"At-at Mrs. Brandon's, father." He blushes like a girl as he speaks.

At the next moment he is scared by the execration which hisses from his father's lips, and the awful look of hate which the elder's face assumes that fatal, forlorn, fallen, lost look which, man and boy, has often frightened poor Phil. Philip did not like that look, nor indeed that other one, which his father cast at Hunt, who presently swaggered in.

"I

"What! you dine here? We rarely do papa the honour of dining with him," says the parson, with his knowing leer. suppose, Doctor, it is to be fatted-calf day now the prodigal has come home. There's worse things than a good fillet of veal; eh?”

Whatever the meal might be, the greasy chaplain leered and winked over it as he gave it his sinister blessing. The two elder guests tried to be lively and gay, as Philip thought, who took such little trouble to disguise his own moods of gloom or merriment. Nothing was said regarding the occurrences of the morning when my young gentleman had been rather rude to Mr. Hunt; and Philip did not need his father's caution to make no mention of his previous meeting with their guest. Hunt, as usual, talked to the butler, made sidelong remarks to the footman, and garnished his conversation with slippery double-entendre and dirty old-world slang. Betting-houses, gambling-houses, Tattersall's, fights and their frequenters, were his cheerful themes, and on these he descanted as usual. The Doctor swallowed this dose, which his friend poured out, without the least expression of disgust. On the contrary, he was cheerful: he was for an extra bottle of claret-it never could be in better order than it was now.

The bottle was scarce put on the table, and tasted and pronounced perfect, when-oh! disappointment!-the butler reappears with a note for the Doctor. One of his patients. He must go. She has little the matter with her. She lives hard by, in Mayfair. "You and Hunt finish this bottle, unless I am back before it is done; and if it is done, we'll have another," says Dr. Firmin jovially. "Don't stir, Hunt"-and Dr. Firmin is gone, leaving Philip alone with the guest to whom he had certainly been rude in the morning.

"The Doctor's patients often grow very unwell about claret time," growls Mr. Hunt, some few minutes after. "Never mind. The drink's good-good! as somebody said at your famous callsupper, Mr. Philip-won't call you Philip, as you don't like it. You were uncommon crusty to me in the morning, to be sure. In my time there would have been bottles broke, or worse, for that sort of treatment."

"I have asked your pardon," Philip said. "I was annoyed about-no matter what-and had no right to be rude to Mrs. Brandon's guest."

"I say, did you tell the governor that you saw me in Thornhaugh Street?" asks Hunt.

"I was very rude and ill-tempered, and again I confess I was wrong," said Phil, boggling and stuttering, and turning very red. He remembered his father's injunction.

"I say again, sir, did you tell your father of our meeting this morning?" demands the clergyman.

"And pray, sir, what right have you to ask me about my private conversation with my father?" asks Philip, with towering dignity.

"You won't tell me? Then you have told him. He's a nice man, your father is, for a moral man.'

"I am not anxious for your opinion about my father's morality, Mr. Hunt," says Philip, gasping in a bewildered manner, and drumming the table. "I am here to replace him in his absence, and treat his guest with civility."

"Civility! Pretty civility!" says the other, glaring at him. "Such as it is, sir, it is my best, and-I-I have no other," groans the young man.

"Old friend of your father's, a university man, a Master of Arts, a gentleman born, by Jove! a clergyman-though I sink that

"Yes, sir, you do sink that," says Philip.

"Am I a dog," shrieks out the clergyman, "to be treated by you in this way? Who are you? Do you know who you are?" "Sir, I am striving with all my strength to remember," says Philip.

"Come! I say! don't try any of your confounded airs on me!" shrieks Hunt, with a profusion of oaths, and swallowing glass after glass from the various decanters before him. "Hang me, when I was a young man, I would have sent one-two at your nob, though you were twice as tall! Who are you, to patronise your senior, your father's old pal-a university man :-you confounded supercilious

"I am here to pay every attention to my father's guest," says Phil; "but, if you have finished your wine, I shall be happy to break up the meeting, as early as you please."

"You shall pay me; I swear you shall," said Hunt.

"Oh, Mr. Hunt!" cried Philip, jumping up, and clenching his great fists, "I should desire nothing better.'

The man shrank back, thinking Philip was going to strike him

(as Philip told me in describing the scene), and made for the bell. But when the butler came, Philip only asked for coffee; and Hunt, uttering a mad oath or two, staggered out of the room after the servant. Brice said he had been drinking before he came. He was

often so. And Phil blessed his stars that he had not assaulted his father's guest then and there, under his own roof-tree.

He went out into the air. He gasped and cooled himself under the stars. He soothed his feelings by his customary consolation of tobacco. He remembered that Ridley in Thornhaugh Street held a divan that night; and jumped into a cab, and drove to his old friend.

The maid of the house, who came to the door as the cab was driving away, stopped it; and as Phil entered the passage, he found the Little Sister and his father talking together in the hall. The Doctor's broad hat shaded his face from the hall-lamp, which was burning with an extra brightness, but Mrs. Brandon's was very pale, and she had been crying.

She gave a little scream when she saw Phil.

"Ah! is it you,

"I never

dear?" she said. She ran up to him: seized both his hands: clung to him, and sobbed a thousand hot tears on his hand. will. Oh, never, never, never!" she murmured.

The Doctor's broad chest heaved as with a great sigh of relief. He looked at the woman and at his son with a strange smile ;-not a sweet smile.

"God bless you, Caroline," he said, in his pompous, rather theatrical way.

"Good night, sir," said Mrs. Brandon, still clinging to Philip's hand, and making the Doctor a little humble curtsey. And when he was gone, again she kissed Philip's hand, and dropped her tears on it, and said, "Never, my dear; no, never, never!"

P

CHAPTER XI

IN WHICH PHILIP IS VERY ILL-TEMPERED

HILIP had long divined a part of his dear little friend's history. An uneducated young girl had been found, cajoled, deserted by a gentleman of the world. And poor Caroline was the victim, and Philip's own father the seducer. He easily guessed as much as this of the sad little story. Dr. Firmin's part in it was enough to shock his son with a thrill of disgust, and to increase the mistrust, doubt, alienation, with which the father had long inspired the son. What would Philip feel, when all the pages of that dark book were opened to him, and he came to hear of a false marriage, and a ruined and outcast woman, deserted for years by the man to whom he himself was most bound? In a word, Philip had considered this as a mere case of early libertinism, and no more; and it was as such, in the very few words which he may have uttered to me respecting this matter, that he had chosen to regard it. I knew no more than my friend had told me of the story as yet; it was only by degrees that I learned it, and as events, now subsequent, served to develop and explain it.

The elder Firmin, when questioned by his old acquaintance, and, as it appeared, accomplice of former days, regarding the end of a certain intrigue at Margate, which had occurred some four or five-and-twenty years back, and when Firmin, having reason to avoid his college creditors, chose to live away and bear a false name, had told the clergyman a number of falsehoods which appeared to satisfy him. What had become of that poor little thing about whom he had made such a fool of himself? Oh, she was dead, dead ever so many years before. He had pensioned her off. She had married, and died in Canada-yes, in Canada. Poor little thing! Yes, she was a good little thing, and, at one time, he had been very soft about her. I am sorry to have to state of a respectable gentleman that he told lies, and told lies habitually and easily. But, you see, if you commit a crime, and break a seventh commandment let us say, or an eighth, or choose any number you will-you will probably have to back the lie of action

by the lie of the

tongue, and so you are fairly warned, and I have no help for you. If I murder a man, and the policeman inquires, Pray, sir, did you cut this here gentleman's throat?" I must bear false witness, you see, out of self-defence, though I may be naturally a most reliable truth-telling man. And so with regard to many crimes which gentlemen commit-it is painful to have to say respecting gentlemen, but they become neither more nor less than habitual liars, and have to go lying on through life to you, to me, to the servants, to their wives, to their children, to -oh, awful name! I bow and humble myself. May we kneel, may we kneel, nor strive to speak our falsehoods before Thee!

And so, my dear sir, seeing that after committing any infraction of the moral laws, you must tell lies in order to back yourself out of your scrape, let me ask you, as a man of honour and a gentleman, whether you had not better forego the crime, so as to avoid the unavoidable, and unpleasant, and daily recurring necessity of the subsequent perjury? A poor young girl of the lower orders, cajoled or ruined, more or less, is of course no great matter. The little baggage is turned out of doors-worse luck for her!—or she gets a place, or she marries one of her own class, who has not the exquisite delicacy belonging to "gentle blood"-and there is an end of her. But if you marry her privately and irregularly yourself, and then throw her off, and then marry somebody else, you are brought to book in all sorts of unpleasant ways. I am writing of quite an old story, be pleased to remember. The first part of the history I myself printed some twenty years ago; and if you fancy I allude to any more modern period, madam, you are entirely out in your conjecture.

It must have been a most unpleasant duty for a man of fashion, honour, and good family, to lie to a poor tipsy disreputable bankrupt merchant's daughter, such as Caroline Gann; but George Brand Firmin, Esquire, M.D., had no other choice, and when he lied-as in severe cases, when he administered calomel-he thought it best to give the drug freely. Thus he lied to Hunt, saying that Mrs. Brandon was long since dead in Canada; and he lied to Caroline, prescribing for her the very same pill, as it were, and saying that Hunt was long since dead in Canada, too. And I can

fancy few more painful and humiliating positions for a man of rank and fashion and reputation, than to have to demean himself so far as to tell lies to a little low-bred person, who gets her bread as a nurse of the sick, and has not the proper use of her h's.

"Oh yes, Hunt!" Firmin had said to the Little Sister, in one of those sad little colloquies which sometimes took place between him and his victim, his wife of old days. "A wild bad man Hunt