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an habitual sensualist, a bad landlord, an idle and utterly useless man; and with little of the true gentleman remaining below the surface or shell.

Happily for him his pleasures were to a certain extent antagonistic. Poetic instincts of purity survived in him through all his worst degradations; and made him feel at times as keenly the true character of his life, and shrink back from it with a loathing as intense, as if some powerful religious belief had suddenly risen within him, and thrown his whole nature into a kind of revolutionary convulsion. What religious feeling might have done for him Cunliff knew not, and never even dreamed of asking. What his poetic tastes left him he had little pleasure to see.

At thirty years of age he already felt as if his capacity for enjoyment (once so boundless) needed to be economised thenceforth. He therefore became thrifty in his pleasures; restricted in his range of vision; ceased to see always so many beautiful and attractive forms flitting before him, as parts of an infinitely extending aërial perspective, and fixed on one of them. To do him justice, John Cunliff's love for Mrs. Rhys was certainly the best feature in a continuously. bad life, if we may speak so paradoxically. It was only since he knew her that he had given the first real check to desires and tastes perpetually wandering, under obedience to no law but that of an unceasing thirst for pleasure.

CHAPTER V.

PASSING GLIMPSES.

DURING the day following that on which our story begins, a gentleman got out at Shrewsbury from the train going towards London, and immediately took his place in the down train for Wales, thus retracing the way he had come.

The official, as he looked at the ticket given up to him, wondered why the gentleman was sacrificing so coolly, over a ride of a few miles from his country seat, a ticket taken for London. He appeared to be well known on the platform. Porters touched their caps as he passed. The guard of the Welsh train put him into a compartment by himself, and locked the door.

The traveller shut down both windows, and threw himself into a corner with the air of a man worn out with fatigue and anxiety, and who felt he could now enjoy his miseries in his own savage fashion. He threw his feet with their muddy boots on the opposite seat; opened the breast of his coat, and drew a long deep breath; flung his hat to the farthest corner; and then sat still for a minute or two, staring at the flying trees.

What a superstitious ass I grow! I put it all on the question whether I should or should not reach Shrewsbury in time for this train. I did reach; and here I am, going, not to London, but--whither? To the devil, most likely. With all my heart. And I had better, now that I am in for it, entitle myself to his most respectful consideration.'

Thus ran the first turbid current of thought; the actual evil of the speaker's heart consciously exaggerated in his bitter irony.

his

By-and-by he became quieter, leaned back his head, closed eyes, and for a few minutes seemed to sleep; but suddenly he started up, and stared as if he saw some horrible thing; then laughed, struck out his arms with a sort of gymnastic movement, till he was thoroughly wakened from his drowsiness, when he sat down again, as still, and holding as stern a command over himself, as if not a single seat in the carriage had been vacant.

He was soon interrupted by the guard, who said, in a low, deferential tone

'Very sorry, sir, but we've no room elsewhere. Quite a gentleman, and-'

'Now then!' shouted the station-master; the guard sounded his whistle; the ponderous train began slowly to move; and then, leaping in so as to compel the gentleman inside to draw up his limbs in an undignified hurry and posture, came the new passenger. The door was banged to. They were off.

'I really beg pardon,' began the new-comer, out of breath. 'Rather a sudden entrance. We had a run for it. I didn't know anybody was inside. I-'

Here he stopped abruptly, noticing that no kind of response was forthcoming; stopped; took one steady look at the corner where the silent person sat, and said aloud, with inimitable coolness and enjoyment

'Really! I am sure I thought I saw a gentleman somewhere!'

And then, as if entirely convinced of his mistake, took out a cigar; lighted it without gesture or apology, which obviously on his theory could not be required; opened the window on his own side, and was about to do the same on the other, when the silent gentleman found it necessary to interfere with a decided lift of the hand, and a—

'No; I thank you!'

.

Again the new comer looked, and his look was answered with interest. And then, before either knew what he was going to say, both broke out into a laugh.

Five minutes later the two young men were engaged in more genial talk than either of them had ever had before on so slight an acquaintance.

The silent traveller had felt attracted by the intruder's face even in spite of his boorish reception of him. Subsequent glances more than confirmed the impression. He thought he had never before seen so handsome a countenance to be so devoid of pretension and conceit. There was nothing scholarly about it, nothing intellectually noble; just as there was nothing sensual, nothing mean. It was manly. It was picturesque, with its short, thick, curling, chestnut-coloured hair. But its great charm was an indescribable healthiness and happiness of expression, a perfect sunniness of content, that obviously did not spring from any temporary causerecent good-fortune, or recent gratification of long-cherished desires,--but seemed to be native. The very sound of his laugh-low, joyous, but quite undemonstrative-would, of itself, if you shut your eyes, tell the kind of man,—a man who needed only to be. In person he was of middle height; shorter and stouter than his fellow-traveller; easy, graceful, and unembarrassed in manner, though not, to the critical eye of his neighbour, polished. That personage set him down as a gentleman farmer, and so he proved to be. He was from Kent, which he soon gave his companion to understand was the finest county in England.

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'Yet you do find a change desirable sometimes ?' was remarked to him.

'Change, sir?'

The young farmer laughed; glanced at the scenery they were passing, shrugged his shoulders, and looked at his com

panion with eyes brimful of merriment at the idea of his needing a change.

I had something to do to make up my mind to come away, I can tell you!' he said. 'I haven't been away before at this time of the year since I was a boy.'

He had a peculiar mode of speaking, in brief, quicklyuttered sentences, with a meditative pause between each, and the words that came after the pause were often rather a continuation of his silent thoughts than of what he had previously said.

'Why, it's just in its glory! No rains over there yet. Roads cracking in the sun. Hop-pickers pouring in night and day. Ditches nice and dry for 'em. Corn-fields up to the hedge-tops. Nights pretty well light all through; and so hot with gipsy fires, and so noisy with corncrakes and crickets, and with apples falling crash, crash, on the cabbage-leaves, you can hardly sleep. No, sir, I haven't come out of Kent, in September, for the sake of a change.'

Nor for health, I presume?

'Not exactly.'

'Business, perhaps?' suggested the other, tempted on by the farmer's own interest in, and liking for, the conversation. 'Yes; and not very pleasant business.'

'Indeed!'

'I have a cousin in Wales-a small farmer with forty acres of thin mountain land-only rents it-been as poor as a rat all his life. Six months ago he came into a legacy of nigh seven thousand pounds, and now I've got to tell him it's all moonshine.'

'How's that?'

'Do you happen to know the firm of Morgan and Garnet, curriers, Bermondsey?'

'No,' said the other, with a slight smile.

'Well, Morgan, a Welshman, who made that business, retired twenty years ago from the management, but kept his capital, twenty-seven thousand pounds, in the concern. He died last April, and we, who were his nearest relatives-there's four of us in all-thought we had come in for a good thing. I bought a hunter-a prime bit of blood-on the strength of it. Luckily, I'm not obliged to sell him. Two days ago, when I was expecting a summons as executor to meet the partner, and receive the transfer of the capital so long invested, I got,

instead, a letter inviting me to a meeting of creditors. Didn't my lawyer go off in a terrible hurry! 'Twas all true. Twoand sixpence in the pound for the ordinary creditors-nothing to the dead man's relations, for he had been a partner, and his capital long since lost-which he didn't know or suspect.'

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Sharp practice - eh? to keep you all in ignorance so long.' "That's what I can't get over. For myself I don't care; but I never felt so cut up for anybody as I do for my cousin Elias Morgan. He's rough, but true as steel. One in a thousand, sir.'

'But as he has never, it seems, been other than poor, won't he soon get over it?'

'He may. It's a cruel business. Just one bit of sunshine in his whole hard life to show him how gloomy it had been, and then everything back in the old state.'

The listener's look was sympathetic, but he said nothing, and the young farmer went on :

'I'm afraid I made matters worse by being over-sanguine. When the rascals-who wanted, they tell me, to inveigle another partner-kept up such a show of prosperity as to pay us a year's profit, eight hundred pounds-two hundred apiece -which had been for some time due, and when my lawyer said it was a most respectable firm, is it very wonderful I was taken in ? So when I sent Elias his two hundred, I congratulated him on his being easy for life, and I told him I should soon have to send him all the rest, nearly seven thousand pounds.'

'Then he may be incurring liabilities on the strength of it?' 'That's what I'm afraid of. He was so cautious as to write me back a special letter of enquiry. It ought to have warned me. It didn't. I told him the money was as safe

as in the bank.'

'Hem! Very awkward that! He may be drawing cheques on this ideal bank in the shape of orders for goods, that are really promises to pay.'

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Well, it's done, and can't be undone. If he's very hard upon me, I must grin and bear it, as one of my ploughmen says when he is pulled up suddenly by a big root or stone in the furrow.'

'Then you are equally disappointed ? '

'Oh, it won't hurt me.'

' Are you so very rich ?' was the query in the other's

eye.

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