Winter's letter.

It was brief-as was the prologue to the tragedy tropically termed the Mousetrap-and dealt with that other brief thing to which the said prologue was compared.

"June 12, 1877. "Coming up to-night. Will see you to-morrow. Sorry to say S. is engaged (clandestinely, of course) to young Corfe. Latter is my authority. Yours,

"GEORGE WINTER."

Alec laughed aloud, and walked about. "Bobby Corfe, too! How he would catch it if Sir William knew! Poor Bobby. Of course he knows no better. Oh, my Sally !-who said you would never forget me," and he sat down and stared desolately into the room. "I suppose you are trotting him out along the narrow way now." Alec took down the bundle of letters, and read them all through in chronological order. He traced no waning of affection there. No, stay-he did. The last was shorter and more irregularly written, certainly, and ended:

"I'm tired and seedy, so you'll excuse more, old boy, now won't you?"

If Alec had been "tired and seedy" he knew he never would have told her so, or let it interfere with his writing her a complete, copious and cheerful letter. And he put all those letters in a heap on the table, and added to them one or two photographs of her lovely face, a dark lock of hair, one or two dry flowers, some passionate ends and beginnings of rimes, and a little, long-wristed black glove. And he sat with his arms on the table and stared at

them silently.

"All that is left of you, Sally. All the well-known 'properties of the tragical-comical-historical-pastoral scene individable, poem unlimited, and farce unutterable called Young Love." And there Winter found him when he came in, half an hour later. Alec stood up and said:

"Is there any doubt about this? "None whatever, old man. I shouldn't have told you if there had been. I don't suppose this new fad will last very long. She surely must soon find out that Bobby is shallow water, with a muddy sediment. Then she'll want you again."

"Yes.

Or you, if you're handy, or Diomede or even Thersites. Look at that, Winter. Look at it well," Alec added, pointing to the photograph," and say good-bye to it. I did love her once. And she told me with her own lips she loved me. It seems a long time ago. It is a long time ago. It's seven weeks now." Alec laughed; not a nice laugh. "I've got the class-list," said Winter. "Where are you?"

"Fifth."

And

"Glad to hear it. I'll drink your health to-night." "Come to my rooms? Some men will be there? Where am I, in it?"

"I will.

"You aren't in it. No good beating about the bush, is there?"

"Not the least. Besides, I'm not surprised. I know quite well I've only myself to thank. Here, I think we'll add that class-list to the heap on the table. It's all part of the same romance. The class-list is the last chapter-at least, I hope so." And Alec deposited the whole pile gently, almost reverently, as one burying a late friend, in the empty grate. Then he crammed in under it. a resinous preparation locally called a "devil," and put a match to it. And the two men watched the remains of the late romance through the process of cremation. Sally's portrait lay face uppermost on the top. When the flame began to curl the edges of that, Alec turned away, and looked out of the open window into the sunshine of the court. And that sunshine showed a pale, hard, tired-looking face with desperate, desolate eyes. Winter said, "You'll be round to-night?"

"Yes."

During the rest of the day Alec wandered about the gardens and "backs," now made beautiful with summer-though inferior in splendour to what next October's freshness would see, and across the country. He tried most of the well-known walks I think that day, and came to a final standstill-or rather sit still-in Madingley churchyard. There he lit a pipe, the first that day, and said, nearly aloud, "I have been a fool, I'm a man now.' And he smoked silently and rested, watching the birds who circled through the blue above that quaint and attractive old church. Things were not so bad as they seemed, perhaps. He had had a passionate poetic existence for a few weeks, which, after all, was well worth having, and none could take from him. "You can't take away the kisses you gave, or the words you have said to me, and men you may think you love sometimes will never love you like me. I have wasted my days for love of you, and dreamed of you night after night, and you have drifted away from me-and we shall never be the same again. I shall never be able to believe you again, all my faith has been spoilt and broken-and I shall drift away too through the world, man enongh to fight for my own hand now, and redeem the folly of those three spoilt, luxurious years which have left nothing but a heap of ashes, and an exam. gone wrong. I see it all now. You might have made a more flattering choice of a successor, though-Winter now, for example, why not experiment on him? He's a good friend, and a square man, as you perhaps know. It might have been interesting to see how much of you he would stand before he, too, surrendered. I shouldn't have quarrelled with him. Don't flatter yourself. I

wonder if I'm going a little cracked, addressing the tombstone of, let's see, George Henry Bark, aged 82, 1834-in these terms?

"Oh love, my love, had you loved but me!'"

Then Alec ceased to think at all for a while, and soon rose and walked quickly back into the town.

In his rooms the afternoon post had brought many bills and several severely ironical advertisements of bachelors' hoods from tradesmen. And one letter, in a handwriting his heart would have danced at the sight of had it come a few hours ago. It, too, was brief. As it was so, and as a specimen of each of the young lady's various epistolary styles has been implicitly promised, this final number of the Alec-Sally series for 1877 shall be quoted. It ran thus:

"I suppose Mr. Winter has told you. Forgive-if you can, and forget me as soon as possible. I don't know what to say more and I hate myself for it, but it can't be helped now.

"SALLIE."

"H'm. Forget me as soon as possible; thanks, Sally, I'll try. Some day I may succeed, when the sea gives up her dead, and we know whether tares be not grain." Alec stood hesitating whether that last note should join the heap of ashes in the fire-grate, or stay, as a reminder of the fluctuation of human fortune and the versatility of the female mind. "Oh, hang it, I shall remember it all well enough, without a memoria technica. You go into the fire with the rest. And he put a match to the corner of the letter, and held it till it nearly burned his finger and thumb. Then he dropped it among the other ashes. Then he wrote an answer to Sally; this was it:

"Received your note. Also Winter's information. I don't think we need discuss the matter further. You, of course, will do as you please. Try and stick to your present lover, or you will get into a habit of regarding love-or whatever occupies its place in you-as purely episodic, which is in the long run a mistake. I hope you will have a long run, anyhow. Imagine next time we meet that we have never been anything but tolerably intimate acquaintances. I will try and imagine the same thing as soon as I can. As for forgiveness, as you call it, I don't know exactly what it means. I suppose you will be equally comfortable with or without it. I don't want to say anything more lest I might say what I should be sorry for. And you did love me once, I don't forget that. You have given me experience. Thank you for that. Good-bye, Sally.

A."

Then Alec opened a letter from his father, containing a very handsome cheque, and the words among others "We shall look

for your name in to-morrow's paper, and hope to see it high up.” "My poor dear old man," thought Alec, "how you can have so much faith in a scatter-brained Waster like me, after knowing me for twenty-one years, I can't make out. No one else has it. How on earth am I to tell him the truth? Well, he'll soon know it, whether I tell it or not. Wish I could bribe the Times into misprinting my name into the first class. Daresay a lot of other men wish the same. Alec looked at his watch. It was close on the time for Hall dinner. He washed and brushed himself, hung the discoloured ragged old gown on and limp cap-for the last time, as will appear-put his hands in his pockets and walked over to the Hall passage, and joined the usual expectant group on the top of the well-worn stone steps. "If I've made a general mess of things, I'm not going to skulk for it. My friends shall see I've got at least the pluck to admit that I'm ashamed of myself and discuss matters calmly."

Of course his hall table, with the exception of Winter (who opened not his mouth, except to eat and to say, "Thanks,awfully, old man," to congratulations), knew only of the Tripos catastrophe which was just then Alec's minor grievance, so they alluded to it as little as possible, and were pleasant and kind to him, and discussed how the "long" should be spent, compared the relative advantages of North Wales, the lakes, Scotland and abroad, for places for what they called reading in. This table consisted almost exclusively of reading men, though some of them, like Alec, might occasionally have broken an oar, done a hundred yards, "record," or chatted cleverly at a Union debate. I fancy that lawn tennis in the Backs was then a thing of the immediate future. It was on the tapis though not on the turf, as Alec remarked. "That's not "for a

a bad zeugma," he added with a sick sort of laugh, ploughed man."

After dinner Alec went back to his rooms and sat reading and smoking there alone. And among what he read was this:

And then he laid the book down on his lap, and asked himself endless questions, to which a heap of ashes before him on the hearth was the only and perpetual answer. That heap of ashes was like a recurring decimal, with a far reaching thought between each repetition.

Later that night there was wassail and music and revelry in Winter's rooms, which echoed through the open windows into the

June evening, and mixed with the May-flower fragrance of the old quadrangle and the murmurous melody of the fountain. And Alec was up there, merry, loquacious and even witty, the life of the party, until his gyp arrived and put a telegram in his hands, which tore down the mask of riotous gaiety from his face, and left only the ghastly pale despair it could no longer cloak. Alec said:

"Excuse me, you men," and went out. Winter followed him"Can I do anything, old man?"

"No, Winter; you can't. And I don't know who can. My father has lost his money, in this infernal Company. Think of my debts and duns! This and Sally and the class-list are about enough for one summer day's programme, I think. Lucifer's fall wasn't in it. Go back to your friends, now there's a good fellow, and leave me here, to think." Winter left him, and he thought.

CHAPTER III.

THREE YEARS AFTER.

LONDON was not the only field of Alaster McAlpin's labours. Between his residence there and his subsequent residence in Paris, where this chapter finds him, he had experience of the greatest surgical school in the world, where the experiments made are more cruel than the direst nightmare of the most hysterical and imaginative antivivisectionist. For they are made on men by men to illustrate and popularise the science of War. Alaster Mc Alpin was at Plevna. What he saw and did there has no place in history. But he did his duty. Therefore, by a convenient abridgment of space and time, let us alight in the Café Dora in the Rue Vaugirard, near the Odéon, Paris, on a warm May evening in the year 1880. It was a very fine May in 1880, as some of us perhaps remember, and the old palace of the Luxembourg was no doubt glowing in the western sunlight; as it generally did in fine weather, at the proper time. But the young man sitting on the end of a marble table, his hat on the back of his head, his hands in his trousers-pockets, his left foot on the floor, his right swinging in the air, took all that for granted, and was thinking of something else. An air of jaunty shabbiness, of cheery destitution, and of determined and haggard gaiety, suffused his person. His face was handsome and pale, and showed the traces of long and persevering dissipation in continual struggle with mirth and health. His fine dark eyes had lines round them-which meant laughter and sorrow, and shades below them which meant revelry and late hours. His cheeks and chin and neck had a blue shade of bristle on them which meant laziness-and perhaps unsteady hand in the morning. His handsome and well-set mouth was decorated by a long thin meandering black wisp of moustache-which meant nothing. His