CHAPTER V.

MRS. HAVILAND.

AND yet I am jotting down this rough sketch of the past on my marriage-day. My fair girl-wife took leave of me an hour or two since; she has gone, under my mother's care, to the old home by the sea, where I first saw and loved Mrs. Carruthers, five years ago.

I shall never see that low, rambling house, nor those lovely, drooping beech trees again. When a few years have come and gone, my mother's plan is to bring Ethel to join me in some of the quiet Swiss valleys; and I have promised that I will then try to take up the life which hangs so wearily on my hands now, and see whether happiness may not be found growing, as doth a wild flower, on Duty's steep path. May Heaven forgive me for feeling, with a thrill of joy, that perhaps before that time arrives, I may have

gone Home-home to the Eternal Forgiveness-home to where Adelaide Carruthers rests.

Yes, she has been safe in those All-embracing Arms for a long time now. They say it was the

cold Northern winter which killed her. I know better. She broke down under the strain of the load with which her life was burthened. I helped to murder her by my impatience, and violent protests against the promptings of her sensitive, pure nature. Would I have had her feel her fault-our fault-less, though it was but a sin of our hearts? No-not now.

And yet I have married to-day, married a fair young wife, with half an English county for her dower.

Before you fling aside my poor story as the hypocritical cant of a sordid worldling, before you take back again the momentary sympathy which I would fain hope has been given to me, and which is infinitely more precious in my eyes than all my wife's gold pieces, read on for a few pages, and then condemn me if you will.

I have not dwelt longer on my entreaties, my anguish, and my great despair, partly because I dare not revive too vividly the remembrance of those days— yea, those nights, of anguish and of alternating

hopes and fears. Nor dare I venture to touch the unhealed wound which the news of my love's early death in that icy, distant land dealt to my bare and bleeding soul.

It had always been my mother's great desire to find a wife for me, more especially since the summerdays under the beech-trees. Until then she fancied, good, simple soul, that I was wedded to my books. She did not dream that it was chiefly from their pages I had drawn my conception of a lovely and beloved woman, and that I found it very difficult to realize my ideal. So difficult, that I am obliged to confess that in many points at first, I was fain to idealize the real, as it appeared in Mrs. Carruthers.

But having done so once, and failed when success seemed nearest, I would not try again. I returned to my old, silent friends with intensified loyalty, and I would have been, at all events, content in their society.

Suddenly all the quiet of my life was upset by an unexpected visit from that dear anxious mother. Have I told you that I was living by myself, among the bleak moor-lands and purple fells under the shadow of the northern ranges ? There, into this gloomy solitude, my mother penetrated. She knew it would have been useless to ask me to come to her

on any plea but that of sickness, so she set forth, at her advancing age, and in bleak, unseasonable weather, to seek her melancholy son.

After the first anxious inquiry on my part whether disease or disaster had sent me so unexpected, but so welcome a visitor, I said, half-laughingly, and without the faintest shadow of an idea how near the truth my haphazard words struck :

"You have not brought me a wife, have you, mother? I know your great ambition is to see me married, but I am much too busy just now to think of such trifles."

The dear old lady blushed a most guilty blush, and answered, with some confusion,

I have had a very extraordinary letter, Paul, which I have brought to show you myself:" and she held out an old-fashioned big sheet of square letter-paper, on which the penny stamp looked quite out of place. It was folded and addressed as in the old days of franks; and, as I say, the stamp had an altogether incongruous and pert appearance.

"Have you received this epistle lately, mother?" I asked, fancying it might refer to some family affair of bygone date.

"Yes, only two days since; but won't you take it and see what Mrs. Haviland says?"

Certainly I will, if you wish it," I replied; “yet I cannot imagine what she can have to say to you concerning me."

"Read it, and you will know," was the obvious answer. So I read, with an amazement which increased at every word, an earnest entreaty on the part of old Mrs. Haviland to my mother for her consent to a scheme which she had formed for marrying her granddaughter, a little girl of fifteen years old, to me.

Beyond knowing that such a person as Mrs. Haviland existed in some remote and splendid home, none of our mother's children had any acquaintance with this eccentric old lady. In former years her only daughter had been a school friend of our mother's, and she was often invited to spend her holidays at their beautiful place in the country. Miss Haviland married young, and, as it turned out, most unhappily. Our mother had been her bridesmaid, and after the wedding Mrs. Haviland, who was herself a widow, took immense pleasure in the society of her absent daughter's favourite companion.

For some years, in spite of the disparity of age between them, old Mrs. Haviland and our mother kept up the closest and most affectionate intimacy, and we, as children, delighted to hear tales of these old times. Indeed I could boast of having been taken, when a