CONTRABAND;

OR, A LOSING HAZARD.

CHAPTER I.

RAIN-CLOUDS.

"IN confidence, Sir Henry-"

"In confidence, Mrs. Lascelles, of course. I think you can depend upon me." And Sir Henry, as directed by a weather-beaten guidepost, turned into a narrow lane on his homeward way, while the lady with whom he had been riding, jogged her tired horse gently along the high road, absorbed in thoughts, pleasant, suggestive, engrossing-not precisely in "maiden meditation," for she was a widow-nor yet, although she was nearer thirty than twenty, wholly "fancy free."

Mrs. Lascelles loved her horse dearly, and had been riding him with the liberality and confidence that spring from true affection, in a ladylike manner no doubt, and gracefully enough, but with considerable daring, and no small expenditure of pace. The good generous animal had a perfect right to be tired, having borne his precious burden honourably and safely close to hounds as long as a stout old fox could live before them, and had fairly earned the caresses she lavished on his toil-stained crest and shoulders, while the hoof-tread of his late companion died out in the distance. Mrs. Lascelles, I have said, loved her horse dearly. For the first time in her life, perhaps, she was beginning to find out she could love something better than her horse.

The light waned rapidly. Heavy clouds, gathering in the west, sailed up steadily on the moaning wind that so often in our English winter rises with set of sun. The day had been sad-coloured and overcast, delightful for hunting purposes, but for every other pursuit melancholy

in the extreme, and evening was drawing on, sadder, gloomier, and more disheartening than the day. Certain elms and ashes that skirted the high road trembled in every leafless limb, shivering and whispering together, as if they too were moved by ghostly forebodings of cold and darkness to come. Why should Mrs. Lascelles have looked so radiant and happy? How had been kindled that light in her blue eyes; and what, in the name of chaste Diana, could have occurred during a day's hunting thus to fix and deepen the colour in her check? Was it that she loved to recall the stirring memories of the last few hours, the joyous rally of the find, the dash and music of the hounds, the pace, the pastures, the glorious turns and windings of the chase? Or was it that she had her own private successes to register, her own secret triumphs to record, exulting that she too had hunted her fox fairly in the open, and was running into him at last?

Rose Lascelles, like many another who has squared her life to the rule of expediency rather

than right, was a woman thrown away. An ambitious girl, in her marriage with Mr. Lascelles, now deceased, she had been guided by a desire for social advancement, rather than by individual preference, or even a taste for domestic life. He was young, handsome, agreeable, a finished man of the world-thoroughly selfish; and some women would have loved him dearly, but for Rose Vanneck he was simply an eligible partner as heir to a good fortune and a title. So he treated her very badly, outraged her feelings, brought all sorts of people into her drawingroom, spent her money recklessly as his own, and finally drank himself to death, just six months too early to make his wife a peeress; having lived long enough, however, to leave her in the enjoyment of as comfortable a jointure as if he had succeeded to the title, and so far content with her lot that she appreciated the thorough independence of her position; for who is so completely her own mistress as a childless widow, young and attractive, with a balance at her bankers?