except out loud, and I will hear nothing except what is said out loud.

I'd say it still plainer, if I knew how. to-day; but when you do give it

must give it to-day, and here, and now."

You needn't give your answer

No; on second thoughts, you

"Very well, then; I will, since you will have it so," said Victor. "This is my answer-take it as you please." The angry heat in him, to which every word of Gideon's had been fuel, burst out at last. He took the will, tore it across and across, and threw the pieces into the blaze of the fire.

Helen turned almost sick at the sight of what she could only take for sheer madness of greed when driven to bay. Gideon, for the first time in his life, turned pale.

you must be. That

"Are you mad?" he burst out. "By is a will. Do you know what it means in this country to destroy a will? Uncle Christopher, I call on you to bear witness that Victor Waldron has committed felony. Ay, and useless felony, after all," he said, in a voice strangely unlike his own, that trembled with scorn. "There are other ways of proving the contents of a will that can be proved to have been destroyed, if I know anything of the law."

"And I say it was no will," said Victor; "and if it were, you tell me yourself that nobody knows its contents but you and me. I know what I am doing, Gideon Skull, and you know it too. You had better say no more."

The two men faced one another silently. Helen could only see in them two wild beasts fighting over a carcass, with force for teeth and fraud for claws. Gideon looked dark, stubborn, and hard; Victor eager and angry-almost as if he still persuaded himself that he was carried away by zeal in a just cause, instead of by madness in an infamous one. They were wolf and vulture, thought she.

But suddenly the fire died out in Victor's eyes, and he spoke as calmly as if he were speaking to a circle of friends, with the eyes still bent upon Gideon which had not as yet even once turned towards her.

"And now," he said, "I will say my own say. Gideon Skull, it is well for you that no eyes have seen that paper but your own and your wife's and your uncle's and mine. You know, as well as I, why you took care that this should be so, and why, in destroying the paper, I did you the best service man could do to man. I meant to have let you destroy it yourself, but I had to do it for you, as you would not let me see you alone. We will say no more about that; let it go. Yes, let it go, as I let Copleston go. Miss Reid-Mrs.

At last his eyes turned, and looked full into hers. How could they dare to meet hers without shame ? But they did so meet hers, even with the reverse of shame.

"From the day when, by your father's grave, you declared that there could be nothing but War for ever-War to the knife-between you and me, it became the wish of my life that something should happen to make you know me, and how much I value all the land in Britain when it means War-with you. You would not listen to me when I tried to speak a word. Alan was like iron with pride-for his mother and for you. I do think, before he died, he knew that Walter Gray was not the man to care for Copleston only because it meant so many pounds a year. I hoped, when I found you did not recognise me, to make you feel like him. Well, it was a vain hope: as soon as you knew I was Victor Waldron you But perhaps you will know when, for your sake and Alan's sake, and I hope for right's sake, I think so little of Copleston for my own sake as to let it go to-but you know what I mean by that. Only understand that I might keep it if I pleased. Understand, if you please, that I defy all the lawyers in England to prove the paper I have just destroyed. From the very beginning it was never worth more than it is now. . . If I had seen it three days ago, I should have admitted it: but you would have thought to the end of your life that I had surrendered because I found fighting impossible, and not of my own free will. . . . You would have received Copleston from other hands than mine. Thank God, that is not to be. I, who have done all this evil-it is Victor Waldron who has been permitted to give you back Copleston. . . . Here is your father's Will."

He had held a folded paper while speaking; he now rose, came to Helen, and placed it quietly in her hands.

"You need not read it now," said he. "You may be sure-till you read it—that it is as I say. Old Grimes, who has a taste for documents and antiquities, found it in the lumber-chest the Reverend Mr. Skull speaks of, and with his characteristic honesty-brought it to me, whom it very decidedly concerns. I have shown it to a lawyer at Deepweald; there is no doubt about its being your father's will; that will which the evidence of the Reverend Mr. Skull goes amply to prove. I admit it—and my admission is everything, so I am advised. You will see that-like the will I have destroyed-it leaves every thing to Alan, with charges for your mother and yourself, and, in case of his dying childless, then to you and yours. And now-one word more; and I will say it before your husband as I would before all the world. . . . It is no grief or loss to me to

lose Copleston; but it does rub my skin up the wrong way to leave it to Gideon Skull-for he says rightly that, under this will, that is his which is yours. . . . But I think we have all learned one lesson, anyhow. My way to improve upon Providence would have been to throw this will behind the fire, and to pay half my income by way of blackmail to old Grimes. I can't see what good can come from Gideon Skull's being owner of Copleston; and I think I see a considerable amount of good that I could have done. . . . It's not so easy to give up the whole thing, when I had made up my mind to make the best of it, now that the time is come; and I could have turned fraud into duty without more than half shutting one eye; and have taken the part of Providence, which is a long way above the part of law. . . . Well, I don't; that's all. Perhaps I'm afraid of committing a felony; perhaps of being found out in one; perhaps I'm only a fool; perhaps—but anyhow, there's Copleston, for you— and Gideon. . . . I don't think, Mrs. Skull, you'll mind for one minute taking a hand that gives you Copleston-and that will never offend you again."

She did not know of the letter he had written her, or she would have understood him a great deal more; for every word he had spoken to her needed that letter for its interpretation. He did not know that it had never reached her hands, or he would not have been meeting what he deemed her pride and her coldness with greater coldness and pride. There was pride even in the way he held out his hand. She let him take hers-and then something, more subtle than anything which has a name, ran from eyes to eyes, and told them more than can be told in words. No written letter was needed to tell her how and why he was giving up wealth and power, even as he had given up passion. It was certainly not because he was afraid of felony; he had not been thinking of that sort of law.

Somehow, he seemed so to speak his next words to her that, though others were by, they reached her ears alone. At least, she heard them plainly, though neither her husband nor his uncle appeared to hear.

"It is hard to compel you to give Copleston to Gideon Skull. I would have kept it to save you from that, though it is not my own. But do what you ought,' you know; if Providence wants helping through, that seems like the way. I've given you something to live for now. For Alan's sake, be a real wife to the master of Copleston, and make him what the master of Copleston ought to be. You can do it, and there's nobody to do it but you. I have lived to help you, after all."

"Gideon-you have made me, a magistrate and a clergymanMe," she heard her husband's uncle stammering, with a sketch of real indignation in his voice, when Waldron had gone-"you have made me commit Perjury-you have made me swear to a false Will! I can forgive most things, Gideon—almost everything; when you came back to us, as I hoped and trusted, like the Prodigal, I remembered nothing against you; I and your Aunt Sarah and your Aunt Anne received you as if you had been our own son. We forgave everything. But to make me a tool to help you to commit Forgery -No! Gideon-I will never speak to you again."

"Forgery!" said Gideon, fiercely. "Forgery!--to make a fair copy of a real Will? Are you crazy, Uncle Christopher-or a fool? How was I to know that that scoundrel had found what you had hidden away? Was my wife to lose Copleston because you were a fool? Forgery! It was the remedy of accident and error for the sake of justice-it was what the Courts of Equity have to do every day. . . . I will not have my honesty slandered-no; not even by you!"

CHAPTER XXXIV.

A ghostly flight are they that rise
Around the rock-hewn wall:
Yet none, by pennon and devise,
May fail to name them all-

By Sword, or Scrip, or Bleeding Heart
Held high, that all may see:

Hard round that castle do their part

That phantom chivalry.

Which come as friends? and which as foes?

Which banners lose or win?

More wise than man is he who knows,

Till All have entered in !

GIDEON SKULL had nailed the colours of Honesty to the mast. He had certainly been detected in what looked, from the outside, like an exceedingly ugly piece of business; but it was impossible for a man in whom honesty was a passion to perceive that to replace a lost document could be called Forgery by anybody but an imbecile curate or a straw-splitting attorney. He could place his hand upon. his heart, and dare anybody to say that, throughout the whole course of this history, he had ever told a single lie. If others had allowed themselves to be deceived by the bare, literal truth, which he made it his pride and his boast to tell, that was surely the fault of their own

stupidity, for which he could not be held accountable. The will he had put forward, though—from unavoidable necessity-written, signed, and executed by his own hand, was as true and honest a will as that which his uncle had hidden and old Grimes had found. He felt himself as much beyond reproach in this business as in that of his marriage with Helen. He had never told her that he was actually a

rich man, and he had honestly believed that he was going to be one. And so, in the matter of the will, it was his uncle who had chosen to swear to its genuineness; and he was not his uncle's keeper.

And, forger or no forger, he had won Copleston after all—thanks to Mrs. Reid's violent effort to straighten what seemed the crooked lines of the world instead of following their curves.

He had won it-but the bitterness of the prize! Tragedy had entered into the life even of Gideon Skull.

He had come down to Hillswick, full of all zeal of revenge in the name of justice, and of greed in the name of passion. Never, since the world was made, had a man found Love, Hate, Revenge, Self-Interest, Justice, Pride of Will, Copleston, Waldron, Helen, Self -in a word, all Right and all Passion-so completely blended in one; so that he might gratify all his desires by one single word or touch without feeling his especial kind of conscience one whit disturbed. All his wishes and principles had been turned loose into a masquerade with licence to wear one another's masks and dominoes as chaotically as they pleased. He might picture himself to himself as a man who, inflamed by a righteously indignant sense of having been wronged, and by a sense of justice so exalted as to place him above all personal considerations, had come to thrust out a usurper and to reinstate a rightful heir as a true and faithful knight who, for his lady's sake, had vowed to regain Copleston: as a husband generously bent upon showing his wife that he was the true and the strong man-her romantic and sentimental lover to be a sneak and a cur. How could he help it, that the unscrupulous doing of complete justice meant his own gain?

:

A first and unsatisfied passion in such a man, heightened, strengthened, and deepened by every belief and instinct that has part in him, is no child's play. Copleston was indeed his and hers. But it had not come to her from him. It had come to her straight from Victor Waldron. Volumes could not tell what this meant to him. It was the lover who had come out as the faithful and generous knight: while it had been himself who had been made to look a liar and a felon in Helen's eyes. Most people would