Soon he would stand in his jailer's presence, stripped of his very garments, no longer á man, but a thing; called no more by a name, but a number; beggared in mind, body, and soul; and a stony despair possessed him. Mr. Hawkshaw thought he might get five years, he told him, and five years, or even ten, left some small room for hope. After five years, youth would not be utterly gone; he might still bridge over the gap in his life. He might go to some new world and begin over again, wasted by imprisonment, with five precious years lost, but still in the prime of his faculties. But twenty years shut out all hope-twenty years of early manhood and maturity, cut off from all sources of mental activity, from all knowledge of the world and life, the echoes of whose onward rolling wheels could never reach him; chained to manual toil; herded with the scum and off-scouring of vice and misery. Supposing that he survived this awful fate, what could he expect to be at the end?

He was glad now that none of his friends save Mr. Maitland and George Everard had seen him since his arrest. His fate was beyond the reach of sympathy or help; the only thing now was to keep its contamination to himself. He refused to take leave of any one. George had irritated him by untimely exhortations, by gifts of tracts, and a disbelief in his innocence, or rather, a stubborn assumption that he was guilty on all counts, which astonished him beyond measure; Marion sent her love, and would see him "if he wished"; his father and two brothers were still abroad; and his married sisters agreed with their husbands that Henry was dead to them.

But Mr. Maitland procured an interview after the conviction, and was accompanied by Lilian. The meeting was brief and agonized. Lilian's marvelous self-control kept her outwardly calm, while the calm of utter despair quieted Everard. He bid her forget him, think of him as dead; reminded her that she had her life to live in the outside world; and hoped she would open her heart to newer and happier affections. Lilian replied that she never could and never would forget the one love of her life; that the cruel fate which separated them for twenty years could not cancel the bond between them, which was eternal. "Besides," she added, with asorrowful smile, "your innocence may yet be proved."

“My poor Lilian,” he returned, thinking how bitter such a proof would be for her, "we must not venture to hope for that."

"I shall pray for it night and day," replied Lilian; "and, in the

mean time, do not forget me, Henry. Remember the morning in the wood, and all that you promised me,"

He turned his face away, and could not speak for some time; and Lilian continued in her quiet way to tell him how grieved Cyril would be to have missed seeing him, and how terribly he had suffered by his friend's calamity. Lilian had only left his bedside for the short time granted her to bid farewell to Everard, for Cyril was at death's door. He had not ceased raving since he recovered from the fainting-fit into which the passing of Everard's sentence threw him. All this Everard heard with the same stony calmness, which was shaken only by the ineffable pity he felt for Lilian. It would be better for her if Cyril should die, he thought, though for himself it would cut off the last possibility of escape from dishonor. He sent a tender message to Marion, thanked Mr. Maitland for all his kindness, and then it was time for his friends to go.

"I shall never forget you, Henry," Lilian said, as their hands were clasped in a last farewell. "I have but one life and one love. Twenty years' suffering will not make me love you less. I can never forget you-never."

Lilian's firm lip quivered, as she spoke these words in a voice the natural music of which was enhanced by the deepest mingling of love and sorrow, and the quiver recalled to Henry's mind the pitiful trembling he had often seen in Cyril's mouth, the sign of a fatal inherent weakness of purpose. The sharpening of her features, and the pallor consequent on mental suffering and intense emotion, further increased Lilian's likeness to her twin brother, and Everard felt his heart rent in twain by a tumult of conflicting feelings as he took his last long look at the sorrowful, beloved face.

He could reply only by a look which haunted Lilian ever after, and by a closer pressure of the beautiful adored hand, and then he heard the doors shut with a dreadful heart-crushing sound behind her.

In that moment of exquisite anguish his stony despair gave way, for the farewell between true lovers can never be all pain, and a holier though deeper agony shook his heart, mingled with a rush of the old pity and affection for his friend, and a thousand thoughts and feelings poignant with joy as well as sadness, and he dropped his head upon his hands and cried as Englishmen, and even English boys, rarely cry. He never shed such tears again, though the time came when he would have given worlds for the power of such a passionate outburst.

Lilian also broke down when the door closed upon the unfortunate prisoner, and wept, regardless for once of her father's feelings, unrestrained by the presence of the stolid and indifferent prison officials, to all of whom a woman's tears were a too-familiar sight, until she regained her brother's room, and took her part in placing ice on his burning head, and listening to his incessant ravings of battles and music and churches, and his frequent calls to Lilian to protect him from some shadowy and awful terror. Then Lilian would lay her hands gently and firmly upon him, and tell him she was there, and nothing should hurt him; and then sometimes a dim glimmering of consciousness would return to his wild and vacant gaze for a moment, and he would be quieter for a time; till at last, after a long and weary time, one day, when Lilian felt that her strength was quite at an end, he looked up with a glance of recognition and spoke her name.

Then they were told that he would live, but whether his reason would ever return to him depended greatly upon his treatment during convalescence.

PART II

peace above all earthly dignities, A still and quiet conscience."

CHAPTER I.

THE full glory of late summer brooded in afternoon stillness over the golden harvest-fields, the gray dreamy downs, the deep-shadowed woods, and the soft azure glimpses of sea around Malbourne. Everything seemed wrapped in rich, delicious luxury. Improvident boys reveled in blackberries, and stormed their friends' heavy-laden fruit-trees; while provident squirrels watched the swelling acorns and hazel-nuts, and prepared little granaries for storing them when ripe. The sun had drawn the richest tones of color from everything -from the ruddying apple and purpling plum; from the brown-gold corn and brilliant wayside flowers; from the dark green woods and purple clover patches; from the bronzed faces and limbs of the laborers and children; from the cottage gardens, bright with scarlet-runner, vegetable marrow, and rich fruit. Passing down the village street, you could scarcely see the thatched cottages for the flowers about them, the gay hollyhocks standing like homely sentinels among the red snapdragons, geraniums, carnations, and gillyflowers; while the Rectory grounds were gay with their fullest bloom, and the redspur valerian climbed over the low church-yard wall, and red poppies blazed through the corn, which stood ready for the sickle on the other side.

The yellow lichens and stonecrop on the gray spire and tiled roof of the church glowed intensely in the sleepy sunshine, into which a warm haze had brought a ruddy tint, and the blue sky gazed, softened and dreamy, through the same hazy veil. Down from the belfry, standing there in the sweet blue, fell the slow,

drowsy chime of the three old mellow bells, and floated pleasantly over the quiet, basking fields, where cows stood withdrawn beneath the trees, chewing contentedly, with lazily winking eyes and whisking tails; and the horses fed serenely, not knowing that they would have to drag all that rich harvest home before long; and the little brook babbled faintly because of the great heat which consumed it.

Service was over, and people were straggling home through fields, or lounging at garden gates in idleness and Sunday clothes, though the full male toilet was subdued by a tendency to shirtsleeves. Granfer was holding forth to a select circle outside the low wall of the church-yard, where he was wont to bask in the sun, like some novel species of lizard, the summer long. Farmer Long was wending his way slowly homeward with his family, full of thought. He had decided to cut his first wheat-field, half a mile off, on the morrow, and lo! he saw that the corn through which they were passing was over-ripe and crying out for the sickle.

Farmer Long was puzzled. He could not think why Providence made the corn ripe all at once, when it was obvious that it could not all be cut, much less carried, at the same time. "You may depend upon it," his wife told him, "Providence have got plenty to do without thinking o' your carn, Long. Cutting of it and carrying is our lookout. All Providence have to do is to put it there for us, and thankful we must be there's any to cut." Which Mr. Long reflected upon over his pipe after tea, not without a remote inward conviction that he would have made better arrangements himself.

Sunday afternoon is the great time for sweethearting. Many a shy couple detached itself from the straggling parties going homeward, and wandered off through wood and field-paths and green lanes, for the most part silent, but contented, if not happy, and full of more unspoken poetry than the world dreams of.

It is a melancholy time for the forsaken or scorned swain, who cocks his felt hat in vain, and whose bunch of carnation or hollyhock, jauntily stuck in his hat-band, avails him nothing in the eyes of the cruel fair. It was the hour when Charles Judkins's misplaced passion gave him the most exquisite pangs; an hour which he usually spent in solitary brooding, chiefly by the brook-side, where he was wont to lean on a certain stile, shaded appropriately by willows, and "pore upon the brook that babbled by," just like the unfortunate youth in Gray's "Elegy." And let no prosaic child of culture,