another thing. You've been pretty shy of my friends ever since we married, and lately, whenever one of them comes into the house, I notice that you go away and hide yourself. Now, I'm not going to stand that either. You'll come in to-night and take your place at the head of the supper-table, where you ought to be. Mind that, now."

She never changed the weary look of anger and disdain which had impelled him to tag this injunction to his list of complaints, and he, growing restless under it, had turned away from her, and, opening the hall door, had delivered the greater part of his speech half in the house and half out of it. The young gentleman not only wanted to stand well with himself, but had, perhaps, even a stronger desire to stand well with other people, and if he had suspected the presence of Ned Blane outside it is likely that he would have moderated his tone; for although it is undeniably a pleasant thing to bully the feeble, and to have one's way with full assurance of courage, where there is no danger, the most triumphant swaggerer would prefer to execute his paces in private. But, little as his presence was suspected, Ned Blane stood in the darkness, under the shadow of the hedge opposite, and heard more than enough of his successful rival's speech and tone to make his blood boil and his heart ache anew. He was not of the stuff of which listeners are made, and had lingered there with no hope of a glimpse of the family skeleton. He had been unaware of Hackett's entrance, for when he had once seen Mary beyond her own door he had retraced his steps awhile and had then returned. But the tone and the words together rooted him to the place, and he felt such a dangerous flood of rage rise within him that he knew he had only to make one physical movement to give it a chance to break all bounds.

By the time Hackett's diatribe was over, however, the boiling flood had all subsided strangely. He was bitter within until his heart loathed its own bitterness, but he was completely master of himself, and he knew it. The honestly-incensed husband slammed the door behind him at the "mind that now!" and so escaped without retort, and at the same time gave force and point to his injunction. He strode angrily down the little gravel path and fumbled for a moment at the gate. In his wrath he shook at it so noisily that he failed to hear Blane's footstep, and it was something of a shock to him to see the sombre figure looming so closely on him in the dark.

"Hillo!" he said, starting back nervously.

Good-night, Will!" said Blane, passing an arm through one of his with a singular slow and firm deliberateness. Ned's arm clenched on his old companion's so firmly that Hackett felt as though he were in custody, and made a half-unconscious movement to extricate himself, but the arm which encircled his felt like a bar of iron. Hackett had never had an idea that Blane was so prodigiously muscular as he seemed to be. He began to wonder a little what his old friend might mean by his silence, and the strange captivity in which he held him. Then he remembered the open door, and the recent address delivered to his wife-in the open air, for any passer-by to have the benefit of it!

"Don't you think, Will," said Blane, strenuously but quietly controlling Hackett's footsteps to the measure of his own, "that you'd better keep those little endearments private-eh?"

"Oh!" cried Hackett, gladly seizing on the chance this gave him, "you've been eavesdropping, have you, Ned? Come, now! that doesn't do you any special credit, does it?"

"Now I'll warn you," said Blane, with a curious dryness and coolness of tone which very much chilled his involuntary companion, "there's nothing I should so dearly like at this minute as for you to give me a reasonable chance of quarrelling with you on my own account. Will you take that back, if you please?

"

"Well," said Hackett, who liked less and less the iron pressure on his arm, "I don't recognise your right, you know, to make any comment on what you happen to overhear between my wife and me"

"Will you take it back, if you please?" Blane asked again, as if the other had not spoken.

"Haven't I taken it back?" Hackett demanded. "I said you happened to overhear, didn't I?"

"Will you take it back, if you please?" "I have taken it back," said Hackett.

"Very well. And now for my question again. Don't you think those little endearments between man and wife are best kept private? Tell me now."

"I don't see what it has to do with you at all, Ned. You used not to be a meddlesome fellow. Let a man mind his own concerns, will you?"

He was a good deal less bellicose than he

had been a while ago with the weaker vessel, but that, of course, was natural. He put more of good-humoured badinage than of remonstrance into his voice, and finished with a half laugh.

"I don't see what it has to do with me either," said Blane. The iron grip on Hackett's arm began to tremble perceptibly, and whilst the captive wondered what this might mean, he found himself suddenly released, but confronted face to face. "I do see one or two things," Blane was saying. "I do see that you've married-one of the best girls in the world, and that you're as worthy of her as I am to be an angel. I do see that you bully her and snarl at her, like the mongrel dog you are. Business of mine? You may thank your stars, my lad, that it's no business of mine, for if it were you'd suffer."

"Now come, Ned," said Hackett in an almost genial, and altogether allowing and friendly way, "you go too fast and too far. You do now, really. I'm in the most abominable heap of trouble. I've had shameful luck lately, and nothing's seemed to go as it ought to go. And I've had news to-night that's enough to put any fellow out of temper."

"Go your way," Blane answered with something very like a groan. "I've done with you."

"I shan't bear any malice for what's passed between us, Ned," said Hackett.

"Very well," said the other. "Least said soonest mended."

"Ned's queer," thought Hackett to himself, as he went on his way. "He's very queer. He used to be prowling a good deal about -old Howarth's house himself. Is that it?"

So the one effect of Ned Blane's interference was that it gave Will Hackett a needle to prick his wife with, and that he made up his mind to use it.

CHAPTER VIII.

MARY did not appear at the supper table, in spite of Hackett's injunction, and when the latter went up-stairs to insist upon obedience he found the bedroom door locked against him. He reserved to himself the right to express his opinion with regard to this open defiance later on, and controlling himself without much difficulty for he was one of those people who need to say how indignant they are before they can get up any great force of steam-he descended to his companions. They were easily contented with his apologies, and were, indeed, rather pleased than otherwise to be freed from the

restrictions a hostess's presence would have imposed upon them.

The rosy maid, who waited at table, was amazed at the gaiety of the party, and more than a little frightened by it. She remembered the burdensome gloom, the terror and restraint which had been created by Abram's presence in her father's house, and her master's recklessness had something awful in it, to her simple mind. It even wore a look of impiety, and the rosy maid was in terror of a judgment, and broke a plate or two in her agitation.

Hackett's convives were four in number. Two were old cronies of his-by no means the pick of his old acquaintances, but such as fate and his own courses had left to himand the other two were strangers to him, found in his friends' companionship on that day's race-course.

"My friends' friends," said Will with his own genial and delightful swagger, "are mine. I won't offer you amontillado and turtle, gentlemen, but plain fare and a hearty welcome you can have.

There are people who do not care for these sudden expansions of the heart, but then, on the other hand, there are people who do, and Mr. Hackett's new acquaintances happened to belong to the latter type. They said they would be delighted, and they accepted with almost as much effusion as Will himself had displayed in his invitation. They were in all the better humour with themselves, and with the world at large, because the day's ventures had been prosperous, and they were all the more pleased with their host because his inspirations had for once in a way led him to choose the right horses, and they had followed his lead.

"And now, Will, my lad," said one of them, when the cloth was cleared away, "before we settle down I've a favour to ask you. This gentleman is a mighty fine judge of music. He ought to be, for he ran the opera in New York for three years-didn't you, Bob ?—and I particularly want him to hear you sing. In fact it's a treat I've as good as promised him-haven't I, Bob?"

This gentleman was a bald man in spectacles and evening dress. He had apologised on arrival for the character of his costume by the statement that he had been obliged to look in at the theatre in the great town hard by for an hour or two, and Hackett had been told, with an air of mystery and importance fully equal to the nature of the disclosure, that he had his eye on a singing chambermaid there, and had half a mind to

engage her. The two squireens were mighty proud of their knowledge of this personage, and to be permitted to call him Bob was a glory they would not have exchanged to have been at Waterloo, and barely to have won money from a professional exponent of the three-card trick.

The great man said, with no particular enthusiasm, that he should like very much indeed to hear Mr. Hackett sing.

"I'm not in particularly good voice lately," said Will, "but I'll do my best for you."

The entrepreneur leaned back in his chair, drew his glass towards him, and puffing lazily at his cigar prepared to suffer. His experience had made him familiar with the amateur tenor, and he dreaded him as the burnt child dreads the fire. Among the smaller of life's unescapable ills the amateur tenor bulks dark and large, and the gentleman from New York had suffered more from him than most men have; in part, of course, because of his position, which impelled musical incapacities of all sorts to whine and howl and growl and strum and scrape for him, but mainly because he was an uncommonly good judge of music, and bad music was as offensive to his ear as an evil odour is to the average nose.

At this ebb of his fortunes Hackett hailed with all his heart the chance of singing before such a man as this. He displayed no eagerness, but he had too much tact to make the common fuss, and wait for the usual eager pressure. He laid down his cigar upon an ash-tray and sauntered to the piano, and carelessly turned over a heap of music there. If in the whole range of English balladry there was a ditty on the rendering of which he particularly prided himself, it was that sweet old song, "The Thorn." "The Thorn." He decided that he would not sing more than once, unless the important personage especially pressed him, and there was no such great difference between his singing of "The Thorn" and any of his other pet ballads that the listener would be likely to note a falling off, and he wanted to create a good impression. So he opened the pages, balanced them on the music rest with a good deal of feminine-looking coaxing and persuading of the limp and well-used pages, and began.

Before he had sung through the first line the man of music rose softly from his chair, and dropping his elbows noiselessly on the mantel-board, suffered his chin to fall upon his hands and put his heart into his ears. From first to last-not a flaw. Tone, phrasing and expression absolutely just. The listener had heard finer voices, but he could count

them on the fingers of one hand. What pleased him, even more than the voice, was the management of it.

The tender, melting rapture of the captivating rascal's voice reached his wife as she lay sobbing in her bedroom.

"No!" I exclaimed, "by Heaven! may I perish, If ever I plant in that bosom a thorn!" He warbled on, never thinking of her, and charming all listeners' ears but hers and one other's. And as for her, poor thing, it is not easy to be angry with her, because anger stilled her sobs for a moment at this tuneful lie. The barbed satire of the thing struck through and through her. It had been his pet song in his brief courting days, and though he had always ogled her in precisely the same way and at precisely the same places, she had never pierced to the mechanism of the handsome and devoted eyes he made at her, and had taken the declaration to be as solemn a piece of earnest as if he had spoken it, and it had been in prose. It had been through this chivalrous and devoted tenderness of his that she had hoped to lead him from his erring ways and make a good man of him. So affectionate, so easily swayed, so facile in confession, in repentance, in promise for the future! And now. And now.

Ned Blane must needs torture himself, as happens with most young men who find themselves in similar case. He could have made choice among a score of streets and lanes to stroll in if he had a fancy for getting wet through; and by this time the threatening storm had burst, and the warm summer rain had soaked him to the skin in the first five minutes of its fall. But he must torment himself by being near his suffering idol, whom he had no right or power to comfort, and by the grim hate which was taking root in every fibre of him against the man to whom she was tied. And the song which struck up as he was passing for the fifth or sixth time made such an appeal to him as any man of common sympathy can understand. Perish rather than plant a thorn in that tender breast? The song itself was an unimaginable insolence of cruelty. Perish? He would have done it! Ay, a thousand times. The desolate heart ached as it had never ached before.

Young men exaggerate this love trouble at times, no doubt, and in a year or two Jane consoles for Sarah's want of feeling. And if Mary Howarth had married well and had been happy, Ned Blane could have put up with his trouble as many a stalwart, worthy fellow had done before and has done since,

is doing now, and will do. But it was not a tithe of his trouble that he was left out in the cold. It would have been hard that another man should make her happy, and not he; but he was man enough to have borne that quietly. But to have that pure soul throw herself away on such a man as Hackett-that queen of womanhood degraded, that sweet heart wounded, the delicate, sensitive, weak thing rated and scolded-oh! all this was hideous and too bitter to be borne. His eyes burned dry with anger and his whole frame ached with pity.

When the song was over three of the singer's guests were noisy in approbation. The important man turned his back to the fireplace, flicked off the ash of his extinguished cigar behind him, struck a light, took a meditative puff or two, and for awhile said nothing. By-and-by, when the others had done with their compliments, he spoke.

"Mr. Hackett," he said, "will you be so good as to tell me where you studied?"

"Oh," Will answered, "I never studied at all, to speak of. My grandfather went through three or four years in Italy. He taught my father, and my father taught me, what little bit he knew."

"Ah," said the stranger; "you come of a musical family. What was your father's

name?"

"Hackett, of course," said Will. He knew very well what the other meant, though he would not seem to do so.

"Of course," the other answered smilingly. "But his stage name?"

"My father had no stage name," said Master Will, rather haughtily.

"He was the biggest landowner for some ten miles around," said one of the young squireens.

Will had relied upon one of them to say this for him; but, in default, he would have said it for himself.

"I beg pardon. Did you ever think of carrying that fine voice of your own to market, Mr. Hackett?"

'No," said Hackett carelessly, fingering the pages of his music and looking round upon his questioner as he did so. "I'm not a rich man, but I've never had need to do that yet. And I'm not sure that I should care to do it. They're not a very gentlemanly lot," he added, with a very gentlemanly air, "that get their living that way." "There are all sorts," said the spectacled man, smoothing his head placidly with a hand all over rings; "Mario's a nobleman, as you know."

"Of course, of course," said Will. He was not ill-pleased to let it be thought he knew it.

"There's a good two thousand a year in the voice if you cared to use it," said the stranger guest.

"Oh?" said Hackett lightly. "That's a bait, if I could see it to bite at.

"Is it?" asked the other, still polishing his head and placidly puffing. "It's there to bite at if you like to bite. Will you sing us another song, Mr. Hackett ?"

This judgment from a man who ought to be competent warmed the vocalist's heart. He had been thinking of little else than of carrying that fine voice of his to market for a month or two past; but his habit of putting things off was native and rooted by habit, and what with that, and his pride, and his not quite knowing how to begin, his thinking had led to nothing.

"Do you sing in Italian?" asked the manager, turning to the canterbury and fingering the pile of music there. "What's this? 'Spirito gentil?' Try that, Mr. Hackett."

"No," said Will; "I'd rather not. I can sing it in a way when I know there's nobody by to see where I go wrong in the lingo. Here's 'My Pretty Jane.' I'm not afraid of that, if you like it." "My Pretty Jane,' by the manager.

all means," said

So Will sang "My Pretty Jane," and confirmed the good opinion the important personage had formed of him. The man in possession stole into the hall to listen, and so the vocalist had three more auditors than he counted on or thought about.

"And now," said Hackett, when his song was finished and the applause was over, "let us have a turn at the pasteboard." And the others assenting, they sat down to the table and began to play.

It was the host's style to play wildly, and so it almost always happened that he lost or won with great rapidity. To-night the run of the cards favoured him, and he won a great deal more than two at least of his guests could have desired to lose. At last, what with his winnings on that day's racing and his run of luck at cards, he had more than enough in hand to discharge his unwelcome visitor in the morning. He grew radiant, and he laughed louder and drank more than all his guests together.

There is a gambler's superstition, which, like all superstitions, will fulfil itself at times, to the effect that it is a fatal thing for a winner to count his gains before the end