"Now Grace, God knows I love you as dearly as ever man loved woman, and that I am ready to make any reasonable sacrifice for your sake; but"

He paused, checked by a sudden huskiness, perhaps arrested also by something in the face looking up at him, which whitened to the lips.

"But what?" Grace Redmayne asked, slowly.

"I cannot marry you. Your home shall be as bright a one as wife ever had, your lover as devoted as ever husband on this earth. Nothing but the empty form shall be wanting; and our union must needs be all the more sacred to me because it will be consecrated by a sacrifice on your part. I will love you all the days of my life, Grace, but I cannot marry you."

She looked at him fixedly, with wide-open eyes that seemed to him to grow unnaturally large, and then change to a lighter color as she looked. Her white lips moved, as if she tried to echo his words, in sheer amazement; but no sound came from them but a little choking cry, with which she fell heavily to the ground.

Hubert Walgrave remembered the scene of the viper in Clevedon Chase. He knelt down and raised her gently, with her head upon his knee, calling loudly for help.

The domestic offices were not remote, and it

is possibe that the newly-hired servants were lurking a little nearer than their legitimate abiding place. A young woman rushed into the room, shrieked, glanced at the heap of tumbled silks, jumped at once to the conclusion that her master and mistress had been quarreling, and then began the usual cabalistic formula in fainting cases.

Without any

effect, however.

that was to have been her ownlay with her hands folded on her breast, more lovely than be could have sup posed it possible for death to be. The two servant-maids, and a weird old woman who came he knew not whence, had summoned him to see her, when their dismal office had been done; and he had stood alone by the white bed, looking down at her, tearless, with a countenance that seemed more rigid than her own.

He staid there for a long time --knelt down, and tried to fashion a prayer. but could not: he had not command enough over himself to shape thoughts or words into any given form. There was a confusion in his

"She is in the habit of fainting in this way," Mr. Walgrave said, nervously; "it's constitutional. But I think you'd better send for the nearest doctor. Quick, quick!-good God, woman, what are you staring at?"

The housemaid fled to the cook, whom she dispatched in quest of a surgeon. Mr. Walgrave lifted the statue-like form with a great effort, and placed it gently on the sofa. He knelt down and laid his hand above the heart. Great heavens, what an awful stillness !

He bent his ear down to the girl's breast and listened, but could hear no sound, and in a sudden terror rushed to the bell, rang violently, and then came back to fling more water over the pallid face.

It was something worse than pallid. What was that cold,

"My angel, my dove, come back to me!" he cried; "I will not believe that you are dead."

But that awful coldness, that utter stillness, gave him an agony that was more than he could endure. He turned away, and went back to the room below, where he sat alone till morning, with scarcely a change of posture, thinking of what he had done.

To say that if he could have brought her back to life he would have married her, would have flung every hope of worldly advancement, every consideration for the prejudices of mankind to the winds, is to say very little.

Looking back now at his conduct, in the light of this calamity, he wondered how he could ever have counted the

"Now, I am not a believer in long engagements," continued Mr. Vallory; "I am a man of the world, and I look at things from a worldly point of view, and I can't say that I have ever seen any good come of them. Sometimes the man sees some one he likes better than the girl he's engaged to, sometimes the girl sees some one she likes better; neither is candid enough to make a clean breast of it, and they go dawdling on, pretending to be devoted to each other, and ultimately marry without a ha porth of love between them."

"There is sound philosophy in what you say, no doubt; but I should imagine where the affection is sincere, and not weakened by separation, time should strengthen the bond."

"Yes, when a man and woman are married, and know that the bondage is a permanent business. Now, when you first proposed to my daughter, with a full knowledge of her position as a young woman who might fairly expect to make a much better match, I told you that that I could not consent to your marriage until you had achieved some standing in your profession-income was a secondary consideration with me. Augusta has enough for both."

"I hope I made you understand clearly that I could never submit to a position of dependence on my wife?' Mr. Walgrave said, hastily.

"Quite so; but you can't help absorbing the advantages of your wife's money. Your wife can't eat turtle-soup at her end of the table, while you eat mutton-broth at your end. Augusta is not a girl who will cut her coat according to your cloth. She will expect the surroundings she has been accustomed to from her cradle; and she will expect you to share them, without question as to whose banking account contributes the most to the expenses of the household. What she has a right to expect from her husband is personal distinction; and as I believe you are on the high road to achieve that, I give my full permission to as early a marriage as may be agreeable to you both."

Mr. Walgrave bowed, in acknowledgment of this concession, without any outward semblance of rapture; but as they were both Englishmen, Mr. Vallory expected no such demonstration. "You are very generous, my dear sir," said the younger man, quietly; "I am Augusta's slave in this matter; her will is mine."

"So be it. I leave you to settle the business between you. But there is one point that I may as well explain at once-my late partner Harcross's will is rather a remarkable one, and provides for the event of Augusta's marriage. He was a peculiar man in many ways, my old friend Harcross, and had a monstrous reverence for his own name; not that he ever pretended that any Harcrosses came over with the Conqueror, or when the Conqueror came were all at home, or anything of that kind. His grandfather was a self-made man, and the Harcrosses were a sturdy, self-reliant race, with an extraordinary opinion of their own merits."

not a bad signature to be put at the foot of a letter to the free and independent electors of Eatanswill, when I go in for a seat in parliament by-and-by. Hubert Harcross-so be it! What's in a name, and in my name above all others, that I should cherish it?""

CHAPTER XIX.

GREAT ship far out at sea, an English ship, homeward bound, from Brisbane to the port of Liverpool, and among the passengers on board her, one Richard Redmayne, agriculturist, gold-digger, and general speculator, sailing back to the home of his forefathers.

He is returning to England sooner than he had hoped to return by at least a year. Things have gone well with him during the last eighteen months; almost as well as he had fancied they I might do in his day-dreams under the old cedar at Brierwood, in those Summer afternoon reveries in which he had watched his daughter's face athwart the smoke of his pipe, and thought what a grand thing it would be to go out to Australia and make a fortune for her. He has done it. For a long time the fates seem against him; it was dreary work living the hard, rough life, toiling from misty morning to mistier evening, facing all weathers, holding his own against all competitors, and with no result. Many a time he had wished himself back in England-ay, even with Brierwood sold to strangers, and only a field and a cottage left him-but a field and a cottage in England, with English flowers peeping in at his casement, English fare, English climate, and his daughter's sweet face to make the brightness of his life. What did it all matter? he asked himself sometimes. Did a big house and many acres constitute happiness? Had his broad fields or goodly rick-yards consoled him in the early days of his widowhood, when the loss of his fair young wife made all the universe seem dark to him? A thousand times, no. Then welcome poverty in Kent, among the orchards and hop-gardens, with the daughter of his love.

He had been sick to the heart when the tide turned. His first successes were not large; but they cheered him beyond measure, and enabled him to write hopefully home. Then he fell into campanionship with a clever adventurer, a man who had a smattering of science, and a good deal of rough genius, in his peculiar way; a man who was great upon the chemistry of soils, but lacked a strong arm, and herculean muscles, like Rick Redmayne's; whereby there arose a partnership between the two, in which the farmer was to profit by the knowledge of Mr. Nicholas Spettigue, the amateur chemist, while Mr. Spet

"And, to come to the point at once," continued Mr. Vallory, "my good friend left it as a condition of his bequest, that whoever Augusta married, her husband should assume the name of Harcross. Now, the question is, shall you have any objection to that change of name?"

Redmayne's labor. The business needed four men to work it well; so they took a brace of sturdy Milesians into their company, whose labors were to be recompensed by an equitable share in the gains; and with these coadjutors began business in real earnest.

"Upon my word I don't see why I should object," he said. "The proposition seems a little startling at first, as if one were asked to die one's hair, or something of that kind. But I suppose any shred of reputation I may have made as Walgrave will stick to me as Harcross."

"Decidedly, my dear boy; we will take care of that," Mr. Vallory answered. "There is no name better known and respected in the legal profession than the name of Harcross. As Hubert Walgrave you may be a very clever fellow; but as Hubert Harcross you will be associated with one of the oldest firms in the "Law List." You will be no loser, professionally, by the change, I can assure you."

THE REVERIE.-PAGE 187.

up their claims in the neighborhood; but Mr. Spettigue had spotted the best bit in the district, and Fortune favored him and his Kentish partner. They were not quite so lucky as a certain Doctor Kerr, who, in the early days of the gold discoveries at Bathurst, found a hundredweight of gold one fine morning on his sheep-walk, lying under his very nose, as it were, where it had lain throughout his proprietorship of the the land, and might have so lain forever, had not an aboriginal shepherd's eye been caught by the glitter of a yellow streak amidst the quartz. They did not fall upon monster nuggets, but by patience and toil rcalized a profit varying from ten pounds a week per man to forty..

When they had exhausted, or supposed they had exhausted, their field of operations, they divided the spoil. Richard Redmayne's share came to something more than three thousand pounds. All he owed in England could be paid with half the amount. He had seen a good deal of the country since he had been out-had seen something of i's agricultural capabilities, and wanted to see more; so now that the chief business of his exile was accomplished, he gave himself a brief holiday in which to explore the wild sheep-walks of this new world.

He was not a man who loved money for its own sake; and having now more than enough to pay his debts, and set him going again in the dear old Kentish homestead, he had no desire to toil any longer, much to the surprise and vexation of Nicholas Spettigue, who had his eye upon a new district, and was eager to test its capabilities.

"I shall have to look out for a new pal," he said. "But I doubt if I shall ever find an honest man with such a biceps as yours, Rick. If you'd only keep on with me I'd make you a millionaire before we shut up shop. But I suppose you're homesick, and there's no usc in saying any more."

"I've got a daughter, you see," Richard Redmayne said, looking down with a thoughtful smile, "and I want to get back to her."

"As if I didn't know all about your daughter," exclaimed Mr. Spettigue, who had heard of Grace Redmayne very often from the fond father's lips. "Why don't you write to her to come out to the colony? You might settle her somewhere com

fortably in Brisbane, and go on with your work up here, till you were as rich as one of the Rothschilds."

Richard Redmayne shook his head by way of answer to this proposition.

"A colonial life wouldn't suit Gracey," he said; "she's too tender a flower for that sort of thing."

"I dare say she's an uncommonly pretty girl," Mr. Spettigue remarked, in his careless way, "if she's anything like you, mate."

"Like me!" cried the farmer; "she's as much like me as a lily's like me-she's as much like me as a snowdrop is like a sunflower. If you can fancy a water-lily that's been changed into a woman, you can fancy my daughter Grace."

"I can't," answered the practical Mr. Spettigue. "I never was good at fancying, and if I could, your water-lily-faced woman is not my style. I like a girl with cheeks as red as peonies, and plenty of flesh on her bones, with no offense meant to you, Rick."

So the partnership was dissolved, and Richard Redmayne bought himselt a horse, and set off upon an exploring expedition among the sheep-farms.

In the course of these wanderings, in which he met with much hospitality and kindness in solitary homesteads, where his bright face and cheery voice won a joyous welcome, Mr. Redmayne came upon a lowland farm in Gippsland, whose owners had fallen on evil days; the rough log-house was empty, the land neglected, and a family of vagabond wanderers who had taken up their abode in one of the barns told him that the estate was to be sold by auction at Brisbane, in something less than a fortnight.

He went over the land, and his practiced eye was quick to perceive its value. It had been badly worked, and the man who owned it had gone at a rapid pace to the dogs; but the occupants of the barn told Mr. Redmayne that this late proprietor had drunk himself into delirium tremens three or four times a year, and had squandered every sixpence he earned playing "poker" and other equally intellectual games with any wandering stranger whom Providence sent in his way.

The farm had fallen into bad odor by reason of his nonsuccess, and had been put up to auction already, and withdrewn from sale, the biddings not reaching the reserved price which the late owner's trade assignees had put upon it.

"You might get it by private contrack, I dessay," said the man, when he perceived Mr. Redmayne's inclination to buy, "if you was to look sharp about it, and make yer hoffer to the hauctioneer between this and nex' Toosday week."

Richard Redmayne was fascinated by the place, which was called Bulrush Meads, there being a considerable tract of lowlying meadow land, with a broad stream meandering through it, richly fringed with tall bulrushes-superb land for stock. There was hill as well as dale, and the site of the rough log dwellinging-house was as picturesque as anything he had seen in his holiday ramble. What a king he might be here with Grace, he thought to himself. The life would not be rough for her, safe sheltered under his wing, and with honest Kentish lasses for her servants.

His quick eye told him how the place might be improved; a roomy parlor built out on one side, with a wide veranda supported by rustic pillars, a pleasant shelter beneath which his darling might sit and work on sunny afternoons. And what a prospect for those gentle eyes to gaze upon! what a varied sweep of hill and valley, bright silver streamlet flashing athwart greenest of meadows, a thousand sheep, looking no bigger than so many daisies, upon the distant uplands, a blue lake, that was vast as an inland sea, in the foreground; and far away on the left of the landscape a forest of almost tropical richness! A couple of bedrooms could be added above, wooden, like the rest of the house, which was strongly though roughly built. Vines and pumpkins climbed to the shingle roof, and all kinds of flowers, brighter and larger than the blossoms of his native land, overran the neglected garden.

On one side of the low, rambling edifice, there was an orchard of peach-trees; on the other, a grove of cabbage-palms, eighty feet high, their tall trunks entwined by a luxuriant flowering parasite; a giant fig-tree spread its broad leaves near at hand,