Genre Romance. Page - 7

and Jane was like a kitten with a bell around its neck--one grows used to its playing about the house and misses it when gone. She also resembled a fixed star in her belief that she had been divinely appointed to carry a message of hope to the vilest of earth, and I felt that the same power had charged me with the responsibility of impressing her with a measure of commonsense.

So we compromised for a while at least. She would stay with me, and I would not interfere with her work in the crime section, nor give way to remarks on the subject.

I was sure the conditions in the Quarter would prove impossible, but as some people cannot be convinced unless permitted to draw their own diagram of failure, it was best for her to try when she was able to make the effort.

The making of an extra room in a Japanese house is only a matter of shifting a paper screen or so into a ready-made groove. It took me some time to decide whether I should screen off Jane in the corner that commanded a full view of

eaver and entered the cathedral, followed softly by his companion. For a moment they stood motionless within the door, which slipped silently into place behind them.

The air was oppressive with the powerful perfume of strong incense, and yet even more bitterly cold than the outer night; the light was dim, flickering, rich, and luxurious, and came wholly from hanging lamps of yellow, blue, and red glass. In what appeared the extreme distance, the altar sparkled in the gleam of two huge candles of painted wax, and behind and about it showed green translucent, unsubstantial shapes of arches and pillars rising up and disappearing in the great darkness of the roof, which was as impenetrable as a starless heaven.

The church was bare of chair or pew or stool; the straight sweep of the nave was broken only by the dark outlines of princely tombs where lay the dust of former Bohemian kings and queens: their reclining figures so much above and beyond humanity, yet so startlingly like life, could be seen in

urn taught it to other harpers, and these, by the orders of Arthur and Lancelot, went into Wales and Cornwall to sing it everywhere.

Meanwhile King Mark's crown had been in great danger. For his country had been invaded by an army from Session, led by a noted warrior named Elias, who drove the forces of Cornwall from the field and besieged the king in his castle of Tintagil. And now Tristram came nobly to the rescue. At the head of the Cornish forces he drove back the besiegers with heavy loss, and challenged Elias to a single combat to end the war. The challenge was accepted, and a long and furious combat followed, but in the end Elias was slain, and the remnant of his army forced to surrender.

This great service added to the seeming accord between Tristram and the king, but in his heart Mark nursed all his old bitterness, and hated him the more that he had helped him. His secret fury soon found occasion to flame to the surface. For at the feast which was given in honor of the victory, Eliot, t

you up?" asked Lady Elspeth."He is very good company, I am told."

"Oh, Charles is excellent company. If we didn't see him now and againthe house would be like a tomb. But he's not there all the time, andwe have relapses. He has his own rooms elsewhere, you know. And I'mreally not surprised. It taxes even him to lighten the deadly dulnessof Melgrave Square."

"It must be a great comfort to Mrs. Pixley to have you with her, mydear."

"I can't make up for all she lacks in other directions," saidMargaret, with a shake of the head. "I get quite angry with UncleJeremiah sometimes. He is so--so absorbed in benefiting other peoplethat he--Well, you can understand how delightful it is to be able torun in here and find the sun always shining."

"Thank you, my dear," said Lady Elspeth, with a twinkle in the browneyes. "Some people carry their own sunshine with them wherever theygo."

"And some people decidedly don't," said Margaret, who was evidentlysuffering from some unusual exhibition of Pixle

next, and if further pursued by legal process there, to step into a third.

A highwayman, at the beginning of the century in which we live, who honoured Kinver with residing in it, planted his habitation at the extreme verge of the county, divided from the next by a hollow way, and when the officers came to take him, he leaped the dyke, and mocked them with impunity from the farther side.

But this was not all. The geological structure of the country favoured them. Wherever a cliff, great or small, presented its escarpment, there the soft sandstone was scooped out into labyrinths of chambers, in which families dwelt, who in not a few instances were in league with the land pirates. The plunder could anywhere be safely and easily concealed, and the plunderers could pass through subterranean passages out of one county into another, and so elude pursuit.

The highwaymen belonged by no means to the lowest class. The gentlemen of the road comprised, for the most part, wastrels and gamesters of go

she said, and withdrew her hands from his shoulders. The faces of both were now gazing straight on over the gold-flecked slope before them. "Go on, you are a man. I know you will not turn back from what you undertake. You will not change, you will not turn--because you cannot. You were born to earn and not to own; to find, but not to possess. But as you have lived, so you will die."

"You give me no long shrift, mother?" said the youth, with a twinkle in his eye.

"How can I? I can only tell you what is in the book of life. Do I not know? A mother always loves her son; so it takes all her courage to face what she knows will be his lot. Any mother can read her son's future--if she dares to read it. She knows--she knows!"

There was a long silence; then the widow continued.

"Listen, Merne," she said. "You call me a prophetess of evil. I am not that. Do you think I speak only in despair, my boy? No, there is something larger than mere happiness. Listen, and believe me, for now I could n

on that snow-shrouded lake was in distress. The sound ceased, and the gale bore in only the ordinary storm and fog signals. Corvet recognized the foghorn at the lighthouse at the end of the government pier; the light, he knew, was turning white, red, white, red, white behind the curtain of sleet; other steam vessels, not in distress, blew their blasts; the long four of the steamer calling for help cut in again.

Corvet stopped, drew up his shoulders, and stood staring out toward the lake, as the signal blasts of distress boomed and boomed again. Color came now into his pale cheeks for an instant. A siren swelled and shrieked, died away wailing, shrieked louder and stopped; the four blasts blew again, and the siren wailed in answer.

A door opened behind Corvet; warm air rushed out, laden with sweet, heavy odors--chocolate and candy; girls' laughter, exaggerated exclamations, laughter again came with it; and two girls holding their muffs before their faces passed by.

"See you to-night, dear.

tle court the country came creeping close up to thetown. There were fields not so far away on these long highways.Wandering and rambling roads ran off to the westward and to the north,leading toward the straight old Roman road which once upon a time randown to London town. Ill-kept enough were some of the lanes, with theirhedges and shrubs overhanging the highways, if such the paths could becalled which came braiding down toward the south. One needed not to gofar outward beyond Sadler's Wells of a night-time to find adventure, orto lose a purse.

It was on one of these less crowded highways that there was this morningenacted a curious little drama. The sun was still young and not toostrong for comfort, and as it rose back of the square of Sadler's itcast a shadow from a hedge which ran angling toward the southeast. Itsrays, therefore, did not disturb the slumbers of two young men who werelying beneath the shelter of the hedge. Strange enough must have beenthe conclusions of the sun could it ha