"You haven't been in Scinde, Phil," said Langton, with the grim smile of a vieux sabreur who hears those who have never suffered jest at scars; while their host, rather tired of this breakfast-chat about women, turned to his unopened correspondence, till his guests, having thrown their letters away, to be answered at any distant and hazardous future, having yawned over the papers, casually remarking that that poor devil Allington's divorce case was put off till next session, or that there was an awful row in South Mexico, rose by general consent, and began to think of the rabbits.

White Ladies was one of the pleasantest places to visit at in England. A long beadroll might have been cited of houses that eclipsed it in every point-but the abbey had a charm, as it had a beauty, of its own; and those who went thither once always gave the preference to a second invitation there, over those to other places. In the deep recesses of its vast forest-lands there were droves of deer that gave more royals in one day's sport than were ever found south of the Cheviots. In the dark pools, some of them well-nigh inaccessible, where they lay between gorzecovered hills or down in wooded valleys, the wild fowl flocked by legions. The river, that ran in and out, of which you just caught glimpses from the west windows, flashing between the boughs in the distance, was famed for its salmon, and had in olden days given char and trout to the tables of the monastery, whose celebrity had reached to royal Windsor and princely Sheen, and made the Tudors covetous for the land and water that yielded such good fare. Sport was to be had in perfection among the brakes and woods at White Ladies; and within its art-stained windows; even in the very bachelor dens overlooking the grey cloisters, there was luxury and comfort; and fair women used to come down to White Ladies, lovely enough to rouse the sleeping Dominicans from their graves as they swept through the aisles of the chapel; and laughter would ring out from the smoking-room, when the men had their feet in the papooshes and their Manillas in their mouths, loud enough to wake all the echoes of the abbey, and make the dead monks lying under the sward turn in their tombs and cross themselves at the profanity of their successors and supplanters.

White Ladies was a grand old place, and Strathmore was envied by most of his friends and acquaintance for its possession. It had come to him by the distaff side, from his mother's father, who, failing heirs male in the direct line, had left it to his daughter's second son on condition that he assumed his name. By a strange chance, Strathmore bore a close resemblance to his mother's line, whose name he had taken; he had nothing either in feature or in character in common with the easy, inert, sensual, placable, Saxon Castlemeres, with their Teuton good humour and their Teuton phlegm, but he inherited in every point the features of the Strathmores, that courtly, silent, Norman race, swift and fierce in passion, dark and implacable in hate, keen to avenge, slow to forgive, imperious in love, and cold in hate; and with the features might go the character. Others do not know, we do not know ourselves, all that lies latent in us, until the seeds of good or evil that are hidden and unknown germinate to deed and blossom into action, and make us reap for weal or woe the harvest we have sown. If with the countenance he inherited the character of those who had ruled before him at White Ladies, there

had been little in his life up to this morning, when he sat drinking his Rhenish and looking over his letters in the oriel-room at the Abbey that warm summer day, to develop the unroused nature. The darker traits might have died out with the darker times, as the mailed surcoat of steel had been replaced by a velvet morning coat, as the iron portcullis had been put away by a gold-fringed portière, as the culverin above the gateway had been removed for the soft, silken folds of a flag. Lions long kept in a tame life lose their desert instinct and their thirst for blood; so the Strathmores in long centuries of court life might have outworn and lost what had been evil and dangerous in them in the days of Plantagenet, of Lancaster, and of York. Or, if the nature were not dead, but only sleeping, there was nothing to arouse it; life went smoothly and well with Strathmore; he had birth, fortune, talents of a high order; he was courted by women, partly because he was very cold to them, chiefly, doubtless, because he was son of the Marquis of Castlemere and master of White Ladies. In a diplomatic career he had a wide field for the ambitions that attracted him-the ambition not of place, wealth, or title, but of Power, the deep, subtle state power that had in all ages fascinated the Strathmores, and been wielded by them successfully and skilfully. Life lay clear, brilliant, unruffled behind him and before him; singularly generous, caring little for money or for luxury, he was cordially liked by men, though there were some, of course, who as cordially hated him; and if there ran in his blood the old spirit of the Srathmores that had in ancient days begotten their fierce motto, "Slay, and spare not;" that had often worked their own doom and been their own scourge; that gleamed from their eyes in the old portraits by Antonio More, and Jameson, and Vandyke, hanging in the vaulted picture-gallery at the Abbey, and that made those who looked on them understand how those courtly, elegant, suave gentlemen had been swift to steel, and pitiless in pursuit, and imperious in ire,-if this spirit still ran in his blood it was dormant, and had never been wakened to its strength. Opportunity is the forcing-house that gives birth to all things; without it, seeds will never ripen into fruit; with it, much that might otherwise have died out innocuous expands to baneful force. Man works half his own doom, and circumstance works the other half. Yet, because we have not been tempted, we therefore believe we can stand; because we have not yet been brought nigh the furnace, we therefore hold ourselves to be fire-proof! Mes frères, the best of us are fools, I fear! The steel is not proven till it has passed through the flames.

Men

Sooner or later though they may lie to it long, half a lifetime, perhaps I believe that men and women are all true to their physiognomies; that they prove, sooner or later, that the index Nature has writ (though writ in crabbed, uncertain characters that few can read altogether aright) upon their features is not a wrong nor a false one. lie, but Nature does not. They dissemble, but she speaks out. They conceal, but she tells the truth. What is carved on the features, will develop, some time or other, in the nature. When Bernini made the prophecy that foretold ill for the heir of England, could any prediction seem more absurd? Yet Charles Stuart wrought his own fate, and the fruit of the past, whose seed had been sown by his own hands, was bitter between his teeth when the foretold calamity fell, black and ghastly,

betwixt the People and the Throne. Strathmore's life, cold, clear, cloudless as the air of a glittering, still winter's noon, was utterly at variance with his physiognomy-the physiognomy that had the eyes of a Catiline and the face of a Strafford! Yet, as time went on, and he passed of his own will into a path into which a man stronger in one sense, and weaker in another, would have never entered, the spirit that was latent in him awoke, and wrought his own fate and wove his own scourge more darkly and more erringly, because more consciously and more resolutely, than Charles Stuart, making him eat of the fruit of his own sowing to the full as bitterly as he of England, who might never have bowed his head to the axe that chill January morning, when a king fell, amidst the silence of an assembled multitude, if the first obstinate error that had seemed sweet to him had been put aside, and the first wilful turn out of the right path been avoided: the turn-so slight!—that led on to the headsman and the scaffold!

II.

UNDER THE SHADOW OF THE ELMS.

THE rabbits were tame in comparison with the drives for which the forests of White Ladies were famed, and with the bouquets of pheasants that the battues afforded later on in the year; but still they were better than nothing, and were peppered faute de mieux that day, though the chief thing done by the whole quartette was to lie under the trees and drink the iced champagne-cup and Badminton, brought there, with a cold luncheon, on an Exmoor pony by the under-keepers about two o'clock; which was, however, as pleasant occupation for idleness on a sultry summer's day as anything that could be suggested, while the smoke of the Manillas curled up through the leafy roofing above head, and the dogs lay about on the moss-covered turf with their tongues out, hot, tired, and excited, and the mavises and blackbirds sang in the boughs.

"Where the deuce is the Sabreur?" said Phil Danvers, when the rabbits had been slain by the scores, and the chimes of the Abbey, ring. ing seven o'clock with the slow, musical chant of the "Adeste Fideles," came over the woods, and warned them that the dressing-bell must be going, and that it was time to think about dinner.

"By George! I don't know," said Strathmore, raising himself from the lichens and ferns on which he lay, and standing up, with a little yawn, to stretch himself. "I haven't seen him for the last hour. Didn't he say something about the Euston Coppice? I dare say he is gone there after the rabbits; we must have missed him somewhere."

"It's deucedly easy to lose oneself in these woods of yours, Strathmore," said Langton, striking a fresh fusee. "The timber's so tremendously thick, and there are no paths to speak of; you never have the wood cut down, do you?"

"Cut down! Certainly not! My good fellow, do you think the woods of White Ladies go for building purposes? The Strathmores would rise out of their graves! I wonder Bertie is gone off like that. Pritchard, have you seen Colonel Erroll ?"

"I see the Colonel a going toward the coppice, my lord, about an hour

ago, when we was beating of the Near Acre-a going down that ere path, my lord," responded Pritchard, the under-keeper.

"Queer fellow!" said Strathmore, as he gave his gun to one of the boys, and lighted a weed. "What did he go off for, I wonder? Hc must have missed us, somehow."

"Perhaps he's taken a wrong cut, and will wander miserably till the soup's cold and the fish overdone," suggested Danvers. "Lady Millicent is coming to-night, ain't she, with the Harewood people? He'll hang himself if he isn't in in time to take her in to dinner; he swears by her just now, you know. The Sabreur's eternally in love! Who isn't, though ?"

"I'm not," said Strathmore, with perfect veracity. It was somewhat his pride that he had never lost his head for any woman in his life.

"Because you're panoplied with protocols, and sworn to the State ! You're a cursed cold fellow, Cis-always were !" interrupted Danvers, with a mixture of impatience and envy. "The Sabreur has lost himself, I bet you; it is easy enough in these woods. I was benighted once, don't you remember?-the under-growth is so confoundedly thick, and it's as wild here as in Brittany. If he miss Lady Millicent, he'll hang himself, to a certainty! We must ask her for one of her rose-tendre ribbons to make the suicide effective!"

"I'll go round by the coppice home, and look for him," said Strathmore, putting his cigar in his mouth. "There are two hours before the people come; it's only now striking seven. I shall be back in plenty of time, and it's a splendid evening. Au revoir!-you and Phil want longer for your toilettes than I do, because you'll dress for the Harewood

women!"

It was a splendid evening-clear, sultry, with an amber light falling through the aisles of the trees, and long shadows deepening across the sward, while the wild fowl went to roost beside the pools, and the herons dipped their beaks into the dark cool waters that lay deep and still, with broad-leaved lilies and tangled river plants floating languidly on their surface. Strathmore left Danvers and Langton to take the shorter cut through the gardens that led direct to the side-door of the bachelors' wing, and strolled himself along through the Hurst Wood, by the longer détour known as Euston Coppice, a wild, solitary, intricate bit of the park, that had, as Danvers said, more of the luxuriant forest-growth of parts of Lower Brittany than of the tamer, more cultivated look of English woodlands. Some volcanic convulsion long ages ago had rent and split the earth in this part into as fantastic and uneven a surface as the Black Rocks of Derbyshire, the gaps so filled up by furze, and hazel, and yellow heath, and the rugged sides so covered with mosses, violet roots, and hyacinths, that the right track might very easily be lost if you were not acquainted with every nook, and corner, and forest path, as Strathmore had been from his childhood. He walked onward, looking about him; for he thought it possible that Erroll might have missed the right path, and that he might fall in with him as he passed round through the Euston Coppice homewards. Bertie Erroll was the solitary person whom Strathmore could ever have been said to have loved. His attachment was very difficult to rouse; he cared for very few people, and, in the world, everybody, specially pretty and romantic women, called him

without any heart, perhaps without any feeling. It was true that he had never lost his head after any woman; he had had an intrigue with this one, a liaison with that, but loved them he had not; his indifference was no affectation, and his vaunted panoply no pretence; the Strathmores had always better liked state plot and subtle power than the woman whose odorous tresses had swept over their Milan corslets, and whose golden heads had been pillowed on their breasts. To Bertie Erroll, Strathmore bore, however, a much deeper attachment than women had ever won from him—the attachment of a nature that gives both love and friendship very rarely; but when it gives either gives instantly, blindly, and trustingly; the nature that had always been characteristic of the "swift, silent Strathmores," as the alliteration of cradle chronicles and provincial legends nicknamed the race that had reigned at White Ladies since Hastings. The friendship between them was the friendship closer than brotherhood of dead Greece and old Judæa-the bright truthfulness, the soft laziness, the candour, the dash, the verve, the hundred attractive, attachable qualities of Erroll's character, endeared him to Strathmore by that strange force of contrast that has so odd a spell sometimes in friendship as in love; and the bond between them was as close anti firmly riven as a clasp of steel. They never spoke of their friendship hardly; it was not the way of either of them; it is only your loving women who lavish eternal vows, and press soft kisses on each other's cheeks, and swear they cannot live apart over their pre-prandial cup of Souchong, to-slander each other suavely behind their fans an hour afterwards, and sigh away their bosom-darling's honour with a whisper! They rarely spoke of it; but they had a friendship for one another passing the love of women, and they relied on it as men rely on their own honour, as silently and as secretly. Once, when they were together in Scinde, having both gone thither on a hunting trip to the big-game districts for a change one autumn, to bring home tiger-skins and try pig-sticking, a tigress sprang out on them as they strolled alone through the jungle-sprang out to alight, with grip and fang, upon Strathmore, who neither heard nor saw her as it chanced. But before she could be upon her victim, Erroll threw himself before him, and catching the beast by her throat as she rose in the air to her leap, held her off at arm's length, and fell with her, holding her down by main force, while she tore and gored him in the struggle—a struggle that lasted till Strathmore had time to reload his gun, and send a ball through her brain; a long time, let me tell you, though but a few short seconds in actual duration, to hold down, and to wrestle in the grip of a tigress of Scinde. "You would have done the same for me, my dear old fellow," said Erroll, quietly and lazily, as his eyes closed and he fainted away from the loss of blood. And that was all he would ever vouchsafe to say or hear said about the matter. He had risked his life to save Strathmore's; he knew Strathmore would have acted precisely the same for him. It was a type of the quality and of the character of their friendship.

The evening shadows were slanting across the sward, while the squirrels ran from branch to branch, and the chesnuts lying on the mass turned to gold in the western sun, as Strathmore walked along through the Hurst Wood with a couple of beagles following in his track.

See Erroll he did not, and he wondered where the deuce he had