with overwhelming agitation. As I sat thus, he opened the door suddenly, and I rose and stood trembling before him. It was the forerunner of an illness, which made me more than ever his care. He was so solicitous for me, so tenderly patient towards my father, whose petulant anxiety could not be soothed. He was with us daily, and spent all the time he could spare from his professional duties at our house; he exerted himself to interest and amuse me; he opened for us more liberally the treasures of his memory and reflection; he gained over us a stronger mastery and authority.

Then there arose a fiercer and more solemn contest. I no longer dared to deny to myself the fatal love that degraded me; but never for an instant did I lower the lofty standard of womanly virtue and purity round which half of my nature rallied in the desperation of a betrayed cause, and which he, by many casual words and by his true manliness, planted more firmly. The me of my conscious existence seemed to lose its personality in a duality of natures: one yearning, craving after excellence and inward rectitude, the other degraded, impassioned, chained down to sin and shame; neither could be appeased or vanquished. Hour after hour I knelt, till my clasped hands and bended knees grew cramped with the tension of their attitude; but I could seldom pray, for to utter his name even then was to float away from the subject of my petition into dreams and reveries of my forbidden love. If I ever grew strengthened by prayer, when he came every thought was swallowed up in an intense desire to please him, to win his admiration and love; a desire which, in his absence, filled me with self-loathing and abhorrence.. Thus the conflict raged and reigned within me, till I counted my life utter wretchedness.

Still the daily routine of life went on unbrokenly. Dr. Gilbert visited us constantly, exercising over us his quiet and friendly sway, and treating me with a half-fatherly, half-brotherly regard; while I tried to behave myself towards him with the assumed vivacity of a careless girl. Music and singing passed away the evening hours, they two sitting by the fireside and listening peacefully. Sometimes when I accompanied the doctor to the door, and answered his paternal good night, and returning thence to the sitting-room to find my father with our old family Bible before him, where was that register of our lineage for three centuries, I longed to confess to him my burden of sorrow. But how could I tell him that Joanna, whom he had loved next to me, and whose death was the last woman's death recorded in our pedigree, had violated the inherited and sacred purity of our name in the sight of men, while I stood her sister in guilt in the sight of God. I cannot describe to you that first time when I stood face to face with death; when there befell me the only bereavement with which mortality could then threaten me. My father died, and in the presence of our last, majestic enemy, the voice of every other foe was stilled for a time; there was a great calm, in which the one vast wave of sanctified sorrow swept over the undercurrent of

earthly passion. But it was not for ever; the lapse of time brought again to me both consolation and temptation. Dr. Gilbert was my father's sole executor, and I was left in his guardianship. If before my father's will and pleasure had detained me in my scene of temptation, now his authority, whom I dreaded to gainsay, was the one that ruled my actions, and might reasonably demand my motives. He provided a companion and chaperon for me in an aged relative of his own, whose residence with me gave repute to his continued visits. Still, when he rode past I knew I must expect him on his return, though it might be merely for a busy hour of abstracted investigation of my father's papers, from which he could snatch only a few minutes for the discussion of a book or the unreserved utterance of the noble thoughts that occupied him. Again the tumult swelled within my soul; he would have led me to the excellence I yearned for, but I placed him between me and the standard to which he pointed.

Then there came a day when all the morning I had fought desperately with the demon that possessed me, and there was no strength left in me. As the afternoon wore on, I wandered away despairingly, as Cain might have wandered with his solitary curse in the untrodden plains of the old world. I was out, unwittingly, on the uplands; a sultry air brooded heavily upon the land, and deepened the ominous silence of the solitude; and in the north a pile of lurid clouds raised their threatening and serrated battlements into the narrowing vault of sky. Not far beyond the spot where I first met Dr. Gilbert stood two Norwegian pines, the only trees within the range of sight; one had been barked and split by a thunder-storm the summer before, and now pointed mockingly with its bleached fingers to the electric clouds; the other began to groan and wave its beckoning arms under the pioneer breeze. I hurried on with a hopeless wish that it might attract the lightning as its scathed fellow had done, for an accidental death, so I said to myself in my madness, would be better than the life I led. I threw my arms round the rough tree, and with hidden face listened recklessly for the first roll of the thunder. That was not the sound that drove away the silence: it was his voice; he had followed me unheard and unseen.

"Alice," he said, "what folly is this? begins."

Come home before the storm

"I will not come home," I cried, turning to him with gloomy defiance. "Home!" I repeated; "where is it? I have had no home since father died."

my

"You do not know what you are saying, Alice," he answered; “you are exciting yourself."

"I mean what I say," I replied; "to be sure, there is an empty house down there in the valley which you and the world call my home; but there is no one there to care for and to love. Oh, I cannot bear loneliness as you do, who are strong. Don't mock me by telling me to go home."

Dr. Gilbert's face grew grayer in the gathering darkness, and then he spoke vehemently, but in muttered tones, as if the listening air upon the desolate hill-top would catch the words and trumpet them to the world.

"Alice, you compel me to speak, though for months I have kept down my secret with a heavy hand. It is your folly that makes me own that I, your guardian, your father's trusted friend, have forfeited my honour, and love you, Alice,-my little Alice, my true, innocent, guileless child."

In the deep, oppressive gloom, with the muffled booming of the thunder rolling towards us, he muttered this avowal, which brought to me no release from suffering, no accession of joy or peace, but laid upon me a heavier burden.

"O God!" I said, but I addressed neither God nor him, only some vague, inexorable fate that I could not comprehend,-"O God! is this love really evil?”

As I spoke the citadel of thunder opened its embrasures, and a broad flash of lightning, dropping globes of fire, shot across the leaden sky. Dr. Gilbert's horse, with a scream of terror, broke its fastening, and bounded madly down the hill, while I leaned, shuddering, against the tree, till he passed his arm round me and bore me hurriedly towards his home, followed by horrific peals of thunder, like the rolling of the chariot-wheels of an infuriated and powerful pursuer. Soon we reached his door, breathless and exhausted, and stayed for a minute to watch the floods of rain that began to pour from the accumulated clouds, forgetting momentarily, in the war without, the words that had passed between us under the Norwegian pines. But presently the guilty recollection came. I withdrew from his side by an instinctive impulse and seated myself in the farthest corner of the sitting-room, while he, miserable and consciencesmitten, leaned against the fireplace, where the gloomy twilight threw a ghastly and discoloured shade around him. Not a word was spoken by either of us; the thunder still pealed through the valley and against the resounding hills, but most terrible to me was the mental echo of that avowal which had cast down the surest barrier between myself and sin. I would have given my life then to have been assured that he did not love me.

"You will hate me now," he said at last, bitterly, "you will shrink from me; there is no more solace of companionship for me. I thought I should neutralise to myself the temptation and charm of your presence when I told you Joanna was yet alive; but I did not. Every day there was some new fitness, something in harmony with me. Yet more than all I loved your goodness, that which will now condemn me."

Reluctantly, but as if irresistibly, I dragged myself to his side, and looking up into his steady eyes, as if I gained strength from them, I told him all; how I had loved him first, and still loved him, against honour and peace and conscience. While I confessed in broken sentences the

conflict and the humiliation I suffered, the storm without subsided, and a low wailing wind moaned by gusts under the eaves. Dr. Gilbert maintained a silence which extorted from me all my oppressive secret. I felt a

"I must be good," I said pleadingly, when I finished. longing for his strong arms to be clasped round my trembling and exhausted frame; yet when he stretched them out to me, involuntarily I shrank away from him. He saw and understood the gesture of recoiling, with the weakness that accompanied it, and he drew a chair for me to his side.

"Alice," he said, "you must not be afraid of me. I have not so long and intimately contemplated the miseries of this crime to plunge you into them. Dear girl, you feel that I am stronger than you; and you have so implicitly yielded to my influence, that you are fearful of yourself and me. I will not hinder you from attaining the excellence you crave. You need not distrust me; I will save you from my own love." "May I go home?" I asked.

"You said you had no home when I found you on the hill. This ought to be your home, here, where I sit solitary day by day, with no voice of wife or child to fall upon my ear. Joanna is dead to me, yet horribly alive. This morning I had a letter from my wife, Alice; a begging letter. Alice, no one in the world knows I have a wife living except us three, and she would never meddle."

If he ever wavered from the set purpose of his resolute will, it was then when he glanced round on his solitary hearth, and his eyes rested upon me, as lonely as himself. I saw deep down in them how his soul, looked out eagerly for some sufficient subterfuge, and for a moment they kindled with a hope that died away before my earnest gaze.

"God knows," he said sadly, "it gives me no pleasure to know that you love me. If I stood alone in the conflict, I could conquer myself; but every look of yours enfeebles and betrays me. You must go, Alice."

"Yes," I answered, rising instantly, "I must go home now; and you will see me again to-morrow. We will return to our old life; we will never mention this again."

"Child," he replied, almost with a smile, "you do not understand yourself or me. It is impossible for us to return to the old life with this consciousness between us. While I was afraid of repelling you, I could keep guard and control over myself; but now that I know every word or look of love from me will make your heavy heart glad, I shall learn to lavish them upon you. You have no ties here except this one, which must be severed at once. I will find you a home at a distance from me. I cannot take upon me the responsibility of your soul also."

He spoke in a voice of irrevocable decision, which dismayed me, as if I were come to the very moment of my banishment. Seeing it, he smoothed away my hair which had fallen over my forehead, and for the only time pressed upon it a long and ardent kiss. My face crimsoned at the unwonted caress.

"You see it cannot be," he said gravely; "if I send you away now, Alice, you may by and by meet with some one you can love without blame. Thus far you need not be ashamed to own this mistake, this innocent error, this affection born of inevitable circumstances. love, you cannot stay."

Dear

"You don't know what it will be to me," I cried; "I never have been altogether alone, with no one to tell me what to do. Life is very wretched to all of us. Why does God let Joanna live to be a curse to every body? And how is it I cannot help loving you, if the love be evil?"

Dr. Gilbert gave me no answer, but wrapped my shawl round me, and led me out into the last gleam of twilight, still lingering above a bank of thunder-clouds in the west, which smouldered with fitful fires, that lighted us on our way homewards. When we reached my cottage he did not tarry at the door, or in the lobby, but led me immediately into the parlour beyond, where his aunt sat placidly beside a newly-lit fire. She greeted us with a smile as we entered.

"Benson told me Alice was with you, Francis," she said; "he saw you at your own door, or I should have been very anxious about her. I knew she would be safe under your care."

"We have been detained by the storm and business," he replied; "I had some affairs to arrange with her. It is necessary for her to see more of the world than she can do down here; and I have decided that she shall go to my friends the Fosters, in London. Their daughter is just married, and Alice may stay with them for years, if she will. You must go with her, and settle her there, aunt."

The old lady bent her eyes scrutinisingly upon us both, and appeared to come to a sudden decision of her own.

"My dears," she said, "don't let there be any misunderstanding between you now. I have held my peace all the while, believing you would both act wisely, without my interference. But I can guess whose fault it is. Alice, if you suppose Francis cannot love you right truly, because he has mourned so long and grievously for Joanna, you judge like a foolish girl. Is he to have no more happiness at all on earth because he buried the first promise of it in India years ago? He does love you, Alice; I've seen it ever since I came here. And all the neighbours see it, and tell me how glad they are that Dr. Gilbert will be married again; they think it is a settled thing, and that you are only waiting to leave off your mourning. Don't throw away your happiness and his for a girl's whim. He is a good, tender-hearted, honourable man, and worthy of a princess."

She did not know how keenly she probed the open wounds.

"Aunt," answered Dr. Gilbert, "you are mistaken. You know that I never intended to enter into a second marriage."

"Then you ought not to have come here so constantly, Francis Gilbert," she replied. "If any one else had said it of you, I would not have