To Ernest De l'Orme all the world was cramped, narrow, selfishall the world suspected him, and was either conscious of that act of cowardice in the past, or was seeking to discover it; all the world condemned him for it; no one could sympathise with or pity him for that physical cowardice, because he himself would have been most unscrupulous in condemning such fatal weakness in another. Were any incident to Hugh Deverel's discredit to become known to De l'Orme, in the position they now stood-rival suitors for the favour of Violet Trevor-nothing could have prevented De l'Orme making full and free use of such information to humiliate his adversary. Was it likely that Hugh Deverel would be more punctilious?

Were offence given to Hugh Deverel, De l'Orme believed Lord Haig's friendship for him would be endangered also; and De l'Orme knew well that that friendship had had the most genial effect upon him of any influence in his past life, and prized it accordingly. He dreaded the loss of Lord Haig's friendship, as lose it he felt certain he would did Lord Haig learn to despise him Tender-hearted as the young owner of Craigdallie could be, almost to womanliness, small as were his physical forces, De l'Orme knew that he had the courage of a lion if need were; he had seen its exercise in the coolness with which he had defied danger and death in the storm on Lake Leman, and on this account he believed he would be the more likely to condemn this deficiency in another; therefore De l'Orme hated to see this league, slight though it were at present, existing between Lord Haig and Hugh Deverel.

While De l'Orme walked alone, buried in moody thought, Violet pointed out the familiar landmarks about Craigdallie to her companion, and told him of the festivities they had enjoyed, and of the lorldly hospitality of their host. In return Hugh gave her details of his pedestrian wanderings, and of the glorious aspects of the Northern mountains seen in the golden and crimson lights of morn or even, mist crowned, mist wreathed, or standing dark and bare against a purple background of sky. And Violet, who never cared, as a rule, for any descriptions of scenery, listened now with new delight, for the rugged simplicity of his language seemed to colour all things anew. If his word-pictures were so vivid, his sketches must have attractions too, and Violet made him promise to show her the contents of his portfolio.

The shadows crept down into the valleys from the mountain gorges, and spread themselves broadly over the glassy surface of the lake, the crimson sunbeams of October sunset slanted their fiery rays from the mountain's brow, like giant spears attacking an army of shadows; and Violet saw a glory in this gorgeous transformation-scene of nature she had never recognised before.

A jealous eye behind noted the change in her demeanour, and saw that the time was come when her strictly impartial regard was broken in upon, and one of her suitors was preferred to all others.

CHAPTER XII.-AFTER THE PICNIC.

That evening Ernest De l'Orme sought opportunity to tell Violet some of the thoughts that made pandemonium of his breast. He detained her in a small ante-room where he met her on her way to the guest-thronged rooms, made brilliant by lights and music; and, beside himself with jealous rage and defeated hopes, he turned the key in the lock of the door that communicated with the rooms beyond, and thus cut off from all interruption, as he supposed, he compelled her to listen to him at last. Unknown to De l'Orme, there was inlet from the conservatory, hidden, however, by the heavy drapery of curtains behind him. Had he been a clever schemer he would have thoroughly examined his trap before he placed dependance upon its security.

Violet stood proudly before him, her placid face aglow with indignation.

"How dare you detain me here!"

"I dare do this and much more if you provoke me. My love for you gives me a right to demand opportunity for its expression. You have intentionally denied it to me for a long time. Can you tell me without perjury that you have been ignorant of this ?”

Violet turned pale, but still her self-command was perfect. "If I avoided receiving explanation, it was that I might spare you the humility of learning that your presumption was vain."

"Presumption!" he exclaimed; his lip curled contemptuously, his brow darkened with a scowl. "What presumption is there in my aspirations? Is not a De l'Orme, of De l'Orme, in every way fitted to wed with a daughter of the Trevors ?"

"The presumption was in aspiring to what you must have known from my conduct I would not willingly give. The selfish passion you are pleased to call by the name of love is not fit to be compared to the devotion I would, and must, give to a favoured suitor."

De l'Orme stepped near to her and spoke sneeringly in her ear. "The regard you have given to that traitor Deverel, you mean." Violet started from him, and the colour rushed over neck and bosom; the latter heaved, while tears of anger and mortification stood in her eyes.

"The cowardice is worthy of you, to lock me, a defenceless girl, in here apart from those who will avenge this insult, that you may vent your spleen upon me when I am powerless to avoid it."

The epithet "cowardice" acted upon the nerves of De l'Orme as

a pistol shot would have done. He fell back from her side; his face turned ashen pale. Violet, unprepared for the effect of her words, marvelled at the change.

"Cowardice!" he murmured.

"Yes, cowardice. No wonder your conscience smites you."

"What do you know that warrants the use of that word?” he gasped.

"What should I know," said Violet, sternly, "but the means you have used to entrap me into the explanation you must be aware I have striven to avoid?"

De l'Orme recovered himself, for he saw at once that he had needlessly alarmed himself.

"Since I have offended you in achieving this opportunity, I will not let it pass without gaining my end. You shall listen to the story I would have told you long ago, though you spurn me from you the next instant."

Violet stood, white and stately, disdaining reply.

Ernest De l'Orme paused to gain composure, and then commenced in tones more pleading than passionate. As they fell upon her ear, in spite of herself, Violet was touched, and her womanly heart re-awakened to the pity that had moved it when she breathed her thoughts into Pansie's sympathetic ear that evening at Crowland.

"My life has been strangely destitute of those influences that make so many sunny and bright," began De l'Orme. "You know, for I have told you in part, what my solitary boyhood was; how my mind, preying upon itself and its own morbid fancies, nurtured passions which I have never since been able to control and regulate. At the age when a man takes his heritage of manhood and assumes, or ought to assume, a certain position in the world, my life became a wreck by the destruction of those pillars I had been taught from my infancy to lean upon. My uncle died, and I saw the whole of the wealth that had been called mine ever since I could remember pass away, to endow different charities, and this gross injustice was nominally inflicted in remembrance of one fault of my school days, when I had neither judgment nor physical strength to regulate my own actions."

Here he paused for an instant, and Violet took the opportunity to speak the thoughts his words kindled.

"It is a common thing for men, and women too, to fail when they rely solely upon their own strength and judgment; but through our failures we should learn to trust the more implicitly, and rely more perfectly, upon the strength that is above and beyond If we learn such lessons from our defeats we turn them into blessings."

our own.

"But I did not learn such a lesson," he said, bitterly. "I knew, and know still, nothing of religion but that which impresses upon my mind the respectability of attending church twice every Sunday. That was the substance of the religious instruction imparted to me in my childhood. I am faithful to it still. Whatever soft feelings I had, and at that age I could not have been wholly without them, were turned to gall and wormwood. I hated every one I knew; I hated mankind universally. I fled from my old home and all the mocking, familiar faces, whose expressions of pity were to me so many mockeries of my disappointment. I wandered abroad for some years, and at length I fell in with Lord Haig at Rome. You know what he is. You will not be surprised when I tell you that association with him kindled the first vital spark in my bosom that had burned there since the revolution in my heart occasioned by my uncle's posthumous injustice. We joined company; we travelled together. Our friendship was not many months old when that accidental encounter occurred at the auberge in Switzerland. We followed you to Lucerne. You know how our acquaintance ripened; and again life smiled upon me; again there were sunny skies above and flowery meads below. I was awakened to a new life. You were kind to me then, Violet; you encouraged me to converse freely with you, and all went smoothly and happily until the thrice cursed invasion of our paradise by Hugh Deverel." Had all this been spoken but yesterday, the deep pity glowing in Violet's breast might have led her to make a different reply from that which now she was constrained to make. She had followed Ernest De l'Orme so far, compelled, by the answering emotions his words awakened in her bosom, to a deep commiseration for him in spite of the compulsion he had made use of to obtain her ear, but this allusion to Hugh Deverel turned the tide; even had her heart Rot been interested in him, her sense of justice would have caused her to condemn his accuser. The influence of Hugh Deverel's simple, manly bearing, the deference with which he addressed her, the respectful attention he obliged her to accept, were all so recent, and withal had been so agreeable to Violet, that their sweet memory fenced her round still. One aspersion cast upon him wrought a speedy revulsion in her mind, and from that moment Ernest De l'Orme had not a ghost of a chance of reinstating himself in her favour.

"I know not," continued Ernest De l'Orme, speaking hardly between his teeth, "what slander he made use of to blacken my name and reputation, but from the first moment of his appearance your whole bearing was changed."

"If Mr. De l'Orme can recollect," said Violet, with quiet scorn in her tones, "it was in the midst of the storm we encountered

at Lake Leman, and immediately after we had received proof of the deficiency of his character in that quality it is the nature of us to admire, that Mr. Deverel first became known to us."

Then her tones deepened, and she addressed De l'Orme more directly.

"Had Pansie and I depended upon your skill and coolness in that hour of danger, and had Lord Haig not been near, we might never have lived to set foot upon English soil again. Our fate might have been the same as that of the poor cousins of Mr. Deverel had our rescue depended upon the risk of your valuable life. It was natural that we should institute comparisons between your conduct upon that memorable occasion and that of Mr. Deverel, who no sooner learned that danger and death menaced his sister and cousins than, regardless of self, he rushed to save them, or die in the attempt. It was your own fault if the comparison were to your disadvantage; heroism compels admiration, because it appeals to the deepest and holiest emotions of our heartscowardice, on the contrary, obliges us to despise."

De l'Orme seized her white wrist with no gentle grasp, while his face grew livid with passion.

"How dare you taunt and insult me thus? Is it not enough that you have embittered my whole life, and rudely broken the sweetest dream that ever visited my unhappy vision? If you were a man I would avenge myself."

"Release me!" cried Violet; and her voice was elevated almost to a shriek, for the pain of her wrist, held in such vice-like grasp, was extreme.

The curtains covering one side of the small ante-room were put aside by a hasty hand, and the next instant De l'Orme was seized by the collar and sent reeling against the opposite wall as though he had been a mere straw in the hand of him who gave the impetus.

"It is to the fact of her being a woman that Miss Trevor has to lay the insult of such treatment as this. It is well known that De l'Orme only tyrannises over those who are weaker than he and unable to defend themselves against him," said the deep voice of Hugh Deverel.

Violet, in the relief and anxiety of the moment, clung to the arm of her protector, trembling from head to foot. When De l'Orme, recovering hastily from the shock of his fall, turned and confronted them, he saw his rival's strong arm passed round the shrinking form of her to win whose favour he would have made the greatest sacrifice he was capable of doing, saw Violet voluntarily cling to him for support, and madness and despair gave him a momentary courage. With the celerity of lightning he attacked