enjoyment was delayed for five hundred and forty-eight days. And all those days, except a few hours now and then in the presence of her lover, were worn away in a restless agony of suspense; and with each of those cruel days was worn away and lost forever a portion of her youth, her innocence, her gentleness, and her trust.

After a time she grew fairly callous to charges of filial ingratitude and of breaking her father's and mother's heart. Who showed any gratitude to her lover for his forbearance and chivalrous courtesy? Who cared about breaking her heart? She defied their warnings of the inevitable remorse which would soon dispel her dream of happiness. Let her have the happiness first, and she would bear the remorse afterward.

Hereupon she flew at the domestic inquisidors, and upbraided them for their cruelty. Why was she driven to clandestine and infrequent intercourse with the man she loved, a man as superior to them in breeding and feeling as he was in social position? Why was he repulsed with rude discourtesy when he proposed in due form to become a suitor for her hand, with the sanction of her parents? Why was he refused a reason for this behavior? Why could not papa ask him to the house, and behave like a gentleman to him? And then, if any good reason could be shown why she should be robbed of her husband, let them produce it to his face. He wants no secrecy. He never insinuates, and sneers, and hints at scandal which he could not prove to be true. It is only cowards who torture girls and steal a man's character in the dark. These retorts did not tend to avert the wrath of Messrs. Eldred and Son, Solicitors, Peperton.

And though Edith spoke thus in her wrath, yet she did feel that an air of mystery enveloped her lover, that he was an austere man, though very gentle with her, and that (in short) she dared not ask him those pertinent questions. This fact tormented her horribly. When driven to acknowledge as much to herself the blood would rush from her heart to her brain, or seem to do so, in a sudden access of fury. For a few moments she would feel like a wild and fierce animal, baffled and trapped in the hunter's toils. Then love, the enchanter, would cast over her his glamour. The generous blood would return to its wonted channels with buoyant pulsations. Upon her radiant face would play the mixed smile of confidence and scorn-scorn for the maligner, and confidence in the maligned, which so provoked the spirit of enmity in her amiable relatives that their hatred of this stranger surpassed all reasonable limits. They loved this

But by-and-by a more terrible engine of torture was brought to bear upon her. This at first only toyed with her feelings, arousing secret, halfformed apprehensions of evil, and dallying with them as some cruel cats will dally with a mouse. How would she like, after she had been married for several months, to find out that Major Treloar had only married her from pity, because she had allowed her feelings to be too plainly seen? What if she were, when it should be too late, to find out that her husband had loved another woman years before he had ever seen her, and had never left off loving that other? Had she ever asked him whose hair that was in the locket on his chain? More beautiful than hers, though hers was well enough-hair which glistened like the gold mounting of the jewel. Then she would ask, pitifully, How did they know it was hair at all? She had seen no hair. But her brother Alfred had. One night at a ball, when the major was waltzing with Laura Wyndham, the locket sprang open. The lady noticed it, and admired the hair, which she could afford to do, as hers was a purple-black, and there could be no question of gold or car-wayward, headstrong, and impenetrable girl ats. This was a mild joke of Alfred's, "carats' being so pronounced as to do duty also for "carrots." But even had Edith's hair been red, so as to suffer any point to attach to the witticism, it would have failed to attract her attention. She was too desperately eager in undergoing her proper torture and hugging the barbed arrows which lacerated her heart.

more than they loved her sisters, and almost as much as they loved themselves. Moreover, they both, and especially her father, took a pride in her budding beauty, which partook both of brilliancy and depth, combining in a rare degree both the power to attract and to grow upon the sense of whosoever beheld it, unfolding new phases of its character as one emotion displaced another in the depths beneath.

Perhaps another motive may have lent its influence to the complex dislike which biased the mind of Mr. Eldred against his future sonin-law. This requires some explanation. The lawyer had ascertained beyond a doubt that Treloar had already spent a fortune, and that he would be disinherited of another unless he married according to that imperious uncle's will. He not unnaturally thought that a man who has squandered considerable wealth before at

By slow degrees the engine developed its powers. How did Edith know that Major Treloar had never been married? Some people said that he was a widower, and how could the report have got afloat? Had she ever asked him? That was the only way to deal with secret, mysterious men. She knew next to nothing of his past life. True, his name was in the army list, attached first to one regiment, then to another; and certainly he had received rapid promotion, and served on the staff, and gained some decorations. But men who are well containing middle life could neither bear poverty nected are always placed above the heads of steady, worthy soldiers, who only do their duty and make no show. Other people knew something of the major's past life, if Edith did not.

with a good grace nor work successfully for the maintenance of a family. But, further, he believed that Treloar could not deceive himself with an idea that he could do this. Also Mr.

Eldred knew that Treloar thought Edith to be out; for his very amusement on the subject almost dowerless. would have served her for evidence of its injustice. Moreover, the lists of marriage licenses had been examined in both provinces of the Church. Inquiries had been prosecuted in the colonies where the major had served in his various regiments. All in vain.

Father and son were both baffled, clinging with dogged obstinacy to their hypothesis of a Her affections and her reason, her passions surreptitious wife in the back-ground. Treloar, and doubts, her trust and distrust, were at they said to one another, was not the man to in- war with one another. Her very will was at cur the burden of a wife and family, with pov- strife with itself. A hatred (artificial, pererty staring him in the face, while an heiress haps, but still potent) for father and brother and a fortune hung within his reach. He was grew out of their protracted opposition. exactly the man, they said, to delude a girl who desire to be revenged upon them matured itcould not otherwise be won, with a false mar- self, or distrust might really have gained the riage, and when she had served his turn to get day, and caused her to withdraw from her enrid of her by any device at hand. The simple gagement with Treloar. They acted unwisely solution of the difficulty seemed to be the one in their resistance, as men usually do when most foreign to their minds. They could not urged by anger and suspicions which they can conceive that Edith should have aroused in the hardly justify to themselves. Why not accept bosom of a gay and brilliant officer a passion at the major on his own terms frankly, as a suitor once so strong and so pure as to urge him to willing to submit his claims to parental considrelinquish fortune, position, and worldly wis-eration and to an open discussion? It would dom, to become, if necessary, poor and lowly have been easy to create further delay for in

quiry had not Edith's pride and anger been heart which should have been recognized by aroused, and the gentleman himself driven (in her, through all obstacles and barriers, as true self-respect) to exercise a haughty reserve. At and pure, strong and tender. any rate, Edith should have been taken into their counsels, and not left to discover, from time to time, some new conspiracy against her lover, nor taunted with insinuations that she was lending herself to a scheme of reckless self-indulgence which must end in ruin to herself and disgrace to her family.

But she, poor child, was distracted and bewildered. When she read his letters she trusted him; when her father sneered, or launched an innuendo, she thought there must be some truth in it; and then she burned with anger to think that this glorious lover, so grand and yet so gentle, might, after all, be only acting a part (as they said) to win her silly heart; that some day she might awake from this dream of illusory love, and find that her hero had existed only in her fancy, that her fool's paradise had melted away, and that she was cast off and discarded, as others had been (so they said) by this same spendthrift of hearts, before she caught his roving eye.

When they met she dared not tell him of these terrible doubts and cruel suspicions; cruel to him, and ah! how cruel to her!-robbing her young soul of trust, and devotion, and repose. Often, in those rare interviews, her cheek would burn, her heart beat wildly, her eyes flash with strange lights. He could not read the signs. He knew there was a contest between filial love and conjugal love; he trust

Thus goaded into desperation, and stung into anger and resentment against her own father, Edith was forced to content herself with a fragmentary and unsatisfying intercourse with her betrothed husband. During their stolen interviews she wavered between fear of offending him by betraying her suspicions and violent gusts of passionate devotion to one who seemed so far above all this petty strife; one who, for her fickle, changeful allegiance gave her an unwavering, unselfish devotion, and bore this delay for her sake, that she might win that obdurate parent by patience and gentleness. He was giving up friends and fortune for her sake, incurring unjust enmity and aspersion. He was stepping from a superior social grade to an inferior one; consenting, of his own free-will, to share pov-ed that some day he might reconcile the two, erty and obscurity with her, rather than wealth and station with another. He was learning to live inexpensively, and acquiring habits of regular work; though for many years he had devoted much time and energy to art, working by fits and starts, as the humor seized him. Gradually cutting off his own luxuries, and the refinements of his old life, one by one, he had yet made Edith presents of jewelry far more costly than any of her acquaintance could boast of. "As if she were an actress," Alfred said, with a sneer. "As if she were an empress, you mean," retorted Constance, one of Edith's sisters, who always supported her.

and so give her peace. Until then, and after, he would devote his whole powers to shelter her from evil. But the siren's eyes were flashing mischief; and her cruel doubts were dealing stabs at the breast of her benefactor.

Yet to her, in her better moments, it was very sweet to think that she would be able to lighten his labor of love with her little store of hoarded wealth, as well as with her confidence and sympathy; to make him some little recompense for all that he was willing to do and to suffer for her. And that little recompense, coming from her, would be so great to him. Would it not? Was she not so much to him? Was not her very smile a ray of sunshine to him? The tinkle of her silver laugh as the voices of many birds? Her breath as the wind of "the sweet South which breathes upon a bank of violets, stealing and giving odor?"

Treloar talked of a honey-moon, passed in France and Germany, whenever and however she would, to compensate her a little for her long, unhappy engagement. During that month of compensations no limit was to be placed on their expenditure. After that he proposed that In the course of time Mr. Eldred was forced they should rent a small house, with a studio, to acknowledge that fate was too strong for in one of the suburbs of London, where he him in this matter. Seeing the willfulness of would toil laboriously at his art—toil lightened his child, and tardily admitting the invincible by her presence, the toiler encouraged by her obstinacy of her nature, he had latterly resympathy. Already, as an amateur painter, frained from overt resistance, and had only he had achieved successes. An opal and dia- been doing his utmost to gain time, hoping mond ring which she wore he had purchased that something would transpire to put an end with the price of a picture to which she had to the engagement. It was with some such been the inspiration. Doubtless, industry in desire that he had consented to draw up the his vocation, stimulated by love and ambition, marriage settlement with Major Treloar's legal would soon raise him to a place of honor among adviser. At that time he had promised that artists, a place of which she would be proud, if the matter were satisfactorily arranged, and because it had not come to him by birth, if both parties should hold to their resolution, but would have been earned for her. These the marriage should be solemnized in the enschemes were unfolded in long, ardent letters, suing summer, at the parish church in Peperfull to overflowing of the outpourings of a ton, without any opposition from him. To heart where true love reigned supreme-a this proposal the major, loth to rupture the

filial bond between Edith and her father, acceded willingly. The conditions had been complied with. The summer had arrived. No excuse presented itself for any further delay. For a while Mr. Eldred tried what mere dogged resistance would do. Then there occurred a period of total estrangement between Edith and her family. One of those sullen, dismal passages of arms, when members of the same family meet daily at one table, and go through the same melancholy routine of eating and drinking without relish, and part in silence to sleep without repose, and so to meet again and part again. Letters of expostulation were addressed by the soldier to the lawyer, and returned unopened (so report said). At length clandestine proposals came to Edith secretly; and the mother's watchful eye surprised her preparing for flight. This was more than the father could endure; so he told her to fix the day, and let him know when it was to be; adding that he supposed he must meet "the man" in church, but trusted she would have a sufficient remnant of filial feeling not to bring him into the house. As if the house of man should be more sacred from angry passions than the House of God!

CHAPTER II.

THE DOPPELGÄNGER.

an Harcourt, who had driven his friend, Major Treloar, down from London, with the purpose of acting as his best man on a trying occasion. For Treloar was to take Edith Eldred to wife at ten o'clock on Monday morning.

If the expectant bridegroom may be supposed to have arrived at Peperton jubilant, his friend will be readily accredited with a measure of sadness; for they had been intimate since childhood, with more mutual affection than intimacy always implies, and Mr. Harcourt regarded the marriage of a friend much in the light of his death. He had never known the sweets of friendship to survive wedlock; and his opportunities for observation had not induced much faith in that bliss which is popularly supposed to atone to a husband for the loss of his single-blessedness. He was therefore sad, not only on his own account, but on behalf of his friend, as became a thoroughly amiable and generous man. Moreover, the little which he had seen, and the sudsidiary little which he had conjectured, of the courtship between Treloar and Edith Eldred, constituted a grave cause of uneasiness. The material loss which Treloar was about to encounter seemed to demand in return some splendid gain; and although Edith, in person, was beautiful beyond any thing which he could call to mind, Mr. Harcourt knew that her beauty alone would not satisfy Treloar. If the girl had only been dazzled by the light of the great world which invested her admirer, and flattered by the preference of one who belonged to a superior station-if she did not love him entirely and solely for himself—if she did not esteem him, as a wife should do her husband, above all mortal men, and his love above himself—if she did not trust in him blindly and utterly, so that she could refuse the evidence of her own senses rather than to allow a shadow of suspicion to fall upon

this marriage. Treloar would certainly be content with nothing less than her whole heart;

whom he loved, although he knew too well that an enemy could suggest evidence on which foul suspicions affecting him might be justly based. Nor did Harcourt fail to divine something of Edith's character. He perceived, with the sagacity of a man of the world, that her passionate, untutored emotions were a very virgin soil for distrust and jealousy, and that under the influ

On a certain bright Sunday morning, toward the end of the month of June, 185-, after the contention briefly sketched in the last chapter had been going on for some eighteen months, a gallant pair of chestnut horses, drawing a light mail phaeton, wheeled swiftly into the entrance archway of the De Bœuf Arms, at Peperton. An active groom sprang to the ground, and was at the horses' heads long be-him-then nothing but misery could come of fore the drowsy ostler, by sundry twitchings at his nether garments, and scratching of his head, had certified himself of being awake. Two gen-nor could he brook suspicion from any one tlemen descended from the carriage, and were shown by a waiter, the landlord being at church with his family, into the best sitting-room on the first-floor. A double-bedded room and a dressing-room were also engaged, which arrangement perplexed the household sadly, for they saw that the unexpected guests were persons of some position, and wondered at their being satisfied with less than the two best bed-ence of these prompters she might be, to one rooms. The gentlemen, however, were close whom she both feared and loved, false and fierce. friends, and were intending to part company on In the afternoon Treloar left his friend and the following day, under circumstances which walked out alone, thoughtful, but happy. At they anticipated would interrupt, if not term-six o'clock he returned, evidently ill at ease inate, their intimacy; and therefore they were with himself. A natural delicacy which charanxious to have as much of each other's com-acterized him was barely sufficient to disguise pany as possible in the mean time, and were an unusual irritability which seemed to prey wholly indifferent to the opinion of their critics. upon him. After drinking a glass of brandy, It was soon ascertained, not only within the and walking restlessly about the room for some precincts of the De Bœuf Arms, but generally minutes (seeing that the waiter came to make throughout Peperton, that the phaeton and preparations for dinner), he asked Harcourt to horses were the property of the Honorable Juli- dine alone. VOL. XLII.-No. 249.-25