market for a twelvemonth: and then come smaller parties, and impromptu teas, and dinners, and all the reckless expenditures that women abandon themselves to, when once you give them their head at all. When Colonel Dashwood pondered over these things, and saw that his daughters managed to be invited out and admired merely on the strength of their own good looks, and one inexpensive, semi-polemical At Home' a year-I repeat it, I can quite believe he felt duly thankful for the nerves and views, and blessed saving of money generally, that the second Mrs. Dashwood, together with her nice little fortune of so many thousand pounds, had brought

to him.

All

But Jane and Milly saw in their father's ready submission to his wife's wishes only another cause of righteous detestation to their stepmother, another element of discord in their loveless, disunited home. All the practical efforts of Mrs. Dashwood's religion, were, as far as they were concerned, deprivation of the things they cared for. Colonel Dashwood's philanthropy (and he was very philanthropical-took chairs at meetings, and made long twaddling speeches after the manner of his kind) was put off, his children said, on the threshold of his own house, and never extended to them. As Esther got to know more of their home and of their training, she wondered less and less at the scanty affection bestowed by the Dashwood girls upon the members of their own family, and at the cool and systematic deceit existing between every one of the entire household towards the rest. Upon Milly, faulty though she was, her bringing up had exercised a less powerful influence for bad than upon Jane. Millicent Dashwood's, like her father's, was a temperament precisely fitted for extracting the greatest possible amount of personal gratification, and the very smallest of personal suffering, out of any position of life in which she might find herself placed. Her loves, her sympathies, her dislikes, were all of the same moderate and prudent temperature. You could just look

onward twenty or thirty years, and imagine her then as Colonel Dashwood was at present; performing all expedient duties well, and digesting her dinner, and living within her income, and caring very little for anything beyond her own ease, and being very well thought of indeed by the world at large.

Was she upright? was she conscientious? No one living-no, not herself-ever knew as much as that of Millicent Dashwood. Common sense and thorough selfishness and a cool temperament kept heras they keep hundreds like herfrom ever infringing any law, the infringement of which should entail penalty on herself. She simply did not know the meaning of refined or fierce temptation, and consequently it was impossible for her to be tempted beyond her power of resist ance. Jane's sensitive organization and utter deficiency of moral strength made her whole life a series of struggles and failures; of struggles against conditions and temptations too strong for her; of surrenders to things which, even while they conquered her, she had enough nobility of soul to revolt from and despise. And Milly, like the true little Pharisee that she was, already indulged in much secret thankfulness to Providence that she was not as poor dear Jenny in her frequent short-comings, and spasmodic endeavours after impossible perfection.

The fact was, no real moral discipline in childhood had fitted Jane Dashwood either for the temptations or the weariness of ordinary human life. Mrs. Dashwood, in accordance with the traditions of her class, had early talked a great deal to her stepdaughters about their sins, and spiritual helplessness, and need of repentance and forgiveness; and Millicent, by the time she was eight years old, had improved so much upon her instructions as to be able to mourn, in the orthodox, casuistic argot, over all the iniquities of her childish days, and obtain little prizes of tracts and picture cards as a recompense for the sensitiveness of her conscience. But Jane could not play fast and loose with her own soul, even then. She could no more

lament over unfelt sins than she could steal the almonds and raisins from the sideboard, and go to sleep half an hour afterwards unhaunted by remorse, like Milly. Whatever she felt was real: and so, as she faithfully believed all that she was told in such matters, her conscience became really excited into precocious and unnatural sensitiveness. She thought herself fallen and lost, and she preferred despairing hymns to story books, and she heard mysterious calls and voices, and sustained raptures and trances.

And so I got used up in religious feeling, as I am now in everything else,' she said to Esther, once. 'I do things that I ought to repent for, as I repented then, and I can't. All the straining after repentance before I really knew what wrong was seems to have exhausted my repenting powers for life.'

She was mistaken in this, as her constant fits of self-upbraiding proved. Her temperament was too acute a one for even Mrs. Dashwood's training to have wholly deadened its capacities for suffering. But her repentances were still merely emotional, like those she had played at when she was a child: passionate revulsions of feeling bearing no fruit whatsoever beyond present tears and speedy longings after renewed and stronger excitement.

Esther Fleming was the first person she had known in whom her feverish unsettled spirit could find anything like repose. Esther was so little excitable, so strong, so rarely moved! Everything she said and felt was so real, so unlike the sentiments developed in the Dashwood atmosphere. Religion with her had been, as a little child, to learn her lessons, to weed the garden, to mend her clothes, to go to church, to obey. Miss Joan abhorred questioning children about their feelings; 'fostering their vanity, and training them to be hypocrites, as though that won't come fast enough without any assistance of ours.' She held that the only way to train them was to bring them up in stern obedience to all natural law, moral and physical, to make them temperate, enduring, self-reliant, strong;

and trust to their early-instilled unreasoning reverence for church and Sunday, and their Bibles, to keep them right in theology. And probably her theory was as right as any theory of education ever can be; Esther's nature, at all events, had not developed badly under it.

"You would be better if you thought less about yourself. altogether, Jane,' she would answer when Miss Dashwood had been mourning over the decay of her repenting powers. 'I am not at all sure you don't at heart like the sensation of being wicked. Self-analyzation, as you call it, may be a very fine and useful exercise, but I can't help thinking that if you would just give up flirting with Arthur Peel, and not seek so many occasions of falling, it would be more to the purpose.

Esther did not know then how near poor Jane's heart her foolish passion lay. When she found what the girl's love for Arthur Peel really was, she could never bring her lips to say anything harsh or strong-minded upon the subject again.

CHAPTER XXI.

FIFTY THOUSAND POUNDS.

One morning early, Miss Dashwood came round alone to ask Esther to walk with her. Milly had gone to spend the day with some friends of her own, and Jane felt a strong inclination for a quiet country walk; besides, she added, she had something very particular indeed, that she wished to talk to Miss Fleming about; something concerning which she desired especially to ask Miss Fleming's opinion.

'You must give me yours on something equally important to me,' said Esther. I have had an invitation this morning to a party at Mrs. Strangways for next Thursday, and Aunt Thalia and I cannot decide whether I shall accept it or not.'

'Paul will be there,' said Jane, laconically. I had a note from him this morning, to say that he will return to Bath next week.'

'And is Mr. Chichester sure to be at any party given by Mrs. Strangways, Jane?'

Quite certain, Esther-under some circumstances. There will be people at Mrs. Strangways' house on Thursday whom Mr. Chichester cares to meet.'

'I am sure everybody seems to be taking up with Mrs. Strangways now,' cried Miss Whitty, who was busily disrobing Mrs. Tudor's chandeliers for an approaching tea-party. 'Whom do you think I saw with her this morning, Miss Dashwood?'

'Oh! I am sure I don't know,' answered Jane, turning sharply

away.

'Why, Miss Lynes-the Miss Lynes-the heiress, and Mrs. Strangways, and Mr. Peel was with them, on horseback. I was coming back from my little early walk on the common, and I knew who it was directly, though I've not been introduced. Miss Lynes's face is so familiar to me from her likeness to her uncle, Sir Samuel Lynes, whom I've played with scores and scores of times when I was a child.' (It was a peculiarity of Miss Whitty's to have played with everybody when she was a child: knights, baronets, poets-laureate, generals, dukes; nothing short of royalty stopped her.) And most surprised I was, dearest Mrs. Tudor, I can assure you, to see Sir Samuel's niece in such company.'

Then your surprise was very ill-placed, Miss Whitty,' replied Mrs. Tudor. 'A clothier's niece-'

'Oh, dear mim! an army agent's-' 'An army agent's, a clothier's, a tailor's niece, like Miss Lynes, may be well content that her fifty thousand pounds have brought her at all into the society of gentlemen and ladies. Mr. Peel means to marry the young woman, I hear, and, considering the family of ruined spendthrifts he belongs to, 'tis about the best thing for him to do.'

Esther saw that Miss Dashwood writhed visibly under Mrs. Tudor's last words, and began to talk of other things as soon as they left the house; but Jane, of her own will, recurred at once to the theme of Arthur Peel and Miss Lynes.

'Your aunt is right, Esther; all the town is mentioning their names together. I know, of course, that there is nothing in it; how can there be? the very idea is preposterous; but still it makes me sick and miserable even to hear his name spoken of with any other woman's. That's what I want to talk to you about. We'll not walk in the town, we'll go away through the park to the common, where we shall meet nobody, unless, indeed, we are lucky enough to fall in with that ridingparty Miss Whitty told us of.' And then Jane laughed rather bitterly.

The ordinary Dashwood idea of a walk consisted in making the greatest number of turns that were possible, without being actually notorious, before the club-house, and up and down the principal gangways of Bath; and Esther felt a good deal relieved that for once they were to go away into the country and be spared the manoeuvring which walking for two consecutive hours along three streets demands. was a clear, still day of late autumn; the air summer-like, but for its intense stillness and fragrance from the dying woods; the colouring on the surrounding amphitheatre of hills full of those tender hues of russet-gold and delicate greys which render some mornings in December fairer than all the brightest days of May or June.

It

Bath is a beautiful place,' Esther remarked as they turned in the upper park to look back across the town. 'If I was condemned to live in any city all my life, I think I would choose this.'

'And I would sooner choose any other in the inhabited world,' said Miss Dashwood. I hate, I detest, I loathe Bath-Bath, and its people too.'

'The people you have spent all your life among, Jane?'

'The people I have spent all my life among, Esther. Leaving out papa and Milly, I shouldn't shed a tear at all the people I know in Bath being swallowed up by an earthquake at this moment.'

"The riding party on the common excepted, of course.'

'Arthur Peel excepted; the other two might share the general fate, for any wish of mine to the contrary. Not that either of them have injured me, or have it in their power to injure me,' she added quickly. 'Mrs. Strangways detests me, but as to poor Miss Lynes, with her great fat white lymphatic face, I shouldn't think it was in her to like or dislike anyone; and I am sure I could never have the slightest feeling of either kind towards her.'

'And are you sure that Mrs. Strangways does detest you, Jane? She is always wanting you to be with her; she is dreadfully affectionate to you in her manner. What can you have ever done to make her detest you as you say she does?'

'Not any one particular action, perhaps. It is not one great palpable injury, but a series of small rivalries, that make dear friends like Mrs. Strangways and me detest each other. I am a dozen years younger than she is-men ask me to dance oftener than they do her. She can look back upon scores of times when my vanity has been gratified at the expense of hers. Paul Chichester, who would not under any conditions pay her attention, became my friend the first day he saw me. Are not these sufficient reasons for her to hate me?'

'And yet she always wishes you to be with her.'

'Oh, yes, she has got to the point where rival aid has to be called in. A humiliating point that, Esther, eh? I wonder when I am thirty whether I shall be what Mrs. Strangways is now?'

'God forbid, Jane,' said Esther. 'I hope you will be happily married, and caring nothing for balls and parties long before then.'

'Married-to whom?'

Esther hesitated. Miss Dashwood's position as nominally engaged to one man, and unconditionally in love with another, made the question a rather difficult one to answer.

'Married to whom?' repeated Jane. Speak out, Esther, I want to have your opinion.'

'I hope you will be married to a man you can respect, Jane. You

would never be happy unless you did respect him.'

'Shall I tell you what I think of that style of moral sentiment, Esther? I think, like all copy-book things, it means nothing whatever. No pretty little axioms can fit everybody; good and bad, passionate and phlegmatic, alike. Respect and esteem may be necessary elements to some people's love; they are not to mine. I can love without either.' 'I spoke of happiness, Jane.'

'And love is happiness. When I am married to Arthur, I shall be happy, whatever he is, whatever he has been. It is just the one subject in which reason does not enter, you see, Miss Fleming. I suppose you allow that?'

'I-I don't think I know much about very passionate love,' said Esther; and recollecting her numerous remarkably cool judgments upon the defects in Oliver's character, the truth was borne in upon her, not without a sense of shame, that Jane's attachment, hopeless and misplaced though it might be, had yet stronger vitality, more of the genuine element of love in it than hers. 'I don't think I know much about passionate love, except what I have heard, and read in books. I think, now, that I could always reason, whatever I might feel.'

And pray to Heaven that you may always feel so!' cried Miss Dashwood. 'Pray that you may never love any human being better than yourself; above all, that you may never commit the desperate folly of staking your hopes of happiness upon the miserable chance of any man's heart being as stable as your own.'

'Have you done that, Jane?'

'Have I not done it? you should say. Am I not giving up the best years of my life, giving up all other prospects or hopes; am I not ready to sacrifice everything-my own soul if it would help him-to Arthur Peel! and how does he return it all? Don't speak, please, don't say anything; I can bear to say these things, but not to hear them said. Does Arthur really love me, Esther? He must do that;' she turned her face, white and excited, to Esther;

'he must do that,' she repeated passionately. Men are not like women, of course: they require excitement, amusement, a thousand things that look like infidelity, yet are not really so. Arthur's whole life is spent in committing actions that make me miserable, and still, at heart, I know he loves me. Why, just think how long our engagement has been going on-three years! It makes me old to think of it.'

"Engagement! I never knew before that there was anything like an engagement in the case,' said Esther, with a feeling of more interest in Jane's love affairs than she had ever known before. Do you mean me to think that you are actually engaged to be married to Mr. Peel?'

'Well, yes. I don't see the good of making any more half-confidences. In our way, Arthur and I are engaged.'

'Oh, Jane! and I have laughed at you about it, and said such things about Mr. Peel! How I wish you had told me all from the first!'

'Never mind,' cried Miss Dashwood, with rather a forced laugh. "You need not take it so dreadfully au sérieux. I said we were engaged in one way, and our way would not be yours, Esther. I amuse myself pretty well, as you see, in this odious life of ours at Bath, and I dare say Arthur pines no more than other young Guardsmen pine in London. Whatever you have said is not half so bad as what people in general say of both of us.'

'But people in general don't know that you are engaged to each other, I suppose.'

'Not now. My little attentions to Paul have drawn others as well as papa on the wrong scent, as I meant them to do. Very goodnatured of Paul to help me out so well, wasn't it?'

'I don't know, Jane. I am dense in such matters. I don't quite understand the advantage of it.'

It is very simple. Papa thinks I am safe, and does not watch me. Mrs. Dashwood thinks some one is really going to be fool enough to take me off her hands, and abstains occasionally from bullying me. Between them I get my freedom,

and see Arthur, and write to him as much as I choose. And Mr. Peel himself is regarded as so perfectly free, that all the world set him down as about to marry Miss Lynes.'

'But if I were in your place I don't think I should like such perfect liberty as that.'

'You wouldn't care if you knew, as I do, that all these reports are utterly malignant and preposterous,' exclaimed Miss Dashwood. 'Arthur marry Miss Lynes! with his fastidious tastes and admiration of refinement! I should like you to see her, Esther; I should only like you once to see her! You wouldn't be so desperately sure of her becoming my rival, if you did.'

Miss Dashwood's wish was destined to be accomplished. Almost while the words were yet on her lips, a sharp turn in the path brought them in full sight of three people on horseback, who had just turned into the upper park from the common, and Esther recognised instantly that two of the three were Mrs. Strangways and Mr. Peel.

'A most extraordinary coincidence, as your friend Miss Whitty would say, Esther. Please talk away to me, and let us have the manner of being unconcerned as we pass. Mrs. Strangways and that -that other person will be hoping to see me look annoyed: but they will be disappointed. Do look at the heiress's figure! Arthur likes delicate mignon lines-must not that waist be fearfully seductive to him?'

Miss Dashwood tried hard to make her manner natural, and probably succeeded well enough to prevent Mrs. Strangways and that

that other person from detecting the effort; but Arthur Peel knew, long before they reached her, what kind of feelings were masked by Jane's smiling face and ringing laugh. He felt horribly ill at ease himself. Women can carry off such a situation readily enough: indeed, I have known some of them, who are never so thoroughly natural, and in their element, as when they have to play one lover off against another, doling out equal hope to both, and utter despair to neither.

But