Miss Vallory did not see any reason why the married of her sex should alone be privileged to wear gorgeous apparel. Rich silks and heavy laces became her splendid beauty better than the muslins and gauzes of the demoiselle à marier.

To-day she wore a fawn-colored silk dress, with a train that swept the carpet for upward of a yard behind her-a corded fawn-colored silk, high to the throat, without a vestige of trimming on body or sleeves, but a wide crimson sash tied in a loose knot on one side of the slender waist. The tight sleeves, the narrow linen collar, became her to admiration. A doubtful complexion would have been made execrable by the color ; every defect in an imperfect figure woull have been rendered doubly obvious by the fashion of the dress. Miss Vallory wore it in the insolence of her beauty, as if she would have said, "Imitate me if you dare!"

"Papa will be very glad. We have not told any one we are in town; and indeed I don't suppose there is a creature we know, in London. You will enliven him a little." "And papa's daughter?"

"Oh, of course; you know I am always pleased to see you. Half-past six. If you are very good, I won't change my dress for dinner, and we can have a comfortable gossip instead." "I mean to be unexampled in goodness. But under ordinary circumstances-with no one you know, in town-would you

"Why, Hubert, how well you are looking!" said Miss Vallory. I expected to see you still an invalid."

"Well, no, my dear Augusta; there must come an end to everything. I went into the country to complete my cure; and I think I may venture to say that I am cured."

Mr. Walgrave's tone grew graver with those last words. He was thinking of another disease than that for which the London physician had treated him, wondering whether he were really on the high road to recovery from the more fatal fever.

gown, for the sole edification of the butler?"

"I dress for papa, and because I am in the habit of doing so, I suppose."

"If women had only a regulation costume like ours-black silk, and a white muslin tie-what an amount of envy and heart-burning might be avoided! And it would give the handsome ones a fairer start-weight for age, as it were-instead of the present system of handicapping."

"I don't in the least understand what you mean, Hubert. Imagine girls in society dressed in black, like the young women

This was an agreeable, easy-going manner of concealing the fact that Mr. Walgrave had nothing particular to say. The woman who was to be his wife was handsome, accomplished, well versed in all worllly knowledge; yet they met after eight

"No, it was not at all bad-for a week or so. The place is old-fashioned and picturesque, the country round about magnificent. There were plenty of chub, too; and there was a pike I very much wanted to catch. I shall go in for him again next year, I dare say."

"I have never been able to comprehend what any man can find to interest him in fishing."

"It has long been my hopeless endeavor to discover what any woman can have to say to her milliner for an hour and a half at a stretch," answered Mr. Walgrave, coolly.

Augusta Vallory smiled-a cold, hard smile.

"I suppose you have found it rather tiresome when I have kept you waiting at Madame Bouffante's," she said, carelessly; "but there are some things one cannot decide in a hurry; and Bouffante is too busy, or too grand, to come to me."

"What an unfathomable science dress is! That gown you have on now, for instance," surveying her critically, "doesn't seem to be very elaborate. I should think you might make it yourself."

"No doubt, if I had been apprenticed to a dressmaker. Unfortunately, papa omitted that branch of instruction from his programme for my education. Madame Bouffante cut this dress herself. The train is a new style, that was only introduced three weeks ago by the Empress of the French."

"Good heavens! and I did not recognize the novelty when you came into the room. What a barbarian I am! But, do you know, I have seen women who made their own dresses-when I was a boy."

"I cannot help it, my dear Hubert, if you have lived amongst curious people."

He was thinking of Grace Redmayne as he had seen her one Saturday afternoon seated under the cedar, running the seams of a blue-and-white muslin dress which she was to wear at church next morning, and in which, to his eyes, she had seemed fairer than a wood-nymph. Yet Miss Vallory was much handsomer than Grace, even without the adventitious aid of dressmuch handsomer, but not so lovely.

only lean lazily back upon the ottoman, and admire her with cold, critical eyes. Time had been when he fancied himself in love with her. He could never have won so rich a prize, without some earnestness of intention on his own part, without some reality of feeling; but whatever force the passion had possessed was all expended-it was gone utterly.

He looked at her to-day, and told himself that she was one of the handsomest women in London, and that he cared for her no more than if she had been a statue.

He

She was very handsome; but so is a face in a picture. had seen many faces on canvas that had more life, and light, and soul in them than had ever glorified hers. His heart had been so nearly her own, but she had wrought no spell to hold it. What had she ever given him, except her cold, business-like consent to be his wife, at some vaguely defined future period, when his prospects and position should be completely satisfactory to her father? What had she ever given him-what tears, or fond looks from soft, beseeching eyes, or little clinging touches of a tremulous white hand-what evidence that he was nearer or dearer to her than any other eligible person in her visiting list? Did he not know only too well that in her mind this lower world began and ended with Augusta Vallory-that nothing in the universe had any meaning for her except so far as it affected herself?

One night when she had been singing Tennyson's song, "Home they brought her Warrior Dead," Mr. Walgrave said to her, as he leant across the piano:

"If you had been the lady, Augusta, what a nuisance you would have considered the funeral !"

"Funerals are very dreadful," she answered, with a shudder. "And they might as well have buried her warrior where he fell. If I ever come to grief in the hunting-field, I will make an arrangement beforehand that they carry me straight to the nearest village deadhouse, and leave me there till the end."

CHAPTER XII.

WILLIAM VALLORY, of Harcross & Vallory, was one of the wealthiest attorneys in the city of London. The house had

JJDITH AND HOLOFERNES.-PAGE 34.

three thousand per annum. What her father might have to leave was an open question. He lived at the rate of five thousand a year, but was supposed to be making at least eight, and Augusta was his only child.

It was, of course, a wonderful stroke of fortune for such a man as Hubert Walgrave, with three hundred a year and his profession, to become the accepted suitor of Augusta Vallory. The thing had come about simply enough. Her father had taken him by the hand three or four years before; had been pleased with him, and had invited him a good deal to Acropolis Equare, and to a villa at Ryde, where the Vallorys spent some part of every Summer-invited him in all unconsciousness of any danger in such an acquaintance.

He had naturally rather lofty notions upon the subject of his daughter's matrimonial prospects. He was in no hurry for her to marry; would, so far as his own selfish desires went, have infinitely preferred that she should remain unmarried during his lifetime. But she was a beauty and an heiress, and he told himself that she must inevitably marry, and could hardly fail to marry well. He had vague visions of a coronet. It would be pleasant to read his daughter's name in the Peerage before he died.

All such ideas were put to flight, however, when Miss Vallory coolly announced to him one morning that Mr. Walgrave had proposed to her on the previous night, and that, with her father's approval, she meant to marry him; not without her father's approval-she was much too-well-brought-up a young woman to conceive the possibility of any such rebellion. But, on the other hand, if she were not allowed to marry Hubert Walgrave, she would certainly marry no one else.

William Vallory was dumfounded. He had suspected nothing, seeing nothing. There had been a few accidental meetings at flower-shows in London. Hubert Walgrave had been among the young men most frequently invited to fill up the ranks at the Acropolis Square dinner-parties; he knew a good many

people in Miss Vallory's set, and had happened thus to meet her very often in the course of the London season.

Then came an Autumn invitation to Mr. Vallory's villa at Ryde; a great deal of idling on the pier, an occasional moonlit stroll, a little yachting-most fascinating of all pleasures; during which Augusta Vallory, who was never sea-sick, looked her handsomest, in the most perfect marine costume that a French dressmaker could devise.

It was while he was on board Mr. Vallory's yacht, the Arion, one balmy August morning, that Hubert Walgrave told himself for the first time that he was in love with Augusta. She was sitting opposite him, making a pretence of reading a novel, dressed in blue and white, with a soft cashmere scarf floating about her tall, slim figure, and a high-crowned hat with a bunch of white-and-blue feathers crowning the massive plaits of black hair.

"Why shouldn't I marry her?" Mr. Walgrave said to himself. "The notion looks preposterous at the first showing, but I really think she likes me-and she must marry some one; her fortune would be an immense assistance to me; and over and above that, she is a woman who would help her husband to get on in life, even if she hadn't sixpence. She is the only woman I have ever really admired in life; perhaps the only woman who ever liked me."

At this stage of Hubert Walgrave's career he had no very exalted idea of that passion which makes or mars the lives of some men, and counts for so little in the careers of others. He meant never to marry at all unless he could marry to his own direct and immediate advantage. If he married, he must marry money, that was clear. The income which was ample for all his wants as a single man would be ridiculously small when set against the requirements of a wife and family. He was very positive upon this point, but he was no heiress-hunter. Not the wealth of Miss Kilmansegg would have tempted him to unite himself to a fright or a dowdy, a woman who dropped her h's, or was in any manner unpresentable.

Nor did he go out of bis way to seek Miss Vallory. Fate threw them together, and he merely improved the opportunity. Of all the men she had ever known, he was the one who treated her with most nonchalance, who paid least court to her beauty or her wealth. Perhaps it was for this very reason that she fell in love with him, so far as it was in her nature to fall in love with any one.

So, one moonlit night on the little lawn at Ryde-a grassy

"Of course, my dear Augusta," he said, in conclusion, "I cannot be blind to the fact that I am a very bad match for you, and that I am bound to do a good deal more than I have done toward winning a position before I can reasonably expect any encouragement from your father. But I am not afraid of hard work, and if you are only favorably disposed toward me, I shall feel inspired to do anything-push my way to the woolsack, or something of that kind."

And then, little by little, he induced Miss Vallory to admit that she was favorably disposed toward him-very favorably; that she had liked him almost from the first. That final confession was going as far as any well-brought-up young person could be expected to go.

“You have not been so absurdly attentive as other men," she said, "and I really believe I have liked you all the better on that account."

Mr. Walgrave smiled, and registered an unspoken vow to the effect that Miss Vallory should have ample cause to continue so to like him.

It was rather a long time before Mr. Vallory got quite over the shock occasioned by his daughter's astounding announcement; but he did ultimately get over it, and consented to receive Hubert Walgrave as his future son-in-law.

"I will not attempt to conceal from you that it is a disappointment," he said; "I may say a blow, a very severe blow. I had hoped that Augusta would make a brilliant marriage. I think I had a right to expect as much. But I have always liked you, Walgrave, and-and-if my daughter really knows her own mind, I can hold out no longer. You will not think of marrying just yet, I suppose?"

"I am quite in your hands upon that point, my dear sir. My own desire would be to make an assured position for myself before I ask Augusta to share my fortunes. I couldn't, on any consideration, become a dependent on my wife; and my present income would not allow me to give her an establishment which should, even in a minor degree, be the kind of thing she has been accustomed to."

"That's all high-flown nonsense!" exclaimed Mr. Vallory, rather impatiently. "If you marry Augusta, you will marry her money as well as herself. As to waiting till you've a silk gown-well, you may do it if you like, and if she likes. I shall be glad to keep her near me as long as I can. But you will be as old as I am, I take it, before you can hope to win a position that would be anything like what she has a right to expect. She has made a bad bargain, you see, my dear Walgrave; and there's no use in you or me trying to make-believe that it's a good one."

-an apartment that was almost awful in its aspect when sparsely occupied-with a Pompeian claret-jug between them. "I need scarcely say how pleased I shall be to make the acquaintance of any of your people."

"I have no people," Mr. Walgrave answered, coolly. "I think you must have heard me say that I stand quite alone in the world. Augusta will not receive many wedding-presents from my side of the house; but, on the other hand, she will not be troubled by any poor relations of mine. My father and mother both died while I was a youngster. I was brought up in Essex by a maiden aunt. She, too, has been dead for the last five-and-twenty years, poor soul! She was a kind friend to me."

"Your father was a professional man, I suppose?'' hazarded Mr. Vallory, who would have been gratified by a more communicative spirit in his future son-in-law.

"He was not. He lived upon his own means, and spent them."

"But he left you fairly provided for."

"He left me three hundred a year, thanks to the good offices of a friend who had considerable influence over him. The money was settled upon me in such a way that my father could not touch it. I should have begun life a beggar if it had been in his power to dispose of the money."

"You don't speak very kindly of him."

'Perhaps not. I dare say I am somewhat wanting in filial reverence. The fact is, he could have afforded to do a good deal more for me than he did do, and I have not yet learned to forgive him. He was not a good father, and, frankly, I don't much care about talking of him.”’

This was like a conversational dead-wall, with "No thoroughfare" inscribed upon it. Mr. Vallory asked no more questions. Hubert Walgrave was a gentleman --that was the grand point; and it mattered very little how many uncles and aunts he had, or if he were totally destitute of such kindred. He was clever, energetic, hard-working, and tolerably sure to get on in the world.

"I am not marrying my daughter to a drone, who would stick a flower in his button-hole, and live on his wife's fortune; that is one comfort," the lawyer said to himself.

He had, indeed, no reason to complain of any lack of industry in Hubert Walgrave. From the hour in which his engagement to Miss Vallory became a settled thing, he worked harder than ever. That which would have tempted most men to idleness, urged him to fiercer effort, to more eager pursuit of that single aim of his existence-self-advancement. He wanted to win a reputation before he married; he did not want people to be able to say, "There goes that lucky fellow, Walgrave, who married

"If it is so very bad a bargain, sir," he said, gravely, "it is not at all too late for you to rescind your approval, or for me to withdraw my pretensions."

The great William Vallory looked absolutely frightened. His only child had a will of her own, and a temper of her own; and he had had more than one unpleasant scene with her already upon this question.

No, no, my dear fellow!" he answered, hastily; "bless my soul, how touchy you are! Haven't I told you that I like you? My daughter's feelings are involved; and if she likes to marry for love, she can afford to do it. It will not be love in a cottage; or, if it is, it will be a cottage of gentility, with a double coach-house, and so on."

Thus Mr. Walgrave found himself accepted, much more easily than he could have supposed it possible he should be. He was engaged to a young woman with three thousand a year in the present, and unlimited expectations of future wealth. It seemed like some wild dream. Yet he bore this sudden fortune with the utmost equanimity. Indeed, it scarcely surprised him; he had made up his mind from the beginning to prosper in life.

as the celebrated Mr. Walgrave, the Queen's counsel, and his lucky marriage spoken of as a secondary affair, springing out of his success.

With this great end in view-a very worthy aim, in the opinion of a man of his creed, which did not embrace very lofty ideas of this life-Mr. Walgrave had very nearly worked himself into a galloping consumption; and while going this high-pressure pace had been brought to a sudden standstill by that perilous illness which had led to his holiday at Brierwood. Skillful treatment, and a naturally good constitution, which would bear some abuse, had pulled him through, and he was what our forefathers used to call "on the mending hand," when he went down to the old farm-house, to fall sick of a still more troublesome disease.

CHAPTER XIII.

"I have never heard you speak of your family," he said one

"I found your cousin Weston at the office, Augusta," said