felt certain then, that her plan was the very best one possible; while the doctor walked away stronger than ever in his resolution, to avoid this new comer as much he might politely, and to crowd every moment of her visit with work or study. The doctor was honest, and had a sense of pride besides, in being faithful and true to an obligation which he might be said to have voluntarily assumed.

The last hour before sunset therefore, when he would have otherwise been at leisure, he devoted to a solitary walk across the fields to the cottage of Dame Goodman, an aged paralytic sufferer, who was in a professional way his dependant and beneficiary. The evening was still and golden, the air tremulous with dew and perfume, and Dr. Glendenning felt as he looked across the wide serene landscape, as if there were a great poem dissolved in the spaces about him, if only he could put it into the alembic of his thought and crystallize it into language.

"But," he sighed to himself, "I am losing all the poetry and freshness of my youth; growing hard and practical and fossiliferous every day I live. There is an element wanting in my life; a conserving, immortalizing essence, that should have kept me at thirty, still tender and genial as a child. I wonder, I wonder, if the old fables are true, and there is an Elixir of Life, which not to find is the only real ill which can befall a mortal?"

He had reached a stile, and was sitting down upon it, to humor his restless thought, which would absorb all the activity of his being; with eyes bent upon the green turf at his feet. Presently, a rustling, the slightest possible sound startled his ear. looked up, and beheld indeed, the poem he had dreamed of.

He

A slight, pale woman, with dark hair, and eyes of spirit-like and starry radiance; and a general litheness and elegance of figure, so unstudied as to be more apparent in the loose-fitting

traveling-garment she wore, than it would have been in a robe of satin, was all externally that he saw; but these details no more revealed her, as she impressed herself upon his interior consciousness than the midnight sky reveals its secrets of order and harmony to the shepherd on the lonely moor who searches it for prognostications of the weather. She was approaching to cross the stile, he held out his hand to assist her, saying as he did so, all the time conscious of the inconsistency of his thought.

"It is Eloise Vaughan."

"Yes," she said, with a most engaging frankness, "it is Eloise Vaughan; but who of all my old friends in Brockendale shames my memory so utterly?"

"It is indeed an old friend whom you meet, Eloise," he said, speaking from that deep consciousness to which she seemed irresistibly to appeal, "older far than you know, though it is after all only Richard Glendenning."

"Cousin Richard ?" she said, with a faint intonation of wonderment.

"Yes," he said, "you hesitate I see very charitably, to put to my account this seeming want of courtesy."

"Oh no," she interrupted, "I was glad no one met me. It left me so at liberty to consign my trunks to John, and come quietly across these well remembered fields myself. love Brockendale, cousin Richard, every inch of it. It is a dear old home."

I

The sun had already set, and the shadows were falling. As Dr. Glendenning had assisted her over the stile he had drawn her hand into his arm, and so they slowly walked homeward through the dusk.

The talk between them was strangely unconventional. From the very first they ignored the outer world of dust and noise and incidents and accidents, and walked together in that deep, still realm of feeling and phantasy which so few comparatively of world-dwellers ever enter. Deep

and still now, destined by and by to reveal to them, a rush and whirl of the elements, such as the outer plane of life is never the scene of.

Mistress Elsie, looking out of the window from her sofa in the shady corner of the room, was amazed to see John drive home with a load of trunks, and no owner therefor; and a few minutes later to behold her lawful husband strolling up the gravel walk, and on his arm, her delicate face lifted to his in the most unrestrained chat, a woman whom she had never loved, but whom from this moment she hated.

As they stepped upon the doorsill, she coughed a little cough. The sound recalled Dr. Glendenning to his recollections with a shock that was like a dream of falling, from which one wakens suddenly. He saw at once that Elsie's face was not quite placid, and hastened to explain.

"The strangest chance, my dear. Miss Vaughan preferred walking, and came across the fields alone, by which means we met just at the stile which leads to Dame Goodman's. How are you feeling since supper?"

"Oh! quite as usual, thank you. Eloise, dear, I did so regret not being able to meet you at the depot. It seemed so unkind, but when one has a doctor for a husband, one is always under the professional eye." she looked up so fondly into Richard's face, Miss Vaughan ought not to have been aware that a ripple had ever disturbed the serenity between them.

And

But Miss Vaughan was so aware, though not perhaps at the moment, consciously. A quiet, cheerful, unconventional woman, with a heart attuned to some fine and strong chords of feeling, an intellect to which an absolute integrity was so truly pivotal, that it faced all contingencies of thought or revelations of the spheres with a deep and dauntless courage, her rarest peculiarity was, after all, her wonderful intuitiveness. As some still

forest tarn glasses with equal fidelity the green moss on its margin, the plumy ferns which dip into its waters, the spray of foliage which overhangs it, or the still heavens with their golden stars which bend above it, so her nature received into its translucent depths a faithful and undisturbed picture of all events and relations about her. To all the world Richard and Elsie might seem truly husband and wife; she might even herself not consciously dissent from the proposition, but deep below all intellectual perceptions, her nature still asserted a subtile sense of dissonance.

"I trust," she said serenely," that my coming has not been too malapropos."

"Quite otherwise, I assure you, I was delighted when Aunt Dorothea made the arrangement; only I have a little fear that you will not find yourself well entertained."

"Oh!" replied Eloise, "I cannot have too much liberty to entertain. myself in Brockendale. If you will let me make you the least possible trouble I will be answerable for all other consequences."

Richard, meanwhile, with a salutary remembrance of his pre-formed resolution had excused himself from the company of the ladies.

For three days he steadfastly avoided her. At meal times, and in casual pauses of the day's occupation, he could not make his nature unaware of her; though to be sure Elsie so timed her demands upon him, as to leave him as little as possible in a state of calm receptivity.

With womanly

tact, too, she made a very fair showing of the justice of her claims. Her sufferings may have been exaggerated, but they were not altogether the creations of fancy, and moreover the exaggerations were judiciously managed. In the circumstances too there was something which appealed powerfully to a very deep and tender sentiment in Richard's heart. With a misgiving of danger, he rallied all his forces

around the old citadel. Its foundations might be unstable, but he would fortify them to the extent of his last resource; the walls might be crumbling, but he would man them bravely; the flag might not signal his deepest loyalty, but he had raised it himself, and he would stand by it. So much he owed to his own consistency; to his integrity at the bar of his family and of the world. Many a man, similarly placed, has made a good fight, has kept the faith, and won the crown of a spotless name and fame before the world; a family well kept together, and all the hosts of scandal held in abeyance. It is a good reward to win, if not at too great a cost. Let us take into the account that there is a difference between fighting an outward predilection, and running a muck against a central and eternal law like gravitation; also that the highest prizes on the external plane of life are chaff and ashes in that immortal realm to which the soul of man owes irresistible and undying allegiance, and where the golden crown of attainment is an absolute and un. varying TRUTH, in heart and life as well as on the lip.

By a steady adherence to his resolution Dr. Glendenning might have achieved the victory he had set his heart on. But unfortunately this resolution militated against Mrs Glendenning's plans. During these three days she had been sedulously striving to impress upon the mind of Eloise a conviction that Dr. Glendenning was the most devoted of husbands. The undercurrent of her thought was perhaps a memory of the time when Proctor Vaughan had passed one of his cousins by to prefer another, and she was determined to convince Eloise that she was not now suffering from any similar want of appreciation. That in fact the present more than made up to her any possible deficiency of the past. To do this successfully she counted with excellent judgment upon her husband's sense of honor and

domestic propriety, and at the same time she saw, or thought she did, in this arrangement of things a means of keeping him so perfectly within range of her own influence as to secure him against what she was pleased mentally to term Miss Vaughan's machinations. Therefore, when Richard after a hasty and perhaps taciturn breakfast showed a disposition to absent himself for the day, Elsie would say with a smile of the most winning entreaty.

"You will not be gone long, dear? I am so nervous now when you are absent."

To which the Doctor would reply, "I had planned to go to Waterford to day upon business, but if you desire, I can postpone it."

"Then do, by all means, love. Eloise would like to ride over to the Black Rock this evening, and I shall not dare to go unless you drive. John is so careless."

Whereupon the doctor would quietly bite his lip, and say:

"I shall take great pleasure in driving you over." And Elsie would smile upon him and then look at Eloise in a manner which said as plainly as words could say it,

"You see-he is my slave."

But always it happened when they drove to Black Rock, or to one or other of the dozen charmed localities which Eloise's unforgetting memory associated with the past, that while Elsie directed the conversation mainly into her own shallow channels, to the weariness of her still uncomplaining listeners, there floated in here and there a strain of the pure harmony of Eloise's nature, which kept on ringing through Dr. Glendenning's brain for many an hour thereafter, in a way which his wife Elsie could not possibly suspect, because her nature was so constructed that to her ear there had been no harmony.

Thus one day as they came out of the deep Brockendale woods upon the green meadows which sloped down to the river, Elsie exclaimed:

"I think forests are abominable; they tear one's shoes and disarrange one's drapery, and are every way rough and outlandish. If I had made the world there should not have been woods in any civilized portion of it." "No woods," said Eloise, "no cool shadows in your landscape; no sacred reserve of solitude? Next to the infinitude of sky and distance, I should miss most from nature the withdrawal and mystery of the forests." Apropos to which Elsie said that evening to the doctor :

"How Eloise drags in her art at every turn of the conversation. It seems to me in bad taste."

The doctor replied with a shrug of the shoulders, which might have referred to the thing quoted or to Elsie's appreciation of it, as the listener chose to interpret it. The truth was that the remark had seemed to him to be very suggestive of character. There was about Eloise a reserve of power which made her attractions seem exhaustless. Always one felt that the concerns of the hour or the day were so incidental to her. All that interested her deeply had the sweep of eternities in it. A friendship was not with her a matter of taste or convenience or recreation, but an intimate accord of spirits, which rung out celestial and undying music. Love would be to her, ah! who but the lover upon whom she smiled couid tell what it would be! A giving and receiving so perfect and co-ordinate, that henceforth two souls should beat only one rythm in the music of life; and all life, even pains and perils, should flow in numbers that should enchant, since the great law of harmony receives and dissolves and makes glorious even discords themselves.

All this Eloise revealed to the Doctor, and so doing, as unconsciously as the sun in mid-heavens discovers to you a flower in the hedge-row, she revealed to him-Love. It seemed to him to be not a sentiment, not at

all a passion, but just a great central soulful fact; a relation of things so positive, so inevitable, that not the ruin of all physical nature could jar it one hair's breadth from its perfect poise and respondence. All sentiment clung about it, and beautified it; all passion surged through it, and vivified it; but in its essential nature it was a principle primal and eternal as the spheres.

So much made clear to him, it seemed at first immaterial whether Eloise dwelt in his house or in another; whether he saw her each day or only on chance occasions. Had he been younger in spirit, or had this revelation come to him under circumstances less solemn and commanding,

for it is a solemn thing for the soul of man to hear destiny calling, and itself fettered by a clod of earth-he would no doubt have yearned passionately for the blessing of her constant presence, of the perpetual overflow of her beauty and her inspiration upon his soul. He would have felt the very manly longing and determination to win expression for all this overcharged fullness of feeling. As it was he abandoned the right to all this utterly, cheerfully-since he must. One desire only his soul clung to, cried out for, would take no bribe, no refusal, instead of. If he called, would she hear him. Looking at the whiteness of her life, the perfect purity that ensphered her, he dared make no sign. Yet again and again he said to himself: "She is mine, as I am hers. She will never be consciously strong and pure, she will never reach the fullness of her womanhood, till she knows it."

starry eyes, but never any more. The Vaughans said, Richard is too much engrossed in his profession. He ought to be more social! The family has done a great deal for him, he should acknowledge it! Even Elsie felt nothing more than that vague misgiving which was as much as anything the relic of an old habit of feeling towards Eloise.

The doctor rode hard all day, and studied late into the night, watching Elsie meantime a little sadly as she walked wearily among her flowers, or sewed industriously at the piles of fleecy muslin, which filled her basket. He had never since their brief honeymoon been more tender toward Elsie than in just these days; yet never before had she so surely felt his distance from her. Since he had thoroughly learned what she was not to him, he could be patient to recognize and appreciate what she was, and what she soon would be.

Yet serenely as his life seemed outwardly to run, who shall tell the conflicts with which its solitudes were filled. There were still times brief and bright, when inspired by some sweet soulful ray of her eye, or some thrilling utterance of her lips, he fancied, that simply to love might fill the measure of human happiness. He had dreamed of love, as he had dreamed of Eloise; seeing her had realized all his dreams, and it seemed to him that just that absolute verification of the world-old stories about the divine passion, just that simple certainty that his soul held in inalienable possession the fee-simple of a glorious, spiritual estate of which, in the long sweep of the ages, no power, human or divine, could defraud him, into which at some sure time when he should have reached his spiritual manhood, the Lord of Life should bid him enter, was a sweetness that could content him indefinitely. But there were other times, and they were far more numerous and enduring, when the world. seemed very dark to him, and his por

tion in it very bitter. He had laid hold on Truth-his soul cried out for freedom; and he rebelled with impotent rage against the limitations to which both Truth and Freedom are subject in this world. He was too noble to make individual complaints. Elsie had deceived him, but not more basely than he had deceived himself; and day by day increasing signs reminded him that long since he had known that he did not love her he had still been taking a husband's dues, incurring a husband's responsibilities. Moreover, he knew very well that thousands suffered in spirit the very pangs which tormented him, who had mutually assumed the chains which gailed them in all sincerity and trustfulness. It was not, then, to avenge his own pains that he clenched his hand so nervously to wrestle with an invisible and intangible power, but because anywhere, in any instance, earthly and material considerations should so dominate over the eternal prerogatives of spirit. But again, as he mingled among men, he was forced to see how natural and inevitable these limitations were how the world's order and human progress hinged upon them, and how wise and patient must be the power which should finally work their undoing. "The patient are the strong," said the spirit to him. "All evil is for the hour. Rejoice, oh soul! that eternity is thine."

So the months wore away, and the autumn came, and with it talk of Eloise's return; then, indeed, he felt the knife enter his soul. While she was near him, while he could silently watch the coming and going of the tides of her life, while he could know that no demon in the shape of a wooer was weaving enchantments against his peace, he could hold his impatient spirit in leash; but to feel her slipping out of his presence, to yield her up again to that great Babel of conflicting influences from which she came and to which she would go,