men were always better suited to my taste; for they deem it worth while to play the agreeable, and a beauty aims no deeper than the eye." "You are wrong-quite wrong, there, most sapient papa-" and Clara assumed all the pretty badinage of childhood"beauty, through the eye, aims at the heart." The glance at Beresford identified the aim and the object; and long af ter he had quitted Portman-square, did he recal, and muse upon that glance, with disgust and scorn. CHAP. CHAP. VI. WHILST in conformity to the olden usage, from St. Paul's and the adjoining churches, "The curfew toll'd the knell of parting day," captain Beresford, as on the preceding evening, close wrapped in his furred cloak, took his station upon Waterloo-bridge, to muse, and to loiter, and to watch, by the aid of the undulating gas, the busy throngs, driving, and often jostling him, as they hurried into Surrey. Perhaps he was in a moody and a moralizing vein; certain it is, he drew an estimate of human nature and of human life from the motley specimens before him, all alike. spurred on and tickled by shadows of their own coinage; for the seeming substance, so diligently sought, and so greedily grasped at, seen, and analyzed, and justly justly estimated, were, like themselves, shadows. It was thus before the flood, from the fall of the first Adam-and it will be thus, to the latest stretch of recorded time, even to the fall of the last breathing son of Adam. For man is the creature of circumstance, the dupe of imagination, the slave of sense; he lives in a world of illusion and error, nor does illusion and error cease, until his speculations, his theories, and himself, are laid in dust. But the visionary dreams, and strange fantasies, which in the idle hour, fail not to flit and dance before the eyes of men and women, sometimes to cheer, oftener to cozen, were abruptly put to flight, by the sudden starting up, as it were, of the same dense lump of breathing clay, who the night before, from eight till ten o'clock, like himself, had kept watch upon the bridge. The stranger wore the same rough coat and broad-brimmed hat, and it was as before drawn close down upon his brow; and and after a turn or two on the centre arches, he took his station immediately beneath one of the lamps, and fixed his eyes in deep and earnest scrutiny on Beresford. But he spoke not. Beresford watched the stranger, as earnestly and as narrowly as the stranger watched him; and he too watched in silence, for he was resolved not to make the first advance. Two whole hours thus passed in dumb show the clocks from the different churches struck ten; and at the moment, as if by mechanism, they moved away in opposite directions; the stranger, as before, quitting on the Surrey side-Beresford bending his steps homewards. It was too late for half-price at any of the theatres; besides his mind was more attuned to reflection than to pleasure; and when seated at his own fireside, he mused long and painfully on the different incidents of the day-on D'Arcy, driving the round of profitless pleasure, and sacrificing time and talent to the vain and heartless VOL. I. G heartless coquette who had so fatally cast a spell upon his senses. Beresford was no coxcomb; perhaps few men possessed a more humble opinion of his own powers of pleasing; yet was it man to shut his eyes and his senses against the too-palpable designs of Miss Elrington? After the interview of the morning, was it man, to do other than identify himself in the new idol of her fickle and vagrant fancy? Beresford could not mistake her looks and her words: though a new species of love-making, it proved to him how little she valued the restraints of custom -how entirely she lived the slave of her own will; and the conviction brought with it regret and grief. Had the slighted lover been other than major D'Arcy, perhaps her extreme beauty, and her blandishments, might have wrought upon his feelings, and softened down the severity of his censure. In her youth, and in the pernicious bias of her education, he might have framed excuse for |