her poor disordered mind. Like an arrow to the bow of her fiery Eastern blood, she took her flight. And, with the iron sticking stubbornly in her soul, she believed she was acting for his happiness-always the last infirmity of morbid minds.

For three days Bellersham heard nothing. He shunned his work, he shunned his friends. His face was never seen at the House of Commons, nor at his clubs. He walked the streets day and night objectless and despairing. His inactivity stung him, yet he did not know what course to take to find Rachael. He heard rumours that the Government was gaining ground, and read with a sneer on his lips, that he had saved it from death. On the fourth day Rachel wrote. Bellersham recognised the beautiful handwriting on the envelope, and tore it open deliriously. He had not believed that anything could be worse than the suspense of the last few days yet as he read he could have cried out for his painful ignorance again. This damning certainty that she was lost to him for ever, froze his blood. The uncertainty had racked him in a flame. The definite news stretched him on "fields of thick-ribbed ice."

The letter was very short.

"I went away because I was miserable. I could not bear the idea of seeing you again after that night. There is another woman in the world whom you want to marry. I found that out, and there is another man in the world whom I ought to marry-I have found that out. He has been faithful to me for six years. He is not clever or interesting, but he will love me, and I turn to the quiet humdrum life with him with immense relief. I am tired of excitement. If one wants happiness, one must be content with homely things. Don't try to find me, for by the time you get this I shall be married.

"R. N."

It was a baffling letter. Poor Bellersham tried to blame the writer. He tried to think harshly of the woman who could lightly leave him without a word, and bind herself irrevocably to someone else. But all his thoughts revolved on the axis, "I have lost her, and she is Rachel !"

III.

He had tracked her at last. And in a dingy room in a dingy house in Clonmel they stood face to face. It was only a week since Bellersham had got the letter, yet by the change in his face 2 F

VOL. OVIII.

it might have been years. One of his most striking characteristics had been an air of glowing health and vitality. It had always been in his favour, for men and women, marvelling at the brilliancy of his looks, were ready to believe in the brilliancy of his mind. A week's anxiety had extinguished the lamp. Eyes and skin were lustreless. The boy in Bellersham was dead.

"I am too late. You are married, Rachel."

"Yes, I am married."

"Who is your husband?" asked Bellersham with an effort. Until he heard it from her own lips he had not believed it possible.

"He is a lawyer here. He loved me when I was very young. When I left London, I came straight here, and asked him if he still wanted to marry me. Although it was a long time since we had met, he never hesitated. There must be some good in a man who is as faithful as that." She spoke jerkily. "You will be happy then?"

"Yes," but as she said it, she raised her eyes, and there was a heartrending look in them, which taught Bellersham that not even yet had he drunk his cup of misery to the dregs.

'Oh, my love!" he cried passionately. "What have you done? Your life is wrecked, and so is mine. If you did not love me I could bear it, but you do, you do, Rachel!"

He caught her in his arms and held her while she sobbed.

"It was all my wickedness," she said, suppressing her tears. "I saw a letter from Maud Scarisbrick which made me think you had gone to her instead of coming to me that night. I made myself believe that you had been making love to me to amuse yourself, that you was mad with my wretchedness. I could not stay and face it. Oh don't be hard on me. I was mad, dear. If you had left one word, one single word__”

I

"Yes," cried Bellersham bitterly. "Reproach me, I deserve it. I won't reproach you. What use are reproaches now? If they could undo what's done, I would pour them out until my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth. I would listen to them though they stung and lacerated. But they can't alter it. Nothing can. You are married."

As she heard the cruelly inevitable words from his lips, Rachel shivered. It seemed to her that she had never realised it till

now.

"Well." He spoke wearily. "There is nothing more to be said or done. Good-bye, Rachel."

"Good-bye."

He turned at the door and looked back at her, standing expressionless in the drab little room, upholstered in the hideously respectable fashion of twenty years ago. He thought of her exquisite taste, and how it would all jar on her, when she woke. He thought of her beauty wasted on this petty country town. He thought of her brilliant gifts which here must surely run to waste. He thought of the little grey-bearded homely man he had met on the steps outside, whom instinct told him now, was the husband. He thought of all these things, and then of what might have been. Ah, how terrible it was! With a quick exclamation he strode across the room and clasped her to his heart. She submitted, but her body felt chilly unresponsive.

"If you are unhappy, dearest, you must tell me. Only believe, if it does not add to your burden, that I shall always love you. That vow has been broken very often. I shall not break it. Every year you shall know that I love you still."

Rachel was paralysed, and could not speak. He waited for a word in vain. It was an unsatisfactory parting.

And on the stairs he brushed past the grey-beard, a dried-up little lawyer, in snuff-coloured clothes of a strange cut. He thought he heard a voice in the hideous accent of North Ireland, offering him "refreshment." But he took no notice.

That was the first of August. And on that day every year, Rachel got a box of roses, and in the middle of them a slip of paper on which was written these words, "I love you still, C. B."

In time they were a Prime Minister's roses, and the woman who kissed them passionately was a poet whose identity was a secret, but whose verse was recognised far and wide to be of strange beauty and power.

Yet the world, which knows so much, did not know that the poet had made the statesman, and the statesman had made the poet.

R. C. SAVAGE.

Gipsying by Water.

ONE delightful evening in July, we, my husband and I, got out at Wroxham Station, the headquarters of Broadland, with many wraps and sundry parcels, all of which had been specially selected with the view of taking up our abode on the water for several days to come. Leaving our luggage, we started off to the riverside where our boat the Heron lay moored.

Not a yacht, you will understand, nor a wherry, nor even a cabin boat; nothing so luxurious. Simply an eighteen-foot open boat, decked in at the stem and stern just sufficiently to form lockers, carrying a single lug sail of ample size, and fitted with a canvas awning to be rigged up at night or in bad weather, with the help of rails on each side that were slipped down when not in With the centre-board up she drew only twenty inches of water. She looked like a floating gipsy tent with her pale green awning stretched over the boom and folded sail, and I was surprised as I stepped in to find how roomy and comfortable it was. One could actually almost stand upright!

use.

Then we explored. A locker in the fore part served as pantry; two bags of straw-or should I say mattresses ?-intended for beds, lay on the middle seat; a filled water-bottle was stowed underneath, and beside it were two boxes, one containing necessary crockery, the other two spirit stoves, a kettle, frying-pan, and saucepan. After getting stores and other necessary impedimenta on board, Kit took down the awning, hoisted sail, and our journey had begun. A look of ineffable content beamed from his face; his dreams of many past days had come true; he was once again on the water, tiller in hand, waiting for the wind to fill the sail.

And he had to wait. With the contrariety inherent in all things natural, the gentle breeze that had so lately wafted great clouds of dust in our faces, now died away in sweet exhaustion, and we crept past the vessels moored below the bridge at a pace which was only just motion.

That evening will linger long in our memories. The hush of

eventide had fallen on all things, the deep after-glow of the already set sun burned in the west; every moment trees and reeds. and grasses became more deeply silhouetted against the pearly light of the sky; wherries, yachts, and the houses on shore grew more indistinct and ghostly as we dropped farther down stream; Nature was lulling her children to rest, and the sound of church bells chiming faintly, sweetly, across the water, might have been her cradle song; birds stirred here and there in the trees, uttered a sleepy cheep and settled off again; only the curious rattle of the grasshopper warbler kept on, sounding like the unwinding of the line from a fishing reel.

The tide carried us slowly, imperceptibly along about half a mile from the bridge, and here we lay-to for the night. But how loth we were to shut out that beautiful scene! The thought of being close to Nature all night long was so novel, so enchanting! Day the Second. If this chronicle were not strictly, faithfully, honourably true, I might wander into fields of fancy, and describe the joys of lotus-eating on the water-a most suitable place, by the way during the burning hours of a hot summer day.

But alas for the truth of it! We woke up next morning and were a little amused to find it wet. Of course it couldn't last. We were both convinced of that. We therefore breakfasted gaily under our awning, enjoying the novelty of making coffee and frying bacon in the scanty space our boat allowed, and felt we were gipsies indeed.

Our outdoor prospects were not brilliant. The rain came dropdropping in big splashes into the leaden-coloured water as if a myriad of sprites were bobbing up and down in a sort of frog's dance; the opposite bank was unadulterated marsh, with never a tree or cow for the eyes to rest upon; and the side to which our boat was moored looked a shade more dismal, for the hay lay in sodden heaps, and now and again a wisp would be washed into the stream, adding to the general dreariness of aspect.

Sailing was out of the question, so we turned our attention to examining stores more particularly than the scenery had allowed us to do the night before. Presently Kit called out from the package of groceries he was investigating

"I say, we shall have plenty of matches. How many did you

order ? "

"I said a pennyworth," I answered, and after foraging for a minute among a heap of waste paper, I triumphantly produced the bill, which freed me from suspicion of extravagance

at once.

"Something wrong somewhere," Kit muttered. "Made in