souled feeling, to which he had long been a stranger, and which refreshed his parched spirit like waters in a desert of burning sand.

Lilian briefly mentioned Cyril's terrible illness and her own, and described his state, which was still one of doubtful sanity, requiring the most watchful care; there were few tidings besides. Then she spoke of Henry's affliction, and bid him keep up his heart, and pray constantly, as she did, that his innocence might be made clear. That the truth must come out sooner or later, she was convinced, referring him to the great promises made to the just men in the Scriptures. In the mean time, who could tell but that some wise and beneficent end was to be fulfilled by his sojourn in prison. The purposes of the Almighty were deep and unsearchable, far hidden from the thoughts of men; but whatever treachery and wickedness had brought Everard to that pass of shame and misery, she bid him remember that without the divine permission he could not be there.

What if some nobler and higher use than he could ever have wrought outside in the free world were to be his in that dreary place? Who could say what the influence of one solitary man of stainless life might be in that crowd of degraded yet still human creatures, or what sorrow might be there to comfort? Let him - only remember that the Almighty had placed him in that dreary dungeon as surely as He had placed the sovereign on the throne, the priest at the altar, and the bright blossom in the sunshine, and take comfort.

These opportune words soothed and strengthened Everard's soul, the more so as Lilian did not underrate the magnitude of the sacrifice he had been called upon to make, but spoke feelingly of the cruel denials and degradations of his lot, and of the frustration of their common hopes, and of the separation, which she trusted might soon be at an end.

She bid him remember also that, as a true lover, he must keep up his courage for her sake, and hope in the future, which they might still enjoy together. Nor was this noble letter wanting in those assurances of love which are so cordial to parted lovers. Its effect upon the lonely prisoner is difficult to imagine, much less describe.

But it was greatly due to the hope and faith which it inspired, that from that day the prison became to Everard no longer a placo

of darkness and despair, but a part of God's own world, over which divine wisdom and mercy still smiled, and in which a man's soul might still find its necessary celestial food.

CHAPTER IV.

EVERARD found, to his unspeakable consolation, that he might answer Lilian's letter, though his answer would have to pass before the cold eyes of the officials; and, further, that once in every few months Lilian intended to write to him.

Thus from time to time his soul was braced and refreshed by the dear delight of communicating with the being he loved most in the world. How he counted the weeks and days till the day of days arrived; how he treasured phrases and sentences of those precious letters (which he was, of course, not allowed to preserve) in his memory; and how much thought he gave beforehand to the composition of replies!

Many dark and terrible hours of bitter inward wrestling he still had after that blessed antumn Sunday, but the general tenor of his inward life was brave and hopeful. He found much to interest him in his fellow-prisoners, and here and there flowers of tenderness and charity sprung up along the barren prison path, and he even formed friendships—yes, warm and lasting friendships—with some of the felons among whom his lot was cast, and enjoyed the pure happiness of knowing that he had, as Lilian predicted, rescued more than one fallen creature from despair, and set his face heavenward.

Among his first friends was a young fellow whose character reminded him strongly of Cyril's, lovable, pious, well-disposed, refined, but weak and selfish. He was of gentle birth, and had held a position of trust under a large banking firm. He married young on a small income; marriage brought cares, and did not diminish the love of pleasure. He got into debt, gambled to extricate himself, and, of course, plunged further in. Ruin stared him in the face, and he embezzled the sums trusted him, meaning, as such criminals usually do, to pay all back in time. He left a young wife and child destitute in the hard world while undergoing his seven years im

prisonment. He was heart-broken, and Everard saw him glide swiftly into the clutches of consumption and fade before him.

Many a stroke of work he did for the poor weakling, and many a thought of hope and manly cheerfulness he gave him. And by the darkness in the prison the day the poor fellow was taken to the infirmary-never more, as Everard well knew, to come out again— he knew how much brightness his friendship had made in that dreary spot. Everard, as a special grace, besought them to give him hospital duty, that he might himself tend his dying friend, and thus he was able to soothe his latest moments; receive his piteous message for his wife, whom Everard had little hope of ever meeting; and close his eyes when he had no more need of the sun.

As the outer world so was the narrow prison sphere, Everard found after awhile: men trusted and betrayed, loved and hated, schemed and envied, derided misfortune or helped it, as in the world, only there was a larger percentage of rascals inside the prison than outside. His friends were chiefly gentlemen, though he sought the friendship of the lowest; a man had but to be miserable to found a claim upon his heart.

But never till he dwelt on equal terms with the scum of all classes did he discover how hard and inflexible are the iron bars which divide class from class. The gentlemen, from the fraudulent director and forging ex-Guardsman, down to the smallest clerk or shopman who could handle a pen, hailed him as a brother, while those who belonged to what one may call the washing classes were as his twin brothers; but the hand-laborers, the non-readers and non-washers, and the criminal class proper, looked upon him as their natural enemy, and, beyond mere brutal elementary necessities, discovered little on which they could exchange sympathy and build friendship.

Everard sometimes longed for half a dozen villainous noblemen, a misdoing minister or two, and one or two iniquitous emperors to make the social world complete. In that case, in spite of the prison equality, there would be no fear, he well knew, that the little society would resolve itself into a republic; the rascal emperor would have his rascal court, and the minor rascals would fall naturally into their places.

In the process of the long years a sort of sleep had settled upon Everard's nature. He grew so inured to the prison routine, with its numbing drudgery, that he had ceased to think of freedom or feel

active pain in his never-ceasing torment. But Leslie's funeral was like the stab of a sharp knife in a numbed limb; it woke him to full consciousness of his misery and degradation. He had been at Portsmouth only for some six months, having been suddenly transported thither, he knew not why, and he had but recently discovered that his father was port-admiral.

Daily, as he worked on the dock-yard extension, he had passed the admiral's great house, with the green in front, and the semaphore, waving long arms to all the subject ships in harbor, upon its roof, and had looked at it with a listless, incurious eye, little dreaming who was the chief figure in the court which gathers round the port-admiral as a tiny social king, till one sunny noon, when going home to dinner with his gang, he saw the admiral descending the steps to welcome some guests, and felt the sting of his humiliation as he had never done before, not even when one day, in the midst of his muddy work at the extension, he had seen Keppel in full uniform rowed ashore from his ship with all the pomp and circumstance of a naval captain on blue waters. Some weeks before the funeral, when he was going on to the dock-yard works at early morning, the port-admiral's house was still lighted up, its windows shone sickly in the gray daylight, a few carriages were still drawn up in a lessening line before the principal door, and the last strains of a military band were dying away.

The admiral, assisted by his daughter-in-law, the Hon. Mrs. Keppel Everard, had given a great ball that night, and in one of the carriages, into which the admiral was leaning, talking, No. 62 saw a black-coated man, whose features, dim in the shadow, suggested Cyril's, and by his side, pale from the long night's waking, and talking to the old man, was surely, surely, his own sister Marion.

Did they know he was there? or had Lilian purposely withheld the information to spare them pain? He could not tell. But these circumstances, together with the funeral, conspired to make his life intolerable, and, when once more he found himself laboring on the old fortifications, be stepped along in the gang with a subdued leap in his gait, like a caged beast.

Long since he had renounced the hope of being freed by Cyril's conscience. He had never made any attempt to fasten the guilt on the real criminal; he shrank from the complex misery it would bring upon all dear to him; and, moreover, his evidence, though absolutely convincing to himself, was purely conjectural. He could

bring not one proof, no single witness, save the dumb cat, and that evidence, he well knew, would suffice only to convince the one person he most wished to be ignorant of the truth, Lilian herself.

The day on which he returned to the fortifications was hot and fiercely bright. The town was full of life. Gay carriages were bearing ladies in light summer bravery to garden-parties, afternoon dances on board ships, and other revels; bands were playing on piers; vessels of every kind, some gay with flags, dotted the Solent and the calm blue harbor; colors had been trooped on the common, troops had marched past the convicts; the sweet chimes of St. Thomas's had rung a wedding peal; the great guns had thundered out royal salutes to the royal yacht as she bore the sovereign over to the green Wight; there was such a rush and stir of life as quite bewildered Everard, and made the sharpest contrast to his gray and dreary prison life. To see these freest of free creatures, the street boys, sauntering or springing at will along the hot streets, or, casting off their dirty rags, flinging themselves into the fresh salt sea, and reveling there like young Tritons, or balanced on rails, criticising the passing troops, was maddening.

The day grew hotter, but pick and barrow had to be plied without respite, though the sweat poured from hot brows, and one man dropped. Everard saw that it was sunstroke, and not malingering, as the warder was inclined to think, and by his earnest representations got the poor creature proper treatment. The brassy sky grew lurid purple, and heavy growls of thunder came rumbling from the distance; some large drops of rain fell scantily: and then suddenly the sky opened from horizon to horizon and let down a sheet of vivid flame. Darkness followed, and a roar, as of all the artillery at Portsmouth firing and all its magazines exploding at once.

"Now or never," thought Everard, and, dropping his barrow at the end of his plank, he leapt straight ahead down into a waste patch, over which he sprang to the road. He ran for life and liberty with a speed he did not know himself capable of, straight on, blindly aiming at the shore, tearing off his cap and jacket and flinging them widely in different directions, as he went through the dark curtain of straight, rushing rain.

The warders, bewildered by the awful roar of the thunder, blinded by the fierce, quick dazzle of the lightning and the blackness of the all-concealing rain, did not at first miss him. It was only when he leapt the palisade bounding the road, and showed through