"There is no harm, I am sure, in disseminating pure poetry, and in any case, as almost in loco parentis, even yet I have some little claim to know if the compliments that are proffered to my late ward and cousin are base metal or the true Parnassian gold."

"I am, it seems, in bearing, like a Virgilian goddess, a priestess carrying sacred vessels."

"Heavens! he could say the same of our milkmaid, Lizzie, carrying the cogues of peasemeal and milk to the calves. I prefer my own comparisonof the graceful and mysterious cat."

"And, sitting, I have what does he call it?-the hieratio aspect of some old Madonna." "Ah! the dear lad! what a sad evidence that poets and lovers should derive from life, and not from literature or art. You are too cold to Master Reginald, Norah; a swain so devoted and so fervent, though so confoundedly obvious in his compliments, does not deserve the snubbings that your playful and whimsical affection too often bestows on him. With a little more encouragement the lad could show you he has the stuff of a grand passion under the copy of Keats he always carries in his breast-pocket. I dragged him out on the yawl a week ago, and sailed him an hour or two along the coast with the sea coming over the coamings, and I liked the fellow's eye-there was no moment of quailing; but the idiot spouted Byron ! Great Neptune!Byron at such an hour-with

the nor'-easter coming down in black squalls and a lost reefpennant! I was ass enough to give him the tiller, while I went forward for a moment, and he let her gybe. God nearly had us there!"

"Oh!" oried his hearer, "you horrify me! It is the first time I have heard of it; you must not-must not do such dreadful things.

He had risen, and was pacing the floor; the wind blew in from the open window, laden with summer scents, bearing the sounds of the valley-the reapers' hone, the plunge of the river on its weirs, and the scream of plovers. It blew through her beautiful and abundant hair, and seemed to pale the burnished olive of her pure and healthy cheek. Her eyes stared troublously; she had risen to her feet, and clasped her hands together, sucking her breath through sleet-white teeth, her lips apart and shuddering.

"Ah!" he said remorsefully, "I shouldn't have mentioned it; and I promise you I'll never give him a tiller again."

"You make-you make me furious!" she exclaimed, stamping her foot. "You should never have had him on board; you should never have let him take the tiller; you know very well he knows nothing about it. Had you had you drowned Reginald!"

"What!" cried the Captain mockingly. "The author of 'Aphrodite!'

'I spurn the sea-billow and mock at the gale,

For thee, Aphrodite

The devil take it, Norah! why should a man throw off poetry of such a briny flavour if he doesn't know enough not to let a boat gybe in dirty weather? I like the lad that he seems not to have thought the incident worth mentioning to you. No doubt he's storing up all his emotion over the affair for a sonnet in the book. How, by the way, goes the opus?"

She looked sideways at him distrustfully, still in a regal humour. "I don't know, and you are deliberately leading away from the subject we were engaged upon, which was certainly not Mr Maurice and his poetry."

"Deliberately,—now, Norah! you give me credit for a slyness I don't possess. Reggie's gybe came into my mind quite irresistibly with a twinge from a broken rib I got from a swinging boom in consequence of it."

"A broken rib!" she cried with knitted brows. "That accounts for your interviews with the doctor. You are the most secretive mortal surely ever breathed. Was it necessary to conceal such a thing from us?"

"No, not absolutely, but judicious. Discretion obviated explanation and alarm, and all the fuss Aunt Amelia would certainly have made about such a thing. A rib is neither here nor there; remember the indifference of Adam to one completely lost."

"Is it painful?"

"No more at present than Adam's was; if wives were always to be got so easily,"

he stammered as one confused, remembering; flushed, and sighed. "Norah," he went on in a new voice altogether, quietly, wistfully, "does the house not seem, even yet, a little lonely? Something chilly's in the morning, eh? We are so quiet here. Silences, lapses, pauses, I can't ride them down, not if I rode the mare till she foundered. Would you imagine there would be so much difference? Oh! a man wants a wife! I'm possessed of devils,—the worst of devils, -old remembrance and remorse, and the days are full of ghosts."

"Go swimming, Andy," said the girl, suddenly all softened with a pity that welled up in her eyes, and made her bold lips tender and tremulous.

"Swimming!" he cried, flinging up his arms. "I've swam, and behold the sea hath lost its ancient efficacy! Once it could wash away all care, cool the fever of foolish nights, dispel the phantoms of the mind, cleanse, console, invigorate; now, by the Lord! it might be ditch - water! man wants a wife, a little wife to look at, hear, be kind to. I came to-day on a silly novel, pushed at the back of the escritoire in her room, some day, perhaps, when she heard me coming, and was afraid-"

A

"No, not afraid, cousin ; Jean was never afraid of you; she knew she had no reason; probably shame, poor dear, to be found disappointing you."

"That tawdry volume gave me as much emotion as if

it had been part of herself. Ghosts!" He ran his fingers through the thick hair over his temples. "Do you ever realise how bogey is the world? -so much is left behind of folks departed. Their breath is in the wind; their cast-off clothing keeps the shape it took from the pressure of their bodies; the sound of their voices and their footsteps goes for ever through this unchanging space. It isn't only that, but there are ghosts of touch, and hate, and appreciation; Jean's gone, but a wraith of her haunts Fancy Farm, where I hope she was not so unhappy, and whatever she cared for here has an aura about it that belongs to her, and whatever she touched-even the stupid novel-is haunted by the spirit of her hands."

He turned his back upon the girl, and looked out at the piling clouds that billowed silvery in the west against a sky intensely blue. The house of Fancy Farm-once a simple steading, but in recent years a little aggrandised with new wings pierced by low wide windows, gables corbel-stepped, and the deep verandah-stood upon a brae that gave the loveliest prospect of the valley. The brae sloped down in turfy waves that ended at the river, which went over its granite weirs with a gushing sound that seemed to cool the day, and made its neighbourhood melodious; and over the river lay the tawny meadows, populous now with men and women and children making hay. Beyond, the old plantations,

garrulous with rooks, and over them the steeple of the village.

"I'm afraid of getting tired of this place, Norah," he exclaimed, in an altered mood again. "Tired! tired! It was all very well when it was Jeanie's Fancy, but now I'd give ten years of my lease of life to be back in Schawfield, and in the sound of the sea. Yon's the place! I should never have leased it to our English friend, -a decent fellow, but "he snapped his fingers and grotesquely puckered up his face-"Schawfield is thrown away on him."

"At two thousand pounds ayear," said Norah, twinkling.

"Yes! yes! that's the confounded thing!" cried her cousin impetuously; "the poor devil's not getting anything like the value for his money. He misses the romance of the place: he has only got the house and shootings, and the sunsets, and has not the key to its magic garden; he has not the faintest hint of its old associations.

I'm defrauding

Beswick; I've half a mind to return him fifty per cent of his rent."

"Yes, why don't you?" asked Norah, looking at him through drooping lashes, and her cousin laughed.

"You know very well!" said he. "It's simply because I don't happen to have a thousand pounds at present at my disposal. What money is in my name is in the oddest corners of the world,—digging gold in West Australia, lumbering in Newfoundland, trapping and tracking furry things in Atha

house."

"And, incidentally, it's not getting much in way of dividends," said Norah, laughing. "Andy, as a speculator, you're a perfect child I"

He actually flushed, quite pleased as at a compliment; shook with the soft chuckle that made Maurice always think of old Melampus in among the thickets, and stroked his chin. "Ha! So! Of course! of course! That's what I want, the child's illusion, wholesomest and cheapest of all joys. Unless ye become as one of these But not so very childish, Norah; some day Athabascas will do well. We are growing the finest fruits at Fort Macfadyen, near the Arctic circle. What a world! What a world! Magnificent! Here am I, to the carnal eye, lounging about Fancy Farm, the prosiest of lives, but a wraith of me's paddling a canoe and singing chansons on the Mackenzie, or shooting moose and bear for supper. Great value! Great value for my money! And just yesterday I had a splendid adventure, fifteen fifteen hundred pounds sterling of me struck a new reef on the Witwatersrand." He rubbed his hands ecstatically.

Norah sighed patiently. "What a guardian I've escaped from!" said she. "I'm glad the what-do-you-call-thems did not permit you to venture my money on such fairy enterprises. You go into the Stock

"So it is! So it is!" cried the baronet, quite delighted at the idea. "That's the way to look upon it, like a play; or a poem! That's why I'm sorry for poor old Beswick; he takes his Works in the deadliest earnest, looks upon them as a kind of soulless congeries of mechanism for grinding out, not steel for railways, ships, and bridges, but gold for his daughter's Paris bonnets and his own wearisome luxuries, including Schawfield,-but, without the privilege of the magic garden. By George! I'd let him have the house and shootings for the rest of his lease for nothing if I could have but the privilege of a hut on the place, and & guarantee that he wouldn't talk Commerce when he met me. I was foolish to let Schawfield, when I think of it. I could have scraped along,

if it weren't that it would involve shutting up the lodges, and paying off a lot of men; I couldn't very well do that,— such decent fellows; almost all of them have been with dad. But, if it weren't for that, I could have rubbed along without letting."

"You never required to let," said Norah, calmly regarding him.

"Never required to let ! Good heavens! what would happen to Schawfield as & whole if I didn't? It takes every penny of Beswick's rent to pay the mortgages."

"You never required to let," repeated Norah firmly.

"Ah!" he exclaimed, "you're

back at it again; you mean, I could have taken some of your money?"

"Borrowed it, and paid me back when the dividends come from the fairy and romantic speculations," said the intensely practical and frank young person.

"There have been one or two rogues in the family," said Captain Cutlass, straightening himself, "but of late we have run to common decency. I like the element of imprudence in your proposal, but I thought we had settled long ago it was not for a moment to be seriously considered. My dear Norah, you have yourself to think of, and your future. You will marry, and the most attractively poetical quality about Mr Reginald Maurice to me is that he hasn't as yet made a farthing by the Muse or anything else."

"Upon my word!" said Sir Andrew. "I believe I really did not understand my duty as your guardian, or I should have brought Maurice to the scratch about you when I had the right."

It

She stared at him with her lips apart and breathing deeply, her heavy chestnut eyebrows more than customarily close together, her fingers playing the tattoo of the devil on the table she had drawn her chair to, conscious of a tremor of her legs that might betray her even while she sat. was a mercy that Sir Andrew Schaw, in Norah's presence, ever was a man considerably abstracted - rapt in inner visions; often it annoyed her, now she saw it gratefully. With an effort she quelled the coward flesh of her, and compelled in her voice an ironic

accent.