herself in front of the town prison. A sentinel was before the door. She went up to him.

"Was Guido Zondara brought here to-day ?—he is a painter," she added impatiently, as the soldier stared at her in surprise.

"I don't know.

passibility.

Ask the porter," he replied, and resumed his im

Lucia turned to the porter, and repeated her question in the very same words.

"Do you suppose I know the names of all the people who are brought here?" said that functionary, munching a hunk of bread and salame. "You must ask there," and he pointed to a kind of bureau within the court. But a woman standing by, talking to one of the jailors, had heard Lucia's question.

"A painter?" she repeated. "Why, of course, it was that handsome lad brought this afternoon for murder. You know him? Poor thing! poor thing!" and the shrill tones subsided into a cadence of passing sympathy, and the black eyes fixed themselves on Lucia with inquisitive interest.

"You can be allowed to see him on visitors' day," said the porter, answering the glance, more fraught with despairing longing than she guessed, which the girl had cast through the sombre doorway to the building beyond.

"You are his sweetheart, perhaps?" questioned the woman.

"No," said Lucia, "I am nothing to him." Then she turned and left them. The sight of the prison, the knowledge that Guido was really there, had roused her from her apathy, and awakened in her an intolerable pain. The formless horror and incredulity which had oppressed her brain suddenly lifted, and were succeeded by a rush of ghastly images. An overpowering desire to know more, to get closer, as it were, to the hideous fact, possessed her. She quickened her steps, and in a short time found herself in front of the palace where the murdered woman had dwelt. Two men with flaming torches stood at the door, and the portal was full of the white-robed, whitehooded Brothers who, in Italy, carry the dead. Evidently the funeral was about to take place.

A small pony-carriage dashed up,inside which were two ladies, friends of Countess Wanda, whom Lucia knew by sight.

They had brought a cross of gardenias and Cape jessamine, to lay upon the coffin; and now looked round for somebody who would carry it upstairs.

it."

Divining their desire, Lucia went forward, eagerly. "I will take

"Ah! c'est la petite brodeuse! Poor Wanda was kind to her. Yes, give the cross to her to take," said one of the ladies, glad to be released from the necessity of exertion on such a sultry night.

Swiftly, silently, Lucia passed up the stains, through the groups of Brothers, of servants, and of guests with long faces of assumed

solemnity, that broke every now and again into smiles of real indifference.

On the landing stood two gentlemen talking.

"I was at the baths of Lucca, and came up this afternoon as soon as I received the telegram. Poor woman! so beautiful! so young! such a tragic end!" said one.

"Cioronski is overwhelmed, I suppose?" observed the other.

"To tell you the truth," answered the first speaker, lowering his voice confidentially, "I am quite uneasy about him. His conduct. is strange. This morning he was wildly excited; asked endless questions; hurried on all the formalities; insisted upon the body being removed to-night, saying he could not be another night in the same house with it. And yet he would not leave, though of course everybody was profuse in invitations. Up to an hour ago he would not approach the corpse, only insisted perpetually that it must 'Gogo.' And now, there he is in the room with it, kneeling by the coffin, praying perhaps, and nobody dares go near him, his manner is so distraught."

"Is there not-you understand?" said the other gentleman, significantly tapping his forehead.

At this moment they perceived Lucia behind them, and heard at last her softly-spoken request to pass. They moved aside, and she went on. She had heard what they were saying, but apparently had not heeded it; or else the dumb fascination of horror which possessed her left no room in her mind for scruples. Impelled by an irresistible impulse, she made straight for a door slightly ajar, through which streamed a flood of light, and a heavy scent of incense and of flowers. A servant darted forward to prevent her entering, but was not in time. Bearing the cross of flowers she advanced, noiseless as a spirit and almost as pale.

The murdered woman was known to have loved light, and perhaps for that reason tapers had been multiplied round her coffin, until the blaze was almost dazzling. She lay in their lustre, surrounded and covered with flowers, her face alone visible.

With a throb of agony and awe Lucia recognised the outstretched wax-like figure, the little golden head, and was seized by the solemn wonder of the living at the newborn mystery shrouding the familiar figure of the dead. She moved a step nearer, breathless, her heartbeats sounding loudly through the silence. Dead? No! Surely some mighty longing would revive her, as the touch of the Redeemer raised the lifeless of old. Lucia mechanically stretched out her arms, a sob of speechless desire parting her sad lips. Was it only the flicker of the tapers, or a returning breath that quivered on the marble cheek?

"Wanda !"

The name breathed through the room like a sigh, but Lucia never knew that she had spoken. She stood rapt, chilled by a

sense of the eternally irrevocable, and yet trembling with a vague expectancy.

There was a slight stir, and, from the other side of the coffin, where he had been kneeling unobserved by Lucia, Count Cioronski rose, with a face so livid, so altered out of all knowledge, that she shrank from him as from a ghost. He stared at her for a moment in silence; then all at once his countenance changed, an expression compounded of fury and of terror swept across it, and with a stealthy spring, like a wild beast's, he threw himself upon her and seized her by the throat. A short, silent struggle took place between them; but Lucia's slender hands were no match for the muscular ones that held her, strengthened as they were by some maniacal instinct of blood. Already half-suffocated she had sunk to the ground, when the door was thrown violently backwards, and the terrified servants rushed in. The guests followed, and two men catching the Count in their arms, forced him to release his grasp. He wrestled with them for a moment, then fell back insensible and foaming at the mouth.

The maids, meanwhile, had dragged the half-fainting Lucia into the antechamber, and there loosened her dress and dashed water in her face. With a moan she came to herself after a few moments, and looked at them with bewildered eyes.

"Madonna santa!" said one of them, "why did you go in? It was a mere chance that through the door I caught sight of him holding you. I have seen him in awful rages before, but never like this."

A gentleman came out hurriedly. "How is the girl?" he asked.

"Ah! better. Send for a doctor, Carlotta. The Count is in an epileptic fit."

An hour later poor Countess Wanda's funeral streamed slowly down the street, with all the pomp that flaming torches, chanting priests, and decorous mourners could give it.

A great crowd had gathered along its passage, and by the time the procession reached the cemetery it had been swelled by a number of humble followers. These were some of the many sufferers whom the generous hand of the murdered woman had succoured.

(To be continued.)

ONE

HUGH LATIMER.

NE afternoon in the year 1490, a man, wearing the dress of a common country farmer of that day, might have been seen crossing the rich green fields near the village of Thurcaston in Leicestershire. His face seemed to show that he was in no very cheerful frame of mind. The weather had been gloomy, the crops were looking bad, one of the very best bullocks had just gone the wrong way. Altogether the farmer was not disposed, that evening, to take a very bright view of life, especially of his own share of it.

But when he drew near his own door, the door where the porch was all ablush with red roses, his face suddenly lit up with a look of anxious interest. There was a sound in the house which had not been in it when he left it this morning: it was the cry of a child. With quick steps his heavy mud-stained boots crossed the threshold. There, from a group of gossips, he heard that there was born to him a

son.

That boy was christened Hugh, and was to leave a story written on the page of English history which would have nothing to do with farmyards or cattle-breeding. He was to be known, in after time, as Hugh Latimer, the champion of God even to the death.

Hugh's childhood was very like the childhood of any other boy of his day who was in his position of life: that is to say, it was like the childhood of others in all its outward surroundings. There was the store of legendary lore learnt at his mother's knee; there was the rough and ready initiation into the everyday ways and habits of the world, which, in that age, fell to the lot of a lad in Hugh Latimer's rank of life; there were frequent visits to the house of the parish priest, who was the unfailing patron of every intelligent village boy, to pick up fragments of Greek and Latin, and of gentle manners above his station; fragments which a quick-witted lad like Hugh Latimer would soon join together, till they became a harmonious whole that determined the course of his future story.

The childhood of Hugh Latimer must have had yet another thing, which did not belong to every home then, which does not belong to every home now. That other thing was a solid groundwork of high principle and pure feeling. We know neither the name nor the lineage of Hugh Latimer's mother. She may have been the daughter of some wealthy yeoman who descended a few steps to marry the small farmer, or she may have been once a waiting-maid who arranged the silken robes of some grand lady. No pen or pencil has told us whether her hair was tinged with Norman black or Saxon brown. But still, between the lines of her great son's story, we can see her influence written as by a recording angel's loving finger.

Thus time went on, while year by year strengthening limbs and firm elastic steps told of vigorous bodily development in breeze and sunshine; while year by year, through books partly borrowed and partly bought by hard-earned savings, his young mind drank deeper from the well of knowledge; while year by year the young spirit looked out bolder and with a steadier gaze into life. Thus time went on, until the boy had become a youth. And now what was to be his Was he to stick to the plough and the spade of his forefathers, or was he to try to spring into some higher walk of life? His intellect and his whole nature made him long for different companionship and different employment from that he found in the old Leicestershire farmhouse; but there seemed little hope of his gaining either.

In truth, in those days of slow progress and rigid barriers between class and class, it appeared a very vain dream to think of the small farmer's son treading college halls at the side of young nobles and high-born gentlemen, and rising to be the friend of a king. But God had work for him to do in high places, and thither now He began to guide his steps. Latimer had, as yet, no idea of the glorious task his Lord was going to lay upon him. His religious convictions were, at present, all on the side of the Roman Catholic Church, which had, in some degree, befriended him, and helped him into the path of secular learning. But the Almighty Hand was leading him on towards the light, though he himself knew it not. Through the name made for him by his own already brilliant talents in his native county, through the generous kindness of some neighbouring gentlemen of rank and wealth, he was sent to Cambridge, and thus his first step upward was assured to him.

At Cambridge he soon made his mark. He gathered swiftly the golden fruit of all academic honours, and his strong individuality quickly made him both friends and enemies in the university. Every one that was brought into near contact with him saw plainly enough that here was one of the rising men of the young generation. He was not, however, exactly a popular man in his college. His words were too keen and brisk, his whole being too bristling with lively, original force for that: but where he won a heart he never lost it again.

Hugh Latimer was, at this period, sufficiently attached to the Roman Catholic Church to resolve to enter her priesthood: the clerical profession seemed to him the one which would suit him best, on account of his love of study. Accordingly, when he reached the usual age, he took holy orders. It was quite impossible for the restless energy of his nature to remain long in any position without making some active movement in it. Before much time had passed, therefore, after his becoming a priest, we find Latimer delivering lectures at Cambridge, in which he combated some of the opinions of the reformers.

But the young warrior was very soon to buckle on his armour in a different cause.

VOL. XXXII.

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