honour, refinement, not destroyed by an isolated faux pas. But now all such tender webs of soothing thought were for ever impossible. It was plain that his nature was vulgarised and debased to the core.

A spasm of pain distorted the Premier's countenance. "You judge me harshly," he replied humbly. ""Tis true I have deceived the world, but what evil have I done that cannot be repaired ?"

"You are right. Nothing is lost, sauf l'honneur.”

"L'honneur!" echoed Floppington in dismay; "surely you are exaggerating. I cannot believe I have been guilty of anything really dishonourable. Aquinas himself, who was the first to lay such stress on the subjective side of moral action

Surprise and indignation had rendered Gwendolen momentarily speechless; but when she heard this impudent, casuistic appeal to the Angelic Doctor, all her ardent nature flashed out in lightning that made the Premier quail before the dark recesses of his spirit which it illuminated.

"It is not really dishonourable to lower yourself to the level of an untutored peasant; it is not really dishonourable to masquerade in another man's name, leaving State affairs to regulate themselves as best they may; it is not dishonourable to trail the reputation of a noble family in the dust; nor to

Oh, spare me, spare me!" he entreated, cowering before her arrowy glance and holding his hands before his face as if to ward off the shower of verbal darts; "I did not think of all that. Spare

me!"

"Spare you!" cried Lady Gwendolen; and her words were dagger-thrusts. "And did you spare me when you made me a subject of ridicule, of scandal in my own house? Did you bestow a thought upon what your infamous conduct would probably expose me to? Did you--"

The Premier interrupted her by a cry of pain. Oh, my God," he thought, "what madness was mine! I who would die to save her pain have recklessly exposed her to all this! What must her delicate spirit not have suffered! Yet God knows I thought our lives sundered beyond the possibility of such an intimacy."

"Did you not subordinate all other considerations, great or little, to your own selfish desires ? "

"I did, I did," moaned the Premier. "I was blind, but you have opened my eyes."

He uncovered his face and stretched out his hands towards her in piteous supplication.

"Forgive me," he said in a low tone that vibrated with infinite pathos. "If you knew what I have suffered! Forgive me!" Gwendolen was moved in spite of herself.

"What is my wrong beside hers?" she said softly. "Ask her to forgive yo !"

"What do you mean?" said the Premier with an air of innocence that irritated Gwendolen afresh, and sent through her a thrill of indignant pity at all the countless sufferings of her sex,

"I have wronged no woman but you." Gwendolen looked straight into his eyes and said with bitter reproach:

"Is it not wrong, then, according to your remarkable code, to persuade a poor housemaid that you are going to marry her in three months?" The Premier did not flinch before her withering glance. She saw a proud look of low cunning in his eyes and a wicked smile playing round the corners of his mouth, as, after a sigh of relief, he said with the easy affability of an accomplished roué:

"Is that all? Now, whatever wrongs I have really committed, I cannot see that I did anything blameworthy there. I acted for once like a man of the world at one stroke I ensured my own repose and her happiness. Of course," he concluded, breaking into a melancholy little laugh, "you don't suppose I ever meant to marry the girl."

Gwendolen started from her chair, her sweet face rigid and pale, her gray eyes flashing fire, her figure drawn up in regal majesty, her imperious forefinger pointing to the door.

At the shock of this attitude the Premier's heart almost ceased to beat. "Don't send me away," he cried wildly. "I don't understand it all. I have so much to say to you."

Still the imperious forefinger pointed to the door while she made a movement towards the bell.

"Gwendolen !" The cry was wrung from his innermost heart. The forefinger was relaxed, and the hand fell to her side. "If you have really anything to say," she said after an instant's silence, "I will listen to you for five minutes. Then we part for ever."

"For ever!" The Premier looked round the room in a dazed fashion. He was conscious of serried rows of rich morocco bindings, and of workaday chairs and fire-irons; but all this concreteness seemed curiously out of harmony with the dream-like minor key in which his inner life was playing itself out. Mechanically he went to the window and opened it, admitting a rather chill breeze. He closed it immediately, and then walked to the fireplace and stood looking reflectively into the fairy structures and arcades of red-hot coal. All at once he turned round and found Gwendolen's

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eyes fixed curiously upon him. He started. "For ever!" he repeated musingly. So much for human vaticination. Do you remember, Lady Harley, my prophecy that your sex would have to wait for ever for its enfranchisement?

"I never thought," said Gwendolen, sadly, "that the day would come when I should wish that we were indebted for this act of justice to some other man than you."

'Tis true I am the agent," replied Floppington, "but a very indirect agent. My own opinions are unchanged. You know why I allowed it to be introduced. It was part of our agreement

"I deny it! There was no agreement," exclaimed Gwendolen passionately. "I thought that you had altered from conviction, though I know better now. Did you think to buy me thus? Or did you fear that Bardolph Mountchapel was too strong for you?"

"You are mistaken," replied the Premier, mildly. "I agreed to let him have his own way just for the sake of the experiment." "A very paltry evasion of my last question and one worthy of you. You allowed him to prepare the public mind and to persuade the Cabinet to the new course-in fact, it is to him that the gratitude of our sex is due and not to you. And all the while you knew you intended ultimately to oust him out of his office so that you might reap all the glory of his great measure!"

The Premier was about to protest, but Gwendolen went on rapidly: "Perhaps you are going to say it was not dishonourable to play such a trick as you did on Mountchapel !"

"That can hardly be called a trick," returned the Premier with the faintest suspicion of a mischievous smile. "I certainly paid him back in his own coin, unchristian though it may have been, and I cannot honestly say that I regret that he has lost his place in endeavouring to deprive me of mine. He met his match. Besides, all's fair in love and war, they say."

"At last a ray

"Ah!" ejaculated Gwendolen, scornfully. of truth! Is it thus that you revenge yourself on a rival, sir? Thank Heaven that our interview is at an end." She rang the bell. An electric shock seemed to pass through the Premier.

"I deeply regret having intruded my presence upon you," he said quickly and with infinite humility. "How could I foresee that my visit would be as superfluous as it has proved? I did not mean to take up your time in discussing my political rival. It must be plain to you that I came to show you-I know not exactly how, for I had sworn to tell no one-that the man whom rumour declares to have replaced me in your affections, my rival in love," a faint, sad smile passed over his face as he said the words, "is an impostor, or at least not what he pretends to be, and that, of course, you mustn't marry him."

"How now?" exclaimed Gwendolen, flushing deeply. "Will you dictate to me? Am I to give my heart where you choose? If you had a spark of gentlemanly feeling in you, you would have spared me this last insult of interfering in my love affairs."

"You must not," he repeated in wild astonishment; "you don't know him; he is vulgar, uncultivated, a stranger to refinement."

"Continue to heap indignities on the head of a defenceless woman," interrupted Gwendolen in low tones vibrating with intense scorn. "But what is to be expected of one who slanders the absent? You to constitute yourself a judge of refinement! You to dare speak thus of a man who was magnanimous enough to praise you far beyond your deserts!"

"He magnanimous enough!" gasped the Premier.

66 Unable to win by fair means you resort to foul, in love as well as politics. Well would it be for the country if you made way for him altogether. Mine would not then be the only grateful sex. She said the last words very calmly, for a footman had just entered.

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"If I made way for him altogether!" repeated Floppington, disregarding the domestic, who was welling over with delightful excitement. "Is this your real opinion? Do you think it would be better for the country?"

"Most decidedly,” she replied, quietly. “Adieu, Mr. Floppington! Pour toujours!"

His lips twitched painfully. He moved slowly towards her as if intending to take her hand. She remained perfectly rigid, her delicate fingers grasping a chair tightly to keep herself from trembling. Her gray eyes were cast down, but as he came close to her, they were raised to his with a hard, glittering expression that seemed to interpose a bar of steel against his further progress.

My punishment is greater than I can bear," said the Premier in a whisper that was half a sob. "You will at least keep the secret you have surprised."

Gwendolen shuddered perceptibly, but made no answer. Her eyelids drooped once more.

"What is done cannot be undone,” he pleaded humbly.

not my secret alone."

"It is

She raised her eyes again and flashed upon him a look of fierce, contemptuous indignation. "It wanted but that," she said bitterly, nevertheless retaining enough self-possession to speak French; "but since you must have a categorical answer, yes, I will keep your shameful secret."

A twinge of pain shot across the Premier's face. He gazed at the pallid, firm-set, unquivering mask that hid a world of agony behind its cruel, white beauty, and he bowed his head as if before some stony image of remorseless and unexultant Justice.

CHAPTER VI.

AN UNFORESEEN CONTINGENCY.

THE afternoon continued fine. There was a softness and coolness in the air after the rain and in the clear light the faded façades of houses stood out with a delicacy of outline that made them almost picturesque. Yet to the bent figure walking slowly along the busy pavement, the atmosphere was charged with a wistful pathos, and thick-shadowed with olden memories. Faces that had long fallen into dust, voices whose musical or unmelodious ring vibrated no more save for the ear of remembrance, scenes hallowed by the mystic glamour of childish association, these accompanied him as he almost unconsciously threaded his way through the throng of pedestrians. The present had vanished, nor did he ask himself why his mind was not busy with it. The events of that day or of the day before, or of the past week, seemed to him to belong to the life of somebody else, and to concern him no more than a tragic story one vaguely remembers to have listened to with dull apathy. But something had thawed the frozen stream of forgotten experience

and it burst into life and motion. Aspiration, struggle, failure, regret-so ran the gamut of his life, which year after year did but reproduce in different keys or with other discords. He had settled down surveying his past with the quiet mournfulness of the philosophic observer by the time he reached the Bethnal Green Road, down which he forgot to turn.

"Finds himself a fool at forty," he muttered. ""Twould probably be the same if, like cats, we could make nine experiments in the art of living. Yet it seems hard to have had only one life to bungle. Too late have I found that each man belongs by nature to one of two classes-the first formed for action, the second for criticism. The function of the former is to do all the work of life, that of the latter to find fault with it when done. By these two agencies, each as indispensable as the other, does the world's work progress and I wishing to play a part in both-I beg your pardon!"

66

voice.

Whyn't yer look where yer a-goin' to?" growled a juvenile

Jack Dawe looked at the small boy who was wiping beer-splashes off his grimy garments. It was the hero of the saveloys. The recognition was mutual.

"If yer don't pay for that 'ere champagne yer spilt," cried the boy, whirling the can rapidly to show off his power of retaining the contents, “I'll have yer locked up, s'elp me Bob I will."

The sight of the lad brought Jack back with a shock to the realities of life. The heat and effluvia of the dinner in the shop came upon him with almost the intensity of actuality, and his gorge

rose.

Then with the image of the dining-rooms came that of their sick proprietress, and with a self-reproachful frown he strode forward more rapidly.

66

Come back," shrieked the boy, with an excellent imitation of Jack's morning manner and matter. "Ye haven't paid me for that champagne!

Some passers-by looked on admiringly, but Jack merely quickened his step.

66

Stop thief!" cried the boy, running a few yards after him. Jack smiled a smile of humorous melancholy, tolerant alike of the boy and of his admirers.

"Tis but Mountchapel in miniature," he murmured.

Suddenly a bright idea struck the small boy. He put his hand into his pocket and drew out a huge pellet which he hurled at the high hat of the pedestrian. The large, mealy Regent caught the target neatly between brim and crown, and there crumbled into floury dissolution, ruining the glossy silk in its own destruction. It was the cold potato Jack had given him after freeing him from the grasp of the policeman. Jack staggered under the force of the blow. Recovering himself, he took off his hat and looked at it ruefully.

"Said I not he was an embryonic Mountchapel?" he muttered.

E