with the wild beasts of rage and despair-with the man's natural sense of dishonour and instinctive desire of revenge. Mr. Lascelles, his eyes too half closed, watched him in this conflict, half wondering how it would end. Richard was a powerful man physically, and might easily be dangerous; and anguish has an ugly trick of making gentlemen forget their breeding, and letting loose the passions which it is their duty to control.

At last Richard conquered himself sufficiently to be able to speak. "Your platform is well defined," he said in a constrained voice. "You do not hesitate in your terms."

"I knew that you would prefer candour," returned the vicar with a half-complimentary air. "Between men of the world the truth is always the best, and the shortest way the wisest."

Perhaps you have left out one factor in the sum," said Richard, still in the same constrained manner, as if forcing himself by an effort to be calm.

"The affection of a loving woman, which will recoil from aiding in her husband's discomfiture."

Mr. Lascelles smiled. Again the image of that flushed, half-tearful "penitent" of his, confessing to her own shame and his triumph, came vividly before him; and he shook his head with undisguised satisfaction, if also with affected pity for the man whom he had

overcome.

"In the days of her darkness, and before she had been called, yes, you might have believed in her acquiescence in your manner of life and in her refusal to join in any scheme of action which should disconcert you; but now she is converted and gives her highest duty to God." He said this with clean and clear precision. He knew so much about Hermione Fullerton's soul, he could enlighten even her husband who had once known all and now understood nothing.

"God! To your demon, you mean-to Moloch!" said Richard with a bitter laugh.

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'Blasphemy will not help you," said Mr. Lascelles quietly. "Call Him by what name you will, He is now her Master whose will she obeys, as expressed by the Voice of the Church."

"The Voice which teaches falsehood and superstition, enmity and deception, which is more cruel and no truer than that of Delphi and Cuma!" said Richard.

"Which teaches truth and righteousness," returned the vicar; "and which, I am grateful to be able to say, your wife and daughter have heard and obeyed."

"And this is the work in which you rejoice! The ruin of one of the purest hearts in England, your boast; the destruction of one of the happiest homes, your honour !"

"So speaks the unregenerate man; the Christian would say that I have cause for great thankfulness, inasmuch as I have been made the chosen means by which has been saved a precious soul, lost for all eternity until my advent." Mr. Lascelles spoke with the air of a man modestly taking the merit that was his due. "And for the rest,"

he continued and his manner may be inferred from his words—“ I can safely say that your wife, my precious penitent, had not a virtue in the past which I have not fostered by the discipline of the Church and strengthened by confession-not a grace which is not enhanced tenfold by religion. She has put on the beauty of holiness, and by so doing every natural beauty of her own shines with redoubled brightness. Between my creation and yours there is not a question which is the more admirable."

As Mr. Lascelles said this he got up and rang the bell. A certain sudden glare in Richard's eyes—a certain sudden movement—a little daunted him; and the presence of a third person, if only a maid-servant, might be valuable.

"Wine," he said, as the girl entered suddenly.

The coming of Mr. Fullerton had excited the Vicarage household; and if keyholes are not made for eyes and ears that wish to be informed, of what use are they?

"You will take a glass of wine, Mr. Fullerton? It is a cold day," he added with the nicest accent of sympathetic hospitality.

Richard turned away and stood for a few moments apart; then faced Mr. Lascelles once more.

"There is no good in vulgar raving," he said slowly. "I understand you, without need of more words. You have played your game cleverly, and so far you have won. Craft and deceit generally do win against blind trust; and my trust was blind. For the rest I may try some of those points on which you have defied me, and strengthen my hands against you by the aid of the law where I can."

"Do so," said Mr. Lascelles cheerfully; "and you will find that what I have said is true. You have no law on your side. You are an atheist, and the English conscience repudiates you. You have excommunicated yourself, and, like a felon-and you are a spiritual felon-your crime has deprived you of your natural rights. Ah! here is the sherry. Let me offer you some. It is dry, and the day is wild."

"God! is such a man possible?" said Richard, half to himself.

"This man is a model minister of Christ-this man who almost makes me believe the devil possible!"

Mr. Lascelles smiled.

"I should have fulfilled my duty had I made you quite believe," he said. "It might have saved you a rougher process in the future.”

He spoke with admirable equanimity. To liken him to the devil was but a stone cast by unblessed hands, that hurt him no more than those missiles cast at saints which turned to rose-leaves as they fell. It was part of that hypothetical "martyrdom" which these popular dominators of souls, these petted inquisitors of men's lives, are so fond of proclaiming that they undergo; glorifying themselves in that they are accounted worthy to suffer for the truth, when all the time it is they who burn and they who rack, they who destroy here and consign to eternal perdition hereafter.

"Better hell with those wise and good with whom I have cast in my lot, than heaven with such as you!" said Richard with a gesture of repulsion.

"All right,” said Mr. Lascelles; "it is well to be content with the bed which one makes for oneself. Really, you had better let me give you a glass of wine! It will keep out the cold."

Richard did not speak, but turned abruptly and left the room; and in the same state as he was in when he entered-blind and dazed, not clearly knowing where he was nor whither he was goinghe passed through the hall, and once more set out into the cruel wind and driving snow of this bitter biting winter's day.

:

The interview had advanced nothing, done no good any way, he thought, as he walked onward. Some insolent truths had been said, some bitter words been spoken, but the main facts were rooted as before the love and obedience of his wife and daughter had been taken from him, and if he could not recover their love he could not enforce their obedience. The law had indeed made, in the one case the wife, in the other the Church, superior to the husband and father. Should Hermione so choose, he was as powerless in his dealings with her, through the terms of the will which gave her the sole possession of her fortune, as his natural authority over Virginia was nullified by those Acts of Parliament and decrees of judges which demand that every Englishman shall belong to some form of religious faith if he would receive the benefit of social conventions, or be confirmed in his natural rights :-Acts of Parliament and decrees of judges, thought Richard bitterly, which declare that learning, probity, goodness, self-devotion shall all count for nothing in a man's control over his children, if not backed up by belief in the Divine wisdom of

a book which makes the universe about six thousand years old, and places the earth in the centre of the system. Yes, Mr. Lascelles was the stronger in this struggle for mastership over those two dear ones. He recognized that now, sorrowfully enough, but clearly. The law was on the side of the vicar; so was that large majority-those weak souls which must cling to something tangible and external if they would stand upright at all;-" While I," he said aloud, "have only my own strength and the goodness of my cause, in the fight that I have made against superstition and credulity-in my endeavour to substitute for blind faith in legends which no man can prove and no ingenuity harmonize with known conditions, the study of facts and reverence for law."

But again-what could he do? Were he even disposed to command, he had no power to enforce; and a brutum fulmen only makes a man ridiculous. And of what use to attempt argument against blind faith in favour of reason, when reason itself was held to be a snare spread for souls by the Evil One, and this same blind faith was alone accepted as safe guidance because Divine illumination? Appeals to old affection, to the instinctive love, the holy harmony of the family-these too would go to the wall before the firm if sorrowful assertion that martyrdom was the glory of the saints; and that it was better to serve the Saviour, who came to bring salvation into the world by setting the child against the father and the wife against the husband, than to attend even to the Ten Commandments which once represented the Word of God without appeal or comment. Everywhere he was met, baffled, defeated; and he felt like one round whom the iron cage is fast drawing in, leaving him neither hope of escape nor means of living.

It was as if years had passed over him since this morning, when he came home just as the short twilight was darkening into evening. He never knew where he had been, nor how far he had walked. Had he been asked, he would have said that he had stood still for all these hours, searching for means of escape from a grievous spiritual prison, and finding none. But he knew that he must have walked far and fast, and been buffeted by the wind and snow in some exposed place; for he was dead weary when he reached his home, and soaked through to the skin. So far physical exhaustion had befriended him, by bringing him back to the consciousness of material things.

Also, his long absence on this fearful day had frightened both Hermione and Virginia, so that the ice of their late estrangement broke up under the pressure of their anxiety, and they were only

eager to welcome back to his home the husband and the father whom their fanaticism had driven abroad. As time passed on and their fears deepened, they forgot all causes of displeasure which they had against this sinner, once so dear to both, to remember only that they loved him, that he was worthy of their love-mercy being infinite and the natural man a lineal descendant of Adam !—and that perhaps he was in danger, with no one to help him :—and they the cause of his peril.

CHAPTER XX.

ALMOST !

MOTHER and daughter had stood by the drawing-room window watching drearily, anxiously, for more than an hour before the small side gate opened, and the weary master who was not owner passed through like one walking in a dream, and instinctively took the short woodwalk across the upper end of the park. Hermione's dark blue eyes were full of tears which every now and then fell silently on her hands, which she had clasped together against the framework of the window, as a rest for her pretty golden, self-accusing head. And Virginia's eyes too were full of tears; but she had comforted herself by snatches of fervent, silent prayer; and Hermione had not.

It had been a day of checkered emotions for the pretty woman whom nature had made for love and submission, and whom the Church was fast transforming out of all likeness to her original selfor rather, was fatally transferring to another direction. At first she had been sorrowfully proud, mournfully elate, at the constancy with which she had borne her testimony, and the fidelity of her obedience to Mr. Lascelles. It had been hard at the moment, but when done it was well done; and when she next saw dear Superior she would have a clean page to offer, which he would sign, smiling, with his approval. She was a little disturbed when she saw Richard dash out so heedlessly into the snow and wind; and she thought that he was probably bound for the Vicarage, where he would see Mr. Lascelles, and either insult him by his unblushing atheism, or quarrel with him in some yet more terrible and ungodly fashion. This thought tormented her for a long while, now inclining her to anger for her husband and corresponding sympathy for the vicar; now softening her to the former for fear of the hard things which the latter might say,