have pledged yourself to me-you have your pledge to remember whatever I have done. Can you dare to break your solemn promise to be true to me?'

At this a little strange gleam of fire came into the wet eyes. 'I gave my solemn promise to be true to Mr. Rymer-I was true to him, till the last,-but, Sir John Cunliff, from the first minute you were made known to me, I felt I felt the one that I had loved before was gone. You were left, but you were not the one that I had loved-I do not wish to love you. I do not understand you-I will certainly never marry you; I am not fit for you, nor you for me. You saw it all so truly, if you would but remember.'

He stood regarding her in bitter silence. Those words, 'you saw it all so truly, if you would but remember,' were as gall to him! and it was as if the cruel light they threw upon his heart's secrets was reflected back on Hirell's, for he suddenly saw, or thought he did, the one taint of her nature.

'Hirell,' he said, in a voice such as she had never heard from him before, you are not so perfect as you think, after all your anger against me. Your suffering, which keeps alive your anger, is all not because I sinned against your womanhood, but because I sinned against your sainthood; and you cannot bring back the old glory and halo, the sense of unapproachable light and goodness of which you were so proud.'

Her eyes, fixed on the table before her, were filled with anguish; he saw that he had indeed stung her-but, when she spoke, he knew the sting had only made her heart close up from him the more.

'Perhaps you are right, Sir John Cunliff,' she said, 'perhaps I am guilty of the thing you say, but if so I have never withdrawn myself from God's hands, and He knows what He is doing with me. I am sure, too, that He knows I ought to keep the one thing you have left to me—my faith in Him, and this I could not do if I married you.'

'Hirell, forgive me. How dared I say what I have said!' 'I have no doubt but that it was true-too true, Sir John.' Again he stood silent, in fierce self-reproach and suffering. Hirell, Hirell,' he cried suddenly, 'this is too much! It cannot be that I must drain this bitter, bitter cup.'

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6

May God make it less bitter for you, sir; I cannot.'

He rose, and walked the length of the little room twice with head bent down, hands linking, and eyes looking helplessly round as in a vague search for hope.

At last his eyes resting on Hirell's little Bible as it lay by her black gloves and bonnet, he stood still a moment looking at it. Suddenly he went to the table, took up the little book, and came to her with it.

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Hirell, I cannot play the patient lover after this, and offer to live on hope when no hope seems to exist. I know you too well, and I know I have already given you too much time for consideration for this to be any mere caprice, and yet I cannot -I cannot bring myself to believe, Hirell!'

She looked at him with cold, questioning eyes.

'Hirell, my darling! my only hope and love! you do not mean me to take your words for solemn truth-not for truth so solemn that you could swear it upon this book. You could not do that?-say you could not, and I will wait-and hope-and come to you again.'

She rose up, she put her hands upon the book as he held it, but though her lips opened and moved, she could not speak. 'No, Hirell, no,' he pleaded, shudderingly trying to draw away the book; but following his entreaty came the words, low, but clear and distinct—

'I swear upon this book that I will never marry Sir John Cunliff.'

His hands were slowly withdrawn, the Bible slipped from hers, and fell on to the floor.

Both knew that the vow, the first she had ever made, was irrevocable. Both knew, as she sank into her chair, and he knelt beside her, that they were severed as utterly as two sailors on an iceberg, when it breaks, and they are being borne away on its different parts by different currents.

He scarcely seemed to feel her hands, or she his, as they were clasped in that last clasp. They seemed rather to be stretching them towards each other in the distance they felt spreading so fast between them.

And then the real parting came, and they saw each other

no more.

CHAPTER LVII.

THE SOLITARY.

As a man stunned by a blow which deprives him of all sensation beyond a confused dull pain, which he does not even attempt to understand, will go blindly groping along, so that

a bystander may not even guess his state, Sir John Cunliff, after carefully closing the door of Bod Elian behind him, descended the hill into the valley.

He stood for a minute or two on the Dolgarrog road, upon the long, old, stone bridge that crosses the valley, and leaned over the parapet, as if studying the Roman pavement of the ancient ford below. But the head sank more and more, till it and the hand rested on and pressed closely to the cold stone.

A bird sang high in the air, and began to descend, singing deliciously as it did so. He lifted his head, as if from old habit, to listen; broke out into a passionate but unintelligible exclamation; climbed over the wall of the bridge, and went on through the marshes, up to his knees in water occasionally (for the tide overflows here), nor did he stop till he reached the ferry.

The ferryman was on the other side, and Cunliff gazed as if in perfect helplessness towards him. Perhaps, the sound of his own voice, raised just then in a shout, would have been too horrible.

He waited in a dreadful calm till somebody should come. A tramp, with traets in his hand, as a pretence for a vocation, was the first comer: he shouted lustily.

The boat and boatman soon crossed, and soon took them both over; the tramp neither annoying Cunliff by looking at him, nor by offering his wares, to the latter's great relief.

Is the river deep ?' asked the tramp.

'Deep enough to drown a man last week,' replied the boatman, who got in for a swim, and couldn't get out again.' 'I wonder what he thinks of his luck, now ?' said the halfjesting, half sepulchral voice of the gentleman-passenger; but the boatman looked as though he'd be glad when he'd got rid of such a reprobate: and the tramp himself looked on in a spirit of grave reproof.

Cunliff, as he jumped out of the boat, threw them a shilling a-piece, and called out with a laugh

Even the devil, you see, is not so black as he's painted,' and passed away from their wondering eyes.

It was the solitude of the mountain that evidently tempted him. Criba Ban in all its majesty rose before him; its highest peaks rising steeply up from where he stood; while its mighty arms were prolonged far away, right and left, for many miles in each direction.

He was mad enough to think he could ascend from this part. When, after some half hour of vain effort, he saw he could not, he determined to ascend from the side opposite to Dolgarrog; a place that just now he seemed bent to shun.

A tremendous sweep had to be made to accomplish this, but after two or three hours of exertion that would have been simply impossible had he been in his ordinary senses, he found himself at the top of one of the minor crests that hang about the breast of Criba Ban.

He was now full two thousand feet above the valley. The afternoon was yet sufficiently light for him to see the glorious scenery. Never yet had he ascended to a place like this without a vivid sense and keen enjoyment of the beauty and sublimity thus made visible. Yet now, the moment he stood on a little level platform, which he seemed to know familiarly, he lay down, without casting even a single glance around.

He lay on the hard, bare rock-now with his face to it, now, in his writhings, with his face to the sky, the eyes shut, and the teeth fixed, as if with a vice. He seemed above all things to dread that unpacking of the heart with words, of which Hamlet speaks.

Gradually the light decreased, and a thin white mist crept stealthily up. Had any friendly voice been near, it would have been raised in warning. To be on Criba Ban, or Snowdon, in a mist, is about the most promising condition in which a man can place himself who would like to have the benefit of suicide without its responsibility.

Sir John may be acquitted of any such thoughts; he had found the solitude he yearned for, the one only thing that in all this world offered even a gleam of relief; and if the word luxury can be applied to any condition annexed to the bed of tortures on which he lay, that luxury was his—the luxury, the relief to be alone.

Still more dim grew the afternoon, but he saw it not, saw nothing, till a faint light began to twinkle out on the slope of the opposite hill. He saw that, and sprang to his feet as if an electric shock had passed through him.

It was Bod Elian; there was no other house there.

He stood as if turned to a pillar of stone, watching that light for some minutes. Did its radiance-the undefinable sense of comfort suggested by it-kindle the possibility of

BB

hope, of yet another effort to win Hirell before it should be too late?

Some mechanical impulse caused him to take out his watch, look at the time, knowing nothing, however, about it, and put the watch back. Then quite unconsciously he again took it out, and did notice, though with some difficulty, through the increasing gloom, that it was near six, and then came the full remembrance of where he was, and of his danger if he remained.

Before he had stirred a dozen paces it was again all forgotten, and he threw himself upon the rock so carelessly as to cut both his face and hands with the sharp prominences; but he felt nothing of the hurt, but began to give way to the ,heaving, maddening chaos within, to the bitter loathing of himself, of his life, of the world, and of all created things that he felt.

Passages from Scripture, used by Elias, came from time to time athwart this seething, sweltering hell, into which he struggled not to look, but which would not be denied his countenance. When he had covered all over as with the black ash of ruined hopes, and strove only to be at rest in a blank torpor, there would be a sudden light, and roar, and he and all the fiends of hell seemed once more to be in company.

The growing darkness seemed to be as welcome as sleep to wayfarers in the Arctic regions when suffering from intense cold, the sleep that foreruns death.

Is it with the cruel inconsistency that suffering forces upon us, that he cannot leave the place from whence he sees that far-off light gleaming, even while every particle of strength he possesses is given, and has been given for hours past, to the one effort that can alone save him from insanity—the effort to shut out the actual picture of Hirell from his sight, and to exclude every thought directly leading to her from his mind?

The darkness is still thickening about him, the wind moaning and sobbing vehemently, so that he can see nothing distinctly in the valley below; and at last, the light that he has watched as a drowning mariner on a raft at sea might watch a similar indication of the place where he yearns for his foot to rest, fades, fades, and disappears.

The sense of the extreme cold now strikes upon his senses for the first time, as though that poor light had been sufficient sun for him while it lasted.