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? O, 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 dieand the world be rid of me?"

No, she would not believe it. It was a wicked, horrible temptation of the devil. She would rather 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 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 recog nizing 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 cer tainly is not an euphonious or aristocratic name; and "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 or 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, pen

ury, 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 débût, he is expected to stand by, and fight for, against the universe; but that is but fair. If a young gentleman, invited to enrol 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 their efforts for the subversion of common sense, good taste, and established things in general, as if he had pledged them, as he would have done in Rome of old, in his own life-blood? Bound he is, alike by honor and by green tea; and it will be better for him to fulfil his bond. For, if association is the cardinal principle of the age, will it not work as well in book-making as in clothes-making? And shall not the motto of the poet (who will also do a little reviewing on the sly) be henceforth that which shines triumphant over all the world, on many a valiant Scotchman's shield, ·

"Caw me, and I'll caw thee"?

But, to do John Briggs justice, he kept his hands, and his heart also, cleaner than most men do, during this stage of his career. After the first excitement of novelty, and of mixing with people who could really talk and think, and who freely spoke out whatever was in them, right or wrong, in language which at least sounded grand and deep, he began to find in the literary world about the same satisfac tion for his inner life which he would have found in the sport. ing world, or the commercial world, or the religious world, or the fashionable world, or any other world, and to suspect strongly that wheresoever a world is, the flesh and the devil are not very far off. Tired of talking when he wanted to think, of asserting when he wanted to discover, and of hearing his neighbors do the same; tired of little mean

nesses, envyings, intrigues, jobberies (for the literary world, too, has its jobs), he had been for some time withdrawing himself from the Hatchgoose soirées into his own. thoughts, when his "Soul's Agonies" appeared, and he found himself, if not a lion, at least a lion's cub.

There is a house or two in town where you may meet, on certain evenings, everybody; where duchesses and unfledged poets, bishops and red republican refugees, foxhunting noblemen and briefless barristers who have taken to politics, are jumbled together for a couple of hours, to make what they can out of each other, to the exceeding benefit of them all. For each and every one of them finds his neighbor a pleasanter person than he expected; and none need leave those rooms without knowing something more than he did when he came in, and taking an interest in some human being who may need that interest. To one of these houses — no matter which-Elsley was invited on the strength of the "Soul's Agonies;" found himself, for the first time, face to face with high-bred Englishwomen; and fancied (small blame to him) that he was come to the mountains of the Peris, and to fairy-land itself. He had been flattered already; but never with such grace, such sympathy, or such seeming understanding; for there are few high-bred women who cannot seem to understand, and delude a hapless genius into a belief in their own surpass ing brilliance and penetration, while they are cunningly retailing again to him the thoughts which they have caught up from the man to whom they spoke last; perhaps (for this is the very triumph of their art) from the very man to whom they are speaking. Small blame to bashful, clumsy John Briggs, if he did not know his own children, and could not recognize his own stammered and fragmentary fancies, when they were reëchoed to him the next minute, in the prettiest shape, and with the most delicate articula tion, from lips which (like those in the fairy tale) never opened without dropping pearls and diamonds.

O, what a contrast, in the eyes of a man whose sense of beauty and grace, whether physical or intellectual, was true and deep, to that ghastly ring of prophetesses in the Hatchgoose drawing-room; strong-minded and emancipated women, who prided themselves on having cast off conven tionalities, and on being rude, and awkward, and dogmatic, and irreverent, and sometimes slightly improper; women who had missions to mend everything in heaven and earth except themselves; who had quarrelled with their husbands,

and had therefore felt a mission to assert woman's rights and reform marriage in general; or who had never been able to get married at all, and therefore were especially competent to promulgate a model method of educating the children whom they never had had; women who wrote poetry about Lady Blanches whom they never had met, and novels about male and female blackguards whom (one hopes) they never had met, or about whom (if they had) decent women would have held their peace; and every one of whom had, in obedience to Emerson, "followed her impulses," and despised fashion, and was, accordingly, clothed and bedizened as was right in the sight of her own eyes, and probably in those of no one else.

No wonder that Elsley, ere long, began drawing compar isons, and using his wit upon ancient patronesses — of course behind their backs; likening them to idols fresh from the car of Juggernaut, or from the stern of a South Sea canoe; or, most of all, to that famous wooden image of Freya, which once leaped lumbering forth from her bullock-cart, creaking and rattling in every oaken joint, to belabor the too daring Viking who was flirting with her priestess. Even so, whispered Elsley, did those brains and tongues creak and rattle, lumbering, before the blasts of Pythonic inspiration; and so, he verily believed, would the awkward arms and legs have done likewise, if one of the Pythonesses had ever so far degraded herself as to dance.

No wonder, then, that those gifted dames had soon to complain of Elsley Vavasour as a traitor to the cause of progress and civilization: a renegade who had fled to the camp of aristocracy, flunkeydom, obscurantism, frivolity, and dissipation; though there was not one of them but would have given an eye- perhaps no great loss to the aggregate loveliness of the universe-for one of his invitations to 999 Cavendish-street south-east, with the chance of being presented to the Duchess of Lyonesse.

To do Elsley justice, one reason why he liked his new acquaintances so well was that they liked him. He behaved well himself, and therefore people behaved well to him. He was, as I have said, a very handsome fellow in his way; therefore it was easy to him, as it is to all physically beautiful persons, to acquire a graceful manner. Moreover, he had steeped his whole soul in old poetry, and especially in Spenser's Faery Queen. Good for him, had he followed every lesson which he might have learned out of that most noble of English books; but one lesson at least