as member for Blankshire, and, as his lordship was a man of decision, he started the evening of the day he received the telegram.

Let us, before he arrives, see what Sir Philip was about. It was winter in England, but spring at Amalfi. The little town, which lies semicircularly in a small bay of the Mediterranean, was lighted up by the Italian sun shining in an atmosphere devoid of haze, and reflecting so brilliant a colour on the sea that northern artists, mindful of their patrons, would have shrunk from producing it on canvas. The perfect purity of the spring atmosphere in Italy, devoid of moisture and, as yet, of that radiant, shining heat, which in summer clothes the scenery in a hot, golden mist, brought out the outlines of the houses so clearly and sharply that each looked like a Dutch toy-house, so perfect were its outlines against the green sky; and more remote objects were so distinctly seen in minutest detail, that the sense of distance, so well brought out in our hazy climate, was at Amalfi almost lost. You thought you could cast a stone at the hills, which, with their weather-worn scarpments, partially covered by acacia trees and vines, shut in at a distance of two or three miles this picturesque town, and on the summits and broken pinnacles of these hills columns of Roman art and arches and buttresses of the middle ages, could easily be discerned by the naked eye.

At a window of the principal hotel sat Sir Philip Warden. He is gazing on the Mediterranean--the mirror-like monotony of which is unbroken by a single sail or a single breath of wind. His head reclines on his right arm. The attitude and expression are suggestive of deep thought. Though only six months have elapsed since we saw him last, there is a considerable change in his appearance. His dress, if not slovenly, is loosely and carelessly put on; his beard, which he has allowed to grow, is shaggy and irregular; and the hair on his head, which, though grizzled by time and care, used to be arranged with scrupulous care, seemed now to lie anyhow on his pale and lofty forehead. On that forehead and under the eyes there were furrows which one who had carefully scanned his face six months before would not then have detected, and there was a slightly perceptible increase in the descending lines about the mouth.

All this would not have been remarked except by a careful observer, and an ordinary acquaintance would have accounted for the eccentricity of his garb by that laissez allez which sometimes transforms the Englishman of fashion, when abroad, into the Bohemian; and his graver and sadder aspect might have been ascribed to the effect of that lassitude which is apt to assail one of our insular race when in Italy.

As it is our duty to explain matters to our reader, we will inform him how it happened that the change above described had come over Sir Philip.

Our readers will recollect he had married an Italian lady, and that the union had been an unhappy one. It led, as we have mentioned, to a separation

Now, Sir Philip had made up his mind, some time before the dinner at the "Hyperion," to leave England for some time. Two motives had impelled him to that resolution. The first was the one he avowed to himself. It was, if possible, to obtain distraction from the painful thoughts which oppressed him, and which solitude had intensified. The second, the real motive, was one he did not avow to himself, and which, had any one asserted to be that which really determined his decision, he would indignantly have repudiated. But in his inward soul the desire to see again the scene where he first met his wife had become so great that he could not resist it. Sir Philip still loved that wife-not as he believed she was now, but as she had been when first he saw her. As he believed her to be a traitress to his love, he had long discarded her from his heart, and could not think of her without indignation, nor without a fierce feeling of revenge towards the man who had broken his beautiful idol ; but as she had been the bride of his youth, his first and only love, pure and spotless, he worshipped her hopelessly. Even although it would occasionally break in upon his solitary musings that there was no such being as her he idolised; though his reason forced him to admit that his ideal was, in reality, the same as that woman who had made him hate her sex and his own, the greater part of his time he lived, thought, and felt as if the two had no relation to each other; or if there were any association in his mind between the two lines of thought, it was one of contrast-the contrast between light and darkness. Nor is this treasuring of the ideal uncommon. Not unfrequently a man in his youth has passionately loved a young girl, and, clothing her with the rich imagery of his own mind, has conceived her, not merely a little lower than the angels, but much superior in moral purity and beauty; and it has happened that time and chance has separated them, and in after-life he meets her again, worldly, frivolous, and coarse-it may be, depraved. Does he immediately banish from his memory the vision of his youth? It is often impossible to do so. In foreign travel, in the heat of India, in northern cold, in battle and privation, that image has been ever present to him-the centre of all his aspirations after happinessthe loadstar which protects his heart from sin. He cannot cease to love her. But the real woman he now sees before him is another being-he never loved her. It may be that, with all the freshness

of an uncontaminated soul, he loathes and hates her. But she-the young, the beautiful, the glory of his youth-she must ever remain enshrined in his heart, the dearer, perhaps, because he knows he was mistaken and that it was not the woman, but the reflection of his own fresh, ingenuous heart he had worshipped. The impression is indelible, it is the impersonation of his vanished youth, the centre round which clings the memory of pure and noble thoughts of unselfish aspirations of the poetry of life.

Such, at least, was the case with the brooding mind of Sir Philip, and it was this reason which had decided him to make a pilgrimage to the place where he first saw her. Lord Grahame knew this, for he was Sir Philip's only confidant, and he had long abstained from inquiring after him, notwithstanding the political importance which attached to his name. But Sir Philip, as we have explained, at last wore out Lord Grahame's patience.

Sir Philip did not go direct to the Abruzzi. For some reason or other he lingered in Paris. Then he went to Naples, and there he remained a month, in the strictest privacy and seclusion. last he had gone into the Abruzzi.

At

He found external nature the same. Every large boulder-rock, every tree, every watercourse was there, the same wild desolation of nature; but there was one change which added to the dreariness of the scene-the population had disappeared. The brigand villages existed no longer, and the Chateau of the Capelmonte and Amaldi were both tenantless and in decay.

With some difficulty Sir Philip found out a goat-herd, the solitary inhabitant of a district which, when he last saw it, contained 300 or 400 men.

What had become of them? True, they were robbers, and robbers' wives, and robbers' sons and daughters; but still they were human beings. The goat-herd could explain little. It was not long ago since he had come, and things were then as now. The fact was, the population had been civilised off the face of the country. Many had gone across the frontier into the States of the Church, where robbery is still an institution; a goodly proportion had been shot or hanged; the remainder were nowhere.

As to the Capelmonte, his goat-herd knew nothing, except that an old priest, who visited the district once a year, was called Father Capelmonte, and he had once or twice gone with him to the old chateau, where, said the goat-herd, the Father had always bade him adieu. He added that this was about the time when the Father came here in the course of his rounds, and as he had not missed him since he himself had come to the country, he did not expect to do so this year.

Sir Philip had little difficulty in persuading the goat-herd to give him shelter in his hut till the priest should come.

He spent a week in this humble abode. He wandered about all day in the desolate country, and always before he returned to the hut he visited the chateau and the green where the village fête had taken place. It had made an indelible impression on his memory; he could reproduce the whole scene in its remotest detail. This airy company kept him from wearying; and though everything tended to sadden his feelings, though the reactions which followed his day-dreams, when reclining in the shadow of the ruined castle, with his eyes closed, he repeopled the desolate scene, left him utterly hopeless, he did not experience that ennui which had been so insupportable at home. All these eight days he saw no one except the goat-herd, whose conversation did not disturb his gloomy reverie.

At last the priest came. He was a venerable-looking man, probably about seventy. He seemed surprised and displeased to meet anyone with the goat-herd, and did not show himself disposed for conversation; but Sir Philip took the initiative, and introduced himself as an Englishman, who had come, from motives of curiosity, to visit a part of Italy of which so little was known, and he would be much obliged if the father would give him some information regarding the district.

"There is little to give," said the father. "We three are all the inhabitants within a circuit of eight miles, and my friend Sasio is the only resident. He can tell you about his goats, and when that is told, you know all which is to be known."

"Hardly," said Sir Philip. "Excuse my curiosity, but I have remarked close at hand the ruins of a village, and there are two castles not far from it, which must at one time have been of importance."

"What have we to do, my son," said the father, "with the things of the past?-the present is the scene of our duties."

"True!" said Sir Philip; "but not the scene of our affections, nor of our hopes. These are often with the past-the affections never to be again reciprocated, the hopes gone for ever. But even were it

not so, the past interests me with its associations. I like to re-create scenes that have long gone by, and to try and conceive how human passions expressed themselves in the actions of those who have left the stage. There is a unity in history: the same motive power runs through the whole; happiness and sorrow, love and hate, play their parts with, on the whole, an equal intensity in one country as in another. Fundamentally, mankind is everywhere the same; and the differences in results which we see-the varied history of nations, the different destiny of peoples-arise altogether fron

external causes; it is in the tracing the effect of these interferences upon the same plastic element of humanity that history consists. Therefore," he continued, "when in the course of my travels I come on a scene like this, I read on it no traces of vice, or folly, or crime on the part of those who once lived here. I take it for granted they were much like other people, but I conclude that circumstances of an extraordinary and tragic nature have been introduced ab extra, which has broken up the uniform progress, the monotonous course of ordinary events. This missing link, connecting cause and effect, becomes, then, an object of curiosity and interest, and I do not feel satisfied till I take it up, and realise that, after all, it is the same eternal drama which has been enacted."

'In the present case, at least," said the priest, "your philosophy is at fault in two ways. In the first place, the people of the Abruzzi differ from all other Italians, and are the very antipodes of that phlegmatic race from whose history you have derived your most unhistorical creed. If there be no essential difference between the passions and motives, if all the rest of the world but repeat cach other, I will still hold up the Abruzzi as an exception to the tiresome monotony. You tread on a volcanic soil. The external aspect of nature, elsewhere so permanent, is here transitory and mutable, and the fortunes of the various races who have attempted to take root in it have partaken of its volcanic nature and of its vicissitude. And yet, even in the desolation you see, there is a corroboration of one aspect of your philosophy. No cause which the inhabitants, at least, deemed extraordinary or providential, has caused their ruin. These villages have been burned and destroyed by the Neapolitan or Papal troops, and their inhabitants killed or dispersed ordinary causes which have been working in the Abruzzi since the fifth century, in one shape or another; the only difference is that this has been one of the many epochs of complete desolation which the history of the locality records. The Neapolitans have only done now what Lombards, Huns, and Burgundians and French did at intervals before. As for the inhabitants, they have been disposed of even more summarily than in former days of violence. These villagers happened to be robbers, and by what, I admit, was rather an extraordinary concurrence, it happened lately that the Neapolitan and Papal Governments held for a very brief period the eccentric idea that robbery should be put a stop to, which they accordingly tried to do by the natural expedient of exterminating the robbers."

"But," said Sir Philip," the people in the two chateaux, whose very unpicturesque ruins we see, were they robbers, too? I am somewhat of an antiquarian, and if I am not mistaken, that one to