as told me that you are not a happy woman.

Alan could never

have become an unhappy man, because he did not look upon happiness as the end of living, or as worth going out of one's main road to look for. He taught me a great many lessons during the little while we were together. And, somehow, I had taken it into my head that he had learned the best of them from you."

"Were he and you very dear friends?" asked Helen.

"Very dear friends. I know at least that he is 'very dear to me. Did he never mention me in his letters home?”

"He never wrote home."

"Why, to my own knowledge, he never wrote a letter to his newspaper without sending at least a line to his mother or you. Do you mean his letters never reached you? How could that be?" "They never reached us.

Not one."

"But that sounds impossible. Surely they would not neglect to forward his letters to you? They knew your address, I suppose?" "They were asked for constantly by Ah, I see!" she exclaimed. "After all, what harm can there be in robbing a mother of her son's letters, when it may be the means of getting a little more money? However it is as well to know everything. . . . . I was asking if you and Alan were very dear friends, and you were telling me that you were. Did he tell you any part of his story-what he had lost, and how?"

"Yes: I know all that. Nobody better than I."

"And you tell me that he was not even unhappy?"

"He was not the man to sit down and cry over a lost fortune. No."

"A fortune!—who would cry over the loss of such a thing? Of course, I don't know how far men tell one another things that girls talk over. Did he never speak to you of what losing Copleston meant to him? Did he never tell his nearest friend that he lost the love that would have made up for all, because he was too proud to tell a lady that he loved her, for fear she should throw herself away upon a nameless and penniless man?"

"I never heard him speak of that is that true?"

"So, you see how much you know about whether he was unhappy

or no.

Perhaps you don't know much more about him than you know of me, Mr. Gray. That he hid his secret in his heart, I can well understand. He would not wear his heart upon his sleeve. It is not hard, I should think, for a man to whom every day brings new duties that concern his head and his hands, to fill up his whole time with them, and to carry a brave face to the world. I am only a woman.

No day brings me any small duties: and a duty can't mean something to be borne: it must mean something to be done. You expected to find a happy, contented, energetic woman in one who is fatherless, motherless, brotherless, nameless, with nothing left for her to do, with no means of doing it if there were, without a friend or a belief in friends, with no faith in herself, who has thrown away all the little good there ever was in her for the sake of-nothing. You were good enough to ask if you could help me. I believe you mean what you say for to-day; and there is certainly nothing that you can expect to gain by me. But what can you do?"

"Nothing great, I fear. But-for Alan's sake—”

"For Heaven's sake, say anything but that! You don't know what that means!"

"I don't know what you mean. But when I say 'for Alan's sake' I know what I mean. For Alan's sake-there must be many little things I can do, in the merest business way, while you are still in London alone. You will be joining him, I suppose-your husband, I mean ?"

"I don't even know where he is gone. But I should not join him, even if I did know. I married Mr. Skull because he was rich: it is not to be supposed that I should go to him when he turns out to be poor. Surely you, as a man of the world, would not expect a woman who is not an idiot to do anything so absurd."

"Mrs. Skull," said Victor, slowly and deliberately, "I was only introduced to you yesterday, so that I owe you, I suppose, the usual courtesy that is due to a stranger. You are also a woman, so it is doubly hard to say to you any but smooth things. Nevertheless, I will be uncourteous enough to tell you, a woman and a stranger, and my friend's sister, that I do not believe one single word you say."

He gave every word its full weight, for he meant to strike fire out of her if he could, and to provoke her out of her impracticable and cynical mood. He did not believe that she had married Gideon Skull for money; and he was quite sure that, if she had, she would not have made a point of telling a stranger so, as if to take a man for being rich and to desert him so soon as he became poor were matters for boasting over. But he was to be mistaken once more.

"Thank you," said Helen simply. "Why should you believe anything I say? Why should you speak as if unbelief in a strange woman were anything strange? I should think it very strange indeed if you did believe."

"Very well-since we are to talk as plainly as we like," said Victor, a little hotly, "I do not mean to be played with in that sort

of way. You know perfectly well that you did not marry-your husband-because you wanted to be a rich woman: and if you don't know it, I do. And you know perfectly well that you do not talk of your husband to me like that because he is poor. And you know just as well that if you said to me what was really true, or in any way likely to be true, I should believe your words just as if they were Alan's or my own: just as I expect you to believe me, whatever I say. I was your brother's friend, and therefore I want to be yours. Are friends so scarce that you can afford to play with them like that, and then toss them away? I don't want to know the whole truth about your life-that is no business of mine unless you like to make it so : but nothing but the truth I will have, for it is my due as the last man who heard your brother speak or held him by the hand."

Assuredly Helen had never been thus spoken to since she had been born: never had Victor been driven to speak thus to any woman. To all seeming he was impudently intrusive, rough, and rude, and with no shadow of real reason for interfering with her concerns. But though the real motive of his interest in her was hidden from her sight, it was as real, even in expression, as interest could be; and no one could look for an instant at Victor and suppose that he would forget the most conventional deference due to a woman without ample cause. He looked like a knight-no longer like the mere carpet knight of Hillswick Bell-tower-and he spoke like one, for all that his were not knightly words. He was in earnest, at any rate : for to make Alan's sister find her knight in her supposed enemy had grown from a wish and a dream into an eager desire-and how could he be the knight of this new Helen, unless he could unmask the old? And do you know," said she, "how good it is to find somebody alive who is determined to believe in one, without knowledge and without cause? Yes, there is something that-for Alan's sakeyou can do for me: something worth doing. Believe that I meant to do right, for his sake, once upon a time; and that if I do nothing now but sit down and drift-anywhere or nowhere-it is because there is no right left me to try to do."

"There is always right left," said he. "But that does not concern to-day. What are you going to do-now, I mean?"

"Indeed, I don't know."

"You will be hearing from your husband, I suppose ? And meanwhile-"

"Whatever I hear from him will be nothing to me"But it must be something to you." Somehow he felt as if, in this second passage of arms between them, it was he who had got

the upper hand, and as if he might reckon upon keeping it so long as he dispensed with formal courtesies. "Of course, I don't know what has happened between you, and I don't want to know. But it is clear that you must wait to hear from him; you must not leave this house; perhaps he will come back to it, and is not really gone. Whatever you feel about him, his affairs are in your hands until you hear from him. Perhaps the remains of his credit depend upon your remaining here. Don't trouble yourself about business; I will see to all that, so far as you are concerned. I am an idler in London, with nothing on earth to do"

A servant came in with a note, which had never been through the post, and gave it to Helen. She read it, and handed it to Victor. He read

"I meant to have been back to-night, but am detained. I have my reasons for not wishing you to know where I am until I return with good news. You will not be troubled while I am away. I have communicated with those Greek scoundrels, and they, for their own sakes, will hold their hands. It will pay them better to put me on my legs again than to throttle me while I lie with empty pockets on the ground. I wish I had seen you before leaving; but it is better so. I may be back any day, but it depends on many things. I have only now to tell you that I was never so certain of everything as I am now. Go on in all ways as you are; and if anybody inquires after me, refer them to Messrs. Aristides & Sinon.-G."

"What ought I to do?" asked she.

Victor hardly noticed her question or its change of tone. He felt himself to be so much in the right that her sudden trust in him seemed less like the result of a battle without smoke or fire than the most right and natural of relations between him and the sister of Alan Reid.

"As he tells you," he said. Stay here, and make no change. that may make matters less bad than they seem. Though it is true that Gideon Skull was always a sanguine man-at least, so I have been told by those who knew him in America. You must stay here, anyhow. There is nothing else you can do. If you are troubled about anything, send to me; you have my card. comes back, or if he sends for you.

"There is nothing else to be done. Evidently something has happened

When he

"If I would not go to him when he is poor, do you think I would go to him when he became rich ?" asked she.

He made his parting a pretext for taking and bending over her hand. He might be the knight of the true Helen, after all.

w

CHAPTER XXVII.

Julian.-I scorn such dull, cold prating-Dust that's rasped
By saws, harsh grinding on the shuddering heart
Of tortured saplings, when their sap is dry.
Prudence!-Fiends take the word, for 'tis their own

Whereby they conjure. In the larger scale
Lowest is Prudence, Law one breadth above,

Loftiest is Liberty,

Who knows no Prudence and transcends o'er Law
As Heaven transcends o'er Earth and sees not Hell.
Such is my creed.

Andreas.

Ay: Thine and Phaethon's,

Who, scorning Earth, set Moon and Stars on fire.

NEVERTHELESS, it must have been either a very wilful instinct, or else a miraculously keen one, that enabled Victor Waldron to recognise any traces of Helen Reid in the wife of Gideon Skull. As for her, she did not even comprehend, when he left her, that she had been brought into contact with a visitor from a new world. She could only know that she was utterly worn out with a lost battle, the course of which she was too tired to try to understand. She fancied she had scarcely energy enough left wherewith to loathe the man who had tricked her into the sacrifice of all that a woman has to give, knowing all the while that he for whom alone she made it was beyond the reach of its good and of its evil alike, and only-as it seemed to her-that he might through her step into her dead brother's shoes. How could she dream that Copleston had hitherto been but an excuse for passion? And, if she could have known it, it would only have given her almost enough energy for loathing him even to the fulness of her heart's desire.

Victor could not guess how much of mere weariness there was in her final submission to him at the close of their interview, nor she that there could be anything more. She could understand that Alan had been really dear to him, and this was enough to give him some sort of place apart from the rest of the world. He could not, therefore, be quite on the level where men think of nothing but getting the better of their neighbours. For she believed in Alan still. A man whom Alan had taken for a comrade would not have robbed widows and orphans like Victor Waldron, or have trafficked in a woman's soul like Gideon Skull. Such a man would probably draw the line somewhere before quite reaching such things as these-at least, unless the temptation to do them became exceptionally strong. But, after all, except as having been the last to take her brother's