"Then who, in heaven's name, are you?

could have forgotten you."

"You have, I think," she said demurely.

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Tell me! I never

"Impossible that we could ever have met, and I forget you! She looked up to him quickly.

"Do you remember Belthorpe ?"

"Belthorpe! Belthorpe!" quoth Richard, as if he had to touch his brain to recollect there was such a place. "Do you mean old Blaize's farm?"

"Then I am old Blaize's niece." She tripped him a soft curtsy.

The magnetized youth gazed at her. By what magic was it that this divine sweet creature could be allied with that old churl!

"Then what what is your name?" said his mouth; while his eyes added, "O wonderful creature! how came you to enrich the earth?”

"Have you forgot the Desboroughs of Dorset, too?" She peered at him archly from a side bend of the flapping brim.

"The Desboroughs of Dorset ?" A light broke in on him. "And have you grown to this? That little girl I saw there!" He drew close to her to read the nearest features of the vision. She could no more laugh off the piercing fervor of his eyes. Her volubility fluttered under his deeply wistful look, and now neither voice was high, and they were mutually constrained.

"You see," she murmured, "we are old acquaintances.

Richard, with his eyes still intently fixed on her, returned, "You are very beautiful!

The words slipped out. Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious. Her overpowering beauty struck his heart, and like an instrument that is touched and answers to the touch, he spoke.

Miss Desborough made an effort to trifle with this terrible. directness; but his eyes would not be gainsaid, and checked her lips. She turned away from them, her bosom a little rebellious. Praise so passionately spoken, and by one who has been a damsel's first dream, dreamed of nightly many long nights, and clothed in the virgin silver of her thoughts in bud,-praise from him is coin the heart cannot reject, if it would. She quickened her steps to the stile.

"I have offended you!" said a mortally wounded voice across her shoulder.

That he should think so were too dreadful.

"Oh no, no! you would never offend me." She gave him her whole sweet face

"Then why-why do you leave me?"

"Because," she hesitated, "I must go."

«No. You must not go. Why must you go? Do not go." "Indeed I must," she said, pulling at the obnoxious broad brim of her hat; and interpreting a pause he made for his assent to her rational resolve, shyly looking at him, she held her hand out, and said "Good-by," as if it were a natural thing to say.

The hand was pure white-white and fragrant as the frosted blossom of a May night. It was the hand whose shadow, cast before, he had last night bent his head reverentially above, and kissed; resigning himself thereupon over to execution for payment of the penalty of such daring- by such bliss well rewarded. He took the hand, and held it, gazing between her eyes. "Good-by," she said again, as frankly as she could, and at the same time slightly compressing her fingers on his in token of adieu. It was a signal for his to close firmly upon hers. "You will not go?"

"Pray let me," she pleaded, her sweet brows suing in wrin

kles.

"You will not go?" Mechanically he drew the white hand nearer his thumping heart.

"I must," she faltered piteously.

"You will not go?"

"Oh yes! yes!"

"Tell me - do you wish to go?"

The question was subtle. A moment or two she did not answer, and then forswore herself and said Yes.

"Do you do you wish to go?" He looked with quivering eyelids under hers.

A fainter Yes responded to his passionate repetition.

"You wish- wish to leave me?" His breath went with the words.

"Indeed I must."

Her hand became a closer prisoner.

All at once an alarming delicious shudder went through her frame From him to her it coursed, and back from her to him.

Forward and back love's electric messenger rushed from heart to heart, knocking at each till it surged tumultuously against the bars of its prison, crying out for its mate. They stood trembling in unison, a lovely couple under these fair heavens of the morning.

When he could get his voice it said, "Will you go?"

But she had none to reply with, and could only mutely bend upward her gentle wrist.

"Then farewell!" he said; and dropping his lips to the soft fair hand, kissed it, and hung his head, swinging away from her, ready for death.

Strange, that now she was released she should linger by him. Strange, that his audacity, instead of the executioner, brought blushes and timid tenderness to his side, and the sweet words, "You are not angry with me?"

"With you, O Beloved!" cried his soul. "And you forgive me, fair charity!"

She repeated her words in deeper sweetness to his bewildered look; and he, inexperienced, possessed by her, almost lifeless with the divine new emotions she had realized in him, could only sigh and gaze at her wonderingly.

"I think it was rude of me to go without thanking you again," she said, and again proffered her hand.

The sweet heaven-bird shivered out his song above him. The gracious glory of heaven fell upon his soul. He touched her hand, not moving his eyes from her nor speaking; and she, with a soft word of farewell, passed across the stile, and up the pathway through the dewy shades of the copse, and out of the arch of the light, away from his eyes.

And away with her went the wild enchantment. He looked on barren air. But it was no more the world of yesterday. The marvelous splendors had sown seeds in him, ready to spring up and bloom at her gaze; and in his bosom now the vivid conjuration of her tones, her face, her shape, makes them leap and illumine him like fitful summer lightnings-ghosts of the vanished sun.

There was nothing to tell him that he had been making love and declaring it with extraordinary rapidity; nor did he know it. Soft flushed cheeks! sweet mouth! strange sweet brows! eyes of softest fire!-how could his ripe eyes behold you, and not plead

to keep you? Nay, how could he let you go? And he seriously asked himself that question.

To-morrow this place will have a memory,- the river and the meadow, and the white falling weir: his heart will build a temple here; and the skylark will be its high priest, and the old blackbird its glossy-gowned chorister, and there will be a sacred repast of dewberries. To-day the grass is grass; his heart is chased by phantoms and finds rest nowhere. Only when the most tender freshness of his flower comes across him does he taste a moment's calm; and no sooner does it come than it gives place to keen pangs of fear that she may not be his forever.

Ere long he learns that her name is Lucy. Ere long he meets Ralph, and discovers that in a day he has distanced him by a sphere.

WHE

RICHARD'S ORDEAL IS OVER

From The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

HERE are the dreams of the hero when he learns he has a child? Nature is taking him to her bosom. She will speak presently. Every domesticated boor in these hills can boast the same; yet marvels the hero at none of his visioned prodigies as he does when he comes to hear of this most common performance. A father? Richard fixed his eyes as if he were trying to make out the lineaments of his child.

Telling Austin he would be back in a few minutes, he sallied into the air, and walked on and on. "A father!" he kept repeating to himself: "a child!" And though he knew it not, he was striking the keynotes of Nature. But he did know of a singular harmony that suddenly burst over his whole being.

Somewas in

The moon was surpassingly bright; the summer air heavy and still. He left the high-road and pierced into the forest. His walk was rapid: the leaves on the trees brushed his cheeks; the dead leaves heaped in the dells noised to his feet thing of a religious joy-a strange sacred pleasure him. By degrees it wore; he remembered himself; and now he was possessed by a proportionate anguish. A father! he dared never see his child. And he had no longer his phantasies to fall upon. He was utterly bare to his sin. In his troubled mind it seemed to him that Clare looked down on him-Clare, who saw

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him as he was-and that to her eyes it would be infamy for him to go and print his kiss upon his child. Then came stern efforts to command his misery and make the nerves of his face iron.

By the log of an ancient tree, half buried in dead leaves of past summers, beside a brook, he halted as one who had reached his journey's end. There he discovered he had a companion in Lady Judith's little dog. He gave the friendly animal a pat of recognition, and both were silent in the forest silence.

It was impossible for Richard to return; his heart was surcharged. He must advance; and on he footed, the little dog following.

An oppressive slumber hung about the forest branches. In the dells and on the heights was the same dead heat. Here where the brook tinkled, it was no cool-lipped sound, but metallic, and without the spirit of water. Yonder, in a space of moonlight on lush grass, the beams were as white fire to sight and feeling. No haze spread around. The valleys were clear, defined to the shadows of their verges; the distances sharply distinct, and with the colors of day but slightly softened. Richard beheld a roe moving across a slope of sward far out of rifle mark. The breathless silence was significant, yet the moon shone in a broad blue heaven. Tongue out of mouth trotted the little dog after him; couched panting when he stopped an instant; rose weariedly when he started afresh. Now and then a large white night-moth flitted through the dusk of the forest.

On a barren corner of the wooded highland, looking inland, stood gray topless ruins set in nettles and rank grass blades. Richard mechanically sat down on the crumbling flints to rest, and listened to the panting of the dog. Sprinkled at his feet were emerald lights; hundreds of glow-worms studded the dark dry ground.

He sat and eyed them, thinking not at all. His energies were expended in action. He sat as a part of the ruins, and the moon turned his shadow westward from the south. Overhead, as she declined, long ripples of silver cloud were imperceptibly stealing toward her. They were the van of a tempest. He did not observe them, or the leaves beginning to chatter. When he again pursued his course with his face to the Rhine, a huge mountain appeared to rise sheer over him, and he had it in his mind to scale it. He got no nearer to the base of it for all his