Helwyze suddenly felt old and sad and bitterhearted, as if they had stolen something from him.

"I have learned to wait," he said, with the cold brevity which was the only sign of displeasure Gladys ever saw in him.

In remorseful silence she hastened to find her place in the book they were reading; but Canaris, who seemed bubbling over with good spirits, took no notice of the chill, and asked, with unabated cheerfulness,

Any commissions, sir, beside these letters? I feel as if I could put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes,' it is such a glorious, springlike day."

Nothing but the letters. Stay a moment, while I add another;" and, taking up the pen he had laid by, Helwyze wrote hastily,

"TO OLIVIA AT THE SOUTH:
:-

"The swallows will be returning soon; return with them, if you can. I am deadly dull: come and make a little mischief to amuse me. I miss you.

JASPER."

Sealing and directing this, he handed it to Canaris, who had been whispering to Gladys more like a lover than a husband of half a year's

standing. Something in the elder man's face made the younger glance involuntarily at the letter as he took it.

"Olivia? I promised to write her, but I”— "Dared not?"

"No: I forgot it ;" and Canaris went off, laughing at the grande passion, which now seemed very foolish and far away.

"This time, I think, you will remember, for I mean to fight fire with fire," thought Helwyze, with a grim smile, such as Louis XI. might have worn when sending some gallant young knight to carry his own death-warrant.

XII.

OLIVIA came before the swallows; for the

three words, "I miss you," would have brought her from the ends of the earth, had she exiled herself so far. She had waited for him to want and call her, as he often did when others wearied or failed him. Seldom had so long a time passed without some word from him; and endless doubts, fears, conjectures, had harassed her, as month after month went by, and no summons came. Now she hastened, ready for any thing he might ask of her, since her reward would be a glimpse of the only heaven she knew.

"Amuse Felix: he is falling in love with his wife, and it spoils both of them for my use. He says he has forgotten you. Come often, and teach him to remember, as penalty for his bad taste and manners," was the single order Helwyze gave; but Olivia needed no other; and, for the sake of coming often, would have smiled upon a far less agreeable man than Canaris.

much were all my work. Oh, I am a thrifty wife, though such a little one!" and Gladys broke into her clear child's laugh, which seemed to cheer them both, as a lark's song makes music even in a cloud.

Canaris laughed with her; for these glimpses of practical gifts and shrewd common sense in Gladys were very like the discovery of a rock under its veil of moss, or garland of airy columbines.

"But what will he say to all this?" asked the young man, with a downward gesture of the finger, and in his eye a glimmer of malicious satisfaction at the thought of having at least one secret in which Helwyze had no part.

"We need not tell him. It is nothing to him what we do up here. Let him find out, if he cares to know," answered Gladys, with a charmingly mutinous air, as she tripped away to her own little room.

'He will care, and he will find out. He has no right; but that will not stop him," returned Canaris, following to lean in the door-way, and watch her kneeling before a great basket, from which she pulled reels of gay silk, unfinished bits of work, and fragments of old lace.

"See!" she said, holding up one of the latter,

"I can both make and mend; and one who is clever at this sort of thing can earn a pretty penny in a quiet way. Through my old employer I can get all the work I want; so please do not forbid it, Felix: I should be so much happier, if I might?"

"I will forbid nothing that makes you happy. But Helwyze will be exceeding wroth when he discovers it, unless the absurdity of beggars living in a palace strikes him as it does me."

“I am not afraid !”

"You never saw him in a rage: I have. Quite calm and cool, but rather awful, as he withers you with a look, or drives you half wild with a word that stings like a whip, and makes you hate him."

"Still I would not fear him, unless I had done wrong."

"He makes you feel so, whether you have or not; and you ask pardon for doing what you know is right. It is singular, but he certainly does make black seem white, sometimes," mused Canaris, knitting his brows with the old perplexity.

“I am afraid so;" and Gladys folded up a sigh in the parcel of rosy floss she laid away. Then she chased the frown from her husband's