CHAPTER XII.—CONTINUED.

Waikato Times, Volume IV, Issue 220, 7 October 1873, Page 3

CHAPTER XII. —CONTINUED.

The sisters-in-law hud to endure their uncertainty. Mr dint did not come home t<> luncheon, anil ]tfr St Quentin found Miriam in a very absent nad unsatisfactory state ot mind. There was no evening engagement on liund, and Mr ■t>t Quentin had not beea incited to dinner bj Iw>r father, so that Miriam had to contemplate a solitan evening with Mr Clint. Her miad wm unusunlly full of Walter, and she, for the first timt, ipoke of him freely to Mr St Quentin. She was not quite pleated with hii manner of receiving v\ hat the said. There wu a decided absence of sympathy about it, a disposition to interpolate florid compliments to herself, into her account of the affection which had always subsisted between her and her brother, and no alacrity to echo her conviction that her father had been entirely to blame, and Walter almost blameless, in the unfortunate rupture between them. Miriam waa disgusted by this, but not alarmed. Old men were so na-row and eg)tisiical, she thought; it was like the sour-grape attitude ot mind which they assume when youth has departed from them, to lean heavily on the faults of young men, and ignore their temptations j and, no doubt, her father had taken pains to imbue Mr St Quentin with his ideas respecting Walter. This was the only point on which Miriam was mistaken. Her future husband was e\en more narrow and egotistical than she believed him to be, but he had receired no confidences from Mr Chut. The reserve ! *nd coldness with which he listened to Miriam, were the genuine expre'i on of his own unassisted sentiments, and a prudent though silent notfiication of his intention to stand aloof from the Clint family affairs. In popular phruse, he meant to marry her, and not her family. I Never mind,' thought Miriam : ' he is under papa's influence now; but when we are away from him, he will be under mine, and he shall be interested in Walter. One thing is clear; if papa has any real suspicion, he has not imparted it to Mr St Quentin.' A little blunder, destined to produce & large result! Dinner passed orer, without anything) baring occurred .either to relieve Miriam's mind or to confirm her fears; but, just as she was about to make her escape, and join Florence, Tier father addressed her. ' Miriam, I want to ask you a question. I hops you will tell me the truth.' I 1 always do tell you the truth, papa.' ' Perhaps so. It will be for your own interest, and other people's, if you tell me the truth now. Have you had any letter from your brother since he left England ?' ' I hare not.' 1 Had you heard from him shortly before he left ?' 1 The only letter I had had from Walter for six months ■was the one I shewed you, by his desire.' fc' And —now attend' to me, and tal* my assurance thot (you are likely to do your brother a very great injury, (if jou mislead me —in any letter which you received from him previously, did he mention to you any entanglement into which he had gotten himself 9 Did he confide in you any intention of marriage? Did he ever allude to the daughter of the person in whose house he lodged, a girl of the name of Reeve ?' Miriam's heart was beating loud and fast. She glanced at her father's stern, frowning, discontented face as she thought: ' Shall I risk all, and tell him ? Have I any right to do so?' But however the swift impulse of the minute might have decided the second question, the face she looked at decided the first in the negative. She dared not tell her father the truth ; a horrid vision of Florence turned out, destitute, and insulted, flashed, with the hesitation, across her. She replied, in the steadiest voice she could muster to the fortunate form in which Mr Clint bad put bis questions. ' Walter never told me of any entanglement. He never alluded, to me, to any intention of marriage. He never mentioned any girl's name to me.' Her father looked at her sternly while she was speaking, but she kept her countenence well". ' What address did your brother give you for your letters to him, f after he left his lodgings in Thirl wall Crescent?' 'He |never gave me any other address. I did not know he had left them, until I got his last letter.' 'He had not lived there for a year previously,' said Mr Clint. ' Indeed,' replied Miriam. 1 That will do : you may go now. I had a reason, which it is unnecessary to explain, for asking you these questions. If ever I discover that you have answered them falsely, it will be so much the worse for you. For your brother, it cannot make much difference.' Miriam left the room promptly, and burst into tears on the stairs. She paused to recover herself before «he entered her own room, where she expected to find Florence, in order that she might not alarm her by her agitation. Her mind was in a whirl, but the uttermost feeling was exultation at having kept Walter's counsel, and also at the nearness and certainty of her emancipation. When she had recovered herself she went into her room, and there •he found Florence looking very pale and ill. She related all th»t had paste* between her father and herself, but, though it confirmed them in the fear which Mr Clint's ▼isit to the house in Thirlwall Crescent had awakened, it left them in entire ignorance of the origin and extent of his information. ' There's nothing to be done,' said Miriam, ' except to keep resolute silence, and go on in the most cautious way possible. For the few days we shall remain now in London, you had better go out as little as possible, as papa must have gotten a clue from some one, and it is possible that you might be seen and recognised. I wonder we never thought of that danger before. What could have been more unlikely than that we should have seen papa at Thirwall Crescent, and yet we did see him ' Florence gladly assented, and then they talked the matter over again, each making herself more than ever uneasy and alarmed iv the process. The next day Miriam had recourse to the good offices of the lady of the house in which they were lodging in the matter of her shopping, as her maid had a bad cold, and could not go out. ' Has anything happened ?' was Miriam's eager question to Florence, on her return. • Nothing alarming; only that I have seen more of your father to-day than in all the time since we have been in London. He has been ill again, threatened with gout, I fancy, and spnt for me shortly after you went out.' ' Was there anything remarkable in his manner ?' ' No, nothing. He seemed to be in very low spirits, and was perfsotly civil to me—indeed, for him, really kind. You may imagined how frightened I was, and I suppose I looked ill, for he noticed my being very pale, and said he believed London disagreed with me as much as •with him, and wished we were all out of it.' Nothing more occurred to alarm Miriam and Florence; Mr GJint continued ailing, and they left London a few days sooner than they had intended in consequence. Mr St Quentin did not accompany them. He was to arrive at the Firs on Christmas eve, and the wedding, which was to be of the quietest description, was to take place at Drington Church on New-year's Day. He took leave of his betrothed at the railway station with perfect propriety and acjpft real feeling. Miriam was rather pleased to find that sS$ did not experience any sensation of relief and pleenre at getting rid of him. It augured well, she thought, for her not finding him a drawback to the comfort of her life in the future. There was not mnoh comfort in her life in the present, except in such part of it as sbe passed with Mrs Cooke. Mr Clint was apparently bent on indemnifying himself for the oanaession he bad made to propriety by his visit to London, by additional moroseness and violence, and he was decidedly not well. Her father's looks did not particularly interest Miriam, but she noticed them, urgedby Florence, and thought them bad. Mrs Ritchie commented to her mistress npon the change, observing that master was all gone away to nothing like, and how it was the general experience of the household that his temper was uncommon short. The interval before Miriam's marriage passed over. Mr St Quentin arrived duly on Christmas eve, and took up his abode with Mr and Mrs Cooke—having succeeded in effecting a restoration of external civilities between the parsonage and the Firs. He brought Miriam a wedding present of very fine and tastefully selected jewels, and his demeameanour was unexceptionable. Mr St Quentin had endured an English winter, during its milder half, very well, but he had no intention of exposing himself to the rigours of the first five months of the new year, and had therefore arranged to takj his bride abroad immediately after their marriage. The hour for the wedding w»s an unuonally early one, in order to enable the happy pair to cross from Dover to Calais on. the same day. Th« first pay of the new year dawned, cold, frosty, but bright. Florence dressed Miriam in her bridal garments with a heavy heart, but with her usual quite alacrity. Miriam looked very beautiful on her wedding morning, and quite composed. The party assembled to witness the ceremony was small, but the church was crowded with the Tillage people. The bridegroom was not so oompletely a secondary object of popular curiosity in this case as bridegrooms generally are. Everybody wanted to see him; and everybody was surprised when he or she did us him. Here was nor • fe«ble old age tottering to the altar to unite itself to mercenary and unblushing youth,' as the prospective union had been characterised in certain circlet of the neighborhood. Here was an up'-ight, remarkably well-looking, perfectly dressed, elegantlooking man, whom no one in the church would believe to be a day over fifty—how could poople be so absurd as to say he was u old as the bride's fathe-! —all devotion and gallantry to the bride. Certainly the was very young and pretty, but she was uncommonly lucky too. The marriage became popular on the- spot;. Miriam was becomingly nervous, but for all that, elated nnd happy ; and as she pnsvil through the crate* on her way buck to the Firs, she looked out of the carnage-window eagerly. 'Not a regn-tl'ul (?la.noe, I trust 5< said the bridegroom, pressing the (i»yd which kp held tenderly.

' 0 dear, no,' laid Miriam. 'I vu just wondering whether toy one Jin the world who had hred so long in anj place, erer felt ho delighted to get away from it, for erer, as I do !' The wedding breakfast was over, the few guests were longing to be off, the travelling-carnage wae at the door, and Mn St Quentin wai supposed to be elmnging her dress. Sho was really locked in the arms of her mind, who was alto ready for the journey, nnd li»te»ing to her entreaties that she would be very careful and cautioui in her demeanor to her ; that the would remember she must expect Mr Ht Quentin to behave to her at to any ordmnry (errant ; and alto to the delightful n««i tlmt, while Miriam was at the church, the morning j>oit had brought Florence a letter from Walter.

It it well know that leather articlei, kept in stables, loon become brittle in consequence of ammoniacal exhalation!, which affect both harness hanging up in such Localities and the shoes of those who frequent them. The usual applications of grease are not al wa) s sufficient to meet this difficulty ; but it is said that by adding to them a small quantity of glycerine the leather will be kept continually in a soft and pliable condition. '1 he most polished man in Now York just now ia a drygoods merchant whose wife undertook to bathe him all orer with balsam for the rheumatism. After the job was well done she looked at the label of the bottle, and found it was furniture polish she had been using.