We shall not dwell any longer in detail upon the remainder of Bertrand's and Pigott's stay at Cairnarvoch.

For the former, the time passed all too quickly, every day unfolding new charms in the object of his love, every hour increasing his enchantment, till even the ideal of his early worship looked, in the cold distance of the past, but a dim, imperfect shadow, compared with the bright reality now flooding his life with sunshine. As for the others, Pigott's temper, which, as a rule, was eminently equable, soon regained its tone; the weather was glorious, the sport good-for him two grand consolations; so that he even recovered some of his original semi-enthusiasm for the place and its amusements.

The cloud soon passed from Mr M'Killop's brow. Tainsh had shown no malice; so far from carrying the fiery cross of denunciation and slander about the country, as predicted

VOL. CX.-NO. DCLXIX.

66

by Mrs M'Killop, he had written a cordial note of congratulation on the news conveyed to him by Mr Cameron," and M'Killop beamed upon the young couple, and seemed to await as impatiently as they the arrival of Sir Roland's fiat. Mrs M'Killop could not, from her very nature, remain long in cold abstraction, and ere long her noisy tongue clattered with all its wonted energy: her secret sorrows and disappointments were, no doubt, assuaged by the prospect of excitement in store-a trousseau to superintend the éclat of a marriage, and all the bustle, movement, noise, and display therewith connected : altogether, the latter weeks of the Cairnarvoch campaign passed blessedly for some, tranquilly for others, and tolerably at least for all. the most liberal "leave" must have an end, and with the second week of October that of Bertrand and Pigott came to a close; and the lover had to turn his back upon his

A

But

love, and return to his duty; and never was the old antagonism between love and duty more keenly appreciated than now by him, as he mooned through his daily occupations in a somnambulistic way, wondering to find everything so changed the joys of the barracks so flat, the duties so stale, the companionship so wearily vapid and unprofitable.

Sir Roland's answer was not expected for three months, and in the event of its being favourable it was decided that the marriage should take place immediately after its arrival. The delay and the separation would probably have been irksome and trying to most men; but to Bertrand, who thought and felt and acted, all, so to speak, in the superlative degree, the weariness of this interval appeared to be something without a parallel. What had formerly constituted his social pleasures now offered no distraction, and occupations that had once been full of interest afforded him no relief. Garrison convivialities were coarse orgies; garrison duty a solemn farce; the funniest man in the regiment was a dreary buffoon, and the smartest officer a peddling prig. Looking thus on his surroundings with a jaundiced eye, his surroundings soon began to return the compliment; for where there is a large circle of cheery companionship to choose from, it is not to be expected that men whose object it is to live merrily all the days of their lives, should trouble themselves to coax a moody man into good fellowship. So Bertrand dropped into a state of isolation strangely in contrast with his former position in the regiment, and had a weary, fretful time of it, his mind inverted and staring at its own discontent, morn, noon, and night. In all the twenty-four hours there was but one gleam of sunshine for him, and that was when the

post came in and brought Eila's daily epistle-for a daily epistle was of course necessary to keep the lovers properly posted up in the thermometric readings of each other's hearts; and charming letters Eila wrote, full of life and sparklefreely interspersed with the essential element, and one-half at least devoted to the discussion of Bertrand's merits, moral, intellectual, and physical. They were most satisfactory, and they did satisfy their recipient for about an hour, after which he began to look forward to the next, with a full recurrence of the restless cravings and longings of the lovesick.

Pigott was his only resource in the way of society. He had always, as we know, been Bertrand's very special friend; and now the merit of knowing her procured for him a monopoly of the lover's company-a distinction which poor Pigott sometimes found to be rather oppressive.

"A little of that kind of thing goes a long way with most men," he complained pathetically to the Mess one day; "and every one knows it is not in my line. I would do a deal for Bertrand, but he does become maddening at times-simply maddening. His conversation has become a sort of. what do you call it? what they sing at the end of the Psalms? yes-a doxology; and he won't let me off a single 'Amen.' If the marriage doesn't come off soon, I'll do something desperate. I believe my reason is beginning to totter; as for my digestive organs, they are simply nowhere. I dream at nights. I dreamt last night that the marriage was coming off. was the groomsman, and my duty was to carry a haggis to church under each arm, and to see that the bride and bridegroom each disposed of one before the ring was put on. That shows what a state I must be in."

I

Notwithstanding all this, however, Pigott was, on the whole, very patient with his friend, and only showed himself otherwise now and then, on which occasions he would viciously point out the absurdity of expecting Sir Roland to give his consent to the marriage, or dilate with a great deal of powerful wordpainting on the idiosyncrasies of Mr and Mrs M'Killop.

Then Bertrand would flare up, and there would be a row-such rows as always happen between men who are too much shut up together -and then a reconciliation, and so forth.

The time went past, however, somehow, and the winter crept on. The M'Killops went down to Edinburgh, partly from stress of weather, and partly because they wished to lose not a moment in commencing arrangements for the wedding when the "mere matter of form" arrived from the antipodes. It was Bertrand's earnest prayer in all his letters that these arrangements might be proceeded with in anticipationthe trousseau procured, the day named, even the guests biddenand nothing left to be done but start for church, and live happy ever after, as soon as Sir Roland dropped the flag. It was his pet grievance, for ever dinned into his friend's tingling ears, that this prayer was not complied with; to which Pigott, when out of temper, would reply, that "old M'Killop was not half such a fool as he looked, and knew perfectly well that a second-hand trousseau and a stale wedding-cake were about the most unsaleable forms which portable property could assume."

At last the period of suspense came to a close; the eventful day arrived; the colonial mail came in, and Bertrand found on his table the unmistakable despatch, directed in his uncle's handwriting-the order of release from purgatory-the "Open

"DEAR BERTRAND,-I duly received your letter of the 12th September, but as the same mail brought me a communication from an individual who professes an interest in your welfare (though he desires to remain incognito), containing statements bearing upon the matter of your letter, I have delayed my reply to you till I could verify these statements, which I have been enabled to do by communicating with correspondents in a neighbouring colony. Looking only to your own letter, requesting my consent to your marriage with a Miss M'Killop, the daughter of a person with whom, as far as I can make out, you have been boarding in Scotland during the autumn, I should have been inclined to say, first, that your application to me ought properly to have preceded your addresses to the lady in question, your own means not enabling you, without my assistance, to carry out any engagement of the sort. Knowing, however, that your disposition is eminently rash and impulsive, I might have been inclined to look upon this error with some leniency, had the step you propose to take not been open to the gravest objection in every particular. That at your age, in your profession, and with your vague prospects, you should dream of matrimony at all, argues a tolerably advanced stage of folly; but that you should gravely propose to ally yourself with a nameless nobody, and thereby sacrifice any advantage of connection which you now have, or might possibly acquire, really appears to be insanity pure and simple. With nothing, then, to go

upon but your own letter, I should have unhesitatingly withheld my consent, and warned you to look for no countenance or assistance from me in the event of your declining to abandon the engagement. But if these were my views merely on your own statement of the case, you may imagine what they became when I learned from your friend the fact the horrible fact that the person whose daughter you propose to make your wife has actually been a convicted felon, and has undergone, in a colony adjacent to this, a term of penal servitude. There is no possible doubt as to the identity of the man. Dismiss any such idea which your own wishes might suggest. I have ascertained the facts of the case. I neither speak nor act upon some light hearsay evidence, and what I assert, you may thoroughly depend upon. Under these circum

stances it is idle for me to discuss the matter. I can only hope-and indeed I can scarcely doubt--that you will assure me by the return mail that you were ignorant of the stigma attaching to the family you propose to ally yourself with, that you recoil with horror from an engagement contracted in ignorance of it, and could not for an instant look upon such an obstacle as otherwise than insurmountable. I can scarcely doubt, I say, that you will write to me at once in this sense.

"But there must be no sort of misconception on your part, as to how I shall act, if unfortunately I should be wrong, and if, in one of those flights of wrong-headed romance in which you seem occasionally to indulge, you should still venture to think of such a disgraceful connection-led away, perhaps, by specious protestations of injured innocence, or by the vehemence of your misplaced attachment: therefore I tell you plainly, that unless you furnish me with a prompt assurance, upon

your honour, that the engagement is at an end, and that you will have no further communication with the girl, I shall cease to look upon you as a member of my family, or as interested any longer, in the remotest degree, in the destination of my property, which, under such circumstances, I have full legal power to alienate from you. I trust such stern measures will never be called for. I sincerely trust that, as a threat, they are unnecessary. I prefer to believe that the recollection of what is due to the honour of our ancient race will be alone sufficient to make you do what is right. Still it is necessary that there should be no possibility of misconception, and so I speak plainly. I look anxiously for your reply, and remain your affectionate uncle,

"ROLAND CAMERON."

Bertrand began to read this letter, standing upright at the table; as he read, his colour changed, his eyes became dilated, and his lips were tightly compressed; but when he came to the passage "has actually been a convicted felon," he paused, stared wildly about him, and sank down upon a chair with such a cry of anguish as can only come from a heart stricken with some sudden, excruciating pain. Still he read onalmost mechanically-to the end, and then the paper fell from his hand, as though he had been paralysed.

A numb stupor came over his mind; his consciousness seemed to be pent in by walls of thick, impenetrable cloud, and the pressure of a darkness that could be felt, weighed upon him with an indefinite sense of overwhelming misery. He was stunned; he was conscious only of utter pain and misery; everything else was confused and indefinite; and it was only after a long interval, and slowly, that from this

chaos, the actual calamity which had befallen him shaped itself out in clear, inexorable reality.

Every graceful attribute, every charm of mind or of person which Eila possessed, had been so wrought up by Bertrand's love and poetic fancy, that she had become to him a being inhabiting the earth indeed -mysteriously inhabiting the earth -yet not of it; a being too ethereal and pure to be affected by the sordid details of everyday existence, a unique creation, "a floweret of Eden," upon which the serpent's trail could never pass. All asso

ciations of common life that accidentally obtruded themselves, from time to time, in any sort of juxtaposition with the thought of her, jarred upon him painfully, as if the flow of a harmony had been suddenly interrupted by some intolerable discord. Not the least of these had been, at first, the circumstance that she possessed a father to whose earthy characteristics it was impossible to be blind; but, after all, he was an unobtrusive person; and what with habit and daily contemplation, what with some instinctive sympathy with a natural affection which he felt that Eila must entertain towards this detrimental parent, he had got to look upon him as rather negatively an evil, than a positive profanation of the object of his worship. Thus the fact of her paternity had hung, like a cloud indeed, but remotely, on the far-away horizon of his otherwise sunbright heaven. But now came this disillusionising fact, breaking, as by a counter-spell, the magic circle with which his imagination had hedged her in; and there was she, whom in his fastidious devotion he would have guarded from contact with aught that was prosaic, were it never so innocent-there was she, the prismatic nimbus that enveloped her reft and dissipated, standing

revealed in indissoluble association with all that was vilest and most degrading. Bertrand contemplated this, and was torn with the agony of a struggle between the different elements which go to make up what the world calls "Love." We all know how little there often is of the pure essence in that mysterious compound; how Vanity, Egotism, Selflove, and Self-interest, calling Fancy to their aid, can put on the graceful semblance of the passion, and pass, even self-deceiving, for its reality; and how often the strongest analytic test can scarcely disintegrate the counterfeit. To such a test was Bertrand's love now exposed. Richly overlaid, and glittering with beautiful illusions, it was cast into the alembic: stern was the ordeal, and mortal the pain, as the fire burned, and, one by one, each baser ingredient turned into refuse. Mortal, indeed, was the pain; but Bertrand's love was pure and tender and true, and if it came forth stripped of many a grace and charm, it was still intact in its strong truth and tenderness. Pride, indeed, spoke out to him of contaminated blood, and chivalrous traditions cancelled by alliance with disgrace. Duty and Prudence counselled obedience to his uncle's wishes, and whispered of the penalties of disobedience; but all in vain.

"Did I not love her?" he cried out, as if arguing the point with an antagonist-" did I not love her for her heart, for her mind, for her beauty, for her grace, for her innocence for all those qualities that, making up her, make her superior to every other woman in the world? Did I not love her, purely and disinterestedly, for herself alone? Is she altered now? The taint was on her birth when I first loved her; it made her none the less lovable when it was unsuspected; and now being known, can it alter her intrinsically? It cannot it does not.