Harrington lifted his calm eyebrows with some wonder at the furious entrance of his friend, and sat regarding him with a firm mouth and steadfast eyes. Wentworth, out of breath with the speed of his course, and the tumult of his emotions, had flung his hat across the room, and himself upon the sofa, and sat panting, with his handsome face flushed, and his bright auburn curls damp with perspiration.

“Well, Richard, what’s the matter?” said Harrington, calmly. “Has the sky fallen?”

“Harrington, see here,” panted Wentworth, “Johnny’s just been up to the studio.”

“Johnny? Who’s Johnny?” interrupted Harrington.

“Oh, pshaw! Bagasse’s boy, you know. John Todd,” fumed Wentworth, stopping to wipe his brow with a white handkerchief.

“Well. Is that any reason for your running yourself into a pleurisy?” bantered Harrington.

“By George!” exclaimed the young artist, “it’s a reason for my running Fernando Witherlee into something else, and that’s a broken neck, I’m thinking. Cursed rascal!”

“What’s Witherlee been up to now?” inquired Harrington, with sudden interest.

“Impudence,” replied Wentworth. “Impudence unparalleled. Listen, Harrington. John Todd says Witherlee came into the fencing-school this morning, and had the atrocious impudence—the abominable—the infernal”—

Wentworth stopped, gasping with rage.

“O Muse of adjectives, descend!” jocosely cried Harrington, lifting his hand in mock-heroic invocation, with his cheeks wrinkled in a rich smile.

Wentworth, thus prayed for, began to laugh, even in the midst of his fury.

“Well, Harrington,” said he, “I know it’s foolish to get excited about it, but upon my word, Witherlee behaves scandalously. Do you know that he has been telling Bagasse a long rigmarole about Muriel and Emily, and you and me. Bagasse! Now just think of it! Think of his talking of two ladies like those, and in such a connection, and to Bagasse! Yes, of all persons in the world, to Bagasse!”

Harrington’s color changed and his face puckered with amazement, while he nervously grasped the arms of his chair.

“Is Witherlee possessed!” he ejaculated. “Why, I never heard of such conduct. So boyish, so foolish, such an outrage against the fitness of things”—

“And so infamously impudent,” put in Wentworth. “It’s the impudence that strikes me.”

“Certainly. It’s impudent, too, and I don’t wonder you were moved,” murmured Harrington, slowly, with an absorbed air.

“Moved!” snapped Wentworth. “By Jupiter, I am moved to give him a sound horse-whipping, and he’ll get it, or my name’s not what it is. Why, look at it, Harrington. In the first place, Emily’s a particular friend of his. Now, wouldn’t you think that the commonest respect for her would have prevented him from bandying her name about in conversation with anybody, much less old Bagasse?”

“Eureka! I have it,” exclaimed Harrington, bursting from his abstraction. “That accounts for Bagasse’s remark about the two ladies that gave the violets.”

“What do you mean?” inquired Wentworth.

Harrington recounted what the fencing-master had said that morning.

“You see, Richard,” he added, “that set me wondering; for how did Bagasse know that ladies had given us the violets? How did he know but that I had gathered them from my own yard? Then, when I saw your nosegay in his button-hole, I thought you must have told him, and I was astonished to think that you should choose the old veteran for a confidant.”

“By Jupiter, Harrington, you didn’t think I would do such a thing,” exclaimed Wentworth, reproachfully.

“My dear Wentworth, it was absurd in me, and I beg your pardon,” returned Harrington. “Certainly, it was not like you; but then, somebody must have told him, and how could I imagine it was Witherlee?”

Wentworth sat silent, thinking with mounting rage of Witherlee’s remarks to the fencing-master. If he had been cool and thoughtful, he might have at least suspected, from the sample he had of the good Fernando’s nature, that he was at the bottom of Emily’s alienation from himself. But Wentworth’s vivid temper only threw gleams and flashes on things, and what he saw, he saw in salient points, without observing their connections and relations.

“By George, I’ll break his neck!” he foamed, stamping his foot on the floor.

“Now, Richard, keep cool,” said Harrington. “You can depend that Fernando has been making mischief all round, and let us just track it out. In the first place, let’s hear Johnny’s report of what he said.”

“Lord! I can’t tell you! it’s gone from me,” fumed Wentworth, running his hands through his curls, as if in search of it. “Let’s see. In the first place, he had some snob criticisms on your coat; which, he thinks, is not genteel enough to entitle you to Muriel’s friendship.”

“Oh, indeed,” said Harrington, with grand good-nature. “Well, that’s a trifle, anyway.”

“He said,” continued Wentworth, “that you looked like a beggarman, who had been in the watch-house all night.”

“Complimentary,” jeered Harrington.

“Wondered how you had the assurance to visit Miss Eastman at all, when your social position was so much beneath hers,” pursued Wentworth; “and thought it was very kind in her to permit you.”

Harrington burst into a peal of hearty laughter.

“Positively,” he said, “this is comic. The only tragic thing about it is, that all this time, Fernando has been pretending that he was the best of friends to me.”

“I tell you, Harrington,” replied Wentworth, “that fellow’s a perfect snake in the grass. The next thing was to pitch into my personal appearance.”

“Yours!” exclaimed Harrington, laughingly. “Why, Richard, you’re the pink of fashion. You’re D’Orsay and Raphael Sanzio, in one.”

Wentworth smiled faintly; too angry at Witherlee to be much amused.

“Nevertheless,” he continued, “Witherlee poked his gibes at me, too—something about the Anti-Slavery Bazaar. Do they sell clothes there?”

“Not exactly,” replied Harrington, laughing.

“Then, I’m hanged if I know what he meant by that,” said Wentworth.

“Well, probably he said you looked bizarre; and Johnny, not knowing the word, mistook it for its fellow in sound,” remarked Harrington.

“That’s it I’ll bet,” burst out Wentworth, reddening. “Bizarre! The cursed snob! He wants me to cut my hair off, I suppose, and wear a stove-pipe hat instead of my Rubens. I’ll see him hanged first.”

“Well, go on Richard,” said Harrington. “All this is unimportant.”

“Then,” continued the young artist, fidgeting in his seat like a man who had to deal with an awkward subject, and looking very fixedly at the opposite wall, with his face redder than before, “then he proceeded to give Bagasse a sketch of us two with Cupid’s arrows stuck in our bleeding hearts—a regular Saint Valentine picture. O bother, I won’t report the stuff! It makes me crawl.”

“Oh, go on, Richard, go on,” urged Harrington.

“No, I won’t. Let it go. Come, Harrington, let’s drop it. Upon my word, I can’t repeat it, and I won’t,” said Wentworth.

Harrington saw that it was no use to urge him, and was silent. The fact was, Wentworth did not like to have Harrington think of him as the lover of Emily, and Witherlee’s portraiture of him as such was too faithful for exhibition. No man likes to confess that he has been jilted by a woman, as Wentworth thought he had been by Emily, and to say that he had been reputed her lover by Witherlee was certainly an approximation at least to such a confession.

“Very well,” remarked Harrington after a pause, “if you don’t care to talk about it, let it go. Now, Richard, I want you to leave this matter to me. There’s more in it, I’m convinced, than appears, and if you make a quarrel with Fernando we shall never know the whole of it. Just keep cool, say nothing to him of what you have heard, and let me track the fox through all his doublings. Will you promise?”

Wentworth hesitated, but his own suspicions were roused, and he felt the good sense of Harrington’s proposal.

“I agree, Harrington,” he said at length. “Yes, I promise, and I’ll keep dark.”

“Good,” replied Harrington. “I declare, Richard, I can’t help feeling, in view of the serious grandeur of life, that all this is pitifully petty. These pigmy broils and imbroglios seem all the more trivial in contrast with such scenes and passions as I have been in to-day. I wish we could live only in the larger life, unvexed by this buzz and fribble.”

“What has happened to-day, Harrington?” asked Wentworth.

Harrington told him briefly of the scene in Southac street, omitting to mention what passed in Roux’s house, lest it should lead to questions verging upon the secret which Emily now shared with Muriel, himself and Captain Fisher.

“I wish I could feel interested as you do in these political affairs,” said Wentworth, lightly, when Harrington had concluded. “Somehow, I can’t though. Of course, I’m for liberty in my own quiet way, and I pity the poor darkeys and all that, but then it doesn’t come home to me at all. I’m an artist in the grain, I suppose, and art-life and matters connected with it, leave me no interest for other matters.”

“Ah, Richard,” replied Harrington, “you must outlive these notions. Art cannot thrive sequestered from life. It may live in the cell, but it will narrow and spire, and it can only branch and broaden into Shakspearean greatness when planted among the ways and walks of men. No man can be a great painter, sculptor, composer, poet, whose heart is not deeply and warmly engaged in the life of his own time. It is the lack of interest and participation in human affairs which makes our modern artists mere imitators and colorists, and so much of modern art weak and pallid—a mere watery reflection of old models and forms of beauty.”

“Come, now, that’s heresy?” said Wentworth, laughing. “Talk of poets—look at Shakspeare. What interest did he take in human affairs? He kept the Globe Theatre, studied his part by day, played it at night, and wrote his dramas between whiles. That’s the way his years were occupied. What participation had he in Elizabethan politics? What in the life of his own time? Why, Ulrici says, in substance, that Shakspeare didn’t care enough about the politics of his age to have his mind even colored by them. The critics agree that a more thorough aristocrat or conservative never breathed. Jupiter! according to the critics, he was a perfect despiser of the common people, and a man utterly without patriotism and philanthropy. Your Verulam there, now,” pursued Wentworth, looking at the statue, “was patriot and philanthrope. He toiled for his country and wrought for ‘the relief of the human estate,’ as he phrases it. But the most powerful microscope couldn’t detect anything of that sort in William.”

Harrington laughed amusedly.

“Now, look here, Richard,” he replied. “In the first place, I flatly deny that there is contempt for any sort of people, common or uncommon, in the Shakspearean pages. But let that pass, for what I am going to say will cover it fully. I want to call your attention to the distinctive peculiarity—the uniqueness—of the Shakspearean creations. In the Shakspearean mind you have an unexampled union of the subtlest observation and the profoundest reason. This author observed far more closely than even Thackeray, and philosophized far more greatly than even Plato. But this is not all. He constructed a series of works which show the principles of human action as they lie in the nature of man, and all the complex operation of the human passions. And more, he created a number of figures, which are not characters, but types. That is the grand distinctive Shakspearean peculiarity. Nobody has done that but he. The Don Quixote of Cervantes is a great figure, but it is not Shakspearean. The Greek Prometheus, the German Mephistopheles are immense allegorical creations, but they are not Shakspearean. He alone has made figures which are types—representative men and women standing for classes. In a word, he alone has given us in a series of models or images, the Science of Human Nature. This it is that makes him solitary, as the power with which it is done makes him supreme, in literature.”

“I understand,” said Wentworth, “and I agree; but I don’t see what you’re driving at, mine ancient.”

“Wait a minute, and you shall see,” returned Harrington. “Bacon wanted this very thing done. Nothing that you can do for the elevation of the world, he says substantially, is of any value, unless this is done. The radical defect in all science is, he says, that it has not been done, and he rates Aristotle sharply for not doing it. He wants a work which will give us the Science of Man, as he is, in order that we may make him what he ought to be—a work, he says, which is to contain the descriptions of the several characters and tempers of men’s natures and dispositions to the end that the precepts concerning the culture and cure of the mind may be concluded upon—a work which is also to contain examples in moral and civil life. This is what Bacon wanted done, and the author of the Shakspeare Drama did it. Bacon’s requirement is fulfilled exactly in the Shakspeare Drama. Even our critics have got hold of the idea that the Science of Human Nature which Bacon wanted is in the Shakspeare Drama, and the purpose which Bacon intended such a work to accomplish, is in daily process of accomplishment through the agency of those plays. And what is more, Bacon wanted that work to be in the form of poetry—the Georgics of the Mind, he calls it, with a reminiscence of Virgil. The poets, he says elsewhere, are the best doctors of this knowledge; and again, for the expression of such a purpose, reason is not so perspicuous, nor examples so apt, as the dramatic or poetic presentation. Very good. Bacon wanted it in poetry, and in poetry you have it.”

Wentworth looked at Harrington steadily, with so curious an amazement on his countenance, that Harrington smiled.

“Now, Richard, observe,” he pursued. “The Shakspeare Drama contains the Science of Man. A Science of Man cannot be formed accidentally, or by the mere spontaneity of genius; it involves design. The author of the Shakspeare Drama knew, therefore, what he was about; and the fact that his figures have the peculiarity of being types, sufficiently proves it. Now, science is preparatory to art, and a Science of Man is a preparation for an Art of Human Life. This makes of your ‘aristocrat’ and ‘conservative’ Shakspeare a Socialist of the most daring order—the largest innovator the world has ever known.”

“By Jupiter!” exclaimed Wentworth, “it’s precious odd that nobody has noticed all this before.”

“So it is, Richard,” returned Harrington, smiling good-naturedly at him. “About as odd as that Ulrici should have said that Shakspeare took no heed of the politics of his time, when Lear, Coriolanus, and Julius CÆsar are occupied, under the dramatic cover, and in the very face of the military despotism of the age, with the broadest sort of political discussion. About as odd as that you should think Shakspeare had no patriotism, when the historical dramas so overflow with passionate love for England that London theatres, at this day, rise and roar to it when Phelps or Macready gives it voice from the stage.”

“Well,” said Wentworth, reddening and laughing, “I spoke too fast, no doubt. Besides, there’s Brutus—a splendid type of the pure country-lover. But the philanthropy—where’s that?”

“So the man who drew up the Science of Human Nature, subtle, vast, exact, complete, the inevitable preliminary to the relief of the human estate that Bacon schemed for, had no philanthropy,” bantered Harrington.

“That’s you exactly!” burst out Wentworth, coloring again, and laughing. “Thunder, Harrington! that’s the way you hook in a fellow. Of course, since I’ve accepted your first proposition, the rest follows. Well, at all events, you may show philanthropy as the genius of the plan, but I’m hanged if you can name a character that has it in the plays.”

“Can’t I, then?” retorted Harrington, good-humoredly. “What do you think of Lear? Whose heart folds in poor Tom, the social outcast from the lowest sinks of the Elizabethan wretchedness? Who hurls forth that terrible invocation for the ‘superfluous and lust-dieted man that slaves Heaven’s ordinance—that will not see because he does not feel?’ Who prays for the ‘poor naked wretches that bide the peltings of the pitiless storm,’ and dwells so eloquently on ‘their houseless heads and unfed sides, their looped and windowed raggedness.’ Who is it, the impersonation of cold and callous conservatism, that is made, as Burke says, to ‘attend to the neglected and remember the forgotten,’ and comes face to face with houseless poverty and want to exclaim, ‘Oh, I have ta’en too little care of this?’ Who demands that the rich and fortunate shall expose themselves to ‘feel what wretches feel,’ in order that their superfluities may be shared with them, and justice be more the law of social life? And if this is not philanthropy, what is it?”

“Say no more, Harrington, I cave,” replied Wentworth, gaily.

“It is true,” pursued Harrington, “that the Shakspeare Drama has no figure of a philanthropist like Howard, no more than it has of a religious saint like Xavier or Monica. But I do not think that such portraitures would consist with the author’s design, which, however vast, is still special, having for its end the culture and cure of the human mind, and, as I have said, the reconstruction of society. Ah, but the true philanthropist, the true saint of that Drama is its author! No need to add such a figure to his pages when he himself stands there added to them by our thought, an image of the noblest love that ever strove and suffered for mankind.”

They both sat in silence for a few moments, lost in musing.

“It is strange,” said Wentworth, at length. “All we know about Shakspeare personally, is in conflict with what you have said—though I admit that his works sustain your view. He seems to have lived a very common-place and vulgar sort of a life. Certainly, his biography does not show that he had large sympathies and designs for man, and it is indisputable that he did not participate in the loftier life of his age.”

“I look at it in this way,” replied Harrington. “Set aside the evidence we might collect from his writings, and consider only what must inevitably have followed from the nature of his intellect. The complex catholicity—the massive breadth—in a word, the universality of his mind, inevitably involves a corresponding vastness of interest and participation in the public affairs of his time, and all the varieties of its thought and life. Isolation from public life may coexist, and be perfectly compatible, with intensity of genius—with universality, never. Moreover, to be worldly wise, as the plays show their author to have been, a man must follow the rule Bacon insists upon as indispensable—namely, to ally contemplation with action. Deny such a man experience, and you cannot get from him the lessons of experience, as you get them from this author. Isolate such a man from affairs, and his genius spreads aloft into the vast air of the abstract, and you never get in his writings the voices of the street, the camp, the court, the cabinet—in a word, the voices of concrete practical life, as you do in the Shakspeare Drama. Take for example, the man nearest Shakspeare, the many-sided Goethe: the corollary to his many-sidedness is the fact that he was a man of the world, a scientifician, courtier, statesman. So with the author of the Drama. He must have been immersed in public life. He must have held office. He must have administered the affairs of State. It was the inevitable result of his genius, and it was the condition on which the manifestations of that genius depended. Denied public life, and either his development would have been arrested, or he would have become a vast dreamer or abstractionist.”

“Upon my word, Harrington,” said Wentworth, “that’s an astonishing thing for you to say!”

“It’s the truth, nevertheless,” replied Harrington, smiling.

“But the facts of Shakspeare’s life are against you,” rejoined Wentworth.

“Well, you must reconcile them as you can,” said Harrington. “Meanwhile, there is the indestructible truth. All history, all facts, all reason testify to it. It is so.”

“But look here, Harrington,” said the amazed Wentworth. “On the one hand, you infer that a man of Shakspeare’s genius must have been a statesman. On the other hand, is the plain fact that Shakspeare was nothing of the sort. Now, therefore, we must at once conclude that your inference is wrong.”

“Not necessarily,” replied Harrington.

“Not necessarily?” Wentworth laughed, and fixed his eyes with a puzzled look upon the floor. “Well, I don’t see how you can escape from so obvious a conclusion. Now, let me state it again. In the first place, who wrote the plays?”

Receiving no answer, Wentworth looked up, and saw Harrington gazing with rapt affection on the noble bust of Verulam. For a moment the young artist held his breath in utter stupefaction; then a deep flush burned upon his face, and he laughed immoderately. Harrington colored, but took his friend’s merriment, as he took everything, good-naturedly, and sat smiling at him.

“Bravo!” cried Wentworth, at length. “Another sacrifice to the idol! Now, Harrington, I can’t swallow the idea, that the idol wrote Shakspeare’s plays, but, for goodness’ sake do publish it! It will make such a jolly row. By Jupiter! what fun it will be to see all the steady old ink-pots fizzing into vitriol bottles, and foaming over on to your idea! Do publish it.”

“One of these days, Richard,” said Harrington, gently. “But I don’t think Verulam alone wrote the plays. He had help from others—and some of them came from a lower order of mind than his. But in all the great plays his intellect and design are visible. However, let it pass, and in the meantime, say nothing about it to any one, for till it can come with solid proof, it will meet with no favor from the Jedburgh justice of a world that hangs your thought first, and tries it afterward. But for your own sake, I wish you could believe that this great poet could not have been the poet he was, if he had not been concerned in everything that concerns mankind. Especially must he have cherished the idea of political liberty, for without that, poet or artist can be but little.”

“Upon my word, Harrington,” said Wentworth, “I shouldn’t be much astonished if you were to assert that the author of Shakspeare’s plays, as you call him, would be, if he was alive, a Garrisonian Abolitionist.”

“Well,” replied Harrington, laughing in his beard, “you know Montaigne says a man’s books are his children, and I’m sure this author’s children don’t vote with the Webster Whigs or go union-saving or kidnapping with either Whigs or Democrats. And as for Shakspeare being a Garrisonian, it’s quite clear to my perverted sense, that the man who makes his patriot, Brutus, cry aloud, as the first demand of political justice, ‘Liberty, Freedom, and Enfranchisement,’ would not, at any rate, if he were with us, be found in Mr. Ben Hallett’s party.”

Wentworth, touched at the idea of Shakspeare and Ben Hallett being by any chance thrown together, laughed immoderately, while Harrington, highly amused at his mirth, sat and smiled at him.

“Harrington,” said Wentworth, recovering from his merriment, “you almost tempt me to extend my studio among the sons of men.”

“That’s where the great artists extended theirs,” replied Harrington. “Raphael, Giotto, Cellini, Angelo, all those superb artists, were politicians, country-lovers, friends and comrades of their kind. Their human sympathies gave their genius its pulse of life. You young artists ought to blush when you think of Michael Angelo.”

“Well, Michael was a trump,” returned Wentworth, gaily.

“A trump?” repeated Harrington. “I wish he was a trump that could sound some of you fellows into life. Yes, there was a man behind the artist in Michael, and his works are cryptic with his humanity. By the way, Richard, how comes on the ‘Death of Attucks?’”

The “Death of Attucks” was a picture which Wentworth, instigated by Harrington, had begun to paint in illustration of the picturesque scene on that wild March night of the early Revolution, when a black man flung himself on the bayonets for a country which enslaves his race, and has scribes to defile his memory.

“Well,” replied Wentworth, with a look of momentary sadness, “I haven’t painted much lately—so the picture stands. O me,” he sighed, “I see intellectually the truth of all you say about the relation of liberty to art, but somehow I don’t get kindled.”

“Look here, Richard,” said Harrington, “you ought to hear Wendell Phillips.”

“So I ought,” answered Wentworth, “and I mean to sometime.”

“You must,” replied Harrington. “He will show you the ideal beauty of anti-slavery. Many a young man has found his eloquence the golden door to a life for liberty. Now Muriel has planned to go to the Convention to-night, and you are to go with us, and I hope you will hear him.

“Who are going?” asked Wentworth.

“We four,” replied Harrington.

“You three,” responded Wentworth; “I won’t go.”

“Oh, but you must,” replied Harrington. “I promised to bring you there to tea, and my word is at stake.”

Wentworth was silent, and sat with his eyes fixed on the floor, and his face reluctant and uneasy. Harrington watched him, and felt that there was some reason connected with either Muriel or Emily for his desire to avoid going to Temple street that evening. Suddenly the story Witherlee had told him about Wentworth and Muriel flashed into his memory, and with it came the sharp suspicion that Witherlee had lied. Could it be, after all, that Wentworth and Emily were lovers? Harrington’s heart trembled, and he determined to question Wentworth on the spot.

“Richard,” said he, “why are you averse to going up to Temple street this evening? Is it on account of anything in this talk of Fernando’s which John Todd told you?”

“Oh, no,” replied Wentworth, coloring. “I don’t care—I’ll go since you desire it.”

“Richard,” said Harrington, after an awkward pause, “pardon my rudeness, but I want to ask you a frank question, and I have a reason for asking it. Are you in—well, have you, as Witherlee said, one of Cupid’s arrows in your bleeding heart?”

Harrington tossed out the question gaily, but with a flushed face, and his heart beating. As for Wentworth he was scarlet to the roots of his hair, and with his eyes fixed on the floor, toyed with his moustache in great confusion.

“Oh, that wasn’t Witherlee’s phrase,” he stammered evasively. “That was my way of reporting what he said.”

“Well,” returned Harrington, “but is it true or not?”

Wentworth was silent for a moment.

“Suppose it is true. What then?” was his answer.

“It is true, then?” faltered Harrington.

Wentworth was still for a moment, then nodded affirmatively.

“Good!” exclaimed Harrington. “Richard, I give you joy. But now tell me—pardon my inquisitiveness—tell me which is the one?”

Wentworth felt himself in a corner, and with his face hot as fire, and his heart throbbing furiously, cast desperately about for some evasive answer.

“Is it Emily?” said Harrington hastily, in a voice which he could not keep from trembling.

Wentworth instantly took the tone as evidence of Harrington’s love for Miss Ames, and with a bitter feeling filling his heart as the sense of the injury she had done him, swept over him, he became self-possessed and cold.

“Emily!” he repeated, affecting surprise and looking at Harrington’s flushed face with desperate placidity, while a faint smile curved his proud lip. “Indeed, Harrington, none of Emily’s lovers have a rival in me.”

The answer was at once a taunt and an evasion, but to Harrington it seemed decisive, and spoken in plain good-faith. It fell upon him like a death-blow, but his heart, mailed in magnanimity, rose from under it, and he forced himself to smile, lest Wentworth should be pained by perceiving that it gave him pain. As yet, Wentworth had not the least idea that his friend loved Muriel. And, as yet, he did not perceive that he had just given Harrington to understand that he himself was her lover.

So, thought Harrington, Witherlee told the truth after all, and I was not mistaken.

“Richard,” he cried, springing from his seat, and crossing over to Wentworth, who instantly rose, startled by his sudden movement, as well as by the strange emotion which struggled with a smile in his lit face. “Richard, I give you joy. I do with all my heart and soul. You should have told me before, that I might sooner have been happy in your happiness. But I am glad to know it now—from your own lips, for I knew it, or all but knew it, before. My love and blessing on you both forever!”

All this poured forth impetuously, his hands grasping Wentworth’s, his features convulsed and smiling, his kind eyes shining through tears. An awful feeling swept down, like an avalanche, on Wentworth. Petrified with the suddenness of the revelation, he not only saw that he had inadvertently confessed himself Muriel’s lover, but he saw that Harrington loved her! He strove to speak, but his lips refused their office, and no form of words came to his whirling mind. Harrington saw his pallor and agitation, and mistaking them for the signs of a young lover’s emotion at being thus brusquely congratulated, wrung his hands once more, and turned away. Wentworth, too much overwhelmed to even think, sank down upon his seat, and leaning his arm on the back of the sofa, covered his hot eyes with his hand.

At that moment a low, piteous whine was heard in the yard. Harrington started and colored and went out instantly.

Wentworth, meanwhile, hearing the noise, and aware of his friend’s exit, took no heed of either, but sat trying to compose his mind to think of the new complication in which he found himself.

Presently the deep sense of Harrington’s splendid magnanimity in so joyfully giving up the woman he loved, rose upon him in contrast with his own passionate envy and jealousy when he thought him the lover of Emily, and with the tears springing to his eyes, he felt as if he were the meanest man that ever breathed. To go and fling his arms around Harrington, ask his forgiveness, and explain the whole matter, was his first impulse. Then came the consideration that in doing this, he must own that he loved Emily, for had he not said that he was in love with one? and he must own that she had played the coquette with him, and left him with a wounded heart. He could not do it. Pride forbade it. But what should he do? He could not leave Harrington in error, and such an error! Yet how explain that loving one of the two, he did not love Muriel, nor yet Emily. Altogether, Wentworth was in a dilemma!

Vainly revolving the matter for a few moments, he finally came to the desperate resolution so say nothing at present, but wait until he could be alone, and then think what course he could pursue to extricate himself from this embroilment.

The clear remembrance came to his mind how sedulously Emily had been wooing Harrington of late. Acquitting him now of all knowledge or blame in this respect, his censure gathered into a fiercer focus on her. It was plain that, having played the heartless coquette with him, she was trying the same game on his friend. A regular Lady Clara Vere de Vere, he thought, remembering the haughty beauty dowered with manly scorn in Tennyson’s poem. Fiery rage at Emily contended in his soul with fiery love for her. Gnashing his teeth with fury, scorning himself that he could love her and she so false and base, scorning himself that he could hate her when he so loved her, he walked up and down the room for a minute or two; then suddenly, with a violent effort, grew cool, and picking up his hat from the floor, went out into the yard.

He did not see Harrington at first, but stepping around the corner of the house, he caught sight of him, and all his passionate agitation faded away in surprise as he became aware of his friend’s occupation. Harrington was stooping down in an angle of the garden near a large square box set on end, rubbing away with a gloved hand at the back of an old, weak, white dog, the same Wentworth had seen tormented in the street that morning. Actually, thought Wentworth, he went back to take that forsaken brute home with him!

“What in thunder are you doing, Harrington?” he exclaimed, approaching the scene of his friend’s operations.

Harrington started, and turned his glowing face with a half ashamed smile upon Wentworth, then continued to rub the dog’s back.

“I couldn’t leave the poor old fellow in such a plight, Richard,” he remarked, in an apologetic tone, “so, you see, I took him in.”

“Why, he’s got the mange,” said Wentworth, eying the animal with a face of mingled disgust and curiosity.

“That’s not his fault,” returned Harrington, coolly, dipping his gloved hand into a box of what appeared to be powdered sulphur, sprinkling a handful on the dog’s back, and rubbing it in.

The dog, meanwhile, lying on the ground, was devouring with feeble content a plateful of broken victuals which the young man had procured from the house. He was a miserable, weak, red-eyed, flaccid-jawed, dirty-white old mastiff, and, as the young artist had observed, he had the mange. As ugly, forlorn-looking and worthless a cur in his life as that dead dog which, the old Mohammedan apologue says, the Jewish mob derided in the streets of Jerusalem, when a tall stranger of grave and sweet aspect drew near, and paused to cast a look of compassion on the object of their derision. “Is it not a miracle of ugliness!” jeered the crowd. “But see,” said the stranger, “pearls are not equal to the whiteness of his teeth!” And then, says the Mohammedan story, the people knew that the stranger was the great prophet Jesus, for none but he would look upon a dead dog with the beauty-seeing eye of love.

“Poor old fellow,” soliloquized Harrington, “I quite forgot I had him, till he whined for his dinner.”

“How confoundedly dirty he is,” observed Wentworth.

“Dirty? Oh, no—that’s his color,” said Harrington, naively. “He’s not dirty now, for I washed him.”

“The deuce you did!” replied Wentworth, laughing. “Upon my word, Harrington, you’re a regular Brahmin. Though it’s mighty good in you to take so much trouble for a brute like that. Faith, I’d have left him to his fate.”

“Oh, well,” replied Harrington, tranquilly, scanning the dog’s back, to see if any diseased spot had escaped him, “the poor old thing has something to do in this world, or he wouldn’t have been sent, and he has a right here, seeing that he does no harm. There, I guess that’ll do, and he’ll be comfortable till I get back.”

He took off his glove, patted the old dog on the head, and spoke to him. The animal, who had finished his dinner, feebly wagged his tail, and licked the kind hand, then looked up with bleared red eyes into the face of his protector, still wagging his tail.

“Good,” said Harrington; “see how grateful he is! Come, Wentworth, it’s time for us to go,” he continued, rising to his feet. “It’s after four o’clock, and I promised to be there early.”

Stooping again, he lifted the dog into the packing-case on some old rags of carpeting, put a pan of water near him, laid the tin box of sulphur and the glove on top, and turned away to the house.

“What a good fellow Harrington is,” muttered Wentworth, following him. “To think of his rescuing that old brute from the boys, and taking as much care of him as if he was Scott’s Maida! I wonder that I, who admire such things so much, never think of doing such things.”

He got into the room just as Harrington was disappearing up the flight of steps into the room above, whither he went to wash his hands and brush his clothes. In a few minutes he descended again, closed the windows, put on his slouched hat, and they set off together arm in arm.