She waved her hand in gracious dismissal, and Mr. Sims, with a jerk that may have been meant for a bow, turned on his heel, unlocked the door, and departed. He walked gingerly along the richly carpeted corridor of the hotel, stopping ever and anon before some particular door, and studying the number with a look of owl-like wisdom. He also meditated for full three minutes before a vast pyramid of bedroom candles, and meeting a pretty chambermaid bade her good night in a fatherly manner. To the solemn waiter, whose life seemed to be passed in torch-bearing, and who was just lighting up a county magistrate in a private room, he imparted his lady's behests; and as the bells began to ring for somebody to tell somebody else that number eleven's maid was wanted, Mr. Sims stepped into Euston Square.

"A clever woman, but rash, and cannot resist her impulses," he soliloquised," her One impulse, at least. That is irresistible, and will be the ruin of her. Who can overcome one's little fancy? I can't. With proper management that woman ought to be a Russian archduchess, at least; but she'll end badly, I fear, all through impulse."

He was decidedly the most retiring and least ostentatious of mankind, Mr. Sims. He walked all the way from Euston Square, through Covent Garden, to the Strand, and was positively not above supping off a dozen oysters at a stall beneath the pillars of Clement's Inn. Then, after a sober libation of stout, he resumed his walk westward.

"No hazard left!" he thought. "No hazard, eh? not a tiny nook and corner where a gentleman from the Continent can sport a fifty? Well, we'll have a try."

Mr. Sims went to the play, but he passed both the Haymarket and Adelphi theatres without availing himself of the privileges of half-price. Where he went to, what play he saw, and in how many acts, and whom were the players, it is no business of mine to inquire.

The lady's-maid came, disrobed her mistress, and went back to longprotracted vigils of sugar-and-water and M. Xavier de Montépin. Mrs. Armytage did not read; but it was late ere she sought her couch in the adjoining bedchamber. They brought her a little carafon of Maraschino, and she sipped a tiny glassful now and then. She had drawn an easychair to the fire, and wrapped in her China silk peignoir had got to her old trick of toasting her little feet at the fire. There were no bottines to toast now, and the little feet, covered with a film of open-worked silk, looked ravishing in the purple slippers.

"It is a hard life," she said to herself. "A convict, or a minister of state, can't be much harder worked. It is all sowing and ploughing, and harrowing and weeding, and what will the harvest be? Do I shrink? do I falter? am I afraid? No; but the life is very wearisome. It makes my head ache. It makes my heart ache. I suppose I have a heart as well as other people. I know I feel it more than other people do, and that I shall die some day of palpitation, or aneurism, or something. Heigho! heigho!"

The little dog, snoozling on the hearthrug, lifted up his blinking eyes, as though in surprise at the unwonted sounds. Screams and laughter he was accustomed to-but sighs!

"Down, Mouche," his mistress cried pettishly, as though offended that the animal had heard her. "What was it that the stupid tract said at the railway?" she went on cogitating. "Where are you going?' Do the good people know where they are going? I should like to be good, but I can't. I used to scream, 'I will be good! I will be good!' as a child, when they punished me; but I never could be good when the smart was over. I suppose it isn't in me. There must be some pleasure, though, in being able to sleep without horrid dreams, in being able to walk without looking over one's shoulder every five minutes. Good people pray. Where is the good of my praying? Will the words of a prayer help me? My thoughts used to wander away from the words of the service at church. What am I to do, where am I going, and where am I to go?"

She uttered these words against her wicked will, and aloud. The innermost voice had started up unbidden, and overwhelmed her with the imperious suddenness of its summons. It was not a still small voicethe creeping uneasiness of conscience :-that had been stifled long ago. No; this was a sharp, harsh cry. It seemed as though her name were pronounced close to her, as if some one said, "Florence Armytage, Florence Armytage, where are you going?"

Among the trinkets and the gold-bedizened scent-bottles of her dressing-case in the next room, was a little crystal phial, carefully stoppered, and half-full of a dark liquid. She opened it, and, holding it from her, allowed its vapid odour to exhale.

Bah! 'tis an idiot's

"But a little courage, and it would all be over. resource to kill oneself. I may win the grand coup, and leave this life. But that isn't it. I haven't the courage."

She never lied to herself; she was too clever.

"Why can't I cry?" she exclaimed passionately, looking at herself as in the mirror at Paris. Why can't I squeeze a few tears out? I never could. That white-faced puss at Goldthorpe can whine and sob. I can't even weep when I think of Hugh. Am I to begin to learn whimpering now?"

She had yet some little business to go through ere she sought her bed. From a secret drawer in her jewel-case she took a common red penny memorandum-book, and opened it. The columns were full of figures in English and foreign moneys. These she dwelt long over. Then she turned to another page with writing on it.

"Amiens, St. Lazare, La Bourbe, Nice, Preston, Philadelphia, Kilmainham, Kirkdale, Lewes, Manheim, Milan: a pretty catalogue!" she said, with a bitter smile. "Ah, I have been a great traveller. Where is the journey to end?"

Once more, as though dreading to go to rest, she went from her sleepng to her sitting room, took writing materials, and, sitting down, penned

G G

a long letter on foreign post-paper. She carefully folded it, gummed the envelope all round, sealed it, and addressed it thus:

"Dominique Cosson,
Frère laïque,

Aux Pères Maristes des Bonnes-Euvres,

Hoogendracht (près Louvain),

Brabant,
Belgique."

"Sims must post this the first thing in the morning," she said almost And then for the second time I leave

gaily, as she rose from her seat.

her to her bed, and to Sleep, which comes alike to the evil and the just, to the criminal in his cell and the anchorite on his pallet, and covers all over with the Death that is in the midst of Life.

CHAPTER VIII.

SHEPHERD AND SHEEP.

SIXTEEN months had passed, and crazy fools who had predicted the end of the world before the year was out-not forgetting to take houses at long leases meanwhile-found for the thousandth time that their reckoning was confusion, and that their prophecies were wind. The old world went on, and men-children were born to supply the loss of those who had been taken away; and kings and cadgers alike gave up the ghost; and Death as usual met the wedding guest on the threshold, and with unvarying politeness bade him pass in first, as there would be plenty of time for him.

It was the merry month of May of the year eighteen fifty-one, and London was in a frenzy about the Great Exhibition. The glass-house in Hyde Park has, directly, nothing to do with the conduct of this story; and you will hear little about it from me. But the influence of the fever that raged in London was felt in the remotest portions of the English provinces. A gadding-about mania seized on all ranks and conditions of men. Women went up in droves to London professedly to see the Exhibition-actually to stare at the dresses and bonnets in the shop-windows. Ancient hedgers and ditchers, who had scarcely been familiar with the high-street of their market-town, were put into clean smockfrocks, and paraded by their pastors through the giant metropolis, and the wonderful structure in the park. The very paupers in rural workhouses were dressed in their best, taken to town, permitted to croon forth feeble notes of admiration in nave and transept, and regaled with unwonted meat and beer. Some such kindly feelings from the rich towards the poor are generally brought forth by great public festivals. He who has all is even anxious to let him who has nothing share-in the infinitesimal degrees. Exclusive possession palls. If Flag gets a couple of thousand pounds as prize-money, he flings fourteenth-class half-a-crown as his portion. A man who has a blue diamond, or a cabinet full of Rafaelles, is frequently most liberal in permitting the gratuitous inspection of his treasures.

It has been said that the Great Exhibition made itself felt all over the land. The press and the post-office between them distributed hundreds of thousands of journals teeming with woodcuts and glowing with descriptions of the rare contents of Paxton's Palace. Every rustic Paul who found himself in London wrote letters to his kinsfolk. The humours of the Great Exhibition and "Lunnon town" were put into the Lancashire dialect, and chanted by the descendants of those Troubadours, of whom Tim Bobbin was the Blondel. Somersetshire, Westmoreland, Yorkshire, Northumbria had ballads in their vernacular about the great carnival of industry in the capital-ballads which would have delighted Prince Lucien Solomon Bonaparte. This was the time when lads ran away from home to seek their fortune, and expecting to find London paved with gold, discovered that pockets might be so lined, but that the streets themselves were jagged and muddy; and so, Bow Bells seeming to chime out more to the effect that they were fools for their pains, than to bid them turn again and be Lords Mayor of London, betook themselves to their homes, and were feasted on the fatted calf, or the cold shoulder, as the case might be. It was in all respects-you, who remember it, will agree with me an exceptional year. Gentlemen fell in love at first sight, not in three-volume novels, but in actual reality, with young ladies they met in railway carriages, or at Osler's Crystal Fountain, and married them out of hand. Freemasons from Mount Atlas fraternised with Freemasons from Primrose Hill, and the Polish Lodge entertained a Babel of foreign brethren. The oldest habitués of the Park and the Opera were forced to confess that they saw daily and nightly in Rotten Row and the Halls amazons and amateurs with whose faces they were not familiar; and the learned in social statistics ascertained for a fact, that from May to September-such was the mollifying effect of the season-vast numbers of born and well-born Englishmen and Englishwomen made no scruple of conversing with persons to whom they had never been formally introduced.

But, as in the midst of a railway loopline, or between its parallels, or midway between its horns, you shall find some hamlet-some small country town, even, sometimes-which has no station, no omnibus nor fly communication, no gas, no police, and no roads much better than bridle-paths, and which is, to all intents and purposes of civilisation, five hundred years behind the age; so down in the county of Kent was there a village whose inhabitants did not trouble themselves in the slightest degree about the Great Exhibition-and many of them had but a very hazy and uncertain knowledge of what an exhibition was-at all.

This place was called Swordsley; and the rector of Swordsley was the Reverend Ernest Goldthorpe. The village was of some size, its population numbering nearly nine hundred. It was not a specially ignorant or uncouth village; it was simply indifferent to all that went on out of its precincts. If a Swordsley man had designed the House of Fame in Hyde Park, or the heir of the lord of the manor of Swordsley-who was a captain in the Guards-had been sent to the House of Correction

for assaulting a policeman in Rotten Row, the villagers might have taken some interest in the World's Fair. As it was, none of those in whom they interested themselves had any thing to do with it; so they left the Great Exhibition to its own devices.

To the inhabitants of this tranquil place, the world was bounded by the limits of Swordsley parish. The ancient cathedral-town of St. Becketsbury was not very far distant,-scarce ten miles, in fact; but that was a matter concerning the rector and his curate, and not the laymen of Swordsley. There was a station at Daiseybridge, four miles distant, belonging to the South-Eastern Railway, and the aristocracy of Swordsley might avail themselves of it; but the Swordsleians were profoundly indifferent, and all but unconscious of the existence of such things as trains and locomotives. An early village bard had made a satirical song, in days gone by, against the railway movement generally, deriding it as a new-fangled invention, and lampooning it as a "Long-Tom's Coffin,”— hit which told immensely, more for the sound of the phrase than for its actual signification. When a Swordsley man was pressed to accede to a branch-line from Daisey bridge through Swordsley, and so on to the little seaport of Shrimpington-super-Mare, he ordinarily made answer, "We want none of your Long-Tom Coffins hereabouts," and was supposed thereafter to have irretrievably demolished his adversary. A sharp lawyer from St. Becketsbury once threatened the intractable villagers with an Act of Parliament which should compel them to have either a railway, or gas or water pipes, or some other filaments of the crinoline of civilisation; but Chuff the saddler, who was the village oracle and the "Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood" of Swordsley, cried, "Let un try it. I'll Parliament House un. I'll sow their Acts up like so much pig-skin." And it was universally believed (in Swordsley) that any attempt on the part of the Legislature to coerce Swordsley into light, or cleanliness, or activity, would be met by the erection of barricades and the invocation of the Patron of battles.

There was a society, less convivial than conservative and inquisitorial, held at the "Old Dun Horse" tavern, called "The Leave-us-alone Club," in Swordsley. It was particularly active in suppressing new-fangled inventions. It was stanchly Protectionist, had burnt Peel and Cobden in effigy, and debated the propriety of presenting a silver pitchfork to the once illustrious, but now forgotten, champion of dear corn-Chowler. The St. Becketsbury lawyer, aided by one or two incendiaries among the neighbouring gentry,-for at Swordsley, and not for the first time since the Creation, it was the patricians who were strong liberals, and the yeomen and peasantry who were bigoted Tories,-had actually got a Bill, affecting Swordsley, sufficiently into work as to have complied with the standing orders of the House. There was an indignation meeting among the villagers, and a secret sederunt of the "Leave-usalone Club," who, from their own funds, despatched a deputation, consisting of Chuff the saddler, Muggeridge, mine host of the Old Dun