st ask, as an imperative condition, if
your visits here are to be renewed--if your intimacy here is to be
established. And unless you comply with that condition, come no more; we
cannot confide in each other."

"Oh, Lady Montfort, impose any condition. I promise beforehand."

"Not beforehand. The condition is this: inviolable secrecy. You will
not mention to any one your visits here; your introduction to me; your
discovery of the stroller's grandchild in my adopted daughter."

"Not to Mr. Darrell?"

"To him least of all; but this I add, it is for Mr. Darrell's sake that
I insist on such concealment; and I trust the concealment will not be
long protracted."

"For Mr. Darrell's sake?"

"For the sake of his happiness," cried Lady Montfort, clasping her
hands. "My debt to him is larger far than yours; and in thus appealing
to you, I scheme to pay back a part of it. Do you trust me?"

"I do, I do."

And from that evening Lionel Haughton became the constant visitor in
that house.

Two or three days afterwards Colonel Morley, quitting England for a
German Spa at which he annually recruited himself for a few weeks,
relieved Lionel from the embarrassment of any questions which that
shrewd observer might otherwise have addressed to him. London itself was
now empty. Lionel found a quiet lodging in the vicinity of Twickenham.
And when his foot passed along the shady lane through yon wicket gate
into that region of turf and flowers, he felt as might have felt that
famous Minstrel of Ercildoun, when, blessed with the privilege to enter
Fairyland at will, the Rhymer stole to the grassy hillside, and murmured
the spell that unlocks the gates of Oberon,

BOOK VIII.

CHAPTER I.

"A LITTLE FIRE BURNS UP A GREAT DEAL OF CORN."--OLD PROVERB.

Guy Darrell resumed the thread of solitary life at Fawley with a calm
which was deeper in its gloom than it had been before. The experiment of
return to the social world had failed. The resolutions which had induced
the experiment were finally renounced. Five years nearer to death,
and the last hope that had flitted across the narrowing passage to the
grave, fallen like a faithless torch from his own hand, and trodden out
by his own foot.

It was peculiarly in the nature of Darrell to connect his objects with
posterity--to regard eminence in the Present but as a beacon-height from
which to pass on to the Future the name he had taken from the Past. All
his early ambitio