One Sunday afternoon he was walking past the gate of the nearest cemetery when he met, face to face, Henry Judson, the widower, clad in respectable black, returning, apparently, from the grave of his wife.

The two men recognised each other and stopped mechanically. 'Mr. Engle!' said Judson, raising his hat in a slightly theatrical manner. 'I am glad to meet you once again, sir.' Robert, awkward and embarrassed, murmured some commonplace phrases of condolence.

'I am glad to meet you,' repeated the widower-and he jerked his head backward in the direction of the cemetery- for her sake as well as my own. It was a great loss, Mr. Engle-a great loss.' His weak face became convulsed with grief, and he blew his nose violently.

'I am sure of that,' said Robert Engle nervously. 'It seems awfully hard lines.' He cast about in his mind for some more consoling words, and then he added:

-especially as you were so devoted to each other.'

The widower stared fixedly at Robert Engle.

'Ah!' he said at length;

that's the worst of it. I cared for

her, but she didn't care for me. I ought never to have married her. Mr. Engle, sir, I feel I can speak to you freely. I feel you will understand me, as you knew her and appreciated her, and were such a great friend of hers.'

'Well, hardly a great friend. In fact, I don't think I met her half a dozen times.'

The widower shook his head disconsolately.

'I know all about it. She never hid anything from me, did my poor Etty. I tried my best to be a good husband to her; but she never really loved me. I thought that when the baby came it would make everything different; but you see this happened, and I've lost them both. Yes, you were the only one she loved.'

'I the only one? Oh, no! This is some mistake. You don't mean that, I am sure.'

'I do mean it,' declared the widower bitterly. 'She loved you as she never loved me: her heart was yours to the last.'

'I can assure you mering protest.

'I don't blame her, and I don't blame you. She was not like other women '-here a strange little note of pride crept into his voice-it was your intellect, I suppose, and your manners.

She used to say that you were such a refined man, and so well educated. She set great store on education, and I never had much of it. She often said she wished she had married you.'

His voice had a pathetic quiver; he was a child grieving over a broken toy.

'I must tell you,' said Engle, desperately, 'that it is impossible! Why, I have never seen her since her marriage.'

'I know that well enough. She didn't forget I was her lawful husband; don't you make any mistake about that, Mr. Engle. If you had seen her it wouldn't have made any difference. She was as straight as a die, sir; but she told me that she walked out with you before she was engaged to me.'

'Once !' said Robert Engle, his face as pale as death. Then he stood still. 'It is quite unnecessary to discuss this now,' he added. 'It could do no good, even if what you suppose were true. I hope it is not true. Good afternoon.'

He turned and walked away, almost overcome by a surprising surge of feeling that made him feel dazed and sick at heart. His thoughts flew far and wide like leaves before an autumn wind. He wondered if it were possible that the dead woman had really cared most for him, in spite of her manner. When he was alone in his room he wept for her.

He had misjudged her, he told himself; he had wrongly attributed to her base and sordid motives; he had, in his folly and ignorance, thrown away a pure and unselfish love, such as life might not hold for him again. The thought was intolerable, but it remained with him, gradually losing its poignancy as time

went on.

Out of the memory of the commonplace and narrow he step by step created an ideal image, which became more and more real, obscuring all her faults, annihilating all her sordidness, and winning his worship. He did not realise that this divine creation was no more like Etty Clark, as she had existed in the flesh, than the glow-worm by night is like the glow-worm by day.

So a year passed, and one evening, as he was returning from school, Engle again met Judson, no longer the disconsolate widower, but jaunty and smiling. Seeing Engle, who had hoped to pass by unnoticed, he stopped and greeted him with unlooked-for enthusiasm.

'How do you do, sir? How do you do, Mr. Engle? . . . Glad to see you once again.'

Robert took the proffered hand, feeling meantime something that was not unlike a cold pang of jealousy. For this man had been the husband of the divinity he now worshipped; this man alone had the right to remain faithful to her memory.

'I hope you are well,' said Robert Engle mechanically, trying to shut out one hateful picture his mind would conjure up. Capital! A 1. Doing well in business; first-class.

you're the same.'

'I? Oh yes, thank you.'

Hope

'Right you are! I say, Mr. Engle . . . ' here Judson lowered his voice to a confidential whisper-'I've a bit of news. Guess what it is.'

'Guess! Really, I can't. What is it?'

The young grocer laughed in a knowing manner, and put his hand familiarly on Engle's shoulder.

I am going to enter a second time the holy estate of matrimony. Wish me luck.'

Engle gazed at him, astonished, almost revolted.

'A second time! Well, I hope you'll be happy.'

Even while speaking he realised that his words were more true than he had intended. Now he could be, indeed, the sole cherisher of one radiant memory.

Judson enlarged upon the merits of the woman he was now proposing to marry, not the least of these being the fact that she was the owner of a tidy little income, sir, which'll start us in a business.'

The school-teacher went home more firm than ever in fidelity to the vanished woman, or at least to his conception of her; irradiated within by a sort of joy that he at last was her exclusive possessor, sweet phantom only though she was. She whom he now worshipped was an ecstatic vision, an embodiment of grace— happy, beautiful, pure, and spiritual beyond earthly women, and she was now his.

As at that sad time when he had been the prey of a needless and cruel disillusionment, he leaned from his bedroom window gazing out into the night-far into the night.

From the darkness came an answering murmur, one that grew and swelled. He heard the carol of a bird hidden in the shadesa carol that became a pæan of rapture and transcendent sweetness.

He listened, enthralled, till his soul leapt up and swam out to greet the heavenly singer; care dropped from him like a garment, and he entered into the kingdom that was his by right.

His soul brightened, even beamed, under the influence of a joy that is given to few. The happiness he found in this dream of one who was his own creation was embodied in the far-off song he heard. For it was no bird of earth that sang to him that night, as surely it had sung to others in years now dead. Was not this the nightingale that Keats had heard, the skylark of Shelleyalso dream-begotten like his idol-the bird that would sing to others when this poor poet's heart was clay?

F. E. DUGDALE.

654

ON A PLATTER AT MONTREUIL.

BY J. H. YOXALL, M.P.

I was no sooner come within the walls of the little old bourg on the hill than Hobbinol, an assiduous familiar elf whom every collector knows, must carry me aside to a window, show me an aged soup-plate, and whisper Remarkable old bit of printed blue, don't you think?'

"So it is, temptatious imp,' I admitted.

'Daresay they'd jump at a franc for it?' said he, leering.

'Worth more than that,' said I, 'if only to find out how it got here.' For Montreuil is a bit of old France, and the platter seemed a bit of old Staffordshire. Upon the upper disc of it, where in the starving days of Revolution and Empire soupe maigre had swum its greasy and fishlike' eyes,' two fine old English gentlemen were depicted, in line and stipple and aquatint; warm and wellfed and jolly fellows, fishing down an English brook, within English park-palings and beneath an English sky of cloud and gleam. Top-hatted and curly-brimmed, shooting-coated, roll-collared, gamepocketed, high-legginged and muttonchop-whiskered tall Englishmen of their hands they were, all of the olden time'; there on the platter they stood and fished, superbly ignoring Montreuil. And No such noble sportsmen as those were ever seen angling here alive, I'll swear!' said I. 'This is a piece of This is a piece of pure Stafford

shire. Eh, Hobbinol ? '

Yet when I had paid the franc and gone off to mine inn-the hostel, by the bye, where Laurence Sterne saw 'the sons and daughters of poverty' surround him—and had washed the platter and made out the mark on the back of it, I could tell that my piece of old blue had been moulded and potted and decorated in old France; not at Burslem or Hanley, after all, but at Choisy-le-roi.

Which thing is a parable, and a piece of the true stuff of history as well. For note that Choisy-le-roi is a patriotic little townthe author of the Marseillaise' died and is statued there-and Choisy-le-roi lies inland, and is almost metropolitan, being hardly six miles distant from Paris itself. But what of that? In days