to the window—turned back again into the room
—and approached the table, close to where he
was sitting. The writing materials scattered
near him offered her a pretext for changing
the subject; and she seized on it directly.
"Were you writing a letter?" she asked, " when
I came in?"

"I was thinking about it," he replied. " It
was not a letter to be written, without thinking
first." He rose, as he answered her, to gather
the writing materials together, and put them
away.

"Why should I interrupt you?" she said.
"Why not let me try whether I can't help you
instead. Is it a secret?"

"No—not a secret."

He hesitated, as he answered her. She
instantly guessed the truth.

"Is it about your ship?"

He little knew how she had been thinking in
her absence from him, of the business which he
believed that he had concealed from her. He
little knew that she had learnt already to be
jealous of his ship.

"Do they want you to return to your old
life?" she went on. " Do they want you to go
back to the sea? Must you say Yes or No at
once?"

"At once."

"If I had not come in when I did, would you
have said Yes!"

She unconsciously laid her hand on his arm;
forgetting all inferior considerations in her
breathless anxiety to hear his next words. The
confession of his love was within a hair's-breadth
of escaping him—but he checked the utterance
of it even yet. " I don't care for myself," he
thought. "But how can I be certain of not
distressing her?"

"Would you have said, Yes?" she repeated.

"I was doubting," he answered—" I was
doubting between Yes and No."

Her hand tightened on his arm; a sudden
trembling seized her in every limb—she could
bear it no longer. All her heart went out to
him, in her next words.

"Were you doubting for my sake?"

"Yes," he said. " Take my confession in return
for yours—I was doubting for your
sake."

She said no more—she only looked at him.
In that look, the truth reached him at last. The
next instant, she was folded in his arms, and
was shedding delicious tears of joy, with her
face hidden on his bosom.

"Do I deserve my happiness?" she murmured,
asking the one question at last. " Oh, I know
how the poor narrow people who have never felt
and never suffered, would answer me, if I asked
them what I ask you. If they knew my story,
they would forget all the provocation, and only
remember the offence—they would fasten on my
sin, and pass all my suffering by. But you are
not one of them? Tell me if you have any
shadow of a misgiving! Tell me if you doubt
that the one dear object of all my life to come
is to live worthy of you! I asked you to wait
and see me: I asked you if there was any hard
truth to be told, to tell it me here, with your
own lips. Tell it, my love, my husband!—tell
it me now!"

She looked up, still clinging to him, as she
clung to the hope of her better life to come.

"Tell me the truth!" she repeated.

"With my own lips?"

"Yes!" she answered, eagerly. " Say what
you think of me, with your own lips."

He stooped, and kissed her.

THE END.

LINKS IN THE CHAIN.

THERE is something in the progress of
successive ages, very analogous to the links of a
chain. Occasionally we come in contact with
an individual still living, and are startled to
find ourselves in the presence of an extinct
age. When Thomas Moore met old Mrs.
Piozzi, two years before her death in 1821, he
appeared to be brought eye to eye with the
great spirits of the eighteenth century. "Faces
of other times," he writes in his Diary, " seemed
to crowd over her as she sat—the Johnsons,
Reynoldses, &c." But the venerable lady may be
regarded as a link between this very day
and the days of Hogarth; for the illustrious
painter of social life in the reigns of the first
and second Georges, introduced her portrait,
when she was fourteen years of age, into one of
his pictures; and in some of her later letters she
alludes (in no very complimentary terms, for she
was the highest of High Tories) to the noble
lord who at this moment occupies the post of
Foreign Secretary. She was born before the
death of Pope, yet she lived to read the poetry of
Byron and Moore. She was fifty years of age
at the time of the French Revolution; yet she
saw the introduction of gas-lamps and
steam-boats. Had she survived eight or nine years
longer, she might have ridden in an omnibus, and
might have been helped across the road by a
policeman. Yet she was eight years younger
than Mrs. Garrick, who was married to the
famous actor as far back as 1749, and survived
him forty-three years: nor did she die until 1822,
when, sitting in her arm-chair, she was quietly
withdrawn from mortal existence at the age of
ninety-eight.

One of the most remarkable connecting links
between the present and the past, was Samuel
Rogers, who lived until the close of 1855,
yet who once went with a young literary
friend to the house of Dr. Johnson in
Boltcourt, with a view to consult him about their
writings. They were at the very door, when
terror took possession of their souls, and they
fled from the tremendous deity within. Rogers,
however, must often have seen the Leviathan
rolling about among the human billows of
Fleet-street; and he shook hands, when he was a youth,
with the Doctor's special horror, Jack Wilkes.
Walter Savage Landor, who was nine years old
when Johnson died in 1784, is still spared to us.