miraculously preserved. But the first escape is no security for the future. He has an enemy, of whom he has no suspicion; and this enemy, the last man who ought to seek his life. Let Captain Vaughan be cautioned against walking unarmed towards night-fall. This notice comes from a concealed friend."

There was no name to this alarming intimation; it had been thrown into the avenue. The mother's heart was in an agony of apprehension, but her scruples on the conti nental journey were extinguished at once. She tore the note, lest it might meet Vaughan's eye, and urge him to inquiry and hazard. Early on the next day the cottage was given up, and its inmates were on the road to Dover.

CHAPTER XXVII.

Of all her hopes, the labour of her years,
What is her harvest ?-Sneers, eternal sneers.

Savage.

THIS had been Mrs. Courtney's most brilliant winter. Her new alliance had opened

the circle which it had been the business of her life to penetrate, but which had till now been a circle of adamant. She moved among the stars of fashion, herself a luminary; and what she wanted in rank she made up in ad dress, in display, and what the censorious would call the effrontery of fashion. Her handsome person was seen every where, and was always conspicuous for splendour and singularity of dress wherever it was seen; she played, and played high; she talked, and talked loud; her spirits were unfailing, and her smile was beyond all the power of weariness or vexation to subdue.

Nature had given her beauty, which time. had rather shaded before she could reach the true position for its triumphs; but nature had given her a powerful mind, which time had only matured, and from which it had removed the last obstacle by taking away whatever heart she once had. She was now a bold, brilliant, dashing woman, whom men of a certain age followed, and whom women of all ages fled or feared; for she had wit, and the will to use it; and many a high-born insolent, and many an opulent imbecile, did homage to her supremacy of sneer.

But in all this triumph there was a latent pang. In this full-blown elevation there was a worm; and Mrs. Courtney, when after seeing her apartments cleared of her multi

tude of titled guests, and smiling the last of her dukes and princes down her glittering and flower-wreathed stairs, she closeted her lawyer, and, with an aching head and a racked frame, consulted how to meet the demands of her morning creditors, might have been thought to purchase her distinctions under a severe penalty.

Every inspection of her resourses was less and less cheering; her income had sunk with a rapidity that surprised even herself; her expectations of repayment on the marriage of her daughters, for whom exclusively she professed that she mixed in the world, had failed; a little scheme of a more personal nature, excited by the dangling of a superannuated Marquis, and kept long in suspense by the most active yet most cautious attentions of the handsome widow, seemed sink, ing into utter hopelessness; and what was scarcely less vexatious, the secret which she had kept with such dexterous care, had obviously become no secret to fashion.

Desertion and destitution were the prospect now before her; and in bitter reluctance she addressed a long letter on her necessities to Lady Lovemore.

The old feuds between Mrs. Courtney and her daughter had died away by their sepa ration; but utter coldness had come in their place. Her ladyship was the bird sent from

the family nest to wing her own way; and like the bird, she never winged her way back again. Mrs. Courtney, with all her fashion, was still untitled: her patrician daughter was perfectly sensible of the distinction of ranks ; and the plebeian mother shrank before the stern superiority of the handsome and haughty Lady Lovemore.

The answer to her letter was simple, but expressive. "The Countess Lovemore lamented that it was a rule which she had prescribed to herself, not to apply on matters of money to the Earl Lovemore."

London was now no longer tenable. The season was in its full tide; but Mrs. Courtney suddenly discovered "that she had raked too much for her health, that her dear girls were right in entreating her, as they had long done, to sacrifice something to herself, and that Baillie would not be responsi ble for her constitution another week in the atmosphere of town."

"Brighton, the next remove of fashion, was prescribed; and to Brighton the family cavalcade swept down before the week was closed.

Mrs. Courtney's eclipse made the talk of a day. Her embarrassments had long been the laugh of her thousand dear friends; it was secret, but not the less sincere. The laugh was now loud; and the superannuated

Marquis detailed the story of his flirtation with the loudest laugh of all.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Come to the woods, for there the nightingale
Sings to the moon; or to the twilight shore,
And hear the seamen's songs, as in their ships
They slide along the mirror of the deep.
Night is the time for talk of gentle love.

Phineas Webb.

BRIGHTON is, as all the world knows, London in little. The sea is certainly rather more obvious than the Thames, and the South Downs are more sheep-covered than Constitution-hill. But in all else, in formality of brick, in chicanery of trade, in folly of the supreme bon ton, there is not a hair's breadth between the London in Middlesex, and the London on the shores of the Channel.

Mrs. Courtney's arrival caused a sensation ; her entrance had been made in the most triumphant style; her barouche and four, with its attendant equipages, freighted with her multitudinous establishment, had whitened the promenaders of the Steyne with more