then Uncle Stephen will be coopered, and Aunt Rachel can be squared. You can stop the prosecution. Come, Uncle Anthony; they won't mind your boots.'

'It isn't the boots I am thinking of,' said Anthony, gravely.

'Is it the feeling that you will look such an ass?' asked the boy with ready sympathy. 'No one could look a bigger donkey—that's true-if he was to try with all his might. But never mind that; the servants are all in mourning still-ho! ho! -and the old lady's got a new cap trimmed with crape home yesterday-ho! ho!and there's the black band round my hatho ho ho !-and there's the tablet in the church--ho! ho! ho! ho! What a game it will be! You'll have to pay the bill for everything but your own funeral. I wish we could hire a mourning coach for us to go home in-I wonder if my pocket-money would run to it.'

The boy, who was half hysterical by this time, broke into inextinguishable laughter, which naturally led to choking and to tears.

'Come, Uncle Anthony.' He wiped his eyes, and put his uncle's hat on for him. 'What a shocking bad hat!' He took him by the hand, and led him unresisting into the street. 'I've got three shillings in my pocket, that will take us to Clapham Common. We will walk up to the door. I will smuggle you into the study. Then I will go away and bring you'

His voice

'Poor Alison !' he

broke again into a sob. cried; then he brushed away his tears. 'First thing you must do, is to put on a pair of new boots. Any other man but myself would be ashamed to be seen walking in company with such beasts of boots. I always used to keep you respectable in the old time, and I mean to again, remember that.'

CHAPTER THE LAST.

HOW YOUNG NICK ACHIEVED GREATNESS.

WHEN Stephen Hamblin saw his daughter fairly out of the room, and got through those manifestations of joy of which we have spoken, he began, once more, to reconsider everything. Now the message which Miss Nethersole sent him by means of his daughter was nothing short of an Evangel, a Blessed Gospel, to him. It relieved him, at one stroke, of all anxiety on the one side where his armour was weak; and even while he thought of the opportuneness of this truly Christian message, a way occurred to him by which

he might, even without it, face the world and challenge his enemies to do their worst.

Augustus and the crew,' he thought, 'rejoiced to have that trump card in reserve. They knew that I did not suspect its existence, and was not prepared to answer it. They played it fairly well, considering. But not so well-no, not so well as I mean to play my trump card, presently. It is not only forgiveness, but justification.'

This message of Rachel's, too, showed him how wrong he had been in his treatment of Alison. He should not have met her approaches with coldness: he should not have received her timid advances with a snub: he should have welcomed her: held out his arms: tried, at least, to kiss her: and, without a murmur, should have submitted to any endearments which the girl might offer. To be sure, the style and title of daughter no more commanded his affection than that

of niece his heart which had long since ceased to feel any warmth towards Alison's mother, by no means leaped up at the meeting with Dora's daughter. Quite the reverse. He felt that the whole thing was a gêne; he would very much have preferred Alison to have continued Anthony's daughter.

You cannot, however, by wishing, reverse the current of affairs. That is an axiom in the First Book of Fate; and the wise man makes the best of materials in his hands. The materials in Stephen's hands were a girl ready to acknowledge him as her father, and do her best to enact the part of Christian daughter; a sister-in-law who had been deeply wronged, and who, for the sake of that daughter, was ready to forgive and forget the past: a little knot of conspirators, eager to get rid of him, to push him off the scene, to land him, once and for all, across the Channel.