"Old Pike, who is as good a fellow as ever stepped, was quite deceived by the man's manner, and apologised freely; but a young fellow named Perigord, a capital boy not long from Eton, smelt a rat, and followed him out of the house, I suppose, to see that he didn't make away with the spoons."

"Bravo, Pieman!" interrupted the small soldier. "Perigord was my fag-I taught him all he knows.”

"I followed the young one, to see he didn't get into mischief," proceeded Horace, "and ran the couple to ground in a queer billiardplaying kind of place-No. 99, Cheap Street, Haricot Lane. I had plenty of time to learn the address, for I waited outside ten minutes and more, considering the next move."

"Funking, no doubt," said his small tormentor. "Go on, Horace, the more you looked at it the less you liked it, I'll take my oath."

"I blundered on, at any rate,” replied the other, "and found this young beggar, fresh from Eton, settled down to écarté. Ecarté, if you please! with my friend in the spectacles! I need not say I watched him pretty closely and he showed no inclination whatever to play on the square. It's an old joke enough, but I never saw a fellow pass the king so well. He did it while he sneezed, and I don't believe, though I was watching, I could have detected the action but for a scar on his left hand, that I couldn't keep my eyes off. A deuced ugly seam it was, from the knuckles right up to the wrist."

"That's the man!" muttered Percy Mortimer. "What fools the cleverest of these scoundrels are!"

Nokes, listening attentively, removed the cigar from his mouth and emitted a volume of smoke. Nothing more.

6

"When he marked the king it was my turn," continued Horace. "I told him he was a thief; and that brought his pals 'upon me. I told them they were all thieves, and I might as well have saved my breath for they must have known it before. One chap tried to cut up rough, and butted his stupid head against my knuckles. Hang him! he has taken all the skin off! There was a good deal of bad language, but not much of a scrimmage, and I brought my man out only three sovereigns the worse, gave him some good advice, saw him safe home, and came on here. This is a long story. Let us talk of something else. Nokes, my boy, how does the world go on at Middleton ?'

But Captain Nokes, wrapped in profound silence, had disappeared from the circle, and was already bowling along Pall Mall in a cab, on his way to Scotland Yard.

"Let's walk home," said Percy Mortimer, running his arm through Maxwell's as they emerged in the fresh air; "I sent my brougham away when I came here. It's a fine night, or rather morning-and look here, old fellow, I've got something to say to you."

"Now for it," thought his friend, "he's engaged!-he's going to tell me so. Good-bye, Annie. Perhaps he'll ask me to be his best man."

But it is only justice to say that he resolved to bear the trial without wincing, and honestly from his heart to congratulate the man he liked, on winning from him the woman he loved.

Percy's manner, however, was anything but that of a successful suitor. It was impossible for one so sleek, composed, and self-contained, to look really disturbed, but he seemed about as much ruffled as does a well-groomed horse, when its coat stares in an east wind.

"I never thought that scoundrel would come to England again," he began; whereat Horace, with his thoughts fixed on Annie Dennison, started in surprise. "But your description is quite enough for me. The man who tried to rob young Perigord to-night is a sharper I've known for years. I am ashamed to say he did me out of seven hundred pounds at a sitting by the very trick you detected so cleverly. I wasn't sure till you described his hand. Shall I tell you how he came by that scar? He was playing cards at San Francisco with a clean, close-shaved, sharp-featured man, who looked like a cross between a steeple-chase jockey and a Methodist parson, but was really what is called 'a sportsman' in the States-a fellow who will play with and cheat you at any game you like to mention. Seeing it was a case of diamond cut diamond, with a heavy stake on, our friend had made up his mind to win, right or wrong. He had kept a card up his sleeve, which at the critical moment he concealed under his left hand, stretched carelessly on the table. The game went on, and his hand never moved from its place. Suddenly there rose a scream of pain, an oath, and a rush of all the company towards the players. Blood was spouting over the cards, and our friend's hand was nailed to the table by the blade of a bowie-knife, its haft still quivering from the force with which the steel had been driven through flesh and tendons and pasteboard, into the wood. If the ace of spades ain't sticking on my toothpick when you take it out,' said the sportsman, 'you shall do as much by me. If it is, you're a bloody cheat, you are! and it's no more than you deserve!' The ace of spades was transfixed by the bowie-knife, and everybody said the cruel, quiet, clean-shaved man had done right. Long before this I had dropped the swindler's acquaintance, but I could not leave him in a foreign town to die of lock-jaw, as seemed highly probable. I sent for a doctor, had him taken care of, and his wife nursed him patiently till he got well. Very soon after they were separated. She was a handsome resolute woman, to all appearance a thoroughbred lady. Why she ever married him, or how she could stand it so long as she did, often puzzled me exceedingly, for though I did not know her well I could detect in every word and gesture that she belonged to quite a different class

from her husband. The man's name was Delancy. Can you guess, Horace, who his wife is ?"

"Not Miss Blair!-not Mrs. Lexley!" exclaimed the other. "Good heavens, Percy! what a complication !"

"It is a complication," said Mortimer. "I had always understood the scoundrel was dead, and Mrs. Delancy free to marry again. Poor Lexley! he seemed foolishly fond of her. What a sword is hanging over his head!"

"She has left him," answered Horace, "and I suppose nobody in the world was ever so terribly cut up. I hear he's been almost out of his mind."

"Left him!" repeated Percy, "not to go back to this fellow ?"

"I don't know," replied the other, loth to betray the confidence Laura had reposed in him, but desiring above all things to ask his friend's advice. "Don't you think one ought to find out? Don't you think one ought to tell Lexley? He's a dear friend, I can't bear to think he is so miserable. I am at my wit's end. What would you advise?"

Percy pondered for a few seconds, looking very grave and wise in the grey light of the summer morning, then he shook his head and delivered the following opinion:

"I should wait. When in doubt what to do, he is a wise man who does nothing. In the moral as in the material world the negative force is strongest of all. Dead weight must win in the long run. Where a woman is concerned, as in the present case, nothing is really to be trusted but the chapter of accidents. So much the more reason for waiting, as old Dennison says, to see what turns up. The sex won't bear hurrying, I've always said so, and yet I believe I upset the apple-cart to-night solely by furious driving. Horace, I've something to tell you. Hang it! I wouldn't tell it any fellow in the world but you!"

"Out with it, old man!" said Maxwell, while his cheek turned a shade paler in the morning light.

"You and I have each been in a scrimmage since dinner," was the metaphor in which Mr. Mortimer thought well to convey his confidence. "You've given a facer, and I've had one. Do I look as if I had been knocked down? I feel like it. Will you believe it, Horace, I proposed to a woman not three hours ago and she refused me!" "Refused you!" Horace could not have added a word to save his

life.

"Asked her in so many words to be my wife, and she said 'No!' as plain as I'm speaking now. It's a deuced odd thing, unaccountable, and all that, but there's no mistake about it. I will do Miss Dennison the justice to say I think she knows her own mind."

So heavy was the weight taken off his heart that Horace felt as if

he must fly up into the air. Loyal to the last, however, he made shift to stammer out :

"I'm sorry for you, old fellow, at any rate; but won't you try again ?"

Mortimer shook his head. "Never allow a woman another shot," said he. "She mightn't miss with the second barrel. I believe the girl is quite right. She had my interest at heart, and perhaps I'm better off as I am."

TEMPLE BAR.

JUNE 1874.

Patricia Kemball.

CHAPTER XV.

DEMETER.

ERE is a time in the history of most of us, while young, when

THER

the mind takes a sudden awakening and we enter into a new order of thought. We cannot always say how or why this has come about; but sometimes we do know the precise moment when our eyes first opened to the higher truths, and can state how it was that the current of our inner life was changed. We can single out the one from whom we received the ineffaceable impress, and give the pattern of the altar from which we took the living fire that kindled our own. Up to that moment we had been waiting or wandering; after then we knew where our Mecca stood, and set our faces toward it.

Such a moment was coming for Patricia. While her uncle lived she had had no need of extra direction. She had led, as has been said more than once before, that healthy and unreflecting kind of existence wherein youth grows strongest and loveliest, but wherein is no conscious mental development because no spiritual struggle. She had never known the doubt of conflicting duties, nor suffered the anguish of moral uncertainty; the law under which she had lived had been simple and absolute, and no subtle Advocatus Diaboli, skilled in compound ethics, had held a brief at Barsands.

But now at Abbey Holme everything was changed, and her moral standards were fluctuating with the rest. The old and the new had come into collision, and her soul was yearning for an authority outside itself which should settle her difficulties and help her to fashion her life anew; an authority that should show her how to order herself in accord with her present conditions, and yet live nobly after the teaching of her uncle.

VOL. XLI.

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