Christina's voice trembled a little as she spoke.

Christina, I have not thought of loving her; not in that sense. Not as I loved you-not as I-"

"Then why do you meet her?"

"Because I was lonely, and at odds with everything, and her voice sounded sweetly in my ears, and her eyes looked kindly on me; and she was a mild delightful influence, and I was selfish enough to think of nothing else."

"Then my warning may be of use. Listen, Emanuel. If you loved this girl passionately, and hoped to marry her, you might possibly gain your wish; for I believe there is nothing her father would not in the end consent to for her sake. But I don't believe you could be happy with her, or she with you. She is a sweet loving child, with a child's feelings. She has, I think, no strength of character, no enduring, absorbing affection. Either she must lead a life with you to which she would be utterly unused-you know that she has never breathed our atmosphere of Bohemia-or you must live a kind of pensioner on her father, maintained as the husband whom his wilful and foolish daughter would marry, and who therefore must be taken into the family circle. You wince under this. Is it not true?"

"But there never was the faintest idea of anything of the kind. Never. Good heavens! one may speak to a young lady without-" "Yes, one may; but when one meets the young lady very often clandestinely-”

"Clandestinely!"

"What other word can you find for it? Clandestinely, and nothing else. When one does this, he must contemplate something, or he must have no brains and heart at all; and you have both. Emanuel, I would, at almost any risk, save you from an entanglement that could only end, I am sure, in unhappiness. I speak to you, therefore, with an openness which perhaps wise people and good people would think does me little credit. Lilla Lyndon loves you!"

I am afraid the first emotion created in me by this declaration was a pang of fierce and wild delight. It was followed quickly, as by a rush of cold air on a burning forehead, by a chilling sense of hopelessness and pain and shame.

"It cannot be so, Christina; it is not so."

"It is so; I know it. Do you think I would talk of the poor girl so, if I did not know what I was saying? It is so. I have seen her lately; I know her well; I have talked with her many times; she has come and seen me here in this room; and a thousand things, a thousand words, have betrayed her poor little secret to me. Perhaps she does not know it herself. I don't suppose she has ever indulged much in examination of her own heart. What of that? I have eyes, and can see. If she were sinking into a consumption, she might not know it; but I should know it, or you. There is nothing much to wonder at in

the matter, Emanuel. The poor girl has hardly ever met any men but elderly members of parliament, and heavy capitalists, and bishops. I know Mr. Lyndon too well to suppose he would allow any poor and handsome young curate ever to come near his daughter. Wohlauf! Your whole life is to her something interesting, strange, romantic. What is there to wonder at? I daresay if she had met a dove-eyed young clergyman in good time, the thing never would have happened. Mr. Lyndon is like the man in Esop who shut up his son in a tower lest he should be killed by the lion; and, behold, the picture of a lion on the wall brought his death."

Christina spoke with flashing eyes, and with all the dramatic energy she always had shown since her girlhood, whenever she felt any interest in what she was saying. A stranger might have thought she was acting even now; but I knew she was not.

"Why do you tell me this-even if it be true?"

"Because I think I am speaking to a man of honour and spirit, and that the best appeal to you I can make is by the full frank truth.” "What would you have me do-supposing all this to be true?" "Give up this girl-leave her-never see her again! Leave her before it be too late. She will forget you, Emanuel, believe me; she will forget you, if only you leave her in time; and she will marry somebody her father likes, and she will be a good obedient girl, and very happy, and her days will be long in the land, as the story-books put it, or the religious books, or what you will. And you will forget her; you say even now you do not actually love her. She will cry a little, perhaps; but all girls cry for something, and I really don't think it much matters for what."

"Christina, I don't like your tone-I don't like your way of speaking."

She laughed a low, slight, scornful laugh.

"Not romantic and tender and sentimental enough, perhaps? But look what your romance and tenderness come to. You are teaching this girl to deceive her father-yes, you are;—yet you don't know that you love her, and you have no object whatever in meeting her! Tarare! You are not a boy, Emanuel, to act so any longer."

I bit my lips. I felt vexed and ashamed, and only too conscious that I deserved all she said or could say.

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Well, Christina, I must try to deserve your better opinion, and to act with more judgment and manliness. I make no promise, and I must act for myself in my own way; but I hope you shall have no further cause to feel ashamed for me."

"That is like yourself your old self; I am sure you will do right after all. I would not talk to you in this way, if I thought you loved this girl; I would rather say, Fling every thought away but that of loving her and holding her against the world. But you do not, and I think she will be cured at last of her love for you."

I rose to close the conversation.

"I will do my best, Christina. Existence, I suppose, is always to be a bore and a weariness and a renunciation to me. Well, I accept the situation; it will come to an end some time."

"O, pray, don't speak so."

"Yes; I am weary of everything. I am sick of this wretched profession-or art, or whatever you choose to call it for which I have no heart and no genius, and in which I know I can never come to anything worth living for. I am tired of the people one meets, and the follies one commits, and the weary restraints one has to put on if he would not commit follies, and worse. What is one's motive in living? I don't know."

"Still we live, my dear; and we can but make the best of it. I at least will not see you sink away, Emanuel, into any folly or fatality without saying a word to interpose. Perhaps you think I have no right to preach or to advise?"

I waved my hand to repudiate this idea.

"But we made a pledge of friendship, Emanuel, when we entered on-that new chapter of our lives; and I have kept it in my heart as sacredly as I could, though we have not often met. And I do notindeed, I do not-think this you have done could come to any happiness for you or for her. Perhaps I don't understand the little girl quite, you will say," and she smiled slightly; "but if I am wrong, the thing will come to pass none the less because I ask you to be open and manly, and yet careful. You ask me what is the use of living, and how one is to bear with life? My good friend, others have bitter burdens too to bear, and bitter bad temptations to resist; and I could tell you how they learn to do it, only I dare not yet; you would smile at me, or think me hypocritical, and I could not bear either. But one time I will tell you that, and other things too which now perhaps you do not know or guess. No, don't ask for explanation; I have said enough, and too much. Now, good-bye!”

CHAPTER XXV.

IN KENSINGTON-GARDENS.

THE Conversation with Christina, which left me a little mystified in the end, has at least cleared up something of my story since the Lyndons, mother and daughter, left London. Perhaps it has told so much that I might now go straight on with the rest as it occurred, and without turning back to review or explain anything. But it would possibly be well to give a few lines to a candid recapitulation of what had taken place, and to a chapter of my life which I always look back on with a mixture of pride and of shame.

When poor Ned Lambert was left by Lilla Lyndon, he and I spoke but a very few words over the matter: few, but enough. He was a

silent fellow by nature, and a man to crush down what he felt. He knew how thoroughly I sympathised with him; and a grip of the hand from such a man or to such a man is incomparably more eloquent than words. His nature was quiet, patient, confiding; he knew that Lilla loved him, he knew that there was some reason why he must at least submit to wait; and he submitted, and asked no questions. He did not maunder, or mope, or idly repine at fate or anything else, but only seemed to throw a fiercer energy into everything he did, to the very smoking of a cigar; and he used to sit up half the night devising new improvements in the construction of organs. He told me he went to see Christina sometimes, but never when anybody was likely to be there. He "dropped her a line," he said, when he felt anxious to say a word to her, and she always set apart a time to suit him at the earliest moment. Like most silent men, he was, I am sure, ready to be very effusive and confidential with any woman he trusted in; and I have no doubt that he told Christina every word of his disappointment and his love, and talked to her as he would not-indeed, as he could not-have talked to any man alive.

Meanwhile his occupations took him a good deal out of town. I don't know whether Lilla Lyndon wrote to him: she wrote to me sometimes, and gave me good news of her prosperous and promising occupation in Paris. Of course I told her all about Ned Lambert, and hardly anything else, when I replied. After a while she began to tell me that she had received the sweetest, kindest letters from her cousin Lilla, whom she had never seen, but who had suddenly opened-up a correspondence with her. Lilla the elder-Ned's Lilla-was greatly amazed and delighted at this, and could not understand it at all. I felt like one who is conscious of having done something delightfully good, and is proud of having it known only to himself. After a while I began to take a somewhat modified and less flattering view of my own position in the transaction.

For all had happened as I told Christina. I had acted on the idea of making Lilla the younger the angelic, celestial mediatrix in the whole of the painful business. I felt sure that her influence over her father would have power enough to induce him, for the sake of the other Lilla, to buy off or pension off in some way his wretched brothersend him to America or Australia, or anywhere out of the way. Many times I passed her door to no purpose. One day at last I saw her as her groom was holding her horse's head and she was about to mount. Perhaps if she had not seen me then, and cordially recognised me, I might not have ventured to speak to her; but she did see me, and gave me a frank and friendly recognition; and then I went up and presented myself to her, and told her without hesitation that I came of my own counsel, unasked by anybody, unknown to anybody, to plead for her good offices on behalf of her cousin, the other Lilla. Whatever of secrecy might afterwards have grown up, this at least was done

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openly, at her father's door, under the eyes if not within the hearing of her groom, in the face of day. She received me with that innocent, genial, sympathetic trustingness which nothing but purity and nobleness of heart ever can give.

I confess that as I spoke to her that time, and saw her pure calm eyes turned to me, and heard her sympathetic, tender, girlish voice, I thought that between her and me lay a distance as broad as between two creatures of different worlds. It no more occurred to me as possible that such a woman could turn one thought towards me, than that one of the Madonnas of marble in an Italian chapel could have come down from her pedestal in the sacred stillness of the evening, and, like Diana, kissed some mortal worshipper.

She had only known before that she had a cousin whom her father would not suffer her to see; of her uncle she had known nothing. She spoke to her father, and pleaded hard; and all she obtained was permission to write to the other Lilla Lyndon. From Lilla the elder she doubtless received encomiums of my honour and integrity and brotherly affection, and so forth, which led her to confide frankly in me. She did not despair at all of winning over her father; and but for the too frequent presence of her hard and puritanical step-sisters-she was the daughter, the only child, of Mr. Lyndon's second marriage—she might much sooner have prevailed. I learned from her that she had actually found out and tried to redeem, and petted and largely bribed, the wretched old scoundrel, her uncle; and that she really did contrive, by her influence, and still more by her money, to keep him from making any more scandal. How I sickened at the idea of her meeting the odious old hypocrite! and yet I did not dare to hint at what I thought of him. She had, with all her sweetness, a sort of resolute sanctified wilfulness about her; and nothing on earth, except perhaps her father's absolute command, could have kept her from trying to do good to her outcast uncle. Meanwhile the only good of keeping him temporarily decent was that it made her father feel convinced his brother would not dare to annoy him any more, and therefore more than ever determined not to yield to any entreaty on his behalf.

What I confessed to Christina explains all the rest. We met by chance frequently. I found it was Lilla's habit to walk almost every day in Kensington-gardens for half an hour or so. It was only, so to speak, crossing the street from her own house; and her maid was generally with her. We spoke together: she had always something to say to me about the progress of her endeavours on behalf of her cousin. She did sometimes come alone. I did observe the hour and day of her coming, and I did always contrive to be there. To speak to her did always seem to sweeten and purify life for me. I did at last begin to think I was acting a mean and shameful part, although no word had ever passed between us which her mother, were she living, might not have heard. I did begin to feel ashamed of thus meeting a girl whose