in a tone stern with anxiety, "Ask Bessie, Madam, who that man is with whom she has lately been observed walking near Eaglescairn, almost before daylight in the morning, and after dusk in the evening. From whom has Bessie received of late the rarest flowers, grown in an expensive conservatory, such as poor people, in our rank, cannot afford even to look at? Ask her, madam, also where she got these."

Robert hurled upon the table, while his pale compressed lip quivered with angry contempt, a rosary of amber beads, a relic of decayed bone in a small glass case which broke as it fell, an image of St. Bridget in stucco, an old tooth fit only for a charnel-house, some ancient iron instrument of torture, a lock of odd-looking red hair, said to be St. Bridget's, and a missal richly decorated with brass corners and clasps. He turned then to Bessie, and said in accents dignified by the intensity of feeling with which he spoke, "Your mother sent me these. Is it for trash like this, Bessie, that you give up the honest affection of a heart that would die for you? Tell me what villain has betrayed you into such worse than folly. If I could be certain if I could only discover that Lord Eaglescairn himself is the enemy who has misled your mind, he should feel what man is to man, where the feelings are by nature alike. Bessie, end my suspense! Do you prefer another? Nothing short of that assurVOL. II.

F

ance can make me abandon all hope. Whom do you prefer?"

Bessie rose from her seat. With a trembling tearful glance she held out her hand towards Robert, and falteringly advanced a few steps towards him. He rushed forward to meet her, and she fell fainting into his extended arms, while he showered upon her a thousand epithets of the tenderest attachment. When Lady Edith observed the depth and ardour of affection with which young Carre watched the gradual restoration of Bessie's consciousness, and the honest rapture with which he welcomed her restoration, she thought how beautiful are the best affections of human life, how merciful is the Creator who grants His blessing upon them, and how cruel that religion which would extinguish the most pleasing earthly gift of God to man. To Robert's memory these lines of his favourite Burns soon after occurred as a pleasing expression of his own feelings, which had always been full of nature's best poetry:

"Not the bee upon the blossom,
In the pride o' sunny noon;
Not the little sporting fairy
All beneath the simmer moon;

Not the poet, in the moment
Fancy lightens in his 'ee,

Kens the pleasure, feels the rapture

That thy presence gives to me."

CHAPTER V.

"Such thoughts as love the gloom of night,
I close examine by the light;

For who, though bribed by gain to lie,

Dare sunbeam-written truths deny ?"-GREENE.

THE next news that Lady Edith and Beatrice heard of Bessie filled them with indignant and almost incredulous astonishment. She had disappointed her young lover, and gone to serve Lady Eaglescairn at the Castle, there to be taught under an Abigail to act as the future assistant in the toilet and boudoir, at a very considerable salary. Robert, who felt that the greatest of all griefs is to cashier from our affections one who had hitherto appeared deserving of their utmost depth, with feelings of outraged affection angrily and sadly contemplated Bessie's farewell letter to him as if he almost hoped the words might vanish altogether. From that day he sorrowfully shut himself up in a nut-shell at home, refusing to see any one, while paying constant unremitting but most sorrowful attention to his dying father.

On young Carre's return home from the last

interview at Lady Edith's with Bessie he saw a man leave his father's house, and after obviously making a circuit to avoid meeting him he disappeared like a phantom among the offices. Robert hurried forward to overtake the fugitive, but failed; and though he asked the maid usually in attendance, who had left the house at his approach, she maintained that no mortal had been at Daisy bank during his absence. There was nevertheless a hurry and confusion in the servant's manner of speaking, and a look of craven fear that perplexed young Carre, who then approached the bedside of his dying father. The old farmer, when Robert appeared, struggled up from his pillow and sat erect, an effort which he had been unable before to make. He threw a rapid but almost vacant glance round the room, and spoke, though so inarticulately from extreme agitation, that it was impossible to understand the drift of what he said. Conscious himself of this he wrung his hands, with a look of helpless anguish glanced nervously round the room, made signs as if he were writing, and pointed to the quaking terrified maid, evidently wishing her to explain. Seeing that she in a stupor of wonder and evident agitation did not obey, he fell back on his pillow, and with tears slowly coursing each other down his pallid face fixed a look of unutterable sorrow on Robert, who now did all in his power to compose the old man's

mind by diverting his thoughts from everything of an agitating tendency. The dutiful and affectionate son thought nothing of importance compared with the invalid's comfort, and avoided afterwards whatever might possibly revive any painful recollections such as his aged father was evidently very little fitted to bear. Occasionally the old farmer started up on a sudden in his bed, and looked anxiously round, his whole soul in his eyes, as if terrified for the intrusion of some dreaded apparition; but the instant he saw Robert dutifully planted beside him, where night and day the young man, worn and sad, remained immoveably fixed, he sank back, weak and exhausted. The lines on his cheek were sharpened, and the light in his eye had become dim, when once only the old man again endeavoured to speak, but in such broken sentences that whether he were in his senses or not Robert could scarcely feel certain. His father pointed towards the maid, who was trying desperately to look quite unconscious, and muttered,-" She let him in. Was it a dream? What did I sign? Ask her ask her. Are we beggars?"

With a vacant look, the old farmer fell shuddering on his pillow, but still pointed to the maid, who looked greatly confused, in a perfect agony of terror, and hurried out of the room, saying that her master was delirious, and that he frightened her by his insane raving. "But," she added,