"Good-bye," said Helen coldly-not with intention, but because her heart felt cold. Everything was lost and gone, except Gideon Skull. She went home, and despaired. Her scheme looked very ugly now that it had become impossible. But she felt, in herself, that its impossibility was no merit of hers, and that the wrong of a thing is complete when the thing is planned. Yes, it is hard to wish what one hates oneself for having wished, and to feel at the same time that the self-contempt comes from having failed. It disposes one to resolve never to fail again. As for the self-contempt, that cannot be felt twice over. What could Helen do for her brother now?

Gideon, having bid for Helen the ten thousand a year at least which he was going to have in full time to make his statement perfectly true, returned to the Argus. He felt he was not making a fool of himself in bidding even twenty thousand a year for this girl, seeing that he knew all about the will. If it did not end in making him master of Copleston, it would ensure the ruin of Victor Waldron, and bring him a good dowry with his wife and a considerable amount of prize-money from his brother-in-law. Well, perhaps not that, though gratitude was not to be looked for from the high-minded and unworldly type of young man. But the rest was secure, and probably a great deal more. But, in spite of all things, he was thinking of Helen herself much more than of Copleston.

reached the office again, "Miss You'll give me all private letters

"Crowder," he said, when he Reid tells me she is leaving town. from her brother, and I'll forward them to wherever she may be. That's all. Remember Saturday."

"I will!" said Mr. Crowder, sending a look of defiance across the table to Mr. Sims.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Luke.-A fig for all such baubles, and the fools
Who waste their wits, and fog their arid skulls
To learn that force is force and weight is weight,

And that on nothing not a straw can stand !
Give me one pinch of dust, and I will move
The elemental world, the solar sphere,
Cycle and epicycle, planet, star,

All earth and anti-earth, without the aid

Of wheel, or block, or bar, or slant, or spire

All that the Syracusan dreamed I'll do

Without a fulcrum-so the dust be gold.

SURE enough, when Helen went indoors again she found upon

the mantelpiece a letter from Bertha. There was no need to open it

in order to know that it contained a pressing invitation to her and her mother to make a long stay at Thorp End. Without such an invitation the letter would not have been from Bertha. Helen did not take the trouble to open the letter immediately. What did anything signify? The whole future looked too hideous for facing. Alan, at barely more than five-and-twenty, was to accept as his destiny a life of heartless plodding for daily bread-what would he become? She, at less than five-and-twenty, was to accept as hersnothing; and to accept this no-life after having set herself to do all things for Alan. She had been robbed of all that she had made up her mind to live for, and nothing was left but the barrenness of waiting for what she knew nothing of, save that it was something which could never come to her. Waiting to turn into a man, perhaps that would be the best thing, and by no means the most impossible. In what spirit can a girl, in her first womanhood, tell herself consciously that such a life as this must be hers?

If she have one least touch of nature in common with Helen Reid, she will have but one answer to give herself. She will flatly refuse. There was as much desire for the fulness of life in her as if she had not devoted her life to her brother's, and far more than if she had not been torn out of her natural world. In leaving Helen out of it, Mrs. Reid had neglected to take into account a very considerable element in her scheme for Alan.

Fortunately or unfortunately-her mother was not in their parlour when she came in, so she had time to think quietly, as well as to feel the whole need for thinking. She was by no means blind to the very plainly written cause of Gideon's energy and devotionhe had taken care to print it clearly and largely enough in looks, movements, tones, in everything but mere words, which in themselves count for nothing in such cases. For that matter, it was these unspoken speeches of Gideon which had given rise to her barren idea of using what he had taught her against the usurper of Copleston. At any rate, she was driven to think a great deal of Gideon Skullalmost as much as he could have desired, though not altogether in the way that he would have chosen. She felt no instinctive liking for the man. Women are not much better or more exacting judges of the points which go to make up a gentleman than men are of the attributes of ladies; but she could not help feeling that if to be a gentleman means to be like her father and her brother, then Gideon Skull could not be one. He was coarse both in his choice and in his use of words, and absolutely without the faintest flavour of courtesy. But then, on the other hand, he was the most perfect of gentlemen,

if to be a gentleman means to be unlike Victor Waldron. And after all, is not outward coarseness and roughness one of the most famous notes of the diamond? What is polish but an accident? It was no fault of Gideon's that he had been hardened and roughened by a life spent in fighting single-handed against the world, andwinning. Yes, he had won in the battle of life; Helen was in a mood to look upon that as the greatest thing a man can do. If likeness of look comes from likeness of thought, there was every reason for the growth of the likeness between Helen and her mother.

And what, after all, mattered the birth or breeding of man or woman to a nameless nobody like her? Had she not been declaring war against the whole unjust world to which Victor Waldron belonged,--to make up for her father's cowardice and her brother's tame submission? Why, Gideon Skull, who had fought and won, was a hero; and was she to be so cowardly and so submissive as to throw away her power over such a man because his words lacked polish and his manner courtesy ?

He was strong, she felt; but she was stronger than he, she knew. The only question worth thinking about was what she should do with him. Being himself part of her enemy, the world, his only use was to be used. How she could use wealth, however it might come to her, she knew very well. Her mother would be put above want, Alan's uphill path to Bertha would be made straight and level, Copleston might be won back, and life for herself, though it could never again become beautiful, might be turned into a space in which some few wrongs might be righted and a little good might be done. She would not feel so wholly like an insect who has got caught in the wheels of a machine, and whose capacities for life and flight are being ground to pieces uselessly.

Yes, it would be terrible waste to let Gideon Skull slip out of her hand. The only question was how, and not whether, she should use him. And that is a question which can hardly help answering itself, when it lies between a woman and a man. Victor Waldron was the shadow of the piece of flesh, the two birds in the bush, the half loaf, compared with Gideon.

She soon, however, had enough of straightforward thinking about such things. It is best to let them drift, and spare one the discomfort of any avoidable loss of self-respect by settling themselves. She opened Bertha's letter, but only took the most languid interest in what her dearest friend had to say to her. There was nothing in it beyond what she had expected, and yet it seemed to her as if it had been written to quite another Helen Reid than the Helen VOL. CCXLVII. NO. 1795.

C

into whose hands it had come, even than the Helen whom it was

answering.

"DEAREST NELLY," she read,-"As if I wasn't glad and thankful to hear from you; as if I had not been wondering what had become of you, and not been afraid to hear! Why didn't you write months and months ago? If I didn't know you, I should have thought you were something more than unkind; but what is the use of friendship if it can't go on trusting through silence even? I do know you, you see; and though I don't see why you should not have writtten to me, I am sure that you know why, and that your reason has been some wild, extravagant, generous, heroic, absurd, incomprehensible, true-hearted reason-just like you. I'm sure I should love you for it, even though I can't understand, and though I mean never to forgive you for it as long as I don't see you. I wish, dearest Nelly, I had the wit for understanding as well as for trusting. Yes, it did seem to me almost past believing that you-all of you-even you, Nelly, went away without a good-bye, or a word instead of one. I hardly know how to tell you what it made me think. It seemed as if you were too proud to have anything more to do with anybody who knew you before that dreadful time. Only such a thing as that could not be between me and you. I'm glad, with all my heart and soul, to hear it wasn't that—at least with you. As if I haven't been thinking more kindly of you than ever; as if, if I had thought any other way, I should have cared! Then it is true that you have lost everything? I had heard so; but I had been hoping against hope, and nobody seemed to know anything for certain, except that in some strange way Copleston did not belong to you. Nobody seems to know quite why you had to give it up without a trial; but everybody is sure that whatever you did was just and right, and worthy of your father, who was loved and honoured, and is still, in a way that would make you too proud to be proud of anything else under the sun. wish you could hear how mine speaks of yours. Come and hear it, Nelly. Papa has told me, without a hint or a word from me, to tell you and Mrs. Reid to come to Thorp End and stay here all the time your brother is away-and longer, if you will. You can't want to be by yourselves in London all alone; and it is enough to break my heart when you talk in that way of not being able to do anything you want to. You can do everything you need do, and that is to get into a train and come to Thorp End. I do want you, Nell. There is nobody I care to see since you left; and as for talking, I have not done such a thing since last Easter Eve. And I think you want to talk and to be talked to as much as I-and more. Your letter tells me

You don't think I 'No' on Easter Day! And why should he?

that, Nelly. Your letter reads as if all sorts of things had been gathering in your heart and turning bitter; and that will not do. Shall I be such a baby as to pretend I don't understand you about Alan? I thought of being one; but no, I don't think I will. I'll be old and grown up enough to tell you this: that if you had never written me one word about him, I should have known what you tell me-that he did whatever he thought was best for others. I wish people would not be so un-selfish, Nelly. He never said a word to me more than any old friend might who had almost grown up with one. I suppose I have no right to mix up what might have been with what might not have been. But if should have said 'Yes' on Easter Eve, and He did not care enough to try me-that's all. I never supposed he did; and I assure you, with all my heart, that I don't feel one atom the less his friend than ever because he did not happen to ask me to marry him. It would be rather hard on a man if there was to be nothing between not caring for a girl at all and wanting to spend his whole life in her company. I want a great many people, men and women, to care for me very much; but I couldn't marry them all, and I don't mean or want to marry one of them. No, Nelly, not even Mr. Victor Waldron. I think of your brother as always, even though he might have come to say good-bye to an old playfellow without being afraid of her saying anything to him but 'God bless you!'-as she does now.

"It was you made me think of Mr. Victor Waldron; for, so far from knowing him, I have never even set eyes on him. I believe he is known very well at the 'George' at Hillswick, and that he made a bosom friend of old Grimes, the sexton; but he has never made or received a call from any real people, and the last news of him is that he has gone back to America. And as to Copleston, indeed, Nelly, I have never had the heart to go in sight of the lodge gate, and have always ridden other ways. And so—I have no news. For it isn't news, is it, that I want you? You will come, and you will give my dearest love to Mrs. Reid; and if you are a better letter-writer to your brother than you are to your sister, tell him that his sister Bertha thinks just as kindly of him as his sister Helen. Say 'Yes' by return of post, and come by the next train.

"Your loving

"BERTHA."

When she had finished the letter, Helen felt that even Bertha herself was a little changed. These airs of wisdom and resignation and dignity looked much more like the scar of a wound than the