which I have lately rebelled so fiercely, seems to me now a consequence natural and just.

The night wears on, but before me this pitiful fellow, this thing of pride and folly, this windbag of self-sufficiency and virtue, struts to and fro; though when I have learnt him through and through, his every trick, his weakness, his vanity, till I sicken at the sight, and marvel that others have not sickened too, he dies, and a new Dick, every whit as foolish, as ignorant, and as miserable rises in his stead.

But none will ever call him proud again, or find him as harsh to their failings as to his own; none need fear from one who has so justly earned his own contempt, a word that would seem to invest him with the right to despise others; and if he again attain to self-respect, it will not be at the sacrifice of a fellow creature.

I woke but now out of such a slumber

as has not visited my eyes since boyhood, to find the mid-day sun streaming into my chamber, while on the threshold there lay-a letter. It was sealed with black, and bore a foreign postmark. By the morrow's sun I was in Paris.

CHAPTER XIV.

"He that dies pays all debts."

LLATHORNE says you are looking shockingly ill," writes Hetty, "and my advice to you is, come here for a month, get some shooting, settle

affairs with Florizel, and decide

once and for all to cut that wretched profession. I don't expect her for another few days, but, of course, you can come when you please. By the way, Siva is here; he and Charolais are always together, but as yet nothing definite is announced."

I found this letter awaiting me, with half-a

dozen others, on my return from Paris, a week ago, and it is not answered yet.

"Eh!" cried Ariel, when she opened the door to me, "is any of the family dead, sir?" and she pointed to my black hatband and gloves.

I had forgotten that questions would be asked at home.

"A friend,” I answered, as I passed her by ; but my words rang false in my own ears, for something more and less than friend unto me was the dead thus outwardly mourned.

And within? Within all is freedom and light. As yet no human throb of ecstasy ruffles the wings of that superb tranquillity on which I rest; . . . when a man is taken off the rack, or released from some nameless torture, be does not rejoice-he rests awhile in a content compared with whose boundless ocean joy is as a puny, babbling rill.

In these first days I do not think; I do not take my new-found treasure in my hands, and look at it in this light, and that, or weigh it to see how much or how little of happiness it is worth to me. I am conscious only that the leper-stain is wiped from my soul; that the mistake which might have made my life a maimed one to the end has been cancelled by the hand of death, and that I am free (O! word of meaning to one whose fetters have eaten into his flesh), free as air.

Freedom! O! the taste of it between my

lips.

I scarce dare to grasp it, to exult

in it. . . . I put out my hand to touch it, trembling, and, with averted eyes, suffer not its full brightness to burst on me at once, lest it strike me blind.

But at the end of a week this clear, pure atmosphere has become second nature to me; with that impulse of unrest that, deeply rooted