When she had conducted him into the sitting-room, and extinguished the smoky, waning lamp which had seen his vigil, she brought from the cabinet the packet prepared by Alice the previous day in some mysterious prevision of her approaching demise. He carried it to the window, and read its address,

"For the Earl of Glencarrig; to be given to him after my death."

The letter for Lady Flora presented itself first upon opening it, then that directed to himself. He turned more completely from Janet's scrutinizing though respectful observation, and bent his head over this relic of his dead love with that infinite, ineffable yearning of the whole being towards the lost which exceeds all power of thought to express, much more of language to describe. The morn was yet so grey, and, contending with mist and rain, shone so dimly into the narrow street, that the light was inadequate to allow him to read rapidly the irregular, feeble handwriting which covered two pages of the sheet. Line after line, almost word by word, he was compelled to decipher its meaning, and as he did so the tiny drop of honey which had lurked at the bottom of his cup of bitterness became absorbed in the overflowing of that cup; the old certainty that Alice had only loved him as a friend, which had been for a time shaken to the foundation by Janet's asseverations, was after all the only truth; and in the apathy of his misfortune he accepted that knowledge again, and took it home to him, and never for one second tried to delude himself, or regain the brittle spar which might have helped to

float him above the drifting tide that must henceforth carry him on, a dried and leafless branch, to the goal of his existence. He had bowed himself to the decree of Heaven, and cared not to struggle longer; what could he desire or labour for? Let all go! All? what more had he to surrender, what more to feel?

One thing at least to learn, the name of the man who had possessed and rejected, miserable fool! a blessing for which he had wearied Heaven with prayers. He untied the ribbon which fastened the little book, drew out a ring, and the paper to which Alice alluded in her touching farewell.

It dropped from his fingers, paralysed by the sight of the familiar hand and cipher, which stood out like the fiery sentence on the wall. Janet offered to restore it, but he held her off at arm's length.

"You deceived me, shamefully deceived me! How dared you say she loved me, woman-that my desertion broke her heart?

"Me!" exclaimed the astonished Janet, "me! ochonari! who has been deceived here? not yersel', of a surety!"

66

Both, all of us! It was not I——” "It was! I would swear it. "

"Swear not to anything so false!

Here-here is

proof in her own writing, in . . . . in his, whom she loved. Oh misery!"

After a long pause of sad silence, he began afresh to read and compare the letter with his own secret memories, until all doubt was gone, and grief and pity could find no spot untouched to plant one further sting.

"Can I marvel that she so loved him? Can I, of all living men, remembering what he was, marvel that she loved me not? Oh, friend, brother! noblest and best! to thy memory alone could hers be united yet grow the dearer for such bond! But oh, what she must have suffered- .!"

He had moved vaguely, aimlessly, towards the chamber of death, whither Janet dared not follow him again, his step and gestures those of a blind man, so uncertain and purposeless did they seem.

"Once more," he murmured, "only once more. I must give her my promise of silence, or she will not sleep in peace. I am coming, Alice! Let me go-do not detain me," he added angrily, repulsing Janet, who would have protested against his wish.

She read in his dark, restless eye a strength of woe which would bear no curb, and prudently forbore to arouse its tempests afresh. He came forth in a very few minutes, looking rather like the corpse he had just quitted than the living man he was; his right hand concealing something in the breast of his dress, while the other dried upon his lips the same crimson stains which the evening before had reddened their livid pallor.

Into those minutes the agony of years had been compressed, and for him the bitterness of death was past.

CHAPTER XLIX.

CONCLUSION.

Oh bury me under the bracken bush,
And by the blooming brier,

And never let living mortal ken

That a kindly Scot lies here.

OLD BALLAD.

Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea,
Thy tribute wave deliver,

No more by thee my steps shall be,

For ever and for ever.

TENNYSON.

We trust that the reader has felt sufficiently interested in the fortunes of the Earl of Glencarrig to peruse with patience the few pages in which we would sketch the close of a career so fraught with sorrows and events. It shall be concisely done, leaving the reader to fill up the blanks by the help of that imagination upon which we have already, in the progress of this simple story, made such repeated and onerous demands.

After the death of Alice, the young lord continued in Edinburgh only as long as was required to pay the last duties to the beloved remains, and set on foot the best arrangement his situation permitted him to make for ensuring some provision to her worthy and faithful attendant. This completed, he obtained permission, through the credit he possessed with several ex-Jacobite

members of government, to leave Scotland unmolested. It was the utmost that could be granted to so uncompromising a rebel; his estates had been forfeited to the last acre; and the young man quitted his native shores attainted in name, bruised in spirit, sick in body, a poverty-stricken exile, to rejoin on a strange soil the relatives who were all that he had now to love.

He had had no courage to announce his coming by letter, and, on arriving in Paris, found that the countess had set out for the coast that very morning to embark at Havre for Scotland. The information which he brought in person entirely obviated any necessity for this journey, and the earl's first care was to dispatch a mounted courier to bear this message to her, and communicate his arrival. Lord Gilbert Hay was at St. Germain's, and the earl found his sister in the countess's apartments. She was sitting with her little girl, a lovely infant, on her knees; somewhat thinner, paler, and graver, than of yore, but not so as to impair either her beauty or her bright cheerfulness, which latter, chastened by the responsibilities of her double duties, was an invaluable support to herself, and a daily source of pleasure to all around. All the girl's faults were softening and developing into womanly virtues-levity sobering into animation, wilfulness into resolution, the desire for applause into the effort to do right-impulse giving place to principle. The Flora of nineteen, wife and mother, had already, without losing one grace of her natural gifts, divested herself of many defects which could have been imputed