pounds seemed the most natural thing in the world, oddly as it must have come from any other man. It is true that Gideon, in the most natural way, had given an excellent reason—that it was after banking hours, and that he would willingly have paid down a thousand pounds if they were the straw that would turn the scale of Gideon's mind in favour of going to Mademoiselle Juliette's on that or any other evening. His satisfaction with having got an ally like Gideon to play into the hands of his house had hitherto been a good deal modified by his friend's almost over-respectable aversion to winning and losing except at the great game of which all Europe was the board. Gideon may or may not have known, by reason or instinct, what was passing in Mr. Sinon's mind: the most wonderful thing about genius is the way in which it reaches its ends blindfold, without being able to remember or even to perceive a single step of the road, like the cat who may be carried in a bag to the utmost ends of the earth, and yet will find the quickest and straightest way back again to those who flattered themselves that they were rid of her for ever.

But

Most certainly Gideon did know this-that Mr. Sinon, had he known the true state of things, would not only have refused him the hundred pounds, but would have had absolutely nothing to do with him, even as a jackal. He knew perfectly well that they were laughing at him behind his back, as a rich amateur in business whom they could use and fleece, and who could be made to pay for everything that went wrong until all he possessed had passed into their hands or into those of friendly creditors of their own religion. he by no means, when he left the office, turned the tables by laughing at the backs of Messrs. Sinon and Aristides. It was all much too serious, and at the same time too simple and natural, for laughter even in one's sleeve. It was in the fitness of things that Greek merchants and American editors and German statesmen should unite and combine to make the fortune of Gideon Skull. For what had the Americans fought one another but to institute a profitable blockade, or at least a blockade that should have been profitable except for subsequent circumstances that genius itself could not foresee? Such mistakes were not likely to happen again. And now, as if he himself had arranged the board, there was a great war in France, an admirable system of neutrality laws in England, and a clever Greek firm at his disposal to make his fortune for him-really his fortune, at last-out of straw. If the speculation in news and Rentes failed, he could not lose; for he had nothing to lose. But it could not fail. It must succeed; and he would be a capitalist at

once, and in due time a millionaire; and-who knows?—squire of Copleston, and husband of Helen Reid.

Victor Waldron had once called him a sanguine man. And certainly it had happened only too often that his plans, since he had given up pleasure as the great purpose of life, had failed. Otherwise, he would not have been living from hand to mouth on a barren reputation for success at forty years old. But it would be hard to say that there was anything over-sanguine here. Everybody was playing into his hands.

Even some happy instinct had led him to get rid of Helen's brother, or at least to get him out of the way before he could guess, not having yet seen Helen, how important it was about to become that she should have no brother for a while. "No," he thought, "I must not produce that will, even if I could lay my hand on it this minute, till there's occasion. I should make her grateful to me all her days, and I should lose her for all mine. As long as the Reids go down and Rentes go up, I have the whip hand: but the will must be in nobody's hands but mine. I wish I could imagine what it all means; but I must do without imagining. If there's a will, and there's any flaw about it, such as the Reids and the Waldrons seem to have been in the habit of making, I shall know pretty well what to do. If there's one-I shall know any way what to do with Waldron. I think he'll be sorry not to have paid his debts, one of these days-and the longer I hold it back, the better for me and the worse for him. Helen married-out comes the will at any time; out of any old lumber-room, or wherever it might be. Let me see-I told her I'd take three days. Considering what sort of an uncle I've got, one ought to do; and a run down to Copleston won't run away with much of a hundred pounds—I shall have almost enough left to last me till it's time to send Rentes up as high as the sky. Three days! I'm hanged if I make it two."

So he turned into the next telegraph office and despatched this message:-"Skull to Sinon.-Can't come to-night. Must go and see an old uncle in the country. Back day after to-morrow if all goes well." Without putting a false word into the message, his instinct felt that Mr. Sinon would translate it into a summons to a rich death-bed. In what other sense could the word "must" and "an old uncle in the country" be possibly employed by Gideon-or by anybody else for that matter, according to Mr. Sinon's knowledge of the world? Nor would the legatee-like extravagance and haste of putting more than twenty words into the despatch be wholly thrown away.

CHAPTER XV.

In Matters Politic, better it is that we trust them that be over-bold than them that be over-wise. For the Complexion of Mars his Virtue, saith in his Book Barochus of Florens, is to guard with Heat and to be glad in his Guarding: but of wise old Saturn it is to guard with more of Heed, but yet to be sad and sorrowful therein. Wherefore if thou take a Soldier for thine Heart-fellow, it may be he will lodge thy Secrets on Caucasus his Peak where none dare climb albeit some may see them twinkle afar. But if thou take some clerkly Wight, then will he, by divers cunning Shifts and crafty Turnings, bury them as Dadalus his Man-Bull where none may see, yet shall Sir Theseus coming with his Clew find and gain the same. . . . . For the Seeker of Men's Devices climbeth not Atlas after them. But the Maze twisteth not whereof thine Enemy, though he halt never so, gathereth not the Clew hard by.

GIDEON SKULL had his share of human weaknesses, and he was far too honest a man to deny them. But Romance was not one of them. His home was not Hillswick, but the world; so his rare visits to his uncle were most healthily free from those sentimental passages in which the tumble-down church tower of the little country town in which he had played as a boy and done a great deal worse as a young man might have been expected to take part more or less prominently. Nevertheless, when he left his fly in the George Yard, there was a sort of atmosphere about Hillswick which seemed half new to him and yet half old, as if he were remembering something that had never happened. After all, there must have been some scrap of heart somewhere about his very first flirtation; and something had happened within the last eight-and-forty hours to put a ghost of life into that long-forgotten atom. As he passed down the lane that led to the rectory, he remembered how, in that very lane, nearly five-and-twenty years ago, his uncle Christopher had caught him arm-in-arm with Sally Green the carpenter's daughter, and what a storm there had been in Hillswick for a whole week after. To-night was just such a starry evening; and he wondered, as he half smiled at the thought of that scene, what might or might not have happened if Uncle Christopher had not been quite so much shocked at the sight of a young man's first evening walk with a girl, even though she was by no means pretty, and though her father was but a carpenter. Perhaps, he thought, if he and she had been well laughed at instead of preached at and scolded and made the town-talk of, things might be rather different with him now, and decidedly better for her. But, after a moment, he shrugged his shoulders at himself, and went back upon the double track of Helen Reid, almost within reach of one hand, and a good share of at least fifty thousand pounds within grasp

of the other. He had not gone near enough to a reverie to prevent him from noticing even such a common object of Hillswick as old Grimes.

"Is parson at home?" he asked, as the clerk and sexton pulled his cap to him.

"Yes, Mr. Skull," said old Grimes, whom experience and tact had taught never to be deaf with Gideon. "He'll be at home."

"Any news?"

"None but a burying to-morrow, Mr. Gideon, and a wedding next day but two."

"How do you like the Yankee squire ?" asked Gideon, in the bitter tone that never failed to come when he spoke of his old friend. "I suppose he's managed to come over you all pretty well by this time, eh ?"

come over.

"Come over, is it, Mr. Gideon? Oh yes, that's it, if gone off's I'm nigh seventy, and I never see nor hear tell of such a squire. I don't see him at all, for that matter. He's been up in Lun'on all the time he's been here. He's not pulled a bell-rope in this church ever since he's been away; and as for spending a penny in the place, he's not done it, Mr. Gideon. That's bad for trade, I say, though he can't stop the folk from marrying nor from burying. He may call himself Waldron, but it's plain Waldron aren't Reid. Old Harry Reid that I rang into the world and tolled out of it was worth twenty of Squire Waldron."

"Do you mean to tell me he doesn't live at Copleston? I came across the-him, up in town; but I never supposed he wasn't living here . . . . . So that's what wanting Copleston for the sake of the people means," thought Gideon.

"Ah, I thought when he first came grubbing and anti-quiting and perigreeing up in the steeple, he warn't writing a county history. I've halft a mind to write a county history myself out of the ratholes, to try and pick up a fortune too. There's lots more papers, if a man'ld only care to go through, and could pay me my fee-and I'd live in the place, and spend my money on it like a gentleman."

Gideon was duly welcomed by his aunts as a rich and flourishing nephew who did credit to the family, and, having relieved their minds of the terrors of hospitality by telling them he should put up at the George as usual for the few days he intended to be in Hillswick, went to look for his uncle in the study. His arrival was always governed by the same forms, down to the same precise words about their having dined early, the larder being just unluckily

empty, and the spare bed-room being just in a state of full scour. The curate was always deep in accounts, which he kept with the regularity of clock-work, and with as much inaccuracy as regularity; so, as he had perpetual arrears of the most complicated errors in shillings and halfpence to rectify, and was seldom seen but in the profoundest depths of long-division and rule-of-three, no wonder he got the character of being an excellent man of business for a clergyman.

Gideon had not seen his uncle for a considerable time, and noticed that he was looking either worried or unwell. His general air of being a sketch in outline had been increased by the addition of lines and the subtraction of such colour as he had to lose.

"And six is three-and-fivepence-halfpenny. Ah, Gideon! I'm very glad to see you, indeed. You've seen your aunts, I suppose?"

"Oh, yes. I'm taking a day or two's holiday, but I shall give no trouble I'm at the George, as usual. Hillswick's looking much the same. One doesn't see much sign of the new state of things. Why, I expected to see the High Street turned into another Broadway, and an Athenæum, and a new Church, and an Opera House, under the Yankee rule-or a new town pump, any way. I don't see a spark of enterprise; and the George fly was decidedly not new."

"I am happy to tell you, Gideon, that the exceedingly unpleasant and uncourteous American person who broke my reading lamp and nearly fractured my skull chooses to be non-resident. It is very much for the best that it should be so. It reconciles me to your choice of an American."

"Ah, yes, old Grimes, whom I met in the lane, told me he hasn't been taking much advantage of his spell of Copleston. But, as you say, all the better for a warming-pan. It's a most extraordinary story, and the more I think of it the more extraordinary it seems to be."

"Yes," said Uncle Christopher nervously, "it is very extraordinary-very strange. Mrs. Reid is a good, well-meaning woman, but I do not think she has been very considerate of Me. It is true that she has considered my flock in the future, and that ought to be enough for me; and doubtless that is the first thing to be thought of, but it is not the only thing, Gideon. It is a heavy thing for a man at my age to be made responsible for responsibilities which-which are, in fact, heavy ones. I wish she had taken you into her counsel

instead of me."

"Yes," said Gideon, "no doubt it would have been better. But she did not know me, you see, and she did know you."