would be to appear worldly; when he is bound, in fact, to complete his tale of love-making, to produce the given number of bricks with ever so little strawthose days are the days of trial; and happy is he who can pass through them unscathed to that solemn morning which clinches the bargain with joyous ringing of bells, and gay procession of bridesmaids, and Mendelssohn's Wedding March, and transforms the exacting betrothed into the submissive wife.

"I have not the slightest doubt we shall get on very well together when we are married," Mr. Walgave said to himself; "but the preliminary stage is uphill work. I know that Augusta is fond of me, in her way; but, oh, what a cold way it seems after the touch of Grace Redmayne's little hand, the look in Grace Redmayne's eyes! Thank God, I did my duty in that affair, and was open and above board from the first."

AN IDYL OF THE WOODS.

Owen Meredith, and had been enriched by a careful perusal of every book which a young lady of position ought to read; narrow although its culture during the educational period had cost from two to three hundred a year-from these he shrank as from a pestilence; in plain words, he felt that an unkroken week of his future wife's company would be the death of him. And when they were married, what then? Well, then, of course, it would be different. No man-above all a successful barrister-need see enough of his wife to be bored by her companionship. Nor can a man's wife, unless she is inherently obnoxious to him, ever be utterly uninteresting. They have so many ideas in common, so many plans and arrangementspetty, perhaps, but still absorbing for the moment to discuss and settle the list of guests for a dinner-party; the way-bill of their Autumn pilgrimage; the name of their last baby; the pattern of new carpets; the purchase or non-purchase of a picture at Christie's. The wife is only a necessary note-the subdominant-in the domestic scale.

But the long days of courtship, when there is no fervent love in the soul of the lover; the long Summer evenings, when he is bound to stroll with his chosen one by the calm gray sea; when to talk too much of his own prospects and plan of life

THERE was nothing in the world to delay Mr. Walgrave's visit to Eastbourne during the following week, except his own caprice; but he had a fancy for waiting until that locket he had bought in Cockspur Street was ready for him. He selected the photograph which represented him at his best, had it carefully painted by an expert hand, and sent it to the jeweler. At the end of the week the locket was brought to him.. The spring worked admirably.

On opening the golden case there appeared a bunch of forget-me-nots in blue enamel; but on pressing a little knob between the locket and the ring attached to it, the dainty little enameled picture opened like the back of a watch, and revealed Hubert Walgrave's miniature.

The contrivance was perfect in its way, the forget-me-nots a happy thought. The man to whom the work had been intrusted had taken the liberty to suppose that the trinket must needs be a love-gift.

Hubert Walgrave was charmed with the toy, and had it packed, registered, and dispatched at once to "Miss Redmayne, Brierwood Farm, near Kingsbury, Kent." He wrote the address, and posted the little packet with his own hands, and then wrote Grace a formal letter- a letter which could bear the scrutiny of Mrs. Redmayne."

"MY DEAR MISS REDMAYNE-I experienced so much kindness from your family and yourself during my very pleasant visit to Brierwood, that I have been anxious to send you some little souvenir of that event. I know that young ladies are fond of trinkets, and I fancy that your kind aunt would prefer my sending my little offering to you rather than to herself. I have therefore chosen a locket, which I trust Mr. and Mrs. Redmayne will permit you to accept, in token of my gratitude for all the kindness I received under their hospitable roof, "With all regards, I remain, my dear Miss Redmayne, very faithfully yours, HUBERT WALGRAVE."

He read the letter over, and blushed, ever so faintly, at his own hypocrisy. Yet what could he do? He wanted to give the dear girl just one little spark of pleasure. Upon a slip of paper he wrote: " Il y a un ressort entre l'anneau et le médaillon; touchez le, et vous trouverez mon portrait ;" and enclosed the slip in his letter.

Grace would open her own letter, no doubt, and the Redmaynes would hardly see that little slip of paper in an unknown tongue.

"And so ends the one romantic episode in my unromantic life," he said to himself when he had posted the letter.

A day or two afterward he made up his mind to pay that duty-visit to Eastbourne; it was a thing that must be done sooner or later. It was already much later than Miss Vallory could possibly approve. He expected to be lectured, and went down to the quiet watering-place with a chastened spirit. foreseeing what awaited him.

The little sea-coast town, with its umbrageous boulevards and dainty villas, was looking very gay and bright as he drove through it on his way to the habitation of the Vallorys, of course one of the largest and most expensive houses fronting the Summer sea? One of the newest, also: the bricks had still a raw look; the stucco appeared to have hardly dried after the last finishing touch of the mason's trowel.

Other houses of the same type straggled a little way beyond it, in a cheerless and unfinished condition. It looked almost as if the Acropolis Square mansion had been brought down by rail, and set up here with its face to the sea. The unfinished houses, of the same pattern, seemed to have strayed off into a field, where the strange, scentless flora of the seacoast, chiefly of the birch-room order, still flourished. It was what Sydney Smith has called the "knuckle-end" of Eastbourne, but designed to become the Belgravia of that town. Was not Belgravia itself once a "knuckle-end"?

There was a drawing-room, spacious enough for a church, sparcely furnished with "our cabriole suite at seven-and-thirty guineas, in carved Italian walnut and green rep;" a balcony that would have accommodated a small troop of infantry; and everywhere the same aspect of newness and rawness. The walls still smelled of the first coat of paint, and plaster-of-paris crumbs fell from the ceilings now and then in a gentle shower.

The Acropolis Square footman ushered Mr. Walgrave to the drawing-room, where he found his betrothed trying a new piece on a new Erard grand, in a new dress-an elaborate costume of primrose cambric, all frillings, and puffings, and flutings, which became her tall, slim figure.

She wore a broad blue ribbon round her throat, with a locket hanging from it-a locket of gold and gems, her own monogram in sapphires and diamonds, and the sight of it reminded him of that other locket.

Grace Redmayne had received his gift by this time; but there had been no acknowledgment of it as yet when he left London. Indeed, no letter from Brierwood could reach him directly, since he had never given the Redmaynes

his London address. They could only write to him through John Wort.

Mr. Walgrave had not been mistaken about the impending lecture, but he took his punishment meekly, only murmuring some faint reference to Cardimum versus Cardimum-so meekly, in fact, that Augusta Vallory could scarcely be hard upon him. "You may imagine," she remonstrated, in conclusion, "that I find a place of this kind very dull without you."

"I am afraid you will find it much duller with me," Mr. Walgrave replied, drearily; "whatever capacity for gayety I may possess-which, at the best, I fear, is not much-is always paralyzed by the seaside. I have enjoyed a day or two at Margate, certainly, once or twice in my life; there is something fresh and enjoyable about Margate; an odor of shrimps and high spirits; but then, Margate is considered vulgar, I believe." "Considered vulgar!" cried Miss Vallory, with a shudder. "Why, it is Hounsditch by the sea!"

THE DISINHERITED-PAGE 51.

"If Margate were in the Pyrenees, people would rave about it," her lover replied, coolly. "I have been happy at Ryde, as you know," he went on, in his most leisurely manner, but with a little drop in his voice, which he had practice i on juries sometimes in breach-of-promise cases, and which did duty for tenderness; "but with those two exceptions, I have found the seaside-above all, the genteel seaside-a failure. The more genteel, the more dreary. If one does not admit Hounsditch and the odor of shrimps, the pestilence of dullness is apt to descend upon our coasts. Cowes, of course, is tolerable; and I rather like Southsea-the convicts are so interesting; and where there are ships in the offing, there is always amusement for the Cockney who prides himself upon knowing a brig from a brigantine."

Discoursing in this languid manner, the lovers beguiled the time until dinner. Mr. Walgrave was not eager to rush down the beach and gather shells, or to seek some distant point whence to take a header into the crisp blue waves, after the manner of the enthusiastic excursionist, who feels that while he is at the sea he cannot have too much of a good thing. He lounged in the balcony, which was pleasantly sheltered by a crimson-striped awning, and talked in his semi-cynical way to his betrothed, not by any means over-cxerting himself in the endeavor to entertain her.

"The Arion is here, I suppose," he remarked, by-and-by. "Yes; I have been out in her a good deal."

and went up-stairs to array herself for the small family gathering. Mr. Walgrave found himself presently in a roomy bedchamber-walls and ceiling painfully new, grate slightly at variance with its setting, bells a failure, windows admirably constructed for excluding large bodies of air and admitting drafts, furniture of the popular seaside type-brand-new Kidderminster carpet of a flaring pattern, rickety Arabian bedstead, mahogany wardrobe with doors that no human power could keep shut, everything marble-topped that could be marble-topped; no pincushion, no easy-chair, no writing-table, and a glaring southern sun pouring in upon a barren desert of Kidderminster.

"So Weston has been very attentive-has been doing my duty, in short," Mr. Walgrave said to himself as he dressed. "I wonder whether there's any chance of his cutting me out; and if he did, should I be sorry? It would be one thing for me to jilt Augusta, and another for her to throw me over. Old Vallory would hardly quarrel with me in the latter event; on the contrary, it would be a case for solatium. He could hardly do enough for me to make amends for my wrongs. But I don't think there's much danger from my friend Weston; and, after all, I have quite done with that other folly-put it out of my mind, as a dream that I have dreamed."

He went down-stairs presently, and found Mr. Vallory in the drawing-room, large and stolid, with a vast expanse of shirtfront, and a double gold eye-glass on the knob of his aquiline nose, reading an evening paper.

This, of course, offered a delightful opening for conversation, and they began to talk in the usual humdrum manner of the topics of the hour.

Parliament was over; it was the indignant-letter season, and the papers were teeming with fervid protests against nothing particular. Extortionate innkeepers in the Scottish highlands, vaccination versus non-vaccination, paterfamilias bewailing the inordinate length of his boys' holidays, complaints of the administration of the army, outcries for reform in the navy, jostled one another in the popular journals; and Mr. Vallory,

“My dear girl, I consider the mission of a tame cat quite a lofty one in its way; but you see it doesn't happen to be my way. A man who trains his whiskers as carefully as your cousin Weston, lays himself out for that sort of thing. Have you been far out?”

"We have been as far as the Wight. We went to the regatta at Ryde the other day, and had luncheon with the Filmers, who are intensely grateful for the villa."

the beginning to the end, had plenty to say about these things. He was a heavy, pompous kind of man, and Mr. Walgrave found his society a dead weight at all times; but never had he seemed so entirely wearisome as on this particular August evening, when less aristocratic Eastbourne was pacing the parade gayly, breathing the welcome breeze that set landward with the sinking of the sun.

"Not particularly. I have ridden a good deal." "With Weston ?''

"With Weston. You envy him that privilege, I suppose?" This with a little toss of the contemptuous head, and an angry flash of the fine black eyes. If Hubert Walgrave had been in love with his future wife, that little angry look would have seemed more bewitching to him than the sweetest smile of a plainer woman; but there was another face in his mind, eyes more beautiful than these, which had never looked at him angrily. He contemplated Augusta Vallory as coolly as if she had been a fine example of the Spanish school of portraiture a lady by Velasquez.

"Upon my honor, I think you grow handsomer every time I see you," he said; "but if you ask me whether I envy Weston the delight of riding through dusty lanes in August, I am bound to reply in the negative. Man is essentially a hunting animal, and to ride without anything to ride after seems to me unutterably flat. If we were in the shires now, in November, I should be happy to hazard my neck three or four days a week in your society."

"But you see it is not November; if it were, I have no doubt I should be told the duties of a barrister must prevent your wasting any time upon me during that month."

With such gentle bickerings the lovers beguiled the time until the ringing of the dressing bell, when Miss Vallory handed her affianced over to the custody of the chief butler,

lodging-house drawing-room, sitting on the creaky central ottoman contemplating his boots, while Mr. Vallory's voice droned drearily upon the subject of army reform, and "what we ought to do with our Armstrong guns, sir," and so on, and so on, his troubles sat heavy upon.

Weston came in presently, the very pink and pattern of neatness, with the narrowest possible white tie, and the air of having come to a dinner-party. He had slipt down by the afternoon express, he told his uncle, after his day's work in the city.

"There's an attentive nephew!" exclaimed Mr. Vallory, senior; "does a thorough day's work in the Old Jewry, and then comes down to Eastbourne to turn over the leaves of his cousin's music, while I take my after-dinner nap, and is off to the city at a quarter to eight in the morning, unless he's wanted here for yachting or riding. Take care he doesn't cut you out, Walgrave."

"If I am foredoomed to be cut out," Mr. Walgrave answered, with his most gracious smile, "Mr. Weston Vallory is welcome to his chance of the advantages to be derived from the transaction. But the lady who has honored me by her choice is, in my mind, as much above suspicion as Cæsar's wife ought to have been."

The young lady who was superior to Cæsar's wife came into the room at this moment, in the freshest and crispest of white muslin dresses, dotted about with peach-colored satin bows, just as if a flight of butterflies had alighted on it.

She gave Weston the coolest little nod of welcome. If he had really been a favorite Persian cat, she would have taken more notice of him. He had brought her some music, and a batch of new books, and absorbed her attention for ten minutes, telling her about them, at the end of which time dinner was announced, to Mr. Walgrave's infinite relief. He gave Augusta his arm, and the useful Weston was left to follow his uncle, caressing his whiskers meditatively as he went, and inwardly anathematizing Hubert Walgrave's insolence.

The dinner at Eastbourne was as the dinners in Acropolis Square. Mr. Vallory's butler was like Mr. Merdle's, and would not hate an ounce of plate for any consideration whatever; would have laid his table with the same precision, one might suppose, if he had been laying it in Pompeii the night of the eruption, with an exact foreknowledge that he and his banquettable were presently to be drowned in a flood of lava.

So the table sparkled with the same battalions of wineglasses; the same property tankards, which no one ever drank from, blazed upon the sideboard, supported by a background of presentation salvers; the same ponderous silver dishes went roun in ceremonial procession, with the entrées which Mr. Walgrave knew by heart.

Mr. Vallory's cook was a very accomplished matron, with seventy guineas a year for her wages; but she had not the inexhaustible resources of an Oude or a Gouffé, and Hubert Walgrave was familiar with every dish in her catalogue, from her consommé aux œufs to her apple-fritters. He ate his dinner, however, watched over with tender solicitude by the chief butler and his subordinates-ate his dinner mechanically, with his thoughts very far away from that seaside dining-room.

After dinner came music and a little desultory talk; a little loitering on the balcony, to watch the harvest moon rise wide and golden over a rippling sea; then a quiet rubber for the gratification of Mr. Vallory; then a tray with brandy and seltzer, sherry and soda, a glass of either refreshing mixture compounded languidly by the two young men; and then a general good-night.

"I suppose you would like to go out in the Arion tomorrow," Augusta said to her lover, as he held the drawingroom door open for her departure.

"I should like it above all things," replied Mr. Walgrave; and he did indeed feel as if, tossing hither and thither on that buoyant sea, he might contrive to get rid of some part of his burden.

"It is a species of monomania," he said to himself, "and I dare say is as much the fault of an overworked brain as an actual affair of the heart. Who can tell what form a man's punishment may take if he drives the intellectual steam-engine just a little too hard? The truth is, I want more rest, and complete change. I wish to Heaven I could get away to the Tyrol; but that's impossible; I am bound hand and foot, unless I like to fly in the face of fortune, and offend Augusta Vallory."

He did not fly in the face of fortune. He went out in the Arion on the next day, and the next, and even rode Weston's chestnut mare in the dusty lanes, to oblige Miss Vallory, while the owner of the beast sat in an office, where the thermometer was at seventy-five, writing rough drafts of letters to be copied by inferior hands, and interviewing important clients. They went to Pevensey Castle together, and dawdled about among the ruined walls. They went to Beachy Head, and heard wondrous stories of distressed barks and rescued cargoes from the guardians of the point.

They got rid of the days in a manner that ought to have been delightful to both of them, since they were almost always together, and Mr. Walgrave made himself more agreeable than usual.

This lasted for about ten days; but at the end of the tenth he discovered suddenly that he must go back to Cardimum versus Cardimum, and stuff his brain with more precedents; nor would he listen to any arguments which Miss Vallory could urge to detain him. She submitted, ultimately, and made no show of her regret; but she really was grieved and disappointed, for she was fonder of him than she cared to let him

see.

THE DISINHERITED.

SHE stood within her father's house,
An outcast from the hearth
Where she had passed her earliest years
In innocence and mirth.

Her mother died when she was born
Her father's dream was e'er
That she should be a noble's bride,
Or wed a millionaire.

But Ida chose a humbler mate-
An artist, good, but poor;
So, in his wrath, her father drove
His daughter from his door.

One effort more fair Ida strove
To bend her parent's will,
For though his harshness struck her heart,
He was her father still.

'Twas all in vain; a menial barred
Her way, and so she turned
Her footsteps to her husband's smile,
From her own homestead spurned.
But in their mutual love they find
An Eden here below,

And with pure heart and placid mind,
Go through life's weal and woe.

E WERE sitting at breakfast outside the Kursaal, on the Digne, at Ostend-my wife and I. She was frowning, as usual, and dreamily gazing at the smiling, happy faces around us. I was looking at her, and wondering, as I was always doing now, how I could ever have married her.

How? Heaven knows, not I, indeed! Such a thin, awkward creature as she was! So ugly, too, with her pale face and big black eyes, and jetty hair, brushed smoothly back from a broad, low forehead. I am sure that she looked far more like an overgrown schoolgirl than she did like a wife. She was a wife, thoughmine-otherwise I should not speak of her as I do.

I first met her at a country-house in Devonshire. She was barely seventeen then, and not a whit prettier than she was when we breakfasted together that sunshiny Summer morning five years later; not remarkably clever, either. Poor, too, quite poor and alone in the world, when I found her; that is to say, she had but a miserable little income of a few pounds, and no one to care for her except a gouty old guardian. But it was evident that his affection went hand in hand with selfishness, for, from the hour Cornelia Leighton became Cornelia Pemberton, she also became as one dead and buried to him. There was one door shut in our faces.

And as for me, why, when I, Julian Pemberton, a fine dashing young fellow of thirty, went down to that country-house for the Christmas holidays, I had not only a comfortable income, but prodigiously fine expectations. An orphan, with no nearer relative in the wide world than rich old Sir Hugh Ossory, my mother's cousin. I was that great man's acknowledged heir; moreover, I was betrothed to one of the handsomest women in England-Stella Talfourd. She, too, had been my uncle's ward, and, naturally enough, a marriage between us was projectednaturally enough, also, I suppose, the poor girl loved me with all the strength of a very strong and very ungovernable nature; whilst I-well, I might have married Stella if I had never seen Cornelia; but, unfortunately, I saw Cornelia, and she bewitched me. I use that word advisedly, for nothing short of witchcraft could have blinded me to Miss Leighton's manifold imperfections of mind, body, and estate.

To be brief, we married, I was disinherited, and in the begin