ready to throw her long-cherished opposition and objection to the four winds. As if she were afraid of being even suspected of these thoughts, she hastened to talk about the afternoon's guests again. "I'm real glad it was so that they saw the parlor," she said once, in a gratified tone.

XVIII.

Mr. Dale was just reflecting that he should soon be very sleepy indeed, and that he had not been awake so late for several weeks, when a sound was heard outside his door, followed by a light knocking.

"Come in!" he said reluctantly, and then almost laughed aloud at the innocence and good-nature of his aunt's expression. "I might have known she would not let me off so easily," he said to himself, and rose from his comfortable arm-chair without a word, as Mrs. Winchester entered, though he looked as if he were ready to be informed of so unseasonable an errand.

"I knew that you could n't be asleep," declared Mrs. Winchester, resuming her beaming expression, which had been abandoned temporarily at the sight of the flaring candles. Dick really was as much care as when he was ten years old and her orphan ward. "I thought you must be reading when I saw the bright light, as I came up the avenue. The Chaunceys were really quite hurt because you did n't make your appearDinner was later than usual, at any rate, only the soup had been served; and Will Chauncey was detained in town, so that there was an empty seat for you next Kate Dent. She is here for a week, it seems. I always thought her extremely handsome and attractive. You have n't seen her since she returned from abroad, have you?"

ance.

"I believe not," answered Dick patiently.

"I see that you have the Village on the Cliff. Was there ever anything so charming and full of color!" pursued the little lady, after a short pause. She was comfortably settled in a low chair, and was taking a careful survey of her nephew. Really, his clothes were much the worse for wear; he looked not unlike a farmer, himself. "I have been telling everybody what a lovely face that old Mr. Owen has," she continued enthusiastically. "I wish you were fond of figure-sketching. I should like a portrait of him immensely; just a suggestion of all but his eyes, you know, in charcoal, perhaps."

"Oh, you know what I mean," she laughed. "Don't be superior, Dick, if you have such a misfortune as a stupid old aunt. I meant, of course, that his eyes are so fine I cared most for that part of his likeness. He has such a pathetic expression at times. A most sincere, kindly old man. He seems very fond of you. What did he mean by telling me that you bore a welcome resemblance?"

"He thought, when I first went there, that I was like his only son, who was killed in the war," answered Dick, in a more sympathetic tone than he had used before. "I supposed he had forgotten about that.”

"And the old handmaiden, too. Charity did they call her? No, Temperance! She has an interesting, blighted sort of face. She was very indignant because I offered her some money. I suppose it was rude of me, but one gets so used to that way of expressing gratitude in this mercenary world."

"You must wait until you die to pay your debts to your friends gracefully," announced the host of the occasion, beginning to pace up and down the room. It was a familiar sign of his impatience, but Mrs. Winchester did not mean to be dismissed so soon.

"I never thought of that," she said, apparently much pleased. "Yes, we can give money to whom we like, it is the way we do the thing;" whereupon Dick came and stood before his aunt, and regarded her benignantly.

"Do scold me," he said. "I know you are tired to death, aunt Susy, but you must do your duty by me before you sleep. I must be off early to-morrow. I have set my heart upon making a few sketches over at Sussex."

"I have always wished that somebody would do that very thing. To me it is the most charmingly picturesque little place. But, Richard, you must surely give me a few days before I go back to town; you used to like to stay with me. And this year, of all others, while Nelly and the children are away, and I have missed them so much, I do think you should not have forgotten me."

"You always have such a houseful of people," grumbled Dick. "Yes, I suppose I can come for next week; or you may put me down for all next summer, if you like that better. Don't be foolish, aunt Susan. You always have laughed at me, but you never must let me make you sorry," and he laid his finger gently on her little lace cap and soft gray hair, and then turned away quickly, and walked over to the window. "What bright moonlight!" he said. "Do go "Do go to bed, aunt. Be friendly, and take yourself off now. You have no idea how early I had my breakfast."

"Dick," said the little woman, raising herself to her full height and coming to stand before him," Dick, my dear, I begin to think you had better let me have your traps brought here to-morrow or next day. I don't quite like your staying there any more. They're good people and ever so fond of you; but for their sakes, and that nice girl's sake especially, I hate to have you run into any sort of danger. I think it has been a great thing for you in many ways, and a

charming experience on the whole; but believe me, you had better come away. I really should be hurt if you did n't come to me, now that I have told the Chaunceys that you have been hiding yourself so near me for weeks and weeks. If you were a girl yourself, I should feel differently; but with your good looks and your fortune, and your way of making everybody like you, I think it is all a great risk.”

Dick tried to laugh at this determined charge, but at that moment he felt as a girl might truly feel, not like a man. "I am all right, thank you, dear old lady," he said. "Doris has a lover already, if that is what you mean. Perhaps you think that Temperance is setting her nets."

"Good old soul !" responded Mrs. Winchester, with some spirit. "I won't have you make such low jokes, Dick."

"I like her, myself," answered the young man, angrily. "I like every one of them at the island. If I ever amount to anything, I shall thank those sincere, simple people for setting me the example of following my duty and working hard and steadily. I wish sometimes that I had n't two cents in the world. I never was so happy in my life as I have been there; nobody ever asked whether I was rich or poor. You have to be put into an honest place like that to know anything of yourself. You can't think how tired and sick I am of the kind of life I have somehow drifted into."

"I have always felt that you were capable of better things," agreed aunt Susan, much moved by the gloomy cagerness of her nephew. "But now that you have had your lesson you must profit by it; you would waste yourself even more if you stayed long on that farm. Think of your opportunities! I dare say you have found time for thought, and I congratulate you; but what are you going to do with your new energy? Dick, dear, I have been a sort of mother to

you. I have loved you, and tried to make up for the loss of your own mother. Now don't be foolish and sentimental, and fall in love with that pretty girl. You're spasmodic; you 're led by your enthusiasms. I think she is really charming to look at, but she is not a fit wife for you."

"Aunt Susan," and the listener to these exhortations faced about suddenly from the window, "Doris Owen is the most beautiful woman I ever knew. She 's capable of anything. She is not inferior. She may lack certain experiences, but she is equal to meeting them. She is a fit wife for any man."

"Oh dear, dear!" groaned aunt Susan at this incomprehensible nephew, "is it as bad as that?"

"Bad as what?" said Dick, ready to fight for his rights. "Come, this is too late a council; we never should have fallen to discussing such things by daylight."

"You must tell me all about it. How far have you really gone?" persisted the troubled woman.

"Gone?" exclaimed Dick Dale. "I have done nothing at all. If you mean to ask whether I have asked Doris Owen to be my wife, I certainly have not.

And nobody but you should drive me to the wall in this fashion, and question me as if I were a schoolboy."

Mrs. Winchester asks to be forgiven. She trusts Dick, and tells him so. She has never been ashamed of him yet. All these things she says in a matter-of-fact tone, and then bids him good-night, and goes away. Dick does not kiss her, after his old fashion, though she wishes he would, as she lets go his strong hand

and looks at him an instant before she flits away from the door, stepping softly along the hall in her light little shoes. A moment after it is too late, Dick is sorry he did not give her the kiss, and then he considers the propriety of his last statement. He liked, after all, to be treated in exactly this way; it was the only bit of home life that seemed to be always his own. He was invariably called to account by his aunt Susan, and as a general thing took his catechising meekly, as became the nephew whom a kind fate had put under Mrs. Winchester's charge through his early years. The time of boyish marauding, of shirking lessons and abusing clothes and tormenting servants, was happily over with, but his misdemeanors were only transferred to more dangerous quarters. Poor Dick! he felt very young and very willful now; it was only city life and association that made him look upon himself as the Methuselah of society.

waves

The sea was dashing against the low cliffs, not far away. He listened to the sound of it until he fell asleep. The were calling and waiting, and calling again, louder than before. The great sea was farther away from the Marsh Island, and there the cry of it seemed more distant and dull; here there was an insistence, a mercilessness, in its voice. The limitless deep was like a personification of his own future. There was a great pain in such a consciousness of great possibilities and miserable achievements. Was Mrs. Winchester wrong or right? Her horizons might indeed be contracted, but her directions were as true as the compass.

Sarah Orne Jewett.

THE writer of these pages has observed that the first question usually asked in relation to Mr. Cross's longexpected biography is whether the reader has not been disappointed in it. The inquirer is apt to be disappointed if the question is answered in the negative. It may as well be said, therefore, at the threshold of the following remarks, that such is not the feeling with which this particular reader laid down the book. The general feeling touching the work will depend very much on what has been looked for: there was probably, in advance, a considerable belief that we were to be treated to "revelations." I know not, exactly, why it should have been, but certain it is that the announcement of a biography of George Eliot has been construed more or less as a promise that we were to be admitted behind the scenes, as it were, of her life. No such result has taken place. We look at the drama from the point of view usually allotted to the public, and the curtain is lowered whenever it suits the biographer. most "intimate" pages in the book are those in which the great novelist notes her derangements of health and depression of spirits. This history, to my sense, is quite as interesting as it might have been; that is, it is of the deepest interest, and can miss nothing that is characteristic or involved in the subject, except, perhaps, a few more examples of the vis comica which made half the fortune of Adam Bede and Silas Marner. There is little that is absent that it would have been in Mr. Cross's power to give us. George Eliot's letters and journals are only a partial expression of her spirit, but they are evidently as full an expression as it was capable of giving itself when she was not wound up to the epic pitch. They do not explain her novels; they reflect in a sin

The

gularly limited degree the process of growth of these great works; but it must be added that even a superficial acquaintance with the author was suffi cient to assure one that her rich and complicated mind did not overflow in idle confidences. It was benignant and receptive in the highest degree, and nothing could have been more gracious than the manner of its intercourse; but it was deeply reserved, and very far from egotistical, and nothing could have been less easy or agreeable to it, I surmise, than to attempt to tell people how, for instance, the plot of Romola got itself constructed, or the character of Grandcourt got itself observed. There are critics who refuse to the delineator of this gentleman the title of a genius; who say that she had only a great talent, overloaded with a great store of knowledge. The label, the epithet, matters little, but it is certain that George Eliot had this characteristic of the mind possessed; that the creations which brought her renown were of the incalculable kind, shaped themselves in mystery, in some intellectual back shop or secret crucible, and were as little as possible implied in the aspect of her life. There is nothing more singular or striking in Mr. Cross's volumes than the absence of any indication, up to the time the Scenes from Clerical Life were published, that Miss Evans was a likely person to have written them; unless it be the absence of any indication, after they were pub lished, that the deeply-studious, concentrated, home-keeping Mrs. Lewes was a likely person to have produced their successes. I know very well that there is no such thing, in general, as the air of the novelist, which it behooves those who practice this art to put on, so that they may be recognized in public places; but there is such a thing as the air of the

sage, the scholar, the philosopher, the votary of abstractions and of the lore of the ages, and in this pale but rich Life that is the face that is presented.

The plan on which it is composed is, so far as I know, without precedent, but it is a plan that could have occurred only to an "outsider" in literature, if I may venture to apply this term to one who has executed a literary task with such tact and success. The regular littérateur, hampered by tradition, would, I think, have lacked the boldness, the artless artfulness, of conjoining in the same text selected morsels of letters and journals, so as to form a continuous and multifarious talk, on the writer's part, punctuated only by marginal names and dates and divisions into chapters. There is something a little violent in the system, in spite of our feeling that it has been applied with a gentle hand; but it was probably the best that Mr. Cross could have adopted, and it served especially well his purpose of appearing only as an arranger, or rather of not appearing at all. The modesty, the good taste, the self-effacement, of the editorial element in the book are, in a word, complete, and the clearness and care of arrangement, the accuracy of reference, leave nothing to be desired. The form Mr. Cross has chosen, or invented, becomes, in the ap plication, highly agreeable, and his rule of omission (for we have, almost always, only parts and passages of letters) has not prevented his volumes from being as copious as we could wish. George Eliot was not a great letter-writer, either in quantity or quality; she had neither the spirit, the leisure, nor the lightness of mind to conjure with the epistolary pen, and after her union with George Henry Lewes her disposition to play with it was farther restricted by his quick activity in her service. Letterwriting was part of the trouble he saved her; in this, as in other ways, he interposed between the world and his sensi

tive companion. The difference is striking between her habits in this respect and those of Madame George Sand, whose correspondence has lately been collected into six closely printed volumes, which testify afresh to her extraordinary energy and facility. Madame Sand, however, indefatigable producer as she was, was not a woman of study; she lived from day to day, from hand to mouth (intellectually), as it were, and had no general plan of life. and culture. Her English compeer took work more seriously, and distilled her very substance into the things she gave the world. There was, therefore, so much the less of it left for her casual writing.

It was not till Marian Evans was past thirty, indeed, that she became an author by profession, and it may accordingly be supposed that her early letters are those which take us most into her confidence. This is true of those written when she was on the threshold of womanhood, which form a very full expression of her feelings at the time. The drawback here is that the feelings themselves are rather wanting in interest one may almost say in amiability. At the age of twenty Marian Evans was a deeply religious young woman, whose faith took the form of a narrow evangelicism. Religious, in a manner, she remained to the end of her life, in spite of her adoption of a scientific explanation of things; but in the year 1839 she thought it ungodly to go to concerts and to read novels. She writes to her former governess that she can "only sigh when she hears of the "marrying and giving in marriage that is constantly transacted;" expresses enjoyment of Hannah More's letters ("the contemplation of so blessed a character as hers is very salutary "); wishes that she "might be more useful in her own obscure and lowly station" ("I feel myself to be a mere cumberer of the ground "), that she "might seek to be sanctified wholly." These first