hastily settled that Mr. Waldegrave should take his departure the next morning.

He managed to get through the evening very well, with Sir Francis and his son; bore with the explodes and detonades of the former, and the wearying unprofitable prittle-prattle of the latter. Lady Oglander, seeing there was, what she termed, "company" in the house, preferred retiring to her chamber; giving it as a reason, that the approaching nuptials made her feel so twittery. She hoped, she said, that Mr. Waldegrave had not seen how nervous she felt ; but she meant it as no disrespect to him, the pulling down of her chinchilla veil, and passing him so short like.

But Mr. Waldegrave had neither noticed her, nor her "chinchilla veil," nor her "mulligatawny chain," which, on first seeing a stranger, she had displayed, with the eye-glass attached to it.

"She must have been ill," thought Rosa

lind to herself, 66

or she never would have

hurried off in that unaccountable manner." And her flutter was so accounted for, and, by herself, made the most of the rest of the evening, by retiring to bed, hoping she should be well enough, which she was confident she should not, to get up the next morning.

And the next morning came, and the carriage was really packed, and standing in the court ready for its departure; and the posthorses came, and the time came, and Lady Oglander's health a leetle came, for she witnessed these preparations from her window, all came, but the resolution to part. With a perverse doggedness of action, wherever Mr. Waldegrave turned, Frank Oglander was at his elbow, winking to those around the satisfaction he felt in the pleasure of his new acquaintance. Vain was the concise manner in which these advances were met. "Waldegrave was a d-d fine fellow! He saw, in

a moment, through his Jupiter thunderbolt ways, and nothing could give him more pleasure, than if he could contrive just to stay over the day, for the next morning's scrimmidge. His mother-in-law was getting better; no necessity either to put off, or take on! and he laughed merrily at his own wit, and continued, "and no chance for you, Dad, of a fourth wife; so do not cuddle up your cash, and cheat my settlements, either for the next, or for the funeral."

-

Sir Francis winked his eye, it seemed a family accomplishment,

as he said,

"No forty per cent. for me! Take a word of advice, Philip Waldegrave; I can bury a wife as cheap again as most men! I have gone through the ceremony too often to have my feelings, and-a fiddlestick! taken advantage of at the moment. Inquire into their prices, sir and nail them down to black and white! Let it be done with your eyes

open; no handkerchief thrust into them,-the eye must be to business, sir!" And then he shut his mouth, with a satisfied pout, and rolled his full eye into such a vacant stare of amazement at his own powers, shuffling off,

at the same time, with so self-assured an air, that it would have been impossible, at any other time, to have helped smiling at him. But candidates for praise might now go supperless to bed. Mr. Waldegrave remitted none of his own dry reserve, and his natural seriousness was increased by the pang that remained in store for him.

But how could he part, surrounded by such company? company so disposed to be conversable! not on the bow-wow terms they thought to have been, as Sir Francis expressed it, but really on the most sociable terms possible!

"But the longest of lanes has a turning, they say!"

The man of law appeared, with his familiar

carrying the long blue bag, and, with a plain conciseness and gravity not to be trifled with, proposed adjourning to Mrs. Chadwick's abode, that the papers might be signed in readiness for the morning.

Mr. Waldegrave looked at his own Rosalind, on finding himself, at length, with her alone. The smile was gone, and she seemed sad, and the softest repose rested on every feature. It was a calm, he saw, assumed to constrain her feelings, and he said,

"I am often pursued by dark fancies-haunted by melancholy forebodings-desponding over myself, over all! I feel engrossed by one conviction, and almost fancy we shall never meet again." He contemplated her with inexpressible interest; the tears were trickling fast down her cheeks, and she sought not now as she had once done in the same room, and the same place, to hide them. But she said,

"Do not anticipate accidents, or suffer too