of the century. In the intervals, his house was hired for other sales.

One of the adjourned sales of Lely's treasurers is announced in the London Gazette, February, 1687: "Upon Monday in Easter week," it says, "will be exposed by public auction a most curious and valuable collection of drawings and prints made with great expenses and care by the late Sir Peter Lely, painter to his late Majesty. The drawings are of all the most eminent masters of Italy, being originals, and most curiously preserved. The prints are all the works of Marc Antonio, after Raphael and other the best Italian masters and of the best impressions, and good prints, in good condition, and carefully preserved. Some are double and treble. The sale will be at the house in Covent Garden, where Sir Peter Lely lived."

:

That sale which had commenced under Charles the Second, and was carried on during the reign of James, extended far into that of William the Third, before it concluded. In 1694, when one of Lely's executors, Roger North, occupied "the house in Covent Garden where Sir Peter Lely lived," the final sale was announced in the London Gazette for September 17-20, A. D. 1694: "On the 2d October, from 5 to 9 at night, will be exposed for sale, at Mr. Walton's house in Holborn Row Side, next door but one from the corner going to Queen Street, the remains of Sir Peter Lely's curious collection of prints and drawings of the best Italian masters. The collection will be laid open three days before, and may be seen." From first to last, the sale produced about £26,000.

To complete this story there remain but a few words to be said. Lely's daughter, a young lady with some infirmity in the eyes, was enabled by her father to live in ease as she also did in privacy. She died young. The son John, while a boy, was well cared for by his trustees. Their accounts show that they kept him in succulents and sweetmeats and "reasons." They furnished him with money for "plays, and Christmas-boxes for ushers," generally a guinea, reckoned at twenty-three shillings; and they paid about forty pounds a year for his schooling. Only on one occasion is there any trace of the son's connection with his father's calling, in an account of "money spent on prints and crayons." No more is heard of him till 1728, when. the Historical Register has among its "deaths" the simple entry, November 5, John Lely, Esq., son of Sir Peter Lely, the famous painter." This John Lely left a son of the same name, who was so celebrated in his own day that after his death, in 1737, the poet of the Gentleman's Magazine broke out into verse at once elegiac and eulogistic. The bard especially praises the excellence of the portraits of women by this grandson of Sir Peter, and he names a whole roll of aristocratic beauties whose charms will "survive themselves," because they will live forever on John Lely's canvas. His "Lady Torrington" can 66 move without life, and in effigie charm." John Lely's "manly genius," it is said, "scorned the beaten ways."

Hence, thy Eliza can in absence move
And melt the frozen anchorite to love."

John Lely's power of representing character is shown by his illustration of "awful piety," in his "Lady Sunderland," while the charming Ranelagh, on his canvas, may defy death, and be beautiful forever, that is,

"Till painting cease and art herself expire."

The poet even claims for this artist an equality with Sir Peter, not merely in portraiture, but in the noble accessories which enhanced the grace of his pictures. In depicting meadows, plains and woods and fountains, "there all his grandsire in the painter lived."

The Lely story ends unhappily. Estate and fortune (nine hundred pounds a year) came to nothing, or went to Sir Peter's nephew, Weck, of Groll, in Guelderland. However this may be, the widow of the above-named grand-on of Lely was rescued from deep distress by the charity of the Free Society of Artists, and she ended her days in Megg's Almshouses, Mile End.

I AND THE GOVERNOR.

IN TWO PARTS.

PART II. (continued.)

THE temptation to linger over the events of this is almost irresistible. I look back upon the fir spent in that ball-room with all the passionate a tion of their happiness that a man might feel after years, thinks of the golden days of his honey! When Aurora and I were waltzing we made our place close to the Governor. I can see and hear his dark eyes dancing with merriment, his fra and manner never more cheery and fascinatin Governor of my boyhood- my mother's confessed all that was manly and chivalrous. And I can hear Aurora too, and feel her, as she stood radi mated, smiling; her silvery laugh every now and tỉ ing a melody to which my joyous thoughts were little hand resting on my arm with the familia friendship warranted, and, so my wishes made m with an indescribable significance in its gentle as though its owner was glad of the friendship an iarity.

We were engaged to dance the "Soldaten Lie gether; she was fond of that waltz, and I had de that my love should be told to its music. I had on a corner close to the window of the third drawi where she could stand, unseen by all save me, a to the story I had to tell. But before the "So'd. der" came she had to dance with Goldie, and I v about the rooms, presently finding myself beli Glastonbury, who was watching the dancers.

"I have been looking at Franklin with admira wonder," he said. "He is by far the handsomest the room - that awoke my admiration; and youn ing than most of the men of your age that a wonder."

"Oddly enough he said pretty much the sam about you only a night or so ago," said I.

"He compliments and flatters me, then; I ne tended to beauty, and as to youthfulness — he forty, while I"

I knew his age to a figure, so I could say not looked at Aurora skimming by, and at the Gover site doing the agreeable to Mrs. Amory.

"And now, " continued Glastonbury," he has to a state that has long been impossible to melove."

"In love! Well, it does seem so certainly." over at the couple just named as I spoke, and that my romance about them was to end properly.

"Oh, you mean that the widow is the object look so, but it is not the fact, for all that. Wh that he was in love, I suggested her as the obj confessed to being in the blissful condition, but as that Mrs. Amory was not the lady, and he told m find out, if I liked, who was. I have found out He broke off, but his hand slightly indicated t of a lady who, with her partner, had just stoppe Aurora Vernon! Could it be that the really loved her? I turned away, intendingdon't know why I entertained the notion to go the Governor if the Butterfly had spoken the trut

us.

"What odds is it to me, either way?" I said t contemptuously, as I strolled off to the little root spoken of, to see if the place I had chosen for laration was still vacant. I stopped once or my way there to speak to some old ladies of my a ance, and when I reached its doorway I saw, lool of the window into the moonlight, Mrs. Amory Governor. She was speaking in her steady, low

tones.

"For when I see you with her," she was say think of those lines of Owen Meredith's: —

"Why you tempt me thus is more than I can understand," e said passionately. Why you select my love for her the constant theme of your discourse, I know not. For do love her; she is all to me that you have said, and ore a thousand times more. She is love, happiness, outh, the realization of my most rapturous dreams, the ersonification of my most romantic ideal; the realization >t of such dreams as visit a man in the blissful hours of rly life, when the dispelling of one dream is followed by e brilliant fancies of another, but of such dreams of a >ssible but almost unattainable joy as mock the longings a man lonely in the ardent noontide of his existenceho knows that his awakening can only show him the eepening shadows of the fast-coming evening; the pernification of an ideal which I once thought was embodd in the wife whose love and beauty made the pride and ory of my youth- an ideal which, when I left my home, ole back to my heart, like a discarded but still faithful istress, and going with me into exile, was the constant >ject of my thoughts- whose eyes met mine when I conmplated some heroine of history or fiction; a creation of y heart and fancy, lovingly elaborated in the ten years my solitary life, and dear to me as the statue to Pygalion, and who was endowed with the gentleness of laine, the patient faith of Penelope, the poetry and pason of Corinne, but who was withal playful, bewitching chanting as Undine. This, and more, is Aurora to me. he is the desire of a heart burning with the fire of first ve; a fire that has smouldered for years, burning no less tly that its glow was concealed and unsuspected, and hich, now fanned into a mighty flime, can never, if alwed to die down, be rekindled; no, not if the very inarnation of passion strove to warm the ashes with her ery breath!"

He spoke rapidly, but not hurriedly, with a passion that as rather intense than impetuous; without hesitation, ad with an arrangement of his sentences with regard to hat had gone before which seemed to be the result of ng brooding on the subject. It was the language of his eart, and the love he expressed seemed so akin to my wn that his words burnt into my memory, and are realled without an effort.

"She is all you say, and more,” continued the Governor ess rapidly and with less fluency, but not with one whit ess earnestness - the dear, loyal, steadfast, faithful Govrnor. "All this, and more. But my wish shall not be vassal to her will,' if that will should exact the destrucion of a happiness dearer to me than my own. haughtiest hope' may starve, if, by living a pensioner on er smile, it dooms him to the poverty of a loveless life. n plain words, if Hubert loves Aurora, Aurora shall not e wooed by me."

My

"But what if Aurora already loves you?" said Mrs. Amory.

Of course I knew it was mean to listen thus, and of ourse I had made excuses in plenty - all more or less unatisfactory for my meanness, and at the end of the Governor's last sentence I turned to go: but Mrs. Amory's vhispered question tempted me, and I yielded to the emptation.

"What if she already loves you? Beware, lest your hivalrous self-sacrifice makes two people wretched, and as no power to make one happy. Surely you overstimate your duty to Hubert. You owe him nothing now. You are man to man the lists are open to him- he has ad years of advantage over you in constant intercourse with the family. I repeat you owe him nothing." "I fancied at one time that he had entered the lists," aid the Governor, "but latterly I thought differently. Yesterday, however, that little chattering Violet asked

-

me in tones as aggressive as the sound of the challenge trumpet, why Mr. Manners had not visited them lately. I said I did not know. Well, then,' said she, 'I guess why he has not, he has been snubbed, or thinks that somebody else' She stopped here, hoping, I fancy, that I would question her; but I would not. Finding that I remained silent, she contented herself with singing, to the tune Aurora was playing, these words, pointing the moral with significant looks: Tis well to be off with the old love before you are on with the new"" (I could have smiled even then at my little partisan's zeal, and her turn for proverbs.) "As to owing Hubert nothing, I love him as a son, and that should be enough to nerve me to anything; added to that is the thought that by my fault he may have been deterred from seeking her love long ago. But I will not be rash. I will watch for the signs in her of the love you think it possible she feels. I will watch, and although I am weak at the idea of the trial, I trust f shall be strong to make the sacrifice."

I stole away, and went to Langford's study, a place always safe from intrusion. I by no means felt as amiable as the above outburst about the Governor's loyalty, etc., would lead you to imagine; that was written in the warmth of my present feelings. But when I came to anchor in Langford's easy-chair, I was full of resentment against him for what I called his "underrating of youthful love," as implied in his first speech; and I had a contempt for all he said about "self-sacrifice" and letting his hopes starve." What was the good, as Mrs. Amory said, of starving his hopes, if by so doing he starved Aurora's too? "He had come," I said to myself, "to charm her woman's imagination with his eloquence and cleverness, and now, in a fit of compunction for the man-or boy, as he probably called me, in the arrogant superiority of his mature age whom he had done his best to supplant, he proposed to resign to me a heart in whose recesses his brilliant figure would stand side by side with mine; and how should I look then? Rather as James II. appears in history by the side of glorious Dundee. I might indeed be the lawful monarch of that heart, hardly exalted above the commonplace of ordinary manhood, even by" the divinity that doth hedge a king,' "while he would ever remain the ideal of poetic chivalry, eloquent, handsome, manly, self-sacrificing; for would not her woman's wit penetrate to his secret through the thin armor of his self-control?"

I was amused afterwards at myself for exalting the Governor in Aurora's heart to the place he occupied in mine. I suppose my life-long admiration for him unconsciously influenced my bitterest thoughts. In the midst of my angry musings the thought that he had perhaps already begun to "watch," as he had said he intended to do, for any signs of love on Aurora's part, occurred to me, and the idea nerved me to return to the ball-room with all the nonchalance and indifference in bearing and face that I could command. I found myself all of a sudden face to face with the Governor.

"I am in search of you," he said. "Miss Vernon was sure you were out of hearing, or you would never have wasted half the Soldaten Lieder.'"

With a brief apology for my tardy appearance, I put my arm round her, and we danced till the last bar of the waltz in total silence. She was too much taken up with her delight in dancing to care to talk, I making no effort to seem anything but what I was; I would let her see that I was out of spirits, and try and find out by her manner whether she cared to know the cause. I sat by her when we went down for ices, but she did not notice my silence and depression, and my anxious looks only met the frank merriment of her dancing eyes. I watched her from a distance when she could not know I saw her, and there was the same happy look on her radiant face and in her dazzling smiles, and my heart sank. The Governor could not have got any encouragement either for his own hopes, for she seemed as ignorant of the fact that his manner had changed from the dévoué way he had with women in general to one of cold reserve, as she was of my unconcealed melancholy. She

had never seemed so lovely, and never so maddeningly unconscious of our love.

In my perplexity and restlessness I bethought me of consulting Lord Glastonbury.

"With regard to the Governor's suit is it likely to prosper, do you think? Is the lady tenderly inclined?"

"It is difficult to say," said the kindly Butterfly, shaking his head gravely; "she is one of those girls who are devilish shy of showing any sign of love before they have seen some sign of the existence of such a feeling in their lovers. I have only had an opportunity of studying her manner this evening, and the result of my observations is that I believe her to be heart-whole (whether fancy free or not, I suppose even she herself could not say with certainty); and if she is, Franklin has a better chance than most men of making an impression on it."

"I dare say you are right. I suppose you will not tell the Governor that I know his secret. It might make him fancy that I was spying on him."

"No, certainly I shall not tell him, for I fear it was a breach of confidence to tell you of it. However, no harm is done if it goes no further."

I left the crowded rooms, and dreamily looked over the balusters at the men in the hall below. I had yet two more dances with Aurora, and one with Miss Burton, and was taking out my card to see if the time for fulfilling my engagements drew near, when I saw the Governor come out of the ball-room, shake hands with Glastonbury, and come down the stairs. I was in such a state of nervous irritability that I felt if he put his hand on my shoulder in his affectionate way, and lingered to talk with me, I should say something savage. So to avoid the first trial I sat down on the stairs, and to lessen the chances of a conversation I feigned exceeding weariness, and received his first remark with a series of yawns running one into the other, so exactly like the real thing that the poor dear Governor could not stand the horrid sound, but wished me good night almost before he heard the words I tacked on to the last spasm of my performance. When I thought I had got rid of him I heard my name pronounced from below, and there he was, looking up from the hall, telling me on no account to walk home, as the night had turned very cold. I think this simple act of affectionate kindness and forethought banished all my ill-temper and resentment against him.

Alas, every one is not strong to bear and forbear as he was, and I was obliged to have recourse to a lying expedient to get out of my next temptation my waltz with Aurora. I felt I could not again clasp that little hand in mine without asking for a pressure from it in return. I felt a thousand things to warn me that the temptation would be more than I could resist, and I determined not to dare it. Looking round to see that I was not observed, I stooped forward, and tore the elastic of my boot from ankle to sole, and concealing the rent with my handkerchief, held in a careless manner over my knee, I sat quietly there, and awaited the event. My waltz began, and went on and on, and still I sat there.

"This is the second time to-night I have had to send in search of him," presently said her voice. "Why, there he is! Is he asleep?"

I heard her dress trailing down the stairs behind me, and then I saw one little foot, and then the skirt of her dress, and then I looked up into her lovely face. Her comtanion was John, who asked me what on earth I was doing phere. I pointed to my boot.

"A split," said he.

my felt

face with such kind, soft, compassionate eyes Ah, well, no matter!

I chided back my sufferings with thoughts of th ernor, and whatever I may have looked (you see pitied by the woman you love is an awful thing with equanimity, and the trial was so sudden and that I may have shown in my face something of what

whatever, I say, I may have looked, I said nothin brief" Thank you," in answer to her warm sympa explained the accident, and told John that, when was sent for, he must help me down, she listening, w dear eyes meeting mine every now and then. Ver Tottenham came tearing down-stairs for her, fra cause two bars of his waltz had been played alrea she was not there to begin at once. She rose slo unwillingly (how I loved her for lingering, and cursed Tottenham in my heart for bothering about bars, when I was listening to the last notes of the my life!), shook hands with me, and hoped I sh able to come and see her soon-turned and ga heavenly smile when she reached the door of the ba and then vanished from my sight. As she disappe dress of a lady coming down swept to my hand a white flowers. Soiled and trampled upon as it was it to be the bouquet Aurora had worn on her bo some starry flowers yet shone white and pure from surrounding destruction. I took it home, for to n emblematic of the happiness I had held to my he thought to carry away with me this night, but wh verse fortune had changed into a cluster of fade with here and there among its faded flowers the blossom of some never-dying memory.

As soon as I was up next morning I wrote a no faithful partisan Violet:

"I did not strike, and I doubt the hotness of I am not fickle, only unfortunate. She is unconscio feeling but friendship on my part, and she must be to remain so. If I see any reasonable grounds for I shall only be too glad. Be discreet, and do no me."

It was out of the question that I could run the compromising Violet by getting this note put sec her hand, and yet I must get it to her without the tion of her entourage. I knew the ways of the household well, and was aware that Mrs. Vernon rora did not come down to early breakfast after a and that Violet made her father's tea on such I made my plans accordingly, and at 9.30 was at t in Charles Street. Hearing, as I had expected, Miss Violet was down-stairs, I requested that sh come and speak to me for a moment, as, owing to a ankle, I was unable to get out of the cab. Out in a moment, pity for the sprained ankle in her explaining that, as she had not seen either mamm rora, she knew nothing of the events of the last explained in my turn, and added that I was goi town that day.

66

Going out of town! Why, on earth ”— "Sick of town," I said. "Or rather, you can s Here is a note so, if any one asks why I went. private reading; and now, dear, kind common-sen for some little time."

plaining away the rudeness of my departure with From my first halting-place I wrote to the Gov taking, and leading him to imagine that I shoul in town in a day or two; and then I joined Job way to the Hedworths, the family of his fiancée. spent a lazy fortnight, restless, yet too dispirited an effort to get away to more exciting scenes: about alone when John thought it necessary to 3 decided courtship, and dutifully attending my futu in-law's footsteps when John was engaged in so vigorous pursuit.

One day while I was loitering with Marah in the John shouted to me from the house that the Gove I felt a thousand contradictory things; b

come.

he only saw the old affection and regard in my face when I met him, for they welled up in my heart as we clasped hands. I found John complimenting him on his appearance, and in truth he did look young and well and handsome. I thought I knew the cause, and listened in an agony of suspense for the news to come out, and hoped to escape the Governor's eye when it did come. I sat down with my back to the light, and listened to their talk; but when it came to an end no hint had been made of the only subject I cared to hear mentioned. I was in torture, and wanted the coup de grâce. With a graceful ease, for which I have never ceased to admire myself, I thus addressed

them:

"It seems to me that the Governor has something on his mind that he wishes to communicate to his dear little boys. If so, let him at once confide in them, for his happiness must always be to them as their own."

"Always," said John heartily. "Are you going to get married, Governor? To Mrs. Amory?"

"Mrs. Amory? No, certainly not," said the Governor, looking a little ruffled at the question, I thought.

"No," I said; "he worships the eldest Miss Larkins' in other words, he is going to marry Aurora Vernon." While John was exclaiming and congratulating, the Governor's eyes were searching my face. I had felt almost faint with the effort it had cost me to say her name; but I had thought anything was better than hearing it come from his lips, with all the involuntary tenderness of tone a lover's voice has when it speaks the beloved name.

"Yes, I am engaged to Aurora Vernon," he said slowly, and looking still attentively at me; "strange as it may seem to you young fellows that she should prefer a man of my age to the rest of the world."

"Not at all strange," said John. "Why should any one think it strange that a man in the prime of life"

"Hardly the prime," said the Governor gently, and smiling at John's warmth. "It seems strange to me at any rate, and perhaps the strangeness makes me all the prouder of my position.”

He had come to take me with him to join the Vernons in a tour through part of Scotland. I made a few excuses, hardly supposing they would be accepted (which they were not), and finally yielded, because I did not know how to refuse. I felt so dull and spiritless, that I began to think I had suffered the last pang of disappointed love, and could feel anguish no more; but I was soon undeceived.

We were to dine at the Vernons', and at six o'clock we went there, arm-in-arm. The first thing I had to encounter was the smile of recognition from the servant, and of course I had to grin in return, and expressionless enough the grin must have been. Then I had to see the Governor run upstairs, and lead the way into the girls' morning-room, of which I only of all their men friends had the entrée only a month ago. Small trials these may seem, but to me they were painful enough. She was alone reading, dressed in white, with the sun streaming on her golden hair; and beCore she greeted him she gave me her hand, and said how glad she was that I was coming with them to Scotland. Then she turned and gave the Governor a heavenly smile, and then I found that I could still feel anguish, and what I suffered

Well, well, I suppose the stab of a knife feels like nothing out the stab of a knife, and the pang of wounded love feels ike nothing but what it is; so I need not attempt to decribe my sensations. Now, indeed, I saw with my own yes that she was another man's willing prize; now, indeed, saw of a truth that my love must be buried in haste, and without any outward show of mourning, as men buried heir king in the first dark, chill days of the Commonwealth.

I kept away from them as much as I could; but with oth I was a favorite, and the Governor as often as not anked his arm in mine when he was on his way to his ancée's side, and so drew me into the conversation that it as impossible to escape. I often now think with gratide of their constant kindness and affection; but in the arly days of my suffering they tortured me. But if they

had not thus compelled me as it were to their side, I should often have been companionless, as neither of the parent birds were capable of much walking, and Violet had become shy of me, and preferred stealing off for a ramble with her mother's maid to joining the rest of the party. I wondered much at first at the change in her; but as time went on I perceived that she resented my renunciation of her sister, and that she infused into her manner to me a tinge of contempt. I could not seek to make my peace with her without laying bare my wounds, and that for every reason was out of the question. We had been rambling about for a fortnight and more before her iciness melted. We were in Edinburgh, in one of the Royal Hotel sitting-rooms Aurora, Violet, I, and the Governor. He had been singing with great spirit his Jacobite songs, one after the other, and Aurora had been standing behind him all the time. I had been lying on the sofa, but at last joined Violet at the window farthest from the piano, and tried to induce her to talk. Her answers were so short, and spoken so unwillingly, that I had nothing to do but to look silently out of window or at those two at Aurora's graceful figure and rounded cheek, and the Governor's glossy hair and handsome profile - they the while unconscious that I could see them. I don't know what induced the Governor to sing anything so inappropriate to his present felicitous state as "Love's Young Dream," but sing it he did, with great feeling. I saw her redden as he began, and lost in thoughts of the sweetness of the dream, and the exceeding bitterness of the awakening, I continued to gaze, only half conscious of what I was doing; seeing them as it were in a picture. When the song ceased, she bent her head and whispered to him, and he, hastily imprisoning her hands, said: “I may have dreamt it before, but never was the dream so vivid, so real as now. Do not say I think regretfully of my first young dream-I regret nothing, I remember nothing in the past, but the moment you told me you loved me. O Aurora, goddess of my morning, do not let one little doubt obscure the brightness of our happi

ness."

His face was turned more towards me as he concluded, and he bent back his head until it seemed to rest upon her bosom, while he held her two hands in one of his. It was a picture. Mature Manhood, with all its passionate longing for happiness in the ardent expression of the noble upturned face, wooing for a bride the radiant loveliness of Perpetual Youth.

"You've no business to stare at them like that," whispered Violet fiercely.

I was startled; my thoughts had got into a tangle, and I had forgotten where I was. Aurora gently disengaged her hands from the Governor's clasp, and left the room, and he, after playing a bar or two, took up his hat and stick, and left the house.

"I wonder you can bear to see it, day after day," said Violet, when we were alone. "I thought your caring about her had been humbug until just now, when I was watching your face. How can you stay and see it all, and suffer how can you, can you bear it?"

She had tears in her eyes with the violence of her pity; and from that moment we renewed our friendship. I confessed as much of my story as I considered it prudent to disclose, and her regard for me flowed forth again in a bright stream of unaffected friendliness and innocent playfulness.

In September we established ourselves in a place called Strathcairn, and after the first day of our arrival there, we went on expeditions that took us away from our temporary home from early morning until dusk. We were to be there three weeks, and for the first fortnight of our stay the weather was lovely, but in the last week there came two hopelessly wet days. The afternoon of the third day clearing up, Aurora (on the pony), the Governor, and I, set forth upon a ramble, being unwilling to lose a day; for we must return to town at the end of the week, to prepare for the wedding, which was to take place on this day fortnight. We reached the point we had determined to visit in safety; but coming back we missed our way, and roamed

hop about until dusk deepened to dark, and Aurora became too nervous to trust herself to the pony. A mist closed in around us, and it began to rain heavily, and now, despairing of hitting on the right path, we determined to shelter under a projection of the hill, and wait until the moon rose. We were chatty and merry until we grew cold, and when a silence fell upon us, I stole away from them, and watched for some sign that would guide us to a habitation. I soon rushed back to my fellow-sufferers with the news that I saw glancing lights and heard faint halloos; and when the relieving party came up with us, and when Aurora had been refreshed by the wine her mother had sent, we went on our homeward way, she clinging to her lover's arm, or being cccasionally carried by him, slowly but steadily, along the ragged path. Towards the end of the journey she chose to take my arm, to rest the Governor, as she said, and at a little stream that obstructed our path I lifted.her, and ran up the opposite bank with her as easily as if she had been a baby, and I continued to carry her for some little way, regardless of the expostulatory voice of the Governor, following in the distance.

"You should have let William carry me over," she said, smiling faintly, when, breathless at last, I put her on her

"Resign her to another," I had said.

I little thought when I spoke the words that arms which would never give her up even to the Governor were stretched out to take her from us! For never again did we see her as a sunbeam among us; never again did we see the brilliant smile, and the gladness in those sunny eyes; never again did we hear the joyous laugh, and the young voice singing about the house. I and the Governor were the last to hear that voice's gay music in the cold and wet of that memorable night, and upon him had been lavished the last passionate warmth of that tender and pure nature; the last loving ardor of that young heart. For she died good heavens, how vividly in her young loveliness does she rise before me as I write the words!-died at the setting of the sun on the eve of her appointed wedding-day.

There is nothing to tell of the days of her illness. The Governor and I, after one or two days of unconscious ness of her danger, and one or two of hopefulness of a speedy recovery, succeeded by several of anxiety, were left quite alone together. We ate our meals in silence, and afterwards he sat with a book before him, his hand shading his eyes. When any noise about the house fell on his ear, he raised his head eagerly, but as it died away he seemed to come back to the consciousness of his misery, and his eyes met mine with such a world of mournfulness almost despair — in their depths, that all my own suffering was lost in my intense pity for him.

Poor little Violet was the bearer of the last ill-tidings. She came in noislessly, and the Governor, standing at the window, scarcely moved his head to look round at her; she laid her cold little hand upon mine, and said steadily: "She is dying, there is no hope;" and then, with a burst of frantic weeping, she cried: "Why, oh why did you not take more care of her on that dreadful night! My lovely, darling Aurora ! "

Lying on the breast of her mother, with one pale hand in the poor dear Governor's, and almost concealed by his head, which was bowed upon it, I saw her again who had been the joy of my boyhood and youth. As I came into the room she made a slight movement with the other hand, and when I took it, smiled faintly, and said a few words, which her mother, who alone could hear them, repeated to "You love him; try and console him for me." Her languid eyes dwelt fondly on the bowed head of the

me.

man she loved, as her pale mother, with trembling li me the tender, trustful message.

As I tried for her dear sake to say distinctly, "L I always have and always must; I will try to conso a sob, that shook him from head to foot, and dro Violet in an agony from the room, burst from the Governor; and that was the last sound till the end

I never meant him to know that the sun whose se had watched together had been the light of my well as his; but he learnt it accidentally. We left hind us in the silence of lovely Strathcairn, and town. By the time the world came back from its the Continent, and passed through town en rout country-house, we had begun to look people boldi face, and had even received John's condolences, a Lady Langford's kind eyes with something like equanimity," as Scott says. One afternoon the and I, sitting alone in my room, received a visit fr Glastonbury. He was kind and cordial to a deg the Governor for the first time told the details of illness and death. The pathetic music of the boy's voice, the quiver in it that he could not con recollection of her last words for him, and Glast few but hearty expressions of sympathy, all com unnerve me; I turned from them, and sat looking out of the window.

"It is a trial - an awful trial," said Glastonbu the story was told out. "But you will get over it, You will emerge by and by from out this cloud, among us again, to set us envying your health and and wondering how you keep your youth."

"My youth?" repeated the Governor sadly. is dead forever-buried in the valley of Strathca "No, no," said Glastonbury; "you must not ing that. Don't give way to that thought. You n out again among us, and Manners here must do h égayer you- eh, Manners?"

Before I knew he was near me he had seen my "Don't you give way," he said kindly, in a lo "It is an awful thing to see him suffer, I kn cheer him up - don't let him brood over it."

I to égayer him-I to cheer him up! What t in the expression of my eyes as my face was turne him I know not; but there was something in it tha him, as I could see by the quick glance he threw the Governor. He was silent for a moment, and to my horror: "Franklin, did it never strike you boy's youth is buried in the same grave with yours I tried to say "No, no; " but I was utterly overc thus betrayed to the Governor in the weakness of ment the hidden misery of months.

When I raised my head Glastonbury was gon my first movement the Governor came and laid his my shoulder.

"My boy, I guessed once that it was so," he sa you deceived me most effectually. Lately my se has blinded me to any signs of sorrow but my O give me; it shall be so no more. You have hid misery for my sake, and now I will hide mine í We are bowed by the same grief, we have been at the same grave; if anything was wanted to inc love and regard of years, surely this was the thing Hubert."

The conversation did not end here, but the st At present we live together, and nothing can be eventful than the life that we two lead-I and t