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culous stories-my dear little mamma. You know how ready I am to confess; you might, at least; I tell you every thing; and I do assure you I never admired her. She's good looking, I know; but so are fifty pictures and statues I've seen, that don't please me."

"Then it's true, the general and his wife are going on a visit to Marlowe "insisted Lady Alice drily.

"No, they are not. D me, I'm not thinking of the general and his wife, nor of any such d-d trumpery. I'd give something to know who the devil's taking these d-d liberties with my name."

"Pray, Jekyl Marlowe, command your language. It can't the least signify who tells me; but you see I do sometimes get a letter."

“Yes, and a precious letter too. Such a pack of lies did any human being ever hear fired off in a sentence before I'm épris of Mrs. General Lennox. Thumper number one! Sue's a lady of- I beg pardon-easy virtue. Thumper number two! and I invite her and her husband down to Marlowe, to make Love of course to her, and to hit the old general. Thumper number three"

And the bar net chuckled over the three “thumpers' merrily.

"Don't talk slang, if you please gentlemen don't, at least in address ing ladies."

"Wel, then, I won't; I'll speak just as you like, only you must not blow me up any more; for really there is no cause, and we here only two or three minutes together, you know; and I want to tell you somet ng, or rather to ask you - do you ever hear anyting of those Decervils, you know f

Lvly Alice locked quite startled, and turned quickly naif round in her erur, with her eves on Sir Jekvi's fam. The barnets side subsided, and he looked with a dark curiosity in hers. A short but dismal silence flowed.

“You've heard from them "

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"I wonder, Jekyl, you ask for them, in the first place."

"Well -well, of course; but what next?" murmured the baronet, eagerly: "why is it so strange ?”

"Only because I've been thinking of them-a great deal for the last few days; and it seemed very odd your asking; and, in fact, I fancy the same thing has happened to us both."

"Well, maybe; but what is it (" demanded the baronet, with a sinister smile.

"I have been startled; most painfully and powerfully affected; I have seen the most extraordinary resemblance to my beautiful, murdered Guy."

She rose, and wept passionately standing, with her face buried in her handkerchief.

Sir Jekyl frowned with closed eyes and upturned face, waiting like a patient man bored to death, for the subsidence of the storm which he had conjured up. Very pale, too, was that countenance, and contracted for a few moments with intense annoyance.

"I saw the same fellow," said the baronet, in a subdued tone, so soon as there was a subsidence, “this evening; he's at that little inn on the Sterndale-road. Guy Strangways he calls himself; I talked with lain for a few minutes; a gentlemanly young man; and I don't know what to make of it. So I thought I'd ask you whether you could help me to a guess; and that's all."

The old lady shook her head.

"And I don't think you need employ quite such hard terms,” he said.

"I don't want to speak of it at all,' said she; “but if I do I can't say less; nor I won't no, never!"

**You see, it's very odd, those two names," said Sir Jekyl, not minding; "and, as you say, the ikeness 80 astoni-tang" I-I′ what do you think of it

"Of course it's an accident," said the old lady,

"I'm glad you think so," said he, abrupt y.

Why, what could it be; you don't believe in apparitions," she replied, with an odd sort of dryness.

“I rather think not," said he; “I meant he left no very near relation, and I fancied those Deveril people might have contrived some trick, or intended some personation, or some

thing; and I thought that you, perhaps, had heard something of their movements."

"Nothing-what could they have done, or why should they have sought to make any such impression? I don't understand it. It is very extraordinary. But the likeness in church amazed and shocked me, and made me ill."

"In church, you say," repeated Sir Jekyl

"Yes, in church," and she told him, in her own way, what I shall tell in inine, as follows:

Last Sunday she had driven in her accustomed state, with Beatrix, to Wardlock church. The church was hardly five hundred yards away, and the day bright and dry. But Lady Alice always arrived and departed in the coach, and sat in the Redcliffe seat in the centre of the gallery. She and Beatrix sat face to face at opposite sides of the pew.

As Lady Alice looked with her cold and steady glance over the congregation in the aisle, during the interval of silence that precedes the commencement of the service, a tall and graceful young man, with an air of semi-foreign fashion, entered the church, accompanied by an elderly gentleman, of whom she took comparatively little note.

The young man and his friend were ushered into a seat confronting the gallery. Lady Alice gazed and gazed transfixed with astonishment and horror. The enamelled miniature on her bosom was like; but there, in that clear melancholy face, with its large eyes and wavy hair, was a resurrection! In that animated sculpture were delicate tracings and touches of nature's chisel, which the artist had failed to represent, which even memory had neglected to fix, but which all now returned with the startling sense of identity in a moment.

She had put on her gold spectacles, as she always did on taking her seat, and opening her "Morning Service," bound in purple Russia, with its golden clasp and long ribbons fringed with the same precious metal, with the intent to mark the proper psalms and lessons at her haughty leisure. She therefore saw the moving image of her dead son before her, with an agonizing distinctness that told like a blight of palsy on her face.

She saw his elderly companion also distinctly. A round-shouldered man with his short caped cloak still on. A grave man with a large, high, bald forehead, a thin, hooked nose, and great hanging moustache and beard. A dead and ominous face enough, except for the piercing glance of his gray eyes, under very thick brows, and just the one you would have chosen out of a thousand portraits, for a plotting high-priest or an old magician.

This magus fixed his gaze on Lady Alice, not with an ostentation of staring, but sternly from behind the dark embrasure of his brows; and leaning a little sideways, whispered something in the ear of his young companion, whose glance at the same moment was turned with a dark and fixed interest upon the old lady.

It was a very determined stare on both sides, and of course ill-bred, but mellowed by distance. The congregation were otherwise like other country congregations, awaiting the offices of their pastor, decent, listless, while this great stare was going on, so little becoming the higher associations and solemn aspect of the place. It was, with all its conventional screening, a fierce desperate scrutiny, cutting the dim air with a steady congreve fire that crossed and glared unintermittent by the ears of deceased gentlemen in ruffs and grimy doublets, at their posthumous devotions, and brazen knights praying on their backs, and under the eyes of all the gorgeous saints with glories round their foreheads in attitudes of benediction or meekness, who edified believers from the eastern window.

Lady Alice drew back in her pew. Beatrix was in a young-lady reverie, and did not observe what was going on. There was nothing indeed to make it very conspicuous. But when she looked at Lady Alice, she was shocked at her appearance, and instantly crossed and said—

"I am afraid you are ill, grandmamma; shall we come away?"

The old lady made no answer, but got up and took the girl's arm, and left the seat very quietly. She got down the gallery stairs, and halted at the old window on the landing, and sate there a little, ghastly and still mute.

The cold air circulating upward from the porch revived her.

"I'm better, child,” said she faintly. "Thank God," said the girl, whose terror at her state proved how intensely agitated the old lady must have been."

Mrs. Wrattles, the sextoness, emerging at that moment, with repeated courtesies, and whispered condolence and inquiries; Lady Alice, with a stiff condescension, prayed her to call her woman, Mason, to her.

So Lady Alice, leaning slenderly on Mason's stout arin, insisted that Beatrix should return and sit out the service; and she herself, for the first time within the memory of man, returned from Wardlock church on foot, instead of in her coach. Beatrix waited until the congregation had nearly disgorged itself and dispersed, before making her solitary descent.

When Beatrix came down, with out a chaperon, at the close of the rector's discourse, the flowered footman in livery, with his gold-headed cane, stood as usual at the coach door only to receive her, and convey the order to the coachman, "home."

The churchyard gate, as is usual, I believe, in old places of that kind, opens at the south side, and the road to Wardlock manor leads along the churchyard wail and round the corner of it at a sharp angle just at the point where the clumsy old stone mausoleum or vault of the Deverell family overlooks the road, with its worn pilasters and beetle browed

cornice.

Now that was a Sunday of wonders. It had witnessed Lady Alice's pedestrian return from church, an act of humiliation, almost of penance, such as the memory of Wardlock cou'd furnish no parallel to; and now it was to see another portent, for her ladyship s own gray horses, fat and tranquil beasts, who had pulled her to and from church for I know not how many years, under the ministra tion of the careful coachman, with exemplary seda’enes, on tias abnormal Sabbath took fight at a musical per formance of two boys, one playing the Jew's harp and the other drumming tambourine. Wise on his hat, and pundente diabolo and soforth, set off at a gallop, to the terror of all concerned, toward home. Making the read, where the

tomb of the Deverells overhangs it from the churchyard, the near gray came down, and his off neighbour reared and plunged frightfully.

The young lady did not scream, but, very much terrified, she made voluble inquiries of the air and hedges from the window, while the purple coachman pulled hard from the box, and spoke comfortably to his horses, and the footman, standing out of reach of danger, talked also in his own vein.

Simultaneously with all this, as if emerging from the old mausoleum, there sprung over the churchyard fence, exactly under its shadow, that young man who had excited emotions so various in the baronet and in Lady Alice, and seized the horse by the head with both hands, and so cooperated that in less than a minute the two horses were removed from the carriage, and he standing, hat in hand, before the window, to assure the young lady that all was quite safe now.

So she descended, and the grave footman, with the bible and prayerbook, followed her steps with ha gold-headed rod of othee, while the lithe and handsome youth, his bat still in air which stirred h's rich curls, walked beside her with some thing of that romantic deference which in one so elegant and handsome has an inexpressible sentiment of the tender in it.

He walked to the door of Ward lock manor, and I purposely omit all he said, because I doubt whether it would look as well in this une veeptionable type as it sounded from his lips in Beatrix Marlowe's pretty ear.

If the speaker succeed with his audience, what more can oratory do for him? Wea' He was gone. There remained in Peatrix's ear a music; in her fancy a Leaven-like image- a combination of tint, and outine, ant elegance, which made every room and scene without it lifeless, and every other object hereiy. These litte untold impress ons are of course lia bie to four and Vansi, pretty quickly in absence, and to be superseded even sooner. Therefore it would be unwarranted to say that she was in love, although I can't deny that she was haunted by trat -ightly teren your gute I...

This latter portion of the adventure was not divulged by old Lady Alice, because Beatrix, I suppose, forgot to tell her, and she really

knew nothing about it. All the rest, her own observation and experience, she related with a grin and candid particularity.

CHAPTER IV.

THE GREEN CHAMBER AT MARLOWE.

So the baronet, with a rather dreary chuckle, said :

"I don't think, to say truth, there is anything in it. I really can't see why the plague I should bore myself about it. You know your pew in the middle of the gallery, with that painted hatchment thing, you know"

"Respect the dead," said Lady Alice, looking down with a dry severity on the table.

"Well, yes; I mean, you know, it is so confoundedly conspicuous, I can't wonder at the two fellows, the old and young, staring a bit at it, and, perhaps, at you, you know," said Sir Jekyl, in his impertinent vein. "But I agree with you, they are no ghosts, and I really shan't trouble my head about them any more. I wonder I was such a fool-hey? But, as you say, you know, it is unpleasant to be reminded of-of those things; it can't be helped now though.'

"Now, nor ever," said Lady Alice grimly.

"Exactly; neither now, nor ever," repeated Sir Jekyl; "and we both know it can't possibly be poor-I mean any one concerned in that transaction, so the likeness must be accidental, and therefore of no earthly significance eh?"

Lady Alice, with elevated brows, fiddled in silence with some crumbs on the table with the tip of her thin finger.

"I suppose Beatrix is ready; may I ring the bell!"

"Oh! here she is. Now, bid grandmamma good night," said the baronet. So, slim and pretty Beatrix, in her cloak, stooped down and placed her arms about the neck of the old lady, over whose face came a faint flush of tender sunset, and her old gray eyes looked very kindly on the beautiful young face that stooped over her, as she said, in a tone that, however, was stately

"Good-bye, my dear child; you are warm enough you are certain ?”

"Oh! yes, dear grandmamma-my cloak, and this Cashmere thing."

"Well, darling, good night. "You'll not forget to write-you'll not fail? Good night, Beatrix, dear-good-bye."

"Good night," said the baronet, taking the tips of her cold fingers together, and addressing himself to kiss her cheek, but she drew back, in one of her whims, and said, stiffly-"There-not to - night. Good-bye, Jekyl."

"Well," chuckled he after his wont, "another time; but mind, you're to come to Marlowe."

He did not care to listen to what she replied, but he called from the stairs, as he ran down after his daughter

"Now, mind, I won't let you off this time; you really must come. Good night, au revoir-good night.”

I really think that exemplary old lady hated the baronet, who called her "little mamma," and invited her every year, without meaning it, most good-naturedly, to join his party under the ancestral roof-tree. He took a perverse sort of pleasure in these affectionate interviews, in fretting her not very placid temper-in patting her, as it were, wherever there was a raw, and in fondling her against the grain, so that his caresses were cruel, and their harmony, such as it was, amounted to no more than a flimsy deference to the scandalous world.

But Sir Jekyl knew that there was nothing in this quarter to be gained in love by a different tactique; there was a dreadful remembrance, which no poor lady has ostrich power to digest, in the way; it lay there, hard, cold, and irreducible; and the morbid sensation it produced was hatred. He knew that "little mamma," humanly speaking, ought to hate him. His mother indeed she was not; but only the step-mother of his deceased wife. Mother-in-law is not always a very sweet relation, but with the prefix step" the chances are worse.

66

There was, however, as you will by-and-by see, a terrible accident, or something, always remembered, gliding in and out of Wardlock manor like the baronet's double, walking in behind him when he visited her, like his evil genius, and when they met affectionately, standing between them, black and scowling, with clenched fist.

Now, pretty Beatrix sat in the right corner of the chariot, and Sir Jekyl, her father, in the left. The lamps were lighted, and though there was moonlight, for they had a long stretch of road, always dark, because densely embowered in the forest of Penlake. Tier over tier, file behind file, nodding together, the great trees bent over like gigantic warriors' plumes, and made a solemn shadow always between their ranks.

Marlowe was quite new to Beatrix; but still too distant, twelve miles away, to tempt her to look out and make observations as she would on a nearer approach.

“You don't object to my smoking a cigar, Beatrix i The smoke goes out of the window, you know," said the baronet after they had driven about a mile in silence.

What young lady, so appealed to by a parent, ever did object The fact is, Sir Jekyl did not give himself the trouble to listen to her answer, but was manifestly thinking of some thing quite different, as he lighted his match.

When he threw his last stump out of the window they were driving through Penlake Forest, and the lamplight gleamed on broken rows of wrinkled trunks and ivy,

"I suppose she told you all about it " said he, suddenly pursuing his own train of thought,

“Who P” inquired Beatrix.

"I never was a particular favourite of hers, you know grandmamma's, I mean. She does not love me, poor old woman! And she has a knack of making berseif precious disagreeabie, in whch I try to imitate her, for peace' sake, you know; for, by George, if I was not uncivil now and then, we could never get on at ali.

Sir Jekyl chuckled after his wont, as it were between the bars of this recitation, and he asked

"Wh were the particulars- the

adventure on Sunday- that young fellow, you know ??

Miss Beatrix had heard no such interrogatory from her grandmamma, whose observations in the church aisle were quite as unknown to her; and thus far the question of Sir Jekyl was a shock.

"Did not grandmamma tell you about it " he pursued.

“About what, papa "asked Beatrix, who was glad that it was dark. "About her illness--a young tellow in a pew down in the asce staring at her. By Jove! one would have tancied that sort of thing pretty well over. Tell me all about it.'

The fact was that this was the first she had heard of it. **Grandmamma told me nothing of it," said she,

"And did not you see what occurred? Did not you see him staring " asked he.

Beatrix truly denied.

"You young ladies are always thinking of yourselves. So you saw nothing, and have nothing to tell That will do," said Sir Jekyl, dryly; and silence returned.

Beatrix was relieved on discovering that her little adventure was unsuspected. Very little was there in it, and nothing to reflect blame upon her. From her exaggeration of its importance, and her quailing as she fancied her father was approaching it, I conclude that the young gentleman had interested her a little.

And now, as Sir Jekyl in one corner of the rolling chariot brooded in the dark over his disappointed conjectures, so did pretty Beatrix in the other speculate on the sentences which had just fallen from his lips, and longed to inquire some further particulars, but, somehow, dared not.

Could that tall and handsome young man, who had come to her rescue so unaccountably the gentleman with those large, soft, dark eyes, when properly belong to heroeshave been the individual whose gaze had so mysteriously affected her grandmamma What could the asations have been that were painful enough so to overcome that grim, white woman I Was he a relition? Was he an outcast member of that proud famny Or, was he that heir at law, or embodied Nemesos, that the yawning sea or grave wil

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