brought before us in "Esmond" in a vivid manner, the baldness of phrase being, of course, studied; especially effective in the simplicity of wording is the description of the panic that was produced in the era before vaccination by this terrible and disfiguring scourge of populations. Neither Parson Tusher nor Lord Castlewood takes any shame to himself for frank terror, while the mortality that ensues in the little community goes far to justify their attitude. The progress of the attacks sustained by Henry Esmond and Lady Castlewood is not reported at any length, but, save for the remarkably brief incubation in the former case, an accurate clinical picture is drawn both of symptoms and sequela, while the little touch which tells that the gracious and graceful lady's nose remained swelled and red for a considerable period is truly of Thackeray.

Into the regions of neurology I will not follow the novelist, but a protest is wanted against a certain common way of using insanity to punish illdoers-if it cannot be dropped because it is stale, will the fact that it is also silly lead to its surcease? We must all be familiar with the sudden overthrow of reason that occurs in ill-behaving characters. The wretches become insane in a moment. This catastrophe generally comes at the end of the book or play, and mainly to villains whose schemes have miscarried piecemeal; their anxiety increases with their terrific but futile exertions to ward off the The Cornhill Magazine.

approaching wholly unexpected disaster meets them, reason totters on its throne, and they fall with a crash, to be picked up insane. Various situations lead to this kind of fit-the diamonds kept by a thief in reserve to secure flight when the worst has come to the worst at that exact juncture prove to be false or to have been stolen by a confederate; the mistress, hitherto the loving accomplice, deserts the failing fortunes of him who has sinned for her; the fatal rectitude of a wife or a son closes unwittingly the last avenue of a swindler's escape. The victims get purple, grasp their collar-studs, burst into horrid laughter, tumble to earth, and are picked up gibbering lunatics, who for years after may be seen in an asylum going through some pantomime reminiscent of the crowning catastrophe. Who first invented this kind of thing I have no idea; it is founded on no known pathology, but novelists and dramatists believe in the force of its public appeal.

Nemesis; then some

The intentions of a paper whose length will, I know, put a great strain on the good nature of the Editor of the "Cornhill" have been two. First, I wished to suggest by examples from good writers that there are rules by which the medicine of a non-medical writer can be fairly tested. Second, I wished to protest against the ignorance of the medical life displayed by lesser writers.

CHAPTER XVI.

Since they met at Wimbledon, Helga had fetched a letter from Clive once a week from the Surbiton post office, and in his last one he had asked by to

meet him the following Saturday morning at Sloane Square station at twelve o'clock. But he had gone on to ask for more than this, and she had answered him

"I cannot get away for several days or even a whole day: if I could I would not. I still like my own idea; but I don't like yours, and unless you give yours up the lanterns will not be lighted. My point of view is sober and sensible. We are not children. You are a man and I am a woman, and we have chosen each other. This I hold we have a right to do. But my father and mother have rights too, and I will not vex and offend them if I can help it. I hate deceiving them, but I won't enlarge on that, because I'm going to do it, and if you are going to do what is wrong with your eyes wide open, the less you say the better. I will meet you on Saturday at twelve."

It was dry, it was unloving, but she sent it without adding a word, and then went to the post office two days later to see whether there was an answer with a change of plan. Perhaps Clive would say that her idea did not suit him, and that she need not meet him. But there was no letter. So, when Saturday came she made some excuse about Christmas presents, and got away. It had begun to snow a little but Mrs. Byrne was not as nervous about snow as about fog. She thought Helga rather extravagant to go to London for her shopping, but she knew that Mrs. Warwick had given the girl a present of money and that the shopping was to be on a more generous scale than usual.

Helga had her money with her and meant to buy her presents, but they were not in her mind during the coldblooded business of walking to the station, buying a ticket, and taking trains to Wimbledon and Sloane Square in order to carry out a deed that required for its performance the red heat of despairing love. She had promised, therefore she went on, but at every station her courage was at a lower ebb: so that when she saw Clive at Sloane Square she saw him without any rush LIVING AGE. VOL. LIV. 2810

of intimate pleasure and met him frigidly. But he seemed not to ask more of her just then than the gracious fact of her presence: and he accompanied her up the stairs and into a taxi-cab with a gravity she found restoring. The snow was falling now in thick large flakes that fill the air but do not lie on the ground. Clive shut both windows of the cab and then turned to Helga.

"In a few minutes," he said, "we shall be man and wife."

"Only in the eyes of the law," said she, "not really in your eyes and mine." "Legally we shall be man and wife. You do understand that, Helga?"

"Oh!" said Helga, laughing, because her mouth felt like crying, "I'm like the gardner who was told he mustn't shoot his neighbor's cats. I'm not going to study the legal aspect of the question."

"But, my dear girl, what do you mean?"

"What I said in my letter. The lanterns will only be lighted if you agree to my conditions."

"For the present I agree," said Clive, "but not for always. You must understand that too, Helga. I'm determined you are to have your eyes open since you are so young and since you trust me. What we are going to do can't be undone as long as we both live."

"I know," said Helga, in a low voice; and he felt her hand tighten on his in a way that acted like fuel on the fire he was trying for her sake to keep under. "I've read it over and over again just lately-till death does us partbut they won't say those beautiful things to-day, will they?"

"No."

"Till they do we are only half married."

"No," said Clive, with emphasis, "you must be clear about that, Helga, or I WOL go on with it. If the registrar

marries us to-day we come away man and wife."

"In the eyes of the law," persisted the girl. "It will just give us a happy feeling that we belong to each other. But it will have no other effect on our lives, will it?"

The cab stopped at the registrar's office in the King's Road.

"Is it Yes or No?" said Clive.

Helga looked at him but did not speak. They got out of the cab. Clive told the man to wait and they went into the registrar's office together. The proceedings were short, businesslike, and unimpressive. Official questions were asked, forms and registers were signed, fees and witnesses were paid. They were married.

"I feel just the same as when I went in," Helga murmured, as they came away together. "Has anything happened? How it snows! Good-bye, Clive."

"I am coming with you," he said. "No. You are coming with me, in this cab."

"What do you mean?" she cried.

"Oh, don't look like that?" he said, "up in arms and afraid. Get into the cab and we'll have lunch together, and then you shall go home."

The snow powdered them as they crossed the pavement and got into the cab. The air was thick with it so that through the windows they only had a blurred impression of the traffic and of the street on either side. It came down in a slant now and in the small flakes that drift and lie. Like the other Lantern Bearers they were wet and cold and drearily surrounded, and like them in their fools' hearts they were ready to exult and sing. The sense of their action lay in the joy that lighted their eyes. It was too deep at first for speech.

"Are you beginning to understand," said Clive, at last. "You are mine-I am yours-while we live and beyond."

"I don't want to understand too well," said the girl. "I want it to be in my mind like the dream it is."

"A dream that shall turn real." "But you promised, Clive-no, you didn't I can never say that, but I made it a condition."

Her thoughts and sensations were too confused for words. The wooden indifference with which she had answered the registrar's questions and followed what he said was gone now. With a thrill that stirred her to the depths she realized what she had done.

"Our lanterns are lighted," she said; "at the heart of life we have a golden chamber and can dwell in it."

"But you are my wife," said Clive. "I'm certain you only half believe it, and when we are separated-I wish we could have a few days together, right away from every one."

The girl drew from him with such genuine discomfort, that the young man saw his proposal as she saw it, outrageous and impossible.

"We are only half married," she said. "Here is your ring. I can't wear it, and I can't hide it. My mother might find it. Keep it for me." "Till I can give it you again." "If ever the day comes." Unwillingly he took it from her; unwillingly, a little later he let her go. He had ordered lunch in a private room at an hotel, and so they had an hour together like the remembered one in the Surrey garden when they had travelled far along the way where lovers find each other. He had called her his wife again, and she had heard him with the glowing wonder in her eyes that lit them when he first spoke of love. But she had met him with her old dislike of clandestine meetings and a clandestine correspondence, and nothing he could urge brought her to

reason.

"You strain at a gnat and swallow a camel," he said at last.

"Because I hate little everyday deceptions. I hate going to the post office and giving a false name; and on that Sunday when I met you my mother found my wet gown, and wondered why I had gone out; I hate it more than I can tell you, Clive. The one big step we have taken to-day is different. Little subterfuges and tricks drag one down. If we wait patiently and silently, with the light burning, it lifts us up."

"But I must know how you are," said Clive. "You must write to me, Helga." "I would rather not," she said.

In the end, half persuaded, half against the grain, he consented to try her way of marriage for the time, though he vowed it should not last an hour longer than he could help; and then he had stumbled against another of her self-set boundaries. She would not let him give her money or even anything that cost much money.

"I can't understand you," he said. "I've endowed you with all my worldly goods. You ought to feel that what is mine is yours. It's true I haven't much, at present."

"All those things belong to marriage on earth," said Helga, sedately; "we have married in the clouds, for the sake of a thought, of a light to help us along."

His last glimpse of her that day was as he left her at the door of the big shop where she said she would buy her Christmas presents. She was powdered with feathery flakes; and there was a little catch in her voice as she said good-bye; an echo of the moment that he remembered most vividly of all, the moment of real good-bye when they were without witnesses and when the spectre of a long weary separation rose between them chill and cruel. Then she had melted in his arms, clinging to him with little words of love. Her eyes were still shining, her cheeks were still flushed half an hour later

when she turned from him and passed through the shop doors.

As for Helga it was her union with Clive and not her separation from him that nested like a singing bird in her happy heart. The thought of it turned everything golden. She walked here and there in the big shop dreaming and exalted. The business of choosing presents, paying for them and counting her change was phantasmal compared with the shining reality hidden and glowing within her. All through the afternoon it lighted her spirit and even her journey home through deep snow did not depress her. The suburban roads were covered with snow, white for her bridal and quiet for her thoughts. She walked slowly towards her home enjoying the peace.

But when she got to the house she found her mother in a state of anxiety about her and about Mr. Byrne, who had not come back from the City yet.

"I had no idea that you meant to be out the whole day," she said to Helga. "Did you shop in every quarter of London, then-north and south, east and west? You have had time. Your father is late too, and I am troubled about him."

She

Mrs. Byrne was sitting at the diningroom table and in front of her, carefully set out on a newspaper were two pairs of her husband's old boots. had one in her hands and was looking at the patches on it, and the worn-out sole as she talked to Helga.

"I cannot persuade him to buy new ones," she said; "he will not spend the money, and I know those he is wearing to-day will let the snow in. He has got it into his head that Conrad's parents will recall him, and that we shall lose what he pays us. I wish I had never shown him Tante Malchen's letter."

"The best thing to do with her letters would be to burn them unread," said Helga.

"But what she says about Conrad's parents is probably true.”

"Possibly; but as long as Conrad's parents allow him to live here and pay us so much a week they do all we ask of them. We shall never have further dealings with each other."

Mrs. Byrne looked at the daughter's young vivid face, still alight with the day's history, and changed in a way her mother perceived but could not interpret.

"I have been uneasy about you lately, Helga," she said slowly. "I have feared that your affections were engaged, here, or elsewhere. In the one case it could only bring sorrow to us all, but that you know as well as I do -in the other case"

"Is Conrad the other case?" "Naturally. For weeks I have seen that the young man was strongly attracted

"It is most unfortunate," said Helga. "It is unthinkable that his parents will ever consent," said Mrs. Byrne.

"Then let us put it out of our minds. Why are you sitting in front of these old boots, Mummy?"

"They are all your father has except those he is wearing. I was wondering if he could possibly go to the office in one pair while his tidier ones are resoled. But I'm afraid they are impossible."

Helga helped her mother to examine the boots and consider the question. She did not see the sordid side of such difficulties, or feel the clash of them with the insubstantial joys and sorrows of the day. Her deep affection found expression in service, and she had no quarrel with the physical needs and weaknesses of life that fret some natures sorely, and lead them to think realities ugly and unclean. As she looked at the boots, worn with long marches taken in the quest for daily bread, she thought of her father's

hard struggle against bad luck, and of his patience and unselfishness.

"I know what I'll do," she said impulsively, "I've not spent all my money. I'll take one of these for a pattern, and get him a new pair. I'll make them send up several pairs-to try on."

He

Mrs. Byrne looked doubtful. She thought Helga ought not to go out in the snow again. But she thought her husband might get his death of cold if he went out to-morrow in the miserable boots he would bring back to-night, or in these shreds and patches on the table. So Helga went, and at the end of the road met Conrad, who turned back with her. She did not desire his company, but she could not tell him so without being downright rude. He was an amiable and, in some directions, an intelligent young man, but socially he was not quick in the up-take. discoursed eruditely of snow blindness till they got to the boot shop, but when she tried to send him home from there she failed. He went in and waited while she transacted her business. Then he trudged through the snow beside her again and talked of avalanches. It was not till they were half-way home that he said anything disturbing; but unfortunately snow and avalanches put Switzerland into his head, and Switzerland was where he meant to go for a wedding-journey. He asked Helga if she agreed with him, and whether she thought the Oberland or the Engadine would be most attractive.

"I would rather go to India," said Helga.

He seemed to take this answer as a personal rebuff, which Helga thought unusually quick of him. She had meant it for one.

"But you have never been to Switzerland," he said reproachfully. "India would be very expensive."

"I dare say; but when I build castles I don't count the cost."