and without foundation, and which, therefore, ought not to give him any present trouble, provided he prayed to God to remove them, if it were his holy will, provided he did not give them any undue encouragement, or listen needlessly to them. If I had given my friend any other counsel than his, as in that moment of solemn confidence he held my hands so lovingly and so confidingly in his own, I should have acted against all the promptings of my heart and love; and, although the assertion may, perhaps, be false, and whilst I am quite sure there are many who will repudiate it, and reject it as altogether untenable and unworthy of rational men, I am by no means certain that, in a matter such as this, and between friends bound together as we were, the heart, provided it be truthful and honest, is not quite as safe and trustworthy a counsellor as the head.

In a little while he grew ealmer, and spoke to me more in detail about his feelings and his fears of his stepmother. "We have never had any quarrel," he went on to say. 66 'Nay, she always treats me with apparent affection; but yet, although I can scarcely describe it, there is a change in our family, a change which is very evident to me, and one which helps to fill me with an indefinable dread of impending evil, since she entered it. Rupert has gone abroad, after parting from my father in fierce and bitter anger; and Sir Percy makes no secret that he will cause my brother to feel the full weight of his indignation; and, although the family estates are strictly entailed, still there are many ways in which he can interfere with the property, if he be so disposed. Whenever my father speaks against Rupert, my lady pretends to take his part; but you know, Ambrose," he con

tinued, "she only pretends to do it. I am sure she only pretends; and, in the end, my father is always more angry and more incensed than before. My father and I have never had any disagreement, and yet he is not the same to me that he was before she came here. He is more exacting, more distant in his manner; and all the affection that is left in him seems to be lavished on her. At all events," he went on, his low, sad voice growing sadder every moment, "he bestows none of it on me. I love him with all my heart and soul, and I am as proud of him as any one can be of such a noble and true gentleman as he is, but I miss sadly the loving words and the loving care which he used to bestow on us before she came. You know, Ambrose," he went on, "although he was very distant and reserved to the world outside, he was never so to Rupert and me in former days. No boys could have had a dearer or more affectionate father than we had, but it is all changed now. Rupert is an exile, and, for me, I don't know when my turn may come. For some time past I have felt as if the shadow of a great trouble were upon me, and the more I try to shake it off the more it presses upon me, and the darker it becomes. I don't complain, God knows I don't complain because he loves the wife whom he has brought home to us. Still less do I complain because he loves his little child, for he does not love him more dearly than I do; but I think his heart might hold us all. Oh! surely, his heart might hold us all."

His voice died away in a sob, as once more he turned to me for comfort, and consolation, and support. I did my best to comfort him, as one brother may comfort another, in those solemn occasions

which he notified his intention to me were, indeed, almost as cold and frigid as those which he habitually employed; but, I knew him well enough by this time not to judge him altogether by his manner or his mere words; and when, in the excess of my gratitude, I so far forgot his stately presence as to seize his hand, and kiss it impetuously, whilst I stammered out some blundering words of thankfulness and of never-dying recollection of his goodness towards me, there was a tremor in his voice as he told me that he would willingly do more than this for my father's son, which made me think that there were chords, even in his heart, which vibrated to the memories of the past-chords which, perchance, were but seldom touched, but which, when touched, responded all the more deeply, all the more truly, at the call of nature, the great master-hand, by very reason that the notes which they contained, whether of pleasure or of pain, were thus seldom evoked, or allowed to make themselves heard beyond the secret and hidden recesses of the sensitive, or the proud and haughty heart. I could not help thinking, too, that cold, haughty, and passionless, as he seemed to be, there had been a time when he and my dead father were friends, no less faithful and true than were now his own son and the son of his early friend. At all events, I parted from him, on my return to my mother's cottage, with all my former veneration and respect for him increased a thousandfold by the appreciation of his goodness towards me, which was now added to those sentiments. I should have thought him perfection if I could have forgotten those sad words of my friend, which were still ringing in my ears: "His heart might hold us all; oh, surely, his heart might hold

us all;" and, although the recollection of the change which he had allowed to come over him since his marriage, in regard to his elder children, lowered him somewhat in my estimation, still, as I blamed my lady a good deal more than him for even this, I parted from him with a feeling of respectful veneration for himself, and with such a deep and sincere appreciation of what I deemed his high and noble qualities, as would have endured to the end of my life, if, at a later period, by his own heartless and cruel indifference to one whom he ought to have cherished with his heart's best love— if, by his own harsh and unreasonable severity, he had not destroyed the delusion, and scattered it to the winds. There are, I think, few things more painful, even in a world which is full of pain, than the destroying of those illusions which the heart, either in its simplicity or its love, has built up with such a profuse expenditure of its best affections or the object loved; with such a keen and jealous ap preciation of those qualities, either real or fancied, which it believes its idol to possess; with such a lavish forgetfulness of self and selfish interest in its yearning anxiety to pour itself out, with all that it has, on him whom it deems so worthy of its truest love, its fairest hope, its deepest and its never-dying And then, when the appointed time, which, sooner or later, is almost certain to come, has arrived, and the love which seemed so changeless has been blown away by the first rude breath which fell upon it; when the summer heat has withered up, or the autumn blast has blighted, ruthlessly and unsparingly, the flowers which looked so pleasant and so fair whilst the dew of early spring was resting on their leaves, and nestling in their half-blown buds;

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