affair is concerned, to forbear from any further interference whatsoever, in my family."

He spoke with an air of authority not to be disputed; and rising from his chair, immediately quitted the room, leaving Lady Fermanagh dissolved in tears, and with a face in which mingled dismay and disapprobation were written. Whilst Mr. Sullivan was humbled to the dust, what between the reproaches of his own conscience, and the high disapprobation of his conduct thus expressed by one honoured so deeply as he did Lord Fermanagh.

CHAPTER XIII.

Behold her there,

As I beheld her ere she knew my heart,

The darling of my manhood.

TENNYSON.

IT is the day before Eleanor Wharncliffe is to be married to Randal Langford.

It is yet only the beginning of March, for the marriage has been hastened forward, and Eleanor hurried on with a speed she had been little prepared for. But such is the usual course of such proceedings when once consent has been obtained, and everything is settled, and she was too reasonable, too good, too anxious to promote Randal's happiness, not to do considerable violence to herself by acquiescing in this rather than give him pain, and run the risk of offending all the rest by remonstrance or hesitation.

The family party on the Wharncliffe side is assembled at Lidcote Hall, and the Langfords are expected to a late dinner in the evening of this day, at which we are now arrived.

Everard Wharncliffe had come to Lidcote the evening before, being accompanied by one or two intimate friends of his; indeed, connections of the family. There was Richard Delamere, his cousin in the third degree, and Henry Duckenfield, his cousin in the fourth degree, and a few more. Very intimate friends of his they were, young men of the world, and much of his

own stamp, and as completely absorbed in the affairs of to-day as he was. These young men, however, formed the only company staying in the house. Eleanor had no intimate female friend of her own, and was not in a humour to feel any pleasure in seeing mere acquaintance. Since her engagement she had more than ever appeared to shun the society of girls of her own age; and seemed to like to be by herself or with her mother alone. Since her engagement with Langford was concluded, it had seemed almost as if she took refuge with her mother against her own thoughts and recollections, clinging to her, as it were, in a manner which she had never done before.

This was natural enough between those of so different a way of thinking in general, when in one thing they certainly agreed, and this was, in the desire to dwell upon and enhance the good qualities of Randal Langford. The only satisfaction Eleanor could find under the weight of her hidden sense of infidelity, seemed to be in the reiterated assurances of her mother that Randal Langford's happiness was entirely dependent upon her, and in the enumeration of his good qualities. This subject Lady Wharncliffe was never tired of expatiating, and Eleanor sought thus to justify to herself the immensity of the sacrifice, which, at the expense of so much truth and candour, under a heavy sense of her own disapprobation, she was about to make.

Lady Wharncliffe, as you will by this time be well aware, was a thorough adept in the arts of petty sophistry, and it was to such that she directed her conversation, though mostly in an indirect way: endeavouring to strengthen her daughter's resolution, and

to silence that voice of conscience which was perpetually struggling to make itself heard in Eleanor's breast. And thus the courtship had gone on, and the time had slipped away. The period had been, indeed, mostly spent by Randal and Eleanor together; for he loved her too passionately, too devotedly, to bear to be parted from her unnecessarily for a single hour. His whole existence seemed wrapped up in her. Few men do, few men can love, as he loved. It was a master and a tyrant passion, swallowing up for the time every other. He had no tastes and few affections, indeed, to afford a change. His passions were all of the darker sort; his wishes, aims, and ambitions, few and personal; so that the generous affection he now felt seemed to have annihilated those other sentiments and feelings which were so little in harmony with itself.

Every day Randal passed with Eleanor she loved him the better, and became more and more reconciled to the engagement she had made. Even with the most constant hearts, absence and a total breach of intercourse, have great effect. The present assumes its rights over the past; the strongest feelings gradually recede into distance, fade into indistinctness, and lose their agonizing intensity.

But whilst I write this last sentence, I am inclined to hesitate, lest this exhibition should lead to fresh instances of domestic cruelty, - fresh sacrifices offered at the shrine of a too worldly prudence, fresh hearts ruined by enforced separation. There were moments, it should be told, when the recollections of the past would recur with intense bitterness, but they were resolutely suppressed. The indifference and de

sertion of the one was contrasted with the devotion and fidelity of the other; and resentment, even in the gentle bosom of Eleanor Wharncliffe, was not without its due influence in determining the bias of her feelings. She has been sitting thoughtfully at the drawingroom window, for the approaching event, now so near as to have assumed the form of an irrevocable a certainty, weighed heavily upon her. Any approaching change of importance is awful to the sensitive. Eleanor habitually looked forward to the irrevocable with awe. Any change was in itself alarming; she had more fortitude than courage, and always preferred the evils which she knew to the evils in possibility.

She sat there, looking out upon the flower-garden, where the crocuses and snowdrops were beginning to peer, and where a few mezereon-trees were putting forth their blossoms watching the effect of the high March wind, as it swept the flying clouds athwart the sky, bowed the heads of the noble trees with which her father's park was adorned, or swept in loud gusts through the wood, which on one side approached the house very closely.

Everard and his two friends were in the room, standing at the fireplace, laughing and talking. Everard every now and then casting a glance at the thoughtful face of his sister, with a sort of irritating feeling of dislike and dissatisfaction. There was a shade of melancholy generally discernible when the countenance was in repose, that always inclined him to feel angry. He had got a suspicion into his head, not very uncommon with characters of little feeling when they come in contact with those of much sensibility, that Eleanor's melancholy was somewhat affected, and dis