mps."

Ignorant spectators might have set them down for a good, happy, well-met
young couple, with regard to whom it would be simply and equally
appropriate to wish "God bless them."

III.--HAZARD.

Diana did not slacken in her devotion, but there came a limit to the
endurance of Gervase. The gleam of success was but the gleam before
the overcast.

First, Gervase was conscious of being nettled by the distance which
existed between him and Diana. And certainly, to be sensible of his arm
being arrested by an unseen obstacle when he thought to put it round his
own wife's waist, to collapse in the mere idea of asking her to give him
a kiss, never to have felt so fully the dissipated, degraded fool he had
been, as he felt then, was not a pleasant sensation. It may sound
immoral, but it seemed as if, had Gervase been more depraved, there
would have been more hope for him, since he would have appreciated the
gulf between him and his guardian less.

Then the old craving returned like a death thirst. The old, wild,
worthless, low companions, were cognisant, as if by instinct, of a
relapse. Eager to hail its signs, and profit by them, they waylaid him
at the 'Spreading Ash,' with "Hey, don't you dare to swallow a single
glass in your own village, to give custom to your villager, man?" They
waylaid and gathered round him in the market-place of Market Hesketh,
with "Well met, Mr. Gervase Norgate. Lord! are you alive still? for we
had doubted it. Don't speak to him to detain him, you fellows; don't you
see Mrs. Gervase has her eye upon him, and is craning her neck to
discover what is keeping him? Off with you, sir, since you are a
husband, a reformed rake, and a church-goer. If you had gone and joined
the Methodists, you might have been a preacher yourself by this time.
Oh! we don't want to spoil sport and balk your good intentions; but, by
George, Gervase, we never thought you would have been the man to be
tied so tight to a woman's apron-string. You must spare us one more
carouse for old friendship's sake, my boy, just to try what it is like
again, and hear all the news. Ah! your teeth are watering; come along;
Madam is not to swallow you up entirely."

They got him away from his wife, and made him leave her sitting an
hour in the carriage, with a pair of young horses pawing and rearing
and endangering her very life in the yard of the 'Crown.' They made
him send her home without him, and kept him till they had nothing mor