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"What has he been doing, then?" said the man in the dark. "Getting his estate right," replied Laura; more 's the pity; a dreadful crime in these parts, where no one wants him. From all accounts it will be an evil day for the poor when these good Huxtables go, and we have an exchange."

“A very bad exchange, you think ?”

“A very bad one indeed, I fear.”

"Then you have heard no good of Sir Harry?"

"No good whatever.”

"Much harm?"

"O dear no, not the least.

of these windows before?"

Have you ever seen the view out

“If I were He was

"Yes, I know it well," said the man in the dark. Sir Harry Poyntz, I would take this room as my own. born in this room, you know. And I would sit here every day, summer and winter, and I would look north, south, east, and west, and I would say, 'Before I die, every acre, from the moor to the sea, from the promontory westward to the sands eastward, shall be mine.' I would sit in this old robber-tower, and say to myself, 'You are the first of your name for a thousand years who has been forced to lend your castle for a pittance to a Manchester radical, a man who would destroy your order. Make war against his order in return. They have fought for their trade. Buy until there is no room in the land, until the middle class hereabouts are your creatures. The little freeholders are dropping like rotten pears under free-trade. Pick them up and make yourself a peer.'

Laura was amused and interested by this singular confidence from the unknown. She went about with him at once.

"Cursed be they that add house to house, and field to field! you know," she said.

"O, I would risk the curse, if I could get the land; and so would you, and so would any of us. Let's have none of that now, come !

وو

"Perhaps you are right," she said ward thing for some of us for us in particular ry Poyntz were wicked enough to do such a thing."

; "but it would be an awk

if Sir Har

"Sir Harry Poyntz is wicked enough to do anything," he replied. "I am Sir Harry Poyntz, and so I ought to know."

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"O," said Laura to herself, "have I made your ears tingle for you, my gentleman?" and began trying to remember what she had said. Sir Harry thought he had "shut her up,” but he had done nothing of the kind. She was only longing to look on what should be, by all accounts, the wickedest, meanest, most worthless face that ever troubled this unhappy earth. She sat in the dark, trying to picture it to herself, trying to

anticipate the reality, with the same feeling which makes men madly bet not from avarice, but as a proof of sagacity · on some sporting event which will be decided in the next three minutes. She could see that he was tall, and she pictured him satanic: a dark, melancholic man, with sloping eyebrows, wicked little eyes, and an upward curl at the corner of his mouth; the man she knew so well by Cruikshank's art; the swaggering, fiendish cavalier who has come home from the Spanish main, and who is no less than the fiend himself; a man with a wicked leer for a woman, and a twopenny-halfpenny, who-are-you, Haymarket scowl for a man. As she looked at him in the darkness, this fanciful image grew on her imagination till it was nearly reflected on her retina.

Huxtable, coming in with a candle, upset all her fine theories. She saw, instead of her corsair, a bland, fat, flabby, lymphatic man, with a flat pale blue eye, with less depth in it than a wafer; who was too fat for his apparent age; a man who had apparently, by some mistake in Nature's cookery, been boiled instead of roasted; a man who would not even grill well, but would remain mere flabby meat, with a coating of brown. He was so utterly unlike what she had thought, that she forgot Hannah More and all that sort of thing, and burst out laughing. But the nasty, shallow, light-blue, dangerous eye was steadily on hers, with a look of power, too; and she stopped laughing.

I think, if the reader will allow me, that I will leave to her or his imagination, to conceive good Huxtable's fuss when he came back with the candle, and found that he had left, not Maria, but Laura alone with Sir Harry Poyntz; and his explanations, and the grand kootooing and bowing and scraping, the utter ignoring of all passages of arms in the dark, which went on after Laura and Sir Harry were introduced to one another, may be also omitted with advantage, in order to get on to what is more interesting.

CHAPTER XV.

BELOW Laura was pounced upon by Maria, who to her surprise, late as it was, with a rising tide, insisted on coming home with her. There was not the slightest possible danger in crossing the Wysclith at any time of night, so Laura let her come.

Laura called her a traitor and a story-teller for saying she was out when she was not, for the sake of preventing a meeting between her and Sir Harry Poyntz. Maria said she had only done exactly what her father had told her, and had fully believed that she should be out; that Sir Harry Poyntz had come one single day on business, and did not wish to be recognized.

But when they were alone on the Court side of the river, Maria changed the conversation, and became very serious. “Laura, I want to ask a question, and I am frightened." "What are you afraid of?”

"Your answer. What do you think of Sir Harry Poyntz? "Think of him? What I always have ever since I played with him as a child. And now I have seen him again, I must say that his face does not belie his character, but is the most false, mean, and cruel one I ever saw!"

Maria gave a little cry, and laid her hand on Laura's mouth. "O Laura, Laura ! No, no! For my sake, no!"

"What have you to do with the man? Why should I not say what I please about him?"

"Because I am going to marry him, I believe. O, do have mercy on me, and make the best of him."

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Marry him! Where have you seen him?”

"In the North, many times."

"Do you love him?”

"Yes yes, of course! It's a family arrangement, and he has been shamefully ill-used and misrepresented, and-"

"He has been nothing of the kind, Maria. You know you are ashamed of what you are doing, or you would have told me of it before. Sir Harry Poyntz is a thoroughly worthless person. Men wonder how it is that his name is kept on the books of his clubs, a man whom my father would never allow to darken his doors for one instant. You don't love him and you know you don't. You have withheld your confidence from me in this manner, not in the most friendly way, and therefore I cannot tell at all what is urging you on to this most miserable folly. If it is

that you think it a fine thing to be Lady Poyntz, and live at the Castle, I can assure you that you had ten thousand times better be plain Mrs. Hilton. And you could be Mrs. Hilton to-morrow; I know that as well as any one. I have taught him to hate me like poison. He. don't suit me, and I have let him see it most unmistakably. But Harry Poyntz, good heavens !" The shoe pinched a little tight here, it seemed. Laura soon found what she had done with that tongue of hers. Poor Maria turned upon her immediately. That one name had roused her to anger; she turned on Laura, and Laura soon found, for the first time, too, that Maria had naturally every whit as much determination and strength as she had herself, and that at a battleroyal she was her superior, using weapons which Laura had been taught to believe unchivalrous and unladylike.

At this point Maria Huxtable lost her temper.

you

"Better be Mrs. Hilton!" she said, furiously. "I have no doubt think that I had better take up with him, and marry the man you encouraged, until you determined to sell yourself to a titled booby. Laura, you have behaved yourself more wickedly than I thought it possible. I loved that man, and if you had not come between us I know he would have loved me. Loved me! You hear what I say, and see if you can sleep after it. I love him now; and I am going to marry Sir Harry Poyntz, who is all that you say and perhaps more. What fiend made you mention him by name, and drive me mad! I could have gone on smiling, and lying, and pretending I did n't hate you if you had not brought his name up. Nay, I did n't know I hated you before. You must make me know it, forsooth. You have stood between that man and me, and now, when Lord Hatterleigh comes forward, you coolly recommend the man to my attention, when it is too late forever! Laura, you have made an enemy of me, and you will live to wish you were dead before you had done so."

All this was so horribly, ridiculously untrue, that if poor Laura had kept her temper she might have cleared the cobwebs from the poor girl's eyes, and saved infinite woe. She was angry herself, however; and one angry woman going about with another is as vinegar poured upon nitre. She lost her temper now: she turned on the poor girl and said,

"What you have been saying about me is so very impertinent, and so ridiculously false, that I shall not condescend to any explanation whatever. You have often taken my advice; this is the last time I shall ever offer it, and it is this, that you cross the river, go to your bedroom, and pray to God to forgive you your wickedness." And since tall talk inexorably leads to taller, and since if you begin talking big you will say a deal more

than you mean, she continued: "I have done with you. You told me a lie to-day in saying that you were out. I thought till now it was the first; now I see it is the last of many, the very last. Go back across the river to your fate. You have made your bed, and must lie on it. Your servant is waiting for you at the

steps."

And so they parted. Laura was only in time to dress for dinner, and very soon sailed into the drawing-room, looking very beautiful, only a little tired, as her mother and grandmother, two of the wise women of Gotham, could not help remarking.

Lord Hatterleigh was there, got up carefully with a twiceround white tie, looking as if he was at the meeting of a Young Men's Christian Association, and was only waiting for the chairman's summons to rise and make the speech of the evening. He looked at her in what he considered an amatory sort of way, and tumbled over a footstool, and kicked her father, before he bowed himself stern-foremost into Lady Emily's stand of camellias. There was also Colonel Hilton, who was dressed like a boxkeeper, and might have passed for one, only that his clothes were so perfectly cut, his beard (the Duke of Cambridge not having published his order) was so very long, and his Victoria Cross was peeping out on the left side of his whiskers. There was Papa, tall, gray, elegant - in blue and brass buttons; there was Mamma, stout and respectable, yet with twopennyworth of espièglerie to carry it off; there was Grandma, with her waxen complexion, and her lace cap, looking as if she was sitting there until the angels Respectability and Routine came and carried her to heaven, to join Hannah More; and here, in the midst of them, stood Laura herself, with a secret gnawing at her heart, which to her was guilty and dreadful. She loved the gallant young Hammersley, and she knew it. Though she said to herself loudly that it was a monstrous falsehood, yet she knew it to be true.

Lord Hatterleigh twaddled on about the Whigs, that incomprehensible and undefinable body, who form the staple of all political talk and speculation. Her father dextrously helped the turbot, and turned his graceful high-bred head and face towards the Vicar, now and then making a little mild fun with him about the rest of his dinner, this being a Friday, and the Vicar being a ferocious high-churchman. That preux chevalier, Colonel Hilton, flirted solemnly and gracefully with Constance Downes. Sir Peckwich Downes beamed over his white waistcoat at his fish. Mamma and Grandma chirruped and cackled away as usual. Richardson the butler, master of the feast, administered stimulants according to his will and pleasure, getting vexed with Sir Peckwich's perpetual growl of "Sherry!" as showing want of confidence. There were their own three footmen in crimson