stray guineas to his scanty income, not merely to keep the wolf from the door, but to continue, to his delicately-nurtured wife, some, at least, of the comforts and elegancies to which she had been accustomed.

Such were his thoughts, his plans, his projects, during his first sleepless night in London; neither were they dimmed or dissipated, during their discussion with Mrs. Meredith on the succeeding day. The morning was sunny-golden as their own hopes. She saw no snake in the cupboard, no grinning spectre in the background she saw nothing unreasonable in her husband's projects; nothing intangible in his hopes she knew not that this bright and busy, and bustling London, which she saw from her chamber window spread out before her, palaces on palaces, squares on squares, one suburb beyond another; that it was but as a sepulchre, in which lay lost, sunk, and buried for ever, the disappointed hopes and quenched aspi

rations of thousands, as gay, as youthful, and as energetic as herself. She knew not, how should she, and who should tell her? Not her husband, for he knew not himself; and if he had known, he would have hesitated ere he destroyed her happy confidence. Nothing less than peremptory necessity could have hardened him to the task.

Hopefully foreboding too happy influences, from a letter which, on the very moment of her departure for London, she had ventured to address to her father, Emily's spirits were even more than usually exhilarated and lightsome, as if already revelling in the accomplishment of her wishes, she set off with her husband for a long peregrination through the streets of the metropolis, ordering a simple dinner to be ready for them on their return.

It is hardly possible to name objects so fraught with interest to an intelligent mind as our great Metropolis presents.

Emily had never visited London before, Meredith's glance had been a mere transient one, when passing through on busines And so now, ere the realities of their unfriended position pressed too closely on their ninds, they varied the monotony of their unemployed lodging life by walks, sails, and cheap drives to the inexpensive lions of the great city, and to objects of interest in its immediate neighbourhood.

And so the time passed not unhappily

away.

CHAPTER V.

No for a time, it passed anything but unhappily. Newly united, warmly attached, at present all the world to each other, inexperienced in those mutual failings, and faults which were kept in abeyance by the unexpanded warmth of their attachment to each other, and were, as yet, unexcited by adverse influences from without; untouched by privation, unchastened by sorrow, untaught by pain, unacquainted practically with the various, never ending

and most harassing exigencies of life to those whose means bear no analogy to their station and habits-blissful ignorance, which painful and bitter experience was soon to rob them of for ever-placed in the very arena of interesting excitement, with their fancy unsated, their energies untired, animated, joyous, and as yet hopeful, it is no wonder that, for some short weeks, Mr. and Mrs. Meredith thought London a Paradise, and their own, unpretending, but neat, airy, and quiet lodgings, somewhat removed from the busy and bustling streets-a very garden of Eden in that Paradise. One drawback, indeed, there had already been in the pertinacity of Mr. Dalton's silence; but Emily still hoped and thought-she could not but hope and think that her father would ultimately forgive her; and, for the present, she felt that she had indeed merited his displeasure, that she could hardly expect to be at once recalled to favour. So dismissing the subject from her thoughts as