which it is my duty to assert against ?'

Ursula flung down her graver now, and turned two large black eyes, full of wrath and hauteur, upon him.

'I deny your right to prohibit anything she flashed out insolently. I persist in my statement, that I am my own mistress under the circumstances; or at any rate you have no power to control me. My education has been neglected. I have never had opportunities to improve myself like other girls, because father could not afford it. Now that he can do so-that he has money besides what he earns, and is willing to spend it on me-you start up and prattle about impropriety and so forth! Pray, Mr. Keane, is it more improper for me to learn dancing than for other women?'

'Yes. You are my wife. Your position is peculiar at present, and I have a decided objection to your going to public places where I am unable to accompany you. If the lessons were private ones-strictly and respectably private-I would raise no farther objection.'

'Private lessons would be no earthly good to me. It is society and seeing how others do that I require. You are always hinting that I am forward and unladylike.'

'Never! Whatever I may have thought, I trust courtesy towards a woman would restrain me from saying wounding things.'

'Courtesy to a woman! It is not love for your wife, at any rate, that would restrain you; but you have hinted it, and before father, who meekly submitted to your judgment. The worst of the matter is, that it is true; and how am I to be like a lady, when I hardly ever saw a real one in my life except at a distance? In the street, when they sweep by me and look me down, as though I had no busi

ness to breathe the same air with them; or at the theatre, when they glance at me and then as quickly look away, as though the sight of me was pollution!'

'Then why will you go to such places, Ursula ?'

'Why? What takes a boy to the wall against which great luscious peaches are ripening? He knows well enough that they hang far out of his reach, and that they are growing crimson for some one else; but yet the sight of them fascinates his gaze.'

Bernard looked at her pityingly. What a hankering there was in the huge dusky orbs after the good things of this life! what a yearning sounded in her voice for the pomps and vanities and sinful lusts of the flesh !

'Time lost in vain longings is worse than sacrificed, my child,' he said, in a softer tone than he had lately spoken. "Talent has its privileges, however, Ursula, and, when really developed, has a right to high places in the world. If we work hard, work may lift us both to a position more exalted than any held by those very people you may envy; but Rome was not built in a day. We must work and-wait.'

'Tush! I do not care for the exalted position which only comes hand in hand with gray hairs. No one would be interested in me then.'

'I should be. I shall always care for you, Ursula.'

His words sounded tender and pathetic. And she looked up, the frown clearing off her beautiful face, and a half smile breaking on her lips.

'I believe you will, Bernard, hateful as you are at times; but you will care for me more if you let me have my own way now. I am sure I have had trouble enough to persuade father about the dancing, but he has consented at last.'

'But who will go with you? Remember, you look much older than you are, and you are very remarkable, Ursula.'

She blushed, and look pleased, evidently accepting his words as a compliment.

'Father will go with me. Besides, I do know a little about dancing, Bernard, and shall not feel shy or awkward. The old violinist up-stairs once advised my going on the stage, and gave me lessons on the sly.'

'It all seems strange to me, Ursula,' he replied slowly, with vexation flavouring his voice, though he evidently tried to keep himself under control. What can have put such ideas as learning to dance into your head, especially so soon after we two—'

'Hush! not a word about that! Remember, we agreed to keep the matter dark; and father has a great deal to annoy him just now, without hearing of our foolishness.'

'Foolishness! So you have come already to calling it that!' he cried indignantly.

'No, no!' she answered quickly -truth to say, a little frightened at his vehemence—'I did not mean anything to vex you; but you know it is better we should guard our secret at present.'

'Not if you insist on doing things I disapprove of.'

'You must not disapprove, that's a dear kind Bernard! She coaxed, believing soft words to be her best policy, although she chafed within at his interference. 'You know you ought to like to let me have what I want-that is, if you really and truly care for me, as you say you do. And of all things in the world I want to go to a ball, and be able to dance like other girls.'

'Like other girls?'

'Like other ladies, then, if the term suits you better.'

'A ball, Ursula! What ball could

you go to but a public one?—a mixed affair, at which no wife of mine shall put in an appearance. I swear I won't permit such a thing; and you-you should know better than to ask to do what would be unseemly and improper.'

'Father told me he would take me to a ball; and I will gothere!'

'Not if I can prevent it.'

'But you can't, unless you choose to reveal our secret.'

'You will deliberately disobey me, then?'

'Yes!'

She stared full into his face with hardihood; but her courage fell, and she checked herself, seeing how deadly white he grew; and as she looked at him, the hot colour slowly faded out of the half-alarmed half-insolent beauty of her face. She burst out crying then-tears of anger, that fell rapidly down her cheeks.

'I didn't mean quite that,' she sobbed; 'only you are cruel and unreasonable. It is enough to make any woman say things which are wrong, and do them too; but I do not wish to be stubborn-only to persuade you that I am right.'

Bernard gazed down into the depths of the dusky eyes glittering with drops, and, with all his stern resolves, was a little softened. Ursula saw this, and followed up her advantage at once.

'It is settled that father is to go with me everywhere, and you-you can come too, if you like; so I shall have double protection.'

He was not one whit convinced. Still he loved her to a certain extent, and yielded to her persuasion; but so sternly that his very consent was intimidating.

Ursula, my wife,' he said, in a low determined tone, taking her two hands and wringing them hard, 'if I give way in this, it is with a firm conviction that matters are

going wrong, and will end in evil for both of us. Mark my words: you and I shall one day repent of this beginning of the new life on which your heart seems set. I cannot forget, however, how little pleasure you have had, and how keen a relish you possess for it; so I shall say no more against your wishes. Go to the places you want, but understand me clearly. If through going there, or by any other means, you are led to forget what you are and what I am, for the space of one single moment, I will have no forbearance, no mercy.'

'Bernard, don't talk like that— you frighten me!' cried the girl nervously; but her hands were still grasped with force, and Bernard, with kindling pupils and resolute expression, went on,

I may have done a very wrong thing in marrying you, as I have done an unwise thing in keeping that marriage secret; but as we sow, so we must reap. God help us both if the harvest should prove to us what I fear it will, for no two human beings will ever have had such need of help!'

He dropped her hands and went back to his seat; and as he vainly tried to resume his work Ursula watched him, first through a mist of tears, and then with a triumphant smile creeping over her mouth. After a few minutes he felt a pair of white arms go round his neck, and a cheek like moist damask roses pressed to his.

'Bernard,' she whispered, 'thank you very much for consenting. Can't you understand that I want to make myself a lady for your sake? Father's new stock of wealth gives me a hope of having things that I have never had a chance of having before. See there is a piano come, so that I may have music-lessons as well!'

Bernard looked round, and observed the piano for the first time

-a flimsy second-hand affair, but still a 'piano.' There did seem, he thought, a sort of systematic effort to complete Ursula's imperfect education. This, to a certain extent, relieved a part of the anxiety that had oppressed him, and he began to view things in another light. If Ralph Pierce had come into possession of means sufficient to improve his daughter's education, what cause of complaint could reasonably be made? The girl had

been such a holocaust on the altar of poverty all her days, that it seemed positively cruel to wish to debar her entirely from the pleasures of her age and sex. So, again, with a generous feeling of self-sacrifice, Bernard yielded his will against his better judgment, as many a strong man has done before him, and will do after him, in this world.

With Ursula it was again all sunshine. She was not generous enough to consider the sacrifice made for her, nor did the pain, visible enough on his features, detract a particle from the pleasure of winning her own way. She beamed smiles upon him, and lavished caresses on him, with an utter abandon, which repelled instead of pleasing him. And thus, unconsciously, the two so recently made one began to take separate paths, and have separate thoughts, that diverged further and further each day.

Ursula went to a 'private' class for dancing, for Bernard had insisted on that, with but small wisdom in his decree, since there she met something beyond mere children. She was, in fact, thrown amongst men and women of a position above her own, richly attired, full of pride and folly, and well calculated to excite all the vanity and wild ambition of a young creature so utterly unregulated in mind as she was; and Ursula was so

thoroughly sickened with poverty, that she learnt to look upon it as the only great evil of life, from which she was determined to escape upon any terms.

She had not thought in this way so deeply until after one or two visits from John Lock, whose jesuitical eloquence impressed her wonderfully. Up to the time of seeing him, the possibility of wealth, or of arriving at an equality with the people she now met, had never presented itself save as a wild dream. She had looked on Bernard so much as her superior in everything, that the ambition of her nature had been gratified by his praise and admiration, and by the liking which had drawn him into a hasty and unsanctioned marriage. But now that the specious looks and smiles, the scarcely covert and honeyed phrases, of John Lock had awakened the intense vanity inherent in her, Bernard, so lately an object of adulation, fell into the shade, with his reticence and coldness, and became an object of indifference, if not of dislike.

It was not likely that Ursulavain, ignorant, teeming with ambition, mercenary to the backbone, and covetous of all her sex whose lot was cast in pleasanter places than her own-would, or even could, resist the glittering net woven

for her by the human spider known to her as her father's bosom friend.' And he, as he marked how the foolish unwary fly grew daily. more entangled in his web, wore an evil mocking smile on his full lips, and whenever he regarded her his swarthy face flushed and beamed triumphantly.

Meanwhile Ralph Pierce's life was beset with thorns, thorns which he was powerless to pluck away. At this period it seemed to him as though Heaven had given him a foretaste of the punishment that awaited him hereafter. His cheeks grew lank and fell into deep hollows, and his eyes-always sad and haggard-burned with a strange feverish light, as he watched, with painful pertinaciousness, each look and movement of the arch-fiend who had found him once more, only as if to drop gall and wormwood into his daily portion.

Stealing away now and then to the solitude of his poverty-stricken room, where there were no witnesses to his want of manhood, the poor old man, grovelling on the bare boards, would cry like a little child, and mutter to himself over and over again, in a dull, monotonous, helpless sort of voice, ‘O God, O God! The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children!'

IN a satirical farce which delighted our fathers and mothers, and which, even in recent days, has entertained a few of us youth,' a gentleman's gentleman asks another gentleman's gentleman, 'Who wrote Shakespeare?' To which question the reply, not without point, is, 'Colley Cibber.' Between Shakespeare's Richard III. and Cibber's Richard III. there is ever and anon a revival of the popular disputewhich is the right Richard for the stage? How would it do to introduce a purely historical Richard, remodelled on the theories of Mr. Froude? Very indifferently, I imagine. Not to Clio are these sacrifices of the poet's intention offered up, but to some much humbler Muse-to one, if any such there be, presiding over the empiric and uncertain laws of stage effect. Idle reader, let us look back, you and me, at the many and diverse projects of managers and playwrights for fitting Shakespeare easily to the general understanding, by all kinds of ingenious shoeing-horns; none of which, to speak the truth, has ever quite availed in keeping his plays from occasionally slipping down at heel. And do not let us grant too much to those of our friends who may call the inquiry trivial. Let us rather beg them to distinguish between what is trivial and what is natural-between the curiosity which hunts up useless knowledge, and the habit of critical research which is a healthy mental discipline. We may learn something concerning the English popular appetite for amusements, merely

by observing when and how far it has seemed to theatrical managers needful or expedient to pepper and spice the poetical drama, seasoning it in accordance with the public taste. It seems to me a hopeful as it is an undeniable fact that, with all our modern love of scenic realism and mechanical illusions on the stage, we steer much closer to the original intention of the dramatist than was the practice in what are called the British theatre's palmy days. Be this so or not, the question is, I think, well worth considering, whether the 'groundlings' are pleased with a better or a worse representation than delighted them of yore; whether the shoeing-horns they need for the comfortable adjustment of a good play to their understandings-you will bear with so ancient and harmless a pun-are handy implements or complicated machines; and whether, in fact, there is or is not a prospect that those same 'groundlings' may be brought to an acceptance of what is true and excellent in dramatic art, without any shoeing-horns at all.

Cibber's shoeing-horn, provocative though it has been of controversy, and generally denounced by the sounder class of critics, was one of the simplest ever employed to the popular end of making Shakespeare come on easy.' The expert old adapter takes a handsome slice from the fifth act of King Henry VI. and makes it the beginning of King Richard III. He transposes the language more than a little, shifts a scene or two, slashes