to motives of a tenderer and more personal nature. He had never seen her since they had played together as children, and was no less astonished at the improvement a few years had effected, than smitten by the charms which he now contemplated in the full perfection of her womanhood. The visits, which had been begun by policy, were now continued from an attachment to his fair cousin, that gathered strength every day; and he looked forward to the possibility of reconciling all parties to their marriage, by making it appear that he was a compulsory witness in the prosecution of his uncle, and by offering to settle upon Julia the family estate which was to be restored to him by the Government. Such an expectation was not less absurd than sordid; but knaves are peculiarly liable to make the most foolish miscalculations, because they judge of others by themselves, and thus lay the foundation of their plans upon a wrong estimate of human nature.

For some time, however, he succeeded in in

gratiating himself with Julia. Being allowed to communicate with the prisoner by letter, Walton's family learnt his determination to plead guilty, a resolution which they combated most strenuously, and which his nephew also condemned as pusillanimous self-abandonment. He even accompanied Julia to a celebrated Counsellor at Westminster, to solicit him to undertake the defence; and it was upon this OCcasion that Jocelyn had seen them arm-in-arm together as he came out of the Banqueting Room, where the King had been touching for the evil, although his transient glance of the man's figure did not allow him to recognize Mark Walton.

In one instance, the growing attachment of the latter enabled him to afford Julia an essential service. On the day that she had been rescued from the fire, and sent away in a carriage by the King's orders, he happened to recognize her as the vehicle drove up to the back-door of Baptist May's apartments. The latter was the

keeper of the Privy Purse, and the chosen minister of his Majesty's private amours; a circumstance which immediately suggested to Mark Walton the motives with which his cousin was conveyed to this disreputable haunt. Too abject a courtier to interfere openly with any proceeding in which the royal pleasures were concerned, he contented himself for the present with noticing the person who had accompanied her, who proved to be one of the King's minions, with whom he had a slight acquaintance. By throwing himself in this man's way, and alluding to the affair in which he had been engaged in a tone of raillery and badinage, he extracted from him all the particulars; and no sooner learnt that Julia was in a state of insensibility at the time of the rescue, than his crafty and scheming brain suggested to him the possibility of his passing himself off as her deliverer. If, in addition to this claim upon her gratitude, he could release her from her present dangerous predicament, he flattered himself that such im

portant services would go far to counteract any prejudice she might imbibe against him for his conduct towards his uncle, even should he fail to make it appear that he was driven to act in that affair by an inevitable necessity.

The great difficulty was to extricate her from Bab May's clutches without compromising himself or appearing in the transaction; for he was sensible that if he made the King his enemy, the confiscated estate would, in all probability, never reach his hands, and he should have then incurred the odium of his uncle's sacrifice without reaping a single advantage. After some days' plotting and planning, he presented himself to Lady Castlemaine, declared his passion for Julia, stated the circumstances under which the King had ordered her to be secreted in Bab May's apartments, enlarged upon her dazzling charms and great powers of fascination, in order to provoke her ladyship's jealousy, and concluded by imploring her assistance in effecting the liberation of his mistress.

This her ladyship, always afraid of new rivals, readily undertook to do; adding that there was

no time to be lost, as the King, who had been confined to his room from a severe cold occasioned by his exertions at the time of the Fire, meant to go out that day for the first time, and she had heard him, not two hours before, give orders that May should be in attendance in the afternoon.

Between the Keeper of the King's privy purse and her ladyship, there had long existed a league offensive and defensive, cemented by a sense of mutual advantage from its continuance, and a fear of the consequences they might respectively entail upon each other by a rupture.

There was therefore little difficulty in the present negociation. Her ladyship undertook to bear him harmless; and May, who knew that it was much safer to offend the King than the King's mistress, willingly introduced her to his prisoner, and suffered Mark Walton to accompany her into the apartment. The clothes that