m this place," he said with a kind of cry: "I'm not fit
to go about among people."

And they went away, and moved from place to place, but still the malady
grew, till at last, unutterably mournful as it was, Mary felt it a
relief when he ceased to be capable of watching the progress of it
himself: his misery at least was over. Thereafter he slipped into
perfect mindlessness, happy and harmless, but hopelessly mindless and
vacant. Meantime, Lady Louisa Moor made a very brilliant marriage to a
marquis, the eldest son of a duke, the account of which Mary Brunton
read in the newspapers while watching her brother's face with its
meaningless smile. How her heart swelled! and she burst into a passion
of weeping. She threw her arm round him as if to shield him from evil as
she said, "Oh, Jamie, nothing can reach you now--nothing." He looked at
her with the look that was always so touching, as if he were vainly
trying to remember or comprehend: that occasional look of effort was the
only remnant left of all his powers of mind.

The duchess of Dover asked her sister the marchioness one day if she
knew what had become of Dr. Brunton.

"No," said she, "I don't. He has left the Birns, I know."

"Shortly after he wrote that letter to you he became insane," said the
duchess: she put the information in that form, fearful that her sister
would be overwhelmed with self-reproach.

"He was insane before he wrote it," said the young marchioness: "only
insanity could excuse such presumption. Men don't go mad from
disappointed love, or women either, I believe, unless there's a
predisposition to madness. He must have had that, and any other accident
in his life would have brought it out as well as his foolish fancy for
me. If he had been thrown from his gig, or had two or three of his
patients die on his hands at once, the effect would have been the same;"
and she passed easily to other topics.

The marchioness was wonderfully beautiful, and she was clever and
ambitious, and took and kept a very conspicuous place in her sphere; but
her amusements were sometimes costly in their nature, whether she
thought so or not. THE AUTHOR OF "BLINDPITS."

WALPURGIS NIGHT.

Three travelers making haste,
And whisp'ring of some errand of their own,
With arms enlinked and garments backward blown,
Across a twilight waste.

Three gibbets dumb and tall,
Against the east, with scrawny arms, outlined;
Far off a