! No! Verdure and blossom and the smile of spring
are upon every bough!"

"I suppose," said Alban, "it will not now break Lionel's heart to learn
that not an hour before I left London, I heard from a friend at the
Horse Guards that it has been resolved to substitute the regiment for
Lionel's; and it will be for some time yet, I suspect, that he must
submit to be in gloriously happy. Come this way, George, a word in your
ear." And Alban, drawing his nephew aside, told him of Jasper's state,
and of Arabella's request. "Not a word to-day on these mournful topics,
to poor Willy. To-day let nothing add to his pain to have lost a
grandchild, or dim his consolation in the happiness and security
his Sophy gains in that loss. But to-morrow you will go and see the
stricken-down sinner, and prepare the father for the worst. I made a
point of seeing Dr. F. last night. He gives Jasper but a few weeks. He
compares him to a mountain, not merely shattered by an earthquake, but
burned out by its own inward fires."

"A few weeks only," sighed George. "Well, Time, that seems everything
to man, has not even an existence in the sight of God. To that old man
I owe the power of speech to argue, to exhort, and to comfort;--he was
training me to kneel by the deathbed of his son!"

"You believe," asked the Man of the World, "in the efficacy of a
deathbed repentance, when a sinner has sinned till the power of sinning
be gone?"

"I believe," replied the Preacher, "that in health there is nothing
so unsafe as trust in a deathbed repentance; I believe that on the
deathbed, it cannot be unsafe to repent!"

Alban looked thoughtful, and George turned to rejoin Waife, to whom
Vance was narrating the discovery of Sophy's parentage; while Fairthorn,
as he listened, drew his flute from his pocket, and began screwing it,
impatient to vent in delicate music what he never could have set into
words for his blundering, untunable tongue. The Colonel joins Darrell,
and hastens to unfold more fully the story which Vance is reciting to
Waife.

Brief as it can, be the explanation due to the reader. Vance's sister
had died in childbirth. The poor young poet, unfitted to cope with
penury, his sensitive nature combined with a frame that could feebly
resist the strain of exhausting emotions, disappointed in fame,
despairing of fortune, dependent for bread on his wife's boyish brother,
and harassed by petty debts in a foreign land, had been fast pining
away, even