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the way to it. I never can see why people should talk of 'judging mercifully and charitably!' Let them judge justly! That should be enough."

Val smiled, half tenderly, half superiorly, as he rejoined : "If we all got our deserts, who should 'scape whipping?"

"And who would want to sneak away from a deserved whipping? Only a coward!" replied Clemaine, with a fine

scorn.

"There is one vice I see you would be hard on," he said, looking at her with interest-" cowardice!"

"I would try not to be unjust to even that-though I own it is a repulsive quality. One dislikes it as one dislikes a black beetle! I don't mean mere personal timidity," she hastened to explain. "I should probably run away from a rat, and I'm sure I should scream if a bull made a rush at me! The kind of cowardice that I mean-the really revolting kind-is moral cowardice."

"In what form?" he inquired. "I should really like to know what height of courage would satisfy you, and what degree of moral cowardice you consider the unpardonable sin? I fancy you would find many a brave soldier who would lead a forlorn hope, who would be 'moral coward' enough, under many conceivable circumstances, to evade and shirk an unpleasant position!"

"I would not be hard on him for evading a position, if he did not slip out of it at the cost of leaving someone else in it. That is what I call the unpardonable sin-the form of cowardice that shirks the responsibility of a deed that is done, and leaves another to bear the brunt of the consequences!"

They had arrived at this interesting point of ethics when the door opened softly and Mrs. Charteris came in-a delicate little figure, seemingly overweighted with her heavy widow's mourning -greeting them with her gentle dreamy smile.

"Looking over Val's sketches?" she observed. "Have you shown Miss Everard that lovely bit of landscape-the one I liked so much—which you thought of calling After the Storm?'"

She sat down and joined them in their occupation of looking over the portfolio, to which they now promptly returned from their discussion on over-rated and under-rated moral qualities.

Mrs. Charteris had perhaps a more cultivated artistic appreciation than Clemaine Everard; she distinguished more clearly, and admired as cordially, all that was best in Val's work, yet somehow she and Val never seemed to get near to each other. Una's sweetness always reached him as if from the other side of a gulf; there was never a bridge of real mutual comprehension thrown across it. Although their relations were thoroughly friendly, their knowledge of each other never went much below the surface.

In fact, Val did not generally study anybody but himself very much, and then just now all the attention he had to spare was engrossed by Clemaine Everard.

Every time they met, the attraction between them waxed stronger.

"There's something grand about that girl," he said to himself that evening; "a fine scorn of the weaknesses she cannot comprehend, the splendid intolerance of youth!"

He read her truly-as far as he saw.

But what he did not see was that scorn of baseness, hatred of treachery, intolerance of disloyalty and falsehood, were no mere effervescent ebullition of Clemaine Everard's youth, but ingrained in the very core of her nature.

If he thought a great deal of Clemaine, so did she of him.

She did not believe for a moment that he could be in earnest if he derided any one of the virtues, least of all that he could in serious meaning set lightly by her goddess, Truth! Val Charteris, whom she knew, so kind, so sympathetic, so tender and true, so gentle and unaffected with all his genius, popular, admired, yet wearing his honours so meekly, he could only in jest make light of the good and true.

No man had ever yet interested Clemaine as much as did this fair and gracious and handsome young artist and poet. Two or three men had been attracted by the golden eyes and the golden hair, and had made manifest their admiration; and Clemaine, who, being "pure womanly,"

"A creature not too bright and good

For human nature's daily food,"

was not wholly indifferent to the feelings she inspired, had been mildly flattered, and perhaps vouchsafed to her admirers a luke

warm liking that was not much more than indifference with the chill off; but no romance had ever gone further with her than an hour or a day of this mild interest, in which there was nothing more deep and permanent than morning mist. Many a girl of Clemaine's years-for she had left her teens behind—has a heart like an autograph album. Her heart was a pure white page.

She had never known a man quite like Val Charteris. In the circles wherein she moved, in London as at Rylands Royal, he shone as a star. She heard him talked of in tones of admiration

-was aware that the homage of fairer and more brilliant women than she was-or so at least, she thought, though Val's opinion might have been less flattering to them-was delicately offered up at his shrine. With gentle, secret thrills of pride and pleasure she read and re-read the reviews of his poems, and had seen his picture that season hung on the line in Burlington House. She kept that year's Academy Catalogue, with a pencil mark against the name of that picture; she had cut out from various papers sundry notices of his achievements in art and literature, but had never asked herself why she treasured these trifles, nor why she kept them in secret and showed them to no one. The frankest of women has her natural reserves, and Clemaine, with all her in-born and in-bred qualities of truth, candour and sincerity, was reticent, even to her nearest and dearest, on the one subject of Val Charteris.

(To be continued.)

BELGRAVIA

FEBRUARY, 1892.

The honourable Jane.

BY ANNIE THOMAS (MRS. PENDER CUDLIP),

Author of

"THAT OTHER WOMAN," "EYRE OF Blendon,” “DeNNIS DONNE," "PLAYED OUT," ETC., ETC.

CHAPTER V.

CARNATION TIME.

THE friendship between Helen Collette and Captain Stafford was an affair of five years' standing, and it had been marked by countless phases of feeling and demeanour. He had fallen very rapidly and madly in love with her beautiful person and her charmingly frank and vigorous manner, when first he had met her, and, as she was a thorough woman of the world, he had not hesitated to tell her so. But in those days he was only an impecunious subaltern, whose elder brother was alive, and in such good, robust health that Harry Stafford's prospects of coming into any of the family loaves and fishes had been nil, apparently. Accordingly, though she had surrendered her heart to his persistent and passionate pleading, she had refused to marry him, and for a time the repulse had made him a more desperate lover than ever. The fire of his passion was fanned into a fiercer flame by the free use Helen made of every art and allurement of which she was mistress. She would not have him for her husband because poverty and obscurity, and the loss of Mr. Wyndham's convenient cheques, would be her portion if she married him. She loved him in her way-and hers was a very warm and en

thralling one when she pleased-and the possibility of any other woman catching his heart in the rebound drove her frantic. Accordingly, she kept him on by cleverly administered doses of hope and despair, keeping her own head the while, though giving the fullest verbal expression to her love for him.

During his absences from England, she plied him with letters that were calculated to raise the temperature of any climate in which he received them. Such loving, flattering, sympathetic letters they were, never too long, never crossed, and never tedious. He thought he read her heart in every word, and cursed the lack of means which made her prudent "for his sake," as she told him.

But somehow or other, when, by that robust elder brother's death," lack of means " no longer stood between his Helen and himself, a something else interposed. Absence had made him more ardent than ever, when he returned to England rich and distinguished, and sought her without delay. But his ardour was damped when she showed more anxiety to speak of marriage than of love. Her practicality chilled him. She showed the harder and more scheming side of her character just at the time when she should have been most tender and trustful. Even if she had no sympathy with him in the sorrow he felt at his brother's death, he would have liked her better had she feigned a little. Instead of which, she was now in as great a hurry to secure him legally as she had formerly been anxious to keep the legal tie at bay.

He was chilled and disappointed, and he showed that he was those things. Then the usual thing happened. She reproached him with being "cool and changed," until her reproaches first became wearisome, and then odious to him. She grew jealous of the most shadowless women. She disparaged those whom he liked, and called him to account for every idle word he uttered to the girls with whom he danced, and the women he took in to dinner. Finally-most fatal step of all—she "reminded" him of his former vows and protestations to herself, and scolded him for having grown slack in proffering them now, until he held aloof from her, in the hope that her jealousy would make her break with him altogether. When he took this receding step she grew frightened, and implored him with such passionate fervour "to come back to her, if only as a friend," that he

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