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avail you no longer. I bring a charge against you of so foul a nature, that he who has no means to disprove it, can never hope to hold up his head in the world again. But we are united by the ties of blood, Courtney. Agree to give up your ill-gotten possessions without a struggle, and I pledge myself that the transaction shall never be brought forward."

"Iscorn your contemptuous, your pitiless mercy!" said Courtney, stamping with rage. "What is life without the means of sustaining it? Who would believe the tale which I might tell, that saw me thus despoiled, degraded, stripped of my last shilling?" He flung himself into the chair, filled his glass to the brim, and drank it off.

"I know the world," said he, in a low and sneering tone; "I know its tender mercies, and will never go forth in it again to meet the scorn, the insolent obloquy which awaits me there but I have resources which will not fail me, and which not you, Sir, nor you, black and treacherous villain!" darting a fierce glance at Benson, "have heart enough to try or dream of."

He flung open the door, and rushed furiously by them.

"What can this mean!" exclaimed Vaughan: "have his contrivances been deeper than you were aware? have you brought

forward a charge which you have not the power to prove?"

"No," said Benson, "it is altogether impossible. This is merely a bravado: he can have no document which my evidence would not turn to waste paper."

The report of a pistol was heard. Vaughan flew up the stairs in horror, and burst open the chamber-door. His unhappy relative was stretched on the floor, a fearful spectacle! Life was utterly gone. He lay on his back; his teeth clenched; his open eyes glaring with an almost living expression of despair. The pistol was in one hand; the other had been instinctively struck upon his wound. The floor was covered with blood. Vaughan turned away in anguish. Benson stood gazing, and unable to draw his eyes from the dead.

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CHAPTER XXXVIII.

Now are our woes all come to pleasant ends;
Our dropping tears are dried by sunshine smiles;
Our wringing hands are laid on merry hearts;
Our wandering locks that wore the cypress leaves
Shall now be braided with rich jewelry;
Our voices, griefs' companions, shall be tuned
To silver harmonies that, like the lark,

Shall wake the morn, and then outwatch the moon,
More sweet and constant than the nightingale.
Phineas Webb.

MRS. COURTNEY'S establishment at Brighton now came under the hand of the law; and her bijouterie gave a new subject, at once, for the admiration of the loungers of this classic and conversational spot, and for the florid eloquence of Pulpit, its celebrated orator, politician, and auctioneer.

Her spirit was broken: deserted by her children, foiled in all her personal prospects, insulted by the open ridicule, or worse, by the affected pity of her fashionable associ ates, she at length felt of what feeble and visionary materials the glories of high life are made.

Vaughan and Catherine were generous and feeling in their offers of kindness; but she refused all pecuniary assistance, and

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with the trivial wreck of her property prepared to bury herself in some of the obscure and cheap villages of the Continent. Till final arrangements could be made, she came to London, and there shut herself out from all intercourse with society.

Vaughan alone was an exception, his sensitive delicacy, and noble ingenuousness, had won upon her, and with tears which he vainly sought to check, she lamented the injuries which she had in her day of folly and pride, attempted to do him and his love.

She refused all knowledge of what was passing in the world, and it was only by Vaughan's representing the necessity of completing the business which devolved on her by the death of her son, that she expressed a wish for his opening the letters which had lain on her table for a week together.

One of these was from Lord Lovemore's agent, announcing his Lordship's death, and the unexpected discovery that he had been privately married to a celebrated danseuse of the Vienna theatre ten years before. The true wife, who had been silenced by the payment of a large pension, and the perfect indulgence of her own modes of living, had come to England on the intelligence of her old lord's demise. The letter concluded with the agent's "most respectful regrets

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that he could not henceforth have the high satisfaction of honouring Miss Courtney's bills for the amount of her annuity."

"The next letter," said Vaughan, as he opened it, "is from your daughter, Lady Gordon."

"Close it again, my dear sir." said Mrs. Courtney, with a deep sigh. "From Julia I am determined to receive nothing, not even compassion. Her I treated with a severity, at which I now wonder; and from her, now happy, honoured, and rich, I would rather die than receive services imbittered by the remembrance of my tyranny; I must not disguise it, it deserves no other name."

"But this letter, I can perceive from the first line, is neither of compassion nor of triumph; Julia is ill."

There is something in the parental tie, that however it may have been stretched, can never be broken. Mrs. Courtney's heart felt an indescribable pang at the sound. The world seemed to be forcibly torn away from her by the chance of such a loss. She seized the letter, and read it with breathless

eagerness.

It was simple and expressive. An entreaty, that " as her dear mother would not honour her by allowing of her visits when able to make them, she would, at least, not refuse her dutiful and affectionate daughter the con

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