life-work lay, that perhaps such a repu- made poor Peter understand that it tation might be good for him rather than bad; but still it was a pity, considering how Tom had been brought up. However, Robert said nothing on this subject. Perhaps he was all the more eager to proceed with his news, because Tom manifested so little curiosity. "Well, of course, you know that Mr. Sandison came from Shetland," he narrated, "and perhaps, though he was such a friend of your father's, that is all you do know. It is wonderful how much we all take for granted, especially concerning our elders. But when I was in the north this time, the old men who came to my father's funeral, in their natural desire to know all about things in London, let fall expressions which let me know that there was a mystery somewhere, and once I had got as far as that, be sure I lost no time in getting as far as I could go. So you really have not the least idea that Peter Sandison is no Shetlander, except by repute, and that he has no better right to the name he bears?" "I only know that he and my father were friends from their earliest years, and that one of my first memories is of hearing his name mentioned with respect at Clegga." Tom spoke with a coldness quite foreign to his usual manner. He wished to check Robert's communications, yet he would not absolutely silence him, lest it should seem as if he feared what might be said. 66 Robert went on. They say he was brought to the island in a ship, when he was a baby, and was given in charge of the old couple, who provided him with a name and a starting-point in life. One of the old men said that Peter Sandison had been a very dashing, eager sort of boy, but that a great change came over him after his foster parents' death. It was thought that then he first discovered the secret of his birth." Tom said nothing. He was silently adjusting this new fact beside many an old one. Robert went on. "Then they say there was a rumor that he had another terrible come-down in London, years after. They had only a vague story of that, without names or dates, gathered from the reports in home letters of other Shetlanders in the metropolis. They said that he had fallen in love with a young lady, who was supposed to be rather above him in circumstances; not that she had any money of her own, they said, but she was the daughter of some government pensioner, and she wouldn't be nice on his part to take her from her genteel home, and turn her into a wife and a general servant all at once. I dare say she made him believe that, for her own part, she was ready with any angelic sacrifice for his sake," laughed Robert, with the manner of one who knows the wiles of the sex-the easy confidence of the serpent-charmer, who will not be bitten. "Well?" said Tom Ollison, with a sharp note of interrogation. Robert Sinclair's mirth jarred and fretted him. As he would tell this story, let him hasten to its end. "Well," echoed Robert quite complacently, "that happened which might have been expected to happen. While Peter Sandison was toiling and moiling among his books and catalogues, laying shilling to shilling, and pound to pound, a certain smart fellow, who knew both of the courting couple, dashed into a bold speculation, made his fortune, and carried off the lady's heart. It was only a modern version of the old ballad, don't you know, Let him take who has the power, They say she made excuses that she was beginning to have doubts about Peter she thought that some of his views were queer, and that perhaps it was risky to trust herself to a man with so doubtful an origin. But of course one can see what all that was worth. Well, I don't blame her. It is easy to blame people. But we must each do the best for ourselves, and a woman's marriage is always her best or her worst bit of business. She hasn't markets every week." What could Tom Ollison say? All the true romance of his pure young heart was up in arms against such a defilement and desecration of life's sweetest sanctities. And yet by this time he fully realized that to argue over them with Robert Sinclair would be worse than useless, would only lead to further desecration, like a struggle in a church with one who has insolently spat on its altar steps. And every nerve of his warm, true nature was tingling in sym pathy with Peter Sandison. Atheist, was he? If so, then whose was the root of the blame? The beloved disciple had pertinently asked, "He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God, whom he hath not seen?" Was it a grievous perverting of Scripture for Tom to feel that in the very spirit of that question another might be asked, "He who finds no ground for faith in his brother whom he hath seen, how can he have faith in God whom he hath not seen?" "If you thought she was going wrong you should have spoken to somebody, said Tom. "Even Mrs. Brander herself," Oh! how glad he was to think that at he added rather faint-heartedly, "though the very beginning he had not been tempt- | she might have discharged her, might ed to swerve from his allegiance to his have kept an eye on her, or have interfather's friend, even for that bright, peace-ested those in her who would have done ful Stockley life which Robert had held so lightly! But while he pondered, Robert went on again. "The old fogies told me all this news quite simply - just as they knew it. They could supply no dates, no margin narrower than a decade. Nor did they know the names of this false lady and her successful lover. The beauty of it was that I saw directly that I could supply both. They only gave the other half to a half story I half knew before. But as they never dreamed of that I got off without any suspicious questionings. Does nothing strike you, Tom? Don't you see through this?" No," said Tom stubbornly; "I only hear all you have told me." "But don't you feel a clue? You must surely have heard something on which this throws a light? Do you know, I should not have been a bit surprised if you had taken the wind out of my sails by telling me you knew all about this long ago. Do you mean to say you cannot give a guess as to the identity of the nameless parties in my tale? Try." "I am not going to try," said Tom. "I shall know when I am told. Guessing on such subjects is an unjustifiable throwing about of mud, and then some may stick on quite innocent people." Robert was silent for a few minutes, perhaps only because he was lighting a cigar. Probably it would have been quite impossible for him to trace the line of thought which carried him on to his next remark. "Have you heard anything of Kirsty Mail since she left the Branders' service?" For Tom had never told him of his chance encounter with her at the railway refreshment buffet on the day when Robert went to the north. Tom could scarcely have told whether his silence on the subject had been instinctive or intentional. He told him the facts of the case now, as briefly and baldly as possible. Robert puffed his cigar for a minute. "That girl will come to no good," he decided. "She was one of those who will have their pleasure and their leisure at any cost. If I had told all I knew she would have been out of the Branders' house long before she was." 2486 LIVING AGE. VOL. XLVIII. so.' Robert shook his head. "Not likely," he observed easily. "And besides, it does not do to mix one's self up with these matters. It isn't understood. If one does so, people think there is something at the bottom of it. And before one knows where one is there is a mysterious rumor floating about one. And it will turn up some day to do one damage, when and where one least expects it." "Well, good bye now, Robert," said Tom quite suddenly, unable longer to endure his companion's mental and moral atmosphere. It had never before occurred to him that probably the self-condemned accusers of the sinful woman in the New Testament had barely crept away from the presence of her and her merciful Master, before they began to whisper innuendoes against him whom they had left speaking to her with kindly courtesy. It is scarcely in early youth that we discover that society, like the air, is filled with floating matter, ready to settle everywhere, and to convert wholesomeness into poison. while we hermetically seal the food we wish to preserve, let us consider the wis dom which directed that the right hand should not know what the left hand did, and which was feign to seal every good deed with secrecy - "See thou tell no man. So That very afternoon Tom availed himself of a leisure hour to go to the railway station, in the hope of seeing Kirsty, and of making some appeal to her better feelings and good sense. He found another "young lady" at the refreshment buffet. This one had black hair and bold black eyes, with which she stared at him for a full minute before she answered his quiet inquiry after “Miss Mail." "Miss Mail?" she echoed, "Miss Chrissie?" with a mocking emphasis on the abbreviated name. "Oh! we don't know anything of her here, and don't want to. She's gone." Tom felt his face hot under the girl's cruel glance. "She had a cousin, barmaid at the Royal Stag," she went on. "That one took to robbery at least a man she knew did, a man that had run away from Edin more general information as to the wellbeing and prosperity of the son and brother. But now that he had seen Olive Sinclair again, he felt he must see more of her, and to his dismay he found that henceforth her friendly letters were no longer a welcome, temperate pleasure, but a longed-for, passionate delight. In those years, Tom's life enlarged greatly in many ways. He went abroad more than once, deputed by Mr. Sandison, to do work which had been offered to that well-known and respected, "though eccentric," bookseller and bookhunter. He lived a real life in those foreign cities, working amid their workers, and making friends among them. He was more than once at the great book fair at Leipsic. But he always came back, with an unspoiled heart, into the strange, subdued life in Penman Row, and the hearty, homely sociality of the homely folk among whom he worshipped. whom too, he knew by his father's letters, every penny was being extorted and every right gradually withdrawn, and to whom were extended none of the amenities which once made feudal power a possible form of friendly protection. Quix AND so for years, while Olive Sinclair toiled and spared in the old attic in Kirkwall, and while her mother waited and prayed and sealed her yearning maternal love in a gentle silence, the life of the two young men in London advanced steadily up the grooves which each had found for Tom paid occasional visits to the Branhimself. Tom Ollison saw his father sev ders', though the intervals between such eral times, but not by his going to Shet-visits grew ever longer. He could ill land, or by the old gentleman coming up brook to bear the ignorant contempt with to London; they agreed to break the long which the whole family regarded the simjourney for each other by meeting at Ed-ple peasantry of his native island, from inburgh, which spared Tom the sea voy age for which he had little leisure, and saved the father from travelling on "those railway lines" which, despite their smoothness, he mistrusted far more than the roughest waves of his own North Sea. Once, indeed, Tom went to Shetland. He There were times when it almost dawned did not stop in Kirkwall, except on his on Etta Brander's darkened perceptions, return journey while the vessel in which that about this young man with his " he journeyed lay in dock to take in pas-otic ideas" there was something finer sengers and cattle. Mrs. Sinclair and Olive came down to the shore to see him, and to exchange a few friendly words during the brief interval. It pained Tom to see how the schoolmaster's widow had become quite an old lady, with silvery hair | smoothed beneath her black bonnet, and with pain and patience writ large on her sweet and mobile face. But what an interesting woman Olive had grown! rather too slight, perhaps, but gaunt no longer. What fine lines had come out in her countenance! What a wonderful light there was In her eyes! Tom only wished he could have prolonged his stay. Yet though there was nothing in the neat black garments of mother and daughter to rouse in his mas culine unconsciousness any suspicion of the hard life of struggle and privation which they were living, somehow he felt that he would not have much cared to enlarge on Robert's career to them, and that perhaps it was well he was limited to than about her father and Robert Sinclair. She even got so far once as to think to herself that the world might be a pleasanter world if everybody was like him. But then it was no use to dream of what "might be;" it was clear that the world was full of quite another sort of people, and “it was of no use to be singu. lar." She was inclined to pity Tom a little for the long hours which his work seemed to absorb, and for the nature of his recreations, the long country rambles or boatings on the river, solitary, or with some companion as hard-working as himself- the occasional game of cricket or quoits during his Saturday afternoons at his favorite Stockley. How different all these were from the gay, exciting diversions the dances, the polo, the operas, and the pigeon-shooting matches, with out which she felt she could not live! And yet young Mr. Ollison never looked bored, as she constantly felt. Why, she even wearied so utterly of the monotony | men. Already strangers had been seen of travelling in Switzerland, that she got about Stockley, who dropped suspicious her father to push on to the southern hints concerning a big new public-house, gaming tables that she might snatch the feverish delights of rouge-et-noir. Afterwards she always said that she did not wonder that gentlemen enjoyed specula tion. a possible distillery, and plenty of speculative building, as facts looming in that future which was only held back by the frail life of one ageing man. Tom would have been ready to deduct a good deal of the evil report of the Stockleyites concerning young Carson, as due to their fond clinging to a happy old régime, and their natural shrinking from a new and doubtful one. Mrs. Brander did not make much demur over the transformation her daughter worked in the family sphere. She herself had been brought up in the straitest old fashion not to dance, not to go to a play, But Tom had not been left to not to read a novel. Some forgotten an form his opinion of the man from these cestor of hers had rejected these things, alone. At that solitary supper of Robert's perhaps in the days of public Maypoles, at which Tom had put in appearance, he of the libertine Wycherley and of the no- had heard Carson tell a foul story and torious Mrs. Aphra Behn. For genera- crack a vile joke. His name had figured tions afterwards the family had walked disreputably once or twice in the daily blindly in that ancestor's footsteps, doing papers, and was seldom omitted from the right (as far as it was right) wrongly, since suggestive chat of society journals. Mr. they did it not on any principle, but be- Brander did not disguise his own judg. cause it was "the custom" of the most ment of the man, especially of late, since select section of the “respectable" society the interests of his succession had been in which they had been content to move mortgaged, as he said, "to their very hilt." in those days. But now things were Nay, Mrs. Brander herself saw no neceschanged. Mrs. Brander's new friends sity for disguising her knowledge that were fashionable," and had other stand-"the poor dear captain had been very ards. So for these, she quietly deserted wild," while she went on to say her own. She did not honestly change perfect manners he had, and how sweet them, as anybody may change any custom, his disposition seemed, and how she was even in sheer loyalty to the very principle quite sure his heart was thoroughly good which may underlie it. When she alluded at bottom." to her changed social tactics, she did not say, "Things are changed," or "My views have changed." She only sighed, "The times are changed," "People think differently nowadays." She little knew that it was words of hers which put an end, finally, to Tom Ollison's few and far-between visits to Ormolu Square. "what Tom Ollison could not help thinking what different measure was meted to Captain Carson and to Kirsty Mail. But he knew that to draw any such parallel would seem to Mrs. Brander like insanity, and would be regarded by her as a personal insult. So, wishing his words to carry some conviction, rather than to merely relieve his own feelings, he only said, — "The more attractive such men as Captain Carson may be, the more pestilential are they in society." On that evening, she had first descanted long on the graces and accomplishments | of Captain Carson, whom Tom had met there again and again. Long before this, "Oh, now you are uncharitable ! " cried Tom had known that the captain was the the lady; we must always hope for the heir of the good squire of Stockley, the best. I don't believe the captain would unworthy heir, to whose advent into place, harm a fly. There are so many temptathe Blacks, and all the other old tenants, tions for men of rank and wealth that we looked forward with dislike, and even ter- must not judge them hardly. I believe the ror; since the young man's character was captain really aspires after better things. of a kind calculated to check and destroy He told me that he finds it a real treat to all the good influence of preceding genera. go sometimes to St. Bevis's Church, it is tions, while it had already betrayed him so sweet to hear the trained choir singing self into the power of eager, mercenary in the dim, religious light. There is almen like Mr. Brander, who would put ways hope for a man who is religiously every pressure on their weak and self-disposed." There she paused for a while indulgent tool to force him to extort from and then asked, "Is it true, as Robert his ancestral acres more rapid and showy says, that your poor Mr. Sandison is an gains than golden harvests and rosy atheist?" orchards, and a race of loyal and honest | Tom felt his face flush. Had his sacred, though rash confidence been thus bandied | set against him; on the other, a perpetual about? “Madam,” he said, “I have never heard Mr. Sandison name God." "Ah," sighed the lady, "I feared and foresaw that it would be so. And once it was so different. He thought and spoke a great deal of sacred things. And most reverently, too-or, of course, I should not have allowed it. Only he permitted himself to think too deeply, and to venture to think in new ways. I foresaw how it would end." She sighed again sentimentally, and then bending over her crewel work, said, in a lower voice, "He and I were once rather friendly. Poor dear Peter! Without doubt, he has mentioned that to you, when he has heard of your visits here." "He never did so, madam,” Tom was glad to be able to reply. Tom had been unable to suppress sundry conjectures which Robert's hints had aroused, but he had never given them voice. "He never mentioned that, madam. But when I said I had never heard him name God, I was going on to say, that had I gone into his house a pagan, I am sure I should have asked what God my master served, whose service made him so tender and true in his dealings with all men. Perhaps he has learned, maybe too bitterly, to trust words less and deeds more." For many a little secret had Tom discovered to his master's credit, as, for instance, he had come across the hotel bill for that Christmas dinner for the Shands which had aroused Grace's ire (though even now he could not guess that the festivity had been first planned in kindliness to himself); and he had discovered that the wheel and the Shetland prints had been bought to give the old attic a homely look for his eye. And was he going to discuss the mute agonies of the noble soul which haunted Peter Sandison's pathetic eyes, with this shallow dame, who fancied she had faith because she did not know that faith is of the heart and the life, and not of the lip? No, never. And from that day he never returned to Ormolu Square. Etta Brander and Robert Sinclair had been long openly engaged, and their approaching marriage was even being discussed by this time. Everybody regarded Robert as one of "the most rising young men in the City." He had made one or two very lucky hits. But life was a hard and constant strain upon him, being, in one of its aspects, a gambling game, in which at any time much of the luck might struggle to keep his resources up to the ever-rising water-mark of his ambitions, and the needs which grew out of them. People told Etta that she was a very fortunate girl," and Etta grew quite satisfied that to consult high-art authorities on the furniture of one's future home, and to invent æsthetic novelties for one's trousseau, was vastly better than any idyllic love in a cottage, though somehow all the poets and the painters seemed to find the latter the better subject whereon to exercise their gifts, and she found it very nice to buy pretty pictures of people whom in real life she would have only pitied and patronized. For her, there were few lovers' confidences in the gloaming, few lovers' roamings in forest or on seashore, but she saw quite as much of Robert as she wished at the balls and dinner parties to which they were both invited. Etta's own ambitions were growing daily, and as she knew that "business" meant means to gratify them, she never grudged to find "business" her very successful rival. "Etta," said one of her friends to her once, "at one time, I half thought you were in love with that naughty Captain Carson." "Perhaps I was," Etta calmly admitted. "I think I liked him better than I ever liked any other man." “And yet ——————” said the friend signifi cantly. "And yet I shall marry Robert Sin. clair," Etta answered; "that is quite a different thing." Etta had heard little and asked nothing- about the mother and sister in the far north. "They were living quietly in a cathedral town there," she said. That had a pretty and an aristocratic sound. To do her justice, she knew nothing more. Possibly Robert had encouraged her dislike to the thought of ever visiting those remote islands. Mr. Brander himself had gone to his northern estate several times, and had always returned in a bad temper, saying "he would be glad to wash his hands of the whole concern; it was the worst investment he had ever made; he might as well have acted like an old woman, and put the money into consols! It was just before Robert and Etta were married, that one evening, as Mr. Sandison and Tom sat together at supper in the dining-room at Penman Row, Grace came in and announced, in her very sourest manner, "that somebody had been |