surprise, with a condition. He, rich, handsome, aristocratical, accomplished, irresistible,-could not pretend to the hand of an Egyptian girl, but upon the fulfilment of an exaction of her pride.

She took him by the hand, and leaving her slippers upon the silken cushion, walked barefooted over the green sward, to a small stream that ran glittering in the moonlight, over a smooth rock between the terraces of the garden. Placing her right foot in the stream, she drew her trouser of striped silk above the ankle, and resting her weight upon the foot, bade him kneel and see the moonlight follow the water under that bridge of alabaster.

"You have told me," she said, "that in your own land you are highborn-of a proud race. I doubt it not. But my father is of a tribe who judge, by the arch of the instep, how many generations have passed since a family bore burdens like slaves. If water will run under your foot, my father will believe you are not the son of a slave, and my hand will follow where my heart is gone!"

Slippered in the costume of the east, Everard hesitatingly bared his foot, and placed it across the stream. Down dropped Maroula on her knee, and in another instant, without a word, fled like an affrighted fawn across the garden. And with the blood burning like lava in his forehead, the proud son of Sir Everard stood watching the parted stream as, turned entirely from its narrow bed, it divided upon his foot, and in two curving streams recovered its moonlit channel.

And now good night, fair lady, and if you would hear the rest of this rambling story, your fair eyes must seek the teller again.

CHAP. IV.

Ir you have ever, like myself, fancied in your childish dream, that Heaven must be a place with interminable flights of stairs, you would scarce land at Malta, from a wearisome ship, and glance up a mountain-side, all studded with palaces, balconies, stone steps, and flitting and veiled women, without feeling that this fair city, if not the Heaven you had dreamed of, might make a very pleasant stopping-place on one's way thither.

The

The rocks of Malta seem to have been created in architecture. taste and gorgeousness of the whole city of Valetta, bear the lavish and consistent impress which we find in the shapes of trees and the colour of flowers-not here and there a fair tree or a lovely flower, but a world of fair trees and flowers of wonderful loveliness.

Malta so seems to you a part of an architectural universe, and you glance in thought at the Knights of St. John, as having wrought at it as the angels did at mountain and river in the six days of creation.

As melancholy a gentleman as you would meet in your travels, was Mr. Everard Trulian, as he climbed the successive flights of stairs leading from the water-side to the principal square of Valetta. For the first time since he had left Constantinople, he felt forced to drive from his thoughts the image of the beloved Egyptian, and remember that he had come to meet a relative. Miss Mavis, he presumed, was by this time his sister; for though he had not heard that the marriage between his father and Lady Mavis had taken place, the letters which had contained the request that he would immediately join Mrs. Trevor and

Miss Mavis at Malta, had also stated that the bridal would probably take place in the week following.

It was not till he had taken a bath and his breakfast very deliberately at the hotel, that Mr. Trulian rang and inquired if Mrs. Trevor was in the house. He followed his card in a cool half-hour, and was welcomed by the kind old lady very cordially and alone. Little as he had anticipated pleasure or sympathy from the interview, he had been so long away from those who spoke his own language, and knew and loved him as the son of the house of Trulian, that his heart melted to Mrs. Trevor's inquisitive kindness, and he found himself in less than an hour surprised into a confidence which he would not have believed he could have made to any person on earth. He told her the story of his passion, described with a glowing face the absurd and cruel test by which his claims to high birth had been tried and found wanting, and described with a suppressed anguish that moved the heart of his attentive listener, the week of frantic and vain search he had made for Maroula after the sudden parting in the garden.

"But how is it possible," said Mrs. Trevor, as she loosed the curtains to shut out the pitiless brightness of a Maltese sun; "how is it possible that a family so well known as must be that of a Bey, could vanish in a night without a trace."

"I did every thing, my dear Mrs. Trevor! I bribed, and entreated, and forced my way into the gates in open day. They were gone. I thought it might be but for a short time, to evade my importunities, and I returned at all hours for a week. No one but a jabbering Nubian was left at last; and though he was easily induced by gold to give me free liberty to wander through the gardens and the house, he either knew or could explain nothing. There is no police in the east. The privacy of a house that has been occupied by a woman is sacred, and I was foiled utterly. It was necessary that I should meet you here in this month; but I am convinced that I should have discovered no more by remaining at Constantinople. I have lost her, my dear madam, and with her all interest in life."

Mrs. Trevor, during this outbreak of grief and disappointment, sat uneasily on her chair; and to a person less absorbed in his own thoughts than Everard, would have betrayed a state of embarrassment somewhat beyond the demand of a friendly sympathy. She took his hand, at last, with a look of the deepest concern.

My dear Everard!" she said, "I trust that this passion of yours is no deeper than many you have felt and forgotten. You have seen more beautiful and more accomplished -"

"Madam!" interrupted Everard, rising suddenly to his feet, and with the next thought, again putting his hand into hers-" forgive me, dear Mrs. Trevor, if I seem rude and violent. You cannot understand how this love has possessed me. Do not say it is romantic, and loved for its romance. The voice, the eyes, the thousand graces of that beautiful girl, enchanting as they were, were nothing to the qualities of her mind, shown through every syllable she spoke. She was all that is playful, delicate, winning, and tender. I shall never love again, and I know too well that I never loved before. That girl, dear friend, was the destiny of my heart."

"Stay, for mercy's sake, do not say it!" exclaimed Mrs. Trevor,

suddenly walking away from him in the greatest agitation. "I did not think this would be so serious. We have done wrong, very wrong, Everard."

"Madam!"

"Forgive us! forgive us!" she exclaimed, clasping her hands together, and drawing with a sudden effort a curtain, opening out upon a deep balcony darkened with shrubs and flowers, she disclosed the prostrate form of Maroula.

With a single bound Everard sprang into the balcony, and imprinting a long and passionate kiss upon her insensible forehead, bore her out to a small garden beyond, where, above a grove of orange-trees, bearing both fruit and flower, rose the jet of a concealed fountain. The next instant the close yashmak was torn by Mrs. Trevor from the face and bosom of the senseless girl, and while she bathed her pallid lips, Everard slowly and agonizingly retraced, in the Egyptian Maroula, the clearly-chiselled features, though but once seen, of the slighted Elinor Mavis. She had accomplished her perilous revenge, but she had played her part too well!

Dearest lady, in your bright and vivid imagination, you will again have outrun my loitering story, and drawn with your darkest pencil of fancy the painful hours of explanation and reproach between two who had so mutually travestied and entangled their own web of happiness. A sadder party of travellers than Mrs. Trevor and Sir Everard's children, never wound their slow way over Alps and Apennines to England.

Not like brother and sister-no, not at all like brother and sisterbut like lovers doomed to love on, though love be sinful and hopelesssilent, I say, and almost cold in their formal kindness to each other, they drove without the delay of an hour, on their arrival, to Mavis Court.

The sere leaves of autumn were rustling on the trees, but as they approached the home of Elinor, there was a change. Glimpses through the park, showed trees laced with ribbons, music prevailed by broken echoes over the sound of the wheels, and as they neared the gate, out marched a troop of the old tenants of Sir George, and with an English cheer, the daughter was welcomed home again to her paternal halls.

Elinor let down the window as the carriage stopped for the gate to open, and asked the steward, whom she saw directing some further manifestations of welcome, what might mean all this rejoicing.

"Did you not know, my dear young mistress, that this is the day for the wedding?"

There, lady—I have brought you near enough to the close of your story-yours, I say, because you have imagined it more than I have described it. You see how it all should end, but I must just remark, what perhaps I was the only one to notice, that when Sir Everard took the bridal veil from Lady Mavis's head, and the plain gold ring from his own finger, and gave them respectively to Everard and Elinor, there was a look in his eyes that convinced me he would have found consolation, had the union of the Mavis and Trulian property been delegated to himself, and the still beautiful lady of Mavis Court.

PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF TRISTRAM DUMPS, ESQ.*

CHAP. XIII.

HAVING done all that I conceived fell within my province in the gratifying events recorded in the last chapter, I kept clear, the next morning, of the communications which were going on between the parties more intimately concerned. I felt a lively pleasure in having borne a part in what I now considered to be the happily reversed fortunes of the lovely Erminie, and of George Gilbert. For several days I experienced a sort of happiness to which I had long been a stranger; but by degrees my mind relapsed into that inert state which was a part of the insipidity of my solitary existence.

The first time I met Frank Delaroue after the altered circumstances of his friend's prospects, he was in the full flow of juvenile spirits, his countenance beaming with all the unequivocal signs of complete participation in George's happiness; but I soon perceived, after a few days, that he fell back into that new and thoughtful mood, which had invaded him of late.

One day, after a longer pause than usual in our conversation, he said, "I want, sir, to ask a favour of you, if you will be so good as to oblige me.'

"What is that, my-Mr. Frank?"

"Just to obtain for me, from Mr. La Fleur, now that George is otherwise engaged, some information respecting India."

I felt that I wished Queen Elizabeth and her charter-all Leadenhallstreet-directors (though I had a second cousin at the board)-nabobs -pagodas-palanquins, and every thing I had ever heard named in connexion with the Peninsula, at the bottom of the Red Sea.

"Very well," said I, in the tone of a man who makes an appointment with his dentist to have a tooth drawn, "I will not fail."

When he was gone I began to wonder, not why I had taken a fancy to the lad, for every one who knew him liked him, but how it had come to pass, that by some insensible action of the social intricacies, Mr. Francis M. Delaroue had not only become associated with the habitual thoughts of Tristram Dumps, Esq., of Invermair, in the county of Roxburgh, but that he already formed no inconsiderable link in that chain of small occurrences, which connect the daily, and therefore the most important part of life's routine.

It was on the day after this conversation that I wandered out at a very early hour into the Champs Elysées. It was a fine clear frosty morning one of those, in which the air of the continent, always clearer than our insular atmosphere, is doubly brilliant, and to our eyes seems scarcely to belong to this lower sphere of existence-the minutest point of every building stood out boldly and clearly defined against the deep blue sky-the towers of Notre Dame, from which the great and mellow bell was booming forth the hour, shot up their taper pinnacles into the air, and the gilt dome of the " Invalides" was gleaming

Continued from No. ccxx., page 554.

aloft to the early sun. A calm withal-a stillness in the air peculiar to such a state of atmosphere-the fall of a leaf, or the flit of a passing bird, was not lost to the ear. There is something in fine weather like this, which, even from my boyish days, I have always found more conducive to melancholy than the most gloomy and adverse condition of the elements. As the distant hum of the fervent capital broke, at intervals, upon my ear, such, said I, is my life! ever to stand isolated on the precincts of this world's busy interests-alone, not only in person, but in the absence of all those ties which bind the social or domestic affections of mankind. If my poor sister Kitty had been more discreet, and had lived, volatile as her conduct ever was, and dissimilar as our dispositions were, how different would have been my destiny! Her gaiety would have tempered my gloom-the little circle of her home would have been a haven of rest to me whenever the mighty ocean of life became overcast by clouds; and if she had been blessed with children, who knows but that, amongst her little ones, the beam of some innocent eye might have called forth that magic sympathy which comes nearest to a father's interests-have given me at least one hearttie on this side of the grave.

As I found that I was falling into one of my usual melancholy moods, I looked about for something to divert my attention, and to bring me more in unison with the cheerful character of the day. A gaudy little vis-à-vis, bound for Versailles, was rattling and glittering past over the hard dry road-the thin gray figure of the veteran who drove it-a remnant of the ancien régime-the large glazed hat, and pigtail-the bunch of lauristinus in the buttonhole, and the festive air with which he flourished his whip, as an invitation to me while he passed, seemed the very thing for my case, so holding up the forefinger of my right hand, he was at my side in a trice with a dash and caracole of his lively little horse. "Montez, Monsieur-montez," said he, opening the door, and "Pardon, Madame," as he moved an umbrella which lay athwart the door, on the inside. Up I jumped, and off we went in a minute. It was one of those carriages that hold only two, and face to face. opposite seat was completely filled by a large elderly lady" as every one, without licence of heraldry, is called in a public conveyance. She was, however, a stately, prim, tidy-looking dame; and, contrary to the custom of elderly ladies in such positions, and especially in France, did not appear at all anxious to open a conversational intercourse. On the contrary, I perceived that she was surveying me with some caution and deliberation, first looking out at one window, and then as she transported her eye across to the other, taking what is called "a good look" at my countenance and demeanour, en passant. At last I ventured to break silence, and with a civil, somewhat formal bow, made my first remark, which of course was, Il fait beau temps, Madame."

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The

"Oh! aye, it's braw lightsome wather for sic an a place as this!" It must have occurred to many, when groping their way up a staircase in the dark, to have made with great circumspection a step too much at the top, and they must remember the kind of balk when the foot flapped with such unnecessary care and vigour upon the landingplace. Something of this kind always is felt upon such recognitions as these-nor are they without their little embarrassments. No one, especially English, is fond of exhibiting without necessity a defective pro