a casual meeting in the street, or other lucky chance-George was triumphant George still. Not a bit of shame did he seem to take to himself-but so sunny, so fascinating was he, as he held the hands of the half-reluctant grumbler, and protested it should all come right sometime, that the enemy was won over to conciliation for the passing moment. It was impossible to help admiring George Godolphin; it was impossible, when brought face to face with him, not to be taken with his frank plausibility: the crustiest sufferer of them all was in a degree subdued by it. Prior's Ash understood that the officers of the bankruptcy "badgered" George a great deal when under his examinations, but George only seemed to come out of it the more triumphant. Safe on the score of Lord Averil, all the rest was in comparison light; and easy George never lost his good humour or his self-possession. He appeared to come scot-free out of everything. Those falsified accounts in the bank books, that many another might have been held responsible for and punished, he emerged from harmless. It was conjectured that the full extent of these false entries never was discovered by the commissioners: Thomas Godolphin and Mr. Hurde alone could have told it and Thomas preferred to let the odium of loosely-kept books, of reckless expenditure of money, fall upon himself, rather than betray George. Were the whole thing laid bare and declared, it could not bring a single fraction of benefit to the creditors, so, in that point of view, it was as well to let it rest. Are these careless, sanguine, gaytempered men always lucky? It has been so asserted; and I do think there's a great deal of truth in it. Most unequivocally lucky in this instance was George Godolphin.

It was of no earthly use asking him where all the money had gone -to what use this sum had been put, to what use the other-George could not tell. He could not tell any more than they could; he was as much perplexed over it as they were. He ran his white hand unconsciously through his shining golden hair, hopelessly trying his best to account for a great many items that nobody living could have accounted for. All in vain. Heedless, off-handed George Godolphin! He appeared before those inquisitive officials somewhat gayer in attire than was needful. A sober suit, rather of the seedy order, than bran new, might be deemed appropriate at such a time; but George Godolphin gave no indication of consulting any such rules of propriety. George Godolphin's refined good taste had kept him from falling into the loose and easy style of dress which some men so strangely favour in the present day, putting a gentleman in outward aspect on a level with the roughs of society. George, though no coxcomb, had been addicted to dress well and expensively; and George appeared inclined to do the same thing still. They could not take him to task on the score of his fine broadcloth, or of his neatly-finished boot; but they did bend their eyes meaningly on the massive gold chain which crossed his white waistcoat; on the costly appendages which dangled from it; on the handsome gold repeater which he more than once took out, as if weary of the passing hours. Mr. George received a gentle hint that those articles, however ornamental to himself, must be confiscated to the bankruptcy; and he resigned them with a good grace. The news of this little incident travelled abroad, as an interesting anecdote con

nected with the proceedings, and the next time George saw Charlotte Pain, she told him he was a fool to walk into the camp of the Philistines with pretty things about him. But George was not wilfully dishonest (if you can by any possibility understand that assertion, after what you know of his past doings), and he replied to Charlotte that it was only right the creditors should make spoil of his watch and anything else he possessed. The truth, were it defined, being, that George was only dishonest when driven so to be. He had made free with the bonds of Lord Averil, but he could not be guilty of the meanness of hiding his personal trinkets.

Three or four times now had George been at Prior's Ash. People wondered why he did not remain; what it was that took him again and again to London. The very instant he found that he could be dispensed with at Prior's Ash, away he flew; not to return to it again until imperatively demanded. The plain fact was that Mr. George did not like to face Prior's Ash. For all the easy self-possession, the gay good humour he displayed to its inhabitants, the place had become utterly distasteful to him, almost unbearable; he shunned it and hated it as a pious Roman Catholic hates and shuns purgatory. For that reason, and for no other, George did his best to escape from it.

He had seen Lord Averil. And his fair face had betrayed its shame as he said a few words of apology for what he had done-of thanks for the clemency shown him-of promises for the future. “If I live, I'll make it good to you," he murmured. "I did not think to steal them, Averil; I did not, on my solemn word of honour. I thought I should have replaced them before anything could be known. Your asking for them immediately-that you should do so seemed like a fatality-upset everything. But for that I might have weathered it all, and the house would not have gone. It was no light pressure that forced me to touch them-Heaven alone knows the need and the temptation."

And the meeting between the brothers? No eye saw it; no ear heard it. Good Thomas Godolphin was dying from the blow, dying before his time; but not a word of harsh reproach was thrown to George. How George defended himself or whether he attempted to defend himself, or whether he let it wholly alone-the public never knew.

Lady Godolphin's Folly was no longer in the occupancy of the Verralls or of Mrs. Pain: Lady Godolphin had returned to it. Not a day aged; not a day altered. Time flitted most lightly over Lady Godolphin. Her bloom-tinted complexion was delicately fresh as ever; her dress was as becoming, her flaxen locks were as youthful. She came with her servants and her carriages, and she took up her abode at the Folly, in all the splendour of the old days. Her income was large, and the misfortunes which had recently fallen on the family did not affect it. Lady Godolphin washed her hands of these misfortunes. She washed her hands of George. She told the world that she did so. She spoke of them openly to the public in general, to her acquaintance in particular, in a slighting, contemptuous sort of manner, as we are all apt to speak of the ill doings of other people. They don't concern us, and it's rather a condescension on our part to blame them at all. This was no concern of Lady Godolphin's. She told everybody it was

not. George's disgrace did not reflect itself upon the family, and of him she-washed her hands. No: Lady Godolphin could not see that this break-up caused by George should be any reason whatever why she or the Miss Godolphins should hide their heads and go mourning in sackcloth and ashes. Many of her old acquaintances in the county agreed with Lady Godolphin in her view of things, and helped by their visits to make the Folly gay again.

To wash her hands of Mr. George was, equitably speaking, no more than that gentleman deserved: but Lady Godolphin also washed her hands of Maria. On her return to Prior's Ash she had felt inclined to espouse Maria's part; to sympathise with, and pity her; and she drove down in state one day and left her carriage with its powdered coachman and footman to pace to and fro before the bank, while she went in. She openly avowed to Maria that she considered herself in a remote degree the cause which had led to her union with George Godolphin she supposed that it was her having had Maria so much at the Folly, and afterwards on the visit at Broomhead, which had led to the attachment. As a matter of course she regretted this, and wished there had been no marriage, now that George had turned out so gracelessly. If she could do anything to repair it she would: and, as a first step, she offered the Folly as a present asylum to Maria. She would be safe there from worry, and-from George.

Maria scarcely at first understood. And when she did, her only answer was to thank Lady Godolphin, and to stand out, in her quiet, gentle manner, but untiringly and firmly, for her husband. Not a shade of blame would she acknowledge to be due to him; not a reverence would she render him the less: her place was with him, she said, though the whole world turned against him. It vexed Lady Godolphin.

"Do you know," she asked," that you must choose between your husband and the world ?"

66

In what way?" replied Maria.

"In what way! When a man acts in the manner that George Godolphin has acted, he puts a barrier between himself and society. But there's no necessity for the barrier to extend to you, Maria. If you will come to my house for a while, you will find this to be the case -that it will not extend to you."

"You are very kind, Lady Godolphin. My husband is more to me than the world."

"Do you approve of what he has done ?”

"No," replied Maria. "But it is not my place to show that I blame."

"I think it is," said Lady Godolphin, in the hard tone she used when her opinion was crossed.

Maria was silent. She never could contend with any one.

"Then you prefer to hold out against the world," resumed Lady Godolphin; "to put yourself beyond its pale! It is a bold step, Maria."

"What can I do?" was Maria's pleading answer. "If the world throws me over because I will not turn against my husband, I cannot help it. I married him for better and for worse, Lady Godolphin."

"The fact is, Maria," retorted my lady, sharply, "that you have loved George Godolphin in a ridiculous degree.

Perhaps I have," was Maria's subdued answer, the colour dyeing her face with various reminiscences. "But surely there was no sin in it, Lady Godolphin: he is my husband."

"And you cling to him still ?"

"Oh yes."

Lady Godolphin rose. She shrugged her shoulders as she drew her white lace shawl over them, she glanced at her coquettish blue bonnet in the pier-glass as she passed it, at her blush-rose cheeks. "You have chosen your husband, Maria, in preference to me; in preference to the world; and from this moment I wash my hands of you, as I have already done of him."

**

A

It was all the farewell she took: and she went out to her carriage thinking what a blind, obstinate, hardened woman was Maria Godolphin. She saw not what it had cost that "hardened" woman to bear up before her; that her heart was nigh unto breaking; that the sorrow laid upon her was greater than she well knew how to battle with.

GEORGE GODOLPHIN leaned against a pillar of the terrace opening from the dining-room. They had not left the bank yet as a residence, but this was their last day in it. It was the last day they could stop in it, and why they should have lingered in it so long was food for gossip in Prior's Ash. On the morrow the house would be, as may be said, public property. Men would walk in and ticket all the things, apportioning them their place in the catalogue, their order in the days of sale, and the public would crowd in also, to feast their eyes upon the household gods hitherto sacred to George Godolphin.

How did he feel as he stood there? Was his spirit in heaviness, as was the case under similar misfortune of another man-if the written record he left to us may be trusted that great and noble poet, illfated in death as in life, whose transcendent genius has since found no parallel.

I T

It was a trying moment, that which found him,
Standing alone beside his desolate hearth,

While all his household gods lay shivered round him.

Did George Godolphin find it trying? Was his hearth desolate ? Not desolate in the full sense that that other spoke, for George Godolphin's wife was with him still.

She had stood by him. When he first returned to Prior's Ash, she had greeted him with her kind smile, with words of welcome. Whatever effect that unpleasant scandal, mentioned by Margery, which it seems had formed a staple dish for Prior's Ash, may have been taking upon her in secret and silence, she had given no sign of it to George. He never suspected that any such whisper, touching his worthy self, had been breathed to her. Mr. George best knew what grounds there might be for it: whether it bore any foundation, or whether it was

but one of those breezy rumours, false as the wind, which have their rise in ill nature, and in that alone: but however it may have been, whether true or false, he could not divine that such poison would be dropped into his wife's ear. If he had thought her greeting to him strange, her manner more utterly subdued than there was need for, her grief of greater violence, he attributed it all to the recent misfortunes and Maria made no other sign.

The effects had been bought in at Ashlydyat, but these had not: and this was the last day, almost the last hour of his occupancy of them. One would think his eyes would be cast around in lingering looks of regretful farewell-upon the chairs and tables, on the scattered ornaments, down to the rich carpets, up to the valuable and familiar pictures. Not a bit of it. George's eyes were bent on his nails which he was trimming to his satisfaction, and he was carolling in an under tone a strain of a new English opera.

They were to go out that evening. At dusk. At dusk, you may be sure. They were to go forth from their luxurious home, and enter upon obscure lodgings, and go altogether down in the scale of what the world calls society. Not that the lodgings were so obscure, taking them in the abstract; obscure indeed, as compared with their home at the bank, very obscure beside the home they had sometime thought to remove to Ashlydyat.

George could not be prudent: he could not, had his life depended on it, been saving. When the time approached that they might no longer stay in the bank, and Maria, in writing to him in London, reminded him of that fact, and asked where they were to go and what they were to do, George had returned for answer that there was no hurry, she might leave it all to him. But the next day brought him down; and he went out, off-hand, and engaged some fashionable rooms at three guineas a week. Maria was dismayed when she heard the price. How was it to be paid? George did not see precisely how, himself, just at present: but, to his sanguine disposition, the paying of ten guineas a week for lodgings would have looked quite easy. Maria had more forethought, and prevailed. The three-guinea a week rooms were given up, and some taken at half the rent. She would have wished a lower rent still; but George laughed at her.

He stood there in his careless beauty, his bright face bent downwards, his tall fine form, noble in its calmness. The sun was playing with his hair, bringing out its golden tints, and a smile illumined his face, as he went on with his song. Whatever may have been George Godolphin's short-comings in some points of view, none could reproach him on the score of his personal attractions. All the old terror, the carking care, had gone out of him with the easy bankruptcy-easy in its results to him, compared to what might have been-and gay George, graceless George, was himself again. There may have been something deficient in his moral organisation, for he really appeared to take no shame to himself for what had occurred. He stood there calmly self-possessed; the perfect gentleman, so far as looks and manners could make him one; looking as fit to bend his knee at the proud court of St. James's; as ever that stately gentleman his father