One night after dinner she felt more than usually oppressed and unable to breathe in the house; and she made up her mind to go for a longer walk than she generally took, along the sands to a rocky point enclosing one of the distant bays. The tide was going out, and so she knew that she would not have to hurry back; and the thought of a quiet hour on the rocks away from the aggressively happy inhabitants of the village and from the noise of the barrel-organs seemed infinitely attractive. She had the sands all to herself as she walked along by the edge of the sea, and there was something mysterious in the dark shadow of the woods at her right which appealed to her curious restless mood.

The point reached, she settled herself on a broad flat rock worn smooth by the friction of the sea, and leant against the stump of a tree which owing to a recent storm had become imbedded in the sand. The sea was like a lake; the reflection of the revolving lights on the forts and on the lightship stretched right across the water; away over the Solent the lights of Southsea twinkled and shimmered; all was still and silent, save for the occasional plash of oars as some belated boat passed by on its way to the landing-stage.

She had been sitting there some time, now looking straight before her towards the sea, now up into the mysterious depths of the starlit sky, when a sound in the wood at her back startled her painfully and set her heart beating intolerably quickly, and then she looked up through a sudden mist of tears to see Murray Wentworth standing on the rocks above her.

"I want to speak to you," he said gravely, ignoring all preliminaries and speaking with the directness of soul to soul. "I have sought you for many days," he went on, stepping down to her side, "and I have found you at last. I must speak now, or I cannot have any rest or peace."

"What is it you have to say to me?" she said, in a low voice. "I am very weary to-night. Cannot it wait awhile?-to-morrow or the next day—

"No!" he cried, interrupting her with a sudden passion which drove the blood from her heart; "it must be spoken now! at once! before we are either of us an hour older. Will you be patient and listen while I tell you a story?" he went on, while he stepped in front of her and stood leaning on a rock that was higher than the rest.

She could not answer. The passion in his voice and in his eyes filled her with a wonder so great that she had no words at her command, and she bent her head in silence.

"Do you remember," he said presently, after a pause during which he seemed to be laboriously controlling some emotion, "the first night you came to Brandonhurst last year?" "Yes, I remember," she said, scarcely audibly. Remember! Was it likely she would ever forget?

"You came down into the drawing-room earlier than usual, if you remember, and found only Millicent and Frances there?" "Yes, I did; but you were not there. How do you know?" she said wonderingly. And then, as the memory of the words she had used to the girls that night flashed across her, "You do not mean" she began, and then stopped short, while the blood rushed to her cheeks in hot burning waves.

"Yes," he answered slowly, "I mean that I was in the back drawing-room, and that before I could make my presence known

you I had heard every word you said. Don't think I tell you this," he went on gently, a spasm of pain contracting his face at the sight of her distress (for she had buried her face in her hands in an agony of shame), " merely to distress you. Heaven forbid now that I should give you one moment's unnecessary pain; but I want you to bear it in mind, and try to let it plead with you in my behalf when, after I have told you all that is in my heart, I ask you if you can grant me what I so sorely need and hunger foryour forgiveness."

"Forgiveness!" she said tremulously, "I have nothing to forgive."

"But you have!" he cried passionately. "So much that I can hardly dare to hope for pardon. But I must tell you my story first, before I ask it. Long before I saw you, I knew you by name, and—well, since it is all so long ago, and it seems so very ludicrous, I may as well say it out-I disliked you in advance— there is no need to say why. When I heard you were coming, my first feeling was repugnance at the thought of meeting you; my next was a vague, undefined wish which resulted in a definite determination as I listened to your words that night. I resolved to devote all my energies of mind and will to gain your love, and if I succeeded, to throw it back upon your hands. Bah! it makes me sick to think what a self-satisfied, canting hypocrite I was! What right had I, of all people in the world, to constitute myself the instrument of God's justice and wrath! It seems, looking back upon it, as though I could never respect myself again. But don't condemn me wholly yet," he cried, in sudden agonised entreaty, misinterpreting a gesture on her part; "hear me to the end. You cannot scorn and hate me more than I do myself!"

"I do not scorn or hate you," she said slowly. "I think you were quite right-do you understand me?—quite right," she went on with quiet persistency; "and I deserved it all. But oh!". with sudden, passionate self-pity, "though I deserved it, surely my punishment was great!"

Her words seemed to overpower him, and he buried his face in his hands for a few moments without speaking; and when he raised it again there was a drawn look of suffering about the mouth which told of his struggle for self-mastery.

"Must you say things like that?" he asked, in a voice in which the pain inflicted by her words still lingered. I know that they are only my due; but I have suffered a great deal lately, and my powers of endurance seem to have deserted me."

"Won't you finish your story?" she said, with a touch of coldness in her voice-it seemed strange that he should talk to her of suffering. "It is getting late, and I am so tired tonight."

"I will not keep you long-perhaps it is selfish of me to keep you at all; but if you will bear with me a little," he went on humbly, "it would make me happier to tell you all."

"Forgive me," she said gently, touched by his humility; "I did not mean to be unkind. I will listen as long as you wish.”

"Well, I did my best to make you care for me," he went on presently, with some difficulty; "and, while I threw myself in your way as much as possible, I thought it was all in obedience to my sacred resolution, for I did not realise for a long while that to be with you was heaven in itself. But gradually the outlines of my purpose began to grow dim and indistinct, and I thought of nothing but how to see you and hear your voice. But that morning when the telegram came-you know what was in it-it seemed to rouse all my slumbering zeal to a white heat of intensity, and I longed with a strength which, had I been more discerning, might have struck me as exaggerated, to see, before I obeyed its summons, whether I had succeeded in my self-appointed task. . . . It wasn't till after I had left you that afternoon and was on my way to London that I realised I had played with edged tools, and in the agony of my wound I knew that I loved you from the very bottom of my heart, and had loved you from the first. And I have loved you more and more every day, every hour I have lived since then. Yet I have done my best to forget you; for, believe me, I have not deceived myself-I knew how odious I must seem your eyes. But a week ago Mrs. Brandon told me you were here; and it came upon me like a revelation that, if I followed you here, at least I might see you once more, and perhaps hear

in

you say with your own lips that you forgave me. I will go away again at once," he went on pleadingly, "if only I may take your pardon with me, as some comfort in the future. Can you forgive me? I know it is much to ask-but you are kind."

There was silence between them for a while, for she could not trust herself to speak. At length she said quietly, but with a tremor in her voice:

"Yes, if I have anything to forgive, I forgive you from my heart."

"Thank you," he said, very gently, bending down and lifting her hand to his lips. " Good-bye," with the grave solemnity of a man in the act of parting with all he loves most in life. "May all good and happiness attend you always.” . . . . “I shall not see you again," he added, releasing her hand and moving a step away from her. "I am going away to-morrow."

"No, you are not going away," she said in a low voice, suddenly rising to her feet as though awaking from a trance.

"Why not?" he said, a little unsteadily, coming a step nearer to her.

"Because I bid you stay," she said gently, but with a touch of her old imperiousness.

"Why?" he whispered, looking up at her with passionate longing, as she stood raised a little above him, beautiful and stately, while the moon fell softly on her golden hair and mingled with the love-light in her eyes. "Oh! my darling, think well before you answer. Why do you bid me stay?"

"Because I love you, and because you know it," she answered, holding out her arms. And as he held her to his heart, of her own accord she raised her lips to his, as though to seal her words.

A Lover of England.

FEW figures were more familiar in the Row a few years ago than Count Beust as he rode, with erect form and fine sincere look, on the "trusty and well-beloved" white Arab horse that had borne him on the greatest day of his life, the day he accompanied the Emperor Francis Joseph to his coronation at Pesth as King of Hungary. He was always something of a personage in the Park, for he stood out even in that not undistinguished crowd as a statesman who had played a first part in politics, and left a lasting mark on the history of Europe. But it was never guessed that this distinguished stranger was half an Englishman at heart, that he loved England, that he loved her people, that he loved her institutions with a genuine Englishman's love. "I can truly say," he writes, "I have always looked upon England as my second home. Whenever I visit my friends in England (a pleasure I cannot deny myself) my heart rejoices at the sight of Dover. Whether it be the magnificent hospitality that we find in England, or the loyal attachment one meets with, there is a homely feeling about the country which attracts the visitor in spite of the dreary monotony of English life and the lack of amusement."

Count Beust knew England well; he had spent two years here as Saxon Minister when he was still a young man with the world and its promise before him, and he came back and spent seven more years here as Austrian Ambassador after his downfall from the Chancellorship, when his mind was keenly touched with a sense of the inconstancy of the world's favour, and when he seemed to find in the loyalty of his English friends a kind of daily solace against the ingratitude and persistent misrepresentation he suffered from the nation he had served. He was a man of warm affections, and could not help liking a country where he had been happy in his manhood and comforted in the trials of his age. But he had been drawn to England long before he ever saw her white cliffs or tasted in any degree of the staunchness of the hearts of her people. He belonged to a generation to which England was still the England of the Napoleonic wars, and he was sent for his education to a University where English institutions were held in high admiration. This was the Hanoverian University of Göttingen, and Hanover being at the