With great apparent reluctance Cubleigh placed the garment in the old man's hands, and the latter thrust his trembling fingers into the inner pocket, and thence drew forth a small, carefully wrapped-up paper packet, which, on being opened, displayed a broad gold noble of King Edward the Third.

"My noble, my precious noble with the unique mint-mark," quavered Mr. Wilmot; "they've not got one like it in the British Museum, and I could swear to it amongst a thousand. Well, I'm surprised, and I'm sorry, and I'm shocked; but where are the rest? there are at least fifty coins missing, and

The rest of the sentence was interrupted by a loud, despairing cry, and then, with a heavy thud, Wilfred Manwaring fell senseless upon the floor.

"I always feared I had committed an error," said the Heidelberg Doctor, "when I admitted to 'Ehrenbreitstein' the son of a mere commoner, but I certainly never expected to find a thief amongst my pupils."

"I don't believe it," cried the Duke of Ribblesdale; "there's some villainy here."

"And I certainly could not have credited it," said old Mr. Wilmot, fidgetting about "such a

fine, open-countenanced young gentleman, too; I certainly never could have credited it."

"And I," said Cubleigh, "never would have believed my governor would have sent me to a tutor's where there was a thief in the house. And, now I come to think of it, Manwaring went over to Ossington on Saturday, and bought a new gun.”

"Ha!" cried Dr. Massenger, "that is important." "By Jove, Cubleigh," exclaimed the Duke, "I think you are a beastly cad yourself to talk so, when the poor dear fellow is lying on the ground dead, for all we know to the contrary. Come, is no one going to help me to lift him up upon the bed ?" and so saying, he began to raise the helpless body. But the Doctor and Cubleigh stood aloof.

"Let me help," said old Mr. Wilmot, kindly, and the two lifted up the unconscious frame, and laid it tenderly upon the bed, Doctor Massenger strutting by their side, like a disconcerted turkeycock, but never offering to assist. He was thinking how this unpleasant affair would affect the prestige of his establishment, and of what the stern and rigidly conscientious Lord Guttleborough would say when he came to hear of the conduct of the fellow-pupil of his son. A medical man chanced to be in the village, and was soon in attendance; but so great

was the shock that his nervous system had received, that it was long before Wilfred recovered consciousness.

"Where am I?" he sighed at last, opening his beautiful violet eyes, and trying to raise himself on the bed. "Oh! I remember"-and then he sank back again in utter weakness and prostration.

CHAPTER VIII.

A BLASTED LIFE.

HOUG
HOUGH, however, Wilfred could not rise, he

could, when at last he found himself alone, think; and Heaven only knows how exceedingly bitter were his thoughts. For some hours he lay like one stunned, trying, but trying in vain, to see his way out of the maze of sin and misery in which he was involved. Lionel, his heroic brother; Evelyn, his tenderly loved and loving sister; the grey old Rector, who had been his steadfast friend and adviser from childhood upwards; and Mary Elthorne, his sister's friend-what would all these think of him ? And the village lads at Holmcastle, his companions in every manly game, and to whom erewhile he had been the friend and adviserwould not they too, when they came to know it,

despise him in their honest hearts? He had loved those rough, honest, true-hearted fellows as friends and comrades, with that love which, in this country, thank God, so often subsists between the best-born and the rural poor-a thing which it enters not into the heart of a United States republican to conceive or understand; and now Wilfred felt he dare not look one of them in the face. And his father? His father had indeed been a cold, unsympathetic parent, so far as personal intercourse was concerned, and there had been little or no confidence between them; but the boy reflected that he owed food, and raiment, and education, and many of the joys of life to him alone, and his grateful heart swelled with grief at the disappointment he would feel. Wilfred probably appreciated anything which was of good in his father's character more, and loved him better, than did his other children. He had the poet's gift of idealising. His own high-strung, enthusiastic nature led him to feel that his father's foibles, ridiculous and even wrong as they were when viewed from some aspects, had yet for their basis something which, if not noble, was at least unsordid. At all events, they sprang not from that "fons et origo mali," the base love of money. His father's family pride was in some respects redeemed by the fact that he could