position of great material comfort, if not | gland." So we shook hands and we wealth. But Paul was already making way in his profession.

"I must be a judge by forty-five," he said to me, laughing; "otherwise I shall think that I have failed."

"And then, Paul?" asked Isabel. "Then I must be made lord chancellor, and I shall pass great measures for the law of the land, and shall become immortal."

parted. Six months afterwards there came a note to Isabel in pencil from her brother, saying that he was dying of fever on the African coast, and that the letter would be sent on after his death. Isabel wept over the letter, but she dried her tears soon, and I think it was better that the last link which reminded her of the shame of her childhood should have been broken.

As for their happiness, however, it was rudely shaken.

I never knew any couple so entirely happy as they were during the first twelve months of their marriage. They had very One day, Paul, the junior counsel in a few friends, and these were all Paul's own case of no apparent importance, found friends; they lived on Campden Hill - himself unexpectedly called upon to mainremember that it was long before Camp- tain a legal position against the opinion den Hill was covered with houses and of the court; he displayed, in his arguthey were just as selfishly and as comment, so much ability and knowledge of pletely happy as love could make them. the law as to call forth an expression of Gradually the pensive and troubled look admiration from the judge himself. I was vanished from Isabel's eyes: the "cloud," myself present in my quality of briefless the "thing," the secret, whatever it had barrister. On the termination of the case been, was wholly put away and forgotten. we came out, and stood for a few minutes As for me, I sometimes thought of it in talking over the point which had been voluntarily. Was the malignant old man raised. Paul's senior joined us, and contruthful in his account of the village and gratulated him, prophesying that his table its residents? Could they really be all of would never be without briefs after that them outcasts by reason of having been morning's work. Others came to shake found out in something disgraceful? Had hands with him, and there was quite a Isabel's father really been "defended" by little scene of congratulation and triumph. the man Brundish in a speech that made In the midst of our talk I saw, bearing all England ring? One would not pry straight down upon us, with the evident into the matter, but the doubt remained intention of speaking, no other than that which it was impossible to kill. In Isa- terrible ex-Q.C. He was clearly halfbel's society, however, it vanished com- drunk. One of the men among us whispletely. She was one of those rare women pered in disgust: "Good heavens ! here's whose friendship is a great possession that miserable man Brundish! Everyfor a man, and whose love is a gift of the body stood aside to make way for him, as gods; a woman whom one regarded with one makes way for a leper. Worse than a daily increasing respect and admiration; a leper, in the courts of Lincoln's Inn, is a a woman to whom goodness of all kinds man who has been disbarred. As well came by nature. should a man who has been stripped of his commission and drummed out of his regiment for cowardice, show himself again upon parade.

Isabel's brother came to town soon after his father's death, and called upon me.

"I have made up my mind," he said to me soon after his sister's marriage, “what I shall do. So long as I remain in this country, Isabel will always have somebody to remind her of the past. If I once go away she will belong entirely to her husband. While I am here I shall always be in terror of the thing being found out. I shall go away, then, and travel. After a year or two I shall convey to Isabel the news that I am dead. Then she will have broken altogether with the past. I shall settle down somewhere, perhaps, some day. I am not sure where or when, and if I am quite sure that I can never be identified, I shall marry, perhaps. But never, never will I come back to En

This man, then, with a half-drunken laugh, walked straight to Paul and held out his hand.

"How are you, Paul, my boy?" he cried, addressing him independently by his Christian name; Isabel quite well?"

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Paul turned perfectly white. "How dare you," he cried, "how dare you speak to me? How dare you address me by my Christian name?"

"How dare I? Ho! ho! Not use his Christian name to the man who married my dear old friend's only daughter? How do you do, Sir John?" He addressed one of the group, a well-known counsel of very high standing and ex-solicitor

general, who made no reply. "Gentle- away now, my dear fellow, and leave me men, you know me, all of you. I have to think." been in court to-day, and I declare I never heard a better argument than my young friend's here. Why, I never put a point better myself."

"Your friend! Yours !" cried Paul with a gesture of loathing.

"For heaven's sake, Paul," I said, "do nothing rash. Think of your profession first." "Isabel must be

"No," he replied. first thought of."

I lingered awhile, unwilling to leave him.

"Now you know all," he said. "It is something like a cloud, isn't it?" "Is it possible that the courtly and pol

"Come, come!" cried the man. "This is rather too much. Why, Paul, you forget that you married the only daughter of my old friend, Sir Robert Reeve Byrne, baronet, whom I defended. You remem-ished ber my famous defence, gentlemen. I am sure it nearly pulled him through, but not quite, for he got his five years' penal servitude."

Then there was a dead silence, and nobody dared to look at his neighbor. As for me, I understood it all. The case of Sir Robert Byrne was a cause célèbre. He had been, I remembered, defended by Mr. Brundish, Q.C., with marvellous skill and ingenuity. My delightful host was, then, no other than that famous baronet, then! and the rest of his guests were they also what the ex-Q.C. had described them? Paul recovered himself. "It is quite true," he said proudly, "I married the daughter of Sir Robert Byrne, but this man I know nothing of, except that he is a rogue."

Mr. Brundish looked round him; he saw on every face loathing clearly written. Half-drunk though he was, he was cowed. He said no more, but slunk away.

It was Sir John himself who laid his hand upon Paul's shoulder and said kindly, "We are all sorry you should have been troubled by this scoundrel, whom once I called my friend. As for your pri vate affairs but of them we need not speak."

They all murmured something, the group broke up, and I took Paul by the arm and walked with him to his chambers. He threw his papers upon the table, and sank into a chair.

"It is all over," he groaned; "my career is finished."

"Paul, this is absurd."

"No," he said. "I have already made up my mind what will happen. These men are my private friends they are part of our social circle; for Isabel, poor child, had no friends of her own. They are good fellows, and at first they will say that it doesn't make any difference, and think it too. But then, you see, there are the women. They will resent the thing, and show their resentment, too. Isabel must be spared this, at any cost. Go

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'Quite possible. Sometimes I tried to think what he would look like in prison dress, but I never could. There was another side to him, though. I saw it on the day when I asked him for his daughter. "Do you," he said, "know the story of my past?" I assured him that he need not open a painful chapter, because I knew everything. And then- then he broke down, burst into a fit of weeping like any woman, and thanked God solemnly that I had come to take his daugh ter away from him. "For myself," he said, "I suppose I am sorry. That mat ters nothing. But for my children's sake, and especially for my daughter's sake, I am-sometimes I am mad." I think that when he was left alone after our marriage he was really mad, and I am nearly sure that he killed himself. However, that is done with. Isabel must not know what has happened. And she must not be made to suspect that our friends, her new friends, know her secret. Women are not always considerate towards each other. I must think I must think what is best to do."

Next morning, I was not surprised to receive a note from Isabel. She said that her husband was suddenly prostrated with some kind of nervous breakdown, though he looked very well, and that the doctor ordered him to give up all work, break off all engagements, and go away for three months at least. They were going the same day.

The three months became six, and the six became twelve; they were travelling about in unfrequented places, where Paul's health would not suffer from noise and talk of travellers; they stayed only in towns where there were no English residents, and so on. Then Paul wrote to me that he had given up his chambers and bought a cottage in the country, where he proposed to stay, his health, he said, being too wretched to think of his practising any more.

I made many visits to the cottage. It

was three or four miles from any village or house. It was on the seaside, and they had a boat. They had no children, and the only people who ever visited them were the family of the nearest clergyman, who came often to them. Isabel was their friend, unpaid governess, adviser, everything.

"Perhaps with the explanation, whenever my name was mentioned, 'You know, I suppose, that he married Sir Robert Byrne's daughter.' And she would have heard it."

"Tell me," I said, "who were the residents of the village. - the people we met at dinner

"I do not know. Why do you ask?” Evidently Isabel knew nothing of them. Perhaps, after all, the wicked old man lied about them.

"I am glad to think," Paul went on, "that we never met any of them afterwards, because perhaps they knew. Thank God! never, never for a moment after the marriage did Isabel feel that her father's sins were visited upon her."

"Why, Paul," I said, "they were; but you shifted the burden to your own shoulders and bore it for her. Did Isabel ever learn why you left London ?"

"No, she never knew and she never suspected. The man, Brundish, died a very little while after of drink, I be lieve."

Remark, here, a very strange thing. This man, my friend Paul, to whom at the outset life without success would have seemed intolerable, who gave up the most promising prospects solely on his wife's account, who was endowed with every quality which success requires, was perfectly happy in this obscure retreat. He wanted no other kind of life; to sail in his boat, to wander on the sands, to meditate in his garden, always with Isabel beside him, was enough for him. His love for Isabel was absorbing and sufficient for both. Other married people continue to pay each other the attentions of their first love; but this pair seemed to live wholly for each other. As for me, who knew their secret, it seemed to me as if Paul spent his life in a perpetual care to ward off from his wife the danger of being reminded of that dreadful story. It had Never not for a moment. What is destroyed his career — that mattered noth- it that I ever gave up for Isabel's sake? ing. It had driven him from the world-Why, she has done far, far more for me that mattered nothing, provided his wife was never reminded of it, never made to feel it. Needs must that so terrible a thing should bring a burden and a curse upon the children Paul accepted it and bore the burden without a murmur or a sigh. And as they lived together among books, and nourishing thoughts sacred and lofty, their home became as a church in which one might fitly meditate, and the conversation was unlike what one heard outside.

They lived in this way for five-andtwenty years. Then the greatest possible misfortune fell upon Paul. For Isabel caught a fever and died. Then Paul began to break up. He was only just past fifty, and should have been in the vigor. ous enjoyment of his manhood; but he began to fail. In the last months of his life I stayed a great deal with him, and he talked freely about his old ambitions and their sudden end.

"I am sure," he said, "that I did right in giving all up. Sooner or later Isabel would have found out would have been made to feel, somehow - that other people knew the truth. In such a case the only safety lies in flight."

But if you had stayed, your own ca

reer was certain."

"And you never regretted all that you lost?"

than I ever did for her. There is something better than ambition, my friend. Isabel gave me that, in return for the burden which, as you say, I shifted to my own shoulders. It pleases me now to think of what I might have become; but if all were to be done over again, I would have it as it has been.”

What it was that Isabel gave him and did for him I do not know, for I did not ask, and now I shall never learn, because he is dead. WALTER BESANT.

From The Fortnightly Review. THE FUTURE OF THE PEERAGE. A MODERATE Liberal it would be cruel to call him a Whig-summed up his late stump experiences in the remark that "the platform was always behind the pit." In denouncing the House of Lords, he had doubtless said rather more than he meant, and was alarmed to find every violent expression cheered to the echo and beyond it. The popular echo dropped, as usual, every qualifying particle, was deaf, as echoes are, to every hint of caution or compromise. In thirty years' experience I never knew it otherwise.

Candor and moderation are not popular, | swept away. He may be wrong; I hope and believe he is; but he has one strong point in his favor. Caution and compromise are the ideas of an aristocracy, or a middle class accustomed to aristocratic leadership. Founded on a first principle, based on strict logic, a democracy is swayed by first principles and logical de ductions. An English middle class would never dispense with an institution that worked well. It is most difficult to convince the new, inexperienced electorate that an institution can work well which is demonstrably illogical and theoretically absurd. The name of "privilege" is as odious to a sovereign many as to a Stuart monarch. I hold Mr. Morley's powers of advocacy in too much respect to anticipate his argument by a reply. When he shall have stated his case against the experi ence of ages and the common judgment of mankind, I may perhaps ask leave to criticise it. For the present I only commend his declaration to the notice of those who have rashly undertaken to pull down the oldest of existing institutionsthe throne excepted — on the assumption that they would be permitted to reconstruct or replace it.

still less party virtues. But in the present instance the impetuosity of the Radical auditory seems a significant fact, the alarm of the speakers more significant still. Most significant of all is the open avowal of revolutionary convictions by rising, practical, and capable men. We know beforehand for the most part what Mr. Bright and even what Mr. Forster will probably say. Mr. Morley falls short of the high authority of the one, and lacks the experienced statesmanship of the other. But he has at once the historical knowledge of a scholar, the enlightenment of a cultivated gentleman, and that political insight which is acquired only by direct and frequent contact with popular audiences and great constituencies. He knows much of the temper of the multitude; still more, perhaps, of the mood and the ideas of those whom a practical electioneer described as the non commissioned officers of Liberalism - Dissenting ministers and deacons, trades-union lead ers, caucus delegates, and men of local influence. He knows well, if less intimately, the views of Liberal statesmen. He is ambitious, practical, and clearsighted. Such a man must see his way to leadership in the future before he severs himself from the leaders of the present. What he thinks is much less noteworthy than what he says and how he says it. When he formally pledged himself to the abolition of a second chamber, he spoke not only his theoretical belief but that which seems to him the winning opinion the future creed at least of the extreme left, if not of the whole Liberal party. The more extreme the paradox, the more significant its utterance. Mr. Morley knows quite as well as I, if he do not feel as deeply, the weight of tradition and authority, of reason and experience, he has chosen to defy. With the universal adoption of double and the all but invariable failure of democratic single assemblies against him with the hideous record of French Conventions, the weighty examples of successful republics and constitutional monarchies, the history of Rome and England, the authority of America, and the final choice of France herself to explain away, he must have profound faith in the insensibility of the English democracy to historical evidence; a devout and confident belief not merely in the superficial, popular passion of the moment, but in a deep and strong undercurrent of popular conviction before which all authority and all experience will be

Mr. Morley's position is clear and tenable. There are many who share his views without his frankness, who seek by degrading its authority, or curtailing its functions, indirectly to reduce our second chamber to a nullity. Others, thinking it inadequate to its functions, or incom patible with a democratic constitution, would reform or reconstruct it. But all these together form probably a small minority of the Liberal party. The majority, like myself, think a second chamber indispensable. They are even less prepared than I to undertake its reconstruction. Upon a trivial issue, a point of procedure, a question of time, and a very short time, they were prepared to shatter to the foundations the credit and prestige, the remaining power and independence upon which rest its usefulness, its popularity, and its authority. They seemed to regard a wholesale creation of peers with complacency, as an ordinary constitutional resource. It is nothing of the kind. It is not constitutional, even in the sense in which a refusal of supplies, the exercise of the royal veto, or repeated dissolutions like those of the Stuarts, may be called constitutional. If it were even legal, it belongs at the best to that class of extreme measures which are our substitute for barricades and pronunciamentos, insurrection, and civil war. The House of