"Who?"

"I was

"No matter for a name," she said with a shudder. talking of Russell. I was saying that all you, his old friend, could advance in his praise, was nothing to what I know of his goodness; but I love him not."

I felt it was far too delicate a matter for me to interfere about, and I therefore held my tongue, looking as mysterious as I could. In the dilemma I took another glass of claret, and cracked a filbert. She, too, was silent for a short space; but she was again the first to speak.

"It is odd why I should say this-this to a gentleman whom I have never seen before, who tells me that to-morrow is his last day in England, and whom, in all probability, I shall never see again. I say to you, who know nothing of me, who see me only in this melancholy and fallen situation-I say that which must make you despise me for my faithlessness, at least of heart, and my apparent treachery to your old friend who introduced you. But I love

another."

Her tears fell fast, and I remained silent and embarrassed.

"I love another, sir," she continued; "as unlike your friend, as darkness to day, as baseness to honour, as falsehood to truth. Bear with me for a moment. I thought nothing more of Russell, some fifteen years ago, than that he was a pretty boy, when I was, as they told me, a pretty girl. We are about the same age he is but two or three years older; and as our fathers dwelt in the same neighbourhood, we had played together in childhood; but the intercourse between our families was slight. When I first knew him, we had no notion that there were any such things as hearts to lose; and, God knows, I little dreamt of the horrid fate for which I was destined! There was, however, one-a gentleman he was, and he is in the eyes of the world, he was a cousin of my own-- I must take another glass of wine. Mr. Russell is away, sir, and you are not doing as you would have done if he were here; take some more wine.

"It is no use in dwelling on the story. He persuaded me to leave my father's house: I left it. I am of good family-nay, I may say, I am of high family, Sir George, and I left my father's house with him. It is a shameful thing to tell: I was wrong-oh! how wrong! and how was I repaid! Smooth and elegant of manner, cruelty and selfishness alone swayed him: he sought but his own gratification, and for a passing whim would sacrifice all the stock of happiness of another. I do not think he ever seriously cared about me-I once thought he did. But, for some reason-maybe he was tired of me, though scarce that, for I was not much more than seventeen, and it was but three months since he had taken me from my father's house ;-maybe he had other ladies in view, and that I do think, his present marriage is most unhappy, and, God forgive me! I am not Christian enough at heart to be sorry for it;-for some reason, no matter to me what, he left me one morning in furnished lodgings in London, telling me he would return to dinner. Fifteen years have passed, and, save in one or two casual glimpses, I have not seen him since. He left me ruined of name, exiled from my family, with scarcely a farthing in my pocket, a stranger, a beggar, and a word of scorn!"

"He was a scoundrel!" said I.

"So said my brother-my only brother, and he is no more!" A still bitterer flood of tears followed these words. I shall not attempt to repeat the broken and scarcely intelligible conversation which immediately succeeded. I learned enough to know that her brother had challenged her seducer, and had been shot dead on the spot in the duel which followed; her father had inexorably resolved on not seeing her; the man who was the cause of all this sorrow shortly after married a somewhat elderly lady of large fortune; and my new confidante was, at the age of less than eighteen, flung upon her own resources in the most pitiable condition of helplessness.

CHAPTER III.

One eye yet looks on thee;

But with my heart the other eye doth see.
Ah! poor our sex! this fault in us I find,
The error of our eye directs our mind:
What error leads must err.

Troilus and Cressida. Act v. Sc. 2.

AFTER a while, she continued, in a more composed strain

I knew not what to do. My brother's death, occasioned by me and so occasioned, almost drove me mad. I do not know why I should say almost-I think I was quite mad. The people of the house in which I was abandoned, were civil-nay, kind; but I felt that I could not remain much longer. Where to go I knew not. The Serpentine was rising every moment in my thoughts; one plunge, and then adieu to my misfortunes for ever. A still more dreadful suggestion arose; for one of the servants, who was not deceived as to my situation, hinted plainly enough that I might live by infamy. Oh, sir! not even in that time of horror and despair, shameful as you may think-as indeed you must feel my present mode of life to be, not even in thought came I to that!

"But as I wandered, one day-destitute of all; poverty and desperation suggesting the evil thoughts of self-inflicted death, or torturing me with dreaded anticipations of self-inflicted shame-towards the river, mere chance threw your friend Arthur Russell in my way. He knew all my melancholy-all my wicked story, and his heart melted. He brought me back to my apartments, he put an end at once to my pecuniary difficulties. I accepted these favours from him, as from the lad who had been the playfellow of my childhood, without scruple. He interested himself with my angry father, but in vain. He endeavoured to arouse the feelings and sympathies of my false lover, but in vain. He tried everything that the most zealous and the most honourable friend could do to lift me from my sunken position, but in vain. Just then his uncle died. He offered me an asylum in his house. God forgive me! I accepted it. How it is that we are thus living, I hardly know-nor does he. We liked one another's society, and our connexion became daily more and more intimate almost without our observing its progress. I have been a sad impediment to him in his onward course in life; but he loves me. Often and often has he pressed me to marry him. Oh! Arthur, Arthur! I cannot, I cannot !"

Why not?" I asked: "if he wishes it, it may be easily managed. As for society-"

"Society!" she said, flashing her dark and fierce eyes upon me,— Society! do you think I care for that phantom of folly? Let me be in or out of it, it is nothing to me.-But, sir-Sir George, pardon a woman's weakness! your friend Arthur Russell is all that I can praise, what he has done for me, what he has offered to do for me, shall never be erased from my soul; he-he, my seducer, has deceived me, cheated me, dishonoured me, robbed me, insulted me! by him my father's grey hairs have been, indirectly, brought to the tomb earlier than nature would have demanded; directly by his hand fell my only brother, but then he exposed himself in that, life against life; he has done to me all that can hurt or grieve the heart, all that can humble or crush the feeling of woman; and still I love him! I love him, Sir George, as I loved him the first day I confessed it under the winning lustre of his false, false eyes."

She wept. I could not restrain my tears, though I made a strong effort.

"And yet," she continued, "I tried to check all recollections of my love; and in part I succeeded. I was beginning to be reconciled to my lot, such as it is, and to forget-oh, no! but not to think of what had been. But now the wound is opened afresh, and my heart is torn again from its nest of quietude. I told you he was my cousin: it so happened that, in the days of my delusion, I gave him an interest in some estates of which I was to be mistress when I came of age. How I had the right to do so, or how he had the power of converting that right, whatever it might have been, into money, I do not know-I do not care. If it had been my heart's blood, I should then have given it him. Why do I say then? I feel I should do it now: ay! after all-after all, I should do it again!-But my father died, leaving his property in such a manner as to come into the hands of the lawyers, and it is absolutely necessary that I should appear. O that the estate was sunk at the bottom of the sea! I care nothing about it, I loathe its very name ! I have not thought of it for many a long year. And now, I must meet him-ay! and alone."

"You distress yourself," I said, "without much reason, dear Mrs. Russell. If you meet this gentleman, it is on business. There will be attorneys, and barristers, and all the regular people of the law."

"No, no! it is quite necessary, on account of one thing in my father's will that no person should be present at first, but ourselves. It is a matter that none out of the pale of the family must know."

66

"Even so, still it is business. You will talk of family affairs, deeds, wills, bonds, stamps, obligations, and so forth, with all the technicalities of law. There need not be any reference to other events." O, sir, sir, sir! that I could think it! I alone with him-I under the glance, within the influence of the magic of that voice, and talk of nothing else but the technical matters of the law! O that I could!”

"Why, Mrs. Russell, you should muster a lady's pride. Without wishing to speak more harshly of him than you have spoken, I think the gentleman's conduct to you has been such as to call up any other feelings than those of regard or respect, far less love. If a

I

man had behaved to me with so much insolence, putting all other matters out of the question, I should be far more inclined to kick him down stairs than to receive him with even ordinary civility." "You never loved, Sir George, you never loved as a woman. have mustered that lady-pride of which you speak; I have thought of all the wrongs I have suffered, I have thought of the slight with which he insulted me, the shame he has wrought me,-I have thought of his meanness even in this matter of the money, -I have thought on my dead brother and on my broken family; I have thought on the unutterable kindness, goodness, gentleness, generosity, the unwearied love, the self-sacrificing devotion, of this dear, dear gentleman with whom I live. I have contrasted it with the cold and calculating selfish heartlessness of the other ; -I have summoned pride, anger, contempt, disdain, revenge, remorse, to my assistance ;-and, God pity me! I feel assured that all will be defeated by one perjury-breathing accent, one softened look of practised falsehood. Well shall I know that they are perjury and falsehood; but can I resist them, when I know that they are assumed for me?"

"He is unworthy," said I," of such affection; he is

"

"Hush!" she said; "that is Russell's knock. I must clear my eyes. Do not say anything to him of my strange discourse. It was on that business he went-to have the papers ready for the lawyers: he is himself, you know, at the bar. It should have been done on the first day of term, it is now the fifteenth, but I put it off day by day. O that the morning appointed for my meeting him -it must come soon, perhaps to-morrow,-O that that morning found me dead!" "It was

She left the room. Russell returned in good humour.

a troublesome job," said he, "about which I went; but I think I have smoothed it. The matter is not worth talking about, nor would you know anything of the parties if I told you. However, I think you will be glad in general to hear that a great scoundrel, and a most heartless scoundrel to boot, will get a trouncing, if some people's scruples can be got over. And I am pretty sure, too, that even without exposing those feelings to pain, it can be done. He is a ruined man to-morrow, as sure as fate!"

"Who?" I asked.

"A person," said Russell, darkening, "of whom you know nothing; but a scoundrel. A month cannot pass over, without his being driven to the pistol, as an escape from the hangman. But where is Jane?"

"She left the room only as you came in." "Pardon me-I must see her."

In a few minutes she returned, paler than Carrara marble, in company with Russell. She cast her eyes on me as if to say, "Forget our conversation," and, at Russell's request, sate down to the piano, to sing, with sweet and unfaltering voice, the romantic ballads and melodies of which he is fond, as if there were nothing in the world to agitate or distress but the poetic sorrows sung in the melting notes that thrilled from her melodious tongue.

WAYLAC.

MY NIECE'S ALBUM.-No. 1.

MYTHOLOGY MADE EASY!

DEAR Minny, mine is but a musty old Muse,
And knows nothing graceful or fine,

Such as flows from the soft Seraph quills of Sky blues
In the Gem or the Annual line.

If you wish for a tale of a horse with five legs,
Or a dolphin in boots and cock'd hat,

A Jew boil'd alive, or a doll that laid eggs,
I could hit it off rather more pat.

Or, supposing we try a short touch at the lore
Of the bearded old Romans and Greeks?
Then muster your nerves for the horrors in store,
And imagine that Hercules speaks.

"Sing row-de-dow dow-de-dow, dub-a-dub-dub,
Tol-de-rol lol-de-rol-lol!

Here I come with my club, some dragon to drub,
Tol-de-rol lol-de-rol-lol!

When, a baby in arms, I came first to the scratch,
With the snakes who attack'd me in bed,
The biters were bit, and met more than their match,
For I throttled and pitch'd them out dead.

My voice was like thunder, my fist was like steel,
And the nurses all dreaded my gripe,

If they cribb'd but a grain from my infantine meal,

A peck-loaf and a bushel of tripe.

I have made my teeth meet through an oaken joint-stool In my pets, as a two-year-old boy;

At four, I was cock of the county free-school,

But learning was never my joy.

So I grew up a youth of a practical taste,

And very soon felt in the mind

To knock down the monsters who laid the land waste,

And the Ogres that gobbled mankind.

The Nemean lion made havoc and rout,

Eating shepherds and sheep far and wide;

But I gripp'd him, and squeez'd his tough chitterlings out,

And tann'd me a coat of his hide.

The boar, Erymanthian,-'twas precious tough work
To bring him to bay in the wood;

But I stuck piggy-wiggy, and turn'd him to pork,
And his sausages-oh! they were good!

And Cerberus also, the three-headed brute!-
Who was house-dog and pet to Old Nick,-

I unkennell'd and whack'd him, and tamed him to boot,
And taught him to carry my stick.