"We all expect a gentle answer, Jew," quoth Percival Potts. "Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew cars?" began Bassanio, who sat next the host. sudden his voice congealed with horror. Then all of a "By Heaven, he is dying!" cried he. "He has had a fit or something. Run for a doctor-run!" The guests leaped to their feet, and crowded round the unhappy Frenchman. His disguise and the general merriment had hitherto prevented any one from remarking what had happened; but to the affrighted eyes which now scanned him narrowly enough, it was evident that he had had some kind of stroke which paralysed half his features. "Hush, be quiet," said Frederick gravely. "Let us get him to his own room, and, for Heaven's sake, keep his daughter from this sight." "I am sure,” replied Eugenie calmly, whom the cry of “Run, run for a doctor!" had reached on the very threshold of her own chamber, "I am sure I shall not be in the way; you may trust me, indeed you may, but I must never be kept from him; my place is hence forth by his bedside." Every man was deeply moved and sorrow-stricken ; yet, as they carried him upstairs in his strange habit, speechless and motionless, it seemed almost like some hideous carnival procession making a mockery of death. Something of the sort seemed to strike Eugenie herself, for when the doctor had arrived, she declined, with thanks for their sympathy, all further aid. So the masqueraders went below, and resuming their ordinary garments, issued forth into the early morning air, thinking and talking of matters that were not very often present to the minds of any of them. "His gibes, his songs, his flashes of merriment are done, poor fellow, I fear for ever," said Percival Potts as he linked his arm with that of Johnson. “This is an end to our evening's pleasure that might stagger the most philosophic; young Galton seems half out of his mind with it. Let us ask the lad to walk with us a little way he is scarcely fit to be left to his own company." But Frederick declined to do so. "I shall go into the Park for a little fresh air," said he, "and try to shake off all this horror." It was too early for the gates to be opened, so he climbed over the railings, as he had done once before. CHAPTER VIII. THE VIGIL. “O FATHER," writes our greatest living poet, "Wheresoe'er thou be That pledgest now thy gallant son, A shot, ere half thy draught be done, Even while the mother's head is bowed in prayer that God will save her sailor-boy, his heavy-shotted hammockshroud drops in his vast and wandering grave; and while the maiden decks her golden hair to please her expected lover-nay, at the very instant when, having left the glass, she turns to set a ringlet right, her future lord is drowned in passing through the ford, or killed in falling from his horse. There is fortunately no spiritual telegraph to communicate the coincidences of pleasure and pain, of prosperity and wretchedness, of life and death, which are continually taking place among us, or we should be always in a state of feverish expectation. Even the frequent thought, "What is my dear boy doing now?" gives many a mother the heartache. In general, she distresses herself unnecessarily-for even boys arenot, at all times, getting into scrapes-and feels securest at the very time when, to use his own forcible expression, the young gentleman is "coming his greatest cropper." Some weak-minded people, relying upon this fact, are always striving to anticipate calamities"speculating for the fall," as they call it in the Citypicturing to themselves the occurrence of every sort of calamity, under the impression that all evil will be evaded, just as other persons carry an umbrella in order to overrule the pluvial designs of Providence ; but misfortune comes, and that suddenly, and whence the most sagacious looked not for it, as the thundercloud gathers and breaks in the loveliest autumn blue. Little guesses Mary Galton, sitting in her lonely bedchamber in Somers Town, on the night that her |