till six months after my marriage that a letter from Proctor undeceived me, and at the same time explained the disappointment which I had already experienced in my married life. That I was egregiously at fault in not feeling the difference between the two women I readily acknowledge; though not more so than many another man of my youth and inexperience might have been. Still if you know all these things it is more easy to understand how, seeing Eloise, and finding all my youthful dreams more than realized in her, I should the sooner discover that relation which from the first I had believed to exist between us. Still for all this, had not circumstances thrown us together in such a way that we both felt for the moment absolved from all those ties which are binding only in this world, I might, nay probably should, never have revealed to her my most unhappy passion. Since that time we have known that we loved each other-simply that and nothing more. When by your own account she was suffering and perhaps in peril of her life, I visited her only as one friend might visit another in such a case and because I believed it to be necessary to her health and moral and spiritual well-being, I wrote her a letter which was as innocent as I doubt not was her reply, though the latter I have have not been permitted to see, as you doubtless are aware. You have now all the facts in the case, and I beg that you will take them all into consideration before forming your judgment."

Mrs. Vaughan was listening with the utmost interest. The Doctor continued:

"Do not imagine, however, that I consider myself unfortunate above all other men and women in being thus the victum of deceit. You and I both know too well the nature of marriages constantly taking place in society, not to feel certain that thousands of husbands and wives find themselves equally duped. The ques

tion is whether in a matter the most momentous of any which concern only temporal interests, and this form of speech does not fully express the importance of the marriage relation, since it certainly affects in many cases the eternal welfare of not only the two principal parties, but of all the children who may be born of it ;whether, I say, in a matter so mo

mentous, a man or a woman must

inevitably be bound to the consequences of an error committed through haste, or deception, or any of the many influences that may continue to lead young men and women astray in such matters?"

Mrs. Vaughan, like the sensible woman she was, replied thoughtfully and deliberately:

Richard," she said, "I need not tell you how astonished and how deeply pained I am at this revelation. I could not have conceived Elsie capable of such conduct. Yet still, my dear nephew, such things are not to be hastily judged. You have lived together now near seven years; you are the parents of a child; there are every way so many interests involved that it seems to me, if you will look at it calmly, you will see that it is altogether best to keep on in the old way; to break off this new relation. I will take Eloise to Europe with me, she shall be utterly removed out of your sight; your uncle and myself— for we see alike in this matter-will do anything we can to heal this difficulty, if you will only listen to reason, and return to your true and rightful allegiance. What God hath joined together, you know, no man may put asunder."

My dear madam," replied the Doctor," the question is what is my true and rightful allegiance?' It is because my whole soul utterly rejects my relation with Elsie, as false and sinful, and asserts the other to be pure and true and ordained of God by that law of spiritual attraction which was established when the human soul

"Yet still God in his providence did permit you to be legally joined, and he must have intended some good to flow from the union."

Mrs. Vaughan, I might answer you that good has already come of it. In his providence he has also permitted me to find that woman who might be my true and loving and faithful wife; and I could never have been so certain as I now am that my love for her is the full and entire expression of my soul in that direction if it had not been for my experience in the former relation. Having this knowledge, the question is, shall I live true to it, or shall I make my life a lie?"

"Richard, you treat the subject too abstractly; you must be more practical. What is to become of Elsie and Dora if you abandon them?"

"Yes, but we all know human nature, Richard. You may live in this way a few years longer to the destruction of Elsie's peace of mind and the injury of Eloise's good name. But in the end there will be a divorce, or a graver scandal. Oh, Richard, you must be warned in time, and spare your family this heavy disgrace." "Mrs. Vaughan, a divorce may be odious, but it is not necessarily disgraceful. That it is a very grave and momentous thing I am fully impressed. I know full well the responsibility which a man assumes when he lays a destroying hand upon what is truly the foundation of society -the marriage relation. But do not impute evil to me who strive truly to consummate a true and pure marriage; let your accusations rather be directed

against those who daily in the name of God and the church poison the very fountains of life; sap the very foundation of virtuous society by contracting false and foul marriages ; relations in which there neither is nor can be any pure conserving element. Madam, if through youthful haste or indiscretion, I have given the influence of my life in favor of this false estimate of marriage, do not stay me when at great cost and peril,—for Ivalue my good name Mrs. Vaughan,I strive to make my record straight, and testify to all men that love is holier than lust; the truth better than a lie, even by the price of many tears and much suffering."

Mrs. Vaughan was silent for a

moment.

"Richard," she said at length, "much that you say is true. Your misfortune is that you carry these views too far. I really believe you are conscientious, but then pardon me, fanatics alway are. If they were not they could not do such mischief in the world. I must appeal to Eloise; this thing must be stopped."

"I judge then," said the Doctor, "that you are ready to excuse me," and he took his hat to bid her good evening. "I trust however, when you inform Eloise of the means taken to betray her confidence, you will exonerate me from guilt in the matter. Mrs. Vaughan, I can forgive Elsie for the deception she practised upon me. I might even forgive her for waylaying and opening my letters — but I never shall forgive her for showing that letter to a woman who neither knows nor can know the purity of the mind that dictated it. It is in your power, Mrs. Vaughan, to see that that letter reaches its proper destination; and while I have to thank you for much courtesy in this matter, 1 shall certainly hold you responsible in honor and conscience, for the use you make of your power."

Mrs. Vaughan replied coldly:
"I have the letter you speak of in

my pocket. I feel it my duty to carry it to Eloise."

"You will of course use your own judgment in the matter, madam," said the Doctor, "but if your course results in giving to this unfortunate matter a still greater publicity, you must also take the responsibility."

If Mrs. Vaughan had been a woman of penetration she might have understood the Doctor's manner; as it was she received no intimation of his real intention. His thought was, "If you make it impossible for me to correspond with Eloise, you shall not thereby prevent my communicating with her; I am still master of my own actions, and while I don't like scandal, I will assert my rights in this matter." A man given to open threatening would have said this: the Doctor held his peace.

Going out of the house he met Miss Zarie. She opened upon him

at once.

"So you've been to see Dorothea," she said; "I hope you left her easier in her mind than you found her."

"I can't say, indeed," said the Doctor curtly, "I do not hold myself responsible for the state of Mrs. Vaughan's mind ”

"But in this case, Doctor, we shall all hold you responsible for the family name and honor."

Zarie," said the Doctor, "if you talked to me about right and wrong I could understand you better, even if I did not agree with you; but this chattering of your teeth for fear of scandal is something which I cannot appreciate. I despise scandalmongers. I should despise myself if I lived at their dictation. Moreover, I never did know any woman who stood in constant fear of the tribe, who was not either a scandalmonger or the victim of a guilty conscience."

Miss Zarie turned livid with rage. The shaft had struck home in a manner that she was not likely to forget.

The Doctor walked home in no en

viable mood. It was a matter of some moment to him, as well as to others, to stand well in the eyes of the world, and especially to retain the respect of his family. He felt keenly besides the pain which Eloise must suffer through a rupture of the old, tender relations between herself and her Uncle Vaughan's family. Vaughan's family. Abner Vaughan was a man of few words; he would avoid a matter like this as long as it was possible to do so; but when the time came that he must act, the Doctor well knew, that his course having been well considered, would be firmly adopted. On every hand, therefore, persecution, and only persecution, seemed to await him. The Doctor was not a man obstinate by nature; he was not in any sense of the word a passionate man. In every fibre of his being he felt that it was not at all his lower, or selfish nature, which clung so tenaciously, in the face of all peril and danger, to the object of his love, but the highest and purest instincts of his soul. Eloise evoked from him, not only all that we characterize by the term love, but she awoke also the aspiration, the adoration of his scul. Only through her was religion in its tenderest, purest form, revealed to him. The question, therefore, of whether or not he should renounce his allegiance to her, became, not one of mere convenience, or personal pleasure. Judged in that light only, reason would inevitably decide against the relation. It cut far more deeply than this into the tissues of his life. It amounted in effect to the query, whether for personal ease and convenience, he should turn traitor to his highest convictions and revelations of truth. Whether the interests and convetionalities of this life should be let to outweigh the necessities of that spiritual existence which knows no bounds of time, but once begun, as alas! to so many souls it never is begun in this world, stretches away undisturbed by death into the limitless æons of eternity.

Seeing this as clear as the sun' in mid heavens, the Doctor dared not falter. He was not afraid of any power in this world, as he was afraid of those retributions with which the Divine Being visits such souls as, having received the truth, fail to present it in their lives. If God, through this revelation of the divine, august nature of love, had chosen him to be an apostle, should he turn Judas, and, for the paltry coin of this world's Cæsars, betray the Lord? No; though all Jewry, as represented by false institutions, false teachings, false lives, should go to wreck and ruin. Nay, if through any conceivable pain and peril he might further this very end, by so much as one straw's breadth, he would not have suffered in vain. If ever this world-as it surely will shall burst the withering husks of its present marriage institutions, and let out to the sunlight the full ripe grain of a single and pure union, compact and true, seamless and flawless in the eyes of men and angels, it will be through just such throes as these the Doctor suffered.

The very first step in his pathway was one which outwardly he shrank from. That Mrs. Vaughan should visit Eloise, he saw was inevitable. That she would tell the absolute and unvarnished truth about the letter which she carried, he thought unlikely. That the interview would be in any event a very painful one, and especially and unnecessarily so if Eloise were altogether unprepared for it, he felt to be certain. It would be unmanly, it would be cowardly then in him, not to prepare her.

In the course of that day, therefore, he said to Elsie, "I am going away this evening, to be gone for a day or two. I do not go altogether voluntarily; it is an act to which I am forced by those who assume to represent your interests, therefore, I trust that you will make as little stir about my absence as possible, since that is best for us all."

Elsie's distress by this time wa too real and deep, to expend itself in violent demonstrations. She wept silently, and presently left the room. The Doctor's heart ached for her. The sight of her anguish weighed far more heavily upon him than all Miss Zarie's threatenings. As he left the house, with a sobbing farewell kiss to little Dora, the agony of Gethsemane, when the man Jesus prayed to his Heavenly Father for strength to be true in the face of a great temptation and great suffering, grew to have a deeper meaning to him than it had ever had before. In no jocund spirit therefore he set out upon his journey. In Elsie's mind, meanwhile, a great resolution was forming. It would need some strength and some persistency to carry it through, but a certain kind of persistency she was not wanting in, and to her highest nature this thing appealed as that which must be done.

She sat down at her writing-desk, and with trembling hand indited a brief note. It was dispatched, and next morning the reply came in the shape of a call from Father Dunne.

This was not Elsie's first overture to the church. Long ago, through the agency of her friend Mrs. Chilvers, she had made the acquaintance of Father Dunne. She had discussed doctrines with him, and compared theologies. Elsie was quite a theologian in her way. But always when closely pressed by the worthy clergyman, who with the usual zeal for the church at his heart, was always bent on making a proselyte, she had coyly retreated, and put up a defense of small fears and trembling apprehensions, a little to the weariness if not the disgust of the astute priest. But Father Dunne was as good a fisherman as his apostolic predecessors. He had his own ways and means of learning something of Mrs. Elsie's peculiar circumstances, and wisely resolved to wait until stress of weather should drive her into his net. When, therefore, he received this little note,

he felt sure that his time had come, and made haste to secure his game.

Father Dunne was a handsome man in his way; tall, heavily built, with a well-formed head, a square, open brow, and features regular and impressive. But large as he was, every fibre of his great frame was instinct with energy and power. It was not a passionate intensity of force, but a calm, grand, patient weightiness, which when fully roused to action, seemed to bear down all opposition, to level all barriers before its resistless sway. He came into Mrs. Glendenning's presence that morning quietly alert, but possessed with a full determi nation to do the work he had set about, and to do it promptly and thoroughly. When Elsie gave him her hand, and looked up to meet his steady penetrating eye, she felt somehow as if this thing were decided for her once for all.

"I have asked this interview, Father Dunne," she said, "because there is a very delicate and a very painful matter, about which I wish to ask your advice."

"Madam," said Father Dunne, "you having been reared a Protestant, will pardon me one question. Do you seek advice concerning this delicate and painful matter, of John Dunne, or of the Church, through one of her humblest representatives?"

Elsie faltered. She felt all that the question implied; but there was a force in the manner of the man before her, which forbade her to go backward.

"I am weak," she said. "I will lean on the strong arm of the Church." "Daughter, kneel," was the priest's mandate. Elsie knelt and made her first confession. It was long and thorough. In the course of an hour, Father Dunne had possessed himself -with many other things-of every circumstance in this most delicate and weighty matter, together with every shade of coloring which it had received from Elsie's mind. He dealt

with her in return plainly and fairly. He showed her the folly of her deceit, made it clear to her that she was in a measure reaping as she had sown; exhorted her to patience and constancy, and at the close, imposed such penalties as he felt were needed and would be beneficial. Elsie was comforted, composed; not strengthened. She was not asked to be strong, except in her faith. She was to lean upon the Church, and the Church in its turn would protect and defend her. When Father Dunne had gone, she felt happier, more assured than she had done for months.

But she had passed the Rubicon. Baptism must follow confession, and all the other rites in their turn. She was no longer her own. The Church had paid her price, and now possessed her soul and body.

In her way she was almost as much 2 martyr to her faith, as her husband was to his. Her relatives were all of the Episcopacy; Miss Zarie a rigid Churchwoman. Mrs. Vaughan, more tolerant by nature, had still a strong aversion to Romanism. She had few fears of not being able to appease her uncle and aunt, but Miss Zarie she well knew would turn persecutor. The old religious flames have not died out. It is only that now instead of attacking men's flesh and bones, they refine themselves, and are content to roast his spirit. Still Elsie felt the Church at her back, and Father Dunne at her side, and was prepared for her martyrdom.

While she was considering all these things, mingling penitential prayers with intense and harrowing conjectures concerning her husband's absence,there came a letter from Mrs. Vaughan,— who had already gone to Philadelphia,-containing news to electrify the whole family. It was written in haste, almost incoherently.

A single passage contained the gist of it. The remainder was ejacula. tions, interrogations, despair.

Eloise is gone, bag and baggage,