life no longer worth living for, in the very moment of finding out how much worth living it might have been..

Life not worth living? If he thought so for an instant, it was for an instant during which he ceased to be Gideon Skull. Copleston might no longer mean Helen, but it meant Victor Waldron still.

For a few moments he leaned over the fireplace, perfectly still. Then he began to tear up the letter, but before it was torn half across, changed his mind, and put it into the letter-case he carried in his breast-pocket, carefully and smoothly. He lighted a cigar, smoked about a quarter of it, and threw the rest away. Then, more heavily quiet than ever, he rang the bell and bade the servant tell Mrs. Skull that he wanted to speak to her, if she was disengaged.

Helen came.

"Who did you tell me it was," he asked, "who told you of the death of Alan?"

"Mr. Gray."

"Mr. Walter Gray?"

"Yes."

"Have you ever seen him since?

"I saw him nearly every day while you were from home."

He had looked for some sign of confusion, but he found none. He almost found it in his heart to admire her for the coolness with which she was playing her game-she could be no ordinary woman, after all. But after the first instant, when he was nearly surprised out of his own quietness by hers, her open confession only deepened his indignation. "I suppose," said he, "you have been expecting to hear something about Copleston all this while ?"

Then her face flushed, and he triumphed a little over her in finding that the name of the place disturbed her more than that of the man.

"I have been expecting it?" she said.

"All the better, as I shall not take you by surprise. To-morrow morning I go down, myself, to Copleston. I do not intend to deal with that blackguard-you know whom I mean-through lawyers. I have my reasons for meeting him face to face

"There is no need to tell me anything. If Copleston is yours, it must be yours."

"I'm glad you understand so much, any way. Yes, Copleston is mine. But I am not so unreasonable as you think in telling you my plans. You will come with me."

"I to Copleston? Do you want to torture me? No-I

cannot——"

"Torture you? What do you mean? I thought people always made a point of raptures when they revisit the scenes of their youth: Cari Luoghi, you know. I thought it was the right thing to do. And besides, as you'll have to live at Copleston for fifty years, if you live so long, you had better make a beginning. And I didn't say you were to come to Copleston. You will stay with my Uncle Christopher. My aunt must have the spare room ready, for once in a way."

"You cannot want me. I cannot go."

"I can quite understand that you may like to have London to yourself while I am gone. I, on the contrary, intend to keep you under my own eye-young wives ought not to be left alone, especially when they have a way of going out and not coming back again. Once is often enough to play that comedy. In short, I do not mean you to see Mr.-Walter Gray every day at Mrs. Green's while my back is turned."

"You dare to think- She began fiercely and bravely, but her words died suddenly on her tongue. And she herself knew well why such words on her lips had become merely the mocking echo of far-off days indeed. She never understood till that instant all the danger from which Walter Gray had been flying when he seemed to be only selfishly flying from her. But could he, she thought, have known all that Duty may come to mean?

"I most certainly dare to think," said Gideon, "that your place is with me. You may think it a misfortune-perhaps it is—but we can't mend misfortunes by calling them so. I go to Copleston to avoid the scandal that lawyers would be certain to turn into a most unpleasant lawsuit, and I don't choose to incur another scandal by leaving you at home. But all that's as outside the mark as a thing can be. The long and the short of it is, I mean you to come. And if you don't come—-—”

But the "if" meant nothing, now. Threats were no longer needed to break her spirit, which he saw was fairly broken at last-as he believed, by the Will which had given Copleston to him, and lost it to her. His triumph was beginning; if he had lost her heart, he could still crush it-and his own.

CHAPTER XXXI.

And if my life be hollow,

I'll choke it up with stones.

HILLSWICK and Copleston were in their full summer beauty when Mr. Waldron of Copleston took rooms at the "George" until the house of his ancestors could be got ready to receive him. Since he had, at the last moment, managed to turn aside from the edge of the precipice over which he had been rushing, he had tried hard to take a cool-headed view of life and its surroundings. He thought it quite possible for a man, with some right to be confident of his own strength, to feel deeply and keenly, and yet to separate his conscious and reasonable part from that region of his nature over which he could have no control. For Waldron, though desperately given to sudden impulse, did not believe in impulse as being altogether the best part of a man.

That he must give up all thought of Helen had come upon him like a sudden inspiration in the midst of impulse-even in the moment when temptation was strongest, and when sympathetic insight told him that her whole life was in his hands, to take or to leave. It seemed almost unaccountably strange that such a revulsion of feeling should have come to him exactly then,-as if the impulse to win her and the inspiration to save her from his own impulse were one and the same thing. Many people, it is to be hoped, will think it by no means strange that the moment in which a man first feels that he loves a woman above all things should be the instant in which he first learns that he must cut out his own heart for her sake, if need be.

But he was a bad self-analyst, like most people, when the self with whom he had to do was a new one, only distantly related to the old. And he was not the first man who has been bewildered by being saved from wrong-doing by an influence that has seemed, when remembered, to be apart from himself and to have come he knew neither whence nor how.

He had not exaggerated the difficulties of his first letter to Helen; and, when it was written, he felt dissatisfied with it from beginning to end. It was a great deal too long. It amounted to offering a settlement of money to one to whom such an offer must sound almost like an insult unless her insight should prove a great deal more subtle and penetrating than he could venture to believe. Such an offer could not be made otherwise than grossly and clumsily, and

yet it amounted not alone to the only, but to the best, help he could give her. All the delicacy and the poetry of his relation with her appeared to be altogether on the side of wrong-it would have been so easy to have offered her his whole life: it was so difficult to offer her only a yearly income. Then there was so much in the letter about this gross sort of help, and so little about hope and courage and all that may help the loneliest and weakest to bear the heaviest burdens--we are all shy of preaching, even in season; and our own sermons are so empty to us, when it is we who need them. Altogether, he was dissatisfied. But he could do no better, so he let the letter go. Perhaps she would understand it, after all, and be able to read a little between the lines.

He

He did not, however, feel that he needed any excuse to himself for accepting the responsibility of Copleston with a good grace instead of shirking it and running away from it with a bad one. He could not feel it a misfortune for place and people that it was in his hands instead of Gideon Skull's. As he had said in his letter, he could not make matters better by making the worst of them. did not feel in the least fitted for the life of an English squire, and his original views of making Hillswick and Copleston into a centre of energy, intelligence, and true republican example for the whole of the old country had faded away with a better knowledge of the capacity of those places for such things. But he did know that the man who waits to find something he can do before he does something, waits long, and mostly does nothing in the end. For Helen's sake, he must not let Copleston go to the dogs because it had fallen back into the hands of one of the old Waldrons instead of continuing in those of the new Reids. He was no such lusus naturæ as an American without family pride. If he could only feel that he was working a little for Helen-if only he could make his own life full, without feeling that hers must for ever remain empty and cold!

I do not know that the plans he sat brooding over at the "George" would, for all their good intentions, have met with unqualified approval among those for whose benefit they were being laid. There was the Curate, for instance, the Reverend Christopher Skull, to whose thorough-going and systematic incompetence the people were as accustomed as to the church tower, but who struck the American squire as a piece of waste stuff that ought as quickly as possible to be carted away. As patron of the living, he had very different views as to the man who should succeed to the cure of souls in Hillswick, so soon as the absentee Rector or the Curate-in-Charge should be considerate enough to die off and make room. Somebody

with whom he could work, he would look for--somebody who could give him counsel, and keep his active energies alive who would wake up Hillswick into life—it scarcely mattered what especial form of life, so long as it should be life of some kind. He might not be able to make Hillswick much more intelligent, but he would at any rate manage to ensure an educated instead of an ignorant stupidity. He would take a hand at school teaching himself, and scatter conventional routine to the winds. He would become a justice of the peace, of course, and in that capacity would wage war less against criminals than against the causes of crime, including the satellitium. of beer-houses that clustered round the "George." And so on, and so on if Hillswick could not be made the capital of a great social and political influence (and there was really no If in the matter), it should at any rate be made a model country parish, of which Helen Reid would be pleased to hear, should news from her old home ever come to her.

Two or three rooms of Copleston were soon made habitable, and in these, with a few servants, he felt himself destined to live for the rest of his days. He knew that he had become a monk without the vows, and that Hillswick must henceforth become his whole world of action for the remainder of his life. It is very easy to welcome the prospect of such lives when the outlook is new: one knows beforehand that the settled plans will in due course of time become fixed habits, harder to break than they were to form.

He had made all the proper calls, and could not help feeling conscious that his coming was a nine-days' wonder. But he could not complain of any want of welcome from high or low. Copleston had been uninhabited long enough for the people to be used to its emptiness; but they were only too glad to have once more among them a natural leader of society. And, when that leader came in the person of a man and a Waldron, young, rich, handsome, unmarried-in short, everything that a man ought to be, and with a romance about his inheritance so obscure that gossip might fall upon it with a new appetite for all time to come-then he came in the person of a lion and a hero.

From this point of view, the only unsatisfactory visit he paid was to the Reverend Christopher Skull. The Curate's manner struck everybody who did not know him well as being rather odd, and it only confirmed Victor in his intention of getting him to resign his charge as soon as possible. Every subject of conversation he started was instantly dropped by the Curate as if it were a hot coal. It was after this call that he again came across his old instructor in the art