thoughts that make people better.

'Tis not that kind of man that

would steal money for himself; if he committed a crime, I can only think it must have been for the good of someone he loved-not for his own good. You say he and Sir Francis were dear friends; perhaps it was for Sir Francis's own sake that he did it to help him through some strait. And then it would be no wonder that Sir Francis let him escape so easily!"

"But," said Mr. Grant, who had listened with attention to Marion's advocacy, with a curious smile occasionally glimmering across his face-" but, my dear, that is a doubtful cause that can be maintained only on the discredit of the other side. How could this man have embezzled for the benefit of Sir Francis if, as I am given to understand, he absconded with the proceeds of his robbery?"

"No one knows whether he had the money with him," answered Marion, driven to bay. "All that is known is, that he disappeared, and that Sir Francis said the bank was robbed. You say that Sir Francis replaced the loss from his private purse; but perhaps his purse had first been filled for him by the very man he denounced as a defaulter !"

At this audacious hypothesis Mr. Grant laughed, though with so kindly an expression that Marion could not feel she was being ridiculed. "You go near to make me wish, my dear," he said, "that I might be unjustly accused, if I might hope to have you for my defender."

"How fortunate, then, was this questionable cousin of mine, to have made good his embezzlement and his escape, and withal to have found such a defender!" said Lancaster. "You see, Miss Lockhart, my cousinhood with him allows me the liberty of believing him guilty if I choose. Whatever your cousin has done, you are liable to do yourself; so I am only whipping myself across my cousin's back."

"If you need whipping at all, why don't you whip yourself directly?" Marion demanded, quick to resent whatever seemed to her patronising or artificial in another's tone.

"Oh, Marion!" exclaimed Mrs. Lockhart, under her breath.

"I only meant," said Lancaster, smiling, "that whenever I hear of a man committing a crime, I have a fellow-feeling for him: I believe there is the making of a capital criminal in me, if I am only given fair opportunities."

It was not the first time Lancaster had spoken in this way, and Marion had not made up her mind how to understand him. She looked away and made no reply.

After a moment Mr. Grant said, "You spoke of Charles Grantley having left a family behind him; is one to infer from that there were children?"

"There was a daughter, I think," said Mrs. Lockhart, relieved at the change of subject; "didn't you know her, Marion?"

"She was at the same school with me for a little while; but she was much older than I; she was just leaving when I began. She was very pretty and very genteel; much more genteel than I ever thought of being. She never spoke to me but once, and then she told me to go upstairs and fetch her slippers."

"Did you obey?" asked Lancaster.

"No. At first she looked at me very indignantly; but soon she laughed and said, 'You don't mind me, because I am a woman ; but the day will come when you will fetch a man's slippers for him, and kiss them after he has put them on.' She was not like any other girl I ever saw; but almost everyone was fond of her; she could do so much-and yet she was always waited on."

"I should like to know how she turned out. character," remarked Lancaster.

She evidently had

"She married very well, I believe," said Mrs. Lockhart.

"Yes; he was three times her age, and very rich, and so fond of her that he didn't care whether her name was Bendibow or Grantley," rejoined Marion, rather harshly. "She was always called Miss Bendibow, by the way, and she may have been Sir Francis's real daughter, for aught I know; she seemed to think so herself, and she certainly didn't know of any other father. I suppose she didn't much care who her father was. At any rate, she became the Marquise Desmoines."

Lancaster moved suddenly in his chair, and seemed about to speak, but checked himself.

Mr. Grant took snuff, and asked, after a pause, "You say he was very fond of her?"

"Yes, I am sure he was," said Mrs. Lockhart; "he often talked to me about her-for he was a friend of ours, and used to visit us often because my husband saved his life in France, when the Marquis could not have escaped but for his assistance and protection; and after that he lived in London, and was sometimes so poor as to be forced to give lessons in French and in music; for all this time his estates in France were in jeopardy, and he did not know whether he would ever recover them. But he did, at last; and then he entered society, though he was no longer a young man ; and it was then that he met Perdita Bendibow, as she was called. He proposed

to her, and she accepted him; she could scarce have helped but like him, I'm sure. After their marriage they went to France, but I have heard nothing of her since.”

"There is one thing you have forgotten, mamma," said Marion; "it is another proof how much the Marquis cared for her. Sir Francis gave her no dowry. I suppose he thought it no more than just to save the money out of what her father had cost him."

"It is not charitable to say so, Marion ; and I am sure one could not expect that Sir Francis would give her a dowry, when her husband was so wealthy."

"So, the girl never knew her real father? Well, doubtless it was better so; doubtless he would have wished it so himself, if he retained any unselfish and noble feelings--as you, my dear child, have been charitable enough to imagine may have been the case. And perhaps Perdita's lot was the one best suited to her-she being 25 you have described her. For my part, having once had a child of my own, I may hope that she is happy-and that she deserves to be." Mr. Grant uttered all this in a musing tone, as though his mind was dwelling upon other things than those immediately under discussion; but there was much grave tenderness in the sort of benediction with which he concluded. It made Marion's heart go out towards him. She felt sure that he had known some deep love, and grievous sorrow, in his day. Now he was a lonely old man, but she resolved to be in the place of a daughter to him. She leant her cheek upon her hand, and fell into a reverie, in the midst of which the clock struck eleven.

"Bless me! how late we are keeping you up, Mrs. Lockhart," exclaimed Mr. Grant, shutting up his snuff-box ard putting it in his pocket. "The truth is, I have been so long deprived of ladies' society, that now I am prone to presume too much on my good fortune. In future, you must help me to keep myself within bounds. Good-night, Madam-I am your most obedient servant. Good-night, my dear Miss Marion; your father must have been a good man: I wish I might have known him. Mr. Lancaster, do you go with me?" The old gentleman was always thus ceremonious in his leavetakings.

"Yes, I'm with you," said Lancaster, breaking out of a brown study into which he had subsided, and getting briskly to his feet. "I have to thank you for a strange story-an interesting one, I

mean."

"Is there so much in it?" said Marion, as she gave him her hand.

"I fancy I see a good deal in it," answered he; adding with a smile, "But then, you know, I call myself a poet!"

The ladies curtseyed; the gentlemen bowed, and went upstairs together.

CHAPTER X.

WHEN Philip Lancaster and Mr. Grant reached the landing at the head of the stairs, they faced each other for a moment; and then, by mutual impulse as it were, Grant tacitly extended, and Philip as tacitly accepted, an invitation to enter the former's room. The mind resembles the heart in this, that it sometimes feels an instinctive and unexplained desire for the society of another mind. Cold and self-sufficient though the intellect is, it cannot always endure solitude and the corrosion of its unimparted thoughts. Therefore some of the most permanent, though not the most ardent, friendships have been between men whose ground of meeting was exclusively intellectual. But men, for some reason, are not willing to admit this, and generally disguise the fact by a plausible obtrusion of other motives. So Mr. Grant, as he opened the door (after the tacit transaction above-mentioned), said, "Step in, Lancaster, and help me through with a glass of that French cognac and water."

"Thank you, I will," Lancaster replied.

But when the tumblers were filled and tasted, and the liquor was pronounced good, nothing more was said for some minutes. At last Lancaster got up from his chair and began to pace about the room.

"It could be worked up into a good story, that character of the Marquise Desmoines," he said: "at least, as I conceive it. If I were a story-writer instead of a poet, I would attempt it. You would need the right sort of man to bring into collision with her. While I was abroad, I knew a fellow who, I think, would do. Came of good English stock, and had talent-perhaps genius. His father was a poor man, though of noble descent. Gave his son a good early training, followed up by the university curriculum, and then sent him abroad, with two or three hundred a year income. We'll call him Yorke. The fellow's idea at that time was to enter the Church he had eloquence when he was moved, a good presence, and a sort of natural benevolence or humanity, the result of a healthy constitution and digestion, and radical ignorance of the wickedness of this world. The truth probably was that his benevo lence was condescension, and his humanity, good-nature. As for religion, he looked at it from the poetical side, saw that it was sus

:

ceptible of a pleasant symbolism, that the theory of right and wrong gave plenty of scope for the philosophical subtlety and profundity in which he imagined himself proficient, and that all he would have to do, as the professional representative of religious ideas, would be to preach poetical sermons, be the expectancy and rose of his fair parishioners, the glass of goodness and the mould of self-complacency. He thought everybody would be led by him and glorify him, that his chief difficulty would be to keep their piety within practical bounds; and that the devil himself would go near to break his sinful old heart because he could not be numbered among the disciples of so inspired a young prig. It was a lovely conception, wasn't it? but he never got so far with it as even to experience its idiocy. His first bout with theological and ecclesiastical lore was enough for him. He found himself the captive of a prison-house of dogmas, superstitions, and traditions, instead of the lord of a palace of freedom, beauty, and blank-verse. If this was religion, he was made for something better; and he began to look about him in search of it. There were plenty of ideas masquerading about just then in the guise of freedom, and flaring the penny-dip of rationality in people's faces; and this fellow-what's his name?— Yorke, gave courteous entertainment to several of them. A German university is as good a place as another to indulge in that sort of dissipation. Freedom-that was the word; the right of a man to exploit his nature from the top to the bottom-and having arrived at the bottom, to sit down there and talk about the top. He had two or three years of this, and arrived at such proficiency that he could give a reason for everything, especially for those things that suited his inclination of the moment; and could prove to demonstration that the proper moral attitude of man was heels-in-the-air and head downwards. But unluckily human nature is not inexhaustible, at all events in the case of any single individual. The prospect may large enough, but he only walks in such few paths as are comfortably accessible to him; and as time goes on, his round of exercise gets more and more contracted, until at last he does little more than turn round on one heel, in the muddiest corner of the whole estate. As Yorke, owing perhaps to the superior intellectual and moral organisation on which he prided himself, arrived at this corner rather more speedily than the majority of his associates, he was better able than they to recognise its muddiness: and since mud, quâ mud, was not irresistibly delightful to him, and he was not as yet inextricably embedded in it, he thought it worth while to try and get out of it; and made shift tolerably well to do so, though no doubt

be