occasion festival, but Mirren could not be discovered.

Full of his plans, her father went that evening to her chamber at an hour when she should be bedded, and found with apprehension that although the door was barred the chamber held no tenant. He went outside in darkness lashed by rain, and to her open window: made his way within-and found the brooch upon her unpressed pillow! It caught a flicker from the fire and shot a lance of light across the room.

"My God!" cried Wanlock harshly, "oh, my God! is this himself, Mahoun?" and with the jewel burning in his loof, he turned to see his daughter, with a face of shame and fear, framed in the open window. She had, in other hours, a sweetness and a charm like sunny Highland weather, or like the little lone birds of the sea, or like an air of youth remembered: but now arising from the outer night of misty exhalations, pallid against the background of the Manor trees, she seemed a blameful ghost.

He dragged her to his feet: as she knelt and cowered, he stamped with brutal passion on her fingers.

"Where have ye been?" Her gallant spirit plucked her back from the edge of swound to which his cruel act had brought her: she looked without a tremor in his face, and the third blow fell when she told him she had been to

Mellish.

"Mellish!" he cried aghast, "and, madam, what in the name of God have you to do with Mellish? He gave you

"What! and there was the Glasfurd woman!"

"He had never loved her, or only thought so at the first, and the freedom she has given him has more than made amends for his poverty. Father, I am going to marry him."

"Mellish! A ruined man! And you know my pact with Dreghorn?"

"Your pact, father, but never mine: I should die first. It was the horrid prospect sent me to The Peel to-night. The thing is settled: he gave me his troth with the brooch you hold there in your hand-oh, the dear brooch! the sweet brooch of happy omen!—and you will let us marry, will you not? I would never marry wanting your consent.'

"Then ye will never have it if the man is Mellish!" cried her father. He thundered threats: he almost wept entreaties: every scrap of his affection reft from her and centred now on his blackguard son, but the girl was staunch; that night he drove her from his door.

It was with huge dismay he came upon the gem a fortnight later on the floor of his girl's deserted chamber. This new appearance for a moment filled his soul with panic-it seemed the very pestilence that walks in darkness-and then he real

ised she must have left it on the night he sent her forth. With the assassin's heart and the family humour, that had not been confined to Lady Grace, he wrapped the jewel up and sent it as his wedding-present to The Peel.

To his outcast daughter and the man who loved her he could have done no kinder act, for their marriage hung upon his giving to it something of his countenance, and this ironic gift of what to them was ever

a

to

talisman benign, came relieve a piteous situation. Mirren loved, but she had made a promise not to wed without her father's willingness, and she was such that she should keep her promise though her life was marred.

With a light heart, then, did Mellish ride with the jewel in his pocket to the house in town where she had taken refuge, and gladly taking the gem as proof of her father's softening, she married the man of her desire.

"And now, goodwife," said Mellish, "I will go down to Manor and make peace.'

"You will take our lucky amulet," she said, as she pinned it in his scarf, and he galloped with the gaiety of a boy through the fallen autumn leaves to the house of Wanlock.

It was as if he came from realms of morning freshness to some Terror Isle ! Gloaming was come down upon that sad reclusive lowland country: the silvery fog which often filled the valley where the mansion lay, austere and old and lonely, gave to the natural

dusk a quality of dream, an air of vague estrangement, a brooding and expectant sentiment. The trees stood round like sighing ghosts, and evening birds were mourning in the clammy thickets. Only one light burned in the impoverished dwelling; Mellish, through the open window where it beamed uncurtained, saw old Wanlock sunk in meditation with a Bible on his knees, and with a heart of pity left the saddle.

Oh God! that men should die within stark walls in ancient long-descended properties, without a comprehension of the meaning of the misty world!

He passed within the frowning arch and beat upon the knocker. The clangour rang through the dark interior: the night stood hushed, save for the inquiry of the howlets in the pines, the plunge of the Manor Burn, the drip of crisply falling perished leaves, and, far away upon the coast, the roaring of the sea. Pervaded by the spirit of the scene and hour, misgivings came to Mellish, in whose heart the night seemed all at once inimical, fantastic, peopled with incorporeal presences. He heard their mutter, heard them move with cunning footsteps; of a sudden, near at hand broke forth the dolorous utterance of a soul beseeching and forlorn. The dreary note, prolonged and dying slowly, seemed to roll in waves far out on shoreless seas of space, and Mellish, agitated, beat again upon the ponderous brass.

He heard the halting shuffle of feet within; the door was

opened; Wanlock stood with a candle in the entrance. One glance only he gave to Mellish, and slammed the door in his face!

Abruptly from the crowding night round Mellish burst a peal of mad and mocking laughter!

For a moment fear, resentment, and disbelief warred in his brain for his possession: fear, being stranger there, was routed by an effort of the will; disbelief surrendered to his reason; he was left alone on the battlefield with anger. It swept with purple banners through the rally of his senses: drunk with passion, he tore from his breast the gem that had misled him to that hateful door, and flung it in by the open window, then leaped upon his horse and galloped furiously for home.

Wanlock, with the candle in his hand, stood for a moment listening in the passage, glad with venom. He heard the

thud of hoofs die off in the distance of the avenue, then, with a shock that left him trembling, the ululation of his old familiar that dreadful bittern call! It was to-night more sad than he had ever heard it, more imbued with hopeless longing, yet in some way through its desolation went a yapping note of menace and alarm.

He hurried to his chamber with a sense of something older than mankind: he set the candle on the table; turned with eagerness to lift the Book -the comforter, the shield,and there between the open

pages, on the final verses of the seventh Psalm, lay the accursed brooch!

It seemed to him like a thing that had come from the void outside the rim of human life where evils muster with black wings and the torments of men are fashioned. He whimpered as he made to seize it, then, as if it stung him, felt a numbness in the arm. Through his brain for a moment went the feeling of something gush: he staggered on the floor: a mist swept through his eyes. His vision cleared, and he saw the jewel at his feet. He bent to lift it with some curious failure in his members, groped with an impercipient hand, and found his fingers would not close upon it!

"My God!" he mumbled, "what is this come on me?" A mocking chuckle sounded through the room, and the final doubts of Wanlock vanished-another blow was come, and he was in the grip of the Adversary!

With his other hand he caught the gem, and rising slowly, cast a glance of wild expectancy about the room. No assurance came from the discovery that to the eye at least he was alone, yet a subtler sense than vision told he had company, and he looked above him into the umber rafters, then turning to the window, saw enormous hands claw on the sill. They seemed to drag a weight from the nether world behind them: he watched them fascinated, even to the sinews' tension, till there raised and rested on the backs of them a face

"We wrestle," he mumbled, "not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the

rulers of the darkness": he seized upon the Book, and held it up before him like a buckler, all his being drenched in the spirit of defiance, and he cried the Holy Name.

He cried it as they cried it on the moors his people, when the troopers rode upon them he cried with their conviction that the Blood had all things pacified, redeemed, and the apparition chuckled!

:

The last redoubt of Wanlock's faith surrendered: he madly wrenched a page from the sacred volume, crushed it with the jewel in his hand, and threw them in the face of his tormentor, then fell, a withered man, upon the bedstead, while the bittern cry outside arose in demon laughter.

When he drifted back from the bliss of his oblivion, he lay a while like a child that makes its world afresh each morning from a few familiar surrounding things the light, the shade, the feel of textures, and the sound of the cinder falling on the hearth-stone. All

his life came ranked before him in epochs that grew more vivid as his brain grew clear -the folly of youth, the vanity of manhood, the pride

Had he not prayed, and sat at the Communion? Had he not felt the gust of the Holy Spirit? Had he not repented -nay, penitence had been denied him from his very birth, and without repentance well he knew there was no sin's remission. Thus are the unelect at last condemned for a natural inability-terror they have and chagrin at results, but no regret for the essential wrong. There was a sound of some one moving in the house the servant, who had been on a private escapade of her own, was now returned. Wanlock seized a walking-cane he kept beside the bedstead for the purpose, and he loudly rapped upon the wall. At first there was no answer; then he rapped again, and the woman entered, flushed with some spirit of adventure.

She had the radiant sleekness of the country's girls,-a strapping, rosy healthfulness, a jaunty carriage, and a dancing and inviting eye: she seemed to Wanlock for a moment like a stranger, and she carried with her scents of the cool night winds.

For a moment she looked at him, astounded-he had so suddenly grown very old and his mouth so strangely twisted: then she gave a little cry, and hurried to his bedside, and he saw that the shawl she wore was pinned upon her shoulder by the luckless brooch!

It glowed portentous and commanding like a meteor;

with the squeal of a netted hare he grasped at his walking-cane, and struck with fury at the object of his terror. The woman shrank before the blow; the rattan swept the candle from the table to the floor : a fountain of flame flame from the hell that is under life sprang up the bedstead

curtains!

With an oath old Wanlock staggered from his bed in time to save himself, but the Manorhouse was doomed-at dawn the bitter smell of woody ashes blew across the valley.

From the shabby lodgehouse midway in the avenue he looked astonished at the girdling hills, to see them all So steadfast and indifferent: the sun came up and sailed across the heavens, heedless of the smouldering space among the pines, where turret and tower more lofty than themselves had seemed, a day ago, eternal. The rat squeaked as it burrowed for a new home under fallen lintels; the raven, croaked upon the cooling hearth. And night came down on these charred relics, swiftly -night, the old conquering rider, ally of despair! It appeared to Wanlock like a thousand years since he had had a careless heart, yet the ruin of his home for the moment seemed less dreadful than its cause, and the new light it had thrown on his situation. Never before was he so desolate, so desolate !— forsaken of God and man. All night his flaming house had stained the clouds: the crackle of its timbers and the thunder

2 ear,

of its falling walls appeared to fill the whole wor. yet none had come to his assistance: as if abhorred by all, he was left to dree his weird alone among the ashes. One thing only he had saved besides his lifebesides his life-a bottle of Bordeaux. He had seized upon it as the only friend from whom he could look for consolation. Even the maid and the dog had fled from him, but she returned at nightfall to the cheerless lodge to make it habitable.

"Where in the name of God got ye yon accursed thing?" he asked her, and she told him, flushing, she had got it from a lover.

awk

"A lover!" quo' Wanlock, regarding his helpless arm, remembering happier things. "Are there still folk loving?" "It's what he would like to be," said the woman wardly, "but "but the man's dwarfish waif I daren't hardly venture through the woods for; ye'll have heard him screech for a month past. He haunts me like a bogle, comes from I kenna where-a crazy, crooked, gangrel body, worse than the Blednock brownie. He was squatted at the door last night when I got home, and he gave me the brooch-I-I wish to the Lord I had never seen it."

"Where is it now?" asked Wanlock.

"I-I have given it back," the girl replied with some confusion.

"Ye were wise in that," said her master. "Woe upon the owner of the havock brooch! for I have had it too, and the heart of me is withered in my