too, Mrs. Broughton came to his aid as his
better angel, and smiled meaningly, and danced
her curls, and twinkled her two turquoise beads,
and said; "Don't notice her, my dear boy, she'll
be better presently; and worse, poor little soul!"
which made Gordon so gravely tender to her for
days after, so considerate and gentle, that Laura's
heart nearly broke; though her manner was
colder and more constrained than ever, and her
shrinking from him more apparent. "When
will all this end?" she cried, half aloud, as she
flung herself on her knees by her bedside, in a
passion of despair and unavailing remorse.
"When shall I escape from this, and be no
longer a thief in my husband's house— no longer
living a life of robbery and deception? Oh, if I
could only die!— if God would only let me die!"
But young things live long, and Laura's initiation
into the solemn terror of sin, however
much it agonised her, blanched no shining
hair and traced no lines upon her smooth rich
face. It saddened her soul but did not corrode
her body; and well for her, though she in her
girlish impatience thought it ill, that she had time
left her, and grace and opportunity for reparation.

It was a terrible night— one of the most
terrible of its kind— with almost a human passion in
its fury, and more than human despair. The
wind raved and howled through the streets, and
through the houses too, where no amount of
drapery could keep it from stealing into the
room like the ghostly wolf broken loose from the
northern hell; the rain beat against the window-
panes, and tore down on the pavement which
it lashed and spurned like a liquid whip, making
the gaslight reflexions all dance and quiver and
spout up in jets of light, as it ploughed the
wet already lying; and, mingled with the rain,
was a cold and ghastly sleet and the stinging
blows of hail, all knotted and twined together
in a triple cord of winter wrath.

"What a night for Gordon!" said the mother,
glancing at her daughter out of the corners of
her eyes. Laura shivered for sympathy, but
did not answer. "And what a night for all
those poor houseless wretches that live in the
baskets and dry arches," continued Mrs. Broughton,
a little confusedly as to her tabulation.
"What a night, indeed! not fit to turn a do
into!"

"No," said Laura, by way of saying
something. And then there was silence again, as
there always was now between the mother and
daughter. And the wind howled more fiercely
than before, and the rain beat more heavily
against the windows, and the cruel bitterness
of the evening deepened, till it seemed
almost like the face of God withdrawn from the
world.

A knock came to the door. It was not
Gordon's knock, but a louder and clumsier
knock, quite as imperative but not so refined;
for even door-knockers can be made expressive
of states, and give utterance to insolence, or
anger, or eagerness, or timidity, as eloquently
as words. Laura and her mother both knew too
well whose knock it was: the one turned scarlet
and trembled, the other a light shade of green
and frowned, but there was no sign of a
coming contest in either; only of fear and
anger in the one, and of craft and anger in the
other.

"Mr. Roderick," said Annie, opening the
door sullenly. "Roderick, indeed!" she
repeated, when she went down stairs to cook;
"and I wonder who's ' Roderick,' and as like to
our young missis as pork's like to pig. I have
eyes, I have!" which, indeed, Miss Annie, every
one has not.

It was a strange contrast to that luxuriously
furnished room, with its two brightly-dressed,
elegantly-appointed ladies, such a visitor as now
stood in the blaze of the fire and under the
shine of the gas. Haggard, dirty, wet to the
skin, insolent with the insolence of a social and
moral ruin that can never be built up again, the
hunted look of a wild animal in his bloodshot
eyes, and the desperation of a criminal prepared
for the worst, yet prepared also to fight to the
last, in his close-pressed mouth— he looked what
he was, emphatically a dangerous man throwing
for his last stake.

"I have come here again, Louisa, you see,"
he said, abruptly, "in spite of your warning."

"Yes, I see," returned Mrs. Broughton,
quietly; "and a pretty pleasant night you have
chosen."

"It suits me," he said, with a little laugh.

"Does it? I can imagine it," said Mrs.
Broughton, in the same quiet, well-behaved
way.

"Have you nothing to say to your uncle,
Laura?" then said the man, speaking harshly,
and scowling at Laura.

"Nothing in the way of welcome," burst out
Laura, not in her usual manner of shy timidity,
but with a passion a breaking down of
accustomed restraint that showed more than
anything else could have done, what a terrible effect
her late experience was working in her.

Her mother touched her foot. "Our dear
pet is not quite well to-night," she said, in a
voice that was meant to be warning. "You
must not be angry with her, Sam."

"I have rather too much to think of, just at
present, to care much for a little girlish impertinence,"
said Sam. But his dark and angry look
did not quite suit the scornful carelessness of
bis words. "It is only one dig the more!" he
added.

"You have no business here at all," Laura
went on to say, excitedly. "It is not our house,
but Gordon's; not our money, but his. You
have no right to come about us as you do, following
us in the streets, and making mamma give
you money every week, which then she has to
tell stories about, and pretend she has spent in
the house. If it were not for her sake I would
teil my husband everything at once, and let him
know the whole truth."

"I advise you not," said Sam, speaking very
slowly and deliberately;" unless you are tired
of him, or unless he is weary of his own life;