first wife, so short a time dead, and yet, until now, so utterly forgotten. He had known she did not love him; but he had never had any fear, doubt, suspicion concerning her, during their marriage, or before it. She had been quite amenable and obedient, and, if not very happy, had not troubled him about it. He had felt no jealousy in her case-of course he did not call it 'jealousy' in his thoughts; she had been entirely dependent upon him, and had never endeavoured to elude or decrease that dependence. Mr St Quentin was not very far from that fatal stage of affairs at which a man calls himself a fool for having married his wife! Miriam did not love him either, had never pretended to love him; and he was at least not such a fool as to grumble about that; but she was not manageable, she was not dependent; she went her own way, and had her own will, and cared nothing at all for his tastes or opinions. She enjoyed her life thoroughly, and his share of it was as little as she could contrive to reduce it to-not nearly so important as that of her obnoxious maid.

What was this correspondence, so unbecomingly shared between the mistress and the servant? It never occurred to Mr St Quentin to believe his wife's statement that the letter he had seen was from her brother. Rose Dixon's part in the matter set that aside at once. How was he to find it out? If he could have secured the cover of the letter, he

would have sent it to Mr Clint, and asked him whether he knew the handwriting; but Miriam had destroyed the cover also. The incident remained rankling in his mind, long after the tacit reconciliation between him and Miriam, and he so fed his distorted fancy upon it, that to her most careless words and looks were assigned motives and meanings of which she was both innocent and unconscious.

Even the ingenuity of jealousy and uneasy selflove could not discern in Miriam's conduct any cause for her husband's distrust and suspicion. Her frank and free enjoyment of a society in which she had no intimacies, with which her relations were merely superficial, might have been thoroughly reassuring to any reasonable mind. She was always amused and amusing, ready to enter into any scheme of enjoyment; she appreciated to the full the luxury of her life, and was usually in high spirits, and radiant with health and beauty. This order of things was hopelessly opposed to a theory of a prior attachment, abandoned from mercenary motives, and renewed, in the form of a dishonourable intrigue, under the shelter of marriage, to the discomfiture and misery of a confiding husband. But the mind of Mr St Quentin was no more or less reasonable than the mind of any individual abandoned to a mean passion, and this was the absurd fiction he had fabricated, when his marriage with Miriam was not yet a year old, and had actually wrought himself up to believing, as a positive truth. The fact, which even he could not ignore, that it was impossible for him to fix upon any individual, among the Englishmen whom they met in foreign cities, as the object of this attachment, the sharer of this intrigue, did not shake Mr St Quentin's belief in his bugbear. How could he tell that Miriam had never seen any one of the men whom she met at Florence, Naples, Rome, and elsewhere, previously? Aided and abetted by Rose Dixon, and with all the facilities of the perfect freedom he had allowed her, in his blind faith and credulity, from the first, there was no deception which she might not practise safely and successfully. This was a sheer delusion, and there was a strong probability of its growing into a mania; but with the cold craftiness which existed in him, though it had hitherto been but little exercised, Mr St Quentin concealed the real spring of his altered mood and changed action, and hoped thus to deceive Miriam, which, however, he did for only a very short time.

One of the first results of the condition of mind into which Mr St Quentin worked himself was the curtailment of Mirian's morning leisure. He took to interfering with her disposition of her time, to capricious demands upon it, and to a sort of fidgety espionage which disgusted her. In all material respects, Miriam had nothing to complain of. She had the full value of the bargain she had made; his promises were all fulfilled, even beyond her expectation, because her girlish imagination had not fully compassed the solid and enviable realities of the position in which her marriage had placed her; but Miriam was bored to death' by his presence when he was with her, and by the uncertain anticipation of it when she was not.

6

Partly in consequence of this pervading boredom, and partly because her mind required the cultivation of congenial companionship to keep up her interest in foreign parts,' Miriam wished to return

to England in the second year of her marriage. She had never exacted from Mr St Quentin any specific promise on the subject; but it had been generally understood that, the process of acclimatisation accomplished by a year on the continent, he would 'settle' in England. The question of the 'place' had been left undecided, at Miriam's request; she had expressed her sentiments concerning the pleasures of rurality to Mr St Quentin with entire frankness, and he was not, at that period, inclined to oppose her or them. A house in a 'good' part of London, and the free enjoyment of the pleasures of the metropolis, was now Miriam's great object; and it was, therefore, with excessive anger and keen disappointment that she received a peremptory refusal from her husband, when she suggested their making a move in the direction of England. He had no intention of returning thither, he said, and he wished to know what was her motive in proposing it. Miriam replied, that her motive was sufficiently plain; she was tired of foreign travel, and wished to go to England. Instantly, he began to speculate upon some hidden reason for this most straightforward proceeding. Some one had gone, or was going to England, and Miriam wanted to get there too!

His surveillance of Miriam increased in strictness and cunning with this supposed discovery, and she frequently expressed her annoyance to Florence, accompanied with the remark, that she had been a fool not to suspect, in time, that the smooth complacence of Mr St Quentin was not of a durable kind. But she did not acknowledge to Florence that she had penetrated the motive of his conduct, and found it to be jealousy; the instinct of the woman, the pride and self-respect inseparable from the wife, with held her from so humiliating a disclosure. That her husband should dare to insult her by a doubt, exasperated Miriam, who was proud and impulsive, and by no means logical, as deeply as though she had married him from such exalted motives as would have entitled her to his utmost respect. But Florence did not require an explanation from Miriam, in order to understand the position: the instincts of the woman and the wife were equally strong in her case, and she was in full possession of the whole matter, and also of the dislike and distrust with which Mr St Quentin regarded herself.

I hope she may not find out that she has exchanged one kind of tyranny for another, more intolerable, and from which there is no escape,' Florence would think, when Miriam indulged in strictures upon Mr St Quentin's 'tiresomeness and 'obstinate ways.' May Heaven preserve her from temptation; she is in an awfully dangerous position.'

It was an unpleasant shock and surprise to Miriam to find that her power was not absolute-a shock from which she recoiled into perfect silence upon the matter in dispute. If this spirit of opposition were still further roused, and should extend in other directions, all her calculations would be defeated-not only the small ones, with trifling results to be worked out by her supremacy, but the big sum of all, the calculation on the correctness of whose total she had staked her life, her youth, her happiness. To marry an old man, and find myself unable to rule him, would be too bad a fate, Miriam would mutter to herself, as if protesting that a thing would be 'too bad' were

PHEBE RITCHIE.'

This letter caused Miriam a genuine pang of fear and sorrow. Supposing her father were really seriously ill, and were to die without her seeing him again-neglected, alone, save for the hired services, which, in the case of a man like him, could not be expected to be zealous, heartfelt, or efficient! Without an instant's doubt or hesitation concerning the proper course of action, and without one thought of the coincidence between the wish she had been urging and the return to England thus suggested to her, Miriam went in search of Mr St Quentin, and communicated to him the contents of Mrs Ritchie's letter. Miriam spoke on this occasion with more warmth and less formality than there had for a long time been in her manner to her husband. She was moved by a right and generous impulse, and the half-pitying, half-remorseful feelings which actuated her were reflected in her speaking face, in her bright, tearful eyes, and in her rapid and unstudied words. Mr St Quentin listened to her with unmoved politeness, sarcastic scrutiny, and entire unbelief.

'I suppose I may prepare to start immediately?' was Miriam's question in conclusion. I will tell Mrs Ritchie when to expect us, and write to Mr Martin to prepare papa.'

'You will do nothing of the kind,' said Mr St Quentin. I have no more intention of returning to England than I had a month ago, when you wanted to go. This cleverly apropos letter does not change my mind in the least.'

'What!' exclaimed Miriam. 'Do you mean to say that I am not to go to my father? "Cleverly apropos letter!" Do you dare to insinuate that this letter is not the truth?'

'I mean to say that I shall not return to England.'

Then I will go by myself.'

'You will do so at your peril. If you do, you never return to any home of mine; and, considering

your frankly avowed abhorrence of your father's, I hardly believe you will adopt a course which would have that result. I don't believe a word of Mrs Ritchie's letter; I believe this is a concerted plan of yours-you have a taste for confidences with servants, you know-and that that letter has been written to order-a childish expedient to induce me to yield to your wishes, when you saw that you could not have your own way quite so entirely as you imagined.'

"Your meanness is beyond my comprehension,' said Miriam, looking at him with infinite disdain, as she stood, her stately head drawn up, and her fine face-whose girlish sweetness was rapidly passing away-pale and set, and beneath my anger. It provokes only my contempt.'

Indeed! I am unfortunate in incurring so lofty and becoming a rebuke from a lady who has been so suddenly converted into a model of filial affection and solicitude,' said Mr St Quentin, with a savage sneer; but I can bear my misfortune. Be quite assured of this, madam-in me you have not a chance of finding the proverbial "old fool" for whom you evidently take me.'

The hand in which Miriam held the letter extended towards him, dropped to her side, and a visible shudder of disgust crept over her. She stood for one moment uncertain, as though she were going to speak, and then turned abruptly away, and left the room.

'What shall I do, Florence? I am completely puzzled. I know I ought to go to papa; I am sure the case is a bad one, and my right place is beside him now. But I cannot be sure that there is any change in his mood; and he might only be savagely angry with me, if I returned to the Firs unasked, and incurred the penalty of a separation from Mr St Quentin by doing so. I suppose he has the power to carry out his threat? But no matter; I have paid too high a price for what he had to give me' (there was a strange disturbance and loathing in her face), 'to risk the loss of it all now, for the sake of going to my father, who never cared for me, and who would certainly be furious. And yet, that this old man should refuse me; and more than that, should dare to insult me with so ineffably mean and low a suspicion! How does such baseness come into people's heads, I wonder? If I give in to him in this, I shall never be able to carry any other point. Florence,

what must I do?'

'Yes. Listen to me, my dear sister. You can trust my care of him, and you know I will tell you the truth. If I send for you, come to your father at all hazards-I cheerfully accept that responsibility-but otherwise, do not press this disagreement with your husband to extremities. Mr Clint was never rough with me, and I feel sure I can manage him; and Mrs Ritchie and I are very good friends. Never fear but that I will do my duty to Walter's father and yours. Mr St Quentin has no power to control my movements. I shall be in safety in the place where Walter wished me to be: nothing can possibly happen to me; and indeed, indeed, you will be better without me now. Yes, Miriam, I will go.'

'And so I am beaten, and he wins at all points. Florence, I never hated my father, when he made me most wretched; but I do, I do hate this old man!' 'Hush, my dearest-hush!"

A PIONEER OF COMMERCE. ENGLISH traders want to send tea from the province of Assam into Thibet, where tea is the chief necessity, the principal luxury-in short, almost the only object of life-in order to destroy the Chinese monopoly of this great branch of commerce, by destroying the influence of the Thibetan Lamas, who support the monopoly. They are still, to all appearance, very far from success, and, on looking at the map of the countries, though no doubt some of the indications are merely conjectural, it seems highly aggravating that the moral and political difficulties should be so numerous and seemingly insurmountable, while the natural difficulties are comparatively few and small. Few and small, that is to say, when compared with the wonderful achievements of travel which have made the desolate places of the north, and the wastes of the great central deserts, known to us. By degrees we are acquiring some acquaintance with China, and the exclusiveness of Japan is, for all the purposes of the naturalist, a thing of the past. A few brave and determined men, of whom Mr Cooper is one of the most distinguished, have made attempts, more or less successful, to penetrate that wonderful unknown region of the earth, which lies contiguous at its several extremities to the empire of China and the peninsula of Hindustan. Of the three great trade-routes which, in former days, led from China westwards into Mongolia, and thence to India and Burmah, but one remains open at the present day, the great highway from Sz-chuan to Lhássa, the capital of Central Thibet, vid Ta-tsian-loo and Bathang. The hopelessly foreign sound and look of Chinese names, and a kind of dreadful sameness which abides with their bewildering variety, make it difficult to follow Chinese topography, but the map shews us the course of these ancient thoroughfares. Various causes have combined to close the other routes, and to leave the empire of China with but one road, leading westward, by which she supplies Thibet annually with nearly six million pounds of brick tea, which finds its way west as far as the borders of Cashmere. Causes political, religious, and economical, combine to shut out India from communication with China by this route; and it was with the view of discovering a shorter and more direct line of communication between the two countries that Mr Cooper, starting from Shanghai, made a long-projected journey, which did not prove entirely successful, but which has added largely to our knowledge of China, and taught us almost all we know about Eastern Thibet. He purposed to establish relations between the great Chinese commercial_city, Yunnan, and Rangoon, and thus to make Rangoon, instead of Calcutta, the dépôt of trade between our Indian possessions and Yunnan. The importance of the object was

Petticoats; or, an Overland Journey from China towards * Travels of a Pioneer of Commerce in Pigtail and India. By T. Cooper. London: John Murray.