indeed no other than the original of the photograph up-stairs, was seen imploring admittance, with a comical expression of half penitence, half amusement depicted on its comely lineaments. Lady Gertrude's wrath seemed to evaporate as she turned the key for ingress of the new arrival, but it was with a backward toss of the head, and in a sharper tone of voice than ordinary, that she met him with a reproach rather than a greeting. How very unpunctual you are, Gilbert. I told you half-past eleven on purpose that you mightn't keep me waiting.' "So you would have given me the forty minutes of anxiety and agitation instead,' replied the gentleman, with a pleasant laugh; and you know that every minute I wait for you seems an age. Oh! Gertrude, what a bully you are!' She was the least bit of a tyrant, if the truth must be told, and to-day she was in one of her most imperious moods, so she threw her head up once more as she resumed, 'I tell you honestly, I'm going to quarrel with you, Gilbert. It has been brewing for a week, and I mean really to have it out at last. There! of course you begin to smoke, though you know I hate it; but I suppose it's no use my forbidding you to do anything. I wonder which of them worked you that tawdry cigar-case. Bought it at the Baker-street Bazaar? oh, I dare say! Well, what have you got to say in your defence? Come, now, begin.' The owner of the white hat put a pair of lavender-kidded hands together in an attitude of supplication, and without removing his cigar from his lips, mumbled out the very apposite question- 'What have I done? 'It's not what you've done,' she replied, and I can't help laughing at you, though I am so provoked. Pray don't be so absurd, with all those nurses and children looking at us! It's not what you have done, but what you've left undone. Pray, since when have gentlemen 5 considered it honourable to break their word to a lady because she's a cousin? Where were you last Thursday when you ought to have met us at Sydenham? and even Aunt Olivia said it was just like you to forget all about it !'" 'I am always sure of my mother's. good word,' replied the gentleman, somewhat bitterly; 'but last Thursday was the day of the pigeon match.' 'Pigeon match!' echoed his cousin, with the colour mounting rapidly; that wont do. Why, the "ties," as you call them, were shot off before two o'clock. I know it, because I asked Charley Wing the same night, at Ormolu House. By the way, he dances as well again as he did last year; besides, the pigeon match didn't prevent people going to see those hideous rhododendrons, and as Mrs. Montpellier's yellow barouche was there. from three till five, I suppose she gave you a lift back into London.' 'You wouldn't have wished me to walk,' said the unabashed culprit, holding up at the same time a thin and remarkably neat boot, on which it is needless to say he prided himself not a little. 'What I wish seems to be a matter of the greatest indifference,' was the reply. But, indeed, Gilbert, there is nobody to scold you but me; at least, you say yourself you never pay attention to any one else, and you know, after all, I'm a very near relation, and-andlike a sister, in short, and I own I was hurt that you never came near us all last week, and you didn't go to Lady Broadway's, though I sent your invitation myself. Such a stupid ball, Gilbert; and Aunt Olivia, though she says nothing, I can see she don't like it. It's not so much for my own sake I mind it, as for hers; and then, you are doing yourself incalculable harm. Is it true you lost so much money on that childish match of Count Carambole's? 'A hatfull,' answered the defendant, at the same time taking his own off, and looking roguishly into the crown with provoking good humour. 'What a life!' proceeded Lady Gertrude, waxing visibly impatient. What a waste of time, and position, and talent; for you have talent, you know, Gilbert, if you choose to exert it; and all for what? To play billiards night after night at Pratt's, and yawn through the day between the bay window at White's and the end of the ride in the park; you who might do anything.' 6 'Very good of you to say so, dear,' drawled her cousin. I'm not bad at caricatures, I know, and I think with a fortnight's practice I could do the "pea-andthimble" well enough to earn a livelihood during the racing season --but as for high art, and science, and " a career," and that sort of thing, why it's not exactly in my line. She looked at him for a minute or two in silence. Something almost of contempt curled her lip, while she checked the words that came uppermost, but her eye softened as it rested on his comely, good-humoured face, with its habitual expression of lazy contentment, and she put her arm within his and pressed it kindly as she asked his pardon for so lecturing him and taking him to task. 'But you know, Gilbert,' she said, 'Aunt Olivia never scolds you, and so if I didn't nobody would take any pains with you, and what would become of you then? I don't believe you really care for any one mortal thing in the world, and more than that, Gilbert, I don't believe you are really happy-there!' She had broke through the crust at last, for this was a home thrust. He had been thinking so himself of late more than once; had been startled to learn that the wine-cup of youth could taste so flat sometimes, as if filled from a bad bottle; and the garlands, though fresh and rosy still, were not always radiant with the dew of the morning. 'Happy,' he repeated, musingly; 'why should I be happy? After all, I am pretty well alone in the world, Gertrude. I don't believe any one in London cares two straws I have no about me but you. home; certainly not there, he added, nodding towards the house whereat hung the cage and the canary, and to which it was already time for his cousin to return. 'But I live as ninety-nine out of every hundred do; I take the rough with the smooth; and I suppose, after all, I am as well off as my neighbours; at least, I don't know any I should like to change places with Certainly none that own such a pretty cousin with such a pretty bonnet. Time to go in, is it? Well, good bye, Gertrude dear; I'm always the better for a scolding from you, and I'll do anything you like this afternoon, only let me out of the square first; if I don't go away, you know, I can't come back again.' So the white hat was presently vacillating up the shady side of Grosvenor-place, and Lady Gertrude having taken off her bonnet, which it now struck her was indeed a very pretty one, sate her down, as we have already stated, in her own armchair, to recapitulate and think over the events of the morning. The result of her cogitations was in one respect at least decisive. She went to her writing-table, and selecting a pen with great care proceeded to write a note, which she folded and sealed with accurate nicety. We must do women the justice to allow that their missives, however involved in sense and grammar, are at least fairly and decently worked out as regards caligraphy; and that they do not seem to consider the legacy of Cadmus simply as a means of puzzling their hapless correspondents. This done, she looked once more at the coloured photograph, once more at the winsome Lady Gertrude over yonder in the looking-glass; then she walked restlessly to the window, and looked forth into the square gardens she had so recently quitted, and drew a long breath as of one who has at last solved a difficulty, the while she murmured in an audible whisper 'It will be far better for us both; I shall marry my cousin Gilbert!' The cads at Tattersall's Yard knew Gilbert Orme as well as the Wellington Statue. The fast young gentlemen who frequent that equine resort, had each and all a greeting and a pleasant word or two for avowedly about the nicest fellow in England.' Half-a-dozen seasons in London, autumns at Cowes, and winters in the grass countries, had thoroughly identified him with that abnormal portion of the human race which calls itself the World; and with good health, good spirits, good looks, and a good income, few went the pace so easily and gracefully as gentle Gilbert Orme. A long minority had put him in possession of a large sum of ready money, so that the gloss of youth was untarnished by the many annoyances and anxieties which lay upon none so heavily as those who cannot afford to live in society, and cannot bear to live out of it. How I should hate to be a poor man!' was Gilbert's oft-quoted exclamation, when he overheard young Brozier lamenting his inability to keep a certain high-stepping cab horse, which was the only claim to distinction advanced by that uninteresting youth, and the sentiment counted for a joke at the clubs. Many of the members knew its import too well by bitter experience, for, alas, several of those magnificoes whom we are so often called upon to admire as they pace the Ride in equestrian splendour, or traverse Pall Mall in gorgeous 7 apparel, have secret debts and difficulties far more enthralling than those of Mr. Plausible, the coachmaker, whose schedule bears him triumphantly through the Insolvent Court; and ends that wont stretch to come within half-a-yard as near meeting as those of John Stokes the bricklayer. Varnished boots are beautiful objects to look at, but a thick sole with ease is more comfortable for walking, and no man knows where the shoe pinches so well as he who wears it. The I often think that the life of a The damsels' delight, and the chaperone's fear, But Gilbert Orme was not one of these. Living as he did in the midst of the temptations and dissipations of a London life, there was a certain child-like simplicity in his character which, while it enhanced the pungency of his pleasures, doubtless deprived them of their most deleterious ingredients. Far be it from me to affirm that sto the pure all things are pure,' or indeed that Gilbert's theory and practice were much less lax than his neighbours'; but frail mortality at least is inclined to look leniently on those errors in which the imagination and the intellect predominate over the senses; and he must have been a stern Mentor and forgotten the while that he had ever himself been a boy, who could have clipped the wings of that highhearted young eagle, soaring indeed far beyond the bounds of conventionality and decorum, but yet soaring ever upwards nearer and nearer to the sun. I can see him now, as he was long after he had wound himself round my old heart, a lad of eighteen. I can see his tall graceful figure as he used to jump the ha-ha that divided the lawn from the park at West-Acres, and bound away over the turf lithe and active as the very deer scouring before him. I can see him carry out his bat, with a score of fifty-six notches that I marked for him with my own fingers the day the West-Acres eleven beat the united strength of Bat-Thorpe and Bowlsover in one innings. He walked to the tent like a young hero, with his head up and his eye sparkling, followed by a round of applause ungrudgingly bestowed by the players on both sides, and many an admiring glance from the benches on which various coloured dresses and gossamer bonnets quivered and bloomed like a parterre of garden flowers in July. The boy used to come and tell me his triumphs and his misgivings, and pour out his rich fancies and open his glad young heart with an abandonment and a fresh sincerity that endeared him to me strangely, for I was an old man even then, and the heavy sorrow that had crushed me in manhood, but had been borne, I trust, humbly and resignedly in age, had taught me to feel kindly for all, and especially to sympathize with the young. If they knew, if they only knew! what that Future really is to which they look so longingly. Woe is me! not one of them but would cast his burden to the ground, and sit down by the wayside and refuse to move one single step further on the journey. I was reading with him before he went to Oxford; not coaching and cramming him with dry facts and technical memories, but sauntering pleasantly through the beauties of those glorious old Greek minds as a man might walk slowly arm-in-arm with a friend in a gallery of art. My boy (I can bear to call him my boy now) was a scholar, not literally in the dull every-day acceptation of the word, but essentially and, so to speak, in its æsthetic sense. He might not dig the Greek root, or criticise the verb's middle voice quite so assiduously as some more plodding students, but his conception of Homer's heroes, I am convinced, would have satisfied the blind old wizard himself. His spirit seemed steeped in those rolling hexameters, like the garland of Alcibiades dripping and saturated with strong rich Chian wine. I am sure that he could see the son of Peleus standing visibly before him in the blaze of his young beauty, and the pride of his heroic strength; could mark the thin Greek nostril dilating in its wrath, and the godlike head thrown back in high disdain, with scorn on the chiselled lip, and hate in the flashing eye, and stern defiance stamped on the fair wide brow. I know that Briseïs was not to him the mere ancilla who constituted lot No. 1 of a freebooter's plunder, but an ivory-limbed shape, smooth and faultless, cowering in her loveliness under a shower of golden tresses, through which the white shoulder peeped and peered coyly; the while the red lip curled half in smiles, half in entreaties, and the lustrous eyes looked upward from under their long veiling lashes, deepening and softening with mingled love and fear. My boy would read out the burning lines in a low, earnest tone, like a man reciting his own poetry; and I knew when I saw his colour rise, and heard his full young voice shake, that he was back upon the sands before Troy, with white-crested Olympus tower ing on the horizon before him, and the blue sea wreathing into everchanging smiles at his feet. Ah, me! it seems like a dream now, to have ever sat in the hot summer noons under the old oaks at West-Acres. The old oaks that stood apart one by one in their majestic beauty, dotting the level. English-looking park, where the deer browzed lazily in the shade, and the white swans glistened on the burnished surface of the lake; to hear the distant voices of the haymakers blending with the hum of insects in the sun-dried air, and the wood-pigeon cooing softly in the leafy depths of the dense elmgrove, and the chimes striking faintly from the square tower of the far away village church. It was a dear old place, with its redbrick wings and white portico, and all the architectural incongruities of Inigo Jones's taste. There is a degree of comfort in one of these real English houses that we look for in vain elsewhere. But the favourite spot in which Gilbert and I chose to pursue our studies, was half a mile off in the park, under an old oak tree, where the fern grew three feet high, and a clear spring bubbled and sparkled through the greensward ankle deep in moss. It was a strange and suggestive contrast, yet was it not altogether out of keeping, to bask in that fragrant spot and read the noble thoughts, and the shrewd, yet simple reflections; above all, the deep heartfelt poetry of those grand old heathens; to mark the worldly wisdom of the cynic, cold, heartless, and essentially logical, in the colonnades and porticoes of Athens more than two thousand years ago, as on the steps of White's at the present day; to watch the ideal tendency, the divinæ particula auræ, always choked down and smothered, never totally extinguished, in all the casuistry and the luxury, and the gross habitual sin of Greece and Rome, just as it sparkles out and flashes upward now in London or Paris, reaching and leaping and striving towards the heaven from which it came. Is the fable 9 of Prometheus but a legend of barbarians? Is it not rather the profoundest of parables, the most graceful of allegories and myths? Whoever of ancient or modern times has singled himself out from the common herd to benefit or instruct his kind, him have the common herd scouted and stigmatized as an impostor or a fool. They voted Paul mad, and they doomed Socrates to die. Was not that a deep and sad insight into human nature, which feigned that he who brought down fire from heaven, was chained upon the cold rock and tortured the while by a vulture tearing at his heart? Alas for the gifted and the good! they lay their hearts bare in their frank trust and their honesty of purpose, their kindly hearts that throb and quiver to an injury; they lay them bare, and they chain themselves to the naked rock, and beak and talons rend them to the core. But Gilbert, like all boys, saw in the ancients his ideal of manhood, moral as well as physical, and respected them accordingly. How many and many a time under the old oak tree would he argue with me on their chivalry, their patriotism, and their love of all that was noble and good. How his eye kindled when he quoted Curtius driving his war-steed headlong into the gulf, or Leonidas willing to sup with Pluto, so that he turned the Persian myriads back from the human bulwark framed by his own and the bodies of the devoted handful that held the pass of Thermopyla; or the high-crested Horatius and his trusty twain to right and left, the pride of Rome, herself a colony of warriors The three who kept the bridge so well, In the brave days of old; or any of the thousand instances of patriotic devotion and heroic daring with which the annals of those large-hearted heathens teem. Many a time we laid the book upon the grass, and regardless of cricket, fishing, boating, the warning bell for luncheon, or the carriage load of visitors grinding up the avenue, we commented hour |