not even if they made me cry afterwards; and I told him I would. You may scold me as much as ever you like, I shall still go to mamma first."

Philip's hand relaxed, and he let the boy go. "Between Redcar and your mother you are incorrigible," he said; but he spoke in a tone which showed his brave determined boy had touched him in his most sensitive part. Redcar,-all the world perhaps,-even his own child, could see that its mother needed 'protection,'-and from whom? His eyes fell upon Ann. Margaret had caught up little Beatrice, and was playing with her at the farther end of the room. Ethelind did not speak; she saw the look, and read, or fancied she did, all it meant to convey. She loosened her hold of her child; a quick sharp retort was upon her lips, but with a violent effort she repressed it; it curled and quivered for an instant, and the hot blood went back upon her heart. The next, and she had quitted the room, her boy tightly grasped in her hand.

Philip looked after her for a second, then he heaved a deep heavy sigh, which welled up from the bottom of his heart. He rang the bell, and ordered his carriage. "Good by, Miss Atherton," he said; "I do not dine at home to-day. It would have been wiser, perhaps, if I had not let Queenie wile me back now." The next minute he was gone.

Cold at Frascati.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "JOHN'S WIFE."

It is the Café Nuovo in Rome. We are four Englishmen, come to breakfast under a roof of trellised lemon-trees, that are dropping their blossoms -their inexpressibly fragrant blossoms-about us.

Some broad steps lead down into a garden with yellow sanded paths, shrubs, and statues. In a grotto at the farther end a fountain plays, with large-leaved water-plants that mantle the moist brown stones with their intense green. To the left a lofty wall is overtopped by the brick middle-age tower of the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina, a stone's-throw off. Beside a great iron gate in this wall grows, nearly to the top of it, an enormous oleander, coming into bloom.

With one exception, myself, these Englishmen belong to the regular artist crew of Rome. We are expecting a fifth personage, waiting breakfast for him, and talking about him.

"he's

"He has settled down in Spivey's old studio," says Slabber, "and has painted two pictures already. Intends to cut us all out, of course." "But he's not a professional artist," Briggs hastens to observe; not one of us, you know. Harford's quite a gentleman; he don't sell his pictures."

"Bedad," cries poor Flanigan, "I'm a gentleman too! I don't sell mine!"

"Harford is not obliged to be a professional artist," I put in; "but he is studying art quite seriously. He is no flâneur, I assure you—”" "Flan be hanged!" grunts Slabber, that big Anglo-Saxon cockney: "why can't you speak Henglish?"

Why can't you?" I say, and getting up, I stroll to the fountain at the end of the garden.

Coming back, I find that headlong gossip, Flanigan, tumbling out secondhand lies like diseased potatoes out of a sack.

"Flick knows all about Harford," says he. "He shot a man in a jewl about a garrul that was both of their sweethearts; and Flick says he's an ath'ist-don't b'lieve in God or divil, you know-and broke his father's heart; and all sorts."

“I wouldn't repeat such things," says cautious Briggs, "especially after Flick. Now, I was only told, quite in a general way, that Harford had got into a scrape about a woman, and didn't behave well to her. But I'm sure" (in a distinct voice) "Mr. Harford is a perfect gentleman, and I shall be delighted to improve our acquaintance."

At the very moment Mr. Briggs happens to make this gratifying remark, the subject of it walks through the house into the verandah.

He is a tall athletic young man, dressed in light summer clothes and

a wide-awake. His skin, although pale, is healthily tinted by the sun; his thick dark-brown hair and beard have reddish lights. He has a remarkable face, the features of which are so irregular that many people consider it ugly, but far too expressive really to deserve that epithet. You could not help being interested in the man, and watching him. You would find the childish festivity of a Roman carnival in his laughter, and, very often, the dismalness of a Puritan Sunday in his eyes. He apologises for being en retard (which, of course, disgusts Slabber),—he has been riding in the Campagna, his watch is slow, &c.

Harford is our host, and this is a farewell banquet to the last remnant of those bearded tribes that congregate in Rome every autumn, and disperse east, west, north, and south on the approach of summer.

That evening my brother John and his wife, Harford and I, made a flitting to Frascati, where we had arranged to spend all the summer together in a delicious villa.

I must now tell you that Frank Harford and I were old friends and schoolfellows. He was the only son of a retired Indian officer, who had settled down in the west-country parish of which my father was the pastor. When he died, the living was given to his brother, who had been his curate, and my mother continued to live in the village. Frank was two or three years older than myself, but that made his friendship for me all the tenderer, and mine for him reverential. Besides, I looked on Frank as a kind of genial young saint. I always felt rather wicked in his company, because he really seemed, quite naturally, never to do any thing wrong, or to have so much as a wrong thought. I used secretly to feel such a paltry, lying, selfish, cowardly little sneak beside this noble, tender, pure-hearted young fellow. How he loved and obeyed his horrid yellow old father, the tyrannical little major, and how I defied and cheated and grieved my most indulgent and gentle of mothers!

Harford would have chosen art as his profession, I knew, had he been allowed a voice in the arrangement of his own future; but the bilious old despot who ruled his destiny made a civil engineer of him, without the slightest reference to any possible fancy or protest of the lad's. Naturally, he did not take kindly to his work, though he buckled to it conscientiously.

But the city life in an office half broke his heart-chained there to the desk's dead wood, and pining like any young hawk for the wide sky, cliffs, moors, and tors.

When my mother died, and I went to live with John at Gosport, I did not lose sight of Frank. John used often to ask him down to stay a day or two with me, and when John and his wife took me to Italy for my health's sake, Frank and I kept up a pretty brisk correspondence for about a twelvemonth. But in our second Italian summer his letters suddenly ceased to arrive. I wrote to him in vain hope of answer for six months, and then let the correspondence go with a sigh.

We easily ascertained that he was alive and well, but could find out nothing else about him that was more reliable than the grotesque gossip retailed by Flanigan and Co. There had been certain English military men among the booby-birds that had flapped their lazy flight across the sea one winter, and perched in Rome; and that arch-gossip, Flick, had picked an acquaintance with them.

The wild scandal about poor Harford was to be traced to these warriors; that was all I could make of it.

But at last I heard from Frank himself once more. Lo! he had inherited a small fortune from a distant relation; he had thrown civil engineering overboard; he was coming to Rome forthwith to study art in earnest at last; and we must spend the ensuing summer in Villeggiatura together, eating figs at Tusculum. When the farewell breakfast took place, he had been about six weeks in Rome, and had already painted one or two capital little pictures.

No village in the world drives such a roaring trade in scandal as grand old Rome. You have seen how Harford's character went before him, as Sir Peter Teazle's stayed behind, for the comfort of the community, and what mercy it met with. Not that any body, even Briggs, means malice. Bless you! Slabber wouldn't hurt a fly, and Flanigan would help one out of a milk-jug. Now, when circumstances are served up in some singularly wry way of absurdity and untruth, there are generally certain facts which one may trace like pebbles through disturbing waves. I felt convinced that I should do so in Harford's case, if ever it pleased him to give me his confidence.

But I could not try to thrust myself into any chamber of his past not freely opened to me. I could not help guessing that there was a shut and locked door, behind which lurked the solution of a mystery. This mystery was the great and grievous change in my friend, not to be accounted for by the mere lapse of two or three years. And this change was all the more remarkable that it was not always obvious. No two men could be more unlike than Harford to Harford in different moods. It seemed to me as if much evil had flowed into his heart by some rent where much good had run out, but that the poison had never mixed with the healthy juice of his life.

Meantime we throve on figs. We renewed our old fellowship, and talked ourselves back into intimacy. We found each other capital company, and the best of friends. Some people make tolerable companions, but never friends. To become friends, there must be corresponding hooks and eyes. Some people have neither hooks or eyes about them. You find in them an utter want of compliance with your moods, a total absence of sympathy, inflexible denial of fellowship. They never will do any thing you want them to do with you, ex improviso, whether to take a walk, or sit and talk. They set themselves a fixed and fatal round of things to do and places to go, and they delight in beating that worn ring. You can see the methodicality of these folks in every thread of

their clothes, the cut of a man's whiskers, the sit of a woman's hair. How can one get on with such people? One never does get on with them one stands still, or goes off without them.

And as to friendship, it is apt to be fatally exigeant. Why must very sincere affection be of that fixed inalterable character which, it is pretended, always belongs to true love? Even the persons best known to you are, in a daily intimacy, continually turning up some new side of themselves, quite hid from you before. Is it possible that your affection for them can be invariable, and never in the least influenced by their behaviour? I believe not. Your affection for Jonathan, my dear David, and his for you, is as true as any love going, and, for what I know, passing the love of woman; but are you never to be annoyed by the imperfection of his temper? Are you never to put him in a rage by that habit you have of preaching to him? You may not like to confess it, but you know that you are often annoyed by him, and that you put him in a rage three times a week. And it's nonsense to say you love each other all the same, all the time. You don't. Your loves always come back; they are never far off; but they are actually gone for the moment. Not the less cherish your Jonathan, O David, that it can be but a human way of loving; cherish him living, and apostrophise him in poesy (if you can) when he dies!

For ah, old friends, how rare they be !-people who knew you, who grew into your fibre when your heart was young. As well attempt to replace an eye as these! The idea of a dead friend becomes to you that of some beautiful statue dashed to pieces. Dead! It takes years to comprehend so great a loss. A gem has dropped from your finger into the deep, and you gaze at the vacant setting.

One stormy September evening, Frank and I sat in his studio-window at Frascati, high over the rounded tops of woods, now 'urid in the red setting sun. Beneath a leaden sky the gloomy Campag a stretched like a dead sea, and with its far rim cut the disc, a portentou: blood-red ball, slowly, slowly sinking.

Harford had been uttering some very bad sentiments, which would have grieved me more if I had not attributed them in part to some unripe peaches and the state of his stomach.

"Harford," said I suddenly, "I've found a key to much that makes people gasp and stare at you."

"What do you mean?" returned he rather roughly.

"Most persons," I went on, "are half angel, half devil, they say. But your angel and devil seem to share their lodging on the most curious terms of mutual forbearance. They seem to take you turn and turn about, in watches, as it were. Your angel never torments your devil, or interferes with his mode of enjoying himself, his Walpurgis nights with his man; and your devil, with equal politeness, never intrudes himself on the angelical prayer-meetings. They could not possibly come in contact with