A little while ago she might have rather scorned Robert in spite of herself for his happy changeableness; but her respect for him had wonderfully increased since she had watched him among his men that morning, Robert had been so little in the habit of talking of his own work, that Hirell had not been quite sure whether he lived the life of an idle gentleman at Nytimber. She rather suspected when she had heard him talk of his mother's foreman that such was really the case.

'You must get out in the fields before they're all cleared, Hirell,' said Robert, helping himself to cream, which Hirell could only be brought to distribute as so much gold. 'If you promise to come to-morrow, I'll make them begin under the elms, so that you can sit in the shade, and have some shawls and lie down there.'

Thank you, Robert! I shall be very glad to come-only don't take any trouble for me,' answered Hirell.

'As to that, I mean to take a good deal of trouble with you, Hirell,' Robert said, with a decision that rather astonished Mrs. Chamberlayne.

You must come to church next Sunday, if it's only to see the difference between our comfortable old vicar and Ephraim Jones. Then I want you to let me drive you over to Reculcester to see the shops and the cathedral. And it's only eight miles to the Bay-we must go there, and have dinner at Uncle Stephen's.'

Mrs. Chamberlayne laughed.

6

"Why, Robert,' she said, whenever did you arrange all this round of dissipation for Hirell? you quite take our breath away.'

Well, I don't mean to allow you the luxury of a companion invalid any longer, mother,' answered Robert. 'I'm under a pledge to get Hirell strong with the least possible delay; I shan't let her be moped up here any longer.'

When he had said this he looked up at Hirell to see if she guessed whom he had pledged himself to about her; and he saw a lovely faint flush spreading all over her pale face, and her lashes were trembling very low over her cheek.

He got up and took her hand.

Good-night, Hirell,' he said, 'things will all be right soon. I know what your father is, where your happiness is concerned, better than you do; only keep up your spirits and get well.'

Then he kissed his mother, and went out with a parting nod to Hirell.

He went the garden way, and had scarcely reached the lawn when he heard a quick step behind him.

Turning, he saw Hirell coming to him, and looking very pale and troubled.

'Robert,' said she, 'I want to speak to you before you go.' Her hurry had made her breathless and wan-looking. Robert involuntarily made her take his arm, and walk very slowly up the lawn, whose trees were now all in commotion with the home-coming birds; who, by the chattering and quarrelling, seemed to have brought more trophies from the teeming summer fields than could be made room for.

'Robert,' said Hirell, trying to keep her voice calm, ‘I didn't know quite what you meant just now. I understood about your wish to make me go out, and help me to get strong -and I feel very grateful, and you may be sure that I will try. I have tried, Robert, but I will try more than I have done. But, Robert, will you tell me, please, what you meant about-about father just now? '

'Oh, I mean he'll come round,' answered Robert rather confusedly.

'Come round to-to what, Robert?'

'He'll consent to your having Sir John Cunliff. Only let my mother and me do our best with him, and give him time, and I'm certain, Hirell, all will come right.'

'Robert!'

She had snatched her hand from his arm, and stood confronting him, looking at him with bright, angry eyes.

'Write to father, if you dare! Speak to me about marry-` ing Sir John Cunliff again, if you dare! Understand, once for all, he's not what you or any of you think. Understand, Robert, if my father went on his knees to ask me to marry that man, I would not do it!'

Robert felt his senses so hopelessly confused by this outburst that he could at first do nothing but gaze on Hirell's face with a sort of stupor. Gradually, however, there came to him a sense of the deception that must have been practised upon him; and with it a kindling anger that began to burn more and more hotly, though he turned his eyes away that Hirell might not see it.

Oh Robert' she said, her voice suddenly weak again and

gentle, how rude, how ill-tempered I am! What a return I make for your kindness! Forgive me-only, pray say no more about this.'

'Then I'm to understand, Hirell, that your refusal of Sir John Cunliff comes from yourself alone?'

'It does, Robert, quite from myself. I have found he is unworthy to be my father's son, and he shall not be. No, he shall not be.'

'Then you have ceased to care for him, Hirell ?

She looked up at Robert's face with a glance of kindly but irrepressible contempt as if she would ask him if he thought her love were as easily disposed of as his own.

'No,' she said, 'I have not ceased to care for him--nor shall I ever. Oh, Robert! we are not all made alike in this world.' Robert smiled a very serious, short-lived sort of smile as he thought how wide of its mark her little arrow had fallen.

He had been leading her back to the house, and by this time they had reached the parlour window.

"Well, good night,' he said. 'I shall write the instant I get home and retract my promise.'

And the letter was written and posted that night.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

NEWS FROM HOME.

THE next morning, when Mrs. Chamberlayne was looking over her letters, with her usual gentle excitement-it was her one excitement of the day-she found among them the following letter from Bod Elian for Hirell and handed it to her.

It was from Hugh—the first she had received from him since the beginning of his troubles.

'Bod Elian.

'MY DEAR HIRELL,-I wonder which is the most truly selfish, the ambition which makes us feel the world to be all ours, or the tender grief for ourselves that comes after ambition's fall; when we realize that even the little chimney nook to which that world is shrunk-that nook that once was ours is ours no longer-that we have no sound right to it. And that is what I feel now after my return.

'Forgive me-pray forgive me, that I have been too much

engrossed, too much puffed up, and too much overwhelmed, to be able to write as I promised you. The collapse for the moment has been complete. My worst enemy could wish nothing worse for me than I feel, unless it were to come and sing some song of triumph under my windows.

Hirell, I feel something swell dangerously in my throat, when I contrast the tender mercies of our fellow-men outside with the loving-kindness of my brother, his considerateness, his boundless charity.

'And I used to think him hard. God help me, it was the life that was hard-the life that he and all of us were condemned to. 'When I returned-looking like a skeleton, Kezia, says― dreading the very sight of him, and picturing to myself the black, gloomy place destitute of common comforts, and made more destitute by the loss of the delusive hopes I had raised, while this was my state, I was carried into what seemed for the moment to my fancy a domestic paradise. The room was unusually light, there were flowers on the table; everything, in a word, was as if for a feast. That big-boned, big-voiced Christian, with a still bigger heart, Ephraim Jones, I suspect had some hand in this. When I could speak, I told Elias that I thought it was only a more refined mode of punishment, and that he need not fear it was sufficient.

'I had to go to bed, and from thence did not rise till yesterday week, and to-day I will write to you, I hope words of comfort.

"Hirell, I live again. This first failure has humiliated but shall not destroy me. It is one of the dreams of the Saxon's egotism that nobody but he is strong; and in measuring strength he brutally mixes up all kinds of the most incongruous natures for comparison, and then judges them by his own narrow standard. My brief experience has taught me that however difficult the world is, however full of pitfalls, a man may still make way, if, with ambition, and the talent that justifies it, he has good sense and fixed principle; and, to revert to myself, if he can tread down under his feet the artist's deadliest enemy, Pleasure.

'And now for a secret; or rather for a whole nest of secrets. I am going away to-morrow. I am going away secretly. I am not going to please myself, for I would gladly have staid here a few weeks to feel that I and my mother-land were once again reconciled; and yet I must go. And upon all these secrets comes another and greater one that explains them, and which you ought to know.

Hirell, I have long and dearly loved Kezia.

'Elias knew of this long ago, and promised to speak for me. He has fulfilled that promise faithfully, but somehow my love by proxy did not get on; and he wrote to me when I was in the full of my mad holiday to say I had better come and see to the affair myself as soon as I justly could.

'In returning-broken alike in heart and fortune, as it seemed I had secretly the faintest gleam of light still cheering me about Kezia. Her conduct when I did come was strange. It was tender, motherly, but accompanied with a certain restraint that I, exquisite coxcomb! fancied was maidenly consciousness of love.

'It was no time for a pauper to talk, or dream; and I was silent enough, though always thinking, one minute of Kezia, and the next of my second venture forth.

'Last night, or rather about half an hour after midnight, I felt very restless; and got up with a strong inclination to see my brother were awake, and would talk to me.

if

Wishing not to disturb him if he were asleep, or Kezia, who would have fancied me ill, I trod as if my feet were shod with cotton wool; went to his door, which as you know he often leaves ajar for air, pushed it open and went in. The room was in absolute darkness. I was instantly arrested by the sound of his voice. And to judge by the sound, he was kneeling, I think at the bedside; and praying, according to his habit, aloud, that is to say, in a low, monotonous, but painfully earnest tone, which could not be heard by any one in the house less favourably situated than I was.

'I thought it would do me no harm to share in that which he was saying. Believe me, Hirell, I would not for the world have stayed to listen but in that spirit.

'His prayer lasted for some time, was too fine for me now to go into, but deeply interesting, without, however, any special application to myself, which I cannot say I desired.

He had finished, or appeared to have done so by the pause, and I should have spoken, but that I knew he had not risen, and might therefore be still continuing, as I have often known him do, to pray in silence; as if there were subjects too holy, too mysterious, for the soiling of mortal words. Presently he broke out again, and the mere sound of the voice, so broken with trouble; seemed to warn me instinctively of something I needed to hear. As nearly as I can repeat his words, they were these: