perhaps you may not-understand. Pet and her baby sister were so exactly alike, and so completely one, that in our thoughts we have never been able to separate them since. It would be of no use to tell us that our dead child was a mere infant. We have changed that child according to the changes in the child spared to us, and always with us. As Pet has grown, that child has grown; as Pet has become more sensible and womanly, her sister has become more sensible and womanly, by just the same degrees. It would be as hard to convince me that if I was to pass into the other world to-morrow, I should not, through the mercy of God, be received there by a daughter just like Pet, as to persuade me that Pet herself is not a reality at my side." "I understand you," said the other, gently.

"As to her," pursued her father, "the sudden loss of her little picture and playfellow, and her early association with that mystery in which we all have our equal share, but which is not often so forcibly presented to a child, has necessarily had some influence on her character. Then, her mother and I were not young when we married, and Pet has always had a sort of grown-up life with us, though we have tried to adapt ourselves to her. We have been advised more than once when she has been a little ailing, to change climate and air for her as often as we could-especially at about this time of her life-and to keep her amused. So, as I have no need to stick at a bank-desk now (though I have been poor enough in my time I assure you, or I should have married Mrs. Meagles long before), we go trotting about the world. This is how you found us staring at the Nile, and the Pyramids, and the Sphinxes, and the Desert, and all the rest of it; and this is how Tattycoram will be a greater traveller in course of time than Captain Cook."

"I thank you," said the other, "very heartily for your confidence." "Don't mention it," returned Mr. Meagles, "I am sure you are quite welcome. And now Mr. Clennam, perhaps I may ask you whether you have yet come to a decision where to go next?"

"Indeed, no. I am such a waif and stray everywhere, that I am liable to be drifted where any current may set."

"It's extraordinary to me-if you'll excuse my freedom in saying so -that you don't go straight to London," said Mr. Meagles, in the tone of a confidential adviser.

"Perhaps I shall.”

"Aye! But I mean with a will.”

"I have no will. That is to say," he colored a little, "next to none that I can put in action now. Trained by main force; broken, not bent; heavily ironed with an object on which I was never consulted and which was never mine; shipped away to the other end of the world before I was of age, and exiled there until my father's death there, a year ago; always grinding in a mill I always hated; what is to be expected from me in middle-life? Will, purpose, hope? All those lights were extinguished before I could sound the words." "Light 'em up again!" said Mr. Meagles.

"Ah! Easily said. I am the son, Mr. Meagles, of a hard father and mother. I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and priced everything for whom what could not be weighed, measured and priced, had no existence. Strict people as the phrase is, professors

of a stern religion, their very religion was a gloomy sacrifice of tastes and sympathics that were never their own, offered up as a part of a bargain for the security of their possessions. Austere faces, inexorable discipline, penance in this world and terror in the next—nothing graceful or gentle anywhere, and the void in my cowed heart everywhere-this was my childhood, if I may so misuse the word as to apply it to such a beginning of life."

"Really though?" said Mr. Meagles, made very uncomfortable by the picture offered to his imagination. "That was a tough commenceBut come! You must now study, and profit by all that lies beyond it, like a practical man."

ment.

"If the people who are usually called practical, were practical in your direction"

66

Why, so they are!" said Mr. Meagles.

"Are they indeed?"

"Well, I suppose so," returned Mr. Meagles, thinking about it. "Eh? One can but be practical, and Mrs. Meagles and myself are nothing else."

"My unknown course is easier and more hopeful than I had expected to find it then," said Clennam, shaking his head with his grave smile. "Enough of me. Here is the boat!"

The boat was filled with the cocked hats to which Mr. Meagles entertained a national objection; and the wearers of those cocked hats landed and came up the steps, and all the impounded travellers congregated together. There was then a mighty production of papers on the part of the cocked hats, and a calling over of names, and great work of signing, sealing, stamping, inking, and sanding, with exceedingly blurred, gritty, and undecipherable results. Finally, everything was done according to rule, and the travellers were at liberty to depart whithersoever they would.

They made little account of stare and glare, in the new pleasure of recovering their freedom, but flitted across the harbor in gay boats, and re-assembled at a great hotel, whence the sun was excluded by closed lattices, and where bare paved floors, lofty ceilings, and resounding corridors, tempered the intense heat. There, a great table in a great room, was soon profusely covered with a superb repast; and the quarantine quarters became bare indeed, remembered among dainty dishes, southern fruits, cooled wines, flowers from Genoa, snow from the mountain tops, and all the colors of the rainbow flashing in the mirrors. "But I bear those monotonous walls no ill-will now," said Mr. Meagles. "One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind; I dare say a prisoner begins to relent towards his prison, after he is let out."

They were about thirty in company, and all talking; but necessarily in groups. Father and Mother Meagles sat with their daughter between them, the last three on one side of the table: on the opposite side sat Mr. Clennam; a tall French gentleman with raven hair and beard, of a swart and terrible, not to say genteelly diabolical aspect, but who had shown himself the mildest of men; and a handsome young Englishwoman, travelling quite alone, who had a proud observant face, and had either withdrawn herself from the rest or been avoided by the restnobody, herself excepted perhaps, could have quite decided which. The

rest of the party were of the usual materials. Travellers on business, and travellers for pleasure; officers from India on leave; merchants in the Greek and Turkey trades; a clerical English husband in a meek strait-waistcoat, on a wedding trip with his young wife; a majestic English mama and papa, of the patrician order, with a family of three growing up daughters, who were keeping a journal for the confusion of their fellow creatures; and a deaf old English mother tough in travel, with a very decidedly grown up daughter indeed, which daughter went sketching about the universe in the expectation of ultimately toning herself off into the married state.

The reserved Englishwoman took up Mr. Meagles in his last remark. "Do you mean that a prisoner forgives his prison?" said she, slowly and with emphasis.

"That was my speculation, Miss Wade. I don't pretend to know positively how a prisoner might feel. I never was one before."

"Mademoiselle doubts," said the French gentleman in his own language, "its being so easy to forgive?"

"I do."

Pet had to translate this passage to Mr. Meagles, who never by any accident acquired any knowledge whatever of the language of any country into which he travelled. "Oh!" said he. "Dear me! But

that's a pity, isn't it?"

"That I am not credulous?" said Miss Wade.

"Not exactly that. Put it another way.

easy to forgive."

That you can't believe it

My experience," she quietly returned, "has been correcting my belief in many respects, for some years. It is our natural progress, I have heard."

"Well, well! But it's not natural to bear malice, I hope?" said Mr. Meagles cheerily.

"If I had been shut up in any place to pine and suffer, I should always hate that place and wish to burn it down, or raze it to the ground. I know no more.'

"Strong, Sir?" said Mr. Meagles to the Frenchman; it being another of his habits to address individuals of all nations in idiomatic English, with a perfect conviction that they were bound to understand it somehow. "Rather forcible in our fair friend, you'll agree with me,

I think?"

The French gentleman courteously replied, "Plait-il ?" To which Mr. Meagles returned with much satisfaction, "You are right. My opinion."

The breakfast beginning bye-and-bye to languish, Mr. Meagles made the company a speech. It was short enough and sensible enough, considering that it was a speech at all, and hearty. It merely went to the effect that as they had all been thrown together by chance, and had all preserved a good understanding together, and were now about to disperse, and were not likely ever to find themselves all together again, what could they do better than bid farewell to one another, and give one another good-speed, in a simultaneous glass of cool champagne all round the table? It was done, and with a general shaking of hands the assembly broke up for ever.

The solitary young lady all this time had said no more. She rose with the rest, and silently withdrew to a remote corner of the great room, where she sat herself on a couch in a window, seeming to watch the reflection of the water, as it made a silver quivering on the bars of the lattice. She sat, turned away from the whole length of the apartment, as if she were lonely of her own haughty choice. And yet it would have been as difficult as ever to say, positively, whether she avoided the rest, or was avoided.

The shadow in which she sat, falling like a gloomy veil across her forehead, accorded very well with the character of her beauty. One could hardly see the face, so still and scornful, set off by the arched dark eyebrows, and the folds of dark hair, without wondering what its expression would be if a change came over it. That it could soften or relent, appeared next to impossible. That it could deepen into anger or any extreme of defiance, and that it must change in that direction when it changed at all, would have been its peculiar impression upon most observers. It was dressed and trimmed into no ceremony of expression. Although not an open face, there was no pretence in it. I am self-contained and self-reliant; your opinion is nothing to me; I have no interest in you, care nothing for you, and see and hear you with indifference-this it said plainly. It said so in the proud eyes, in the lifted nostril, in the handsome, but compressed and even cruel mouth. Cover either two of those channels of expression, and the third would have said so still. Mask them all, and the mere turn of the head would have shown an unsubduable nature.

Pet had moved up to her (she had been the subject of remark among her family and Mr. Clennam, who were now the only other occupants of the room), and was standing at her side.

"Are you"-she turned her eyes, and Pet faltered-" expecting any one to meet you here, Miss Wade ?"

"I? No."

"Father is sending to the Poste Restante. Shall he have the pleasure of directing the messenger to ask if there are any letters for you?" "I thank him, but I know there can be none."

"We are afraid," said Pet, sitting down beside her, shyly and half tenderly, "that you will feel quite deserted when we are all gone." "Indeed!"

"Not," said Pet, apologetically and embarrassed by her eyes, "not, of course, that we are any company to you, or that we have been able to be so, or that we thought you wished it."

"I have not intended to make it understood that I did wish it."

"No. Of course. But-in short," said Pet, timidly touching her hand as it lay impassive on the sofa between them, "will you not allow Father to render you any slight assistance or service? He will be very glad." "Very glad," said Mr. Meagles, coming forward with his wife and Clennam. "Anything short of speaking the language, I shall be delighted to undertake, I am sure."

"I am obliged to you," she returned, "but my arrangements are made, and I prefer to go my own way in my own manner."

"Do you?" said Mr. Meagles, to himself, as he surveyed her with a puzzled look. "Well! There's character in that, too."

"I am not much used to the society of young ladies, and I am afraid I may not show my appreciation of it as others might. A pleasant journey to you. Good bye!"

She would not have put out her hand, it seemed, but that Mr. Meagles put out his so straight before her, that she could not pass it. She put hers in it, and it lay there just as it had lain upon the couch.

"Good bye!" said Mr. Meagles. "This is the last good bye upon the list, for Mother and I have just said it to Mr. Clennam here, and he only waits to say it to Pet. Good bye! We may never meet again."

"In our course through life we shall meet the people who are coming to meet us, from many strange places and by many strange roads," was the composed reply; "and what it is set to us to do to them, and what it is set to them to do to us, will all be done."

There was something in the manner of these words that jarred upon Pet's ear. It implied that what was to be done was necessarily evil, and it caused her to say in a whisper, "O, Father! and to shrink

childishly in her spoilt way, a little closer to him. This was not lost on the speaker.

"Your pretty daughter," she said, "starts to think of such things. Yet," looking full upon her, "you may be sure that there are men and women already on their road, who have their business to do with you, and who will do it. Of a certainty they will do it. They may be coming hundreds, thousands, of miles over the sea there; they may be close at hand now; they may be coming, for anything you know, or anything you can do to prevent it, from the vilest sweepings of this very town." With the coldest of farewells, and with a certain worn expression on her beauty that gave it, though scarcely yet in its prime, a wasted look, she left the room.

Now, there were many stairs and passages that she had to traverse in passing from that part of the spacious house to the chamber she had secured for her own occupation. When she had almost completed the journey, and was passing along the gallery in which her room was, she heard an angry sound of muttering and sobbing. A door stood open, and within she saw the attendant upon the girl she had just left; the maid with the curious name.

She stood still, to look at this maid. A sullen, passionate girl! Her rich black hair was all about her face, her face was flushed and hot, and as she sobbed and raged, she plucked at her lips with an unsparing hand.

"Selfish brutes!" said the girl, sobbing and heaving between whiles. "Not caring what becomes of me! Leaving me here hungry and thirsty and tired, to starve, for anything they care! Beasts! Devils! Wretches!" "My poor girl, what is the matter?

She looked up suddenly, with reddened eyes, and with her hands suspended, in the act of pinching her neck, freshly disfigured with great scarlet blots. "It's nothing to you what's the matter. It don't signify to any one."

"0 yes it does; I am sorry to see you so." "You are not sorry," said the girl.

"You are glad. You know

you are glad. I never was like this but twice, over in the quarantine yonder; and both times I am afraid of you.' found me. you