coming and going. Anne seemed to herself to be waiting, waiting for the coming of the mother. In the silence, she seemed to hear the low monotonous roll of the wheels which were bringing her, bringing her, but never brought her, all the long silent day. When would she come? When would she herself, poor Anne, be able to go out free from this hectic bed-chamber, where she had no right to be, no natural duty? How she longed to go! What a yearning and anxiety there was in her mind to get out of it, anywhere into the free air, to escape, she did not care how! Yet, she sat still, unmoving though that tumult was in her soul.

In the evening the patient stirred and asked for food; and then, after her long stillness, became restless, and talked; the talk was wild, excited, and wandering; but she had not been "crossed," and there was no passion in it. Then she dozed, and Anne began to think that the worst of her vigil was over, to calculate on a quiet night, and the certainty of the mother's arrival on the morrow, and to allow the slumbrous quiet to steal into her own soul. All at once, however, in the darkening, Mrs. Francis sprang up in her bed, as if suddenly awakened, and full of fresh excitement. She plucked wildly at Anne's sleeve.

"You forget the draught," she cried; "the draught, the thing to make me sleep. Give it me; give it me this moment. You want to keep me without sleep; you want to kill me; you want to marry Francis after I am gone. Oh, I know; he told me how you tormented him; how you gave him no peace. Cinderella, give me my draught; give me sleep sleep! There is the bottle; take it, quickly, quickly! Give me the twenty drops. Oh, you clumsy, stupid. I shall die if I don't sleep. Give it me. Give it me. Quick! quick! quick!"

Anne had started up from a doze. She She was worn out with fatigue and mental pain. She took up the bottle, which stood on a little table close to the bed, and, while this wild storm of words was poured upon her, began to drop the dangerous liquid into a glass. For years after, she labored to recall the exact sequence of her thoughts, as, with this abuse sounding in her ears, with trembling hands and shaken nerves, she tried to do her nurse's office. What were her thoughts? Fright, first, lest the attack should be coming on again; then, indignation, hot shame, contempt, anger; then did the thought cross her mind: Oh, what if the draught were strong enough to still those

babbling, violent lips, and make an end of so much misery? God help her! If the thought passed through her mind, it was none of hers. All at once Mrs. Francis darted at her, violently shaking the hand which held the bottle; then snatched the glass out of it. "There is too much," cried Anne, waking up to the full horror of the crisis, and rushing upon the mad creature ; but before she could stop her, Mrs. Francis had drunk it to the last drop, and, sinking back upon her pillow with a laugh, held out the glass to her in foolish triumph:

"There now, Cinderella, you can go; now I'll sleep."

For the first moment Anne stood still, paralyzed with horror. The next, she rushed to the bell and rang it-to the door, and shrieked for help. Never was stillness more violently and suddenly broken. She called her cousin's name more loudly than she had ever spoken in her life before, and shrieked to the maids to come, to send for the doctor, to bring help, help! Francis had not come in, but all the servants in the house rushed to her. The footman went for the doctor; the maids in a body rushed into the room, filling the place, which had been so still, with a tumult of noises suggesting every kind of remedy. Oh, what would Anne have given for the power to rouse the patient into one of those paroxysms of which she had been so much afraid! For a minute Mrs. Francis kept looking at them from her bed with a smile, and with large, excited eyes, which seemed to have a kind of diabolical light. Her faculties would seem to have been at once deadened by the opiate. She resisted with the extraordinary strength of passive resistance their frantic attempts to raise her, their wild prayers to her to swallow the improvised remedies which each one presented. Anne, for her part, became as if inspired for the moment (she thought, mad, and possessed with the strength of madness). She lifted Mrs. Francis from her bed. With a terrible consciousness of controlling the despair that was in her, she tried everything she had ever heard of to counteract the fearful effects of this death draught. Whether it all passed in one horrible moment, or whether hours intervened, she never knew. By and by she became aware of the doctor's presence, of many fans about, and that she herself was employed in a variety of services with which her reason had nothing to do, acting blindly like a machine, with her whole heart and soul stupefied, but her bodily powers preternaturally active. It was mid

night at last, when, amid dimly burning lights, and strange gusts of air from the open windows, and all the confusion of such a terrible event, Anne became aware at last that all was over. Some one drew her away from the bed-side-some one placed her in a chair, and made her swallow some wine, which he held to her lips. It was the doc-❘ tor, who had employed her as his assistant.

"We have done all we could," he said, with a voice that seemed to Anne to come out of the distance, out of the darkness somewhere-miles away. "We have done all we could." Terrible confession of human impotence which attends the conclusion, whether peacefully or violently, of every human life.

This was the tragedy which, all at once, without warning or probability, enveloped Anne Maturin's life, and swallowed up its tranquillity, its gentle commonplaces, its every-day story. It was no fault of hers; indeed it would be no hyperbole to say that she would have given her life willingly to redeem that one which she appeared to herself to have sacrificed. I dare not lift the veil from the awful thoughts that took possession of her next morning, when, after the broken and disturbed sleep of exhaustion, she awoke to a real sense of what had happened. God help her! Had she murdered the wife of Francis? This was the first awful question which the daylight seemed to ask her. The cry which she uttered rang through the whole house, startling and alarming every one in it. She sprang from her bed in her agony, and paced up and

down the room with moans and cries.

"What have I done; what have I done?" she cried, piteously, when some one came to her.

"Oh, miss, you didn't mean it," cried the horror-stricken maid, who, half-frightened, came into the room and stood by the door, keeping at a distance, as if Anne had been some dangerous animal. What had she done?

The parents of the unfortunate Mrs. Francis Hartley arrived that morning, and her mother, a foolish woman, raved, as a poor creature may be excused for raving over the grave of an only child. She would have had Anne arrested at once and tried for the murder of her daughter; and, indeed, a private inquiry was instituted, at which everything was investigated. Anne, fortunately for herself, was too ill to know-too ill to be aware of the ravings of poor Lady Parker, or even the unreasoning horror of

|

her aunt. "I can't see her; I won't have her here," Mrs. Hartley had cried, and even had gone further-crying out that her children would leave her in the power of that creature, and that she should never feel safe again. When Anne recovered, which was not for a long time, she was transferred, under pretense of "change of air," first to Letty's house and then to Susan's, who became, as they had never been before, most anxious to save her trouble, and would not accept her assistance in their nurseries or any personal attendance from her. "Oh, never mind baby; I am sure he is too much for you," Letty would say; and Susan actually snatched one of her children out of Anne's arms, when she, unconscious, was about to give it something. Poor Anne wondered, but she had become somewhat stupid since her illness. It did not occur to her what was the cause of this. Her heart was very heavy, her life like something spoilt, from which all the flavor and the freshness had gone. When it slowly dawned on her that she was not to be allowed to go home her heart stood still, and seemed as if it would never resume beating again. What was she to do? But Letty and Susan were very kind. They broke it to her in the gentlest way possible; they reminded her that old people took strange notions, and assured her of their own warm support and friendship. "Fancy the possibility of us doubting you!" Letty said with generous and sisterly warmth, but, instinctively, as she spoke she took her child's food out of Anne's hand.

Her

If she had been as well and as full of spirit as in the old days when she thought herself so unhappy, Anne could not have borne it. But she had not the heart to justify herself, or to fly from unjust judgments. She stayed in her corner of Letty's drawingroom as long as they would let her. heart was broken and her judgment enfeebled, and her pride gone. She made the children's clothes, and forbore to look at them, forbore to notice them. She went to see her aunt when she was permitted, without an attempt to appeal against her doom. Her brightness, her pretty color, her lively ways were all gone. She looked ten years older; she looked dull and stupid. "What a change upon Anne!" every one said, and some whispered that it was her conscience, and many avoided her with a cruelty of which they were not aware. From being everybody's willing servant, the blithe domestic minister of the Hartley family, joyously

at their command for everything, she fell into the humble and silent dependent, living in her corner alone, half shunned, half pitied, the pariah of the house.

CHAPTER IV.

FRANCIS HARTLEY had returned to his mother's house. The event which released him from a career of domestic misery acted uncomfortably upon his worldly prospects. An impression that he had not "behaved well" got abroad-one of those vague impressions which can neither be explained nor accounted for, but which sap a man's public character and popularity without any apparent reason. His father-in-law gave him up. He was no longer admitted into his intimacy, scarcely even to his acquaintance; and good-natured friends were but too ready to say and believe that "something must be very much amiss" when a good-hearted man like the Attorney-General so cast off his daughter's husband. Other circumstances concurred, as they always do, to make Francis unfortunate. During his brief married life he had spent a great deal of money and made many new friends, but in the enforced retirement of his early widowerhood, the money he had spent and the friends he had made became useless, and the society into which he had struggled forgot him. Francis felt all these things deeply, as he was in the habit of feeling anything that affected his own comfort. He grew indolent and listless, and this made matters worse. At length he formed a resolution, which involved many changes, and to which he was moved by a great diversity of motives. His wife had been dead about a year and a half, when one morning he came suddenly to the house of his sister Letty, where Anne was staying. During all this time he had been very kind to Anne; a touch of real consideration had been in his behavior to her. His own humiliation before her in those terrible days before his wife's death had made him gentle to her afterward; and in the dull state of no feeling which supervened after so much excessive feeling she had been conscious that he was kind. He was not suspicious, like the others. He did not bemoan her, and then tremble at her as they did. He behaved to her more respectfully, less carelessly, but much as he had done before.

Anne was alone. She was in a little morning room, which she chiefly inhabited while Letty was busy with her household

and her children. What a change it was for Anne-she who had been always in movement about the house, going errands for everybody, executing all sorts of commissions since ever she could recollect! Francis felt for her as he entered the little room where she sat at work.

"Always making pinafores ?" he said, half bitterly. Her aspect made his resolution all the more decided.

"I am very glad to do it," she said, with a smile.

How subdued she was-how unlike the Anne of old!

"Anne, I have a great deal to say to you," he cried, "about myself and about you. First about myself: I have not been getting along well lately. Things seem to have taken a bad turn. Old Parker has set himself dead against me; as if—as if it could have been my fault, and other things have gone wrong. I can't tell you all the details; but the result is, I am disgusted with England and with London, and I have made up my mind to go to India and practice at the Indian bar."

So

"To go to India ?" said Anne, in amaze. "Yes; that is my determination. much about myself. Now about you." "Don't say anything about me, please," said Anne, reddening painfully. "About me there is nothing to be said. I have been very unfortunate, and nothing-nothing can mend it. Talking only makes it all worse. Tell me a little more about yourself. What will your mother do?"

"But, I must talk about you, because myself is involved," said Francis, with a calm sense that all objection on her part must give way to this momentous reason. "Anne, it is best to come to the point at once; why should not you come with me to Calcutta? You are not very happy here now, any more than I am.”

"I go with you to Calcutta?" said Anne, looking up at him with her lips apart, with a strange whiteness coming over her face.

"Yes; why not? I mean, of course, as my wife. Listen to me, Anne, wait a little before you rush from me in that ghostly way. What have I said to make you look so horror-stricken? There is nothing so very much against me to alarm a woman. And, look here, I always was fond of you; even before-before poor Maria's time," he said, slight shiver. "I used to like you years and years ago. Anne, you surely don't mean to leave me without an answer?"

with

I

"Then, why did you not say it?" she cried, with sudden passion. "Why-whywhen nothing had happened, when there was nothing to remember, nothing to fear! Oh, how dare you tell me this now?"

"I did not tell you-because-I think you might guess-because, I could not in my position marry a penniless girl without connections. But now, when things are so different, when we have both been unfortunate."

Anne broke from him with a cry-a bitter cry wrung out of the depth of her heart. The excitement and storm of passionate feeling which overwhelmed her, made her unable to speak; but, when she had opened the door, she turned back again and stood there for a moment, looking at him wildly.

"Had you said it then," she cried, "had you said it then! Oh, how much might have been spared! But now there is nothing so impossible, so horrible. You and I to marry-you and I!-not if we were the last two in the world!"

"But, Anne, why, in the name of Heaven ?"

“Oh, hear him, hear him!" she cried, "you and I, you and I! Would she not come out of her grave to stop it? Oh, go, go; and never speak to me more."

"But you used to be fond of me, Anne," he said, in amaze.

Another low cry of pain came out of her heart. This time surely it was broken quite, and she would die. She rushed up to her own room, leaving him all amazed and uncomprehending, not knowing what to make of it. Why should she be moved so deeply? he asked himself; was this horror affected, or did it really mean anything? He waited for some time, thinking she might come back, and then, when further waiting seemed vain, Francis took up his

This strange interview, of which no one knew, roused Anne out of the half stupor into which her life had fallen. When she was quite sure that Francis was gone, she put on her hat and went out. She did not know where to go; but, had it been possible, she felt she would never have returned again. She walked far and fast until she was weary, and then reluctantly she turned back, with a failing and sinking heart. Home? oh, no, to Letty's, which was all the home she had in the world.

But when she got back, she had not the heart to go in. Letty lived in one of the Squares in the Kensington district, and Anne, after her long wandering went into the garden in the middle of the square, and seated herself on a bench in her weariness. She could not stay there forever, and she had nowhere else to go to; but yet she could not make up her mind to return to the house. She sat there she did not know how long, till the evening was falling, and she was chilled through and through. Just as she began to be aware of the glimmer of lights in the houses round, some one came along the winding walk and started at sight of her. It was the clergyman she had refused after Francis's marriage, but whom, perhaps, if all had gone well, she might not always have refused. He was a friend; he came and sat down beside her on the bench and talked to her in soft and tender tones. And Anne was so forlorn that she burst into tears when she answered and betrayed herself. She had not met him for what seemed to be a very long time, and he knew almost nothing of her story, nor why it was that she had left her aunt's house. In the commotion of her disturbed heart, she told him everything that had happened from the time that Francis had come to fetch her to nurse his wife. That dismal epoch rose before her eyes as she spoke; she told him everything -fully, as she had never been able to tell it before-and then in broken words, by half revelations, unawares, she let him see how desolate she was.

"I have been thinking," she said, "if I could get a governess's situation. I don't know very much; but I could teach little children. Would any one take me, Mr. Herbert, or would people be afraid to let me be with their children, like Letty? Oh, you don't know," cried Anne, with tears, "how hard it is; I, that would rather die than hurt them,-and Letty is afraid of me.

Letty! Don't mind my crying, it does me good. How kind you are!"

"You are trembling with cold,” said Mr. Herbert, whose heart was wrung for the woman who had rejected him. "You will be ill. Miss Maturin, will you go home now, and let me come to you to-morrow? In the meantime, I will think what can be done." "Will you?" said Anne, weeping still, but softly, for her heart was relieved by her outburst. "How good you are! Oh, if I could but stay here until to-morrow; but I know it would be wrong, it would make them all unhappy. I must go back to Letty's; it is not home. I wish I could stay here." "And I wish I could take you home," he said, with sudden fervor.

Far from poor Anne's thoughts was any vanity; any possibility of putting a different meaning on his words. He would like, perhaps try, in his kindness to open her old home to her, she thought; how good he was!-but that could never be.

And she went back, and met Letty's reproaches with humble and gentle apologies. She had not meant to make any one uneasy. She was very sorry to have pained her cousin. That evening, when they were sitting together, she broached her idea of trying "a governess's place."

"I could not teach much," she said; "but perhaps strangers would not be afraid of me." Upon which Letty, touched by her conscience, fell a crying like a woman deeply wronged. "Take a governess's place ?" she cried. "One of our family in a governess's place! Could you have so little consideration for us, Anne, making people suppose that we are unkind to you that you are not happy at home?"

"I shall never be happy anywhere," said

poor Anne. "But you are afraid of me,"

she added with a moan, and with bitter tears swelling in her eyes.

"Oh, Anne, how unkind you are!" said Letty, crying. She had nothing to say for herself, and therefore she wept as if she were the injured person. Many people take this way of persuading themselves that they are right, and the object of their unkindness in the wrong.

Mr. Herbert came next day. He came not to speak of a governess's place, but to tell Anne that he had accepted a living in the country, and to ask her to go with him there. He did not weary her worn-out mind by asking for her love. He took no high ground; his heart was overflowing with pity. "It will be a home, and your own," he said, looking at her with anxious tenderness. "And I will never marry any one but you, whether you will have me or not," he added, with a smile. What answer

could she make but one?

Thus after a while Anne Maturin's story ended in the peacefulest way. Francis Hartley went to India, piqued and disappointed, but the rest of the family were very much satisfied with the good marriage Anne made, and her aunt restored her to her favor as soon as it was all settled. She had not a very long life, but she lived for some tranquil years in her country Rectory, and made her husband happy. Anne, too, was far happier than she ever expected to be,—but yet never, in her own consciousness, got quite free from that tragic net which caught her heedless feet unawares. In one moment, without thought or warning, without meaning or premeditation, she fell into it, and never struggled fully out again, nor quite emancipated herself, all her life.