set his heart on your going into Retreat:-and so had Father Truscott."

"Yes," said Virginia, still more constrainedly.

"So now let us go upstairs. It is a pity that papa is going to Starton too to-day; but we will take the low road-he always takes the high; and perhaps we shall not see him. It would be awkward if we did."

"Let us go now! He will not have finished at Lane End yet," said Virginia. "And perhaps the Sister and Father Truscott are waiting for us."

"Very well! come!" said Hermione briskly, as if trying to shake off the depression which would cling in spite of herself.

They went upstairs together and dressed themselves quickly. The small portmanteau was already packed, and in a few moments' time the carriage would come round.

"Superior wished me to say this prayer, dear," said Hermione, coming into her daughter's room with a written paper in her hand.

Virginia was already kneeling at her faldstool, praying earnestly, but like one in the very extremity of pain. Had she been a martyr enduring the worst conceivable agony for the truth's sake, she could not have looked more grievously tortured, more pitifully anguished.

"Don't, Virginia ! don't look like that!" cried Hermione, falling into a sudden passion of tears. "It is only for a week, darling!" she repeated. "Think how soon a week will pass and how much spiritual good you will get at C——.”

"Mamma! pray to our Lord to help me!" cried Virginia, clinging to her mother convulsively.

"Yes, let us both ask for help!" was the answer; and in a broken voice Hermione recited the prayer which Mr. Lascelles had sent her, asking the Divine blessing on the step which her daughter was taking that step of obedience to a Director and disobedience to a father of adhesion to a creed and deception to her parents, which was assumed worthy of special approbation. Then, the prayer ended, they both rose, and still clinging hand in hand went down the stairs and entered the carriage where the portmanteau was already stowed. "To the Starton station," said Hermione to the astonished man. "Go by the low road, and drive fast."

Not a word was spoken for the whole five miles. Each had to keep up her courage and to quiet her natural conscience which would make itself heard only too clearly in spite of the artificial sophistries that had done so much to obscure its native purity. To each, false

hood, deceit, treachery was abhorrent; yet at this moment both were dealing deceitfully, both were false and treacherous alike. Taught by that fatal school which maintains that the end justifies the means— that the faithful must perfect their work at all cost of morality, of humanity—that infidels and atheists are accursed and to be dealt with as the enemies of God and man alike-that honesty is sinful, while crooked dealing is holiness if that honesty would check superstition and that crooked dealing encourage it-both had become warped from the first uprightness of their lives; and now when they stood face to face with certain consequences they were sorrowful and secretly ashamed. Hermione was betraying her husband, Virginia was betraying both father and mother; but the Director of each had assured his penitent that she was doing well, and that God and the Church approved; and with this assurance each was now striving to quiet her conscience and content her soul-and finding the task hard.

The time passed, and the station was at last reached, without mishap of undesirable meeting by the way; and at the station they found Mr. Lascelles and Sister Agnes, Father Truscott and Cuthbert Molyneux waiting to receive them and to ensure the carrying out of the design on hand.

"Just in time!" said the courtly vicar, smiling, when the two pale, half-frightened women came on the platform as the train rounded the "But a near thing!"

curve.

"Good-bye, dear Virginia!" said her mother, kissing her hastily. She dared not show any feeling before those who were watching her so closely. "In a week's time, remember! I shall be very dull till you come back!”

"But you do not grudge her?" asked Sister Agnes slowly and with meaning.

"No! no! indeed not! but she must come back in a week's time!" repeated Hermione, finding comfort in the definiteness of the time allotted.

Virginia kissed her mother, but neither spoke nor wept. The Sister held her cold hand firmly, almost cruelly clasped; and Father Truscott whispered in her ear: "For the Blessed Virgin and her honour!"

Once after she had, as it seemed, wished her good-bye finally, Virginia turned back to her mother as if to speak to her to kiss her once again; but the Sister, ever watchful, drew her with a firm hand to the carriage. "No looking back, child!" she said; while Father Truscott, under guise of help, lifted her bodily from the ground and

set her in the carriage. Then the doors were shut, the bell was rung, the whistle sounded, and the train moved out of the station.

"Our Mother's chosen child!" said Sister Agnes with her silky smile.

"Child, you have left the darkness of error and are now going into the light and the truth!" said Father Truscott with more sincerity of fervour; while Virginia, feeling as if her heart would break, carried her sin as a cross and her sorrow as a sin, and asked to be supported through the one and forgiven for the other. It was for the good of souls-her own and others—and for the glory of God that the thing had been done. The Father of Lies was draped in shining garments for the occasion; and the life of deceit through which she had been led for so long now was, according to her instructors, a pious fraud which the wickedness of others had necessitated and the holiness of the end justified.

CHAPTER XXVI.

TO ITS LOGICAL CONCLUSION.

"AND the child-where is Virginia ?" asked Richard, as his wife came into the room alone.

Since the new order of things mother and daughter kept always together, with a certain sense of mutual support and countenance against this soul-destroying infidel of theirs, whose influence they feared with the fear of old-time love and indestructible respect; and to see one without the other was strange.

"She is with Sister Agnes," said Hermione, trying to speak with indifference.

She was very pale, and her indifference was a little too strongly accentuated to be real.

"I am sorry," he returned slowly. "Will she be late ?"

"I do not know exactly," answered Hermione from among the music-books where she was making-believe to search for something, so that her face should not be seen, and the nervousness in her voice might be somewhat veiled by distance.

Of course she knew that her husband must be told the truth sooner or later; but, as she and Mr. Lascelles had agreed, the later the better. If he could be kept quiet for this evening it would give the pious runaways a still longer start should he determine on fol

lowing them; for by the time he could reach London Virginia would be safely homed in the House of Retreat at C——, whence she must be taken by main force and the police, if taken at all; and Richard would naturally think twice before he made such a scandal as this.

"Are you sure that Virginia is quite well?" he asked after a short silence and when Hermione, thinking the times now safe and the subject dropped, had come back from turning over the musicbooks.

"Dear me, yes!" she answered, still trying to speak with light indifference.

"To my eyes not. She is as changed in body as in mind," he said with a deep sigh. "Her new friends and their absurd practices, of which I probably know less than half, have had a disastrous influence on her."

He looked at his wife with some reproach. She did not answer. She was thinking with dread of the time when he would have to know that other half of the truth.

"What is she doing to-night?" he asked. "Any new vagary?" "Not that I know of," said Hermione, not resenting the phrase as she would have done had her conscience been clear. But her face betrayed the trouble of her mind, and seemed to show that more was hidden than had been expressed.

With a sudden flash of what was real terror Richard remembered Virginia's strange emotion, Hermione's unwonted softness of this afternoon; and now this studied indifference, which of itself confessed embarrassment. What did it all mean? What new disgrace was in store for him? what further sorrowful perversion for them?

"Something is wrong with you and the child," he said suddenly. "Tell me what it is."

"There is nothing wrong," she answered with a deep blush. "Look at me, Hermione," he said gravely and sternly.

She raised her eyes and tried to meet his, but she could not. She looked just up to the knot of his cravat.

"How can you be so silly, Richard?" she said with a nervous little laugh, her delicate lips strained and quivering.

Deceitful as she had become through the fatal doctrine of "reserve," she was still candid at heart; and when closely pressed, as now, her nature asserted itself.

"There is something wrong," said Richard again. "You cannot look in my face, Hermione, and I know yours. Tell me the truth frankly. This double-dealing is so strange in you who were once the very soul of honour and sincerity, I cannot reconcile VOL. CCXLV. NO. 1785.

T

myself to it. Come, speak to me honestly. What is this about Virginia? Why is she not here to-night?"

"I suppose I had better tell you now at once," returned Hermione, her confusion deepening, and her inability to stand examination overcoming her promise to Superior. "It is all the same whether I tell you now or after," she continued, arguing the matter aloud; "and really there is nothing so very much to tell. Virginia has only gone away with Sister Agnes for a week's Retreat at C that is all. Nothing so very formidable, you see."

Again she laughed affectedly, and again her small sweet lips were strained and quivering.

For the first time in his life Richard felt something like contempt for this dearly loved wife of his. Hitherto his love had been of that quiet unobservant kind which is characteristic of a constant temperament and an occupied mind. He loved her; and there he stopped. He asked himself why, no more than he asked himself why the sunshine was delightful to him or the flowers were beautiful. She was part of his life, her perfect beauty of mind and body part of the existing order of things; and not to love her, not to believe in her without further examination, not to imagine her free from fault or blemish, would have been until now impossible. Her worth and moral loveliness were as absolutely settled, as arbitrarily proved in his mind, as the revelations of the spectroscope. It was not a thing to debate about; it was a question closed and done with. But now at this moment there swept across his mind a bitter kind of disdainful pity for her weakness and duplicity, which at one time would have been as impossible for him to feel as that he should have deliberately injured or publicly insulted her. As he looked at her she seemed to be almost some one else. Was she indeed Hermione, the beloved of his youth, the trusted of his maturity? She who could not look in his face, who could not even lie bravely, and who dared not tell the truth ?—she who had lent herself to this pitiful farce of kindly pretence at the very moment when she knew that she was doing that which would stab him to the heart? He did not know which was the more painful-his daughter's disobedience or his wife's falsehood.

"So! this was the meaning of the little comedy played off on me to-day," he said with a bitter laugh, as strange from him as was Hermione's duplicity from her. "I might have known that it was only a blind for something worse than had ever yet been done. I ought to have known; and yet I was weak enough to hope that you and the child had come back to your better selves, and did really