replied his sister; "and you, Cécile, I suppose,

answered in the same strain ?"

"What! neither in prose nor in verse?"

"I have already replied, Lady Helen.”

Her aunt paused for a moment, and then said:

Cécile, we must see those verses."

The Saint remained silent.

"This matter is fully as painful to me as it is to you," resumed Lady Helen; "but I cannot allow a clandestine correspondence, so serious in its object, to be carried on under my roof. Will you fetch me the verses, Cécile ?"

"No, Lady Helen, I will not."

"Then you must prepare, my dear, to see me summoning your maid, and prosecuting, under her auspices, a minute search in your room. You will scarcely prefer this alternative?"

"I shall, Lady Helen. The responsibility of thus violating the holiest secrets of the heart will rest with you alone."

"Then we shall both be satisfied, my dear, and the matter can be presently disposed of accordingly. In the meanwhile, however, I

have a question or two yet to ask. Conny, I suppose, knows something about all this?"

angel, the more than sister, and so forth. She not in the secret? Well, this Well, this surpasses all belief! Tewkesbury, I am very sorry now that you should not have been here, last month, to have seen this most affectionate, this most considerate cousin on her knees, like a countrybarn Siddons, to Sir Charles and to me, lest we should be so cruel, so unfeeling, as to restrict, in any way, her intimacy with our daughter. I understand the purport of the appeal now. It is safer to be unsuspected, even when we stab in the dark. A sister's friendship is a convenient cloak to such treachery as this, for treachery there has been," continued Lady Helen, her honest indignation fairly getting the better of her usually exemplary self-possession.

Ay, not only deceit to all, but scheming, practices and provocations the most unmaidenly. Who, otherwise, could credit, that a young man, gifted with the ordinary blessing of sight, should, for an instant, prefer what we here witness, to one who is universally reckoned

I

amongst the most attractive in England? only wish that she were here, that we might laugh outright at the contrast!"

As she thus spoke, with a rapid and dextrous wave of the hand, she removed the cap which concealed the jagged and mutilated remains of what was once Saint Cecilia's noble head of hair; and the sight which was thus revealed might well have provoked the beholder's derision, even without any comparison. Lord Tewkesbury, however, singular as it may seem, neither laughed nor smiled. Gazing more intently upon Cécile's countenance: he beheld there the trace of more than one solitary tear, not such as fall fast from the bountiful flow of sorrow, but such as are wrung, drop by drop, from fortitude by the extremest agony. She steadily encountered his glance. It was a strange look which she cast upon him then, one not far akin from that which Othello dreaded to meet at the eternal judgment seat, lest it should hurl his soul from Heaven.

“Ah! are you moved at last ?" said Cécile, in her own tone of calm defiance. "I was

curious to see how long a Peer of England, he himself a father, could stand by and see an

orphaned, unprotected, penniless girl reviled and insulted for his entertainment."

Lord Tewkesbury was much perplexed at this simple appeal. Deeply prejudiced as he had been by Lady Helen's spirited delineation of her niece's true character, and astounded as he was by the startling disclosures that had been elicited from the latter, still he was a wellbred, kind-hearted man of the world, and he could not but feel that the Saint's earnest reproof was not uncalled for.

"My dear young lady," exclaimed he, notwithout some embarrassment, "I should be grieved more than I could say, if this necessarily painful conversation were unduly to affect you. Pray remember that it is a duty to yourself, as well as to others, to obviate all future and serious suffering by a timely explanation."

"Oh! it is for my sake, is it," replied Cécile bitterly, "that I have been dragged to this extremity of shame ? I did not know that it was a matter of such grave moment at Redburn, whether my heart were to wither or to break."

But, my dear Miss Cécile," resumed the Earl, "since you have yourself admitted that

my son takes a particular, and very natural, interest in your fate—”

"I have made no such admission, Lord Tewkesbury," interrupted Cécile fiercely. "Lady Helen's questions were so devised, as to render denial impossible, where admission would be equally insincere. The truth lies between the two, and it shall be fearlessly told by me, now as always. Your son has observed from the first, what you may have seen now yourself with a very different feeling, that I have my trials and my sorrows here. Nay, more, he has deemed, perchance, that there may be an intention somewhere, of driving a despairing heart to some wild and frantic deed, for the folly of which my native infirmity, or my creed, perhaps, may be held responsible. Hence, the sole origin of the interest that he may have taken in my fate. I use your very words, that I may disclaim the interpretation which you attach to them. I could not, in truth or in honour, affirm that I have received no marks of sympathy from him; but I should deceive you far more if I suffered you to imaginehow shall I say?-that your apprehensions are well founded."