-

"I am forced, Miss Hartley, by your own infatuation, into that very connexion," he continued; "I am forced-if you do not pity me, and protect yourself to be a participator in acts which must sink me to the level of that very wretch! Save me, Eliza !-at present I ask-I entreat but little from you;-I ask that you be but deliberate in your arrangements with my rival that you take time-"

"Rude,-gross person!" she muttered, while a deeper colour dyed her cheeks.

"Think of me as you will, I have no alternative but this plain mode of speaking-no other alternative to shield you, your father, and myself from destruction."

"You threaten, Sir? You would scare us with plots contrived by you and your worthy

fellow ?"

"Break the fellowship, Eliza! break it at one word. Restore me to myself!-Promise what I have requested! Defer-”

"Until your plans be perfected?"

"No! I seek not to profit by the delay; but there is dreadful danger in a refusal."

"I contemn it."

She was raising the latch of the orcharddoor. The voice of her favoured lover pro

nouncing her name, echoed from the adjoining garden.

"Hark, Sir!" she said, in a strong whisper, as she laid one finger on her lip, pointed with the other towards the garden, and flashed upon Talbot a glance of mingled triumph, consciousness of protection and bitter taunt.

He started at the voice of his rival, yet almost instantly seized her hand. She had stepped over the threshold of the orchard-door, and struggled spiritedly to free herself. Talbot continued, during the struggle, to speak in snatches.

you

"Your simple promise would have saved from an avowal of the cause of my urgency; which now must be made, and which it will wither your heart to hear; which now must be made though you die under it,—and though I foresee many other miserable results from the rash disclosure. But listen, listen, Eliza Hartley !"—his closely whispered words pierced her ear like the hiss of a serpent,-" You are about to wed-the husband of another."

He dropped her hand and precipitately withdrew. But he could now have held that hand without an effort to retain it. She stood mute and motionless as a statue; and her posture, and the deadly paleness of her cheeks and the

vagueness of her eyes, formed a striking contrast to her late graceful though excessive vivacity. She felt the blood coldly rushing through every vein, until it settled in a sickening mass about her heart. Her head drooped, and she would have fallen, but that the voice of Sir William Judkin again reached her. The instinct of avoidance rallied her strength. She staggered into the middle of the orchard, flung herself to a shade formed by encircling fruit-bushes; and, panting for breath, couched close. In a few seconds, the footsteps of him she now dreaded-" of the husband of another," bounded past her, and were lost to her ear, after having issued through a door that led to grounds at the back of the house. She sprang up-ran-flew to her chamber-locked and bolted her door, and sank on her bed.

CHAPTER IV.

RETURNING to the house, after his vain search through garden, orchard, grove and shrubbery, Sir William urged Eliza's aunt to seek her in her chamber. The good lady found her niece in a highly feverish state. All became panic and bustle. Her father flew to her pillow. Physicians were ordered in by dispatch. Sir William mounted his fleetest horse, and brought back the head practitioner of a rather remote town. Upon the return of the gentleman from the patient's bed-side, the terrified lover learned that there was no extreme danger; and then he sent a pressing, entreating message, for one word, one glance-only one.

Eliza's father held her throbbing hand when the message was delivered, and he could not misinterpret the start-the shrink-the shudder, the closing of eye, and the averting of head, with which, in utter silence, she answered it.

Tenderly he sought his child's confidence. His tears, while he murmured his entreaties, wetted her brow. She then wept too, was relieved, became collected, and felt it her duty to unbosom herself to her only parent.

From first to last, Sir William became acquainted with all the details of the intimacy between Talbot and the juggler, of which, from her own observations on the review-ground, and subsequently from Nanny's gossip, Eliza was aware. She paused, and he could make little of her communication so far. Though matter of some alarm, it evidently was not what had produced her present agitation.

And, during her pause, Eliza wondered at herself for making this information a preface to the real theme. It seemed as if she were preparing to arraign Harry Talbot, instead of his rival. And why should she not? A relieving light burst in! The mere assertion of her lover's treachery and infamy had at the moment struck her powerless, and left her no presence of mind to try the accusation by the test of the character and probable motives of the accuser. But now restored to self-possession, and after having gone over, in her statements to her father, the particulars of Talbot's degrading con