to come to hear it; and when they applaud me, she'll be pleased, I know. Perhaps she'll feel I do it all for her. O sister Nell, you have made me so happy; you have given me new life.'

And Nell tried to smile as she listened, but somehow her little heart sank like lead as she looked at him.

CHAPTER XLVI.

SHANTY LIFE.

'UP by the Yuba River, with twenty thousand fair smooth acres lying near; cattle scattered over the boundless plain; a log hut shadowed by the fragrant blue-green leaves of the tall eucalyptus; above a delicious Californian sky.'

This was what Steven Keane had pictured to his wife.

There was a sorry contrast between the picture and the reality. The devoted woman had tracked him to a wooden shanty,' close to a narrow running stream-an arm of the noble Hudson. In the curve of this stream half a dozen of these shanties clustered. All the dwellings in the place were new. Some of them so recent in their construction that tufts of green leaves might be found still clinging to the logs, and close by the ground was choked up with a litter of broken stones and halfdried beds of mortar, bits of lath and blocks of refuse timber, around which the vivid grass was still growing, as though nothing could suppress its exuberance. The poisonous vine, trampled down by the workmen, started up again, and creeping with its lovely spotted foliage across the loose stones, seized upon the logs and climbed round the eaves of the huts.

A new and important railway was in construction, commencing

at Haarlem, an outskirt of New York, from which place the mushroom village of shanties was situated some fifteen miles.

Nature had munificently favoured the spot, as well as its adjacent villages of Pelhamville, Mamaroneck, and New Rochelle. The river wound round like a silver bow; the ground was above the level plain, and overlooked the tallest and most luxuriant grass that ever tangled itself into gorgeousness with the bright colouring of wild flowers-abundant as itself, and rich as the tints of a sunset sky. At close of day the scene was beautiful. The water sent up sparkles of light here and there, as the dying sun shed flashes of scarlet or gold upon it and on the shanties' with their clinging vines. The owners of these huts were workers on the railroad, and the contrast of Steven Keane's picture to the reality was this:

In the picture promises of wealth, domestic happiness, a better life were prominent.

In reality were poverty, trust betrayed, and old besetting sins.

The shanty life had its hour of rest, however, like lives elsewhere; and that hour of rest had fallen. The trees seemed set on fire by drifting flame tints let loose by the setting sun; the river was partly in shadow, partly sparkling with gleams of gold, but along its banks was all cool green shadow.

On these banks two persons were lingering; evidently it was the old, old story-sweeter each time it is told-that, falling from the lips of the man, flushed the woman's cheek into such radiant bloom.

He was about twenty-seven, and had a handsome thoroughbred face, that bore upon it an impress of matured thought not usual at that age; and he was a splendid specimen of manhood, tall and athletic in figure.

She had barely reached the perfection of her beauty, but her face was sweet and winsome enough as she listened with downcast eyes to the tale, as full of witchery now as when Adam whispered it to Eve in the fragrant bowers of Paradise.

All at once the man seized the two white hands that gleamed like snow rifts in the partial light.

Ethel,' he murmured, 'don't you believe me?'

She lifted her eyes from the shelter of their long lashes, gave him one look, then veiled them again; but over her face beamed a smile so sudden and brilliant, that he uttered a cry of delight, and catching her in his arms, he kissed her passionately.

'You love me, Ethel !'

She glanced up at him softly. 'Bernard, who was that girl I saw you with one night at the theatre at Liverpool?'

He started, and released her gently from his clasp. She looked at him in surprise. The colour had deserted his cheek, a shadow swept over his eyes, and a shiver of pain seemed to pass over him.

'I am sorry you asked me that just now, Ethel; for an hour like this should be all joy, and I should have told you later. I will answer you now, however: that woman was my wife.'

"Your wife!

A storm of crimson rushed over the girl's fair placid face. It seemed as though a bullet had passed through her heart.

'I am sorry to have been so abrupt. Forgive me,' pleaded Bernard Keane, troubled by her evident agitation.

Your wife! and you loved her! cried Ethel Seymour; so new to pain that she thought it was killing her.

'Yes, I loved her. Forgive me ; but I did!'

'As you love me-better than

you love me! How dare you talk to me as you have been doing! I shall go home!'

She made some hurried steps, but he caught her waist.

'Not till you have listened to me, dearest; not till you have forgiven me for that which was no crime-at least against you.'

'I cannot forgive it was a deception! I thought you so true, so honourable-'

Ethel suddenly lifted both hands to her face, and burst into a passion of tears. Bernard tried to soothe her, but she began to sob.

'Ethel,' he said gently, but with firmness, 'you must not be angry with me for a thing that happened long before I knew you. If you could but understand how deeply your reproaches hurt me, you would refrain.'

'But you loved her enough to marry her?'

Darling, give me your hands, and look in my face, and tell me if it is a deceitful one. You are almost smiling now. O my sweet one, how beautiful you are with those tears on your long lashes! Do you believe that I ever did, or ever could, love any one as I love you?'

'Are you sure? She was lovely, with such large black eyes and shining hair. Bernard, I hate her!

'Do not say that, Ethel. She is dead!'

Unconsciously he lifted his hat as he said the words, and looked upwards to the heaven where he believed Ursula to be.

The girl gave a shiver and began to cry again, but more quietly than before. At last she turned up a forgiving pair of eyes to his, and said in sweet womanly fashion,

'Tell me all about her.'

He told her the whole sad story: how he had been thrown in the way of Ursula Pierce; how he had compassionated her loneliness, ad

miring her talent, untamed and ignorant as she was; how he had helped her, pitied her, loved her, and in the end secretly married her. Then he told her of the journeys he had taken to see her, and of the last time he had looked on her face. This was the reason of his secrecy. Death had put a seal upon his marriage, and he had shrunk from speaking of it to any one, especially as his heart had gone out so entirely to another.

Ethel listened to him with mingled feelings of curiosity and pain, but after all she was a sensible girl. By degrees her tears abated, and she exalted her lover into a hero of romance. But the subject had brought so many sad memories to Bernard, that the hour which had opened so brightly closed in shadow. He could not be wholly happy when the thoughts of beautiful, faulty, and impulsive Ursula had been so unexpectedly thrust upon him.

Ethel had unconsciously dashed the sweetest moments of her own life with painful shadows when she mentioned the woman who at first had only excited her curiosity, but later, when she learned to love Bernard, vague but bitter jealousy. She was too wise and right-hearted, however, to feel more than a passing pang at the discovery that her own pure first love must accept a second place in the life she had hoped to fill entirely. It wounded her selflove and hurt her pride at first, but that soon passed away. Bernard had in fact committed no wrong against any one, save by a secrecy that sprang from kindness. After all, this married life of his amounted to scarcely more than a dream. How could she cherish jealousy of a woman who was lying in her grave ?

If Bernard Keane felt unhappy, he only gave evidence of it by a silence which settled upon both.

They turned and walked towards the village just as the stars peeped out in the clear American sky, and fireflies dotted the bushes with diamond sparks. They paused before one of the larger and superior built log houses, which Mr. Seymour, as one of the chief men of the new railroad company, inhabited with his wife and child.

Ethel turned her face to the starlight before she opened the door. Her big blue eyes were full of deprecation, her fair face looked a hundred times fairer enframed in the flaxen hair that glittered like gold.

Bernard Keane held out his hand. His features were pale and rigid in the dim light, and he gazed at her imploringly as though he feared she was going to leave him with hard thoughts in her breast.

woman had taken up her dwelling amongst the rough and rude workers on the railroad, she had become better acquainted with the young girl who was akin to her in position and breeding than years of intimacy would have made them in a busy town. Thrown as the two families were into near neighbourhood among the pioneers, surveyors, and masons, sympathy of class drew them into close affection. Mrs. Keane divined the growing attachment of Bernard, and was glad of it; for she loved Ethel with almost maternal tenderness already.

'Let them be happy,' she murmured, with tears springing into her eyes as the two figures disappeared in the purple mist. 'God forbid that their youth should be shipwrecked as mine was! Oh, if we who have learned to suffer could bear all the burdens of those we love, life would lose half its misery and anxiety!'

So the lovers went out of sight, walking slowly down the curving banks, and the woman's thoughts floated off through the dim shadows of memory, until they became anguish, and she started up in a desperate effort to fling off the past, and to make that miserable log hut as pleasant as the palace she had been thinking of.

At this moment Bernard passed.

His mother spread a little table, rudely fashioned by some of the railroad workmen, with a cloth of snow-white linen, one of her hoarded treasures. She brought out bread and fruit and milk; a dish of buckwheat cakes with its twin American necessity, a small beaker of molasses; and in the centre of the primitive meal she placed a cheap vase of wild flowers.

Mrs. Keane's mind had turned from the lovers who had occupied it, and dwelt anxiously, as the

evening deepened into night, on the husband who, with all his faults, she worshipped still.

Steven Keane's hour of return from work was sunset, and it had grown dusk, and, so far as she could discover, there were no signs of his coming. She walked out a little way, wading through the long wild grass. In the distance was a large shanty where several of the men went for their meals, and where that fatal curse to civilisation, whisky, was kept in abundance. Had he stopped there? once again had his manhood given way ? were the hopes she had tried to cherish day after day to be trodden for ever in the dust?

Poor, desolate, unhappy woman! She had made her bed among thorns and thistles from the first. How they had pierced and wounded her, none knew save her God and herself!

She bent her head and listened, and at last she head a rustling in the tall grass and the low hoarse protest of a voice but too familiar to her expostulating supinely with the earth for rising up, swelling, and rolling so unevenly, and with the grass for tying up four pairs of feet that wanted to wade through it but could not. Mrs. Keane's heart died within her. She knew the sound of the voice too well. Many and many a time, when the demon of drink was triumphant, she had heard the muffled curses on the pavement below and the stars above for oscillating under his drunken progress. But the life in America had in a measure seemed to regenerate the man. His strength and looks had come back partially in the pure bright air of the country. She had hoped so much for him, prayed so fervently for him, and of late trust had superseded even hope. Now both were gone, and she stood trembling and broken-hearted, almost ready to

die rather than look once more on his degradation.

Steven Keane came up reeling and stumbling through the tangled ground. His hat was gone, his coat floated open, and, in a fit of frenzy, he had half torn off his necktie, leaving his throat bare.

What an object he was, reeling towards her in the pure starlight of the summer night!

"What-what-is it you, old woman? It-it-it's my opinion the place is on fire. Sparks flying off right and left. What do you keep moving back for so? Can't you keep steady on your-your feet, like a decent woman, without dancing up and down? Stand

still! It's not right for a woman of your age to be hop-hop-hopping about. Just wait till the confounded grass catches you, and see if you don't trip. There— didn't I tell you so?'

She

He gave a lurch forward and fell to the earth, wallowing in the grass as he lay at his wife's feetall the time rebuking her and wondering at her unsteadiness. helped him up, gently and tenderly, with as heavy a heart as ever ached in a woman's bosom. While he leaned roughly on her shoulder, fairly bending down her fragile figure under his weight, she led him towards his home weeping silently all the way.

It was a neat picturesque scene after all, that simple log cabin. White curtains stirred at the window, the table with its fruit and flowers stood under a small hanging lamp, two or three easy-chairs scattered about-luxurious and not ungraceful affairs, though merely scooped out of flour barrels, stuffed with hay and covered with gay chintz, altogether inventions springing out of necessity.

The woman had tried to embellish her wild dwelling-place, hoping for the new life which

To

would spring out of her husband's reformation. With her own hands she had covered the rough walls of the shanty with coloured cloth, and hung up one or two pictures in roughly-carved frames. make her home pleasant she had brought to bear the refinement and genius of her former life. Love had made her an inventor; and her existence in the rude American country, instead of being a hardship, had hitherto seemed like working out a poem.

And she came back this night bending beneath the weight of a drunken man, her dress drenched with dew, her feet so wet that they left tracks on the matting, tears on her face, ice on her heart-hopeless, entirely hopeless.

The last prop had fallen away from her; the rest of her life she felt would be painful and humiliating.

Mrs. Keane led her husband into the hut, and closed the door lest some one might look upon his disgrace.

'Supsupper,' he muttered, staggering towards the table. 'Told you I'd be home, but they set the grass on fire. Snap, flash here— sparks there-everywhere! Come to supper, old Methuselah. What is that on your dress, water or whisky? It's raining down your face too, and stopping in the wrinkles. Get out of my way. I want to catch hold of that chair, but it keeps running off. The table is in a whirl-hold on!'

He squared his feet, planted them heavily on the floor, and pressing both hands on the table, upset it.