"Don't despise me, Allan," answered the other, "I hadn't the courage!"

"Not the courage!" repeated Allan. He paused a moment. "Oh, I know!" he resumed, putting his hand gayly on Midwinter's shoulder. "You're still shy of the Milroys. What nonsense, when I told you myself that your peace was made at the cottage!"

"I wasn't thinking, Allan, of your friends at the cottage. The truth is, I'm hardly myself to-day. I am ill and unnerved; trifles startle me." He stopped, and shrunk away, under the anxious scrutiny of Allan's eyes. "If you will have it," he burst out abruptly, "the horror of that night on board the Wreck has got me again; there's a dreadful oppression on my head; there's a dreadful sinking at my heart-I'm afraid of something happening to us, if we don't part before the day is out. I can't break my promise to you; for God's sake release me from it, and let me go back?"

Remonstrance, to any one who knew Midwinter, was plainly useless at that moment. Allan humored him. "Come out of this dark, airless place," he said; "and we'll talk about it. The water and the open sky are within a stone's-throw of us. I hate a wood in the evening—it even gives me the horrors. You have been working too hard over the steward's books. Come and breathe freely in the blessed open air."

Midwinter stopped, considered for a moment, and suddenly submitted.

"You're right," he said, "and I'm wrong, as usual. I'm wasting time and distressing you to no purpose. What folly to ask you to let me go back! Suppose you had said yes?" "Well?" asked Allan.

"Well," repeated Midwinter, "something would have happened at the first step to stop me-that's all. Come on."

They walked together in silence on the way to the Mere.

At the last turn in the path Allan's cigar went out. While he stopped to light it again Midwinter walked on before him, and was the first to come in sight of the open ground.

Allan had just kindled the match, when, to his surprise, his friend came back to him round the turn in the path. There was light enough to show objects more clearly in this part of the plantation. The match, as Midwinter faced him, dropped on that instant from Allan's hand. "Good God!" he cried, starting back, "you look as you looked on board the Wreck!"

"Do you remember it now?" he asked, and pointed to the Mere.

The sun was sinking in the cloudless westward heaven. The waters of the Mere lay beneath, tinged red by the dying light. The open country stretched away, darkening drearily already on the right hand and the left. And on the near margin of the pool, where all had been solitude before, there now stood, fronting the sunset, the figure of a Woman.

The two Armadales stood together in silence, and looked at the lonely figure and the dreary view.

Midwinter was the first to speak.

"Your own eyes have seen it," he said. "Now look at your own words." He opened the narrative of the Dream and held it under Allan's eyes. His finger pointed to the lines which recorded the first Vision; his voice, sinking lower and lower, repeated the words:

"The sense came to me of being left alone in the darkness.

"I waited.

"The darkness opened and showed me the vision-as in a picture-of a broad, lonely pool, surrounded by open ground. Above the farther margin of the pool I saw the cloudless western sky, red with the light of sunset.

"On the near margin of the pool there stood the Shadow of a Woman."

He ceased, and let the hand which held the manuscript drop to his side. The other hand pointed to the lonely figure, standing with its back turned on them, fronting the setting sun.

"There," he said, "stands the living Woman, in the Shadow's place! There speaks the first of the dream-warnings to you and to me! Let the future time find us still together-and the second figure that stands in the Shadow's place will be Mine."

Even Allan was silenced by the terrible certainty of conviction with which he spoke.

In the pause that followed the figure at the pool moved, and walked slowly away round the margin of the shore. Allan stepped out beyond the last of the trees, and gained a wider view of the open ground. The first object that met his eyes was the pony-chaise from Thorpe-Ambrose.

He turned back to Midwinter with a laugh of relief. "What nonsense have you been talking?" he said. "And what nonsense have I been listening to? It is the governess at last."

Midwinter made no reply. Allan took him by the arm and tried to lead him on. He released himself suddenly, and seized Allan with both hands-holding him back from the figure at the pool as he had held him back from the cabin-door on the deck of the timber ship. Once again the effort was in vain. Once again Allan broke away as easily as he had broken away in the past time.

"One of us must speak to her," he said. "And if you won't, I will."

He had only advanced a few steps toward the

Mere when he heard, or thought he heard, a voice faintly calling after him, once and once only, the word Farewell. He stopped, with a feeling of uneasy surprise, and looked round.

"Was that you, Midwinter?" he asked. There was no answer. After hesitating a moment more Allan returned to the plantation. Midwinter was gone.

He looked back at the pool, doubtful in the new emergency what to do next. The lonely figure had altered its course in the interval: it had turned and was advancing toward the trees. Allan had been evidently either heard or seen. It was impossible to leave a woman unbefriend ed in that helpless position and in that solitary place. For the second time Allan went out from the trees to meet her.

As he came within sight of her face he stopped in ungovernable astonishment. The sudden revelation of her beauty, as she smiled and looked at him inquiringly, suspended the movement in his limbs and the words on his lips. A vague doubt beset him whether it was the governess after all.

He roused himself; and,`advancing a few paces, mentioned his name. "May I ask," he added, "if I have the pleasure—”

The lady met him easily and gracefully halfway.

CAPT

GULL'S BLUFF.

APTAIN SWITZEL found the hero of this story on a wreck which he met floating over the Atlantic, in company with a howling dog, and a few fowls, still alive and imprisoned in a basket-like coop, which had become immovably jammed in the gangway as it was on the point of rolling overboard.

“It is a Danish brig,” said Captain Switzel when he boarded the hulk. "Where do you hail from, youngster ?"

For answer our hero, a boy, seized the dog by the neck and turned a somersault with him into the Captain's boat.

"He can't talk any thing but lingo," said one of the oarsmen, making room for him, "and he's most a-perished; his lips are cracked open and black as whale skin."

Captain Switzel hastily investigated the hold, which contained grain, and then ordered his men to pull back to his vessel.

"I have only caught a Tartar for my pains," he remarked, giving the boy a sideway look. "A human being, Cap'n, is a human being," said the oarsman who had just spoken.

"He's a foreigner," was the reply. "Foreigners that I've come across in all the ports I ever sailed into have proved rascals."

The boy looked about him, aware that he was an object of interest to the rough men who had risen from the rough sea for his salvation, but said nothing till the boat ground against the hull of Captain Switzel's Indiaman. Somebody gave him a rude hoist, which landed him on the deck; then he looked down into the boat and called, in a faint, hoarse voice, “Dag!"

The dog was tossed up; but before the boat was hoisted the boy had fallen in a heap, face, hands, and feet together, as if the motives which had hitherto kept them separate and individual members had vanished. Captain Switzel picked him up as if he had been a bunch of oakum, and carried him below. In a few days he reappeared on deck, a handsome, yellow-haired Scandinavian, dressed in a suit from the slop chest, with a man's dirk in his leather belt. Having made the impression upon the crew that his name was "Lorson," he wisely gave up the attempt of talking in his own language, except to his dog, and applied himself to the study of Captain Switzel's English, which was not as pure as it would have been if it had not been mixed with an idiom derived from a Dutch grandfather; for, in spite of the Captain's contempt for foreigners, this remote relative was born in Amsterdam, though he had recently been buried as an American veteran of the War of 1812.

Captain Switzel was outward-bound when he rescued Lorson from the jaws of the sea; upon this fact, perhaps, depended the consequences of the lives of both. The Captain staying too long on the shores of Sumatra, weighing pepper and cheating the natives, caught the coast fever, and sailed away with it seething in his blood, together with a splendid cargo. A terrible calm befell the ship before his fever reached its height. As the crew said, the water rotted-the horror of creation was visible in its viscid depths. All that the crew saw-the breeding, formless, floating monsters-the Captain felt in his brain, and at last his reason fled. The mate had dosed him from the crude medicine chest and bled him in vain; nothing remained to be done, the mate concluded, but to lash the patient in his berth and leave him. Lorson cut the lashings and pledged his word to the mate that the sick man should do no mischief above or below. By a serene, active care, a patient, acute watchfulness, the Captain was brought back to the confines of reason and convalescence.

the first evening concerned a garden and the improvement of the salt farm. Mary obliterated the old name of the island, "Gull's Bluff," and renamed it "Crusoe," inasmuch as there was no resemblance to that ingenious navigator's retreat-not even in the point of solitude, for the Captain had with him a hired man and a boy; and she had taken into her service Katy Brown, a sailor's widow, who had been long befriended by the Switzels. Lorson, tossing round half the world, pushing in and out its great commercial ports, with "the hopes that make us men," felt upon his return, during the second summer of their abode at Crusoe, as if he had gone into a pre-natal state-the dim, early dawn of a life which could but usher a dim, late twilight, and so vanish without leaving a vestige. He saw, however, that they possessed the sedate content which fills the mind of those who have voluntarily gone adrift from society, yet who people a solitary life with the habits of civilization. Captain Switzel enjoyed his trips to Selhaven, where he realized the profits of his salt harvest. Walking the deck of the schooner, and commanding his crew of a man and a boy, he tasted a safe reminiscence of his former cruisings in distant seas; and his bargains on the main land still connected him with a business fraternity.

Mary also varied the monotony of her existence by going to Selhaven occasionally to attend church, to shop, or to visit her early friend, the preceptor's wife. The merit of every visit, in her estimation, was that something was added to her stock of home-contentment-a new degree of comparison, if nothing less; a new pattern, if nothing more-which served to employ her thoughts and time. The industriouslyinclined may be always busy, and the Captain was as busy in his domain as a cabinet minister ever was in his, neither requiring men but ideas. Mary, on her part, was as much engaged; so entirely, indeed, that she found no time for any dolce-far-niente association with her husband. The fact, however, was never dwelt upon by either; it is for the biographer only to go beyond the limits of the commonplace, if he ventures at all to trench upon the lives of the lower million. Nor did Lorson indulge in any abstract reflections concerning them; he sailed again with an impression so fixed of their absolute fitness for the situation, and the adaptability of the material about them, that only some great shock could have shaken his faith in it. The winter following his absence was a severe one, but Captain Switzel with more than usual energy confronted it. He ran his vessel into Selhaven, trip after trip, without an ostensible reason, for he carried no salt, and lingered about the streets of the town as he never had done when an inhabitant thereof. One day he slipped into a doctor's office, and asked him to explain some curious feelings that had been creeping over him for several months. The doctor examined him, and replied with his finger on the Captain's wrist. The reply contained the information that he probably would not live many months.

"My poor girl is scarcely twenty," was all the remark he made, attempting to count his pulse himself.

What the cabin of his vessel witnessed that evening-for he put out of the bay as soon as he got the doctor's opinion, and to the astonishment of his helmsman bore away from Crusoe, not arriving there till morning-God only knew. We hear of the "strong man's agony," some of us have felt it, but who can describe it? He appeared in the familiar room at Crusoe, where breakfast was preparing, with the simple remark that the smell of the coffee that morning was more delicious than ever. He looked round the walls with the vision of his soul though, as the martyr going to the scaffold clings with his bodily vision to the angles of the streets he turns, and the shadows of the buildings he passes from forever.

It was not long from this time before the faithful Katy Brown perceived that he did not eat his allowance, and mentioned the fact to him before Mary. He looked at her anxiously. as she met his eye, and tried to hold her gaze to his, but failed; her glance wandered over him, and absorbed the atmosphere he was in. The first unearthly shadow passed over her and broke her slumbering consciousness. He knew it, and prayed as he had never prayed for himself. Then an impatient irritation took possession of him; he cursed his luck, and wished that Lorson had let him alone when he had the fever.

face.

None of his emotions came to the surHe said, with a short laugh, passing his hand over his rough whiskers,

"I am not very well. In fact, I am not well at all; that's the long and short of it."

This confession, slight as it was, shattered some prop which had sustained him; he failed visibly therefrom, and Mary was obliged to watch the shadow which daily grew into form and substance. It was strange, but it was true, that the shadow, instead of drawing them together, seemed to keep them apart. It was owing to the Captain's bravery, who denied himself the consolation of exacting the sweet suffering sympathy which was his right, and which she might have extended to him of her own will, if she had ever been taught to look into the deeps of being. She remained calm, respectful, habitually dutiful. Once, tormented with pain, or a mysterious jealousy, he asked her if she had been happy with him. With a slight hesitation, as if she were taking thought whether she had been, she answered, "Yes."

"What has made you happy, Mary ?” "Every thing," she replied, promptly, and with an air of having spoken satisfactorily. "Just so-just it," he said, bitterly. This was the first and last expression of weakness. The subject of the future was approached courageously and calmly; he consulted Mary's wishes about removing from the island, but owned that he hoped she would remain. No other spot, she replied, would be home to her; any shelter that she might seek