"LA question agitée depuis que le monde existe, des visions extérieures, est subsidiaire, quand on y songe; le Demon n'a pas besoin de s'exhiber sous des traits humains ou bestiaux afin d'attester sa présence; il suffit, pour qu'il s'affirme, qu'il élise domicile en des âmes qu'il exulcère et incite à d'inexplicables crimes."

I.

LATE autumn, the little season in London; carriages moving to and fro in the dusk of the worst-lighted city in Europe; dead leaves blown by the damp south-west wind, drifting across Piccadilly; a something of dreariness, a something of gaiety in the air.

Ön such an evening Walter Arden left his club, after an accustomed rubber, as the Abbey clock struck seven, and sauntered dreamily across St. James's Square to his lodgings in Jermyn Street. An idler, and always something of a dreamer, his reverie was deeper than usual to-night. He had been absent-minded at cards, and had played a losing game, to the disgust of his partner.

It had been one of his bad days. Since the first dawn of reason he had been subject to periods of depression, intervals in which his spirits sank to zero, and the disgust of life took hold of him. What right had he to live? what motive had he for life, he who was of no use to any living creature, whom nobody loved or valued ?

Motherless from his cradle; beginning life in a house of mourning, his advent into the world bringing death to the young mother; unloved by the father to whom he seemed the son of doom, the bringer of woe, the avenger of old halfforgotten sins; he had realized the hatefulness of existence at an age when other children are wrapped round with love, and sheltered from the knowledge of sorrow. He was that negligible quantity the youngest son of a peer, the only child of a second marriage; a marriage made somewhat late in life by Lord Wildernsea, who had fallen in love with a girl of obscure birth and humble fortune, but of a most exquisite beauty, and had made her his countess, to the infinite disgust of his first wife's children and their maternal relations.

She was a lovely creature, and adapted herself with consummate grace to her new surroundings, and she died in her second year of wedlock.

Nothing in life became her so well as this early death. Her step-children and their relatives forgave her; and she was ever after spoken of in the family as "Poor Emily."

Her portrait, by Millais, stood on an easel in Lord Wildernsea's book-room, the one room in his country house which he kept for himself. Her image was locked in his heart. He had lived like a modern hermit ever since her death, rarely consorting with his fellow-men except in the hunting-field, where he was notorious for silence and hauteur; a gaunt figure, splendidly mounted, aloof and uncivil. The old members of the hunt called him "the hard-riding spectre."

He hated his youngest son, and had never troubled himself to conceal his dislike. Ignored by half-brothers and half-sisters, who looked down upon him for the lack of blue-blood on the mother's side, the boy in his desolation had discovered a refuge from the world of stern realities in the world of sweet fancies-the world of books. Shakespeare, Spenser, Scott, were to him as fairy godmothers. Hans Anderson and the Brothers Grimm were his playfellows. He made for himself a paradise in the dull old library at Wildernsea, a room with many windows looking out upon the dreary level of a park; a room of such spaciousness that, sitting in his favourite corner by the north fireplace, it was a long walk from the south door for the nurse who came in quest of him.

The youngest of his half-brothers was at Eton before Walter had emerged from babyhood. The elders were grown men. Lord Melbrook, the heir, was a captain in a lancer regiment; Godfrey, the next brother, was a lieutenant in the Navy, when Walter was seven years old. There was a third son at Oxford, and a fourth at Sandhurst; and there were two married daughters; one who had chosen wisely, with the general approval, who had a house in Grosvenor Square, two country seats, and a villa at Cannes; one who had chosen ill, and was supremely happy in a Lincolnshire Vicarage.

Lord Wildernsea was found dead in his armchair in the

book-room, facing his wife's picture, one bleak February morning, while the unloved son was an undergraduate at Balliol, reading hard for a degree. He had nursed his estate in the long years of retirement, and he died a rich

man.

To the unloved son he left more than to any of his other children, except the heir; and Walter Arden began life with an income which was more than sufficient for his wants. He was no spendthrift. He had been a student in his childhood, sitting on the hearth-rug in the long library at Wildernsea, with the quarto Spenser on his knees. He was a student still, and books were his sole extravagance; and as he only bought the books he wanted to read, this extravagance was not fatal. But though bookish, he was not a milksop. He had been stroke of his college boat in his last year at Oxford-he had done well at cricket at the Varsity, but had not pursued that noble sport afterwards; he was a good shot, and a fine fencer. Another young man in his independent position might have talked of a career, might have aired his opinions in politics, in the law, in literature, might have aspired to be something; but in Walter Arden the spring of ambition seemed wanting. He was content to live among his books, to travel alone in outof-the-way tracks, to have very few friends, and no dreams of greatness. His eldest brother, who was always contemptuous, said of him that he had neither vices nor virtues; he was an odd volume of the Aldine poets in a frock-coat.

The past had been visibly present to him as he strolled through the autumn mists, across the damp dulness of the old-world square, to the narrow street that links it to a busier life. Pictures of that joyless past had leapt out of the brown evening, vivid as if seen yesterday.

Something, he knew not what, some feeling in the air perhaps, some cloud in the London sky, had stirred those memories, which ached like old wounds.

He shrugged his shoulders, as if to shake off a burden, as he stopped before the street door. He let himself in with his latch-key, meaning to go straight to his rooms on the first floor; but to his infinite surprise his landlady, the most

unobtrusive of women, whose face he had seldom seen twice in a quarter, darted out of her den at the back of the house, and met him at the foot of the stairs.

"Oh, sir, will you be so good as to step into my sittingroom? There is something I want to say to you."

He saw her face looking up at him in the lamplight, and he saw that she had been crying. There were red marks round her pale, grey eyes, though the eyes were dry. She was very plain, with insignificant features, sandy hair, sandy eyebrows, and white eyelashes, and a pale fairness of complexion which might have been a charm in a beautiful woman. Care, anxious care, was the ruling characteristic of her face, and had given a strained look to every feature. She was a pattern of industry, an admirable manager, and a gifted cook, and her lodgers rose up and called her blessed.

"Certainly, Mrs. Berry," Arden answered kindly. "But what's the matter? I hope you're not in trouble of any kind."

"Indeed I am, sir, in very great trouble; or I shouldn't have ventured to ask your help."

He followed her into a den of a room behind the staircase, and over the scullery, a room where the slow trickle of water from a cistern made a melancholy music. A room where the only prospect by day was the side-wall of an adjoining house, and where the stuffiness by night suggested the black hole at Calcutta, just such a miserable morsel of space pinched off the better part of the house as lodginghouse keepers in London must needs be content to live in -an ill-shapen, gloomy abomination of a room, in which, however, there had been some attempt to achieve prettiness. There were paper fans upon the wall, Japanese teacups on the mantelpiece, and a plaster bust of Byron on that odious piece of furniture called a chiffonier. Even the armchair, covered with American cloth, had something of its hideousness hidden by frills and festoons of muslin.

"Please take a seat, sir; it's a long story I've got to tell you."

"I shall be very glad to help you if I can. money trouble

If it is a

"No, no, sir; it isn't that. It's my daughter, sir; it's my