A CASE OF CONSCIENCE.

BY EVERARD CLIVE.

"Of course you'll not tell any one a word of all this." "Oh, no, no,—of course not."

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Well, be careful that you don't; because, you know, I've told you all this about Lucy Hillary in the strictest confidence."

"To be sure; you may rely on me. pretty and true-hearted she looks!"

Yet what a pity it is!—how

"I do rely on you and your honour, which I look on as pledged, not to repeat this; and mind, also, that you do not in any way show that you are aware of anything against her. There-we must not make our dialogue too conspicuous. A'nt you going to dance? They are playing a Polka. I am going to my husband in the card

room."

Mrs. Omber, the lady-speaker of this last sentence, left the gentleman to whom it was addressed, and glided away from the angle of the room where they had been conversing, bearing in her eye that small, shy, puckered sparkle, which certain reptiles, and also certain bipeds exhibit when they have succeeded in doing something spiteful, and having also round her thin lips that compressed smile, by which the said bipeds show their satisfaction at having secured their own safety, and guarded against being called to account while regaling themselves with a slice of mischief.

Mrs. Omber had certainly succeeded by her narration in making Philip Emerson, to whom it was addressed, look on Lucy Hillary with very different feelings to those with which he had regarded her in the earlier part of that evening, and during the whole of several former evenings and mornings.

Not that he was actually in love with the damsel,-he had not seen enough of her for that; and, besides, he was diligently cultivating at the same time the germs of five or six flirtations in other quarters. But he had liked her, and he took an interest in her. He had been pleased with the mild, quiet expression of her good looks (for, though not strikingly handsome, she was undeniably goodlooking), and the clear gentle tone of her voice had fixed his attention. She walked well,-neither thrusting the soles of her shoes along the ground, nor jerking herself galvanically forward from the tips of her toes; and voice and gait formed two important elements in Philip Emerson's system of female valuations. He found that she decidedly had good sense, and he fancied that she had good temper ; but he had met far too many tigresses in lamb's clothing not to make him suspend his judgment as to the article of temper in every fresh member of the smoother half of the human creation. Perhaps it was for points of negative merit that his liking for Lucy had principally grown up; and, after all, a woman's negative merits are almost her best. She never made the abuse of others the staple of her conversation, though she could speak her mind firmly and keenly enough. She told no fictions,-at least, he had not caught her out in any; and she was able to narrate an incident, or repeat an anecdote, without running into that extreme exaggeration which one hears so

often from pretty lips, and which makes one think that the fair speaker's education must have been exclusively devoted to the study of oriental hyperbole. As Emerson said of Lucy, she was almost the only talking woman he ever met who was able to keep clear of superlatives. He had seen her once or twice a little thwarted and disappointed, but had not heard her elevate her voice to that unpleasant shrill pitch, which grates on the ear like the false notes of a bad piano, indicating that a great deal of tuning will be required before much harmony can be expected either from the lady or the instrument. Lucy rode well on horseback, without being a shegroom; and, though she danced well, she displayed none of that vehement appetite for polking and waltzing, which makes some young ladies resemble human teetotums, perpetually ready to spin about, so long as they can find some man to take them up and start them. She did not worry him about the opera or John Parry; and she neither talked Puseyism, Liebig's chemistry, nor Tennyson's poetry. Altogether, he had never detected anything in her that jarred upon his theories of female amiability and propriety, during their numerous meeings in the course of the nearly concluded London season.

Philip Emerson decidedly liked her, and the expectation of finding her at Mrs. Aston's ball had caused him to be a little earlier than usual in his appearance there that evening. Before, however, he had any opportunity of speaking to Lucy, he encountered and went through the operation of a formal introduction to Mrs. Omber, a distant connection of his mother's family, to whom he thought himself genealogically bound to pay attention, as a matter of pedigree, if not as a matter of pastime. This lady, who had not altogether lost a showy sort of beauty, though considerably on the wane, gladly manœuvred him into conversation, and in the course of it indulged in a few commonplace spiteful remarks on the alleged queerness of the party, and paucity of pretty faces. Emerson, in controverting these criticisms, had pointed out Miss Hillary as a standing (or dancing) argument on the favourable side of the question. Piqued at this, Mrs. Omber had given an extra squeeze of the lemon and an extra dash of the cayenne to the elaborate little dish of scandal which she immediately set before him respecting Lucy, and at the conclusion of it made him give his honour not to repeat or allude to her communication, as has been already stated. Without going into the details of the narrative with which the lady, in her zeal for the diffusion of useful knowledge, enlightened his mind, and which was given in the genuine Mrs. Candour style, suffice it to state, that he learned that she had met Lucy during the preceding September at Scrubville, one of the watering-places on the Essex coast; and that, soon after Lucy's arrival there, a certain officer was observed prowling about the environs, evidently after no good, but evidently on Miss Hillary's account, and by her encouragement; for he never appeared in public, and none of the respectable company knew anything of him, but it was ascertained, on good authority, that he and Lucy used to take most improperly lonely walks together, in most suspiciously solitary places, at most reprehensibly late hours. Nay, on one occasion, when Mrs. Omber and some of her friends had been out on a fishing party, and had been obliged by a calm to go ashore in the evening, some way below the

town, and walk home along the bay, Mrs. Omber herself, on turning the corner of some rocks, had suddenly encountered Lucy, "with her martial youth around her," that is to say, with the officer's arm round her waist. All this, and much more,-how all the world talked about it, and how indignant all the world felt about it, how Lucy and her warlike adorer simultaneously vanished,-did Mrs. Omber narrate with intense gratification, and Philip Emerson hear with intense annoyance, arising partly out of mortified vanity at finding himself wrong in his opinion of Lucy, and partly, to do him justice, out of honest regret at feeling himself obliged to think ill of one so pretty, and apparently so faultless.

Mrs. Omber, after making him renew his pledge not to repeat or allude to what she had said, left him in his rumination; and, after a short pause, he made an attempt to escape from his corner, and commenced a circuit close round by the walls, shrinking back every now and then to avoid the charge of some comet-like couple of Polkers, who came rushing eccentrically out of the usual dancing orbit, whirling an extremity of their constellation, coat-tailed or flounced as the case might be, against the daring circumnavigators of the ball-room.

At length he gained the cooler region of the landing-place, and, as he leaned in the doorway, looking in on the Terpsichorean roundabout, he reflected on what he had just heard, and also on Lucy's demeanour, and the society in which he had met her, and then thought on the possibility of the whole tale being an invention of the narratrix. As he revolved the chances of this being the case, the idea occurred to him,-"I'll watch if Lucy and that woman meet, and see how Lucy looks. That will be a clear test of guilty or not guilty."

Nor was he long without an opportunity of thus putting her on her trial. Mrs. Omber, who had returned into the dancing-room, was watching him, and probably guessed at what was passing in his mind. The dance was over, and the subsequent promenading was commenced, which always seems as if every one felt glad to resume the natural gait of a human being, when Mrs. Omber crossed the room, as if intending to speak to an ancient dame in bugles and a turban, who was sitting near the door; but suddenly stopping short, pretended to recognise Lucy unexpectedly as she came round in the cycle of promenaders, and exclaimed, in a well-pitched, dry, acid drawl,

"How do you do? Oh! Miss Hillary, I believe. Have you been on the Essex coast lately?"-and then, without waiting for an answer, passed on, leaving most of those who heard her surprised at the strangeness of her manner and interrogative.

Philip Emerson was close by; he saw that she and Lucy met, and recognised each other; he caught the last words, and saw that Miss Hillary coloured deeply, and looked exceedingly embarrassed. Lucy quickly glanced round, and saw that Emerson was intently watching herself and Mrs. Omber, who was standing at a little distance in a quiet ovation of malice. Lucy saw that he had been close enough to hear what had been said, and coloured again beneath the peculiar gaze which she encountered on meeting his eye. Philip turned away from the room, with his mind fully made up as to the truth of what he had been told. He left Mrs. Aston's soon after

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wards, and journeyed eastwards to Furnival's Inn, and then upwards along the three staircases which intervened between his dormitory and his mother-earth. He latch-keyed himself into the den that formed his habitation, while undergoing the process of becoming learned in the law; and the first object his lucifer showed him was a card stuck in the rim of the candlestick, with "C. Melville, Adelaide Hotel," pencilled on it. It was the name of his oldest and best friend, whom he had not seen for the last two years, and supposed to be still abroad. A short search on his desk brought to his sight a letter in his friend's handwriting, not post-marked, but evidently written in those very chambers that same evening. He forgot all about Lucy and Mrs. Omber in his joy at the prospect of soon shaking hands with his old comrade, eagerly opened the note, and read as follows:

"DEAR EMERSON,

"I have just returned, sooner than I thought I should be able to do, from Hamburgh. I wish I had found you at home; however, your old woman, whom I found dusting out your domicile, tells me I am safe to catch you to-morrow morning; so I will victimize you for breakfast at half-past eight, unless I am obliged to leave by an early train; but, as there is a chance of that, I scribble these lines for you now.

"I am going to be married, and that, I hope, very shortly. I want you to be one of the trustees of the settlement, to come to church with me, and, in short, to do all for me that is usually done by a man's friends and relations; for, as you know, I have no near kith or kin left me in England; and, as for fetching any of my uncles or cousins over from India for the occasion, I do not suppose they would come; nor, if they were willing to pay such a nuptial visit, should I feel disposed to wait for their arrival, even in these days of overland celerity. When I tell you that the lady to whom I am engaged is very pretty, very amiable, and very sensible, you will of course look on it as merely what every engaged man thinks and says of his intended. But really and truly, Phil, when you see and know her, you will not only wish me happiness, but congratulate me on being sure of happiness. She is two years younger than I am, and half a head shorter; and if the richest light-brown hair that ever curled, the softest blue eyes that ever shone, the prettiest mouth that ever breathed, the fairest complexion that ever beamed, the most graceful figure that ever moved, and the neatest foot that ever tripped, help to make up beauty, she is most assuredly beautiful. We have been engaged for upwards of a year. You were out of England at the time when I was staying in Kent, where I met her, before I started for the Continent; and I will explain when we meet why I did not mention it in my letters. As to her family and fortune, suffice it for the present to say, that the first is unexceptionable (she is a Fair Maid of Kent), and the second is to me immaterial. Her permanent name is Lucy, her transitory name Hillary. God bless you, old fellow.

"Yours ever,

"CHARLES MElville.”

The letter dropped from Emerson's hand as he read the concluding sentence.

"What! Charley Melville marry that Lucy Hillary? It can't be-it shan't be. I'll go and knock that mischief on the head at once." Thinking thus half out loud, he seized his hat, designing instantly to seek his friend at the Adelaide; but, as his hand was at the door, the thought flashed across his mind, "I have pledged myself never to repeat what I heard about her." He staggered back, utterly beat and bewildered. The hope sprung up,-"The name is the same; but yet it may perhaps be a different person." He took up the letter again, and re-read the description. Allowing for a lover's exaggeration, every particular corresponded. He himself had heard her speak of Kent as her native county. He struggled in vain to get up a doubt of the identity of his friend's intended bride with the girl upon whose character he had passed sentence of condemnation in his own mind, not two hours ago. "So gross a case, too!" thought he. "Why, at the very time when she was playing these tricks down in Essex, she was engaged to poor Charles. Last September-ay, that was while he was in Russia." Yet what was he to do in the matter? He was scrupulously sensitive of the obligation which his plighted word imposes on a gentleman, and from the idea of doing, either directly or indirectly, that which he was bound in honour not to do he recoiled with horror. But was he to stand by and see his best friend ruin himself, without stretching an arm to save him,-without giving him one word of warning of the cruel, crushing disappointment, the probable disgrace and misery into which he was blindly rushing? Most bitterly did Emerson anathematise her who had told him the story, and then still more heartily did he devote his own head, like Decius,

Dis infernis terræque parenti,"

for having been such a fool as to listen, and such a still worse fool as to give a retrospective pledge of secresy. One chance alone seemed to remain, a chance, indeed, simply of delay,-but that would be a reprieve. Melville said in his note that possibly he might be obliged to leave town by an early train; it was therefore not absolutely certain that the dreaded first conference would come on next morning: there might be time to imagine some plan to pacify conscience, and reconcile friendship and honour.

Partly with this hope, and partly on the "Victorine, or I 'll-sleepon't" principle, which a man so often has recourse to when he is bothered, Phil turned into bed, most fervently wishing that absent friends might continue in statu quo for some time to come.

He was still absorbed in a farrago of visions, when the sound of a clear manly voice in his outer room found its way to the senses of the sleeper; and, after a succession of winks and blinks, a few deep gasps, and partial elevations on the right elbow, openness was re stored to his eyes. A loud pulsation with the knob of a walkingstick against the door of his dormitory helped to vivify him a little The door opened, there was a clattering back of shutters, and throwing up of windows, and then by his side stood the undeniable Charles Melville, somewhat stouter and darker than when they had last met, but with the same frank hearty tone in his voice, the same warm, strong shake of the hand, the same merry sparkle of the eye as ever.

more.