But Miss Salusbury frankly

perpetual motion had been discovered. owned that she did not care one brass farthing for public opinion, and that she would do what she liked when she liked. There was perhaps some consideration due to what might be said concerning the curate's acceptance of the proposition; but ladies who do as they like are not much in the habit of considering the interests of other people. At any other time, Ruthyn Pendragon would have felt bound to decline the invitation. As it was, perhaps for sundry good reasons of his own, he chose to accept it now, and took his seat beside Miss Salusbury. As he said never a word, that young lady chose to inform him that he was as "grumpy" as ever. Then she adjured the piebalds to "come up." come up." Then she entered into a short conversation with Twitters relative to a new collar for Betty the near piebald, and the propriety of putting a kicking-strap on Harlequin the off one ;-he was vicious when separated from his companion-when she drove him in the tax-cart. For the Honourable Letitia delighted in driving a neat vehicle under duty, on the conspicuous sides of which were painted the style and titles of Lancelot Brian De Crux Salusbury, Viscount Chalkstonehengist, of Chalkstonehengist, Kent.

They reached the house, and had lunch; the Amazon proving by ocular demonstration that she had a keen appetite for game-pie, and fully understood the flavour of old Madeira. Then she took the curate to her own little boudoir, with the carved oak fittings and the walls hung with antlers, brushes, guns, fishing-rods, eel-spears, whips, spurs, and similar sporting gear.

"We don't allow pipes here," she said quite gravely, and without the slightest touch of irony. "Papa even objected to Mr. Neilgherry's hubblebubble. You know:-the yellow man who was so long in India, and talks about pig-sticking and tiger-hunting so well, though every other word he says is a crammer, I do believe. You can have a cigar, if you like; but, for my part, I think they make the curtains smell much worse than pipes do. Mrs. Major Kanaster at St. Becketsbury says so too."

Pendragon, who had not spoken ten words since he entered the house, respectfully declined the cigar. He had definitively given up smoking, he said.

"Is there any thing else you have given up," asked Letitia, in a dry voice.

"I am going away," he said, for all explanation.

"Then you've had a quarrel"-she was nearly saying a "row"-" with the reverend."

"It is so," he answered, bowing his head sadly.

"Where are you going?"

"To London."

"What to do?" It is melancholy to have to record it, but Letitia was within an ace of asking "what's your game?"

"To work."

"That's right," said the heiress. "I only wish I could work at

Poor old Pendragon. Poor old

something. And so you are going.

fellow. I know all about it. Give us your hand."

She held out her honest palm and left it in the curate's grasp, while he pressed it long and cordially. He looked in her face, and saw nothing in that wild, wilful face but truth and generosity. He would have liked to have kissed her.

"You are a good woman," he murmured, going towards the door. "God bless you."

66

Stop," cried Letitia hastily; "London's a long way off, Pendragon, and the pigs have left off running ready roasted through the streets. Do you want any money?"

"I have enough and to spare," the curate made answer, after expressing his gratitude for the offer.

"Well, if you ever do want any money," she resumed, "write to me, under cover to papa. You will go? Well, good by, Pendragon."

She gave him her hand again, and again he pressed it and departed. She watched him long from her window striding towards the spot where she had met him. When his form had disappeared, she took up a book, -it was Strutt's Sports and Pastimes,-and tried to read, but the letters danced before her eyes, and she flung the volume down. Then she took up a parchment portfolio and ran through her collection of salmon flies, gorgeous in pheasant's feathers and yellow floss silk and golden wire. And then she threw herself into a chair, and burst into a passionate fit of weeping.

"A good cry always does me good when I've got the blues," she said, drying her eyes. "Poor Pendragon! I wish I was a man, or a dressmaker, or a charwoman, or a fairy, or any thing else that would enable me to help him; but it's no good; and now I think I'll go and see how Brindle gets on." Brindle was the newest-imported Alderney calf in the byre, and the Honourable Miss Salusbury forthwith proceeded to inspect him.

As for the curate, he walked past the old gibbet stump and past The Casements, towards whose glancing windows he never looked, and to his lodgings in Swordsley village. His rent was paid. His chattels had already been sent to the St. Becketsbury Station, and then to one farther up the line towards London. He purposed to reach this station by a circuitous route of about eight miles. There was no leave-taking to be got through. He had strictly enjoined his landlady to keep his departure a secret for at least twenty minutes after he was clear of the town; and the good woman, who loved him, promised to obey. Words of hot displeasure, of furious wrath, had passed between him and Ernest. Each had said things which he would gladly have recalled. It was too late now. The notice he might have demanded had been foregone by mutual consent. The curate was paid the balance of his wages, and was free to go wheresoever he listed.

The station he was bound for was Tiburnhurst; but by a long walk

round he could reach it without retracing his steps and passing The Casements again. He had to leave the Church of St. Mary-la-Douce, which lay at the back of the village, to his left. He halted as he wound round the grassy knoll on whose summit the timeworn fabric stood.

"In that gray.and crumbling fane," the curate murmured low, as with arms folded he gazed long and earnestly at the church, "I have prayed and I have preached, when my lord the rector would grant me his high permission. There I have married, and buried, and christened. There is no grave in that yard that holds a corse more dead than I am to that which I once was. And my lord rector and my lady Magdalen have trampled on the wretched curate, have they? Old Church," he finished, raising his right hand almost menacingly, "the struggle is henceforth between you and me."

And so Ruthyn Pendragon turned his face away from the Church of England, and went on his journey, whitherwards he deemed best. And I have heard a wise man say that what is said to be done for Conscience-sake is often done for Spite.

CHAPTER XII.

NO SCIENCE TO MR. SIMS IS A MYSTERY.

IT was the last Tuesday in the month of May 1851; and Mr. Sims, having business to transact in Coger's Inn, Strand, betook himself thither at about ten o'clock on a sunshiny morning. He eyed those who passed him, as was his wont, narrowly; yet he seemed with his bent-down eyes to be occupied in counting the number of iron plates in the pavement that covered the coal-holes. It should be mentioned that Mr. Sims was accustomed to wear a broad-brimmed hat, which was convenient for many reasons, and that his eyes possessed the faculty of looking round corners.

Sixteen months, or thereabouts, had elapsed since we last had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Sims; and he was then going to the play. He was bent on the same errand now, although the theatres do not usually open their doors at ten o'clock in the morning. But the whole of human life was a play to Mr. Sims, and he was always, to use a gallicism, "assisting" at the representations of the Theatre Royal Humanity. He did not care to be a conspicuous actor on the noisy stage thereof. He was content to be Signor N. N., non nominato, as the Opera play-bills call the illustrious incogniti who, in a bar and a half of recitative, announce that the coach is at the door, or that the fatal hour has arrived. Or rather he liked to be prompter, or to have the care of the trap-door department, or to stand patiently at the wing with a pan of blue fire, waiting to light up the last scene with a lurid glare.

Time had not thinned the flowing locks of Mr. Sims. He had none that flowed for the Great Gleaner to operate upon. Nature had provided him with a close-set and spiky black caul of hair, much resembling a

horsehair cushion. Time had inserted, since January '50, a few thousand spikes of rusty gray among the sable stubble, and on the crown of his head had mown a little circular tonsure quite bald. His nose was a little more peaked, and a trifle more purple in hue, and that was all.

Mr. Sims came from the west, and set his watch by the Horse Guards. The watch very much resembled the model of a potato in silver, and the disc which prudent housewives sometimes slice off that esculent, to allow the steam to escape while boiling, was represented by the dial. It had belonged to a railway engine-driver, and to it was attached a history. At the corner of St. Martin's Lane it is on record that Mr. Sims purchased a pennyworth of apples. There is nothing so very strange in this fact; but it may be just hinted that Mr. Sims entered into a somewhat lengthy conversation with the fruit-seller, who was an Irishwoman of the purest growth, and earned a considerable addition to her weekly income by colouring cutty pipes for gentlemen whose heads were too weak to allow them to swallow about an ounce of nicotine every day. A clean pipe, half a pound of the strongest tobacco, half-a-crown, and a week's fair smoking, given to Biddy McGrath, and she would colour a cutty for you as black as my hat.

"Five times within a fortnight, eh?" said Mr. Sims as he turned down King William Street. "For watching closely, and never losing a minute, there's nothing like an apple-woman. She never moves, and nobody suspects her. For following, give me an orange-girl." So you see that Mr. Sims did business even as he walked.

In mid-Strand Mr. Sims held brief parley with a Hansom cabman, which ended in that charioteer giving him a ticket, receiving a shilling, laying his forefinger by the side of his nose, and driving on. Had Mr. Sims designed to take a drive any where, and had he suddenly changed his mind? At all events, he reached Coger's Inn on foot, and entering the open doorway of No. 20, mounted briskly to the third floor.

Coger's Inn is not in the Strand, but off it, and is about the dingiest, rottenest old inn of chancery in the metropolis. It should have been pulled down a century since; but as, let out in tenements, it realises a considerable and tolerably safe annual rental, its proprietors-whoever they may be have excellent reasons for allowing it to stand. The windows are never cleaned; the staircases are never swept; the mangy old courtyard is never weeded or rolled. It is a sandy desert in fine weather, and a miry puddle in wet weather. It was a place of legal habitations once, but very few men of the law care to abide in it now. are all cloudy and mysterious. They come nobody knows whence, and go nobody knows where. They have slips of foolscap pasted on their doors, saying that they will be "back in five minutes;" return in ten years, paste a fresh slip over the old one, saying that they will be "back in a quarter of an hour," and never return at all. Letters fall through the slits of the door, and moulder away there; cats die of starvation, and the

Its tenants

crannies of lonely chambers are fusty with the skeletons of mice. It would be a bold flea that took up his quarters within those pinched precincts, thinking to live on the fat of the land, or of the lodgers, and hoping to drink his pint of blood a day like a gentleman. Coger's Inn was the very place to suit Mr. Sims, and for that reason he had chambers there.

The third-floor back, No. 20, had a huge outer door, which was a mass of knobs and staples, and iron bands and plates, and great cross-beams of oak. You might have murdered a man behind that door, and nobody on the staircase would have been the wiser for it; nor, if by holding the ear to the letter-slit, the screams of the dying man had been heard, could any one without a dozen sledge-hammers, or an engineer's petard, have burst the massive portal open. When Mr. Sims had reached this door, and produced his latch-key, he tapped one of the iron plates approvingly with that instrument, remarking, in a satisfied under-tone, that it (meaning the door) was uncommonly strong, and quiet, and safe. The key looked large enough to have fitted the great door of Newgate, and to it, by a piece of red tape, was attached a tiny little Chubb that might have opened a lady's portfolio or a pocket-ledger. Mr. Sims applied the big key, which made a noise of mingled ferocity and anger as it was turned twice or thrice round in the lock, and so passed in to his chambers. It has been omitted to state, that in the midst of the mass of iron and oak forming the door, was painted in faded white letters the name of" Filoe and Co." Whether Mr. Sims was Filoe and Co., or Filoe and Co. had once lived there, but had left the place a quarter of a century since, or the day before yesterday, is uncertain and immaterial.

There was an inner door, panelled, smooth, and knockerless, and with the minutest of keyholes, to which Mr. Sims applied his Chubb, and was fairly within his premises. He who was behind the smooth-panelled door might have seen that it was backed by one solid sheet of iron. "An Englishman's house is his castle," soliloquised Mr. Sims; "and, egad, I think Coger's Castle would stand a pretty strong siege."

Mr. Sims's chambers comprised three rooms, each with a single window, through whose infinitely dirty panes could be faintly descried an agreeable perspective of roofs and chimney-pots. For this was the thirdfloor back, and the background of Coger's Inn was Cadger's Market. The rooms were en suite; and as Mr. Sims stood at the first one he heard a great noise of scuffling and stamping, the clatter of some metallic substance, and the sound of a human voice, crying,

"Saha! Saha! there! Come on, three, six, twelve of you! Come on, ye wolves! Buffalmacco the Ruthless never yields!"

Mr. Sims did not seem in the least disconcerted by this strange discourse, but entered the room, which was low and dusty, very bare of furniture, but, with what little there was, of a counting-house character; and in the centre of whose carpetless floor stood a tall youth about seventeen, marked with the small-pox, and endowed with a shock head of hair of the hue that may be called a fine sunset, inasmuch as it was flaming red.