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the restorer of Latinity, whose finest ancient models he rescued from destruction; the promoter of the study of Greek, and he was also a man of science. Some writers even maintain that he believed in the existence of the Antipodes before his countryman discovered them a century later, founding this assumption upon the sonnet in which he describes-

"The daylight hastening with winged steps, Perchance to gladden the expectant eyes Of far-off nations in a world remote." i

But his fame is sufficiently established without pausing to consider the probability of this supposition.

His life-long if measured by its incidents, although the number of his years was only threescore and tenwas brought to a close at Arqua on the 18th of July, 1374. He died as he had lived, in the pursuit of knowledge and in the improvement of himself and of mankind; for when his servants entered his room they found him dead, sitting in his chair, with his head bent over a book.

His personal character was of a most amiable kind. He neither desired nor despised riches. Without conceit he knew his own worth. He loved fame, but was not eager in the pursuit of it. Liberty and tranquillity were most dear to him, and in order to preserve them he refused many a dignified position, and the

1 Canz. iv.:

"che 'l di nostro vola A gente, che di là forse l' aspetta."

chance of still greater wealth and power. His habits and tastes were of a most simple nature. Adversity never disheartened him, and the influence of the court and the world never sullied his character, which was firmly established upon the basis of morality and religion. His patience was exemplary, and his vigorous memory never recalled an injury, while his anger was easily appeased. The error of his life, which he acknowledges with perfect candour in his later poetry, arose from the violence and excess of his passion for Laura, which, although it raised the tone of his moral character, absorbed him too entirely.

"Keep the choicest of thy love for God,"

says Dante (Par. xxvi.); and Petrarch knew that in the early part of his life he had not done this; but what can be more beautiful than the concluding lines of his "Epistle to Posterity"?

"And now I make my prayer to Christ, in order that He may sanctify the close of my earthly life, that He may have mercy upon me and pardon the sins of my youth, remembering them not. ... And with an earnest heart

I pray that it may please God, in His own good time, to guide my long erring and unstable thoughts; that as hitherto they have been scattered over many earthly objects, they may now be centred in Him, the One true, unchangeable, certain, and Supreme Good."

CATHERINE MARY PHILLIMORE,

A PRINCESS OF THULE.

BY WILLIAM BLACK, AUTHOR OF "THE STRANGE Adventures of A PHAETON," ETC.

CHAPTER XIX.

A NEW DAY BREAKS.

WAS this, then, the end of the fair and beautiful romance that had sprung up and blossomed so hopefully in the remote and bleak island, amid the silence of the hills and moors and the wild twilights of the north, and set round about, as it were, by the cold sea-winds and the sound of the Atlantic waves? Who could have fancied, looking at those two young folks as they wandered about the shores of the island, as they sailed on the still moonlight nights through the channels of Loch Roag, or as they sang together of an evening in the little parlour of the house at Borvabost, that all the delight and wonder of life then apparently opening out before them was so soon and so suddenly to collapse, leaving them in outer darkness and despair? All their difficulties had been got over. From one side and from another they had received generous help, friendly advice, self-sacrifice to start them on a path that seemed to be strewn with sweet-smelling flowers. And here was the end-a wretched girl, blinded and bewildered, flying from her husband's house and seeking refuge in the great world of London, careless whither she went.

Whose was the fault? Which of them had been mistaken up there in the North, laying the way open for a bitter disappointment? Or had either of them failed to carry out that unwritten contract entered into in the halcyon period of courtship, by which two young people promise to be and remain to each other all that they then appear?

Lavender, at least, had no right to complain. If the real Sheila turned

out to be something different from the Sheila of his fancy, he had been abundantly warned that such would be the case. He had even accepted it as probable, and said that as the Sheila whom he might come to know must doubtless be better than the Sheila whom he had imagined, there was little danger in store for either. He would love the true Sheila even better than the creature of his brain. Had he done so? He found beside him this proud and sensitive Highland girl, full of generous impulses that craved for the practical work of helping other people, longing, with the desire of a caged bird, for the free winds and light of heaven, the sight of hills and the sound of seas; and he could not understand why she should not conform to the usages of city life. He was disappointed that she did not do so. The imaginative Sheila, who was to appear as a wonderful Sea-princess in London drawing-rooms, had disappeared now; and the real Sheila, who did not care to go with him into that society which he loved or affected to love, he had not learned to know.

And had she been mistaken in her estimate of Frank Lavender's character? At the very moment of her leaving her husband's house, if she had been asked the question, she would have turned and proudly answered, "No!" She had been disappointed—so grievously disappointed that her heart seemed to be breaking over it; but the manner in which Frank Lavender had fallen away from all the promise he had given was due, not to himself, but to the influence of the society around him. Of that she was quite assured. He had shown himself careless, indifferent, inconsiderate to the verge of cruelty; but he was not,

she had convinced herself, consciously cruel, nor yet selfish, nor radically badhearted in any way. In her opinion, at least, he was courageously sincere, to the verge of shocking people who mistook his frankness for impudence. He was recklessly generous; he would have given the coat off his back to a beggar, at the instigation of a sudden impulse, provided he could have got into a cab before any of his friends saw him; he had rare abilities, and at times wildly ambitious dreams, not of his own glorification, but of what he would do to celebrate the beauty and the graces of the Princess whom he fancied he had married. It may seem hard of belief that this man, judging him by his actions. at this time, could have had anything of thorough self-forgetfulness and manliness in his nature. But when things were at their very worst-when he appeared to the world as a self-indulgent idler, careless of a noble woman's unbounded love-when his indifference, or worse, had actually driven from his house a young wife who had especial claims on his forbearance and consideration-there were two people who still believed in Frank Lavender. They were Sheila Mackenzie and Edward Ingram; and a man's wife and his oldest friend generally know something about his real nature, its besetting temptations, its weakness, its strength, and its possibilities.

Of course, Ingram was speedily made aware of all that had happened. Lavender went home at the appointed hour to luncheon, accompanied by his three acquaintances. He had met them accidentally in the forenoon; and as Mrs. Lorraine was most particular in her inquiries about Sheila, he thought he could not do better than ask her there and then, with her mother and Lord Arthur, to have luncheon at two. What followed on his carrying the announcement to Sheila we know. He left the house, taking it for granted that there would be no trouble when he returned. Perhaps he reproached himself for having spoken so sharply; but Sheila was really very thoughtless in such matters.

At two o'clock everything would be right. Sheila must see how it would be impossible to introduce a young Highland serving-maid to two fastidious ladies and the son of a great Conservative peer.

Lavender met his three friends once more and walked up to the house with them, letting them in, indeed, with his own latch-key. Passing the diningroom, he saw that the table was laid there. This was well. Sheila had been reasonable.

They went upstairs to the drawingroom. Sheila was not there. Lavender rang the bell, and bade the servant tell her mistress she was wanted.

"Mrs. Lavender has gone out, sir," said the servant.

"Oh, indeed," he said, taking the matter quite coolly. "When?"

"A quarter of an hour ago, sir. She went out with the-the young lady who came this morning."

"Very well. Let me know when luncheon is ready."

Lavender turned to his guests, feeling a little awkward, but appearing to treat the matter in a light and humorous way. He imagined that Sheila, resenting what he had said, had resolved to take Mairi away, and find her lodgings elsewhere. Perhaps that might be done in time to let Sheila come back to receive his guests.

Sheila did not appear, however, and luncheon was announced.

"I suppose we may as well go down," said Lavender, with a shrug of his shoulders. "It is impossible to say when she may come back. She is such a good-hearted creature that she would never think of herself or her own affairs in looking after this girl from Lewis."

They went down stairs, and took their places at the table.

"For my part," said Mrs. Lorraine, "I think it is very unkind not to wait for poor Mrs. Lavender. She may come in dreadfully tired and hungry."

"But that would not vex her so much as the notion that you had waited on her account," said Sheila's husband,

with a smile; and Mrs. Lorraine was pleased to hear him sometimes speak in a kindly way of the Highland girl whom he had married.

Lavender's guests were going somewhere after luncheon, and he had half promised to go with them, Mrs. Lorraine stipulating that Sheila should be induced to come also. But when luncheon was over, and Sheila had not appeared, he changed his intention. He would remain at home. He saw his three friends depart, and went into the study, and lit a cigar.

How odd the place seemed! Sheila had left no instructions about the removal of those barbaric decorations she had placed in the chamber; and here, around him, seemed to be the walls of the old-fashioned little room at Borvabost, with its big shells, its peacocks' feathers, its skins, and stuffed fish, and masses of crimson bell-heather. Was there not, too, an odour of peat-smoke in the air?-and then his eye caught sight of the plate that still stood on the window-sill, with the ashes of the burned peat on it.

"The odd child she is!" he thought, with a smile, "to go playing at grottomaking, and trying to fancy she was up in Lewis again. I suppose she would like to let her hair down again, and take off her shoes and stockings, and go wading along the sand in search of shell-fish."

And then, somehow, his fancies went back to the old time when he had first seen and admired her wild ways, her fearless occupations by sea and shore, and the delight of active work that shone on her bright face and in her beautiful eyes. How lithe and handsome her figure used to be, in that blue dress, when she stood in the middle of the boat, her head bent back, her arms upstretched and pulling at some rope or other, and all the fine colour of exertion in the bloom of her cheeks! Then the pride with which she saw her little vessel cutting through the water-how she tightened her lips with a joyous determination as the sheets were hauled close and the gunwale of the small boat

heeled over so that it almost touched the hissing and gurgling foam-how she laughed at Duncan's anxiety as she rounded some rocky point, and sent the boat spinning into the clear and smooth waters of the bay! Perhaps, after all, it was too bad to keep the poor child so long shut up in a city. She was evidently longing for a breath of sea-air, and for some brief dash of that brisk, fearless life on the sea-coast that she used to love. It was a happy life, after all; and he had himself enjoyed it, when his hands and face got browned by the sun, when he grew to wonder how any human being could wear black garments and drink foreign wines, and smoke cigars at eighteenpence apiece, so long as frieze coats, whisky, and a briarroot pipe were procurable. How one slept up in that remote island, after all the laughing, and drinking, and singing of the evening were over! How sharp was the monition of hunger when the keen sea-air blew about your face on issuing out in the morning; and how fresh, and cool, and sweet was that early breeze, with the scent of Sheila's flowers in it! Then the long, bright day at the river-side, with the black pools rippling in the wind, and in the silence the rapid whistle of the silken line through the air, with now and again the "blob " of a big salmon rising to a fly farther down the pool. Where was there any rest like the rest of the mid-day luncheon, when Duncan had put the big fish, wrapped in rushes, under the shadow of the nearest rock, when you sat down on the warm heather, and lit your pipe, and began to inquire where you had been bitten on hands and neck by the ferocious "clegs" while you were too busy in playing a fifteen pounder to care. Then, perhaps, as you were sitting there in the warm sunlight, with all the fresh scents of the moorland around, you would hear a light footstep on the soft moss; and, turning round, here was Sheila herself, with a bright look in her pretty eyes, and a half blush on her cheek, and a friendly inquiry as to the way the fish had been behaving. Then the beautiful, strange,

cool evenings on the shores of Loch Roag, with the wild, clear light still shining in the northern heavens, and the sound of the waves getting to be lonely and distant; or, still later, out in Sheila's boat, with the great yellow moon rising up over Suainabhal and Mealasabhal into a lambent vault of violet sky; a pathway of quivering gold lying across the loch; a mild radiance glittering here and there on the spars of the small vessel, and, out there, the great Atlantic lying still and distant as in a dream. As he sat in this little room and thought of all these things, he grew to think he had not acted quite fairly to Sheila. She was so fond of that beautiful island-life; and she had not even visited the Lewis since her marriage.

She should go now. He would abandon that trip to the Tyrol; and as soon as arrangements could be made, they would together start for the north, and some day soon find themselves going up the steep shore to Sheila's home, with the old King of Borva standing in the porch of the house, and endeavouring to conceal his nervousness by swearing at Duncan's method of carrying the luggage.

Had not Sheila's stratagem succeeded? That pretty trick of hers, in decorating the room so as to resemble the house at Borvabost, had done all that she could have desired. But where was she? Lavender rose hastily, and looked at his watch. Then he rang the bell, and

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left Lewis, and in which her father's portrait had been somewhat rudely set. Just after their marriage, Lavender had taken out this portrait, touched it up a bit into something of a better likeness, and put it back; and then she had persuaded him to have a photograph of himself coloured and placed on the opposite side. This locket, open and showing both portraits, she had fixed on to a small stand, and, in ordinary circumstances, it always stood on one side of her dressing-table. The stand was there; the locket was gone.

He went down stairs again. The afternoon was drawing on. A servant came to ask him at what hour he wished to dine; he bade her wait till her mistress came home, and consult her. Then he went out.

It was a beautiful, quiet afternoon, with a warm light from the west shining over the now yellowing trees of the squares and gardens. He walked down towards Notting Hill Gate Station, endeavouring to convince himself that he was not perturbed, and yet looking somewhat anxiously at the cabs that passed. People were now coming out from their business in the city, by train, and omnibus, and hansom; and they seemed to be hurrying home in very good spirits, as if they were sure of the welcome awaiting them there. Now and again you would see a meeting-some demure young person, who had been furtively watching the railway-station, suddenly showing a brightness in her face, as she went forward to shake hands with some new arrival, and then tripping briskly away with him, her hand on his arm. There were men carrying home fish in small bags, or baskets of fruit-presents to their wives, doubtless, from town. Occasionally an open carriage would go by, containing one grave and elderly gentleman and a group of small girls-probably his daughters, who had gone into the city to accompany their papa homeward. Why did these scenes and incidents, cheerful in themselves, seem to him to be somehow saddening, as he walked vaguely on? He knew, at least, that there was little

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