action, too truly the English Effendi of the Eastern nations, ever to take art or indolence by choice; but there had come many times in his life when to paint the rare scenery, or the picturesque groupings around him, had been his only available pursuit ; and he did this with singular dash and delicacy, vividness and truth. Erceldoune would never have been a creative artist; he had not the imaginative or poetic faculty which idealises, it was wholly alien to his nature and his habits; but what he saw he rendered with a force, a fidelity, and a brilliance of hue which painters by the score had envied him. He passed the dreary weeks now at Monastica painting what he had seen; and the picture grew into such life and loveliness that the nuns marvelled when they looked on it, as the Religieuses of Bruges marvelled when they saw the " Marriage of St. Katherine" left in legacy to them by the soldierartist Hans Hemling, whose wounds they had dressed, and cried out that it should be the Virginal altar-piece in a world-famed cathedral. Yet the picture was but a woman's face-a face with thoughtful lustrous eyes, and hair with a golden reflex on it, and lips which wore a smile that had something more profound than sadness, and more. imperial than tenderness; a face looking downward

from an aureole of light, half sunlit and half shadowed.

"Now I know that I have seen it, or I could not have painted it," said Erceldoune to himself, as he cast down his brushes; and to know that, was why he had done so.

"Keep the picture, madam, as altar-piece, or what it please you, in token of my gratitude at the least for the kindness I cannot hope to return," he said to the Mother Superior; " and, if you ever see a woman whose likeness you recognise in it, she will be the one to whom I first owed the rescue of my life. Tell her Fulke Erceldoune waits to pay his debt."

And Mother Veronica heard him with as much pain in his last words as she had had pleasure in his first, for she saw that the phantom of his delirium was still strong on him, and feared that his mind must wander, to be so haunted by this mere hallucination of the lady of his dreams.

A few days later on, Erceldoune, able at last to endure the return journey through the mountains and across Hungary, attended a Te Deum to gratify the Abbess, in celebration and thanksgiving for his own restoration from death to life; left his three months' pay to the almsgiving of the Order; bowed

his lofty head for the tearful benediction of the Mother Superior; and quitted the innocent community of religious women, in whose convent he had found asylum; the Angelus chiming him a soft and solemn farewell, as, in the late leafless autumn, while the black Danube was swelling with the first rains of winter, and the forests were strewn with the yellow leaves that covered the grave of his dead sorrel, he went out from the solitudes of Monastica back to the living world.

CHAPTER V.

AN IGNIS FATUUS GLEAM OF LOVE."

"Ir was a superb thing-magnificent! The most popular personage in the English Cabinet was standing on the hearth-rug of his own library of his wife's château of Liramar, South Italy, where he had snatched a brief autumn holiday, nothing altered and little aged since some twenty years before when the beggared Border-lord, in the pride, and liberty of his youth and his ruin, had won the great Minister's liking for life, by—a defiance. Erceldoune laughed, a little impatiently.

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Nothing of the kind! Any other man in the service would have done the same; simplest duty possible."

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'Simple duties get done in this world, do they? Humph! I didn't know it. I suppose you expected, when you gave the word to fire, that the brutes would kill you-eh?"

"Of course! I can't think now how they missed

it. I ought to have been riddled with bullets, if they had aimed properly."

"I believe he's half disgusted he wasn't wholly dead, now!" said his lordship, plaintively. "It was a superb thing, I tell you; but don't you do it again, Erceldoune. The trash we write, to bully and blind one another, isn't worth the loss of a gallant man's life. We know that! A terrible fellow went and said so too, in the Commons, last session; he was up, and nobody could stop him. He told us, point blank to our faces, that though we posed very successfully for the innocent public, we might as well drop the toga and show the sock and buskin before each other, as the attitudinising didn't take in the initiated, and must be a fearful bore always for us! Clever fellow. Tremendous hard hitter; but he wants training. By-the-way, the Principalities paid us down a heavy fine as indemnity for that outrage; half the money comes to you, clearly."

"I thank you, my dear lord, I have no need of it."

"Eh? What? I thought you were poor, Erceldoune ?"

"I am; but I have never been in debt, and I want nothing. Besides, if you will pardon my saying so,