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turning an alarmed look upon his new friend. She took it very calmly. She glanced up at him with a comic glance in her eyes, and a twitch at the corners of her mouth. Notwithstanding last night-notwithstanding the anxiety which she dared not move in her own person to alleviate -she was still capable of being amused. Her eyes said, "What now?" with no very alarming apprehensions. The situation was a frightful one for poor Vincent.

"You will be quite justified in turning me out of your house," he said, clearing his throat, and in great confusion; "but if you will believe, I never till this moment saw how atrocious- : Mrs Hilyard-I was in the vestry; the window was open; I heard your conversation last night."

For a moment Vincent had all the punishment he expected, and greater. Her eyes blazed upon him out of that pale dark face with a certain contempt and lofty indifference. There was a pause. Mr Vincent crushed his best hat in his hands, and sat speechless doing penance. He was dismayed with the discovery of his own meanness. Nobody could deliver such a cutting sentence as he was pronouncing on himself.

"All the world might have listened, so far as I am concerned," she said, after a while, quietly enough. "I am sorry you did it; but the discovery is worse for yourself than for me.' Then, after another pause, "I don't mean to quarrel. I am glad for my own sake, though sorry for yours. Now you know better than I can tell you. There were some pleasant flowers of speech to be gathered in that dark garden," she continued, with another odd upward gleam of her eyes. "We must have startled your clerical ideas rather. At the moment, however, Mr Vincent, people like Colonel Mildmay and myself mean what we say."

"If I had gained my knowledge in a legitimate way," said the shamestricken minister, not venturing to

look her in the face, "I should have said that I hoped it was only for the moment."

Mrs Hilyard laid down her work, and looked across at him with undisguised amusement. "I am sorry there is nobody here to perceive this beautiful situation," she said. "Who would not have their ghostly father commit himself, if he repented after this fashion? Thank you, Mr Vincent, for what you don't say.

And now we shall

drop the subject, don't you think? Were the deacons all charmed with the tea-meeting last night?"

"You want me to go now," said Vincent, rising, with disconcerted looks.

"Not because I am angry. I am not angry," she said, rising and holding out her hand to him. "It was a pity, but it was an inadvertance, and no dishonourable action. Yes, go. I am best to be avoided till I hear how this journey has been managed, and what your mother says. It was a sudden thought, that sending them to Lonsdale. I know that even if he has not already found the right one, he will search all the others now. And your Lonsdale has been examined and exhausted; all is safe there. Yes, go. I am glad you know; but don't say anything to Alice, if you see her, as she is sure to seek you out. You know who I mean by Alice? Lady Western-yes. Goodbye. I trust you, notwithstanding the vestry window; but close it after this on January nights."

She had sunk into her seat again, and was absorbed in her needlework, before Vincent left the room. He looked back upon her before he shut the door, but she had no look to spare from that all-engrossing work; her thin fingers were more scarred than ever and stained with the coarse blue stuff. All his life after the young man never saw that colour without thinking of the stains on those poor hands.

He went about his work assiduously all that day, visiting sick people, poor people, men and

women, "which were sinners." "I am so glad to see you, Mr

That dark ocean of life with which he had frightened the Salem people last night, Mr Vincent made deeper investigations into this day than he had made before during all the time he had been in Carlingford. He kept clear of the smug comfort of the leading people of " the connection." Absolute want, suffering, and sorrow, were comparatively new to him; and being as yet a stranger to philanthropic schemes, and not at all scientific in the distribution of his sympathies, the minister of Salem conducted himself in a way which would have called forth the profoundest contempt and pity of the curate of St Roque's. He believed everybody's story, and emptied his purse with the wildest liberality; for, indeed, visitation of the poor had not been a branch of study at Homerton. Tired and all but penniless, he did not turn his steps homeward till the wintry afternoon was sinking into night, and the lamps began to be lighted about the cheerful streets. As he came into George Street he saw Lady Western's carriage waiting at the door of Masters's. Alice! that was the name they called her. He looked at the celestial chariot wistfully. He had nothing to do with it or its beautiful mistress-never, as anything but a stranger, worshipping afar off, could the Dissenting minister of Carlingford approach that lovely vision-never think of her but as of a planet, ineffably distant

-never

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My lady's compliments," said a tall voice on a level with Vincent's eyebrows: "will you please to step over and speak to her ladyship?" The startled Nonconformist raised his eyes. The big footman, whose happy privilege it was to wait upon that lady of his dreams, stood respectful by his side, and from the carriage opposite the fairest face in the world was beaming, the prettiest of hands waving to him. Vincent believed afterwards that he crossed the entire breadth of George Street in a single stride.

Oh,

Vincent," said Lady Western, giving him her hand; "I did so want to see you after the other night. how could you be so clever and wicked-so wicked to your friends! Indeed, I shall never be pleased till you recant, and confess how wrong you were. I must tell you why I went that night. I could not tell what on earth to do with my brother, and I took him to amuse him; or else, you know, I never could have gone to hear the poor dear old Church attacked. And how violent you were too! Indeed I must not say how clever I thought it, or I should feel I was an enemy to the Church. Now I want you to dine with me, and I shall have somebody to come who will be a match for you. I am very fond of clever society, though there is so little of it in Carlingford. Tell me, will you come to-morrow? I am disengaged. Oh, pray, do! and Mr Wentworth shall come too, and you shall fight.”

Lady Western clapped her pretty hands together with the greatest animation. As for Vincent, all the superior thoughts in which he would probably have indulged-the contrast he would have drawn between the desperate brother and this butterfly creature, fluttering on the edge of mysteries so dark and evil, had she been anybody else-deserted him totally in the present crisis. She was not anybody else—she was herself. The words that fell from those sweetest lips were of a halfdivine simplicity to the bewildered young man. He would have gone off straightway to the end of the world if she had chosen to command him. All unwarned by his previous failure, paradise opened again to his delighted eyes.

"And I want to consult you about our friend," said Lady Western; "it will be so kind of you to come. I am so pleased you have no engagement. I am sure you thought us very stupid last time; and I am stupid, I confess," added the beauty, turning those sweet eyes, which were more eloquent than genius, upon the

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slave who was reconquered by a glance; "but I like clever people dearly. Good-bye till to-morrow. I shall quite reckon upon to-morrow. Oh, there is Mr Wentworth! John, call Mr Wentworth to speak to me. Good morning-remember,half-past six-now, you must not forget." Spite of the fact that Mr Wentworth took his place immediately by the side of the carriage, Vincent passed on, a changed man. Forget! He smiled to himself at the possibility, and as he walked on to his lodging, a wonderful maze of expectation fell upon the young man's mind. Why, he asked, was he brought into this strange connection with Her relations and their story? what could be, he said to himself with a little awe, the purpose of that Providence which shapes men's ends, in interweaving his life with Hers by these links of common interest? The skies throbbed with wonder and miracle as soon as they were lighted up by her smile. Who could predict what might be coming, through all the impossibilities of fact and circumstance? He would not dissipate that delicious haze by

any definite expectations like those which brought him to sudden grief on a former occasion. He was content to believe it was not for nothing that all these strange circles of fate were weaving round his charmed feet.

In this elevated frame of mind, scarcely aware of the prosaic ground he trod, Vincent reached home. The little maid at the door said something about a lady, to which he paid no attention, being occupied with his own thoughts. With an unconscious illumination on his face he mounted the stair lightly, three steps at a time, to his own rooms. The lamp was lighted in his little sitting-room, and some one rose nervously from the table as he went in at the door. What was this sudden terror which fell upon the young man in the renewed glory of his youthful hopes? It was his mother, pale and faint with sleepless tearful eyes, who, with the cry of an aching heart, worn out by fatigue and suspense, came forward, holding out anxious hands to him, and dropped in an utter abandon of weariness and distress into his astonished arms.

SPENCE'S AMERICAN UNION.

It would perhaps be too much to say that the tendencies of our constitution towards democracy have been checked solely by a view of the tattered and insolvent guise in which republicanism appears in America. The right instinct and good sense of the country had already preserved it from following the Reform leaders in their downward strides to the declivity that overhangs chaos, and had left those miscalculating chieftains in the ridiculous position of heading an imaginary enterprise-a crusade in which they were the only crusaders -to escape from which the most indefatigable and unscrupulous among them took refuge in the House of Lords. No demagogue was so sanguine as not then to perceive that the attempt to begin the series of changes by which rascaldom was to be rendered the dominant element in the British constitution must be postponed to a more convenient season. As the pause, however, proceeded from indifference rather than conviction, that season might have arrived, and the effort might have been renewed. But the events which have since passed in America have made a deep impression on the public mind. Theorists might have uttered warnings through an entire generation without producing a tithe of the effect which has followed from the spectacle of floundering democracy. Being exhibited, too, at a moment when our own Radicals were complacently inviting attention to the superior merits of the model Republic, it had something of the effect which the appearance of the Reverend Mr Stiggins, the temperance deputy from Dorking, in a state of idiotic and furious drunkenness, had on the meeting of the grand Ebenezer

Teetotal Association, to which he had been so impressively introduced by Brother Tadger. The only result at present of a proposal to "Americanise our institutions" on an audience who are witnessing the Transatlantic exhibition, would be to induce a belief that the proposer was insane. Possibly the time is not very distant when what have lately been propounded as great political truths may, for a season at least, be classed among the most astonishing delusions; when faith in political equality and universal suffrage will appear as absurd and unintelligible as in right divine and the infallibility of the Pope.

Those habituated to abstract political speculation had long foreseen an explosion in the great Republic. To them the marvel was, that a structure reared on foundations so false should have endured so long. But there were large classes among us who could imagine no defects in a system which was so enormously prosperous. The territories of the Republic were seen to be constantly extending, with no apparent limit but the bounds of the vast continent. Every year saw its exports and imports increase by millions. Every census told of enormous additions to the population. There were no expensive establishments to counterbalance these proofs of prosperity. So far from there being a national debt to depress the energies of the nation, one difficulty, fabulous, or at least miraculous, to European ears, had occasionally been to provide for the disposal of a surplus revenue. Where could the English demagogue find so forcible an illustration of the excellence of his theories? Here was a country with no privileged class, with next to no military force, with a peo

'The American Union: its Effect on National Character and Policy. With an Inquiry into Secession as a Constitutional Right, and the Causes of the Disruption.' By James Spence. London: Richard Bentley. 1861.

ple that chose its own governors, with a Government that merely registered the will of the people, yet with resources expanding yearly in an unprecedented degree. Here was the land where food was cheap and plentiful, where wages were high, and where one man was as good as another. What a picture to present to the overburdened tax-payer or the struggling artisan of an old country! a land where children were the sources, not the drains, of wealth, where the poor emigrant's poverty dropped from him like Christian's burden at sight of the cross, and where the humblest citizen might claim the ear of the chief of the State. To what purpose talk, to those who had seen it in this aspect, of the evils of democracy? Accordingly, aversion to the republican system was restricted to those refined classes who regarded it with the unquestioning dislike of natural antagonism, and to those more philosophic minds that could discern its real evils through the adventitious splendours that obscured them.

To these last it appeared to present the phenomena of decay. The progress of the nation was material only; intellectually and morally it was receding. The growth of conflicting interests, the decline of the controlling power, the establishment of the tyranny of the majority, and the spread of political corruption, were so many signs of coming dissolution. Rut in the general mind it was still the Great Republic. Even those who own a higher standard than that of material success, acquiesced in a favourable judgment. They saw the origin of the Republic and its founders spoken of by English writers with respect. They heard those praises re-echoed with enthusiasm on all possible occasions in America. It seemed impossible to oppose the triumphant swell that rolled to us across the Atlantic. "We hear the praises of the constitution," says Mr Spence, "sounding and resounding so loudly, that we fall into a kind of deferential acquiescence,

and yield ourselves to be swept along by so irresistible a torrent of applause." But when inquiry was stimulated, as it has been of late, it was inevitable that an order-loving people, proud of their own country and constitution, and of the position which they hold among nations, should recoil from the aspect of democracy unveiled. The opinion of England, which has so often, when foreign governments have been in difficulties, pronounced against absolutism, has now, with at least equal unanimity, pronounced against the excess of the popular element. Where results are so plainly traceable to institutions, it is easy to draw the moral. To those who feared the predominance of the democratic element in our own constitution, it is reassuring to find, in this expression of opinion, a guarantee that, if our tendencies are still ultimately in the same direction, there is, at least, the respite of a long pause, and that the opportunity is thus afforded to us of reestablishing ourselves on this side of the boundary, beyond which freedom cannot long survive.

Not Conservatives alone, but men of all parties perceive this. Advocates of progress have begun to look beyond American proclamations of perfection, as proved in wealth, territory, and population. They have begun to compare the Union of to-day with the Union of the time of Franklin and Washington, and its present statesmen with those of the infant Republic. They have inquired whether its boasted liberty is a reality, and whether in what constitutes the true greatness of a country it has kept pace with old nationalities that were grey before it was born; and on all these points the verdict is against it.

When English writers who discuss American affairs express opinions unfavourable to the Union, it is very common for the aggrieved Unionists to retort, that foreigners are incapable of judging of their disputes, because they know nothing of the political institutions of

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