which he would never miss? Give it rather to this adopted daughter of yours, for whom you have an affection; and leave my grandson and me unbound by any-obligations!" To the last word M. Malgrè lent an emphasis of elaborate sarcasm, as if to remind himself as well as the Baron that there was no peace between them.

"But I suppose you love your grandson?" the Baron said, not noticing the satire otherwise than by an "He uneasy movement in his chair.

is not too old to receive an education to fit him for as great a career as any man could hope for. Come, monsieur, do not let your resentment against me prejudice his best interests. Remember that he is Annette's son as well as mine."

"I have never forgotten it, M. le Baron," the Frenchman replied, grimly; "and both he and I have suffered for it. Had he been her child only, or hers by an honest marriage, I would have loved him with my best love. But at the moment when I would have embraced him for her sake, the thought of him who destroyed her rose in my heart, and told me that this boy had in his veins the blood of the seducer as well as of the victim. Many a time, monsieur, I could have strangled him with one hand, while I gave him my heart with the other!" As he said this, the old man's eyes shone strangely. "It is a devilish thing that you have done," he continued in a more passionate key. "You have mixed love and hate together in the person of an innocent child!

You

have poisoned all that should have made my old age serene and happy! There is no sweeter thing than to teach the child you love what may make him wise and strong but when I would do this, I thought 'Shall I do good to the son of my enemy?' and I said I would not. Often I have spoken cruel words to him-he knew not what they meant; but they have turned him away from me; I shall end my life here alone! And now you come to offer him wealth and a name-the

name of him who was his mother's ruin!" Here the Frenchman stood up, confronting the other with an air of stern and formal dignity. "M. le Baron de Castlemere," he said, "I do not accept your offer. It is not by the gift of money and rank that you can atone for this wrong. But if you wish to give my grandson to me, with your part in him wiped out, so that I may take him to my breast, and feel that he is all mine-then monsieur, do me the favour first to take this pistol." He held an oldfashioned duelling-pistol towards Lord Castlemere as he spoke, retaining the mate to it in his other hand. "This is not the place nor the country, monsieur," he added, "where the etiquette of an affair like this can be observed. But it is enough for honour that we face each other here alone, with no advantage on either side. Since fourteen years I have kept these weapons, in the hope that a day would come to use them. If you prefer it, M. le Baron, we will stand outside the house; though this room appears to me very suitable. You yourself shall give the word . . ."

For the first time during the interview the Englishman smiled. It was not so much that he was amused by the stiff and antique courtesy with which the Frenchman ornamented his deadly proposal; or that the absurdity of this method of recompensing poor M. Malgre for the sufferings which he had caused him, was especially present to his mind. But he felt the relief of a man not subject to bodily fear, at having the strain shifted from the mental to the physical region of sensation. Any man can take a bullet : the process is a simple one and quickly performed; and certainly the wound does not rankle so long or so virulently as many a tongue-driven missile may do. It is even possible that Lord Castlemere may have been tempted for a moment to do as M. Malgrè suggested; to those coloured with a morbid genius for moral casuistry, the rough and ready way, when it presents itself, may offer almost irresistible

allurements. But a second thought controlled this impulse.

"I cannot consent to run the risk of taking your life, monsieur," he said, putting the pistol down on the table; "but after I have told you of something of which you seem to have no suspicion, I shall not object to your pistolling me if you choose: so far as I can see I might as well come to an end now as any time."

"What have you to tell me, milord?" the other demanded, with an accent of anxiety in his voice, though his demeanour was almost unchanged.

"Your daughter was married to me; she was my lawful wife, and our son is the legitimate heir of Castlemere," replied his lordship, speaking rapidly and breathing short. Then he got up from his chair and leaned with his hand upon the back of it.

The Frenchman's face puckered up, a tremor passed through his body; for several moments he seemed unable to use his voice. When at length it came it had a shrill, pithless sound.

"What you tell me is not true," he began. "You said it because you were afraid-bah! no

But you

were jesting, monsieur: in pity give me the assurance that you were jesting! Body of God! it cannot be true!"

"Are you sorry to learn that your

daughter's honour was pure, M.

Malgrè?!" the Englishman inquired curiously. "Here is the certificate of our marriage, signed and dated at Paris on the day previous to our starting for Havre."

He took a bundle of papers from his pocket, and selecting one from amongst them handed it to the Frenchman, who glanced at it, and let it fall on the table. He then moved to his chair in a tottering way, and slouched down into it, like a man whose stamina has gone from him. He sat with his arms lying nervelessly in front of him on the table, and a piteous contraction of the brow and fall of the mouth.

Lord Castlemere, having had in view his own attitude in the matter

rather than Annette's, had anticipated an outburst against his long-sustained suppression of the fact, and perhaps some fierce reflections on the risk he had run of committing bigamy. The truth was, however, that M. Malgrè was not thinking of his lordship at all, and was profoundly indifferent as to the nature or degree of his moral obliquity. The sole subject of the old man's thoughts, and that which crushed him down, was the wretched and irrevocable injustice that he himself had done his daughter's memory ever since her death. He had cursed her and denied her all forgiveness, and all the while she had been innocent. He had cast her out from his heart as a dishonour to his name, and she had not dishonoured it. He had made her son the scapegoat of his baffled resentment, when the boy should have been the sweet consolation of his loss. Finally, he had brought himself to be a poor, spiteful recluse and exile, at odds with the world, and living only in the vague hope of wreaking a fruitless revenge; and now, at the moment when he fancied the revenge was within his grasp, the substance of it vanished into thin air. All this was a terrible blow to M. Malgrè, and left him no stomach for scolding. "Annette! Annette! Annette ! was the remorseful burden of his soul. He thought of her grave, over which his insane pride had suffered him to put no loving inscription, nor to visit it save by stealth and empty handed; and of the room in which she died-but of that he scarcely dared to think. The vital and characteristic part of the man wandered apart in these forlorn musings; and so much as remained to listen to Lord Castlemere was meek and pliable to excess. As for the pistols, they had become unknown instruments, relics of some forgotten age. Forgotten, too, was the presence, on the other side of the partition dividing the study from the adjoining room, of the reverend gentleman with his black eyebrows and whiskers, who evinced such a lively desire to get the future John,

fourteenth Baron Castlemere, out of the way. And yet the partition was

rather a thin one.

"Well, then," said his lordship (who had previously said several other things, which M. Malgrè had heard, perhaps, but without comprehending them), "I will see the boy in your presence to-morrow morning. With this certificate of marriage, and the certificate of the child's birth, which you have, his identity is sufficiently established."

"Yes, yes; no-assuredly," murmured M. Malgrè. "Here is the paper of his birth, monsieur; I always carry it about with me: accept it, monsieur. Yes-yes; to-morrow.'

"In order to put the matter beyond suspicion," Lord Castlemere continued, "I had a will drawn up-two wills, in fact. Here they are. The first, as you see, is drawn in favour of my niece and adopted daughter, Madeleine. It was to be used in case no direct heir should be forthcoming, and provides for her inheriting the estates on the completion of her twenty-first year. This second instrument-which, as you see, is dated one month later than the first gives the property to my son in due succession, subject to a lien thereon to the amount of one thousand per annum to Madeleine during her life. It was my hope that the two might marry, but nothing of that kind is here suggested, lest by seeming to force their inclination we should dis

courage it. You understand me, M. Malgrè?"

"Assuredly, monsieur; we should discourage it.'

"Well, I will leave all the papers with you, for you to look over at your leisure. I confess, M. Malgrè, that I should have preferred to see this property go unreservedly to my niece, in spite of the drawbacks attending her tenure; but I could not face the possibility of her title being hereafter challenged and besides I did not

:

wish to add wrong to wrong. This affair has caused me great anxiety and unhappiness from the beginning."

His lordship hesitated, as if he had other words to say, but the Frenchman was so plainly not interested in his confessions that he changed his mind. Upon the whole he was not sorry that the other's preoccupation prevented him from appreciating the rather feeble and ineffective figure which he was himself conscious of cutting. And this was the end of fourteen years of secret humiliation and suspense on one side, and of corroding rage and gratuitous misanthropy on the other !

"I will take my leave of you for the present, M. Malgrè," Lord Castlemere said, turning to the door. "Tomorrow we will settle what remains of this affair. I think my little girl is up stairs, monsieur," he added abruptly, turning again and holding out his hand; "don't you think that, after all, we might become friends?"

"Assuredly, M. le Baron-tomorrow!" returned the Frenchman, not changing his expression or moving from his place.

So the two men parted without having shaken hands. In the passage Lord Castlemere called to his niece, and she came down, with her squirrel under her arm; she had made better friends with it than her uncle had done with M. Malgrè, and would not be parted from it. His lordship bent down and kissed her on the forehead, then they went out of the house hand in hand.

Two or three minutes afterwards a burly, black-garmented figure issued from the doorway, glanced to the right and left, and then went hastily down the lane in the same direction that the two others had taken. The easterly breeze had driven a flock of clouds across the sky, and it was already quite dark.

THERE are times when personal experiences may be appealed to without egotism, and studied, for the position they are intended to illustrate, with profit. On this ground I venture to ask all who may be interested in the subject now engaging the attention of the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission to bear with me while I recall my own, which I can do briefly by referring to a pamphlet published by me some twelve years back, entitled The Roman Index and its Late Proceedings.1 Those proceedings were the occasion of my quitting the Roman Communion, after having joined it in mature life, continued in it fifteen years, and witnessed its workings in a host of countries besides my own. True, they were neither novel nor peculiar in my case; but, till then, I distrusted the account given of them in books as being ingrained with prejudice. Brought face to face with them, I found it only too true. It was the ordinary way in which business of that kind is transacted in, what is called at Rome, the Congregation of the Holy Office, but what is better known to the outside world as the Court of the Inquisition; and it was the first of its kind there, as these few words from Morone will show: "In the early part of the sixteenth century, the portentous errors of the heretics Luther, Calvin, Zwingle, and others having led to the institution of the Congregation of the Holy Office by Paul III., and to its revision and enlargement under successive popes, the other Congregations of Cardinals were organised on its model."2

Such, then, is the alternative between England and Rome, so far as existing courts are concerned. I will now recapitulate what the 1 London: J. T. Hayes. 2 Dia. Stor. Eccles. xvi. 142.

action of Rome was in my case. Two volumes of mine were placed on the index of proscribed books in December, 1868. I was neither informed of what was in contemplation, nor of the fact. I am unaware to this day who delated them. I was never confronted with my accusers, nor with my judges, nor with the passages in either volume considered unsound. The first thing Archbishop Manning was careful to tell me about them, on my applying to him, was, that he had never read them himself. Yet they had been out and in circulation no less than two years in England previously to their condemnation. Doubtless it was my recent letter to him that had prompted their condemnation. But, again, that letter was not condemned by him till two months later, when he was away from his flock in Rome, taking counsel, as he had the goodness to inform me, with four theologians on the spot, whom he will not name. I should be curious to have the canon pointed out to me countenancing a judicial process of this kind, and imposing loss of communion in the event of its sentence being disregarded. I could point out at least a score which it insults and tramples under foot.

At the same time, personally, let me not omit to say, there was nothing, or next to nothing, in the conduct of Archbishop Manning of which any reasonable man could complain. Though he had learnt to pronounce Latin as an Italian, he made you feel, thanks to his bringing up, that he had still the feelings of an Englishman smouldering in the depths of his heart. I am persuaded he would have accorded me very different treatment, even officially, had he been his own master. But what could he do? When he had strained every point to come to 3 The Church's Creed, or the Crown's Creed.

a settlement with me, and I with him, he found himself thwarted all of a sudden by a miserable Monsignore of whose doings, in public and private life, the less said the better for his superiors-in whose person Rome quashed our negotiations, and by stepping in between us set me free. Never shall I cease to be thankful for that unrighteous act that act which enabled me with a good conscience to emancipate myself from a system that I had found on full experience to be completely delusive: just as full of blemishes, and distortions, and corruptions, as our forefathers had painted it ages ago; falsifying, in fact, almost every pretension it affected itself, or its proselytisers claimed for it; with unity largely dependent on tyranny for its maintenance, and a blind to any amount of heartburnings and internecine strife behind the scenes; with moral appearances largely dependent on secrecy, and truth played fast and loose with in every possible way for palliating, advancing, or saving the system. All these discoveries made me rejoice over the unrighteous act that set me free, and enabled me to return to my old home, a wiser, but not by any means a sadder man. I had known Rome now, once for all.

The Vicar-General of the Archbishop had already prepared me for this finale, by explaining that the Roman Catholic bishops had not yet got the forum externum accorded them in this country by Rome, though he hoped they would soon. Anglo-Romans were thus no better off under the hierarchy than they had been under vicars apostolic in former times, of whom Mr. Berington, himself subject to their pretended jurisdiction, says in his history, "So entire is their dependence on the Roman court, that the placita Curiæ Romanæ are the sole rule of their conduct." Open trial in an English court of justice, be it even the Court of Arches as now constituted, is surely preferable to that alternative.

But let us cross the Channel, and 1 P. 461.

see whether we shall not find ourselves better off there. It was crossing the Channel that took me to Rome, via France. Things were certainly better in France when I first set foot in it; but what have they since become? I can depose personally likewise to this point. The man who perhaps had most to do with my joining the Church of Rome-whose abilities and acquirements commanded my admiration, whose character won my love, whose fate brings tears to my eyes-Père Gratry, of the French Oratory-what was his fate, soon after my own breach with Rome? He was hounded to death for daring to speak the truth on a great crisis, as I had done when minds, though excited, were less vindictive. The semblance of a forum externum, which then existed in France, stood him in less good stead than its absence in England had me. But even then it was a semblance, not a reality. Practically the ecclesiastical courts, answering to our own, had ceased to exist in France with the eighteenth century. "They were swept away, all of them, by the Revolution," says the VicarGeneral of the Bishop of Soissons, M. Lequeux. "In that sense we construe the law of 11th September, 1790, which, with all the civil tribunals of the old régime, abolished the officials of the ecclesiastical courts too. . . . Nothing indeed forbids the existence of Church courts for strictly Church suits." But "the secular power neither recognises them nor entertains their sentences." 2

The Concordat of 1801 between Napoleon I. and Pope Pius VII., far from restoring Church government, established Ultramontanism in France. It was thus summarised by M. Ollivier only three years ago 3:“ L'article 2 déclare qu'il sera fait par le Saint Siège, de concert avec le Gouvernement, une nouvelle circonscription des diocèses français. Pour le faciliter,

2 Manual. Jur. Canon. i. 477; and iii. 55. Paris Leroux, 1850.

3 L'Église et l'État au Concile du Vatican. Paris Garnier Frères, 1879, vol. i.; 111-12.