be said against his wife of course I heard. It was confused stuff. She was a foreigner, of doubtful birth, and an environment not at all doubtful. She had been an actress, or a singerat any rate had learned to earn her living by such, or, it was even hinted -especially, of course, by the women who had once so loudly sung her husband's praises by still less convenient practises. One thing, at least, was certain Victor Graham had behaved shamefully.

Soon after his marriage he had gone abroad, and his visits to England had been rare and short, and always, so far as I knew, made without his wife. Occasionally we had encountered in the street; once or twice he had climbed my toilsome stairs, and vaguely, though always kindly, expressed a hope that we should see more of each other when he had settled again at home. But of the third party to this arrangement he had never spoken more than once or twice, and always as "my wife." Of her very name even I was ignorant. Naturally I did not court a confidence my friend withheld; and besides, to tell the truth, I had so little curiosity in the matter. I was very fond of him, though years and absence had of course somewhat dimmed the bloom of our early friendship; I was quite prepared to like his wife, when the day came, if it ever came, for me to know her; but for that day I was content to wait with a perfectly equal mind. And now, it seemed, the day was at hand. Who, or what she was, mattered nothing to me, or what she had done. As long as she made her husband happy, and her husband's friends welcome-and from what I knew of Graham I felt sure this last at least would be so really I cared not how black the catalogue of her crimes might be.

So with a sense of rest and cheerfulness, which for many a long night had been a stranger to me, I betook me to my bed, and slept.

II.

My friend was waiting for me at the station. I found a greater change in him than the years only should have brought. He had been, I have said, singularly handsome in his youth. His beauty was not gone; but something was there that should not have been. The finger of Fate seemed to have touched the white smooth forehead before its time in the frank blue eyes there was a shade of weariness, and in the voice a note of sadness that had no business there in one so young, so blessed with what we all agree to call good gifts. Still, he seemed unfeignedly glad to see me; and as we drove over the few miles which lay between the station and his home we came nearer to our old friendship than I had ever thought to come again.

His wife was a beautiful womanno doubt of that. A daughter of the gods, but divinely dark. She welcomed her husband's friend most charmingly, in perfect English, touched with an accent that to my unpractised ear conveyed no particular nationality. By her look she might have been either Italian or Spanish; it was, at any rate, certain that she was of no northern blood. Her husband called her Laure, and they seemed supremely happy with each other.

The house was a rambling old place; a medley of all styles, altered and added at the whims of many a generation of Grahams. To such a purist as Lord Grimthorpe it would have been an eyesore and a profanity, no doubt; but to me it was simply delightful. There was a noble hall, in which we sometimes sat after dinner, smoking, for Mrs. Graham was generosity itself in the matter of tobacco; an infinity of passages leading to nothing; a glorious panelled dining-room; tapestry, stained glass, old oak, old armour, old pictures, old books; and, withal, all modern comforts necessary to nineteenth-century salvation. The grounds were all one would have expected with such a house: the gardens large and

kept in rare order, without any suspicion of primness, and there was a kitchen-garden which, besides the things convenient to such places, boasted an old brick wall that was in itself a crown of glory are there many things more good and comforting to the eye than a brick wall lovingly handled by time? And beyond the gardens stretched a noble park, wherein the waters of a winding lake danced silver-bright in the sunshine, or slept amber-coloured beneath the shade of immemorial trees. Whatever had been the reasons which may have led my friend to forswear the violent delights of life in London, when I saw the home fortune had given him, I had no doubt he had chosen the better part. And for me, such a refuge was as a dream of some impossible Paradise. After the ceaseless struggle for existence in my lonely chambers, this easy, careless, luxurious life was inexpressibly grateful. The return would be doubly bitter, no doubt; but for the present, the present was enough.

And SO the happy days passed, lazily, noiselessly, as though the great roaring tide of human affairs were rolling in another planet. The Grahams were little troubled with neighbours. A small village, boasting the usual factors of rural society, the parson, and the doctor, slumbered peacefully at their gates; and between it and the great house all needful good fellowship existed. But of other society that bugbear of country life there was happily a plentiful lack. In the lands that marched with Graham's stood a mighty pile of stone, the seat of some great lord. But it stood empty, save for a week or two in the shooting-season, while the owner scattered with both hands a fortune laboriously built up by his trading sires. The few squires about had left their cards, and the ceremony had been duly returned. But there the intercourse had ceased.

"We are all excellent friends," said Graham, "when we meet, but somehow we do not meet very often; perhaps that is

what keeps up our friendship. Laure! and I are at one in our dislike to leaving home, and except the parson and his wife who are both good fellows-you are the first guest we have seen. She does not seem bored; and I, as you. know, never did care much for general company." The parson and his wife were now away, making holiday somewhere, so there was nobody and nothing to interrupt the most even tenor of our existence. The days were passed in reading, sauntering, boating on the lake, and sketching, in which Graham was a great proficient, and I an enthusiastic, though not gifted, amateur; the evenings in talk and music, Mrs. [Graham both playing and singing divinely, as became her. A dull time, I dare say, most people would have called it; to me it was as the renewal of existence. Children, I should add, there were none.

I have said my friend and his wife were supremely happy with each other. Very fond of each other they certainly were, but happy was perhaps not quite the right word, if it must signify any sense of gaiety or cheerfulness. Cheerful or gay, in the common meaning of the terms, they were not. About Mrs. Graham, as about her husband, there was an air of melancholy, though with her it seemed rather a natural part of her temperament. It was not unpleasing, certainly not depressing; at least, I found it not so. Perhaps it suited with my mood. As we leave our youth farther and farther behind us, advancing into that debateable land which melts into the middle age, we rarely, I think, carry with us our fondness for the more active forms of gaiety. It is not well, perhaps, to say, with the wise man, sorrow is better than laughter; and verily not always by the sadness of the countenance is the heart made better. Nor have I any patience with those who, like Master Stephen, procure stools to be melancholy upon; the poetic luxury of woe has always seemed to me a very bastad sort of enjoyment. But as the golden morning of youth grows dim, as the en

hantments of the dawn fade into the ard light of noon, there comes, I ink, on most of us a tender feeling, seriousness rather than a sadness, hich is neither unpleasing nor inonvenient. And so the quiet sober tmosphere of my present life seemed o me precisely that I had always onged for. And it matched, too, with he lovely autumn days, with the olden woodlands, smiling somewhat adly in the soft September sunlight; he misty mornings, the crimson evenngs, the crisp touch of frost that came up with the darkness-all the rich heritage of an English autumn. Our summer had gone; our autumn was npon us; it was well to think of the winter.

But we were very far from sad; our hearts were not in the house of mourning. Graham had read much, and travelled much; many lands and cities of men he had seen, and could talk well of them, and of other things. And she bore her part in the conversation, for she had clearly been her husband's companion in many of his studies as in his travels; her tastes had either become moulded to his, or were in natural sympathy with them; while I provided just that occasional spice of disagreement which was needed to keep the symposium alive. And, when the talk had run its course, she would turn to her piano, and charm us into new channels of thought with strains of music and snatches of song, tender and triumphant, strange and sweet and sad, such as I felt ready to swear never came from one who had learned the mystery of music for bread. But always between her husband and me there was silence about her past. About their married life, which had been spent, it seemed, almost wholly in travel, he spoke unreservedly; but about her, save as the companion, the loved companion, of his travels, he never spoke.

And so we passed the days, as happy in our own way as three human beings could be. Once or twice I had murmured something about London;

SEPTEMBER had passed into October; the sweet Indian summer that England We sometimes knows was upon us. had passed a glorious day in the open air, roaming since a late breakfast about the park and the woods, Graham and I on foot, and Mrs. Graham on a strange, unkempt little pony they had brought home with them from some foreign mountain-land, as active as a cat and quiet as a sheep. We had lunched at a keeper's house far away on the skirts of an outlying wood, and had returned through the evening shadows to a very late dinner. Beautiful as the day had been, we had all three been a little silent and depressed, I think, as we made our way home through the dim paths, now thickly strewn with ruined leaves, and along the border of the quiet lake, up through a noble avenue of limes to the house. But dinner had somewhat renewed us; and after dinner we, the two men, walked up and down the terrace that ran past the windows of the drawingroom and library, continuing over our cigars a vivacious argument on some book-I forget what-that had been started during the meal. As we walked and talked Mrs. Graham played, and ever and again her voice came floating out on the stillness of the night in fitful company to her music. A favourite piece of hers had always been those lovely lines of Hood's, beginning

"Farewell Life, my senses swim,

And the world is growing dim." She had set them to some strange music of her own, and never had I heard, and never have heard since, anything so ineffably sad as the effect of the first stanza; then she would

strike a different note, and the strain would rise in gradual cheerfulness till it culminated in a burst of triumph with the closing lines

"O'er the earth there comes a bloom;
Sunny light for sullen gloom,
Warm perfume for vapour cold--

I smell the rose above the mould!"

That night she sang the first stanza, with a deeper, a more intolerable sadness than I had ever heard her throw into the words before

"Farewell Life! my senses swim,

And the world is growing dim:
Thronging shadows cloud the light,
Like the advent of the night--
Colder, colder, colder still,
Upward steals a vapour chill;
Strong the earthy odour grows---

I smell the mould above the rose!"

And as she sang the silver mists came creeping up from the lake, spreading and wreathing themselves over the landscape in all manner of strange and ghostly shapes. Then she stopped.

"Go on, Laure," said her husband; we had stayed our walk at the window to listen. "Go on; the vapours are stealing up; we want the gayer strain to drive them back."

But she rose and shut the piano. "No," she said, coming to the window,

no gayer strain. I am not in the mood for it. I cannot smell the rose above the mould to-night."

Yet as she came into the moonlight she was smiling, and her voice, though gentle and low, as always, had no unusual note of sadness in it as she bade us good-night.

"Are you sleepy?" said Graham, after we had come in, and the butler had set the usual array of bottles and glasses in the smoking-room. That butler, by the way, was the only feature in our life I did not like; a cold, sullen, uneasy fellow, though certainly a most admirable servant. Before leaving the room he had asked his master if he could speak to him for a minute; but Graham, usually most gentle and considerate to his servants, had answered, a little sharply for him, that the morning would be time enough for business. So the man

left the room, with a curious dogged look on his face which did not improve its habitual expression.

"Are you sleepy?" asked Graham, preparing to light a fresh cigar.

No, I was in no humour for sleep, I said.

"I am glad of that," he answered; "for, to tell you the truth, I have been sleeping so badly of late-which is not at all a common trick of minethat I quite dread the idea of saying good-night. For the last week I have had a bed made up in my dressingroom, so as not to disturb Laure, who always sleeps, happy woman, like a child. But, with your help, I think we should manage to exorcise the fiend to-night."

66

So we lit our cigars, and smoked and talked far on into the small hours; till at last Graham rose and said, 'Well, thanks to your good-nature and my selfishness, I think I shall manage to wear through the rest of the night pretty well."

"The dawn cannot be very far off,” said I, winding up my watch.

66

"Ah, well," replied Graham, laughing, as he led the way out of the room, we are not much troubled with early hours and morning gongs in this house. Any one who wished it might sleep till the first Monday after eternity, for all the wakening he would get here."

But when I got to my room I found that I had taken part of my host's burden on my own shoulders. I could not sleep. Accordingly I did what every wise man will do in such circumstances; I lit a candle, and took up a book which I had carried up to my room a few nights previously. It was a volume of Shakespeare, containing one of my favourite plays, the play of Antony and Cleopatra,' and I settled myself in a tolerably equal mood to endure what after all was no very great hardship. But the devil was in it-I could not fix my mind upon the words. I read and re-read them, but my thoughts were straying far away from great Egypt and her high Roman lover, straying

6