actual pain, which died away at last into heavy slumber, as body and mind alike gave way before the strain. Sweet fool! she knew not how could she know? that she might be rearing in herself the seeds of idiocy and death; but who that applauds a Rachel or a Ristori for being able to make awhile their souls and their countenances the homes of the darkest passions, can blame her for enacting in herself, and for herself alone, incidents in which the highest and holiest virtue takes shape in perfect tragedy?

But soon another, and yet darker cause of sorrow arose in her. It was clear, from what Willis had told her, that she had held the lost belt in her hand. The question was, how had she lost it?

Did her mother know anything about it? That question could not but arise in her mind, though for very reverence she dared not put it to her mother; and with it arose the recollection of her mother's strange silence about the matter. Why had she put away the subject carelessly, and yet peevishly, whenever it was mentioned? Yes. Why? Did her mother know anything? Was she? Grace dared not pronounce the adjective, even in thought; dashed it away as a temptation of the devil; dashed away, too, the thought which had forced itself on her too often already, that her mother was not altogether one who possessed the single eye; that in spite of her deep religious feeling, her assurance of salvation, her fits of bitter self-humiliation and despondency, there was an inclination to scheming and intrigue, ambition, covetousness; that the secrets which she gained as class-leader too, were too often (Grace could but fear) used to her own advantage; that in her

dealings her morality was not above the average of little country shop-keepers; that she was apt to have two prices; to keep her books with unnecessary carelessness when the person against whom the account stood was no scholar. Grace had more than once remonstrated in her gentle way; and had been silenced, rather than satisfied, by her mother's common-places as to the right of "making those who could pay, pay for those who could not; " that "it was very hard to get a living, and the Lord knew her temptations," and "that God saw no sin in His elect," and "Christ's merits were infinite," and "Christians always had been a backsliding generation;" and all the other common-places by which such people drug their consciences to a degree which is utterly incredible, except to those who have seen it with their own eyes, and heard it with their own ears, from childhood.

Once, too, in those very days, some little meanness on her mother's part brought the tears into Grace's eyes, and a gentle rebuke to her lips; but her mother bore the interference less patiently than usual, and answered, not by cant, but by counter-reproach. "Was she the person to accuse a poor widowed mother, struggling to leave her child something to keep her out of the workhouse? A mother that lived for her, would die for her, sell her soul for her, perhaps

And there Mrs. Harvey stopped short, turned pale, and burst into such an agony of tears that Grace, terrified, threw her arms round her neck and entreated forgiveness, all the more intensely on account of those thoughts within which she dared not reveal. So the storm passed over. But

not Grace's sadness. For she could not but see, with her clear pure spiritual eye, that her mother was just in that state in which some fearful and shameful fall is possible, perhaps wholesome. "She would sell her soul for me? What if she have sold it, and stopped short just now, because she had not the heart to tell me that love for me had been the cause? Oh! if she have sinned for my sake! Wretch that I am! Miserable myself, and bringing misery with me! Why was I ever born? Why cannot I die and the world be rid of me?"

It was a wicked,
She would rather

No, she would not believe it. horrible temptation of the devil. believe that she herself had been the thief, tempted during her unconsciousness; that she had hidden. it somewhere; that she should recollect, confess, restore all some day. She would carry it to him herself, grovel at his feet, and entreat forgiveness. "He will surely forgive, when he finds that I was not myself when that it was not altogether my fault not as if I had been waking—yes, he will forgive!" And then on that thought followed a dream of what might follow, so wild that a moment after she had hid her blushes in her hands, and fled to books to escape from thoughts.

CHAPTER XI

THE FIRST INSTALMENT OF AN OLD DEBT

WE

E must now return to Elsley, who had walked home in a state of mind truly pitiable. He had been flattering his soul with the hope that Thurnall did not know him; that his beard, and the change which years had made, formed a sufficient disguise; but he could not conceal from himself that the very same alterations had not prevented his recognizing Thurnall; and he had been living for two months past in continual fear that that would come which now had

come.

His rage and terror knew no bounds. Fancying Thurnall a merely mean and self-interested worldling, untouched by those higher aspirations which stood to him in place of a religion, he imagined him making every possible use of his power; and longed to escape to the uttermost ends of the earth from his old tormentor, whom the very sea would not put out of the way, but must needs cast ashore at his very feet, to plague him afresh.

What a net he had spread around his own feet by one act of foolish vanity! He had taken his present name, merely as a nom de guerre, when first he came to London as a penniless and friendless scribbler. It would hide him from the ridicule (and, as he fancied, spite) of Thurnall, whom he dreaded meeting every time he walked London

streets, and who was for years, to his melancholic and too intense fancy, his bête noir, his Frankenstein's familiar. Besides, he was ashamed of the name of Briggs. It certainly is not an euphonious or aristocratic name; and the "The Soul's Agonies," by John Briggs, would not have sounded as well as "The Soul's Agonies," by Elsley Vavasour. Vavasour was a very pretty name, and one of those which is supposed by novelists and young ladies. to be aristocratic; why so is a puzzle; as its plain meaning is a tenant-farmer, and nothing more nor less. So he had played with the name till he became fond of it, and considered that he had a right to it, through seven long years of weary struggles, penury, disappointment, as he climbed the Parnassian Mount, writing for magazines and newspapers, sub-editing this periodical and that; till he began to be known as a ready, graceful, and trustworthy workman, and was befriended by one kind-hearted littérateur after another. For in London, at this moment, any young man of real power will find friends enough, and too many, among his fellow-bookwrights, and is more likely to have his head turned by flattery, than his heart crushed by envy. Of course, whatsoever flattery he may receive, he is expected to return; and whatsoever clique he may be tossed into on his début, he is expected to stand by, and fight for, against the universe; but that is but fair. If a young gentleman, invited to enroll himself in the Mutual-puffery Society which meets every Monday and Friday in Hatchgoose the publisher's drawingroom, is willing to pledge himself thereto in the mystic cup of tea, is he not as solemnly bound thenceforth to support those literary Catilines in