her head. We had walked a good deal, and she was tired, showing it in that delicate paleness which sometimes spiritualises her face, and in an unusual tenderness and duskiness of the eyes. It strikes me as a sample of that egotism which is a part of myself, that I then and there for the first time thought of asking her about the events of her life. I had claimed her wonder, her sympathy, and she had seemed to give it all willingly, so willingly that I had poured out more and more of the rubbish of my own mind and experience into her ears. But I had been content to gather from her comments, her longings, and puzzles, and fancies, and beliefs. I had not asked what she had seen, what she had heard, whom she had met.

"I said as we sat there, I have told you a great deal about myself. Will you now tell me a history of your life; your life from the date of the grey pelisse ?'

"She laughed; with that little sob of ecstatic glee at the climax of her laugh.

"As well ask to hear the history of a squirrel or a rabbit,' she said. 'I have been as wild and as happy as one or the other, and my life has been as monotonous and uninteresting as theirs. It is years since there was an event in my life; until-'

"Until when?" I asked eagerly, as she hesitated, hoping that she would say 'until you arrived.

"Until my visit to Camlough,' she said, with a slight contraction of embarrassment in her eyes, which were averted from mine as she spoke. She gazed before her with that effort not to look at me but to look at something else, which seemed to plead not to be questioned, and yet which urged me intolerably to question. A sense of unshaped trouble darkened my mind, a shadow of uneasy, incredulous bewilderment, such as I remember to have felt before when there was a vague, cruel rumour about the failure of our bank; our bank which held our credit between its finger and thumb.

Ah!' said I, with a sudden jealous interest in the subject, 'I should like to hear of Camlough. You have never told me one word of the things that happened there. Is Miss Archbold still as beautiful as a Greek goddess? You see I also know her. And are you and she the tenderest of friends?'

"Miss Archbold told me of your meeting,' said she, in a hurried way; and I don't think we could ever be called friends,' she added, with a sudden flash of fire dancing across her sweet eyes.

"And you and he probably became very good friends ?'

666

'Very good friends,' she said, drooping her eyes. But that does not hinder me from pitying you.'

"This was said with tender, deprecating, half-raised eyes. The waterfall seemed to gather itself out of the rocks and fling itself in my face. Pitying me! So she not only knew my secret, but she could speak to me of it. And by your leave, fair lady,' I thought, you might have waited until I mentioned it to you.' I felt scornful, wrathful, desperate.

"Thank you,' I said, fiercely. And then I am afraid I commanded her to come home out of the wet. She looked pale and proud, and a little wistful, but she obeyed. As I handed her over a stile, I saw the tears big in her eyes. We walked home in silence. Now I reflect upon these things: the world is as black as a cave, but my rage is gone away. Had she been safe at Monasterlea, I had disappeared during the night-time, never to excite her pity any more. But I must stay by her till I bring her home, whence I brought her. And now I am going to wait until I hear more of this Christopher Lee. My love has cut down my pride, and I have forgiven her for her pity. I have swallowed the tender insult, and overlooked the gentle boldness.

"I will cling to her little hand till another comes to claim it. Then I shall go away."

CHAPTER XX. WORSE AND WORSE.

PAUL wrote later:-"I was reading to her aloud in a safe green refuge which we had sought out of the heat. I had chosen a volume of very sweet old-fashioned poetry, which treats of the passion of love, with more delicacy, and not less fervour, than some of our modern poets think well to use. We stopped to laugh at a squirrel, who had put his nose out of a tree; and she said, as if the squirrel had reminded her of something, or she had not been thinking of the squirrel after all:

"I have heard that you are a poet. Will you show me some of your rhymes?' "I did not stop to ask who had told her a thing so monstrous. Some verses I had just written lay in the book I held in my hand. I had not thought of showing them to her, nor anything of their kind. She would pity me again. Yet some wild whim seized me, and I put the paper in her hand.

"There is a secret in this,' I said. 'If you find it, be tender with it.'

"She was taken by surprise, and the paper fluttered as she opened it. I stood a little aloof while she read my crazy lines. I don't know what I had hoped for as I watched her read. A blush,' a confusion, a look of consciousness without displeasure. What right had I to look for these, after a former rebuff? Had I seen them I should have spoken, and learned the truth, and the whole truth; but nothing of the kind met my eyes. Her face got a little paler as she read, and there was a look of grief on it when she had done; her arm dropped down by her side, and she crushed the paper into the heart of her folded hand.

"Such love_ought to be returned,' she said, coldly. ‘I am very sorry.' And we parted like two people made of ice. I hope I am sufficiently snubbed now; I shall return to Australia as soon as I have brought her safely to Monasterlea."

"She was right to think that he is a poet," said May. "At least, he can write love-songs."

She was talking to herself in a certain little inn chamber, her own for the time, where of late she had given herself up to many grave dreams and reveries. It was a chamber very fit for a young maid to dream in, with a passion-flower running all round the window; it looked out upon a waterfall descending with swift gleams of light into a melancholy tarn, and whose perpetual plash and drip made a restless

murmur of music through the place night and day.

"If I were in his place I would scorn to write them to her!" May opened her shut hand and flung a little ball of crumpled paper fiercely to the other end of the room; and then followed a long silence in the chamber, except for the music that was coming in through the window. She was kneeling at the open sash, with her head crushed up for coolness against the broad, clustered leaves of the passion-flower; and the silence was to her a long fevered space of confused reflection, into which we have no more right to pry than into a private letter, of the contents of which even the owner has not yet possessed himself. The music from without was led by a haymaking woman down in the meadows below the inn, who, in a round, supple voice, was singing a winding Irish tune, ripe with melody. She had been singing it every day, and all day long, for a week, and each time she sang it, it had seemed to become sweeter and softer, growing familiar to May's listening ears. Now the words of Paul's song wandered down into the meadows there, from the corner where they had been so ignominiously flung, and set themselves to the tune as if by magic. They matched with the measure, and they wound themselves into the melody; and the waterfall made an accompaniment as it drummed, and crashed, and tinkled into the tarn.

What

At this time Aunt Martha had quite lost patience with the son of her adoption. Why should he look so gloomy? cause had he for grief of any kind? Was not all the world shining on him? An inheritance in prospect-and-andMiss Martha could go no further. She was too loyal to her niece to declare even to her own thoughts that a young man here amongst them might have May for a wife. It was different from building castles while he was at the other side of the world; but it was not for this ending, she was forced to confess, that Aunt Martha had left her nest under the belfry of Monasterlea, and taken to gipsy ways at her stay-at-home time of life. She had hoped that in giving up her own comfort she was at least doing something towards uniting two young hearts. Now it seemed that she had been doing no such thing. After pondering over this matter very deeply, she shifted the blame from Paul, and persuaded herself that May must be in the wrong. Thinking over this, her anxiety got the better of her discretion.

"Aunt Martha," said May one evening in the twilight, when Paul was absent, and Miss Martha fidgety, but knitting in apparent peace, "I am terribly tired of this place. Let us go home!"

"Sit down here, child, and let me speak to you. You move about the room so, you make me dizzy. If I speak to you in one corner you are in another before I have done, and I can't tell where my answer is coming from. I want to ask you a question." "Here I am then, Aunty; as steady as a rock!"

"You have seen more of Paul than I have done, lately. Do you think he has any intention of marrying and settling down in his Own country? In his mother's place-I should like to see him settled; for many reasons."

May knew too well what was passing in her aunt's mind. The humiliating folly must be driven out wholly and without delay; even if Paul's secret must be dragged out for the purpose.

"I thing nothing is more unlikely," she said, with emphasis. "Indeed-it is not fair-we must not speak of it--but he has met with a disappointment which it seems he cannot get over. He will return to Aus

tralia before long."

STRANGERS WITHIN OUR GATES.

ALTHOUGH the close of the war and the

So.

to return to their own land, many still remain among us. Some of them are yet proscribed by the law, some have lost families and friends, and even hope, and, not caring to disturb the embers of the past, are content to live on here, finding some. small excitement in the study of fresh scenes and fresh people. left behind by the great wave of political revolution which cast them on our shore, they have remained among us, and have gradually settled down among their precursors, the men of '48, the followers of Barbes and Albert, of Ledru Rollin and of Louis Blanc; the singers of Freiligrath's songs or the mourners over Robert Blum's grave. Though there are hundreds of these men, with their families, who have been sojourners amongst us for more than twenty years, and who are, many of them, well known by sight to regular Londoners (surely everybody must know the tall, thin, elderly French gentleman, with the high hat and the short coat with the fur collar, who is apparently always in a hurry, but whose slip-shod feet prevent his making much way), they do not yet appear to be acclimatised, they do not speak our language, nor fall into our ways. They dwell apart in a little colony, which they have established for themselves, into which they welcome the newly-arrived exiles, whom we have just described. exiles there are who arrived a few weeks previously, but who would have received a very different kind of welcome from their compatriots: Imperialists these, servants of M. Rouher, hangers-on of M. Mocquard, varlets in the employ of M. Pietri, piqueassiettes at the Imperial lackeys' table; journalists and swash-bucklers, bullies and spies. Where are they, these dead leaves stripped from the great tree of Imperialism, which itself has since been snapped short by the fury of the blast? Are they in England at all, or, rather, have they not gone to America, waiting for the good time coming. when the golden bees shall once more flaunt on the Imperial purple, and the golden drones once more shall batten in luxury and the Leicester-square and Soho quarters, or riot? Certainly we shall not find them in whom we now purpose to visit. within our gates, amongst these strangers

Other

He had a wife then and two children, but all three, tender plants as they were, collapsed under the effects of our brumous climate and our bitter spring winds, of the scanty living and the wretched lodging, of the want of means and the lack of courage, to bear them out in fighting the great battle of life. And so the Marchese-such is his rank in his native country-is left alone. He gains a livelihood, such as it is, by teaching music, by composing songs and dedicating them to the young ladies his pupils; by "making himself generally useful" at the evening parties, where his title and his button-hole ribbon, and his grand air, procure for him an invitation and a good supper. When he first came over here, he was proud, ambitious, touchy. None of these bad qualities any longer hinder his career; the man's heart is broken, that is all; he is really far more happy than he was. To-day is a jour maigre with him, as he is dependent on his own resources. He has dined for ninepence on soup and fish, and now lights up the blackened stump of an old cigar, which he takes from his breast-pocket preparatory to adjourning to another resort of his countrymen. Peace go with him!

The three young fellows at the next table are of a very different class; lightbearded, blue-eyed, curly-haired, dressed in parodies of English garments made by foreign tailors, with short little feet almost covered by their rounded trousers, and with heavy, family signet-rings on their forefingers. They are unmistakably German representatives of Rhenish winegrowers; perhaps, erst old comrades in Mainz or Frankfurt, accidentally met together in London, and cracking a bottle in remembrance of Deutschland, and in honour of Bruderschaft. These gentry are both thrifty and well paid, and there is no occasion for them, at a meeting like this, to spare their prices. So the dinner is excellent, the wine-the landlord knows his customers, and, indeed, is a customer of theirs of the very best, and the conversation, in a singular mélange of English and German, rattles unceasingly. There are several other guests in the room; two or three English, who look up with a halfamazed, half-amused air; two or three splenetic Frenchmen, who twirl their moustaches angrily as the hated German language breaks into their ears, and seem inclined to take notice of the intolerant assumption of the Teutonic commis voyageurs. But M. Wetter, the host (though

a Belgian, he has a very German sounding name), has been too long in England to permit any disturbance to take place in his house; a word and a smile from madame put the discomfited Frenchmen at their ease; a joke from their countryman, the head-waiter, causes the Ger mans to modify their mirth, and by the time M. Wetter, clothed and in his right mind, has left his stew-pans and appeared amongst them, they are ready to mix business with pleasure by naming new beverages, and suggesting fresh orders, over the coffee just brought into them. It is time for our coffee too; but we will take it not here, but at Tutti's.

Twenty years ago, when the Suspension Bridge, which now spans the Avon at Clifton, spanned the Thames at Hungerford, a portion of the plot of ground now occupied by the magnificent shed, passages, approaches, and hotel of the Charing Cross Railway, was covered by a very mangy block of buildings known as Hungerford Market. A tenth-rate Billingsgate, a fiftieth-rate Covent Garden, a wretchedly bad market in every possible way; in its situation and shape, in the manner of its tradespeople, and in the quality of their wares, in the style of its customers, their tastes and their looks; was Hungerford. It pretended to sell fresh fish, and you could nose them in the lobby of the Adelphi Theatre; it pretended to sell fresh vegetables, but, like certain eccentric modern artists, all its greens were browns; its potatoes were flaccid and watery; and its peas were of the colour of those immortal vegetables which, according to the undying joke, ought to have been sent | to Knightsbridge. Hungerford, too, attempted a poor and colourless imitation of Leadenhall, by offering for sale poultry much too large for the coops in which they were confined, toy terriers, rabbits, guinea-pigs, and such small deer, uncom fortable in appearance and unpleasant in odour. Many of the shops in the long, dismal, dank arcades were untenanted, abortive attempts to obtain a livelihood in them being constantly made, and as constantly failing. The voyagers then by the penny steam-boats, who took the arcade on their way from the pier to the Strand, scarcely exhibited any surprise when they saw one of these doleful tenements undergoing regeneration at the builder's hands. But as day by day revealed to them the progress of an erection of quite an unac customed character, as they saw the ground