"It's a mistake," he said at last, half aloud; "but Uncle George is on the square. He always is."

And when he was ruthlessly twitted next day by his brotherofficers on being cut out by his uncle, he replied simply enough: "He is a better man than me, as all you fellows know. She would not have looked at one of you any more than she would at me. I suppose she had a fancy for marrying a man who could spell, which none of us can."

"Spelling or none," said the youngest sub, "which is an indecent subject which should never be mentioned between gentlemen, anyhow, I mean to borrow a thousand or a fiver off him. Mr. Loftus always tipped me at school."

One of Mr. Loftus's first actions was to stop the preliminary proceedings regarding the sale of Wilderleigh, which he had been arranging a month ago on the afternoon when he had called on Lady Pierpoint. It was like awakening from a nightmare to realise that Wilderleigh would not be sold after all. He almost wished that he might live long enough to set the place in order for Doll.

The engagement was a nine days' wonder, and those nine days were purposely spent by Mr. Loftus in London. He was aware that many cruel things would be said at his expense, and that the bare fact that a man of his years and in his state of health should marry a young heiress, and so great an heiress as Sibyl Carruthers, must call forth unfavourable comments. People who did not know him said it was perfectly shameful, and that it was just the sort of thing which those people who posed as being so extra good always did. How shocked Mr. Loftus had pretended to be when old Lord Bugbear, after his infamous life, married a girl of seventeen. And now he, Mr. Loftus, was doing exactly the same himself. Of course he had a very fascinating manner, just the kind of manner to impose on a young girl who, like Miss Carruthers, knew nothing of the world, and had been nowhere. And every one knew he was desperately poor. Wilderleigh could hardly pay its way. A rumour had long been afloat that it would shortly be for sale. If he had not been so hard up for money it would have been different, but it was a most disgraceful thing, and Lady Pierpoint ought to be ashamed of having exposed the poor motherless girl, left in her charge, to his designs upon her. They wondered how much Lady Pierpoint, whose means were narrow, had been bought over for. The sums varied according to the sordidness of the different speculators, who of course named their own price.

Others who knew Mr. Loftus were puzzled and were silent.

To know him at all was to believe him to be incapable of an ignoble action; yet this marriage had the appearance of being ignoble, not perhaps for another man, but certainly for him. His intimate friends were distressed, and greeted him with grave cordiality and affection, and hoped for an explanation. He gave none. And they remembered that never in his public or in his private life had he been known to give an explanation of his conduct, and came to the conclusion that they must trust him.

Mr. Loftus had recognised early in life that explanations explain nothing. If those who had had opportunities of knowing him well misjudged him after those opportunities, they were at liberty to do so as far as he was concerned. The weight of an enormous acquaintance oppressed him, and though he had never been known to wound any one by withdrawing from an unequal friendship, which he had not been the one to begin, and which was an effort to him to continue, still he took advantage of being misunderstood to lay aside many such friendships. It was not pride which prompted this line of action on Mr. Loftus's part, though many put it down to pride, especially those who had held aloof from him at a certain doubtful moment, and in whose regard subsequent events had entirely reinstated him, and who complained that he expected to be considered infallible. It was, in reality, the natural inclination of a world-weary man of the world to lay aside, as far as he could courteously do so, the claims of the artificial side of life, its vain forms, its empty hospitalities.

He realised that for the purpose of winnowing its friendships the various events of life may be relied on to furnish the fitting occasions. Those who do not wish to offend others by leaving them need make no effort, for they will certainly be presently deserted by those who have never grasped the meaning of the character which has been the object of their transient admiration. "If he is unequal he will presently pass away." Mr. Loftus neither hurried the unequal self-constituted friend nor sought to detain him. But when he departed, shaking the dust from off his feet, the door was noiselessly closed behind him, and his knock, however loud, was not heard when he returned again.

A small batch of uneasy admirers left him on the occasion of his engagement. They said openly that they were much disappointed in him, and that he had shaken their belief in human nature.

"Will Sibyl also pass away?" Mr. Loftus wondered as he sat on the terrace at Wilderleigh on his return from London. "Yes, she, too, will presently pass away; but I shall not give her time to do so. She will be absorbed by her first love for a few years,

and I shall only remain a few years at longest. By the time it wanes I shall be gone, and my departure will pain her but very slightly."

His face softened as he thought of Sibyl. His nature, which, in its far-away youth, had been imaginative and romantic, had remained sympathetic. He gauged, as few others could have done had they been the object of it, the measure of her romantic attachment to himself. It was perhaps safer in his hands than in those of a younger man. For youth perpetrates many murders and mutilations in the name of love, as the schoolboy's love of a butterfly finds expression in a pin and a cork. But it would have cut Sibyl to the heart if she had even guessed that his tranquil mind took for granted that her adoration would not last until the stars fell from heaven and the earth fell into the sun. For "Les esprits faibles ne sont jamais sincères." That is a hard saying, but alas! and alas! that it is only the weak who believe that it is not true. The strong know better, but if they are merciful they are silent.

"And so my second wife is also to be an 'esprit faible,'” said Mr. Loftus to himself, looking at the past through half-closed eyes. "But in the meanwhile I have learnt a lesson in natural history. I shall not expect my butterfly to hew wood and draw water. And this time I shall not break my heart because pretty wings are made to flutter with."

And the remembrance slid through his mind of Millais's picture of the dying cavalier, and the butterfly perched upon the drawn sword in the ardent sunshine. And he thought of the drawn sword of Damocles hanging over his own life, and Sibyl's love preening itself for one brief second upon it. And at the thought he smiled.

Lord Bramwell.

A SKETCH.

In one of the early chapters of the 'Worthies of England,' Fuller refers to the difficulty in finding information as to the judges of the land, "time having almost outworn the traces thereof." "I perceive," he adds, "though judges have more land than bishops, they leave less memorials behind them, of the time, place and manner, when and where they were born and died, and how they demeaned themselves." This still holds good. Even a distinguished judge is quickly forgotten. His reputation is as fugitive as that of an actor or a singer. To-day his name is in all newspapers; he is the central figure of a trial universally talked about; what "my lord" has said is recorded and discussed. To-morrow, his resignation once in the hands of the Lord Chancellor, he passes out of sight, and a year hence it may be a question, even among lawyers, whether he is alive or vegetating at Cannes. Some years ago, Lord Bramwell, then a member of the Court of Appeal, thought of retiring, and was talking the matter over with a friend. "Some one seeing you in the streets the week after you resign," said the latter, "will remark, ‘I think I know that man's face.' 'Oh,' the reply will be, 'his name is Bramwell, the brother of the famous engineer."" "Then I will not resign," was Lord Bramwell's comment on this remark as to the fleeting character of judicial fame; and he did not.

It might have been supposed that there would have been at least one exception to this rule, and that Lord Bramwell's memory would have escaped swift oblivion. His strong, vigorous, and simple character impressed his contemporaries. For nearly thirty years he was the best known of English judges. He had been on the Bench a longer time than any judge of the century. All his life he had been much more than a lawyer. When he resigned the office of Lord Justice, it was only to extend his activity into many new directions. In America he was known

almost as well as in England. There his judgments were read with as much respect as here. "I wish to see Westminster Hall and Lord Bramwell," said an American lawyer, explaining the object of his visit to Europe. To many persons Lord Bramwell had become the impersonation of English justice. And yet I fear that the fate that seems to overtake all judges has befallen my friend's memory. I have looked in vain for some sketch of a remarkable life by some who knew him better than I did.

Lord Bramwell was the eldest of three distinguished brothers; one being the eminent engineer still living, and the other a brilliant lad, a universal favourite, who gave to society gifts meant for mankind, and who died in the United States without having fulfilled the promise of his early years. The father was, at first, a clerk in the banking house of Dorrien & Co. of Birchin Lane, a firm in the end absorbed by the Curries, who were themselves swallowed up in Glyn, Mills, Currie & Co. A silent, amiable, capable, upright man, he became in due time junior partner. Dorrien's was not a bank of the modern type. There were no palatial buildings, no regiment of clerks, no partners possessed of fine estates and with seats in the House of Lords or Commons. The junior partner lived over the bank; he was always to be found in the bank parlour; and he knew the face, credit, and fortune of every man whose bills he discounted.

Lord Bramwell's mother, by all accounts, was endowed with rarer parts than her husband. She lived to the age of ninetysix. To her he owed the vigour and vivacity of his intellect. He went to no public school or university. He was educated at Dr. May's school at Enfield, where he received what used to be called a "plain schooling." We get a glimpse into the household life in a letter written in the stiff, formal style of the time-a style compatible with true kindliness-by the father to the lad in his thirteenth year. He sends his son a watch, with the remark in Mrs. Trimmer's best style, "I wish you many years of health and happiness to wear the same. I hope you will carefully mark the ebb of time, so that you may turn out an honest and a clever man." His schooldays ended at sixteen, by which time he was Dr. May's head boy. It would be a mistake to suppose, as Lord Bramwell's rugged originality might tempt one to infer, that his culture was limited. He knew Latin fairly well. He took delight, though in a desultory fashion, in mathematics. In some early papers which have been preserved are to be found calculations and solutions of problems. In the correspondence which he and his friend, Chief Baron Pollock, never failed to keep up when they were on different