When the story opens Geoffrey Tempest is very much in the position of Balzac's hero in the "Peau de Chagrin." He is a penniless author, who-after endeavouring to eke out a livelihood by endeavouring to do hack work for various London newspapers-is, too, broken down by the refusal of Mr. Morgeson to accept the manuscript of a novel into which he had put the fruitage of his genius. Geoffrey Tempest was agnostic

I did not believe in any God then. I was to myself an all-sufficing mortal, scorning the time-worn superstitions of so-called religion. Of course I had been brought up in the Christian faith; but that creed had become worse than useless to me since I had intellectually realised the utter inefficiency of Christian ministers to deal with difficult life-problems. Spiritually I was adrift in chaos.

-and he felt desperate. If ever there was a time when good and evil angels played a game of chance for a man's :soul, it was on that bitter cold night when, hungry and penniless, his last hope gone, he crawled up to his fireless lodging, the rent of which was over-due. When doing so he saw three letters had arrived, and were lying unopened on the table. One of them was from a college friend in Australia, from whom he had asked a loan of £50. He opened it and found a draft for that

amount.

A BEQUEST OF FIVE MILLIONS.

The second was in an unknown hand, which came from a well-known firm of London solicitors, and contained the astonishing intelligence that a remote relative of his father's had died in South America, leaving him, Geoffrey Tempest, his real and personal estate, amounting to something over five million pounds sterling. The larger bulk of it was lodged in the Bank of England, and a considerable amount in French Government securities. The third letter was from Lucio Rimânez, who was introduced by his friend in Australia who had just sent him the draft for £50. While he was still bewildered by his good fortune, and wondering how to avoid the promised visit of Prince Lucio Rimânez until at least he had a fire in his grate and a decent coat on his back, the Prince arrived.

ENTER SATHANAS!

A tall, shadowy figure appeared on the threshold, which produced an impression that suggested a stately majesty of height and bearing. The lamp had gone out, and they were in the dark. When at last it was lighted he was amazed and fascinated by the appearance of his visitor.

I thought I had never seen so much beauty and intellectuality combined in the outward personality of any human being. The finely-shaped head denoted both power and wisdom, and was nobly poised on such shoulders as might have befitted a Hercules; the countenance was a pure oval, and singularly pale, this complexion intensifying the almost fiery brilliancy of the full dark eyes, which had in them a curious and wonderfully attractive look of mingled mirth and misery. The mouth was perhaps the most telling feature in this remarkable face-set in the perfect curve of beauty, it was yet firm, determined, and not too small, thus escaping effeminacy and I noted that in repose it expressed bitterness, disdain, and even cruelty.

HIS LETTER OF INTRODUCTION.

The Prince presented a letter of introduction, which described him as a very distinguished scholar and gentleman, allied by descent to one of the oldest families in the world. He was a poet and musician of great skill, and in all matters scientific an absolute master. An exile from his native province, he was a wanderer on the face

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of the earth. He had travelled far and seen much, and had a wide experience of men and things. They entered into conversation, and Tempest speedily became fascinated by the easy manner, handsome presence, and mellifluous voice of his guest. The Prince was cynical and generous. He invited him to supper. Tempest, before accepting, explained that, instead of being was supposed penniless, he was in reality five times a millionaire. He handed his visitor the lawyer's letter. He read it and returned it, remarking that the five millions seemed to him a mere trifle, which could be conveniently run through in eight years or less. To be rich, really rich, one ought to have about a million a year; then one might reasonably hope to escape the workhouse. However, he said, he was disappointed; he had hoped to do him a good turn, and found himself, as usual, forestalled.

TO SUPPER WITH THE DEVIL.

Still, as they wanted supper, Tempest accepted the Prince's invitation to his hotel. Outside the Prince's carriage waited, drawn by two proud black horses, caparisoned in silver, magnificent thoroughbreds. As they sped off rapidly to the hotel, in the semi-darkness he saw his new friend's brilliant dark eyes fixed upon him with a curiously intent expression. As they drove along the Prince let fall many shrewd and biting observations concerning the folly of the world, and incidentally remarked that his kingdom was a vast one, for he ruled wherever men obeyed the commands of wealth. In reply to an inquiry, he said that he was a bona fide Prince, with a descent such as none of our oldest families can boast, but his subjects were dispersed among all nations. Some day he promised to tell him more of his private history, but meantime he hoped Tempest would drop the title and merely address him as Lucio.

"That is your Christian name," said Tempest, whereupon the Prince interrupted swiftly, and with anger, declaring, "There is no such thing as Christian in my composition." "Indeed!" Tempest murmured. Rimânez replied :—

"A profound and awful one," he said, in thrilling tones. "And the worst of it is that it is true-as true as the workings of the Universe."

On arriving at the hotel, the Prince was waited upon by his valet Amiel, a fiend whose face seemed dark, unpleasant, and sinister, whose step suggested the stealthy gliding of a cat or tiger. At dinner-time the Prince discoursed chiefly concerning wealth and the Devil, the Prince maintaining that when bags of money fall to the lot of aspiring genius, God departs, and the Devil walks in. Passing from this to literary matters, the Prince advised him never to sacrifice his own personal interests for any considerations whatever. Tempest, somewhat startled by such counsel, said, “Your features are a direct contradiction to your words; your whole aspect betokens a generosity of spirit which you cannot conquer if you would; besides, are you not always trying to do good?" The Prince replied, "Always, that is, I am always at work endeavouring to gratify every man's desire. Whether that is good of me or not remains to be proved."

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"I like you, Geoffrey Tempest," he said. And because I like you, and because I think there are the makings of something higher than mere earthly brute in you, I am going to make you what you may perhaps consider rather a singular proposition. It is this: that if you don't like me, say so at once, and we will part now, before we have time to know anything more of each other, and I will endeavour not to cross your path again unless you seek me out. But if, on the contrary, you do like me, if you find something in my humour or turn of mind congenial to your own disposition, give me your promise that you will be my friend and comrade for a while, say for a few months, at any rate. But if there is the smallest aversion to me lurking in the depths of your nature -here he paused-then resumed with extraordinary solemnity -"in God's name give it full way and let me go; because I swear to you, in all sober earnest, that I am not what I seem."

For a moment Tempest hesitated; he had felt a passing shadow of distrust and repulsion for his fascinating but cynical friend, but he banished it, stretched out his hand, and said, "I assure you I shall be proud of your companionship. You seem to take a perverse delight in running yourself down, but you know the old adage-'The Devil is not so black as he is painted."" "Ah! that is true," the Prince murmured dreamily. "Poor Devil, his faults no doubt are much exaggerated by the clergy." They clasped hands, and while they were still interlocked a sudden flash of lightning blazed across the room, followed by a terrific clap of thunder. The electric lights went out, and the Prince's eyes shone like those of a God in the darkness. Once more the thunder crashed overhead, followed by a deluge of rain, which was rather unusual in January.

That night, as Tempest lay dozing in bed, he had an impression that some one had approached and was looking fixedly at him. He turned on a light but could see no one; but as he again tried to sleep he thought he heard a hissing whisper, which said, "Peace! Trouble him not! Let the fool in his folly sleep!"

66 THIS ACCURSED CITY OF LONDON."

From this time on the career of the new made millionaire and his brilliant friend the Prince ran very smoothly. He brings out his book, Morgeson being only too delighted to publish it, and puff it by the aid of paragraph agencies and other methods with which the Prince was thoroughly familiar, for as he remarked genially, he had been an editor himself, and he knew how to do it. The Prince on one occasion asked Tempest how he was going to spend his money. "On my own pleasure," replied he, promptly. Whereupon the Prince suggested surely a most undiabolical thing-that with his fortune he could make hundreds of miserable people happy, or he might help his fellow-workers in literature, suggestions which Tempest rejected with scorn. Still less diabolical was the Prince's virtuous indignation at the new fiction, with its unsavoury, questionable subjects. "Why do not the heavens rain fire," exclaimed the Prince," on this accursed city of London? It is ripe for punishment; full of abhorrent creatures, not worthy the torture in hell to which it is said liars and hypocrites are condemned." For it must be noted here and always that Marie Corelli's estimate of London society is such that it is too bad even for the Devil.

THE DEVIL AND THE CLERGY.

There was something, she says, of a supreme sovereign, almost God-like, in the looks of the Prince

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as he denounced "man, that blind, thankless worm, who with his smiling face hides a false and selfish heart, flinging his pigmy mockery at the riddle of the universe, who stands gibing at God, feebly astraddle on his own earth grave." Tempest assures him that he believes neither in devils, angels, or even in the soul. "I envy you," replied his companion, " for I regret to say I am compelled to believe in the soul." The Prince was delighted to hear his friend would neither lend nor give money away, although he remarked he always helped charities himself, and never failed to assist a certain portion of the clergy, because by cant, hypocrisy, sensuality and shams of every description they were doing their utmost to destroy religion." For the clergy only come below critics and women novelists in the scale of Marie Corelli's condemnation. The Prince promised that he would set Tempest aloft like a bear who has successfully reached the bun on the top of a greased pole, a spectacle for the envy of man and the wonder of angels. The Prince kept his word. Tempest's book appeared, was advertised regardless of expense, passed through any number of editions, and was praised in all the newspapers and reviews, who sing in admiring chorus at the bidding of McWhing, after that multi-scribbling gentleman had been squared by a cheque for £500.

LADY SYBIL FOR SALE.

The Prince then suggests Tempest should take to himself a wife, but although to the Prince woman is merely "a frivolous doll," he tells him that Lady Sybil, the daughter of the Earl of Elton, is for sale, and he introduces him forthwith to the family where she is on show. They meet in the box of a theatre, where they are watching a play, the heroine of which was a woman with a past. Lady Sybil remarked that for "women with no such past there can be no future, and so-called bad women are the only popular type of our sex with men; it is quite a mistake for women to be respectable, they are only considered dull." Tempest fell into raptures over the lovely curves of her milk-white throat, her beautiful arms and bosom, her rich brown hair, etc., and he murmured inwardly: "All this loveliness is purchaseable, and I will purchase it." Meantime he amuses himself by frequenting gaming hells, at one of which Viscount Lynton stakes his soul against a thousand pounds placed on the table by the Prince, and loses it. A few minutes after he shoots himself in a hansom cab. The Prince remarks, Now, if I were Satan," You would have cause to rejoice," said Tempest. "No, Geoffrey, no, my friend," said the Prince in a strange rich voice. "If I were Satan I should probably lament, for every lost soul would remind me of my own lost soul, my own despair, and set another bar between myself and heaven. Remember, the very Devil was an angel once." His eyes smiled, yet Tempest could have sworn there were tears in them. More attached to the Prince than ever, he bade him goodnight and fell asleep.

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A VISION OF THE FATES.

At five o'clock Tempest woke suddenly as if touched by an invisible hand. The dark room was luminous with a cloud of white smoke or fire, and in the midst of it he had a vision of the three Fates:

Plainly visible and substantially distinct, at a distance of perhaps five paces from my bed, stood three figures, muffled in dark garments and closely hooded. So solemnly inert they were so heavily did their sable draperies fall about them that it was impossible to tell whether they were men or women; but what paralysed me with amazement and terror was the strange light that played around and above them

the spectral, wandering, chill radiance that illumined them like the rays of a faint wintry moon. I strove to cry out, but my tongue refused to obey me, and my voice was strangled in my throat. The three remained absolutely motionless, and again I rubbed my eyes, wondering if this were a dream or some hideous optical delusion. Trembling in every limb, I stretched my hand towards the bell, intending to ring violently for assistance, when a voice, low and thrilling with intense anguish, caused me to shrink back appalled, and my arm fell nerveless at my side, “Misery.”

The word struck the air with a harsh reproachful clang, and I nearly swooned with the horror of it. For now one of the figures moved, and a face gleamed out from beneath its hooded wrappings-a face white as whitest marble and fixed into such an expression of dreadful despair as froze my blood. Then came a deep sigh that was more like a death-groan, and again the word "Misery" shuddered upon the silence.

Mad with fear, and scarcely knowing what I did, I sprang from the bed, and began desperately to advance upon these fantastic masqueraders, determined to seize them and demand the meaning of this practical and untimely jest, when suddenly all three lifted their heads and turned their faces on me-such faces!-indescribably awful in their pallid agony, and a whisper more ghastly than a shriek penetrated the very fibres of my consciousness-" Misery!"

With a furious bound I flung myself upon them-my hand struck empty space. Yet there-distinct as ever-they stood, glowering down upon me, while my clenched fists beat impotently through and beyond their seemingly corporeal shapes. And then-all at once-I became aware of their eyes -eyes that watched me pitilessly, steadfastly, and disdainfully -eyes that, like witch-fires, seemed to slowly burn terrific meanings into my very flesh and spirit. Convulsed and almost frantic with the strain on my nerves, I abandoned myself to despair-this awful night meant death I thought-my last hour had surely come. Then I saw the lips of one of those dreadful faces move. . . some superhuman instinct in me leaped to life in some strange way I thought I knew, or guessed the horror of what that next utterance would be and with all my remaining force I cried out

"No! no! Not that eternal doom! . . Not yet!".

THE DEVIL AS A MUSICIAN.

Various scenes follow which need not be dwelt upon at length, excepting when we come to the description of the Prince's skill as a musician. Lady Elton, who had been one of the rapidest of the fast set, was dying of paralysis in a house where an American heiress was boarded at £2,000 a year, which she paid for the advantage of introductions into society, with the prospect of marrying the Earl when the paralytic wife died. When the Prince was asked if he could play

He bowed. "I do; in an erratic sort of fashion. I also sing. Music has always been one of my passions. When I was very young-ages ago-I used to imagine I could hear the angel Israfel chanting his strophes amid the golden glow of heavenly glory, himself white-winged and wonderful, with a voice out-ringing beyond the verge of paradise."

As if to prove that he was a musician as well as a rhetorician, he stepped over to the pianoforte and played:

The music swelled into passionate cadence; melodies crossed and recrossed each other like rays of light glittering among green leaves; voices of birds and streams and tossing waterfalls chimed in with songs of love and playful merriment; anon came wilder strains of grief and angry clamour; cries of despair were heard echoing through the thunderous noise of some relentless storm; farewells everlastingly shrieked amid sobs of reluctant shuddering agony; and then, as I listened. before my eyes a black mist gathered slowly, and I thought I saw great rocks bursting asunder into flame, and drifting islands in a sea of fire-faces wonderful, hideous, beautiful, peered at me out of a darkness denser than night, and in the

midst of this there came a tune, complete in sweetness and suggestion-a piercing, sword-like tune that plunged into my very heart, and rankled there. My breath failed me, my senses swam; I felt that I must move, speak, cry out, and implore that this music, this horribly insidious music, should cease ere I swooned with the voluptuous poison of it, when, with a full chord of splendid harmony that rolled out upon the air like a breaking wave, the intoxicating sounds ebbed away into silence. LADY ELTON'S DOOM.

After having produced this marvellous effect with his playing, he sang some stanzas entitled "The Last Love Song," the utterances of a lover about to kill his mistress and himself. The words were written by one of Lady Elton's former admirers. She remembered them and was talking to the Prince about them, when all were violently startled from their seats by a most horrible cry --a gasping cry, such as might be wrung from some tortured animal. It was Lady Elton. As they drew the coverlet across her face-but not soon enough to hide the awful change indelible horror was stamped on the drawn features, a horror such as was never seen except in a painter's idea of some lost soul in torment. The eyes were rolled up and fixed in their sockets like balls of glass, and in them also was frozen the same frenzied, desperate look of fear. It was Nature's revenge on the outraged body. Her husband said, "She is dreadful to look at no longer human, you know; her eyes are as scared and wild as if she had seen the Devil; it never alters."

MONKEYS WHO FANCY THEY ARE MEN.

After this there is much discourse, the Prince, as usual, taking a very low view of the world and the things therein. For instance:

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The world is as it is made," he went on, regarding me fixedly. "It is moved by the lowest and pettiest motives; it works for the most trivial, ridiculous and perishable aims. It is not a paradise. It is not a happy family of united and affectionate brethren. It is an over-populated colony of jabbering and quarrelsome monkeys, who fancy they are men. Philosophers in old days tried to teach it that the monkey type should be exterminated for the growth and encouragement of a nobler race; but they preached in vain, there never were enough real men alive to overcome the swarming majority of the beasts. God Himself, they say, came down from Heaven to try and set wrong things right, and to restore, if possible, His own defaced image to the general aspect of humanity-and even He failed."

Every now and then Geoffrey Tempest makes some more or less personal allusion to the Devil, which always makes the Prince smile an amused dreamy smile that transfigures his countenance, and which makes him look like a fine Apollo absorbed in the thought of some new and glorious song.

MAVIS CLARE.

About this time we get introduced to Mavis Clare, whose novel," Differences," may be regarded as suggested by Marie Corelli's "Barabbas." Miss Clare, we are told, is too popular to need reviews; a large number of critics are mad against her for her success, but the public, as usual, care nothing for critics. It is not surprising, considering the marvellous merits that were combined in this supreme authoress. Clearness of thoughte, brilliancy of style, beauty of diction-all these were her own, united to consummate ease of expression and artistic skill. The book was blest with a potent resistless quility of genius, the authoress won fame without the aid of money, and was crowned so brightly and visibly to the world that she was beyond criticism. The frince defends Mavis Clare. Geoffrey Tempest, growing wild with

envy at a fame which, with all his expenditure, he could not rival, cuts up the book in an anonymous article which he contributes to a powerful magazine.

WHAT A GOOD DEVIL HE IS!

Tempest, finding all aspiration for everything ideal dying out within him, betook himself more and more to debauchery. He betted, he gambled, he allowed a few half-naked, brandy-soaked dancers and vulgar music-hall artistes to get £2,000 worth of jewels out of him. He associated with aristocratic boon companions who were utterly worthless, useless, callous scoundrels, who, nevertheless, associated with the best and highest in the land, the fairest and noblest ladies in London; so great is the power of money. The Prince sometimes went with him, but not often. On one occasion when he did, he put three sons of English peers to shame by his kindness to a poorly clad girl who was sobbing and clinging on the iron rail outside a closed church door. "O, God!" she wailed, "O, dear God, help me!" The Prince reproved the lewd reveller who had seized her arm, and thrust some money into her hand, saying, “Leave her alone, let her find God if she can.” “O, God bless you!" she cried, wildly; "God bless you!" raised his hat and stood uncovered in the moonlight, his dark beauty softened by a strangely wistful expression. "I thank you," he said simply. "You make me your

debtor."

He

But neither Tempest's debaucheries nor his wealth nor his paid for reviews gave him satisfaction; he became restless and miserable, and madly jealous of Mavis Clare.

A BRIDE OF THE DECADENCE.

The Prince and Tempest are presented to the Prince of Wales at his levée, and then Tempest brings his courtship of Sybil to a satisfactory conclusion, although it is she who proposes rather than he. The pure outline of this girl's delicate profile suggested to him one of Fra Angelico's saints or angels. Just as this comparison had framed itself in his mind she turns and asks him why he does not buy her right out and be done with it. She warns him, however, that she is a contaminated creature, trained to perfection in the lax morals and prurient literature of the day, who despises her own sex and loathes herself for being a woman. Nevertheless, he kisses her on the lips-a long passionate kiss, which makes him feel, as he says, all the joys of heaven and the fires of hell in a moment; which is a very fair example of the high faluting floridity of Marie Corelli's style. Love and wrath mingle in his blood; he closes his arms about her passionately, saying, "You impassive ice-flower, you shall melt to my touch and learn what love is. You very foolish beautiful child, your passions are asleep, they must wake," which they do with a vengeance; but unfortunately they are awakened, not by her husband, but by the Prince

WHY THE DEVIL HATES WOMEN.

Not that the Prince would have anything to do with her-he hated women. Not, as might be imagined, because they were the saviours of the world; but because with all the possibilities of good in their natures, they deliberately turned these possibilities to evil. Men who are influenced entirely by women are by them driven to hell, for which the Devil appears to be the reverse of grateful. For, as the Prince tells Tempest. he believes in hell and the soul, and assures him he cau demonstrate beyond all possibility of consoling doubt, that the shreds and strippings of that change you call Death are only so many embryos of new life which you must live whether you will or no. In this, as in innumerable other cases, the Devil is per

petually preaching the true Gospel, although it is his fate to preach to deaf ears. If he hates women, he hates men also; he protests, he has always protested against the creation of man.

THE ONE MISTAKE OF THE CREATOR.

Nature, he says, is in perpetual war against God's one mistake, the making of humanity. But with all his riches he is miserable exceedingly. The Prince declares that, as a rule, the most miserable people in the world are the richest. "Are you miserable, for instance?" says Tempest:

"Are you too blind to see that I am?" he answered, his accents vibrating with intense melancholy. "Can you think I am happy? Does the smile I wear,-the disguising smile men put on as a mask to hide their secret agonies from the pitiless gaze of unsympathetic fellow-creatures, persuade you that I am free from care? As for my wealth,-I have never told you the extent of it; if I did, it might indeed amaze you, though I believe it would not now arouse your envy, considering that your trifling five millions have not been without effect in depressing your mind. But I,-I could buy up kingdoms and be none the poorer,-I could throne and unthrone kings and be none the wiser.-I could crush whole countries under the iron heel of financial speculation,-I could possess the world,-and yet estimate it at no higher value than I do now, the value of a grain of dust circling through infinity, or a soap bubble blown on the wind."

Tempest having bought Willowsmere, a country seat in Warwickshire, the Prince undertakes to organise a great fête in honour of the coming marriage, and he does it on a scale of unparalleled magnificence, employing for the occasion a myriad of imps from hell, disguised as pages, servants, actors, etc. Before this great day the Prince and Tempest pay a visit to Mavis Clare, whom they find living in a charming retreat on the other side of the Avon, opposite Willowsmere Court, where she gives her pigeons the names of the newspapers in which her books are abused, and christens a very spiteful and silly old owl the Athenæum. The Prince is fascinated with Mavis Clare, and when parting, stoops and kisses her hand. He then addresses her in a very undiabolical fashion, assuring her that Satan, of whom she speaks with compassion, can never trouble the peace of a pure and contented soul.

THE DEVIL AS A CHRISTIAN.

But the Prince is always preaching, not only to Mavis Clare, but also to anybody and everybody whenever he can get the chance. For instance, what can we say of this discourse of his :

"Oh, you may disbelieve it as you will; but notwithstanding the pigmy peeps earth takes at the vast and eternal ocean of science, the soul is here, and all the immortal forces with it and around it. Nay, the gods-I speak in the plural, after the fashion of the ancient Greeks-for to my thinking there are many gods emanating from the Supreme Deity-the gods, I say, have so insisted on this fact, that one of them has walked the earth in human guise, solely for the sake of emphasising the truth of immortality to these frail creatures of seemingly perishable clay. For this I hate the planet; were there not, and are there not, other and far grander worlds, that a God should have chosen to dwell on this one."

For a moment I was silent, out of sheer surprise.

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You amaze me," I said at last. "You allude to Christ, I suppose; but everybody is convinced by this time that He was a mere man like the res' of us; there was nothing divine about Him. What a contradiction you are. Why, I remember you indignantly denied the accusation of being a Christian."

"Of course, and I deny it still," he answered quickly. "I have not a fat living in the Church that I should tell a lie on such a subject. I am not a Christian, nor is any one living a Christian. To quote a very old saying, 'There never was a

Christian save One, and He was crucified.' But though I am not a Christian, I never said I doubted the existence of Christ. That knowledge was forced upon me, with considerable pressure too."

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By a reliable authority?" I inquired with a slight sneer. He made no immediate reply. His flashing eyes looked, as it were, through me and beyond me at something far away. The curious pallor that at times gave his face the set look of an impenetrable mask, came upon him then, and he smiled an awful smile. So might a man smile out of deadly bravado, when told of some dim and dreadful torture awaiting him.

TURN YE, TURN YE: WHY WILL YE DIE?

Not content with this affirmation of his faith, the Prince tries once more to rouse his millionaire friend to a higher and better life. After his marriage he says to him, "With all your egotism, Geoffrey, there is something forcible and noble in your nature-something which rises up in bold revolt against falsehood and shame. Why in the name of Heaven do you not give it way?" " What would you have me to do?" said Geoffrey curiously, whereupon the infernal Prince replies:

"My advice will seem to you singular, Geoffrey, but if you want it, here it is. Give, as I said, the noble, and what the world would call the quixotic part of your nature full way; do not sacrifice your higher sense of what is right and just for the sake of pandering to anyone's power or influence, and say farewell to me. I am no use to you, save to humour your varying fancies, and introduce you to those great-or smallpersonages you wish to know for your own convenience or advantage. Believe me, it would be much better for you and much more consoling at the inevitable hour of death, if you were to let all this false and frivolous nonsense go, and me with it. Leave Society to its own fool's whirliwig of distracted follies; put royalty in its true place, and show it that all its pomp, arrogance and glitter are worthless, and itself a nothing, compared to the upright standing of a brave soul in an an honest man, and, as Christ said to the rich ruler, 'Sell half That thou hast and give to the poor.""

Tempest replied, sneering at the visionary Jew, an illusion which irritates the Prince; but finding Tempest irrevocably bent on going his own way, he never again attempted to wean him from his downward course. From henceforward he took a determined course with him implacably and to the appalling end. Everything Tempest wanted he had. The Prince bought him an infernal steed named Phosphor, ridden by the fiend Amiel, who, of course, easily carried off the Derby, and achieved for Tempest a fame which his book failed to secure. His marriage was a very grand affair, as might be expected when the Prince of Wales honoured it by his presence, and two great dignitaries of the Church, equally imposing in the fatness of their bodies and the unctuous redness of their faces, performed. Prince Lucio was the best man, and in the vestry he kissed the bride lightly on the cheek; she blushed a vivid red; then suddenly grew ghastly pale, and, with a kind of choking cry, reeled back in a dead faint in the arms of one of her bridesmaids.

THE REVELATION OF THE HONEYMOON.

They went for their honeymoon in Switzerland, where Tempest was not long in discovering that he had married a thing viler and more shameless in character than the veriest poor drab in the street; that his bride, with a face like one of Fra Angelico's angels, had the soul of a harpy and was a vulture of vice. A sickening satiety took the place of the deathless lovers' pain. He, it must be admitted, was as bad as she, and she tells him so plainly. She says, "I have taken the measure of the inherent love of vice in both sexes; there is not a pin to choose between them. Men are no worse than women,

women no worse than men. I have discovered everything except God. We are persistently taught that we are animals, nothing more; let us, therefore, not be ashamed of our animalism." So she talked, and talked until her beauty seemed to him like the beauty of the poisoned flower; and at night when he hel her in his arms and felt her heart beating against his own in the darkness, an awful dread rose in him as to whether he might not at some time or other be tempted to strangle her as she lay on his breast-strangle her as one strangles a vampire which sucked one's blood away. No one can say that this is mild. Tempest brings back this physically magnificent animal of his and introduces her to Mavis Clare, whose sweet face is ideally fair, like a sylph of the woodlands, and he thinks with bitterness what a mistaken choice he has made. Not knowing, hemight as well have proposed to pluck a star from the sky as to win such a woman as Marie Corelli

no, that is a slip-as Mavis Clare. His wife envies Mavis Clare, and longs to make her miserable for once in her life if she can, but finds it impossible, because she believes in a God, and finds life beautiful.

THE DEVIL'S PRAYER.

For a time the millionaire and his bride continued living at Willowsmere Court, he regarding her with a certain savage satisfaction of possession and enjoying the drowsy sensation of a well-fed, well-mated animal. Sybil, however, is wretched, for she does not care for her husband in the least, and upbraids him with not endeavouring to set any noble aims before her, and for not trying to lead her, an erring, passionate, misguided woman, into the light of faith and hope which alone gives peace. He tells her she is hysterical, whereupon she waxes wroth, and the Prince suddenly enters unannounced. Shortly afterwards comes a remarkable scene, in which the Prince makes love to Mavis Clare in the hearing of Tempest and his wife, who are hiding on either side of the elm under which the love-making takes place. It was a curious love-making, for the Prince told Mavis he could not give her love, for he loved none, but he would bring her the proudest men in any country of the world as suitors for her hand. He offered her anything and everything, but neither the world's wealth, nor the world's power, nor the world's love could tempt her. So he addresses her as follows:

"I can do nothing for you-you will not have my aid-you reject my service? Then, as I may not help you, you must help me," and dropping before her, he reverently took her hand and kissed it. "I ask a very little thing of you-pray for me; I know you are accustomed to pray, so it will be no trouble to you-you believe God hears you, and when I look at you I believe it too. Only a pure woman can make faith possible to man. Pray for me then, as one who has fallen from his higher and better self, who strives, but who may not attain, who labours under heavy punishment, who would fain reach Heaven, but who, by the cursed will of man-and man alone-is kept in Hell. Pray for me, Mavis Clare; promise it, and so shall you lift me a step nearer the glory I have lost." Presently she spoke, in sweet yet tremulous accents. "Since you desire it so earnestly, I promise," she said. “I will pray that the strange and bitter sorrow which seems to consume you may be removed from your life"Sorrow," he echoed, interrupting her and springing to his feet with an impassioned gesture. Woman!-genius!-angel! whatever you are, do not speak of one sorrow for me; I have a thousand thousand sorrows, aye, a million million, that are as little flames about my heart, and as deeply seated as the centres of the universe. The foul and filthy crimes of men; the base deceit and cruelties of women; the ruthless, murderous ingratitude of children; the scorn of good; the martyrdom of intellect; the selfishness; the avarice; the sensuality of human