I. (1 <9 i^.'^ri"---: ■• -...-*■. :-'V.V ; v :>*£*■■ -i-:v> ■ LW AUDLEY'S Secket ! BY M. E. BRADDON, AUTHOR OF "LADY LISLE," "AURORA FLOYD," "JOHN MARCHMONyS LEGACY," "THE CAPTAIN OF THE VULTURE," "RALPH, THE BAILIFF," ETC. l£pi MOBILE: S. II. G EL. 1864 If ft 11 Farrow & Dennett, Printers, Mobile. U,.. . >Uiy^....03J^,..^ Lady Audlets Secret! BY THE AUTHOR OF "LADY LISLE," "AURORA FLOYD," "JOHN MARCHMONT'S LEGACY," ETC. MOBILE s S. H. QOETZEL 1864 LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET. BT THB AUTHOR OT "LADT LISLE," "AURORA FLOYD," ITO. CHAPTER I, LUCV. It lay down in a hollow, rich with fine old timber and luxuriant pas- tures; and you came upon it through an avenue of limes, bordered on either side by meadows, over the high hedges of which the Oattle looked inquisitively at you as you passed, wondering^ perhaps, what you wanted ■ for there was no thoroughfare, and unless you were going to the Court you had no business there at all. At the end of this avenue there was an old arch and a clock tower, with a stupid, bewildering clock, which had only one hand; and which jumped straight from one hour, to the next, and was therefore always in extremes. Through this arch you walked straight into the gardens of Audley Court. A smooth lawn lay before you, dotted with groups of rhododendrons, which grew in more perfection here than anywhere else in the county. To the right there were the kitchen gardens, the fish-pond, and an orchard bordered by a dry moat, and a broken ruin of a wall, in some places thicker than it was high, and everywhere overgrown with trailing ivy, yellow stonecrop, and dark moss. To^the left t'.iero was a broad gravelled walk, down which, years ago, when the place had been a convent, the quiet nuns had walked hand in hand; a wall bordered with espaliers, and shadowed on one side by goodly oaks, which shut out the flat landscape, and circled in the house and gardens with a darkening shelter. The house faced the arch, and occupied three sides of a quadrangle. It was very old, and very irregular and rambling. The windows were uneven; some small, some large, some with heavy stone mullions and rich stained glass; others with frail lattices that rattled in every breeze; others so modern that they might have been added only yesterday. Great piles of chimneys rose up here and there behind the pointed gables, and seemed as if they were so broken down by age and long service, that they must have fallen but for the straggling iry which, crawling up tho walls, and trailing even over the roof, wound itself about them and sup- ported them. The principal door was squeezed into a comer of a turret at one angle of the building, as if it were in hiding from dangerous ..■D'f a; DLEY'S SECREt irs, and wished to keep itself a Secret— a noble door for all that— ■ 1 with great square-headed iron nails, and so thick iron knocker struck upon it with a muffled sound^ and the. ring bell tha'1 dangled in a corner among the ivy, lest i' the knocking Bhould never penetrate the stronghold. rlorious old place. A place that visitors fell into raptures with; feelii ing wish to have done*with life, and to stay there forever. staring into the cool lish-ponds, and counting the hubbies as the roach to the surface of the water. A' spot in which peace seemed A en ii p her abode, setting her soothing hand on every tree and r; on the still ponds and quiet alleys; the shady corners- of the 8; the deep window- seafe behind the painted glass; the low meadows and the stately avenues — ay, even upon the stagnant well, which, cool and sheltered as all else in the old place, hid itself in a shrubbery behind the gardens, with an idle handle that was and a lazy rope so rotten that the pail had broken away from it. and had fallen into the water. A noble pla$e; inside as well as out,' a noble place — a house in which von incontinently lost, yourself if ever you were so rash as to attempt inetrate its mysteries alone; a house in which no one room had any sympathy with another, every chamber running off at a tangent into an inner chamber, and through that down some narrow staircase ig to a door which, in its turn, led back into that very part of the house from which you thought yourself the farthest; a house that could never have been planned by any mortal architect, but must have been the handiwork of that good old builder — Time, who, adding a room one- and knocking down a room another year, toppling over a chimney coeval with the Plantagenets, and setting up one in the style of the Tudors; shaking down a bit of Saxon wall there, and allowing a Nor- man arch to stand here; throwing in a row of high narrow windows in the reign of Qu.-en Anne, and joining on a dining-room after the fashion of the time of Hanoverian George I. to a refectory that had been standing the Conquest, had contrived in some eleven centuries, to run up such a mansion as was not elsewhere to be met with throughout the «■( tunty of Essex. Of course, in such a house, there were secret chambers ; the Utile daughter of the present owner, Sir Michael Audley, had fallen nt upon the discovery of one. A board had rattled under her feet in the great nursery where she played, and on attention being drawn to it. it was found to be loose, and so removed, revealing a ladder, lead- in-: to a hiding-place between the floor of the nursery and the ceiling of the room below — a hiding-place so small that he who had hid there must have crouched on his hands and knees or lain at full length, and yet large enough to contain a quaint old carved oak chest half filled with priests' vestments which had been hidden away, no doubt, in those cruel days when the life of a man was in danger if he was discovered to have harbored a Roman Catholic priest, or to have had mass said in his house. The broad outer moat was dry and grass-grown, and the laden trees of the orchard hung over it with gnarled, straggling branches that drew LAP* All.', I iiKT. 5 fantastical shadows upon the green slope. Within this moat there was, as I have said, the fish-pond — a sheet of water that extended the whole length of the garden, and bordering whieh there was an avenue called the lime-tree walk; an avenue so shaded from the sun and sky. so sen from observation by the thick shelter of the over-arching trees, that it seemed a chosen place for secret meetings or for stolen interviews; a place in which a conspiracy might have been planned or a lover's vow registered with equal safety; and yet it was scarcely twenty paces from the liouse. .At the end of this dark arcade then- was the shubbery. where, half buried among the tangled branches and the neglected weeds, stood the. rusty wheel of that old well of whieh I have spoken. It had bi good service in its time, no doubt; and busy nuns have perhaps drawn the cool water with their own fair hands; but it had fallen into disuse now, and- scarcely any one at Audley Court knew whether the spring hud dried up or not. But sheltered as was the solitude of this' Ijme-tree walk, I doubt very much if it was over put to any romantic uses. Often in the cool of the evening Sir Michael Audley would stroll up and down smoking his cigar, with his dogs at his heels, and his pretty yourig wife dawdling by his side; but in about ten minutes the baronet -and his com- panion would grow tired of the rustling limes and the still water, hidden under the spreading leaves of the water-lilies, and the long green vista with the broken well at the end, and would stroll back to the drawing- room, where my lady played dream}' melodies by Beethoven and Men- delssohn till her husband fell asleep in his easy chair. Sir Michael Audley was fifty-six years of age, and he had married a second wife three months after his fifty-fifth birthday. He was a big man, tall and stout, with a deep sonorous voice, handsome black eves, and a white beard — a w i.ite beard which made him look venerable against his will, for ho was as active as a boy, and one of the hardest riders in the county. For seventeen years he had been a widower with an only child, a daughter, Alicia Audley, now eighteen, and by no means too well pleased at having a step-mother brought home to the Court : for Miss Alicia had reigned supreme in her father's house sinc,e her earliest childhood, and had carried the keys, and jingled them in the pockets of her silk aprons, and IOst them in the shrubbery, and dropped them into the pond, -and given all manner of trouble about them from the hour in which she entered her (Seeps, ami had on that account deluded herself into the sincere belief that for the whole of that period she had been keeping house. But Miss Alicia's day was over; and now. when she a.ske.1 anything of the housekeeper, the housekeeper would tell her that she would speak to my lady, or she would consult my lady, and if my lady pleased it should lie done. So the baronet's daughter, who was an excellent horse- woman and a very clever artist, spent most of her time out of doors, riding about th nes, and sketching the cottage children, and the « r of animal life that came in tier wav. ■ r face with a sulky determination against any intsmaoy g \]>Y Al D between I. rselfanfl the baronet's youpg wife; and amiable as that lady v, as. she found it quite impossible to overcome Miss Alicia's prejudices and d convince the spoilt girl that she had not done her a cruel injury by marrying Sir Michael Audley. The truth was that Lady Audley had, in becoming the wife of ' : ir Michafel, made one pf those apparently advantageous matches which are apt to draw upon a woman the envy and hatred of her sex. She had into the neighborhood as a governess in the family of.a Surgeon in ,xhe village near Audley Court No one* knew any thing of her except • in answer to an advertisement which Mr. Dawson, the Burgeon, had inserted in the Times. She came from London; and the reference she puve was to a lady at a school at Brompton, where she had once been ft teacher. But this reference vr$s so satisfactory that none ether was needed, and Miss Lucy Graham was received by the surgeon as the instructress of his daughters. Hor accomplishments were so brilliant and numerous, that it seemed strange that ahe should have answered an advertisement offering such very moderate terms of re- muneration as those named by Mr. Dawson; but Miss Graham seemed perfectly well satisfied with her situation, and she taught the girls to play sonatas by Beethoven, and to paint from nature after Creswick, and walked through the dull, out-of-the-way village to the humble little church three times every sunday, as contentedly as if she had no higher aspira- tion in the world than to do so all the rest of her life. People who observed this accounted for it by saying that it was apart of her amiable and gentle nature always to be light-hearted, happy, and contented under any circumstances. Wherever she went she seemed to take joy and brightness with her. In the cottages of the poor her fair face shone like a sunbeam. She would sit for a quarter of an hour talking to some old woman, and apparently as pleased with the admiration of a toothless crone as if she had been listening to the compliments of a marquis; and when she tripped away, leaving nothing behind her (for her poor salary gave no seope to her benevolence), the old woman would burst out into senile raptures with her grace, her beauty, and hor kindliness, such as she never bestow.d upon the vicar's wife, who half fed and clothed her. For you Miss Lucy Graham was blessed with that magic power of fascination by which a woman can charm with a word or intoxicate with a smile. Every one loved, admired; and praised her. The boy who opened tho five-barred gate that stood in her pathway ran home to his mother to tell of her pretty looks, and the sweet voice in which she thanked him for the little service. The verger at the church who ushered her into the surgeon's pew; the vicar who saw the soft blue eyes uplifted to his face as he preached his simple sermon; the porter from the railway station who brought her songetimes a letter or a parcel, and who never looked ft5r reward from her; her employer; his visitors; her pupils; the servants ; every body, high and low, united in declaring that Lucy Graham was the sweetest girl that ever lived. • Perhaps it was the rumor of this which penetrated into the quiet cham- • LM>Y;AUDLEY'S SECRET. ■ 7 bers of Audlcy Court; or perhaps it Was the sight of her pretty face, looking over the surgeon's high pew every Sunday morning; however it was, it was certain that Sir Michael Audley suddenly experienced a strong desire to be better acquainted with Mr. Dawson's governess. Jle had only to hint his wish to the worthy doctor for a little party to be got up, to which the vicar and his wife, and the baronet and his daughter, were invited. That one quiet evening sealed* Sir Michael's fate. He could no more resist the tender fascination of. those soft and melting blue eyes; the graceful beauty of that slender throat and drooping head, with its wealth of showering flaxen curls; the low music of that gentle voice; the per- fect harmony which pervaded every charm, and made all doubly charm- ing in this woman; than he could resist his destiny. Destiny! Whv, she was his destiny! He had never loved before. What had b/eeh his marriage with Alicia's mother but a dull, jog-trot bargain made to keep somo estate in the family that would have been just as well out of it ? What had been his love for his first wife but a poor, pitiful smouldering spark, too dull to be extinguished, too, feeble to burn*? But this was love — this fever, this longing, this restless, uncertain, miserable hesita- tion; these cruel fears that his ago was an insurmountable barrier to his happiness; this sick hatred of his white beard; this frenzied wish to be young again, with glistening raven hair, and a slim waist, such as he had had twenty years before ; these wakeful nights and melancholy days, so gloriously brightened if he chanced to catch a glimpse of her sweet face behind the window eurtains as he drove past the surgeon's house- all these signs gave token of the truth, and told only too plainly that, at the. sober age of fi%-fi*ve, Sir Michael Audley had fallen ill of the ter- rible fever called love. I do not think that throughout his courtship the baronet once calculated upon his wealth or his position as reasons for his success. If he ever remembered these things, he dismissed the thought of them with a shud- der. It pained him too much to believe for a moment that anv on< lovely and innocent could value herself against a splendid house or a good old title. No; his hope was that as her life had been most likeh one of toil and dependence, and as she whs very young (nobody exactly knew her age, but she looked little more than twenty), she. might never formed any attachment, and that he. 1 icing the first to woo her, might by tender attentions, by generous watchfulness, by a love which should recall to her the father she had lost, and by a protecting care that should make him net D her, win her young heart, and obtain from her fresh and earliest love alone the promise of hi r hand. It was a \ romantic day dream, no doubt; but, for all that, it seemed in a verv lair way to be realized. Luc) Graham appeared by no means to dislike the baronet's attentions. There was nothing whatever in her manner that betrayed the shallow artifices employed by '<*■ woman who wishes to cap- tivate. a rich man. She was so accustomed to admiration from every one. high and low, that Sir Michael's conduct made vary little impres- sion upon her. Again, he had been so many years a widower that | 8 LAbY A! : 'LEY'S SECRET. pie had given up the idea of his over marrying again.' . At last, however, Mrs. Dawson spoke subjeoti The surgeon's Vnfe was sitting in the school-room busy at work, while Lucy was putting the (hushing touches to some water-color sketches done by her pupils. " Do you know, my dear Miss Graham," said Mrs. Dawson, "I think ' you ougnl ider yourself a remarkably lucky girl " The governess lifted Ker head from its stooping attitude, and stared wonderingly at her employer, shaking back a shower of curls. They were the most wonderful curls in the world — soft and feathery, always floating away from her face, and making a pale halo round her head when the sunlight shone through them. •• What do you mean, my dear Mrs. Dawson? 1 ' she asked, dipping her carael's-hair brush into the wet aquamarine upon the j>alette, and pois- ing it carefully before putting in the delicate streak of purple which was to brighten the horizon in her pupil's sketch. "Why. 1 mean, my dear, that it only rests with yourself to become Lady Audley, and the Mistress of Audley Court." Lucy Graham dropped the brush upon the picture, and flushed scarlet to the roots of her fair hair; and then grew pale again, far paler than Mrs Dawson had ever seen her before. •• My deaf don't agitate yourself," said the surgeon's wife, soothingly; " you know that nobody asks you marry Sir Michael unless you wish. Of course it would be a magnificent match ; he has a splendid income, and is one of the most generous of men. Your position would be very high, and you would be enabled to do a great deal of good ; but, as I said before, you-must be entirely guided by your own feelings. Only one thing I must say, and that is that if Sir Michael's attaptions are not agree- able to you, it is really scarcely honorable to encourage him." -i His attentions — encourage himj" muttered Lucy, as if the words be- wildered her. " Pray, pray don't talk to me, Mrs. Dawson. I had no idea of this. It is the last thiug that would have occurred to me." She leaned her elbows on the drawing-board before her, and clasping her hands over her face, seemed for some minutes to be thinking deeply. She wore a narrow black ribbon round her neck, with a locket, or a cross, or a miniature, perhaps, attached to it; but whatever the trinket was, she always kept it hidden under her dress. Once or twieo, while she sat silently thinking, 'she removed one of her hands from before her face, and fidgeted nervously with the ribbon, clutching at it with a half-angry gesture, and twisting it backward and forward between her fingers. " I think some people are born to be unlucky, Mrs. Dawson," she said, by-and-by ; "it would be a great deal too much good fortune for me to become Lady Audley." She said this with so much bitterness in her tone, that the surgeon's wife looked up at her with surprise." "You unlucky, my dear," she exclaimed. "I think you're the last person who ought to talk like that — you, such a bright, happy creature, that it does every one good to see you. I'm sure 1 don't know what we ■shall do if Sir Michael robs us of von." LAm A RET. V) After this conversation they often spoke upon the subject, and Lucy never again showed any emotion whatever when the baronet's admira- tion for her was canvassed. It was a tacitly understood tiling in the sur- geon's family that whenever Sir Michael, proposed, the governess would .quietly accept him ; and, indeed, the simple Dawsons would have thought it something more than madness in a penniless girl to reject such an offer. So one misty August evening Sir Michael, sitting opposite to Lucy Graham at a window in the surgeon's little drawing-room, took an op- portunity while the family happened by some accident to be absent from the room, of speaking upon the subject nearest to his heart. Ho made the governess, in few but solemn words, an offer of his hand. There wa» something almost touching in the maimer and tone in which he spoke to her — half in deprecation, knowing that he could hardly expect to be the choice of a beautiful" young girl, and praying rather that she. would reject him, even though she broke his heart by doing so, than that she should accept his offer if she did not love him. " 1 scarcely think there is a greater sin, Lucy," he said solemnly, "than that of the woman who marries a 'man she does not love. You are so precious to me, my beloved, that deeply as my heart is set on this, and bitter as the mere thought of disappointment is, to me, I would not have you commit such a sin for any happiness of mine. If my happiness could be achieved by such an act, which it could not — which it never could" he repeated earnestly, " nothing but misery can result from a marriage dictated by any motive but truth and love." Liny Graham was not looking at Sir Michael, but straight out into the mist_\ twilight and the dim landscape far away beyond the little garden. The baronet tried to see her face, but her profile was turned to him and he could not discover the expression of her eyes. If he could have done so, he would have seen a yearning gaze which seemed as if it would have pierced the far obscurity and looked away — away into another world. " Lucy, you heard me ?" > u Yes," she said gravely ; not coldly, or in any way as if she were of- fended at his words. ' " And your answer?" She did not remove her gaze from the darkening country side, but for some moments was quite silent; then turning to him with a sudden pas- sion in her maimer, that lighted up her face with a new and wonderful beauty which the baronet perceived even in the growing twilight, she fell on her knees at his feet. " No, Lucy ; no, no !" he cried, vehemently, " not hero, not here !" M Yes. here, here," she, said, the strange passion which agitated her making her voice sound shrill and piercing — not loud, but preternatural- ly distinct; "here, and nowhere else. How good you are— how noble and how generous ! Love you ! Why, there are women a hundred times my superiors in beauty and in goodness who might love you dearly; but you ask too much of me. You ask too muqhofmtf/ Remember what ' my life has been ; only remember thai i my very babyhood 1 have ■ i any thing but poverty. My father was a gentleman : 10 LAI' clever, accomplished, handsome— but poor— and what ;t pitiful vretfih. poverty made <>f him. My mother But do not let me speak of her. Poverty, poverty, trfals, vexations, humiliations, deprivations. Von cannot tell; you," who are. among those for whom life is so smooth and easy, you can never giiess what is endured by such as we. Do not ask auch of inc. then. I cannot be disinterested ; I cannot be blind to the advantages of.suoh an alliance. I cannot, I cannot !" Beyond her agitation and her passionate vehemence, there is an unde- fined something in her manner which fills the baronet with a vague alarm. She is still on the ground at his feet, crouching rather than kneeling, her thin white dress clinging about her, her pale hair streaming over her shoulders, her great blue eyes glittering in the duslc, and her hands clutching at the" black ribbon about her throat, as if it had been strang- ling her. " Don't ask too much of me," she kept repeating ; " I have been selfish from my babyhood." " Lucy, Lucy, speak plainly. Do you dislike me V\ . " Dislike you ! No, no !" " But is there any one else whom you love V She laughed aloud at \his question. " I do not love any one in the world," she answered. He was glad of her reply ; and yet that and the strange laugh jarred upon his feelings. He was silent for some moments, and then said with a kind of effort — " Well, Lucy, I will not ask too much of you. I dare say I am a ro- mantic old fool ; but if you do not dislike me, and if you do not love any one else, I see no reason why we should not make a very happy couple. Is it a bargain, Lucy 1" « Yes." The baronet lifted her in his arms, and kissed her once upon the fore- head ; then "quietly bidding her good-night, he walked straight out of the house. He walked straight out of the house, this foolish old man, because there was some strong emotion at work in his breast — neither joy nor triumph, but something almost akin to disappointment — some stifled and unsatisfied longing which lay heavy and dull at his heart, as if he had carried a corpse in his bosom. He carried the corpse of that hope which had died at the sound of Lucy's words. All the doubts and fears and timid aspirations were ended now. He must be contented, like other men of his age, to be married for his fortune and his position. Lucy Graham went slowly up the stairs to her little room at the top of the house. She placed her dim candle on the chest of drawers, and. seated herself ou the edge of the white bed, still and white as the draper- ies hanging round her. " No more dependence, no more drudgery, no more humiliations," she said : " every trace of the old life melted away — every clue to iden- tify buried and forgotten — exept these, except these." She had never taken her left hand from the black ribbon at her throat. LAJ)Y AITDLEY'S SECRET. H She drew it from her bosom as she spoke, and looked at- the object At- tached to it. It was neither a locket, a miniature, nor a cross : it wa* a ring wrap- ped in an oblong piece of paper — the paper partly printtd, partly writ- ten, yellow with age, and crumpled with much folding. I CHAPTER 11. OX r.OARD THE ARGUS. He threw the end of his cigar into the water, and leaning his elbows upon the bulwarks, stared meditatively at the waves. " How wearisome they are," he said ; " blue and green, and opal ; opal, and blue, and green ; all very well in their way, of course, but thres months of them are rather too much, especially " He did not attempt to finish his sentence ; his thoughts seomed to wan- der in the very midst of it, and carry him a thousand miles or so away. " Poor little girl, how pleased she'll be!" he muttered, opening his cigar case, and lazily surveying its contents; "how pleased and how surprised! Poor little girl ! After three years and a half, too; she will be surprised." He was a young man of about five-and-twenty, with a dark face bronz* ed l>y exposure to the sun ; he had handsome brown oyes, with a razr smile in them, that sparkled through the black lashes, and a bushv beard and moustache that covered the whole of the lower part of his face. He was tall and powerfully built; he wore a loose ^ray suit and a felt hat thrown carelessly upon his black hair. His name was George Talboys, and he was alt-cabin passenger on board the good ship Argus, laden with Australian wool, and sailing from Sydney to Liverpool. There, were few passengers in the ait-cabin of the Argus. An elderly wool-stapler returning to his native country with his wife and daughters, after having mode a fortune in the colonies; a govornoss of thrce-and- thirty years of age, goiug home to marry a mau to whom she had boen engaged fifteen years ; the sentimental daughter of a wealthy Australian wine merchant, invoiced to England to finish her education, and f-ieorgu Talboys. were the only first-class passengers on board. Tiiis George Talboys was the life and soul of the vessel; nohodr knew who or what he was, or where he earn Ut > rcrvbody liked him. lie sat at tin- bottom of the dinner table, ami assisvd the captain in do ing th<' hooori ol the friendly meal. He opoQedttho champagne b< and took wine with every our present; he told film I id led tho h himself with such i peal that the man must hai 12 LADY Al DJ :LT. churl who could not have laughed for pure sympathy, lie was a capi- tal hand at speculation and vingt-et-un, and all the merry games, which kept the little circle round the cabin lamp so deep in innocent amuse- ment, that, a hurricane might have howled overhead without their hearing it he freefc • owiu'd that he had no talent for whist, and that he t know h knight from a castle upon the chess-board.. Indeed, Mr. Talboys was by no means too learned a gentleman. The .pale governess had tried to talk to him about fashionable literature, but rge had only pulled his beard and stared very hard at her, saying occasionally, "Ah. yes, by Jove!" and "To be sure, ah!'.' The sentimental young lady, going.home to finish her education, had tried him with Shelly and Byron, and he had fairly laughed in her fece, as if poetry were a joke. The woolstapler sounded him upon politics, but he did pot seem very deeply versed in them; so they let him go his own way, smoke hi-; cigars and talk to the sailors, lounge- over the bul- warks and stare at the water, and make himself agreeable to everybody in his own fashion. But when the Argus came to be within about a fortnight's sail of England everybody noticed a change in George Tal- boys. He grew restless and fidgety ; sometimes so merry that the cabin rang with his laughter; sometimes moody and thoughtful. Favorite as he was among the sailors, they were tired at last of answering his per- petual questions about the probable time of touching land. Would it l>e in ten days, in eleven, in twelve, in thirteen? Was the wind favorable? How many knots an hour was the vessel doing? Then a sudden passion would seize him, and he would stamp upon the deck, crying out that she was a rickety old craft, and that her owners were swindlers to advertise her as the fast-sailing Argus. She was not fit tor passenger traffic; she was not fit to carry impatient living creatures, with hearts and souls; she was lit for nothing but to be laden with bales of stupid wool, that might rot on the sea and be none the worse for it. The sun was drooping down behind the waves as George Talboys lighted his cigar upon .this August evening. Only ten days more, the sailors had told him that afternoon, and they would see the English coast. 'T will go ashore in the first boat that hails us," he cried; "I will go ashore in a cockle-shell. By Jove, if it comes to that, I will swim to land." His friends in the all-cabin, with the exception of the pale governess, laughed *at his infpatience; she sighed as she watched the young man, abating at the slow hours, pushing away his untasted wine, flinging himself restlessly about upon the cabin sofa, rushing up' and down the companion ladder, and staring at the waves. As the red rim of the sun dropped into the water, the governess ascended the cabin stairs for a stroll on deck, while the passengers sat over their wine below. She stopped when she came up to George, and standing by his side, watched the lading crimson in the western sky. The lady was very quiet and reserved, seldom sharing in the after- cabin amusements, never laughing, and speaking very little; but she and George Talboys had been excellent friends throughout the passage; LAD'S AITDLEY'S SECR] ]',) "Does my cigar annoy you. Miss Morley?"' he said, taking it out of lils mouth. . "Not at all; pray do not leave off smoking. 1 only came uptolook at the sunset. What a lovely eveningl" "Yes. yes, 1 dare say,", ho answered impatiently; " yet so long, so long ! Ten more interminable days nnd ten more weary nights before we land." "Yes," paid Miss Morley, sighing, "i)o you wish the time shorter •1" "Do [?" cried George ■ "indeed I do. Don't you 1 ?" "Scarcely." " But there is no one you love in England ? Is there no one you love looking out for your arrival ?" "I hope so,"' she said, gravely. They were silent for some time, he smoking his ■cigar with a furious impatience, as if he could hasten the course of the vessel by his own restlessness ; she. looking out at the waning light with melancholy blue eyes ; eyes that seemed to have faded with poring over closely-printed books and difficult needle-work ; eyes that had faded a little, perhaps, by reason of tears secretly shed in the dead hours of the lonely right. "See?" said George, suddenly pointing in another direction from that toward which Miss Morley was looking, " there's the new moon." She looked up at the pale crescent, her own face almost as pale aud wan. "This is the first time we have seen it." " We must wish !" said George, "/know what / wish." « What I" "That we may get home quickly.'' " My wish is that we may find no disappointment when we get there," said the governess, sadly. " Disappointment! 1 " He started as if he had been struck, and asked what sho meant by talking of disappointment. " I mean this," she said, speaking rapidly, and with a restless motion of her thin hands; "I mean that as the end of this long voyage draws near hope sinks in my heart ; and a sick fear comes over me that at the last all may not be well. The person I go to meet may be changed in his feelings toward me; or he may retain all the old feeling until the moment of seeing me, and then lose it in a breath at sight of my poor wan face, for I was called a pretty girl, Mr. Talboys, when I sailed for Sidney, fifteen years ago ; or he may be so changed by the world as to have grown ^elfish and mercenary, and he may welcome me for the sake of my fifteen years' savings. Again, he may be dead. He may have been well, perhaps, up to within a week of our landing, and in that last week may have taken a fever, and died an hour before our vessel anchors in the Mersey. I think of all these things, Mr. Talboys, and act the scenes over in my mind, and feel the anguish of them twenty tin- day. Twenty times a day!" she repeated; "why, I do it a thousand times a day." Geonpe Talboys 1 had stood motionless with bis cij?nr in his hand. 14 LADY AUDLEYS SECRET. listening to her so intontly that, as she said the last words, his hold re- laxed, Mid the ci^'ar dropped into tho water. 11 1 wonder," she continued, more to herself than to him, " I wonder, looking back, to think how hopeful I was when the vessel sailed ; I never thought then of disappointment, but I pictured the joy of meeting, imagining the very words that would be said, the very tones, the very looks ; but for this last month of the voyage, day by day and hour by hour, my h^art sinks, and my hopeful fanci'cs fade away, and I dread the end as much as if I knew that I was going to England.to attend a funeral." The young man suddenly changed his attitude, and. turned his face full upon his companion, with a look of alarm. She saw- in tho pale light that tho color had faded from his cheek. " What a fool !" he cried, striking his clenched fist upon the side of the vessel, "what a fool I am to be frightened at this? Why do you eome and say these things to me ? Why do you come and terrify me ont of my senses, when 1 am going straight home to the woman I love : to a girl whoso heart is as true as the light of heaven ; and in whom I no more expect to find any change than I do to see another sun rise in to In the agitation of his mind he began to walk rapidly up and down the lonely deck, the governess following, and trying to soothe him. "I swear to you, Miss Morley," he said, "that till you spoke to me to- night I never felt one shadow of fear, and now I have that sick, sinking dread at my heart which you talked of an hour ago. Let me alone, please, to get over it my own way. She drew silently away from him, and seated herself by the side of the vessel, looking over into the water. George Talboys walked backward and forward for some time, with his head bent upon his breast, looking neither to the right nor the left, but in about a quarter of an hour he returned to the spot where the gov- erness was seated. "I have been praying," he said — "praying for my darling." He spoke in a voice little above a whisper, and she saw his face ineffa- bly calm in the moonlight. CHAPTER III. HIDDEN RELICS. The same August nun which had gone down behind the waste of waters glimmered redly upon the broad face of the old clock over that ivy-cov- ered arohway which leads into the gardens of Audley Court. A fierce and crimson sunset. The mullioned windows and the twink- ling lattices are all ablaze with the red glory ; the fading light flickers upon the leaves of the limes in the long avenue, and changes the still fish- pond into a.sheet of burnished copper; even into those dim recesses of brier and brushwood, amidst which the old well is bidden, the crimson brightness penetrates in fitful flashes till the dank weeds and the rusty iron wheel and broken woodwork seem as if they were flecked with blood. The lowing of a cow in the quiet meadows, the splash of a trout in the ET. 19 fishpond, the last notes of a tired bird, the creaking of wagon-whcel& up- on the distant road, every now and then breaking tin evening silence, only made the stillness of the place seem more intense. It was almost oppressive, this twilight stillness. The very repose of the place grew painful from its intensity, and you felt as if a corpse must be lying So where within that gray and ivy-covered pile of building — so deathlike- was the tranquility of all round. As the clock over the archway struck eight, a door at the back of the house was softly opened, and a girl came out into the gardens. But even the presence of a human being scarcely broke the silence for irl crept slowly over the thick grass, and gliding into the avenue by the side of the fishpond, disappeared under the rich shelter of the limes. >^he was not, perhaps, positively a pretty girl ; but her appearance was of that order which is commonly called interesting. Interesting, it may ecattse in the pale face and tho light gray eyes, the small features and compressed lips, there was something which hinted at a power of re- pression and self-control not common in a woman of nineteen or twenty. She might have been pretty. I think, but for the one fault in her small oval face. This fault was an absence of color. Not one tinge of crim- son flushed the waxen whiteness of her cheeks; not one shadow of brown redeemed the pale insipidity of her eyebrows and eychishcs; not one glimmer of gold or auburn relieved the dull flaxen of her hair. Even her dress was spoiled by this same deficiency. The pale Javendermus- lin faded into a sickly gray, and the ribbon knotted round her throat melted into the same neutral hue. Her figure was slim and fragile, and in spite of her humble dress, she had something of the grace and carriage of a gentlewoman; but she tfas only a simple country girl, called Phoebe Marks, who had been nurse- maid in Mr. Dawso.n's family, and whom Lady Audley had chosen for her maid after her marriage with Sir Michael. Of course this was a wonderful piece of good fortune for Phcebe, who found her wages treble.] and her work lightened in the well-ordered household at the Court; and who was therefore quite as much the. object of envy amongst, her particular friends as my lady herself in higher circles. A man, who was sitting on the broken woodwork of the well, started as the lady's-maid came out of the dim shade of the limes and stood be- fore him among the. weeds and brushwood. I have said before that this was a neglected spot : it lay in the midst of a low shrubbery, hidden away from tho rest of the gardens, and only visible from the garret windows at the back of the w> "Why. Pho;be," said the man, shutting a clasp-knife with which he had been stripping the bark from a black-thorn stake, "you came upon mo so still and sudden, that I thought you was an evil spirit. I across through the fields, .and come in here at. the gate agen the moat and I was taking a rest, before I came up to the house to ask if \ ou was come back/ 1 "lean - -11 from my bed-room window, bulc " Ph«b.< *n 20 I^DY AUDLEY S SECRET. swered, pointing to an open lattice in one of the gables. " I saw you sitting here, and came down to have a chat ; it's better talking out here than in the house, where there's always somebody listening." The man was a big broad shouldered, stupid-lookisg alodhopper of about twenty-three years of age. His dark red hair grew low upon his forehead, and his bushy brows met over a pair of greenish gray eyes; his nose was large and well-shaped, but the mouth was coarse in form and animal in expression. Rosy-cheeked, red-haired, and bull-necked, he was not unlike one of the stout oxen grazing in the meadows round about the Court. The girl seated herself lightly upon the woodwork at his side, and put one of her hands, which bad grown white in her new and easy ser- vice, about his thick neck. " Are you glad to see rne, Luke ?" she asked. "Of course I'm glad, lass," he answered, boorishly, opening his knife again, and scraping away at the hedge-stake. They were first cousins, and had been playfellows in childhood, and sweethearts in early youth. " You don't seem much as if you were glad," said the girl ; " you might look at me, Luke, and tell me if you think my journey has im- proved me." " It ain't put any color into your cheeks, my girl," he said, glancing up at her from under his lowering eyebrows ; " you're every bit as white as yuu was when you went away." "But they say travelling makes people genteel, Luke. I've been on the Continent with my lady, through all manner of curious places ; and you know, when I was a child, Squire Hortdn's daughters taught me to speak a little French, and I found it so nice to be able to talk to the people abroad." "Genteel!" cried Luke Marks, with a horse laugh; "who wants you to be genteel, I wonder? Not me, for one: when you're my wife you won't have overmuch time for gentility, my girl. French, too ! Dang me, Phoebe, I suppose when we've saved money enough between us to buy a bit of farm, you'll be parleyvooing to the cows f She bit her lip as her lover spoke, and looked away. He went on cutting and chopping at a rude handle he was fashioning to the stake, whistling softly to himself all the while, and not once looking at his oousin. For some time they were silent, but by-and-by she said, with her face still turned away from her companion — ' : What a fine thing it is for Miss Graham that was,. to travel with her maid and her courier, and her chariot and four, and a husband that thinks there isn't one spot upon all the earth that's good enough for her to set her foot upon !" " Ay, it is a fine thing, Phoebe, to have lots of money," answered Luke, "and I hope you'll bo warned by that, my lass, to save up your wages agen we get married." " Why, what was she in Mr. Dawson's house only three months ago 1 ?" LADY AUDLBY'S SEORET. 21 continued the girl, as if she had not heard her cousin's speech. t: What was she hut a servant Ji'ke mo? Taking wages and working for them as hard, or harder, than I did. You should have seen her shabby clothes, Luke— worn and patched, and darned and turned and twisted, yet al- ways looking nice upon her, somehow. She gives me more as lady's- raaid here than ever she got from Mr. Dawson, then. Why, I've seen her come out of the parlor with a few sovereigns and a little silver in her hand, that master had just given her for her quarters salary ; and now look at her?" '■Never you mind her," said Luke; "take care of yourself, Phoebe: that's all you've got to do. AVhat should you say to a public house for and me, by-and-by, my girl 1 There's a deal of money to be made out of a public house." The girl still sat with her face averted from her lover, her hands hang- ing listlessly in her lap, and her pale gray eyes fixed upon the last low- streak of crimson dying out behind the trunks of the trees. "You should see the inside of the house, Luke," she said ; " it's a tumble-down looking place enough outside; but you should see mv la- dy's rooms — all pictures and gilding, and great looking-glasses "that stretch from the ceiling to the floor. Painted ceilings, too, that cost hundreds of pounds, the house-keeper told me, and all done for her." "She's a lucky one," muttered Luke, with lazy indifference. "You should have seen her while we were abroad, with a crowd of gentlemen always hanging about her; Sir Michael not jealous of them, only proud to see her so much admired. You should have heard her laugh and talk with them; throwing all their compliments and fine speeches back at them, as it were, as if they had been pelting her with roses. She set every body mad about her, wherever she went. Her singing, her playing, her painting, her dancing, her beautiful smile, and sunshiny ringlets! She was always the talk of a plaee, as long as we stayed in it." "Is she at home to-night?" \ "No, she has goue out with Sir Michael to a dinner party at the Beeches. They've seven or eight miles to drive, and they won't be back till after eleven." "Then I'll tell you what. Phoebe, if the inside of the house is so mighty fine, I should like to have a look at it." "You shall, then. Mrs. Barton, the housekeeper, knows you by sight, and she can't object to my si i ! the best rooms!" It was almost dark when the cousins lefi, the shrubbery and walked slowly to the house. The door by which they entered led iuto the ser- vants' hall, on one side of which was the housekeeper's room. Pho-be Marks stopped for a moment to. ask the housekeeper if she might take usiii through some of th< and having received permission to do so, lighted a candle at the lamp in the hall, and beckoned to Luke Mow her into the other part of the hoHse. The long, black oak corridors were dim in the ghostly twilight — the light carried by Ph« ig only a k of flame tbe broad 22 LADY A I St; passages through whuh the girl led her cousin. Luke looked suspic- r his shoulder now and then, half frightened by the creaking of bis own hol>-nailed boots. . , "It's a mortal dull place, Phoebe,'' he said, as they emerged, from a passage into the principal hall, which wae not yd lighted; "I've heard tell of a murder that was done here in old limes." "There are murders enough in these times, as to that, Luke," answer- ed the girl, ascending the staircase, followed by the young man. She led the way through a great drawing-room, rich in satin and or- mulu, buhl and inlaid cabinets, bronzes, carneos, statuettes, and trinkets, that glistened in the dusky light ; then through a morning room, hung with proof engravings of valuable pictures ; through this into an ante- chamber, where she stopped, holding the light above her head. The young man stared about him, open mouthed ami open eyed. " It's a rare fine place," he said, ."and must have cost a 'power of money." "Look at the pictures on the walls," said Phce"be, glancing at the panels of the octagonal chamber, which were hung with Claudes and Poussins, Wouvermans- and Cuyps. " I've heard that those alone are worth a fortune. This is the entrance to my lady's apartments, Miss Graham that was." She lifted a heavy green cloth curtain which huug across a doorway, and led the astonished countryman into a fairy-like boudoir, and thence to a dressing-room, in which the open doors of a wardrobe and a heap of dresses flung about. a sofa showed that it still remained exactly as. its occupant had left it. " I've all these things to put away before my lady cOmes home, Luke ; you might sit down here. while I do it, I shan't be long." Her cousin looked round in gawky embarrassmeut, bewildered by thfe splendor of the room ; and after some deliberation, selected the most substantial of the chairs, on the extreme edge of which he seated himself. " 1 wish I could show you the jewels, Luke," said the girl ; " but I can't, for she always keeps the keys herself; that's the case on the dressing-table there." " What, that P. cried Luke, staring at the massive walnut- wood and brass inlaid casket. " Why, that's big enough to hold every bit of clothes I've got !" "And it's as full as it can be of diamonds, rubies, pearls and emeralds," answered Phoebe, busy as she spoke in folding the rustling .silk dresses, and laying them one by one upon the shelves of the wardrobe. As she was shaking out the flounces of the last, a jingling sound caught her ear, and she put her hand into the pocket. "I declare!" she exclaimed, "my lady has left her keys in her pocket for once in a way: I can show r you the jewelry if you like, Luke." " Well, I may as well have a look at it, my girl," he said, rising from his chair, and holding the light while his cousin unlocked the casket. He uttered a cry of wonder when he saw the ornaments glittering on white satin cushions. He wanted to handle the delicate jewels; to pull them about, and find out their mercantile value. Perhaps a pang of LADY AUDLK RET. 23 longing and envy shot through his heart as he thought how he would have liked to have taken one of them. " Why, one of those diamond things would set us up in life, Phcebe," he said, turning a bracelet over and over in his big red hands. "Put it down, Luke! Put it down directly !'' cried the girl, with a look of terror ; " how can you speak about such things'?" He laid the bracelet in its place with a reluctant sigh, and then con- tinued his examination of the casket. "What's this?" he asked presently, pointing to a brass knob in the framework of the box. He pushed it as he spoke, and a secret drawer, lined with purple velvet, flew out of the casket. "Look ye here !" cried Luke pleased at his discovery. Phcebe Marks threw down the dress she had been folding, and went over to the toilette table. " Why, I never saw this before," she said ; " I wonder what there is in it?" There was not much in it ; neither gold nor gems ; only a baby's little worsted shoe rolled up in a piece of paper, and a tiny lock of pale and silky yellow hair, evidently taken from a baby's head. Phoebe's gray eyes dilated as she examined the little paeket. " So this is what my lady hides in the secret drawer," she muttered. " It's queer rubbish to keep in such a place," said Luke, carelessly. The girl's thin lips curved into a curious smile. "You will bear me witness where I found this," she said, putting the little parcel into her pocket. " Why, Phoebe, you're never going to be such a fool as to take that," cried the young man. " I'd rather have this than the diamond bracelet you would have liked to take," she answered ; " you shall have the public house, Luke." CHAPTER IV. IN THE FIRST PAGE OF "THE TIMES." Robert Audlev was supposed to be a barrister. As a barrister was his name inscribed in the law-list; as a barrister ho had chambers in Figtree Court, Temple; as a barrister he had eaten the allotted number of dinners, which form the sublime ordeal through which the forensio aspirant wades on to fame and fortune. If these things can make a man a barrister, Robert Audley decidedly was one. But he had never either had a brief, or tried to get a brief, or even wished to have a brief in all 24 l.ADV AUDLEYV tive years, during which his name had been painted upon one of doora in Figtree Court. lie wa9 a handsome, lazy, can for-noihing fellow, of about seven-and-twsnty ; the only son of & you > i her of Sir Michael Audley. Bis father had lefi him 4001. a year, v. his friends had advised him to increase by being called to the bar ; as he found it. after due consi I ble to oppose the wishes of these friends, than tu sat so many dinners, and to take a set of cham- bers in the Temple; he adopted the latter course, and unhlushingty called himself a barrister. Sometimes, when the weather was very hot, and he had exhausted himself with the exertion of smoking his Gorman pipe, and roading French nevels, he would stroll into the Temple Gardens, and lying in some shady spot, pale and cool, with his shirt collar turned down and a blue silk handkerchief tiod loosely about his neck, would tell grave benchers that he had knocked himself up with over work". The sly old benchers laughed at the pleasant fiction ; bu,t they all agreed that Robert Audley was a good fellow ; a generous-hearted fellow; rather a curious fellow, too, with a fund of sly wit and quiet humor, under his listless, dawdling, indifferent, irresolute manner. A man who would never get on in the world ; but who would not hurt a worm. Indeed, his chambers were oonverted into a perfect dog-kennel, by his habit of bringing home stray and benighted curs, who were attracted by his loeks in the street, and followed him with abject fondness. Robert always spent the hunting season at Audley Court; not. that he was distinguished as a Nimrod, for he would quietly trot to covert upon a mild-tempered," stout-limbed bay hack, and keep at a very respectful distance from the hard riders ; his horse knowing quite as well as he 'did, that nothing was further from his thoughts than any desire to be in at the death. The young man was a great favorite with his uncle, and by no means despised by his pretty, gipsy-faoed, light-hearted, hoydenish cousiu, Miss Alicia Audley. It might have seemed to other men, that the partiality of a yeung lady, who was sole heiress to a very fine estate, "was rather well worth cultivating, but it did not so Occur to Rebert Audley. Alicia was a very nioe girl, he said, a jolly girl, with bo nonsense about her — a girl of a thousand ; but this was the highest point to which enthusiasm could carry him. The idea of turning his cousin's girlish liking for him to some good account never entered his idle brain. I doubt if he even had any correct notien of the amount of his uncle's fortune, and I am certain that he never for one moment calculated upon the chances of any part of that fortune ultimately coming to himself. So that when, one fine sprisg morning, about three months before the time of whieh I am writiag, the postman brought him the wedding cards of Sir Michael and Lady Audley, together with a very indignant letter from his cousin, setting forth how her father had just married a wax-dollish young person, no older than Alicia herself, with flaxen ringlets, and a perpetual giggle ; for I am sorry to say that Miss Audley'S animus caused her thus to describe that pretty musical laugh which had been so much admired in LADY AID).. RET. 25 the hue Miss Lucy Graham — when I say, these documents reached Kobert Audley— -they elicited neither vexation nor astonishment in the uro of that gentleman, lie read Alicia's angry cri and i 'tier without so much as removiag the amber mouth-piece of his German pipe from his mustachioed lips. When he had fit, erusal of iich he road with his dark eyebrov elevated to the centre of his forehead (his only manner of expressing surpris the way) he deliberately threw that and the wedding cards into the w vn his pipe, prepared himself for the exertion of thinking out the subject. '• i always said the old buffer would marry," he, muttered, after about half an bout's reverie. "Alicia and my lady, the step-mother, will I that I should meet you this mornit "I've seen you *• r where before, my bearded friend," said Mr. Audley, calmly scrutinizing the animated face of the other, "bin I'll be I if I can remember when or whci lainied the stranger, reproachfully, 'you don't i an to say tl. rge Talho "No I have i with an emphasis by D< -ual to him ; and then hooking his arm into that of his friend, he led bin the shady ring with his old indiiference, "and now about it." George Talboye did tell him all about it. He told tl 2G W-D5 A SECRET. which he had related ten days before to the pale governess on board the s ; and then, hot and breathless, he said that he had twenty thousand pounds or so in his pocket, and that he wanted to bank it at Messrs.- , who had been his bankers many years before. "If you'll 'believe me, I've only just left their counting-house," said •it. "Til go back with you, and we'll settle that matter in five, minutes." They did contrive to settle it in about a quarter of an hour ; and then Robert Audley was for starting off immediately for the Cruwn and Sceptre, at Greenwich, or the Castle, at Richmond, where they could have a bit of dinner, and talk over those good old times when they were her at Etou. But George told his friend that before he went any- ■ ', before he shaved, or broke his fast, or in any way refreshed him- self after a night journey from Liverpool by express train, he must call at a certain coffee-house in Bridge Street, Westminster, where he expected to find a letter from his wife. "Then I'll go there with you," said Robert. "The idea of your having a wife, George ; what a preposterous joke. As they dashed through Ludgate Hill, Fleet Street, and the Strand, it; a fast hansom, George. Talboys poured into his friend's ear all those, wild hopes and dreams which had usurped such a dominion over his sanguine nature. ; "I shall take a villa on the banks of the Thames, Bob," he said, "for the little wife and myself; and we'll have a yacht, Bob, old boy, and you shall lie on the deck and smoke, while my pretty one plays her guitar and sings songs to us. She's for all the world like one of those what's-its-names, who got poor old Ulysses into trouble," added the young man, whose classic lore was not very gpeat. The waiters at the Westminster coffee-house stared at the hollow-eyed, unshaven stranger, with his clothes of colonial cut, and his boisterous, excited manner; but he had been an old frequenter of the place in his military days, and when they heard who he was they flew to do his bidding. He did not want much — only a bottle of soda water, and to know if there was a letter at the bar directed to George Talboys. The waiter brought the soda water before the young men had seated themselves in a shady box near the disused fireplace. No; there was no letter for that name. The waiter said it with consummate indifference, wdiile he mechani- cally dusted the little mahogany table. George's face blanched to a deadly whiteness. "Talboys," he said ; " perhaps you didn't hear the name distinctly — T, A, L, B, O, Y, S. Go and look again ; there must be a letter." The waiter shrugged his shoulders as he left the room, and returned in three minutes to say that there was no name at all resembling Tal- boys in the letter rack. There was Brown, and Sanderson, and Pinch- beck ; only three letters altogether. The young man drank his soda water in silence, and then leaning his LADY AUDLEY S SEGR] 27 elbows upon the fable covered his face with his hands. There was a thing in his manner which told Kobert Audley that his disappoints trilling as it might appear, was in reality a very bitter one. lb- a himself opposite to his friend, but did not attempt to address him. liy-and-by George looked up, and mechanically taking a greasy 7 newspaper of the day before from a heap of journals on the table, stared illy at the first page. I cannot tell how long he sat blankly staring ut one paragraph amoiic the list of deaths, before his daced brain took in its full meaning: lutf. af- ter considerable pause he pushed the newspaper over lo Robert Audley and with a face that, had changed from its dark bronze to a sickly, chalk'v. grayish white, and with an awful calmness in his manner, he poiuted with his finger to a line which ran thus: — « " On the 34th ins'., at Ventuor, Isle of Wight, Helen Talboys. aged 22." t CHAPTER V. THE HEADSTONE AT VENTNOR. Yes; there it was, in black and white — " Helen Talboys, aged 22." When George told the governess on board the Argus that if he heard any evil tidings of his wife he should drop down dead, he spoke in per- fect good faith; and yet here were the worst tidings that could com him, and he sat rigid, white, and helpless, staring stupidly at the shocked face of his friend. The suddenness of the blow had stunned him. In this strange and bewildered state of mind he began to wonder what had happened, and why it was that one line in the Times newspaper could have so horrible an effect upon him. Then by degrees even this vague consciousness of his misfortune faded slowly out of his mind, succeeded by a painful consciousness of external things. ■ 4 The hot August sunshine; the dusty window-panes and shabby paint- ed blinds ; a file of fly-blown play-bills fastened to the wall ; the. black and empty fireplace; a bald-headed old man nodding over the Morning Advertiser; the slipshod waiter folding a tumbled tabh ■-« ■loth : and Ro- bert Audley 's handsome face looking at him full of compps arm — he knew that all these things took gigantic proportion 5 :, and then. by one, melted into dan; blots, and swam before hi He knew that there - of half-a-dozen furious - and he knew nothing more ; thai somebody or something fell hearily to the ground. 28 LAI A' ALlU : UET. lie opened his eyes upon the dusky evening in a cool and shaded room, the silence only broken by the rumbling of wheels at a distance. He lookea about him wonderingly, but half indifferently. His old friend, Robert Audley, was seated by his side smoking. George was lying on a low iron bedstead opposite to an open window, in which there wa or flowers and two 'or three birds in eajes. " You don't mind the. pipe, do you. George?" his friend asked, quietly. " No." He lay for some time looking at the flowers and the birds : one canary was singing a shrill hymn to the setting sun. "DcThe birds annoy you, George? Shall I take them out of the room?" "No ; I like to hear them sing." Robert Dudley knocked the ashes out of his pipe, laid the precious meerschaum tenderly upon the ma'ntel-piece, and going into the next room, returned presently with a cup of strong tea. "Take this, George," he said, as he placed the cup on a little table close to George's pillow ; "it will do your head good." The young man did not answer, but Jooked slowly round the room, and then at his friend's grave face. . "Bob." he said, "where are we?" "In my chambers, dear boy, in the Temple. You have no lodgings of your own, so you may as well stay with mo while you're in town." George passed his hand once or twice across his forehead, and then in a hesitating manner, said quietly : — "That newspaper this morning, Bob ; what was it?" "Never mind just now, old boy ; drink some tea." "Yes,' yes," cried George, impatiently, raising himself .upon the bed, and staring about him. with hollow eyes, "I remember all about it. Helen ! my Helen ! my wife, my darling, my only love ! Dead, dead !" " George," said Robert Audley, laying his hand gently upon the young man's arm, "you must remember that the person whose name you saw in the paper may not be your wife. There may have been seme other Helen Talboys." "No, no !" he cried ; "the age corresponds with hers, and Talboys is such an uncommon name." "It may be a misprint for Talbot." "No, no, no ; my wife is dead!" * He shook off Robert's restraining hand, and rising from the bed, i walked straight to the door. " Where are you going ?" exclaimed his friend. "To Ventnor, to see her grave." "Not to-night, George, not to-night. I will go with you myself by the first train to-morrow." Robert led him back to the bed, and gently forced him to lie down again., He then gave him an opiate, which had been left for him by the medical man whom they had called in at the coffee-house in Bridge street, whe» George fainted. So George Talboys fell into a heavy slumber, and dreamed that he ■-. LADY AUI'i .ilYS SECRET. 29 went to Ventnor, to find his wife alive and happy, but wrinkled, old, and gray, and to find his son grown into a young ma». Early the next morning he was seated opposite to Robert Audley in the first-class carriage of an express, •whirling through the pretty open country toward Portsmouth. They landed at Ventnor under the burning heat of ihe :n. As the two young men came from the ateamer, tru people oh the pier staVed at George's white face and untrirrimed beard. " What are wo to do, George ?" Robert Audley asked. "We have no clue to finding the people you Want to I The young man looked at him with a pitiful, bewildered expression. The. ►big dragoon was as helpless as a baby ; and Robert Audley, the most vacillating and unenergetic of men, found himself called upon for another. He rose superior to himself, and equal to the oc- casion. •• Had we riot better ask at one of the hotels about a Mrs. Talboys, ge V he. said. "Her father's' name was Maldon," -George muttered ; he could never have sent her here to die alone. They said nothing more ; but Robert walked straight to an hotel, where he inquired for a Mr. Maldon. Yes, they told lnm, there was a gentleman of that name stopping at Ventnor, a Captain Maldon; his daughter was lately dead. The v, would go and inquire tor the address. The hotel was a busy place at this season ; people hurrying in and out, and a great bustle of grooms and waiters about the hall. George Talboys leaned against the doorpost, with much the same look in his face as that which had frightened his friend in the Westminster coffee-house. The worst was confirmed now. His wife, Captain Maldon's daughter was dead. The waiter returned in about five minutes to say that Captain Maldon was lodging at Lansdowne Cottages, No. 4. They easily found the house, a shabby bow-windowed cottage looking towards the water. Was Captain Maldon at home? No, the landlady said ; ho had gone out on the beach with his little grandson. Would the gentlemen walk in and sit down a bit? George mechanically followed his friend into the little frout parlor — dusty, shabbily furnished, and disorderly, with a child's broken toys scattered on the floor, and the scent of stale tobacco hanging about the n windww-curtairis. " Look !" said George, pointing to a picture over the mantel-piece. It was his own portrait, painted in the obi dragooning days. A pretty good likeness, representing him in uniform, with his charger in the back- ground. Perhaps the most auimated of men would hav. . so wise a comforter as Robert Audley. He did not utter a word to the stricken J[) LADY AID1 RET. widower, but quietly seated himself with his back to George, looking out of the open window. For some time the young man wandered restlessly about the room,' looking at and sometimes touching the nicknacks lying here and there. Ilcr workbox, with an unfinished piece of work; her album, full of ex- tracts from Byron and Moore, written in his own scrawling hand ; some books which he had jjiven her, and a bunch of withered flowers in a vase they had bought in Italy. " Her portrait used to hang by the side of mine," he muttered ; " I wonder what they have done with.it." By-and-bv he said, after about half an hour's silence — " I should like to see the woman of the house; I should like to ask her about " He broke down, and buried his face in his hands. Robert summoned the Jandhidy. She was a good-natured, garrulous creature, accustomed to sickness and death, for many of her lodgers came to her to die. She told all the particulars of Mrs. Talboys' last hours ; how she had come to Veniuor only ten days before her death, in the last stage of de- cline; and how, day by day, she had gradually but surely sunk under the fatal malady. Was the gentleman any relative ? she asked of Robert Audley, as George sobbed aloud. "Yes. he is the lady's husband." "What!" the woman cried; "him as deserted her so cruel, and left her with her pretty boy upon her poor old father's hands, which Captain MaldoD has told me often, with the tears in his poor eyes?" " I did not desert her," GeOrge cried out; and then he told the history of his three years' struggle. "Did she speak df me f he asked; "did she speak of me — at — at the last?" "No she went off as quiet as a lamb. She said very little from the first ; but the last day she knew nobody, not even her little boy, nor her ;x»or old father, who took on awful. Once she went off wild like, talk- ing about her mother, and about the cruel shame it was to leave her to die in a strange place, till it was quite pitiful to hear her." " Her mother died when she was quite a child," said George. " To think that she should remember her and speak of her, but neve/ once of me." The woman took him into the little bedroom m which his wife had died. He knelt jdown by the bed and kissed the pillow tenderly, the landlady crying as he did so. While he was kneeling, praying perhaps, with his face buried in this humble snow-white pillow, the woman took something from a drawer. She gave it to him when he rose from his knees ; it was a long tress of hair wrapped in silver paper. "I cut this off when she lay in her coffin," she said, "poor dear!" He pressed the soft lock to his lips. " Yes," he murmured : " this is the dear hair that I have kissed so often when her head lay upon my LADY AUDI! RET. 31 shoulder. But it always had a rippling wave in it, then, and now it scorns smooth and straight." "It changes in illness,", said the hmdlandy. "If you'd like to seb where they have laid her, Mr. Talboys, my little boy shall show you the. way to the churchyard." So George Talboys and his faithful friend walked to the Y audlevs secret. 33 " Yes, yes." answered the old man, smoothing the child's curling hair, "yes, Georgey is very fond of his grandfather.'.' " Then he had better stop with you. The pnterest of my money ■will be about six hundred a year. You can draw a hundred of that for Georgey's education, leaving the rest to accumulate till he is of age. My friend here will be trustee, and if he will undertake the charge, I will appoint him guardian to the boy, allowing him for the present to remain under your care." "But why not take care of hiru yourself, George V asked Robert ' Audley. "Because I shall sail in the very next vessel that leaves Liverpool for Australia. I .shall be better in the diggings or the backwoods than ever 1 could be here. I'm broken for a civilized life from this hour, Bob." The old man r s weak eyes sparkled as George declared this determina- tion. "My poor boy, I think you're right," he said, "I really think you're right. The change,. the wild life, the — the — " He hesitated and broke down, as Robert looked earnestly at him. " You're in a great hurry to get rid of your son-in-law, I think, Mr. Maldon," he said, gravely. " Get rid of him, dear boy ! Oh, no, no ! But for his own' sake, my dear sir, for his own sake, you know." " I think for his own sake he'd much better stay in England and look after his son," said Robert. " But I tell you 1 can't," cried George ; "every inch of this accursed ground is hateful to me — I want to run out of it as I would out of a graveyard. Til go back to town to-night, get that business about the money settled early to-morrow morning, and start for Liverpool without a moment's delay. I shall be better when I've puthalf the world be- tween me and her grave." Before he left the house he stole out to the landlady, and asked some more questions about his dead wife. "Were they poor?" he asked, "were they pinched for money while she was ill ?" " < »h, no !" the woman answered ; " though the captain dresses shabby, he has always plenty of sovereigns in his purse. The poor lady wanted for nothing." George was relieved at this, though it puzzled him to know where the drunken half-pay lieutenant could have contrived to find money for all the expenses of his daughter's illness. But he was too thoroughly broken down by the calamity which had befallen him to be able to think much of any thing, so he asked no further questions, but walked with his father-in-law and Robert Audley down to the boat by which they were to cross to Portsmouth. The old min bade Robert a very ceremonious adieu. " You did not introduco me to your friend, by-the-bye, my dear boy,' he said. George stared at him, muttered something indistinct, and ran down the ladder ru the boat before Mr. Maldon could repeat his request 34 LADY AUDLEYS SECRET. The steamer sped away through the sunset, and the outline of the island melted in the horizon as the)- neared the opposite shore. " To think," said George, " that two nights ago, '.at this time, -I was steaming into Liverpool, full of the hope of clasping her to my heart, and to-night I am going a Way from her grave !"■ The document which appointed Robert Audley as gua^ little ' George Talboys was drawn up in :i solicitors office the r.e;tt morning. . '• It's a great r sspons\bili.ty," exclaimed Robert-, "I, guardian to any-. I or anything! I, who never in my life could take care of myself!" '■ •• I tVusl in yodr noble heart, §ob;" said George. "I know you will ' i are of my poor orphan boy, and see that he is well used by his grandfather. 1 shall only draw enough from Georgey's fortune to take me back to Sydney, and- then begin my old work again." . But it seemed as if George was destined to be himself the guardian of ■ti for when he reached Liverpool, he found that a vessel had just sailed, and that there would not be.another for a month-, so he "returned to London, and once more threw himselfiupon Robert Audley's hospitality. The barrister received him with open arms'; he gave him the room' with the birds and flowers, and had a bed put up in his dressing-room for himself. Grief is so selfish that George did not know the sacrifices . his friend made for his comfort. He only knew that for him the sun was darkened, and the business of life done. He sat all day long smok- ing cigars, and staring at the flowers and canaries, chafing for the time to pass that he might be far out at sea. * But, just as the hour was drawing near for the sailing of the vessel, Robert Audley came, in one day, full of. a great scheme. A friend of his, another of those barristers whose last thought is of a brief, was going to St. Petersburg to spend the winter, and wanted Robert to accompany, him. • Robert would only go on condition that George went too. For a long time the young man resisted; but when he found 'that Robert, was, in a quiet way, thoroughly determined upon not going without him, he gave in, and consented to join the party. What did it matter 1 ? he said. One place was the same to him as another, anywhere out of England: what did he care where? This was not a very cheerful way of looking at things, but Robert Audley was quite satisfied with having won his consent. The three young men started under very favorable circumstances, carrying letters of introduction to the most influential inhabitants of the Russian capital. Before leaving England, Robert wrote to his cousin Alicia, telling her of his' intended departure with his old friend George Talboysj whom he had lately met for the first time after a lap^e of years, and who had just lost his wife. Alicia's reply came by return of post, and ran thus: — "My Dkar Robert — How cruel of you to run away to that 'horrid St. Petersburg before the hunting season! 1 have heard that people lose their noses in that disagreeable climate, and as yours is rather a LADY ; AUI>I ,EY'S SECRET, 35 ■ long one. 1 should a to return before the very severe weather .sets in. What sort of person is this Mr. T. J i" he is very agree- able you may bring !:im to the Court as soon : S; are not to i lie price, but to be sure that they are the !■: an be obtained. Papa ia perfectly absurd about his»ri td she and 1 cannot get on together at all ; not that she is di-. tq me, for, ass far as that goes, she makes herself agree- able ; >hc. is so irretrievably childish and sill}. "Belie be, my de "Your affectionate Cousin, 'Alicia AuDLKr." . CHAPTER VII. AFTER A YEAR. The first year of George Talboys' widowhood passed away; the deep band of crape about his hat grew brown and rusty, and as the last burn- ing day of another August faded out, he sat smoking cigars in the quiet chambers in Fig-tree Court, much as hj had done the year before, when the horror of his grief was new to him, and every object in life, hov trifling or however important, seemed saturated with his one great sorrow. But the big ex-dragoon had survived his affliction by a twelvemonth, and bard as it may be to have to tell it, he did not look much the worse for it. Heaven knows what inner change may have been worked by that bitter disappointment! Heaven knows what wasted Bgoni remorse and self-reprqach may not have racked George's honest heart as he lay awake at nights thinking of the wife he had abandoned iu the pursuit of a fortune which she never lived to shar. . Once, while they were abroad, Robert Audley ventured to congratu- late him upon his recovered spirits. He burst into a bitter la "Do you know, Bob,'' he said, "that when some of our fell wounded in India, they home bringing bullet^ inside them. -They not talk of them, and they were stout and hearty, and looked as well, perhaps, as you or 1 ; but every change iu the weather, how slight, every variation of the atmosphere, however trifling, brought back the ol .of their wounds as sharp as ever they ha 1 f«lt it on the battle-field. I've had my wound, Bob ; 1 carry the bullet still, and I shall carry it into my coffin." The travel lei . i from St. ng, and George again took up his quarters in Sis old fri s, only leaving 36 l-AJDY AUDLEY'S SECRET. them now and then to. run down to'Southampton atidkakc a 1 little bov. He always went loaded with toys and sweetmeats to give.. lo the child; bjM-for all this, Gcorgey would not becorai • iilar.'. with his papa, and the. young .man's heart sickened as he, began to fancy) that even his child was lost to him. ■' What can 1 do?" he thought. "If I take him away from his grand- father I shall break his heart; if I let him remain he will grow up a stranger to me, and care more for that drunken ohl hypocrite than for • • his own father. But then what could an ignorant heavy. dragoon like o with such a child ? What could I teach him, except to smoke is and idle about all day' with his hands in his pock' So the anniversary of that 30th of August, upon which George had seen the advertisement of his wife's death in the Times newspaper, came round for. the first time, and the young man put off his black clothes and the shabby crape from his hat, and laid his mourning garments in a trunk in which he kept a package of his wife's letters, her portrait, and that lock of hair which had been cut from her bead after death. Robert Audlcy had never seen either the letters, the portrait, or the long tress of silky hair; nor, indeed, had George ever mentioned the name of his , dead wife after that one day at Ventnor on which he learned the full particulars of her decease. " 1 shall write to my cousin Alicia to-day, George," the young barrister said, upon this very 30th of August. " Do you know that the' day after to-morrow is thelst of September? I shall write and tell her that we •will both run down to the Court for a week's .shooting." "No, no, Bob; go by yourself; they don't want me, and I'd rather • " Bury yourself in Fig-tree Court, with no company but my dogs and ©anaries ! No, George, you shall do nothing of the kind." " But I don't care for shooting." "And do you suppose /care for it?" cried Robert, with charming naivete. " Why man, I don't know a partridge from a pigeon, and it might be the 1st of April instead of the 1st of September for aught I care. I never hurt a bird in my life, bat I have hurt my own shoulder with the weight of my gun. \ only go down to Essex for the change of air, the good dinners, and the, sight of my uncle's honest, handsome face. Besides, this time, I've another inducement, as I want, to see this fair- haired paragon, my new aunt. You'll go with me, George?" "Yes, if you really wish it." The quiet form which his grief had taken after its first brief violence left him as submissive as a child to the will of his friend ; ready to go anywhere or do anything; never enjoying himself, or originating any enjoyment, but joining in the pleasures of others with a hopeless, un- complaining, unobtrusive resignation peculiar to his simple nature. But the return of post brought a letter from Alicia Audley, to. say that the two young men could not be received at the Court. "There arc seventeen spare bedrooms," wrote the young lady, in an indignant tunning hand, "bo* for all that, my dear Robert, you can'* 'e'ornV; for my taken it into her silly head that she is to?) iil to entertain^ visit the matter with her 'than thrre is with mi'), au I'she ntlemen (great rough mi j ) in the L< - nd Mr. Talboys, and tell him that ] you both in the' limiting season, Essex for all that," said JTobert. :is he twisted the, letter into a pipedighi for his big meer- schaum. '• I'll what we'li do. George: there's a glorious inn at of fishing in' the neighborhtfod : we'll go there and haye a" week's sport. Fishing is much better than shooting; •.you've onlj to lie on a bank and stare ; ••; I don't find that you often catch anything', but it's very pleas: He held the bwisted left* r to the feeble spark of fire glimmering in the grate as he spoke, and tl. . mind, deliberately unfolded it and srad per with his hand. "Poor little Alicia !" he said thoughtfully ; ' : it's rather hard to treat her letters so cavalierly — I'll keep it;? upon which Mr. Robert Audley put the note back into its envelope, and afterward thrust it into a pigeon- hole in his office desk marked impor/anl. Heaven knows what wonder- ful documents there were in this particular pigeon-hole, but I do not think it likely to have contained anything of great judicial Tabic. If any one could at that moment have told the young barrister that so simple a thing as his cousin's brief letter would one day came to be a link in that te ruble chain of evidence afterward to be slowly forged in the one only criminal case in which he was ever to be concerned, perhaps Mr. it Audley would have lifted his eyebrows a little higher than u So the ! g men left London the next day with one portmanteau and a rod and tackle, between them, and reached the straggling, old- fashioned, fast decaying village of Audley in time to order a good dinner at the Sun Inn. Audley Court was about threc-cjuarters of a mile from the village, lying, as I have said deep down in a hollow, shut in by luxuriant timber. .You could only reach it by a cross road bordered by trees, and as trimly- kept as the avenues in a gentleman's park. It was a lonely place enough, even in all its rustic beauty, for so bright a creature as the late Miss Lucy Graham, but the generous baronet had transformed the interior of the gray old mansion, into a little palace for his young wife, and Lady Audley seemed as happy as a child surrounded by new nmi costly toys. In her better fortunes, as in her f dependence, wherever she went she seemed to take sunshine ai is with her. In spi; Miss Alicia's undisguised contempt for her step-mother's childish and frivolity, J. J more H ihan the baro- Jiter. That very chilni.v which few could r«- cence and candor of an infant beamed in Lady Audley's fair fare, and shone out i . ■ liquid blue eyes. The rosy lips, the delicate nose, the profusion of fair ringlets, all contributed to pre- serve to her lx Mi and freshness. She owned to twenty years of age, but it wa« hard to believe her ijaere thai* 'seventeen. Het fragile figure, ..which, she -1 vcl- . in ,| s ti(f, I 'ill she looked like a child tricked out for a -VIL her amuse b. She hated reading, or study of any kind, and loved soci ■ lier than be alone, she would adtiiii ; er coniid loll on one of the sofas in her luxw. new costume for some .Coming dim. or party ; or sifi , I with her jew ide her^ upon the s [iehael's presents spread out in her lap, whil mted ier treasures. ] at several public balls at, Chelmsford and Colches- ter^ and v iately established as the belle of the" county. Pleas- ed'with her high position and her handsome house; with every caprice gHttifi him indulged ;• admiyed and caressed wherever she id of her generous husband j rich in a noble allowance of pin money; with no poor relations to worry her with claims upon her purse or patronage; it would have been hard to find in the county of Essex a more fortunate creature than Lucy, Lady Audley. *■■ The two young men loitered over the dinner-table in the private sit- ting-room at the Sun Inn. The windows were thrown wide open, and t ] le f, ry air blew 'in upon them as they dined. The weather was lovely; the foliage of the woods touched here and there with faint gleams of the earliest tints of autumn; the yellow corn still standing in some of the field?, in others just falling under the shining sickle; while in the narrow lanes you met great wagons drawn by broad-chested cart- horses, carrying home the rich golden store. To any one who has been during thehotsummer months, pent up in London, there is in the first taste of rustic life a kind of sensuous rapture, scarcely to be described. George Talboys felt this, and in this he experienced the nearest approach to en- joyment that he had ever known since his wife's death. • clock struck five as they finished dinner. "Put on your hat, George,' 5 said Robert Audley; "they don't dine at the Court till f nies from p kindred hand ; 'sikV 'lis by cruel 6J6we in- flicted with a stake cut from ng oak.' whose vary, si promised- unty of which I wi-ije, .1 have meadow in v. lii< i, on a '■. murdered th gir] who b _ with the stain of tha No sj rime lias evei 1 hi the worst • i calm 1!, in spite of all, we look on Svith a tender, hall yean It, was dusk when gigs - tons, began to rcet, and under the wi of the Sim Inn: suddenly up beneath the It was Sir Michael Aw en a slop before the little inn. The ha .,. 0l ,t of order, and the forei ight. "Why, it's my uncle. :>ert Audley, as the carriage stopped. "I'll run down aifd speak to him." George lit another cigar, and, sheltered by the window curtains, look- ed out at the little party. Alicia sat with her back to the hqrs could pen in the dusk, that she was a handsome brunette; but Lady Audley \ farthest from the inn, and he cou. iiing of the fair haired p f whom hi heard so much. "Why, exclaimed Sir Michael, as his nephew emerged from the inn, "this is a surpri "I have not come to intrude up. ' a r uncle " said the young man, iaronet shook him by th hearty fashion. " Essex is ray native com iow, ami time of year I generally have a t a ,,,l I have con to the inn for I ng." "George — (George wh '"^ dying to see t .. FN run and ; him. and igtrodu No- w hicfa 1- ad ■ Amlley had, i own childish, unthinkin : ely that I i mored from his W1<1 , the inn, it needed but . that she did not vri urge Talboys. 40 '- Never m.rad to-night, Bob, 1 ' he said. " My yvifeis'a little tired after our long day's pleasure. Bring- your friend to dinner to-morrow, and rlien he and Alicia can make each other's acquaintance. Come round and speak to Lady Andley, and then we'll drive home." My ladr was .«<•■> terribly faiigucd that she could only smile swe. and hold out a tiny gloved hand to hec nephew by marriage. " You will come and dine with us to-morrow, and bring your interest- ing friend V she said, in a low and tifed voice. She had been the chief attraction of thu race-course, and was wearied but by the exertion pf fa3cinat!ng half the county. "It'* a wonder Bhe didn't treat you to her never-ending laugh," whispered Alicia, a9 she leaned over the carriage door to bid Robert good-right : " but I daresay she reserves that for your delectation to- morrow, i suppose you are facinated as well as everybody else ?" added the young Jady, rather snappishly. "Sha is a lovely creature, certainly," murmured Robert, with placid admiration. , " Oh, of coarse ! Now, she is the first woman of whom I ever heard you 6ay a civil word, Robert Audley. I'm sorry to find you can only admire wax dolls." Poor Alicia had had many skirmishes with hep cousin upon that pecu- liar temperament of his, which, while it enabled him to go through life with perfect content and tacit enjoyment, entirely precluded his feeling one spark of enthusiasm upon any subject whatever. "As to his ever falling in love," thought the young lady sometimes, "the idea is tow preposterous. If all the divinities upon earth were rang- ed before him, waiting for his sultanship to throw the handkerchief, he would only lift his eyebrows to the middle of his forehead, and tell them to scramble for it." * But, for once in his life, Robert was almost enthusiastic. " She's the prettiest little creature you ever saw in your life, George," he cried, when the carriage had driven off and he returned to his friend. "Such blue eyes, such ringlets, such a ravishing smile, such a fairy-like bonnet — all of a tremble with heart's-ease and dewy spangles, shining out of a cloud of gauze. George Talboys, I feel like the hero of a French novel : I am falling in love with my aunt." The widower only sighed and puffed his cigar fiercely out of the open window. Perhaps he was thinking of that far-away time — little better than five years ago, in fact; but such an age gone by to him — when he first met the woman for whom he had worn crape round his hat three days before. ' They returned, all those old unforgotten feelings ;' they came back, with the scene of their birth-place. Again he lounged with his brother officers upon the shaVjfby pier at the shabby watering-place, listening to a dreary band with a cornet that was a note and a half flat. Again he heard the old operatic airs, and again she came tripping toward him leaning on her old father's arm, and pretending (with such, a charm- ing, delicious, serio-comic pretence) to be listening to the music, and -quite unaware of the admiration oi half-a-dozen open-mouthed eavoJry 5 SJECR] 41- officers. Again the old fancy came back that 'she was somethiri , and that to approach l\or was to walk Kn a higher atmosphere arid to brcathk a purer afy, And since this she • had been his wife, and the mother of liis child. 'She lay in tin: little bhurchyard at Ventnor, and only ;i year ago he had given the order for her t< . A ww slow, silent tears d his waistcoat as bethought of those things in the quiet and darkening Lady Xudl exhausted when she reached home, that shi eased lii. i-- m' iioui the dinner-table, and retired at once to her dre room I by her maid, Phcebe Marks* ittle capricious in her conduct to this maid — sometii very confidential, sometimes rather reserved ; but she was a liberal mis- tress, and the girl had every reason to be satisfied with her situation. This evening, in spite- of her fatigue, she was in extremely- high spirits, and gave an animated account of the races, and the company present at them. "lam tired to death, though, Phcebe," she said, by-and-by, "I'm afraid 1 must look a perfect fright, after a day in the hot sun." There were lighted candles on each side of the glass before which Ladv Audley was standing unfastening her dress. She looked full at her maid as she spoke, her blue eyea clear and bright, and the rosy childish lips puckered into an arch s: t '•You are a little pale, my lady,"' answered the girl, "but you look as pretty as ever." "That's right, Phcebe," she said, flinging herself into a chair, and throwing back her curls at the maid, who stood, brush in hand, ready to arrange the luxuriant hair for the night.- " Do you know, Phcebe, 1 have heard, somu people say that you and I are alike V " I have heard them say so too, my lady," said the girl, quietly ; " but they must be very stupid to say it. for your ladyship is a beauty, and I'm a poor plain creature."' " Not at all. Phoebd," said the little lady, superbly ; "you are like me, and your features nice: it is only color that you want. My hair is pale yellow shot with gold, and yours is drab : my eyebrows and eyelashes are dark brown, and yours are almost — I scarcely like to say it. but they're almost White, my dear Phoebe. Your complexion is sal- low, and mine is pink and rosy. Why. with a bottle of hair-dye, such as we see advertised in the papers, and a pot of rouge, you'd be as good looking as I. any day, Phcel She prattle 1 on in this way for along time, talking of a hundred'friv- ' the pebple she had met at the races, for her maid's amusement. Hef Btep«deughtei came into the dfes«ing-j i her good-night, and found the. maid and mistress laugh i over on e*r>f the day's ad \ Alicia, who % familiar with her servant*, withdrew i ' at mv lady's frivolity. " G© on brushing my 1 Lady Audley -aid, every lime the girl was about to complete her task; "I quite enjoy a chat with you." t'l ' T .1 her ma .jddenly sailed •■ I want you to do rjCte.a fav< . <• I W aht Ion by the first train to-morrow morning to - te a Jit!' i for me. You may take a 'day's h ■ have friends in fcown ; 'and I shall give do wha'; i wa keep your own co " Yes. "by lady." .at that door is securely shut, and come' and sit on this stool ved. Lady Audley'smoothed'-her maid's neutral-tinted plump, white,'and' bejewelled haud as she reflected for a moments: \nd now listen, Phoebe. What I want you to do is very simple." It was so .simple that it was told in five minutes, and then Lady An Hey retired into her* bedroom, and curled herself up cosily under the down quilt. She was a chilly little creature, and loved to bury herself in soft wrappings of satin and fur. " Kiss me, Phoebe," she said, as the girl arranged the curtains. "I Sir Michael's step in the anteroom ; you will meet him as you go out, and you may as well tell him that you are going up by the first or row morning to get my dress from Madame Frederick for the dinner at Morton Abbey." was late the next morning when Lady Aud.ley went down tobreak- .! o'clock. . While she was sipping her coffee a servant brought her a sealed packet, and a book for her to sign. 11 A telegraphic message !" she cried ; for the convenient word telegram, had not yet been invented. "What can be the matter?" . She looked up at her husband with wide-open, terrified eyes, and seemed half afraid to break the seal. The envelope was addressed to Lucy Graham, at Mr. Dawson's, and had been sent on from the villi ■ u Read it, my' darling," he said, "and do not be alarmed; it may be nothing of any importance." It c ' a Mrs. Vincent, the schoolmistress with whom .she had lived before entering Mr. Dawson's family. The lady was dangerously ill, and implored her old pupil to go and see her-. o t il! she always meant to leave me her money," said Lucy, • a mournful smile. "She has never heard of the change in my fortunes. Dear Sir Michael, 1 must go to her." "To be sure you must, dearest. If she was kind to my poor girl in adversity, she has a claim upon her prosperity that shall never be forgotten. Put On your bonnet, Lucy; we shall be in time to catch , the express." "You will go with me?" "Of course, my darling Do you suppose I would let you go alone?" "1 was sure you would go with me," she said thoughtfully. I V AUDLE VS SECRET. i [ J ' "Does your friend send any address?" pent Villa, \\ i .ton; and [ryes there stilL" Tli- 6nl\ time for Lady Audley to hi ler bonnet and heard the drive round I o Michael- culling lli ms as 1 li opened o f terminated in a antechamber hung with oil pail in her has ierately at the door of this locked it, and dropped the key into her pocket. .This door, once k cut off all uts. CHAPTER VIII. « BEFORE THE STORM. So the dinner at Audloy Court was postponed, and Miss Alicia had to wait still longer °r an introduction to the handsome young widower, Mr. George Tall I am afraid, if the real truth is to be told, there was, perhaps, some- thing of affectation in the anxiety this young lady expressed to make- George's acquaintance; but if poor Alicia for a moment calculated upon arousing any latent spark of jealousy lurking in her cousin's breast by this exhibition of interest, she was not so weli acquainted with Robert Audley's disposition as^she might have been. Indolent, handsome, and indifferent, the young barrister took life as altogether too absurd a mis- De event in its foolish course to be for a moment considered seriously by a sensible man. His pretty, gipsy-faced cousin might have been over head and ears in with him ; and she might have told him so, in some charming, ly fashion, a hundred times in a day for all the three bund: ive days in the year; but unless she had waited for "uary, and walked straight up to him, ill you i much doubt if he would ever have discover^ •• !: !iL's. en in love with her h mself, I fancy thai the tender wi'l] him, ha ■ • .rave with •i. and v i knowledge whatever of b ia, to i ide about the I be two young men spent LAI • in Essex; it. frasuwasted trouble to -wear that pret md to b< smgYiiar or' ch Robert unci his friend. The blade curb (nothing like Lady Aim featherly ringlets, but heavy clustering locks, that clung about slender brown throat), the red and pouting .lips, the nose . retrousse, the dark complexion, with its bright crimson. flush,, a] v to glance up like a signal right in a dusky sky, wWn sudden! v upon your apathetic cousin — all tbi beaut} was, thrown away upon the dull eyes of- Robert Ai II have taken your restin the cool drawing-r'oprn . id of working your pretty mare to death under ti. September sun. Now fishing, except to Uu • disciple of I;:aak Walton, is not lively of occupations ; therefore, it is scarcely, perhaps, to be 1 that on the day after Lady Audley's departure, the t\«o ; . (one of whom was disabled, by that heart wound which he bore so quietly, from really taking pleasure in anything, and the other of whom looked upon almost all pleasure 'as a negative kind of trouble) began to grow w,eary of the shade of the willows overhanging the winding streams about Audlcy.- "Fig-tree Court is not gay in the long vacation," said Robert reflect- ively; "but I think, upon the whole, it's better than this ; at any rate it's near a tobacconist's," he added, puffing resigned) at an execrable cigar procured from the landlord of the jSun Inn. George Talboys, who had only consented to the Essex expedition in ' passive submission to his friend, was by no means inclined to object to their immediate return to London. "I shall be glad to get back, Bob," he said, "for I want to take a run down to Southampton ; I haven't seen the little one for upward of a month." He always spoke of his son as " the little one ;" always spoke of him mournfully rather than hopefully. It seemed as if he could take no Comfort from the thought of his boy. lie accounted for this by saying that he hid a fancy that the child would never learn to love him ; and worse even than this fancy, a djm presentiment that he would not live to see his little Georgcy reach manhood. " I'm not, a romantic man, Bob," he would say sometimes, "and I never read a line of poetry in my life that was any more to me than so many words and bo much jingle; but a feeling has come over me, since my wife's death, that 1 am like a man standing upon a long, low shore, with hideous cliiis frowning down upon him from behind, and the rising crawling 'slowly but surely about his feet. It seems to .grow nearer and nearer every day, that black, pitiless tide; not rushing upon me with a great noise and a mighty impetus, but crawling, creeping, stealing, gliding toward me, ready to close in above my head when I am least prepared for the end." , Robert Audley stared at his friend in silent amazement ; and, after a pause of profound deliberation, said solemnly, " George Talboys, I could understand this if you had been eating heavy .suppers. Gold pork, now, Y AUDLEY'fc S 45. lone, migh|; 'produce, this sort of thine;. 'You want air, dear \ v ; you want the refreshing breezes of Fig-tree sphere of Fleet street. Or. ;\\v," he added . ■• I have it ! You've been- smoking our.friend the lamb ts for every "thing." They met 'Alicia Audley oq her mare about half an hour after they to l.he -determination of leaving Essex early t ho next, morning* qubg la rprised and disappointed at h< s determination, and for that very reason pretended j the matter with supreme 'indifference. "Yon are very soon tin d of Audley.. Robeit,",she said, c; "but ds here, except ydifr relations at t ha- lt, you have the most delightful soi and "I get good tobacco," murmured Robert, interrupting his oousio. "Audley *is the dearest, old place, but when a man has to smoke dried ayes, you know, Micia — — ' "Then y< u really are, going to-morrow morning?'' "Positively — by the express that leaves at 10.50.'' "Then Lady Audley will lose an introduction to Mr. Talboys, and Mr. Talboys will lose the chance of seeing the prettiest woman in Essex." "Really " stammered George. "The prettiest woman in Essex would have a poor chance of getting much admirntiori out of my friend, George Talboys," said Robert. " His heart is at Southampton, where he has a curly-headed little urchin, about as high as his knee, wh'o calls him 'the big gentleman,' and asks him for sugar-plums." "I am going to write to my step-mother by to-night's post," said Alicia. "She asked me particularly in her letter how long you were going to stop, and whether there was any chance of her being back in time to receive you." Miss Audley took a letter from the pocket of her riding-jacket as she spoke — a pretty, fairy-like note, written on shining paper of a peculiar creamy h She says in her postscript, 'Be sure you answer my question about Mr. Audley and Lis friend, you volatile, forgetful Alicia!" " What a pretty hand she writes !" said Robert, as his cousin folded the nol "Yes, it is pretty, is it not t Look at. it, Robert." She. put the letter into his hand, and he contemplated it lazily for a few minutes, while ! ted the graceful neck of her chestnuts anxious to be olfoi " Presently, Atalanta-, presently. Give me back my note, U "It is the prettiest, most aoquettish little hand 1 ever saw. Do yon know, Alicia, I have no great belief In those fellows who ask you for offer to tell you whit you have never been pon'my word I think that if I had I seen your aunt, 1 should know what she was like by this slip of paper. .DY AUDLEY'S SECRET. U all is — the feathei : ;, « hildi rokes and do\\ n : strokes.' Ge< id gloomy George Talboys -liaci liking ihebui; i !, hU nd Alu-ia, ady . impaj enj l\ ;. uisitioii upon n li.l it's past eight, and/I -must an . ■;. Come, Atalanta! Good-by, Robert- . Tal- ! journey to town/' uite'red briskly through the lane, and Miss Aud ley v* before those two big, bright tears that stood in her e^yes for ono moment, before her pride sent them back again, rose from her angry heart. "To have only one cousin in the world," she cried passionately, -"my nearest relation after papa, and for him to care about as much for me as he would for a dog! r By the merest of accidents, however, Robert and his friend did not go by the 10.50 express on the following morning, for the young barrister awoke with such a splitting headache, that he asked George to seud him a cup of the strongest green tea that, had ever been made at the Sun. to be furthermore so good as to defer their journey until the next day. Of course George assented, and Robert Audley spent the forenoon lying in a darkened room, with a five-days'-old ' Chelmsford paper to entertain himself withal. " It's nothing but the cigars, George," he said repeatedly. " Get me out of the place without my seeing the landlord ; for if that man and I meet there will be bloodshed." for the peace of Audley. it happened to bo market-day at Ch ; and the worthy landlord had ridden off in his chaise-cart to pu ippliee for his house — among other things, perhaps, a fresh of those very, cigars which had been so fatal in their effect upon ert. ' The young men spent a dull, dawdling, stupid, unprofitable day ; and rd dusk Mr. Audley proposed that they should stroll down to the Court, and ask Alicia to take* them over the house. "It will kill a couple of hours you know, George; and it seems a great pity to drag you away from Audley without having shown you the i, which 1 give you my honor is very well worth seeing." The sun was low in the'skies as they took a. short cut through the meadows, and crossed a style into the avenue leading to the archway — a lurid, heavy-looking, ominous sunset, and a deathly stillness in the air, which frightened the birds that had a mind to sing, and left the field open to a few captious frogs croaking in the ditches. 'Still as the at- mosphere "was, the leaves rustled with that sinister, shivering motion which proceeds from no outer cause, but is rather an instinctive shudder ,ADY AUDLEY'S SECRJ T. 'of the frai] m. 'That stupid < which.knf * other, pointed to seven as/the but'*ipr all Jthal The,y found the'3imc : walk, ■under withered >und. ■ "It in a church fully the dead mighl -.. ep un r this sombi [lurch* Tl- ell; and re one chirk pa We want to see the hous & dark, Alicia," rt. " Then we must be quick," she answered. " ( She led the way through an open French window, modern! before, into the Horary, and thence to the hall. In the hall they passed my lady's pale-faced maid, w d furtively under her white eyelashes at the two young na They weir going up-stairs, when Alicia turned and spoke to the' girl. " After we have been in the drawing-room I should like to show I gentlemen Lndy A ms. Are they in good order, PI "Yes, miss; but the door of the anteroom is locked, am my lady has taken the key to London." "Taken the key ! ' cried AJi "Indeed, miss, I think she has. I cannot find it. and il to be in -the door." "I i Alicia impatiently, "that it is nor. at all unlik. his silly freak into her head. ! xoems, and" pry about d meddle with her jewelry. It is very pnJvoking, for th- j are in lha| antechamber. There is her own por- trait, too, unfinished, but wonderfully "Hi i it!" exclai ' y. •» "I w I have only an imper >n of her to the roo is there any a corri'l anvas looking threatei low with the l 'he wanted to split ' George's 48 LAD? AUDLSY'A SECRET. open," said Mr. Audley, pointing to afierc'eVarriop, whose uplifted ; . above George TalboyV dark liaiK u'Comc out of this room, Alicia/' added the young man. nervously; ' '•I believe it's damp, or else haunted. Indeed, I believe' all ghosts to be' the result of damp or dyspepsia. > Vou sleep in n dampbed— you awake suddenly -in the dead of the night with a cold shiver, and sec an olu in the court costume of George the First's time, sitting at the foot of the il lady is indigestion, arid the cold, shiver is a damp There \frere lighted candles in the drawing-room. No new-fangled ■amps ftad le their appearance at Audley Court. Sir Michael's •rooms were lighted by honest, thick, } ellow-locking wax candles, in ve silver candlesticks, and in sconces against the walls. There, was very little to see in the drawing-room; and George Tal- soon grew tired of staring at the'handsome modern furniture, and at a few pictures by some of the Academieians. "Isn't there a secret passage, or an old oak chest, or something of that kind, somewhere about the plajce, Alicia?" asked Robert. - "To be sure!" cried Miss Audley, with a vehemence that startled her cousin; "of course. Why didn't I- think of it before? How stupid of me, to be sure!" ." Why stupid?" "Because, if you don't mind crawling upon your hands and knees, you can see my lady's apartments, for that very passage communicates with her dressing room. She doesn't know of it herself, I believe. How" as- tonished she'd be if some blaok-visored burglar, with a dark lantern, were to rise through the floor some night as she sat before her looking- glass, having her hair dressed for a party!" "Shall we try the secret passage, George?" asked Mr. Audley. "Yes, if you wish it." Alicia led them into the room which had once been her nursery. It was now disused, except on very rare occasions when the house was full of company. * Robert Audley lifted a corner of the carpet, according to his cousin's direi tiens, and disclosed a rudely-cut trap-door in the oak flooring. "Now listen to me," said Alicia. "You must let yourself down by your hands into the passage, which is about four feet high; stoop your head, and walk straight along it till you come to a sharp turn which will take you to the left, and at the extreme end of it you will find a short ladder below a' trap-door like this, which you will have to unbolt; that floor open* into^the flooring of my lady's dressing-room, which is only covered with a square Persian carpet that you can easily manage to raise. You understand me?" "Perfectly." « "Then take the light; Mr. Talboys will follow you. I gh*e you twen- ty minutes for your inspection of the paintings — that is, about a minute — and at the end of that time I shall expect to see you return." Robert obeyed her implioitly, and George submissively followjog his DY AUDL ; ET. 49 friend foui minutes, si elegant disor- I ouse in a a her unlo y to Lon- and the "whol ofl ig toilette apparatus lay about on >m was almo< ties whose go] A bunch of was Withering upon... lav • in a heap u] 1 the backed hair-b 1 exquisite < hi- : re and tl parti int. George Talboya saw ! ellected in the Qhi and •.. • wo- manly luxu They w< doir, and through the. boudoir inl which tlv . iieiahad- abou' ides my lady's; porn n an easel covered withagn centre of the c»i ber. It had been a fancy of the artist to in this . and to make his baei faithful reproduction *of the pi I am afraid the y< belonged to the pre-Rapl motherhood, for he had spent . conscionable time upon ipoto my' lady's nd the heavy folds of her c . vet dress. Th mg men looked at the paintings on the Avails first, leaving portrait for a hnnne houchc. By this time it was dark, the candle carried by Robert only making jht as he mov- g it before the pic tuces one The broad bare window looked out upon the pale sky, ' • last cold flicker of the twilight. The ivy rustled ss with the same ominoi h agitated every leaf in the garden, prophetic of the storm that was 'to come. "Ti I ' standing before a A'. lolasPoussin — iSulvator — ha — hum! Now for the portrait!" lie paused with I aize, and solemnly addressed his friend. ilboys," h ietween Us only one wax candle, which |d k at a painl look at ; ile than anothi your should* ou're •ck immi no more interest in picture than in all I ^ He i out at the nipbt. y Wben h 1 he saw that Robert had 50 kal LET'S SECAET. conveniently, and that he had seated himself on a chair before it for the purpose of contemplating the painting at his leisure. He rose as George turned round. ■ 'ow, then, for your turn, Tallboys," he said. " It's an extraordinary picture." lie took George : s place at the window, and George seated himse snair before the easel. ■ Yes., the painter must have been a pre-Raphaelite. No one but a taphaeljte would have painted, hair by hair, those feathery masses ' of ringlety with every glimmer of gold, and every shadow. of pale brown, le but a pre-Raphaelite would have so exaggerated every attribute of that delicate face as to give a lurid brightness to the blonde complexion, strange, sinister .light to the deep blue eyes. No one but a pre- Raphaelite could have given to that pretty pouting mouth the hard and almost wicked look it had in the portrait. It was so like, arid yet so unlike. It was as if you had burned strango- colored fires before my lady's face, and by their influence brought out new lines and new expressions never seen in it before. The perfection of feature, the brilliancy, of coloring, were there ; but I suppose the paiuter had copied quaint medisevai monstrosities until his brain had grown bewildered, for my lady, in his portrait of her, had something of the aspect of a beautiful fiend. .Her crimson dress, exaggerated like all the rest in this strange picture, • hung about her in folds that looked like flames, her fair head peeping out of the lurid mass of color as if out of a raging furnace. Indeed, the crimson dress, the sunshine on the face, the red gold gleaming in the yellow hair, the ripe scarlet of the pouting lips, the glowing colors .of each accessory of the minutely painted background, all combined to render the first effect of the painting by no means an agreeable one. But strange as the picture was, it could not have made any great im- pression on George Talboys, for he sat before it. for about a quarter of an hour without uttering a word, — only staring blankly at the painted oanvas, vrith- the candlestick grasped in his strong right hand, and his left arm hanging loosely by his side. He sat so long in this attitude, that Robert turned round at last. " Why, George, I thought you had gone to sleep !" " I had almost." '• You've caught a cold from standing in that damp tapestried room. Mark my word, George Talboys, you've caught a cold ; you are as hoarse as a raven. But come along." Robert Audley took the candle from his friend's hand, and crept back through the secret passage, followed by George — yery quiet, but scarcely more quiet than usual. - They found Alicia in the nursery waiting for thCm. •Well? 1 ' she said interrogatively. " We manage* it capitally. But I don't like the portrait ; there's something odd about it." " There is," said Alicia ; " I've a strange fancy on that point. I think LADY AUDREY'S SECRET. 51 • tha', .sometimes' a painter is in a manner inspired, and i>; able to through, the normal expression ofjtho face, "another expression that is equally a part of it, though not to lie perceived by common eyes. We, have never seen ly look ,as she does in that picture ; but 1 think tiiat alio co % uld I ," said bloberfc Audle/, imploringlv, "don't be German.'!" "But,, .Robert ' • ,. ' German,- 'Alicia, if you love me. The picture; is — the picture ; -my lady. That's my -way of taking things, and 1': hysical ; don't unsettle me.'.' He ral times with an air of terror that was perfectly • and then, having borrowed an urn i ease of being over- ly the j he Court, leading passive Geuigr Tal- away with him. The. one ha i stupid clock had skipped to nine. by the time they reached the archway ;'bui before they could pass under its shadow they had to step aside to allow a carriage, to dash by then'. It was a fly from the village, but Lady Audlcy's fair face peeped out at the window. Dark as it, was, she could see the two figures of the young men black against the dusk. "Who is that?" she asked, putting out her head. " Is it the gar- dener?" "No, my dear aunt," said Robert, laughing; " it is your most dutiful nephew." He and George stopped by the arch- way while the fly drew up at the doo'r, and the surprised servants came out to welcome their master and mistress. " I think the storm will hold off to-night," said the baronet, looking up at the sky : " but wo shall certainly have it to-morrow." CHAPTER IX. 4.FTKR THK BTOBM. Michael was mistaken in his prophecy upon the weather. The storm did not hold off until next day, but bufst with terrible fury over the vilhige of Audley about half an hour before midnight. Robert / udley tooft the thunder and lightning will) the same compo- sure with which he Us of life, lie lay on a sofa in th' usibly reading tin- five-d ' heimsford pa- per, and r< galing hirnse'i ally with a few sips from a largo tum- bler of cold pui I th'' st.>rm had quite * different effect upon George Talboy*. I I was startled when he looked at the young CRET - white face :is he pen window li o the rent every now and ! iked streaks of steel-blue lightniri '•C r watching him for som frightened of the lightning •• No," he answer* "But, di -most en ■• '• men have been fright? euedofit. ; it is .constitutional. : sure you are frightened of it." . ;n not." >eorge, if you could see yourself, white and , . I; with your treat hollow eyes starting out at the sky as if they were fixed upon a | II you I know that lightened."' And I tell you that I am "George Talboys, you are not only afraid of 'the .'lightning, but you are savage with yourself for being* afraid, and with me for telling you of your fear." "Robert Audley,* if you say another word to me, I shall knock you down," cried George, furiously : having said which, Mr. Talboys strode out of the room, banging the door after, him with a violence that shook the hduse. Those inky clouds, which had shut in the sultry earth as if with a roof of hot iron, poured out their blackness in a sudden deluge as George left the room ; but if the young man was afraid of the lightning, he certainly was not afraid of the rain; for he walked straight down stairs to the inn door, and went out into the wet high road. He walked up and down, up and down, in the soaking sho.wer for abouttwenty min- utes, and then, re-entering the inn, strode up to his bedroom. Robert Audley met him on the. landing, with his hair beaten about his white face, and his garments dripping wet. " Are you going to bed, George ?" « Yes." s "But you have no candle." " I don't want one." "But look at your clothes, man! Do you see the wet streaming n your coat-sleeves 1 What on earth made you go out uponsuch a night?" " I am tired, and want to go t^bed' — don't bother me." "You'll take some hot brandy-and- water, George?" Robert Audley stood in his friend's way as he spoke, anxious to pre- vent his going to bed in the state he was in ; but George pushed him fiercely aside, and, striding past him, said, in the same hoarse voice Ro- bert had noticed at the Court — " Let me alone, Robert Audley, and keep clear of me if you can." Hubert followed George to his bedroom, -But the young man banged the door in his face; so there was nothing for it but to leave Mr. Tal- boys to himself, to recover his temper as best he might. " He was irritated at'°my noticing his terror of the lightning," thought Robert, as he calmly retired to rest, serenely indifferent to the thunder, LA] .53 whir lightning playing fitfully \ Juiet f Audley, and v, fas ti see bright sunshine! and a is bedroom window. times suc- ig loud and cheerily, the yellow corn up] K'kK and '.v aved arp tussle with liivh had 'i ii at down the I with ig rain- half the nigh jough.. The vii cl list' ' shakJ ray and tendril. • r him at the b lil — if anything, indeed', irful than usual. old hearty ter for which he ha •wrecked I id, frankly, " for my surly tern] night. You were quite correct in your assertion; the thunderstorm de'tf upset me. It always had the same effect upon me in my youth.'* . "Poor old boy ! Shall we go up by I shall we stop here and dine with my uncle to-. "To tell the truth, Bob. 1 w< ■ . a glorious morning. Suppose we stroll about, all day, take another turn \vith the rod and line, and go up to town by the train that leaves lure at G-15 in the eveaii Robert Audley would have assented to a far more disagreeable pro- position than this, rather than have taken the trouble ;• his friend, so thi . iey bad finished their lock dinner, Grt the fishing with hi But if lb Audley had been un- disturbed by 1 thunder that shook th< nda- Inn, it b ibili- f his unci- ilfterribly frightened of the of tb' 3 her, she soun-, heart bad . known a I ... his I ;. hour . ■ . Toward four o'clock I ', who spent the night, in watching by her.bedside, saw her dtnp Off into leep, from [■•'mot ;i wake for nearly live* hours. But she cairfe into die breakfast-room, at half-past nine o'clock, sirring a little Scotch melody, her checks tinged with as delicate a pink a rale hue of her muslin morning dr ' die. birds at: she seemed to recover 1* i and joyousness in the inorninf. shine. She tripped lightly oat on to the lawn, gathering a -hist 1'mg rosebud here and there, and a sprig or two of geranium, and'retui 'through the dewy grass, warbling long cadence for very hatpin heart, and looking as fresh and radiant as the flowers in hor hands. The baronet caught her in his strong arms as ># rough the open window. • " My pretty one," he said,- " my darling, what happiness to see your own merry self again ! Do you know, Lucy, that once last night, when sou looked out through the dark green bed-curtains, with your poor, white face, and the purple rims round your hollow eyes, I had almost a difficulty- to recbgni?e my little wife in that ghastly, terrified, agohized- uk creature, crying out about the storiru Thank God j'or the morn- ing sun, which has brought back the'rosy cheeks and the bright smile ! .[ hope to Heaven, Lucy, I shall never again see you look as you did last, night!" She stood on tiptoe to kiss him, and was then only tall enough to reach his white beard. She told him, laughing, that site had always been a silly, frightened .creature — frightened of dogs, frightened of cattle, frightened of a thunderstorm, frightened of a rough sea. "Frightened of every thing and every body but my dear noble, handsome husband," she said. She had found the carpet in her dressing-room disarranged, and had in- quired into the mystery of the secret passage. She chid Miss Alicia in a playful, laughing way, for her boldness in introducing two great men into my lady's rooms. l - And they had the audacity to look at my*picture, Alicia," she said, with mock indignation. " 1 found the baize thrown on the ground, and a great man's glove on the carpet. Look !" *. She held up a thick driving glove as she spoke. It was George's, which he had dropped* while looking at the picture. " 1 shall go up to the Sun, and ask those boys to dinner," Sir Michael said, as he left the Court upon his morning walk round his farm. Lady Audley rlitted from room to room in the bright September sun- shine—now sitting down to the piano to trill out a ballad, or the fipst page of an Italian bravura, or running with rapid fingers through a bril- liant waltz — now hovering about a stand of hot-house flowers, doing am- atuer gardening with a pair of fairy-like, silver-mounted embroidery scissors — now strolling into her dressing-room to talk to Phoebe' Marks, and have her curls rearranged for the third or fourth time: for the ring- lets were always getting into disorder, and gave no little trouble to Lady Awdlev's maid. >o M tiried, on this particular September day, restless from very j'oybusness of spirit, and unable to stay'long in one place, or occupy her- ritbj one thing. While Catty Audley amused herselfin her own frivolo'.is fashion, the 1 strolled slowly along the margin of a stream until net where the-water was deep and still; and the lung » B trailed into the bro George Tal hoys took the fishing-rod: while Kobcrt stretched hi' nt full i a railway rug; and balancing his hat upon his nos screen fi the sunshine, fell fast asleep. The happy fish in th lie hanks of which Mr. might have unused themselves to th' s i tli timid nibbles at this n's bait, without in any ner e ired vacantly" at the water, holding his rod in a loose, list! - - hand, and with a strange far- awav look in his eyes. As the church, clock struck two he threw down his rod, and striding away along the bank, left Kobe ft Audley to enjoy a nap which, according to that gentleman's habits, was by no means un- likely to last for two or three hours. About a quarter of a mile further on George crossed a rustic bridge, and struck into, the meadow* which led to Audley Court. The birds had sung so much' all the morning, that they had, perhaps, by this time grown tired ; the lazy cattle uw< re asleep in the men Sir Mich* ill away on his morning's ramble ; Miss Alicia had scampered off an hour before upon her chestnut mare; the servants were all at dinner in the back part of the house; and my lady had strolled, hook in hand, into the shadowy lime-walk ; so the gray did building had never worn a more peaceful aspect thai on that bright afternoon when George Tal boys walked across the lawn to ring a sonorous peal at the sturdy, iron-bound oak door. The servant who answered his summons told him that. Sir Michael was out, and my lady walking in the lime-tree, avenue. He looked a little, disappointed at this intelligence, and muttering something about wishing to see my lady, or going to look for my lady (the sen ant did not clearly distinguish his words), strode away from the door without leaving either card or message for the family. It was full an hour and a Half after this when Lady Audley returned to the house, not coming from tho lime-walk, but no: exactly the oppo- site direction, can opon Book in her hand, and singing a came. Alicia had just dismounted from her mare, and stood in tl • arched doorway, with her great Newfoundland dog by her Bid The dog, which had n&ver liked my lady, showed his teeth with a ed r^rowl. "Send that horrid animal away. Alicia," Lady Dudley said, imp.".' lv. "The bro .• F him, and takes advantage of my terror. ! ey call the ereatUi natur i. C*o»sr! I hate you. and you h the dark in some narrow passage you would fly at my throat a*nd le mo, wouldn . curls' at the angry anirn; .im maliciously. »o you klip that Mr. Talboys, the yo >w6r, lms "i ;d for you?" Ln , eyebrows. "\t loughof theml Sin • of wild autumn flowers in the skirt of lie r muslin *' hrough the fields at the back of the Court, gather- blossoms in hoi road 6 her own rooms. Ge>u. table. 1. r Audley ttog ' the be)} violently, "am by Phoebe 'Mark rply. The girl collected .. and torn papers lying on the table her apron. "What havo y< doing all this morning ?" asked my lady. wasting your lime, I hope 1" •• No, my lady, I have been altering the blue dress. It is rather dark is side of the house, so J took it up to my own room, and worked at the window." The girl was leaving the room as she spoke, but she turned round and looked at Lady Audley as if waiting for further orders. * Lucy looked up at the same moment, and the eyes of the two women ■ " Phoebe Marks," said my lady,' throwing herself into an easy chair, and trifling with the wild flowers in her lap, "you are a good, industrious and while I live and am prospered you shall never want a firm friend or a twenty-pound note." CHAPTER X. When Robert Audley awoke he was, surprised to see the fishingvrod lying on the bank, the line trailing idly in the water, and the float bob- up and down in the afternoon sunshine. The young barrister was a long time stretching his aims and legs in various direc- tions to convince himself, by means of such exercise,, that he still re- tained the proper use of those members; then, with a mighty effort, he contrived t.o rise from the grass, and having deliberately folded his rail- RET. Lieut shape for carrying o\ > . I trout in bet'; but; r< ad answer, grew tired of the i - " \\ pe to his dinner •! ; ■ j i and * " This is lively !" he said. "A cold dinner, and nobody Will: The landlord of the San came himself .to apologize for his ruined "As fine a pair of . wulley, as over you clapped but burnt up to a cinder, along of being kep' hot."f ."Never mind the ducks," Robert - ■-.tiently ; "whore's Mr. '"He ain't been in, sir, since you went out together, this rt. ''Why, in Heaven's name, what has- the' with himself? 1 ' He walked to the window and looked out upon the broad, white high road. !'i aden with trusses of bay crawling s . ! he lazy h d the lazy wagoner drpopii g their ith a weary stoop under the afternoon si ; about th ith a dog runnii in the ! I d I a» in v.. of th< 1 58 '^ uicstion v. look for him. lie certainly wa by the trout si ■ ;o'6d going bacl>,th< ':hul' him. Robert' \ ding before/.the inn, dcliberatipg on %that Was best to be .done, when the landlord came out after him. forgot to tell you, Mr. Audley, as how your uncle called hero minutes after ge asking of you and the tleinan to go down to dinner at the Court." "Then I shouldn't w if .George has' gone down to the Court to call upon my uncle. It isn't like him, but •it's just possible that he has done it." ' ".jltwas six o rt knocked at the door of hi lie did not ask to see any of the famiW|LL. od at once is friend. , the servant tdld him ; Mr. Talboys had been there at two o'clock, or a little after. "And not since!" " No, not sim Was the man sure that it was at two Mr. Talboys called? Robert as 1 " Yes, perfectly sure. He remembered the hour because u, was the servants' dinner hour, and he had left the table to open the door to Mr. Talboys." N "Why, what can have become of the man 1 ?" thought Robert, as he turned his back upon the Court. " From two till six — four good hours — -and no signs of him !"' If any one had ventured to tell Mr. Robert Audley that he could possibly' feel a strong attachment to any creature breathing, that cynical gentleman would have elevated his eyebrows in supreme contempt at the preposterous notion. Yet here he was, flurried and anxious, wildering his brain by all manner of conjectures about his missing friend; and, false to every attribute of his nature, walking fast. "I haven't walked fast since I was at Eton," he murmured, as he hurried across one of Sir' Michael's meadows in the direction of the vil- "and the worst of it is., that I haven't the most remote idea where I am going," • He crossed another meadow, and then seating himself upon a stile, rested his elbows upon his knees, buried his face in his hands, and set himself seriously to think the matter out. "I have it!" he said, after a f«aw minutes' thought; "the railway station !'' He sprang over the stije, and started off in the direction of the little red brick building.. There was no train expected for another half hour, and the clerk 'was taking his tea in an apartment on one side of the office, on the door of which \vas inscribed,, in large white letters, "Private." But Mr. Audley was too much occupied With the one idea of looking for his friend to pay any attention to this warning. He strode at once to the door, and rattling his cane against it, brought the clerk out of his sanctum in a perspiration from"hot tea, and with his mouth full of bread and butter. J,ADY AUDLf LET., 5$ "Do you r the gentleman. that ca(ne down tb Ai: me, Smithers V' a: ' : ' Well, to tell you the real truth, Mr. Audley, I cairt say I d camet'.by the four f you remember, and th v that train.*'"' "ou don'1 r him, thou?'' ir." • "Tin:".- ug! ■ ant to know, Smithers, whethi London since two o'clook to-day! He's a tall, .villi a. bis; brown beard. You couldn't, well mi him.* '•' ! ■• as took tickets'for the. 3.30 up,"., said i rather vap. i m anxious glance.oyer hisshoulder at his wife, who looked by no it this interrupt harmony of the tea-table. ourOrfive gentlemen! But did either of them ai description of my friend " Well, 1 think one of them had a beard, sir." *' A dark-brown beard?" "Well, I don't know but what it was brownish- like." " Was he dressed in gray V' "I believe it was gray; a great many gents we;. for the ticket sharp .and short like, and when he'd got it walk< out on to the platform whistling." "That's George !*' said Robert. "Thank y#u, Smithers; I needn't trouble you any more. 'It's as clear as daylight," he muttered, as he left tho station, he's got one of his gloomy (its on him, and .he's back to London without saying a word about it. I'll leave Audley my- self to-morrow morning; and for to-night — why, I may as well go down Court and make the acquaintance of my uncle's young wifei They don't dine till seven; if I get back across the fields I .--hall b Bob — otherwise Robert Audley — this sort of thing will never do ; are falling over head and ears in love with your aunt." CHAPTER XI. TUK MARK DP08 MY LADY'S WRIST. Robert found Sir Michael and Lady Audley in the di ■>w\0 My lady was sitting over ' She twirled round upon tbi volving g«at, making » rustling with her silk fl<">unfp«, a« Mr. Knb»rt' LAjft A; Audley's narrn then, leaving the piano, she i nephew a pcetfv iuoh for ti. - said, '.hold! her.'K.ttle and twinkling with tin diamonds she wore upon leautifal sables, to ge Rob /most forgotten the commission he had executed For dy Al an expedition. Ij is mind' was •* at he only ■ acknowledged my lady's gratitude by" a ieve it, Sir Michael ?" he said. " TI;.:! foolish chum ck to London, leavin Jic .lurch;", e Talboys returned to to \ a ?" exclaimed my lady, lifting . 'hat a dreadful Lmphe I" said Alicia, maliciously, " since Py- i'. Robert' Audley, cannot exist for half an hour without Damon, commonly known as George Talboys." very good fellow," Robert said stoutly; "and to tell the', honest truth, I'm rather uneasy about him." Um it him ! My lady was quite anxious to know why Robert was uneasy^ibout his friend. "I'll tell ypu why, Lady Audley," answered the young barrister. "George had a bitter blow a year ago in the death of his wife. He has never got over that trouble. _ He takes life pretty quietly — almost as quietly as I do, — but he often talks very strangely,- and I sometimes think I day i his grief will get. the better of him, and he'll do something rash." . \ Mr. Robert Audley spoke vaguely, but all three of his listeners knew that tl • bing rash to which he alluded was that one deed for which' there is no repentance. There /Wfts a brief pause, during which Lady Audley arranged her yel- low ringlets by the aid of the glass over the console table opposite to her. "Dear me!" she said, "this is very strange. I did not think men capmbleiof these deep and lasting affections. I thought that-one pretty lace was as good. 'as another pretty face to the that when me with blue eyes and fair hair died, they had only to look out for number two, with dark eyes and black hair, by way of variety." "George .Talboys is not one of those men. I firmly believe that his wife death broke his heart." "How sail !"" murmured Lady Audley.. "It seems almost cruel of Tall >\s to die, and grieve her poor husband so much." 'Alicia was right; she is childish," thought Robert as he looked at his aunt's pretty face. My Inly was very charming at the dinner-table; she professed the most bewitching incapacity for carving the pheas.ant set before her, and 3sistauoe. "• 1 • e. a leg of mutton at Mr. Dawson's," she said, laughing; " but a leg of mutton is k> easy; and then Fused to stand up." LAKY A' SECRET. Gl lia.el wat< i my lady , on his ne in her usj ilh in Loi ■ she was d; # .aii). .1 mu- to her im from thai •»* ll is i inquiries at the few shops th mble, i ould "discover nothing wha tion we wanted. I have no f husband, whu did all in I but ii my friend's new r ■ "It lish not to send the address in tl • %; V- >le are dying i! is ifc>tso easy to think of all these thil murmured my lady, looking reproachfully at Mr. Audlej blue eyes. In spite of Lady Audley's fascination, and in spite of Robe t*s very uUqalified admrratidn of her, the barrister could not , this null * As he satin the deep emo famullioned window, fcalkii e Court, and he Talbjys smoking his solitary cigar in the i with "1 wish l*d nev • him. I v i.sli to I leaven I o< d give him 1 I him ■ to Ventnor to finish hi peace." war) lb •;" him hu in the 7 BtitTftt ti • " i with hi? Li thinking (,-> LALn AUPUEY'i "George'Taiboys," he answered abruptly. iittlc. nervous shudder. word," she said, "you make me quite uncomfortable Ly the way in which you talk of Mr. Taiboys. One would think that 3< thing extraordinary had happened to him.'' ^ "God forbid ! "But I cannot help feeling uneasy about him. 1 ' Later in the evening Sir Michael asked for some music, and my lady . went to the piano. Robert A,udley strolled after her to the instrument ver the leaves of Tier music: but she played from memory, he was spared the trouble his gallantry would have impo^ ; earned a pair of lighted candles to the piano, and arranged them :iy for the jpretty muemian. She struck a few chords, and then into a pensive sonata of Beethoven's. It was one of the many paradoxes in her character, that love of sombre and melancholy , so opposite to her gay. frivolous nature. JRobert Audley lingered by her side, and as he had no occupation in turning over the leaves of her music, he amused himself by watching her jewelled, white hands gliding softly over the keys, with the lace sleeves dropping away from her graceful' arched wrists. He looked at her pretty fingers one by one ; this one glittering with a ruby heart ; that encircled by an emerald serpent; and about them all a starry glitter * ■of diamonds. From the lingers his eyes wandered to the rounded ; the broad, flat, gold bracelet upon her right wrist dropped over her hand, as she executed a rapid passage. She stopped abruptly to re- arrange it; but before she could do so Robert Audley noticed a bruise upon her delicate skin. "Tou have hurt your arm, Lady Audley !" he exclaimed. 1 She hastily replaced the bracelet. "It is uothingj" she said. "I am unioittmate in having a skin which the slightest touch bruises." She went on playing, but Sir Michael came across the room to look into the matter of the bruise upon his wife's pretty wrist. «' What is it, Lucy ?" he asked ; "and how did it happen?" " How foolish you all are to trouble yourselves about anything so ab- surd !" said Lady Audley, laughing. "I am,r'ather absent in mind, and amused myself a few days ago by tying a piece of ribbon round my arm so tightly, that it left a bruise w heu I removed it." . ' " Hum !" thought Robert. " My lady tells little childish white lies ; the bruise is of a more recent date than a few days ago ; the skin has only just begun to change color." i Sir Michael took the slender wrist, in his strong hand. " Hold the candles, Robert," he said, " and let us look at this poor little^ arm." It was not one bruise, but four slender, purple marks, such as might have been made by the four fingers of a powerful hand that had grasped the delicate wrist a shade too roughly. A narrow ribbon, bound tight- ly, might have left some suoh marks, it is feme, and my lady protested ■- - 63 once more thai .'her recollection', that must have been how •e made. Across one of the faint pur [arkcr tingej as if a* orn ortoue <" . id been ground into bder flesh. " [ a,n: s*ure i rytjf the, ribbo wished his relations \ at about half-] i run up to London by the first train in Fig tree i 'onrt. "If Idoi • tq I shall go to Southampton," he said ; ''and n't find hi — —'" "I shall think thatsomethi I." slowly h twceu the sitting-room at the Sun Inn, v. : :id Geor imgqd to- gether, staring out of the window and smoking their '' To think," he said meditatively. ■• that it is ■ for a fellow ! But come what may, I'll go up to first thing to-morrow morning, and, sooner than bo balked in finding hiin, I'll the very end of the" world.',' With Mr. Robert Audley's lymphatic nature, determination -was so much the exception rather than the rule, that when he did for once in his life resolve upon any course of action, he had a certain dogged, iron-ljke obstinacy that pushed him oh to the fulfilment of his purp The lazy bent of his mind, which prevented him from thinking of half a dozen things at a time, and not thinking thoroughly of any. one of them, as is the manner of your more energetic people, made him remarkably ed upon any point to which he ever gave his serious attention. Indeed, after all. though solemn benchers laughed at him, and rising _ barristers shrugged their shoulders under rustling oilk gowns when pie spoke of Robert Audley, 1 doubt if, had he ever taken the trouble to get a brief, he might not have rather surprised the magnates who under- rated his abilities. CHAPTEE STILL MISSING. iiier sunlight sparkled upon the fountain in the Temple •us when Robert Audley returns lowi»g morning. 64 lad: AlDL; • t the pretty little rpom hi >otge im order iu • laundress had arrfti r the. departure of the t.\yo youi h lid of a cigar-box lit' ... >, lingering hoj bed upon the mantel-pieces and tables of his rooms, on : li< ,ge. •• i pe' slept here las', , nigh' tar-ted for Sou morning."- he thought. "Mrs. Mnlony lias oven here very . y thing tidy after him.'' y tround th ' hen v histling is, a slipsh* fcaircase without bo- ut of that very Mrs. M.u aited upon" the two in as ear; e chambers, en •■ Had anything happened to- the poor, dear gentleman- T' .she asked, ert Audley's pale face. * He tarried round upon her quite savagely at this quest! ohim! What should happen to him? They had only o'clock the day befi . Malohy would have related to him the history of v a poor, dear ypung : river, who had once lodged with her, and who went out, g a hearty dinner, in. the best of spirits, to meet with' his death from the concussion of an express and a. luggage train ; but Robert put on hi in, and walked straight out of the house before the honest tan could begin her pitiful story. it was growing dusk when he reached Southampton. He knew his to the poor, little terrace, of houses, in a dull street leading down to the water, where George's father-in-law lived. Little Georgey was ng at the open parlor window as the young man walked down the , '*■ haps it was this fact, and the dull and silent aspect of the house, which iiiled Robert Audley's mind with a vague conviction that the man he came to look for was not there. ' The old man himself opened the . and the child peeped out of the parlor to look at the strange gen- tleman. lie was a handsome boy, with his father's brown eyes and dark ng hair, and yet with some latent expression which was not his I which pervaded his whole face, so that althou h each feature led the same feature iu George Talboys, the hoy was' not actually like him. Mr. Maiden was delighted to see Robert Audley ; he remembered Qg had the pleasure of meeting him at Ventnor, on the melancholy ■ ~ile wiped his watery old eyes by way of conclusion to Would Mr. Audley walk in? Robert strode into the parlor. The furniture was shabby and dingy, and the place reeked with the smell of stale tobacco and brandy -and-water. The boy's broken LADY AUDLLYS S.EGRET. 65 playthings and the: old man's. broken clay pipes, and torn, brandy and- •r-stained news scattered upon the dirty carpet. Little Geo: ivd the visitor, watching him furtively out of his big, ■ brown ev< -ok the -.boy on his knee, and gave him his watth- il'ay with while he' talked to the old man. asl> the question that 1 came to ask," he said, "I ! should have ibu:; n-in-law here." " What ! you knew that he was coming to Southampton'?" ig !" cried Robert, brightening up. '• I : ' ' not here now, but he has been here." " I. »ht Ismail." "And left again ianmediateb " fie stayed little better than an hour." "Good heaveqs !" said Robert, " what useless anxiety that man haa given me ! . What can be the meaning of all this ?" 11 You knew nothiug of his intention, the 41 Of what intention ?" "I mean of his determination to go to Australia." '■ 1 knew that it was always in his mind more or less, but. not more just now than usual." •TTe sails to-night from Liverpool. He came here at one o'clock this morning to have a look at the boy, he said, before he left Englahd, per-/ hap- return. He told me he was sick of the world, and that the rough, life out .there was the only thing to suit him. He stayed an hour, kissed the boy without awaking him, and left Southampton by the mail that starts at a quarter-past two." "What can be the meaning of all this?" said Robert. " What could be his motive for leaving England in this manner, without a word to me, his most intimate friend — without even a change of clothes ; for he has left every tiling at ray chambers? It is the most extraordinary proceeding !" The old man looked very grave. " Do you know, Mr. Audley." he tapping his forehead significantly, "I sometimes fancy that Helen's death had a strange effect upon poor Georg "Pshaw!" cried Robert, contemptuously; "he felt the blow most cruelly, but his brain v irid as yours or mine." " Perhaps he will write to you from Liverpool," said George's father* . in-law. He seemed anxious to smooth over any indignation that Robert might feel at his friend's conduct. " I le ought," said Robert, grave . e've been good friends from the days when we were top thor b It isn't kind of George Tal- to treat me like thi But even at the moment that he uttered the reproach a strange thrill of rem t through his I "It isn't, likohim/' he said, " it isn't like alboys." Little <; aught at the sound. "That's my name." he said, "and my papa's na - /entleman s name 66 ' LAI>T AUDLEY "3 SECRET. » >: Yes, little i ■ >e last night. ,'a d you ill your.sleep. Do you rememlr >,'' said tb« boy, shaking his curly little head. "You must have been very last asleep, little Georgey. ppt to see . poflr papa." • child did- not answer, but presently, fixing his eyes, upon Robert's he sai; 1 abruptly — " Where's the pretty lady '.'"' " What pretty lady V "The pretty lady that used to ecmea long while ago." [e means his poor mamma," said the old man, • " No," cried the boy resolutely, ' : not maimna.^|JMj£ma was always crying. I didn't like mamma, " ^J " Hush, little Georgey !''"' ■ . * " But 1 didn't, and she didn't like me. She was always crying. I mean the pretty lady ; the lady that was dressed '60 fine, and that gave me my gold watch." . ' "He means the wife of my old captain — an excellent creature, who took a great fancy to Georgey, and gave him' some handsome pre- sents." " Where's my gold watch ? Let me show the gentleman my gold watch," cried Georgey. " It's gone to be cleaned, Georgey." answered his grandfather. "It's always going to be cleaned," said the boy. "The watch is perfectly safe, I assure you, Mr. Audley," murmured the old man, apologetically ; and taking out a pawnbroker's duplicate, he handed it to Robert. It was made out in the name of Captain Mortimer: "Watch, set with diamonds, £11." " I'm often hard pressed for a few shillings. Mr. Audley," said the old man. "My son-in-law has been very liberal to me ; but there are others, there are others, Mr. Audley — and — and — I've not been treated well." He wiped away some genuine tears as he said this in a pitiful, crying voice. " Come, Georgey, it's time the brave little man was in bed. Come along with grandpapa. Excuse me for a quarter of an hour, Mr. Audley." The boy went very willingly. At the door of 'he room the old man looked back at his visitor, and said, in the same peevish voice, "This is a poor place for me to pass my declining years in, Mr. Audley. I've made many sacrifices, and I make them still, but I've not been treated well;" Left alone in the dusky little sitting-room, Robert Audley folded his arms, and sat absently staring at the floor. George was gone, then : he might receive some letter of explanation, •perhaps, when he returned to London ; but the chances were that he would never see his old friend again. "And to think that I should care so much for the fellow !" he said, lifting his eyebrows to the centre of his forehead. laDt* audlevs secret. G7 . '"The place smells of vstale . fobac mattered mi in my smokii lie took one from the iket : there w. i. of fire in '"out for something to light his ' will . la\ half burned upon the hearthrug; he ' folded it. 'o get a bettor pipe-light, by fold- paper. A ■ he di I'so; absent y gjaiici the 'pencilled writi.i in his thoi ■ declining ^^ It n rJ|^yiispatch. The upper portion had been burnt away, but the more iinj 10 greater part of the message itself, remained. alboys came to last night, and left by the mail for London. on his way to Liverpool, whence he was 'to sail for Syduoy." The date and the name and address of the sender of the message had been burnt with the heading. Robert Audley's face blanched deathly whiteness. He carefully folded the- scrap o and placed it between the leaves of his pocket-book. "My God!" he said, "what is the meaning of this I I shall go to Liverpool to-night, and make inquiries there." CHA | BLED DREAMS. "Robert Acdlev left Southampton by the mail, and let himself into his, chambers just as the dawn was creeping cold and gray into the soli- tary rooms, and the canaries were beginning to rustic their feathers feebly in the. early morning. Th leveral letters in the box behind the door, but there was TalbOys. The young barrister was worn i long day spent in hun from place. The usual lazy monotony of his life had been broken as it had never been • qui], upon the nt of George Talboys. It was so difficult to belisvu that it was lots than fe'g LADT AU1>LEY'S SECRET. forty-eight hours "ago -that -the young man had left him asleep under the willows by the trout stream. His eyes were painfully weary for want of sleep. He searched about the room for some time, looking in all sorts of impossible, places fo.r a letter from George Talboys, and then threw himself dressed up6n his friend's bed, in the room with the canaries and geraniums. "I shall wait for to-morrow morning's post,"' he said ; "and- if that brings no letter from George, I shall start for Liverpool without a mo- ment's delay." • He wasthoroughly exhausted, and fell into a heavy sleep — a sleep which was profound' without being in any way refreshing, for he was tor- mented all the time by disagreeable dreams — drearns which were pain- ful, not from any horror in themselves, but from a vague and wearying sense of their confusion and absurdity. At one time he was pursuing strange people and entering strange houses in the endeavor to unravel the mystery of the telegraphic dis- patch,; at another time he was in the churchyard at Venfcnor, gazing at the headstone George had ordered for the grave of his dead wife. Once in the long, rambling mystery of these dreams he went to the grave, and found this headstone gone, and on remonstrating with the stone- mason, was told that the man had a reason for removing the inscription ; a reason that Robert would some day learn. In another dream he saw the grave of Helen Talboys open, and while he waited, with the cold horror lifting up his hair, to see the'dead woman arise and stand before him with her stiff charnel-house drapery clinging about her frigid limbs, his uncle's wife tripped gayly out of the open grave, dressed in the crimson velvet robes in which the artist had painted her, and with her ringlets flashing like red gold in the unearthly light that shone about her. But into all these dreams the places he had last been in, and the people with whom he had last been concerned, were dimly interwoven — sometimes his uncle; sometimes Alicia; oftenest of all my lady ; the trout stream in Essex ; the lime-walk ^at the Court. Once he was walk- ing in the black shadows of this long avenue, with Lady Audley hanging on his arm, when suddenly they heard a great knocking in the distance, and his uncle's wife wound her slender arms about him, crying out that it was the day of judgment, and that .all wicked secrets must now be told. Looking at her as she shrieked this in his ear, he saw that her face had grown ghastly white, and that her beautiful golden ringlets were changing into serpents, and slqwly creeping down her fair neck. He started from this dream to find 'that there was some one really knocking at the outer door of his chambers. It was a dreary, wet morning, the rain beating against the windows, and the canaries twittering dismally to each other — complaining, per- haps, of the bad weather. Rfcbert could not tell how long the person had been knocking. He had mixed the sound with his dreams, and when he woke he was only half conscious of outer things. "It's that stupid Mrs. Malony, I dare say," he muttered. "She may J.AL'V ' AL'M.EY'i SECRET/ {;£ knock again for all I car&. Why can't she use her duplicate key, instead of dragging a man our. of bed when he's half dead with -fatigue ':"' ' The person whoever' it was, did knock again, and then dc apparently tired out; but about a minute afterward a key turned in the door. "She had her key with her all tho time, then," said Robert. "I'm very glad I didn't get up.'' The door between the sitting-room, and bed-room was half open, and he co le laundress bustling about, dusting the furniture, and re- arranging tilings that' had never been disarranged. " rs that y ialony '?" he asked'. " Yes, sir"." "Then why, in goodness' name, did you make that row at the door, when you had a key with you all the time?" "A row at the door, sir !" "Yes; that infernal knocking." "Sure I never knocked, Misther Audley, but waiked sthraight in with my kay "' "Then who did knock ? There's been some one kicking up a row at that door t'ov a quarter of an hour, I should think ; you must have met him going down stairs." "But I'm rather late this morning, sir, for I've been in-Mr. Martin's rooms first, and I've come sthraight from the floor above." "Then you didn't see any one at the door, or on the stairs?" " Not a mortal soul, sir." " "Was ever anything so provoking?" said .Robert. "To think that I should have let this person go away without ascertaining who he was, or what he wanted ! How do I know that it was not somo one with a messago or a letter from George Talboys "Sure if it was, sir, he'll come again," said Mrs. Malony, soothingly. "Yes, of course, if it was anything of consequence he'll come again," muttered Robert. The fact was, that from the moment of finding the telegraphic message at Southampton, all hope of hearing of George, had faded out of his mind. Ilo felt that there was some mystery involved in the disappearance of his friend — some treachery toward himself, or toward George, What if the young man's greedy old father-in-law had tried to separate them on account of the monetary trust lodged in rt Andley's hands ? Or what if, since even in these civilized days all kinds of Unsuspected horrors are constantly committed — what if the old man had decoyed George down to Southampton, and made away with him in order to get possession of that £20,000, left in Robert's custody for little. Georgey'a use? But. neither of these suppositions explained the telegraphic message, and it was the telegraphic message, which had filled Robert's mind with a vague sense of 'alarm. The postman brought no letter from George Talboys, and the person Who had knocked at tho door of the chambers did not return seven and nine o'clock, so Robert Audley left Fig-tree C mi it oncv inon )h of his friend. This fcime he told the cabman to chirp to the -".Enston Station, at on the platform, m The Liv-erpo. had started half an hour before .he re: station., and he had to wait an hour and a quarter for a slow train to take him to his destination. , Robert Audley chafed cruelly at this delay. Haifa dozen vessels might sail i alia while he roamed up and dowi over trucks and porters.'and swearing at his. ill-luck-, brought the. Times .newspaper, and looked instinctively, at the ■second column, With a morbid interest in the advertisements of-pj fcissin^— 'sons, brothers, and husbands who to return or to be heard of more. There was one' advertiseir ^ young man found drowned somo- . where on the Lambeth shore. What if that should .have been George's fateT" No; the telegraphio message involved Lis father-in-law in the fact of his disappearance, and every spe; I jout him must start from that'one point. It was eight o'clock in the evening when Robert got into Liverpool; tbo late for any thiug except to make inquiries as to what vessel had sailed within the last two days for the antipodes. emigrant ship had sailed at four o'clock that afternoon — the Vic- ' toriit Regia, bound for Melbourne. ie result of his inquiries amounted to this — If he wanted to find out who had sailed in the Victoria Regia, he must wait till the next.morn- ing, and apply for information of that vessel. Robert Audley was at the office at nine o'clock the-next morning, and ' was the first person, after the clerks who entered it. He met with every ^civility from the clerk to whom he applied. The young man referred to his books; and running his pen down the list of passengers who had sailed in the Victoria Regia, told Robert that there was iki one among them of the name of Talboys. He pushed his in- quiries further. Had any of the passengers entered their names within a short time of the vessel's sailing'? One of the other clerks looked up from his desk as Robert asked this question. Yes, he said ; he remembered 'a young man's coming into the office at half-; a '; three o'clock in tlie afternoon, and paying his pas- sage money. His name was the last on the list — Thomas Brown. , Robert Audley shrugged his shoulders. There, could have been no possible reason for George's taking a feigned name. He asked the clerk who had Ja< spoken if he could remember the appearance of this Mr. Thomas Brown. No ; the office was crowded at the time; people were running in and out, and he had not taken any particular notice of this last passenger. Robert thanked them for their civility, and wished them good morn-' ing. As he was leaving the office, one of the young men called after him : " Oh, by-the-bye, sir,' he said, ' : I remember one thing about this Mr, Thomas Brown — his arm was in a sling." LADY ftfl>LKY'S SECRET. 71 sr^'was nothing ninre^fec. Robert AndJey t^o do but- to return to town. Heve-entered his chambers at six o'clock that evening, Oughlj' worn out once more with his useless search. Mrs, Malony brought him his dinner and a pint of wine from a tavern in the Strand. The evening was raw and chilly, and the laundress had, light I fire in the .sitting-room grate After eating about half a mutton chop, Robert sat with his wine \\n- tastedupon the table before him, smoking cigars and staring into the "George Talboys uever sailed for Australia," he said, after long painful reflection. "Jf he is alive, he is still in England; and if lie is is hidderi in some corner of England." He sat for |V iuking-^troilbl-ed and gloomy thoughts leaving a dark shadow upon his n e, which neither the brilliant light of the gas nor the red blase of the. lire could dispel. Very late in the evening he rose from his chair, pushed away the ta- ble, wheeled his desk over to the fireplace, took oyl a sheet of foolscap, and flipped a pen in the ink. But after doing this he paused, leaned his forehead upon his hand, and once more relapsed into thought. t; I shall draw up a record of all that has occurred between our going down to Essex and to-night, beginning^ at the very beginning." He drew up this record in short, detached sentences, which he num- bered as he wrote. It ran thus: — u Journal of Facts connected with the Disappearance of George Talboys, inclusive of Facts which have no oppairent Relation to that Cir- cumstance" In spite of the troubled state of his mind, he was rather inclined to be proud of the official appearance of this heading. He sat for "some time looking at it with affection, and with the feather of his pen in his mouth. '■ Opon my word.'' he said. " I begin to think that 1 ought to have pursued mv profession, instead of dawdling my life away as 1 have don- . \]r si ioked half a cigar before he had got his thoughts in proper train, and then began to write': — / '•1.1 write to Alicia, proposing to take George down to the Court. "2. Alicia writes, objecting to the visit, on the part of Lady Audley. "3. We go to Essex in spite of this objection. . I see my lady. My lady r( fus 's to be introduced to George that particular evening on the score of fatigu "4. Sir Michael invites George and me'to dinner for the following evening. My lady receives a telegraphic dispatch the next morning which summon* fcer to Ixmdmv ,2 LADY AUDLEY '3 SKORET. i: 6. Alicia shows mc a .letter from my lady, in which 'she requests to be told when I and my. friend Mr. Talboys mean to leave Essex. To \ this Tetter is subjoined a postscript, reiterating the above request. " 'T. We call at the Court, and ask to see the house. : My lady's apart- ments are locked. " 8.- We get at the aforesaid apartments by means of a secret passage, the existence of which is unknown to my lady.- >lu bne.of the l.Gon rind her portrait. ; ' 0. George is frightened at the storm. His conduct is exceedingly strange for the rest of the evening. " 10.; George quite himself again the following morning.' I propose leaving Audley Court immediately; he pr* lining till the eve-' ning. " 11. We go out fishing.- George leaves me to go to the Court. "■ 12. The last positive information I can obtain of him in Essex is at the Court, where the servant says he thinks Mr. Talboys fold him he would go and look for my lady in the grounds. "13. I receive. information about him at the station which may, or may not, be correct. " 14. I hear of him positively once more at Southampton, where, ac- cording to his father-in-law, he had been for an hour on the previous night. " 15. The telegraphic message." ■ When Robert Audley had completed this brief record, which he drew up. with great deliberation, and with frequent pauses for reflection, alter- ati&ns, and erasures, he sat for a long time contemplating the written P»g e - At last he read it carefully over, stopping at some of the numbered paragraphs, and marking some of them with a pencilled cross; then he folded the sheet of foolscap, went over to a cabinet on the opposite side of the room, unlocked it, and placed the paper in that- very pigeon-hole into which he had thrust Alicia's letter — the pigeon-hole marked Im- portant. ', Having done this, he returned to his easy chair by the. fire, pushed away his desk, and lighted a cigar. " It's as dark as midnight from first to last," he said ; " and the clue to the mystery must be found either at Southampton or in Essex. Be it how it may, my mind is made up. I shall first go to Audley Court, and look for George Talboys in a nar- row radius." CHAPTER XIV. phoebe's buitor. " Mn. < .-•. — Any person^who had met tl since the 7th in es any information re"spectinj nt to that dat< liberally rewarded ou comnlUnicatiiig with ., 14 Cha ■■*■- * * Michael Audley read the above advertisement. in the seooud umn of the Times, as he sat at breakfast with my lady' and Alicia two* or three days after Robert's return to town, . "Robert's friend has not yet been heard of, then," said the bar after reading the advertisement, to his wife and daug " As for that,'" replied my lady, " 1 cannot help wondering that any one can be silly enough to advertise for him. The young man wa dently of a restless, roving disposition — a sort of Bamfyld Moore Carew of modern life, whom no attraction could ever keep in one spot." Though the advertisement appeared three successive times, the party at the Court attached very little importance to Mr. Talboys' disappear- ance ; and after, this one occasion his name was aever again mentioned by either Sir Michael, my lady, or Ali Alicia Audley and her pretty step-mother were by no means any bet- ter friends after that quiet evening on which the young barrister had dined at the Court. " She is a vain, frivolous, heartless, little coquette," said Alicia, ad- dressing herself to her Newfoundland dog Usesar, who was the sole reci- pient of th - confidences ; "she is a practised and consum- mate flirt, Qesar ; and not contented with setting her yellow ringlets and her silly gi half the men in Essex, she must needs make that stupid cousin of mine aance attendance upon her. I haven't common patience with her." In proof of which last assertion Miss Alicia Audley treated her stop- moth; ible impertinence that Sir Michael felt him- self called upon to rei lonstrate with his only daughter. ." The p*ior litile woman is very sensitive, you know, Alicia," the bar- onet ; r ely, "and your conduct most acut •'■ I don't, believe it- a bit, inswered Alicia, stoutly. "You think her sensitive beoauso she has soft little white hands, and big blue eyes with long lashes, at 1 all manner of affected, fantastical ways, which you stup tting. Sensitive! Why, I 1 i her do cruel things with those slender white fing laugh at. the pain she inflicted. I'm very sorry, papa," she ad died a little by her father's look of distress ; " friough she has o >me botween us, and robbed ] AD V AUDLEY'S 3ECKET. ! Alicia of the. love of that dear, generous 1 heart, I iuld like her fo ike; but I 'can't, 1 can't, and no v ;moi She- came up to bin. ith her red lips apart, and her little white ning between the ti iiajid; '.but if i had not had hold of his collar, he would have flown at bor throat ■and st ran. "i She may bewitch every ,aia.:i in bu1 she-'d never make friends with my dog." " Your dog shall be shot," answered Sir Michael angrily".' ' 'ous "temper ever endanger*; Lucy."' '• -The Newfoundland rolled his eyes slowly round in the direction cf the speaker, as. if- he understood every word ley happened, to tenter the'room at that, and the an . : ;.' <>f his mistn pressed growl. There was ig in the manner of the dog which was, if anything, more indicative of terror than of fury; incredible as it appears that •Caesar should, be frightened*by so fragile a creature as Lucy A.udley. • Amiable as ...is my lady's nature, she could not live long at the Court without discovering Alicia's dislike to her'. She never alluded to it but once ; then, shrugging her graceful white shoulders, she said, with a sigh: " It seems very hard that you cannot love me. Alicia, for 1 have never been used to make enemies; but since it seems that it must be so, I cannot help it. If we cannot be friends, let us at least be neutral. You won't try to injure me ? : ' " Injure yoit !" exclaimed Alicia; "how should 1 injure you ?'•' ■ " You'll not try to deprive me of your father's affection T " 1 may not be as amiable a's you are, my lady, and I may not have the same sweet smiles and pretty words for every stranger I meet, but i ftrii not capable of a contemptible meanness; and even if I were, I think you are so secure of my father's love, that nothing but your own act will ever deprive you of it." " What a severe creature^ you 'are, Alicia!" said my lady, making a little grimace. "I suppose you mean to infer by all that, that I'm deceitful. 'Why, 1 can't help smiling at people, and speaking prettily to them. I know I'm no better than the rest of the world, but I can't help it if Ympieasdnter. It's constitutional." Alicia having thus entirely shut the door upon all intimacy between Lady Audley and herself, and Sir Michael being chiefly occupied in agricultural pursuits and manly sports, which kept him away from home, it was perhaps only natural that my lady, being of an eminently social disposition, should' find herself thrown a good deal upon her white-eye- lashed mail! for society. Phoebe Marks was exactly the sort of girl who is generally promoted^ ■ from the post of lady's maid to that of companion. She had just suffi- cient education to enable her to understand her mistress when Lucy chose to allow herself to run riot- in a species of intellectual tarantella, in which, her tongue went mad to the sound of its own rattle, as the Spanish dancer at the noise of his castanets. Phoebe knew enough of the French language to be able to dip into the yellow-paper-ow t AUDJL, ETV BoVete which my 1. he, Burlington course with her The likeness which 1 bore to Lu< ; , per! a point of sympathy ' women. ' It \\ a striking like' i ight have s yefi;haVe failed to remark.it. But there w< dowy*. h. meeting Phoel ks gliding the Com you might have ea y lady. Sharp October wind? \ is from th long ■ withered heaps with a ghostly rui along the I well must I i half choked up with '" about it, and whirled in vu into its black, lotitb. On the still bosom of th pond the same withe . mixing themselves with the tangled weeds- that dis(.v of the w; Sir Michael could employ could not keep the ii autumn's destroying hand from the grounds* about the Court. "How I hate thtis desolate month !" my lady sa ibout the garden shivering beneath her sable mantle. thing dropping to ruin and decay, and tho coid flicker of the sun lighting up the ug of the earth, as the glare of lights the wrinkles of an old wo- man. Shall J ^ver grow old, Phoebe/ Will my hair ever drop off as the leaves are falling from those trees, and leave me wan and bare like them 1 ? What is to become of me when I grow old?" She shivered at the thought of this more than she had done at the cold, wintry breeze, and muffling herself closely in her fur, walked so fast that her maid had some difficulty in keeping up with her. ■ 11 Do you remember, Phoebe," she said, presently, relaxing her | "do you remember that French story we read — the story of a beautiful woman who committed some hat — in the zenith of her power and loveliness, when all Paris drank to her ev< the people ran away from the the king '< hers, and get a peep at hei Do you remember of what she had done, for nearly half & century, spending her old a her family chateau, beloved and honored by all the province as an un- canonized to the poor; and how, when her hair white; and almost blind with age, the secret was revealed through one ofthosn nta by which such secret9 always revealed ; i, rotnances, and she was tried, found guilty, and conden to be bun Tho king who had worn her <■ gone; the court of which she had been the star had i ful functionaries an . who might perhaps ha her, were mouldering in their ho would for lier. had falb i upon ■ to which she had I wenjfc to th< Mowed only by a few ignorant oountr - all her bounties, and hootod at .her for a wicked^or^T'^." 76 . LADY .UiDLEY'd SlvilET. u I don't care for such dismal stories, my" lady," said Phoebe Marks with a shudder. "One has no need to read 'books to give one t*he horrors in this dull place." , V..< Lady Audloy shrugged her- shoulders and laughed at her maid's, candor. " It is a dull place, Phoebe," she said, '.' though it doesn'tdo to say so to- my dear old husband. Though ? am the wife of one of the mpst in- fluential mien in the county, I don't know that Iwasn't nearly as well oil' at Mr. Dawson's; and yet it's something to wear sables that cost ;• sixty guineas, and have a thousand pounds spent on the decoration of one's apartments." Treated as a companion by her mistress, in the receipt of the most liberal wages, and with pecquisites such as perhaps lady's maid never had before, it was strange, that Phoebe Marks should wish to leave her 'situation ; but it was not the less a- fact that she was anxious to exchange all the advantages of Audley 'Court for the very unpromising prospect which awaited her as the wife o'f her cousin Luke. The young man had contrived, in some manner to associate himself with the improved fortunes of his sweetheart. He had never allowed Phoebe any peace till she had obtained for him, by the aid of my lady's interference, a situation as undergrooin of the Court. He never rode out with either Alicia or Sir Michael ; but on one of the few occasions upon which my lady mounted the pretty little gray thoroughbred reserved for her use, he contrived to attend her in her ride.' He saw enough, in the very first halfhonr they were out, to dis- cover that, graceful as Lucy Audley might look in her long blue cloth habit, she was -a timid horsewoman, and utterly unable to manage the animal she rode. Lady Audley remonstrated with her maid upon her jolly in wishing to marry the uncouth groom. The two women were seated together over the fire in my lady's dressing room, the gray sky closing in upon the October afternoon, and the Mack tracer of ivy darkening the casement windows. "You surely- are not in love with the awkward, ugly creature, are you, Phoebe ? asked my lady sharply. The girl was sitting on a low 1 stool at her mistress's' feet. She did not answer my lady's question immediately, but sat for some time look- ing vacantly into the red abyss in the hollow fire. ■ Presently she said, rather as if she had been thinking aloud than an- swering Lucy's question — ■ "I don't think I can. love him. We have been together from chil- dren, and I promised, when I was little better than fifteen, that I'd be his wife. I daren't break that promise now. There have been times when I've made up the very sentence I meant to say to him, telling him that I couldn't keep my faith with him ; but the words have died upon my lips, and I've sat looking at him, with a choking sensation in my throat that wouldn't let me speak. I daren't refuse to marry him. I've often watched and watched him, as he has sat slicing away at' a hedge- LADY -AUDLEY'ts SECB 7, st&ke with his great clasp-knife, ti!l I have thought thai as lio who haye decoyed their sweethearts into lonely places, and, miirdc/ed them for being false to their word." When he was,-, boy lie was always violent and revengeful. 1 .-aw him • up that knife in a quarrel with his mother. I tell von. my lady, I must i him 1 ." ou silJy girl, you 'shall do nothing of the kind !" answered Luey. " You think he'll murder you. do yon ! 1*" you think, then; if n. is iu him, you would be any-safer as his wife? If you thwarted him, of him. jealous ; if he wanted to marry another woman, or to get hold of some poor, pitiful bit of money of you then? I tell you/you sha ry him, Phcebe. In the first hate the man ; and, in the next place, I can't, afford tq part with, you. We'll give him a few pounds and send him about his busines Phoebe Marks caught mj lady's bands in. hers, and hem con- vulsively. " My lady — my good. kind mistress !" she cried vehemently, "don't try to thwart me in this — don't ask me to thwart him. I tell you I must marry him. You don't know what ho is-. It will lie my ruin, and the ruin of others, if I break my word. I must marry him !" " Very well, then, Phcebe," answered her mistress. " I ran'j; oppose you. There must be some secret at the bottom of all this." " There'is, my lady," said the girl, with her face turned' away from Lucy. " I shall be very sorry to loso you ; but I haw ! to stand your fiend in all things. What docs your cousin mean to^do for a living when you are married V ''He would like to take a public house." " Then he shall take a public house, and the sooner he drinks himself ith the better. Sir Michael dines at a bachelor's party at Major rave's this evening, and my step-daughter is away with her fi at the Grange. You can bring yonr cousin into the drawing-room after dinner, and I'll tell him what I mean to do for him." " You are very good, my lady," Phcebe answered with a sigh. Lady Audley sat in the glow of tire light and wax candles in the lux- urious drawing-room ; the amber damask cushions of the sofa con' ing with her dark violet velvet dress, and her rippling hair falling about* her neck in a golden haze. Every where around her were the evidences- of wealth and splendor ; while in strange contrast to all this, and to her own beauty, the awkward groom stood rubbing his bullet head as my lady explained to him what she meant to do for her confidential maid. Lucy's promises were very liberal, and she had expected that, nn as the man was, he would in his own rough manner have expressed his gratitude. To her surprise he stood staring at the floor without uttering a word in answer to her offer. Phcebe was standing close to his elbow, and seemed distressed at the man's rudeness. "Tell my lady how thankful you are, Luke," she said. 78 ' ^ADY AUDLEY'S SECii'ET. " But I'm not so ov.er and above thankful", answered her lover say'; . . " Fifty pound ain't much to start a, public. You'll make it a hundred, my lady '?" '■1 shall do nothing of the kind/' said Lady Audleyy her. dear: blue eyes dashing with indignation, "and 1 wonder at your impertinence- in asking it." . "Oh yc's, you will, though," answered Li juiet insolence that 'had a hidden meaning'. " Ypu'll make it a my lady." Lady Audley rose from her seat, looked the man 'steadfastly in the Face til bermined gaze' sank under heKs ; then walking straight up • maid, she said in a high, piercing voice, peculiar (o her in lim- itation, " Phoebe Marks, youhujgtokl (his man!" The girl fell. on her knees at my ladyj^f ;: ,• ., . : cried. " He fo or I would never, never have told !" CHAPTER XV. ON THE WATG1I. • Upon a lowering morning late in November, with the yellow fog low upon the flat meadows, and the blinded cattle groping their way through the dim obscurity, and blundering stupidly against black and leafless hedges, or stumbling into'ditches, und'istinguishable in the hazy atmos- phere; with the village church looming brown and dingy through the uncertain light; with every winding path and cottage door, every gable end and gray old chimney, every village child and straggling cur, seem- ing strange and weird of aspect in the semi-darkness, Phoebe Marks and her cousin Luke made their way through the churchyard of Audley, and presented themselves before a shivering curate, whose surplice hung, in damp folds, soddened by the morning mist, and whose temper was not improved by his having waited five minutes for the bride and bride- groom. ♦ Luke Marks, dressed in his ill-fitting Sunday clothes looked by no means handsomer than in his every-dav apparel > hut Phoebe, arrayed in a rustling silk of delicate gray, thai lit'd'been worn about half a dozen times by her mistress* looked, as the few spectators of the ceremony' re- marked, "quite the lady." A very dim and shadowy lady; vague of outline, and faint of color- ing ; with eyes, hair, complexion, and dress all melting into such pale and uncertain shades that, in the obscure light of the foggy November morning, a superstitious stranger might have mistaken tho bride for lady aui »L.r; 79 the gdiosfc of some, other linden, ' w.thc oh u rob. Mr. , the herpof tlxj occasion, though fall iblic house. My ladj liad | . -live >r l ho purchase of tl th the stock nd spirl ■ iall inn 'in the village} perched on thy summit of a hill, 'and call kit a very pretty house, to look at ; it had something of a tun down, weather-beaten appear;: did upon hi: ired'only by four or five rgrown poplars, tha up too rapidly for tl hted, forlorn look ii * sequence. The wind had ha