as well as his person drove Becket wild. He spoke of the Bishop of London as an Ahitophel and a Doeg.

Your letter (he replied to him) is like a scorpion with a sting in its tail. You profess obedience to me, and to avoid obedience you appeal to the pope. Little will you gain by it. You have no feeling for me, or for the Church, or for the king, whose soul is perishing. You blame me for threatening him. What father will see his son go astray and hesitate to restrain that son? Who will not use the rod that he may spare the sword? The ship is in the storm: I am at the helm, and you bid me sleep. To him who speaks thus to me I reply, Get thee behind me, Satan!' The king, you say, desires to do what is right. My clergy are banished, my possessions are taken from me, the sword hangs over my neck. Do you call this right? Tell the king that the Lord of men and angels has established two powers, princes and priests-the first earthly, the second spiritual; the first to obey, the second to command. He who breaks this order breaks the ordinance of God. Tell him it is no dishonor to him to submit to those to whom God himself defers, calling them gods in the sacred writings. For thus he speaks: 'I have said ye are gods;' and again, I will make thee a god unto Pharaoh;''Thou shalt take nothing from the gods' (i.e. the priests).

The king may not judge his judges; the lips of the priest shall keep wisdom. It is written, Thou shalt require the law at his mouth, for he is the angel of God.'

The Catholic Church would have had but a brief career in this world if the rulers of it had been so wild of mind as this astonishing martyr of Canterbury. The air-bubble, when blown the fullest and shining the brightest, is nearest to collapsing into a drop of dirty water. John of Salisbury, sympathising with him and admiring him as he generally did, saw clearly that the pope could never sanction so preposterous an attitude. I have little trust in the Church of Rome,' he said. 'I know the ways of it and the needs of it too well. So greedy, so dishonest are the Romans, that they use too often the license of

power, and take dispensations to grant what they say is useful to the commonwealth, however fatal it may be to religion.'

The first practical effect of the excommunication was the recoil of the blow upon the archbishop's entertainers. In the shelter of a Cistercian abbey in France, an English subject was committing treason and levying war against his sovereign and his country. A chapter of the Cistercian Order was held in September. King Henry sent a message to the general, that, if his abbot continued to protect Becket, the Cistercians in England would be suppressed, and their property confiscated. The startled general did not dare to resist; a message was sent to Pontigny; in the fluttered dovecote it was resolved that Becket must go, and it was a cruel moment to him. A fresh asylum was provided for him at Sens. But he had grown accustomed to Pontigny, and had led a pleasant life there. On his first arrival he had attempted asceticisms, but his health had suffered, and his severities had been relaxed. He was out of spirits at his departure. His tears were The abbot cheered him up, laughed at his dejection, and told him there was nothing in his fate so particularly terrible. Becket said that he had dreamt the night before that he was to be martyred. Martyrdom!' laughed the abbot; what has a man who eats and drinks like you to do with martyrdom? The cup of wine which you drink has small affinity with the cup of martyrdom.' 'I confess,' said Becket, that I indulge in pleasures of the flesh. Yet the good God has deigned to reveal my fate to me.'

flowing.

Sad at heart, the archbishop removed to Sens; yet if the pope' stood firm, all might yet be well.-The Nineteenth Century.

CHAPTER XXII.

AT HOME.

It was still early, and Stanton, so easygoing and leisurely a house, was not yet astir when Geoff got home. Hours of sunshine and morning light are over cven in August before seven o'clock, which was the earliest hour at which Lady Stanton's servants, who were all "so kind" to her, began to stir. They kept earlier hours at Penninghame, where Geoff managed to get a dog-cart, with an inquisitive driver, who recognised, and would fain have discovered what brought him from home at that hour. The young man, however, first took leave of his little companion, whom he deposited safely at the door of the old hall, which was already open, and where they parted with mutual vows of reliance and faith in each other. These vows, however, were not exchanged by the hall-gate, but in a shady corner of the chase, where the two young creatures paused for a mo

ment.

"You will trust me that I will do everything for him, as if he had been my own father?" said Geoff, eagerly.

Lilias was less easily contented, as was natural, and replied with some hesitation :

"I would rather it was me; I would rather find out everything, and bring him home," she said.

"But Lily, what could you do? while you see I know a great deal already," Geoff said. It was a bargain not altogether satisfactory to the little woman, who was thus condemned, as so many grown women have been, to wait indefinitely for the action of another, in a matter so deeply interesting to herself.

Lilias looked at him wistfully, with an anxious curve over her eyebrows, and a quiver in her mouth. The tenison of suspense had begun for her, which is one of the hardest burdens of a woman. Oh, if she could but have gone herself, not waiting for any one, to the old woman on the hill! It was true the mountains were very lonely, and the relief of meeting Geoff had been intense;

and though she had not gone half way, or nearly so much, her limbs were aching with the unusual distance; but yet to be tired, and lonely, and frightened is nothing, as Lilias felt, [to this waiting, which might never come to an end. And already the ease and comfort and sudden relief with which she had leant upon Geoff's understanding and sympathy had evaporated a little, leaving behind only the strange story about her father, the sudden discovery of trouble and sorrow which had startled her almost into womanhood out of childhod. She looked up into Geoff's face very wistfullyvery eagerly; her eyes dilated, and gleaming with that curve over them which once indented in young brows so seldom altogether disappears again.

"Oh, Mr. Geoff!" she said, "but papa is not your papa: and you will perhaps have other things to do: or-perhaps-you will forget. But me, I shall be always thinking. I will never forget," said the little girl.

"And neither will I forget, my little Lily!" he cried. He too was nervous and tremulous with excitement and fatigue. He stooped towards her, holding her hands. Give me a kiss, Lily, and I

will never forget."

The day before she would not have thought much of that infantile salutation and she put up her soft cheek readily enough, with the child's simple habit; but when the two faces touched, a flood of color came over both, scorching Lilias, as it seemed, with a sense of shame which bewildered her, which she did not understand. She drew back hastily, with a sudden cry. Sympathy, or some other feeling still more subtle and incomprehensible, made Geoff's young countenance flame too. He looked at her with a tenderness that brought the tears to his eyes.

"You are only a child," he said, hastily, apologetically; "and I suppose I am not much more, as people say," he added, with a little broken laugh. Then, after a pause-" But Lily, we will never forget that we have met this morning; and what one of us does will be for both

of us; and you will always think of me as I shall always think of you. Is it a bargain, Lily?"

Always!" said the little girl, very solemnly; and she gave him her hand again which she had drawn away, and her other cheek; and this time the kiss got accomplished solemnly, as if it had been a religious ceremony on both sides -which indeed, perhaps, in one way or another it was.

When Geoff felt himself carried rapidly after this, behind a fresh country horse, with the inquisitive ruddy countenance of Robert Gill from the "Penninghame Arms" by his side, along the margin of Penninghame Water towards his home, there was a thrill and tremor in him which he could not quite account for. By the time he had got half way home, however, he had begun to believe that the tremor meant nothing more than a nervous uncertainty as to how he should get into Stanton, and in what state of abject terror he might find his Even to his own unsophisticated mind, the idea of being out all night had an alarming and disreputable sound; and probably Lady Stanton had been devoured by all manner of terrors. The perfectly calm aspect of the house, however, comforted Geoff; no one seemed stirring, except in the lower regions of the house, where the humblest of its inhabitants-the servants' servants-were preparing for their superiors.

Geoff dismissed his dog-cart outside the gates, leaving upon the mind of Robert Gill a very strong certainty that the young lord was a wild one, like them that went before him," and had been upon "no good gait."

"Folks don't stay out all night, and creep into th' house through a side door, as quiet as pussy, for good," said the rural sage, with perfect reasonableness.

As for Geoff, he stole up through the shrubberies to reconnoitre the house and see where he could most easily make an entrance, with a half-comic sense of vagabondism; a man who behaved so ought to be guilty. But he was greatly surprised to see the library window through which he had come out on the previous night wide open; and yet more surprised to hear, at the sound of his own cautious footstep on the gravel, a still more cautious movement within, and to

descry the kindly countenance of Mr. Tritton, his tutor, with a red nose and red eyes as from want of sleep, looking out with great precaution.

Mr. Tritton's anxious countenance lighted up at sight of him. He came to the window very softly, but with great eagerness, to admit Geoff, and threw himself upon his pupil. "Where have you

been-where have you been? But thank God you have come back," he cried, in a voice which was broken by agitation.

Geoff could not but laugh, serious as he had been before. Good Mr. Tritton had a dressing-gown thrown over his evening toilet of the previous night; his white tie was all rumpled and disreputable. He had caught a cold, poor good man, with the open window, and sneezed even as he received his prodigal; his nose was red, and so were his eyes, which watered half with cold, half with emotion.

"Oh, my dear Geoff," he cried, with a shiver: "what is the cause of this? I have spent a most unhappy night. What can be the cause of it? But thank God you have come back; and if I can keep it from the knowledge of her ladyship, I will." Then, though he was so tired and so serious, Geoff could not but laugh.

"Have you been sitting up for me? How good of you! and what a cold you have got!" he said, struggling between mirth and gratitude. mirth and gratitude. "Have you kept it from my mother? But I have been doing no harm, master. You need not look at me so anxiously. I have been walking almost all the night, and doing no harm."

"My dear Geoff! I have been very uneasy, of course. You never did anything of the kind before. Walking all night! you must be dead tired; but that is secondary, quite secondary if you can really assure me, on your honor--" said the anxious tutor, looking at him, with his little white whiskers framing his ittle red face, more like a good little old woman than ever, and with a look of the most anxious scrutiny in his watery eyes. Mr. Tritton was very virtuous and very particular in his own bachelorly person, and there had crept upon him besides something of the feminine fervor of anxiety about his charge, which was in the air of this feminine and motherly house.