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don't know how I shall tell you. I don't indeed. But I must.' Then, in a voice harsh with pain, Child, I have made a mistake,' he cried. 'I am wrong, I was wrong, I have been wrong from the beginning. God help me! And God help us all!'

The elder woman broke into frightened weeping. The younger grew pale and paler: grew presently white to the lips. Still her eyes met his, and did not flinch. 'Is it-about our case?' she whispered.

'Yes! Oh, my dear, will you ever forgive me?'

'About my birth?'

He nodded.

'I am not Julia Soane? Is that it?'

He nodded again.

'Not a Soane-at all?'

'No; God forgive me, no!'

She continued to hold the weeping woman's hand in hers, and to look at him; but for a long minute, she seemed not even to breathe. Then in a voice that, notwithstanding the effort she made, sounded harsh in his ears, 'Tell me all,' she muttered. suppose you have found something!"

'I

'I have,' he said. He looked old, and worn, and shabby; and was at once the surest and the saddest corroboration of his own tidings. 'Two days ago I found, by accident, in a church at Bristol, the death certificate of the-of the child.'

'Julia Soane?'

'Yes.'

'But then-who am I?' she asked, her eyes growing wild: the world was turning, turning with her.

'Her husband,' he answered, nodding towards Mrs. Masterson, 'adopted a child in place of the dead one, and said nothing. Whether he intended to pass it off for the child entrusted to him, I don't know. He never made any attempt to do so. Perhaps,' the lawyer continued drearily, he had it in his mind, and when the time came his heart failed him.'

'And I am that child?'

Mr. Fishwick looked away guiltily, passing his tongue over his lips. He was the picture of shame and remorse.

'Yes,' he said. Your father and mother were French. He was a teacher of French at Bristol, his wife French from Canterbury. No relations are known.'

'My name?' she asked, smiling piteously.

'Paré,' he said, spelling it. And he added, 'They call it Parry.' She looked round the room in a kind of terror, not unmixed with wonder. To that room they had retired to review their plans on their first arrival at the Castle Inn-when all smiled on them. Thither they had fled for refuge after the brush with Lady Dunborough and the rencontre with Sir George. To that room she had betaken herself in the first flush and triumph of Sir George's suit; and there, surrounded by the same objects on which she now gazed, she had sat, rapt in rosy visions, through the live-long day preceding her abduction. Then she had been a gentlewoman, an heiress, the bride in prospect of a gallant gentleman. Now?

What wonder that, as she looked round in dumb misery, recognising these things, her eyes grew wild again; or that the shrinking lawyer expected an outburst. It came, but from another quarter. The old woman rose and, trembling, pointed a palsied finger at him. 'Yo' eat your words!' she said. 'Yo' eat your words and seem to like them. But didn't yo' tell me no farther back than this day five weeks that the law was clear? Didn't yo' tell me it was certain? Yo' tell me that!'

'I did! God forgive me,' Mr. Fishwick murmured from the depths of his abasement.

'Didn't yo' tell me fifty times, and fifty times to that, that the case was clear?' the old woman continued relentlessly. 'That there were thousands and thousands to be had for the asking? And her right besides, that no one could cheat her of, no more than me of the things my man left me?'

'I did! God forgive me,' the lawyer said.

'But yo' did cheat me!' she continued with quavering insistence, her withered face faintly pink. Where is the home yo' ha' broken up? Where are the things my man left me? Where's the bit that should ha' kept me from the parish? Where's the fifty-two pounds yo' sold all for and ha' spent on us, living where's no place for us, at our betters' table? Yo' ha' broken my heart! Yo' ha' laid up sorrow and suffering for the girl that is dearer to me than my heart. Yo' ha' done all that, and yo' can come to me smoothly, and tell me yo' ha' made a mistake. You are a rogue, and, what may be is worse, I mistrust me yo' are a fool!'

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'Mother! mother!' the girl cried.

'He is a fool!' the old woman repeated, eyeing him with a

dreadful sternness. Or he would ha' kept his mistake to himself. Who knows of it? Or why should he be telling them? 'Tis for them to find out, not for him! Yo' call yourself a lawyer? Yo' are a fool!' And she sat down in a palsy of senile passion. Yo' are a fool! And yo' ha' ruined us!'

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Mr. Fishwick groaned, but made no reply. He had not the spirit to defend himself. But Julia, as if all through which she had gone since the day of her reputed father's death had led her to this point, only that she might show the stuff of which she was wrought, rose to the emergency.

'Mother,' she said firmly, her hand resting on the older woman's shoulder, you are wrong-you are quite wrong. He would have ruined us indeed, he would have ruined us hopelessly and for ever, if he had kept silence! He has never been so good a friend to us as he has shown himself to-day, and I thank him for his courage. And I honour him!' She held out her hand to Mr. Fishwick, who having pressed it, his face working ominously, retired to the window.

'But, my deary, what will yo' do?' Mrs. Masterson cried peevishly. He ha' ruined us!'

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'What I should have done if we had never made this mistake,' Julia answered bravely; though her lip trembled and her face was white, and in her heart she knew that hers was but a mockery of courage, that must fail her the moment she was alone. We are but fifty pounds worse than we were.'

'Fifty pounds!' the old woman cried, aghast. 'Yo' talk easily of fifty pounds. And, Lord knows, it is soon spent here. But where will yo' get another?'

'Well, well,' the girl answered patiently, that is true. Yet we must make the best of it. Let us make the best of it,' she continued, appealing to them bravely, yet with tears in her voice. 'We are all losers together. Let us bear it together. I have lost most,' she continued, her voice trembling. Fifty pounds? Oh, God! what was fifty pounds to what she had lost. But perhaps I deserve it. I was too ready to leave you, mother. I was too ready to-to take up with new things and-and richer things, and forget those who had been kin to me and kind to me all my life. Perhaps this is my punishment. You have lost your all, but that we will get again. And our friend here-he, too, has lost.'

Mr. Fishwick, standing, dogged and downcast, by the window, did not say what he had lost, but his thoughts went to his old

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mother at Wallingford and the empty stocking, and the weekly letters he had sent her for a month past, letters full of his golden prospects, and the great case of Soane v. Soane, and the grand things that were to come of it. What a home-coming was now in store for him, his last guinea spent, his hopes wrecked, and Wallingford to be faced !

There was a brief silence. Mrs. Masterson sobbed querulously, or now and again uttered a wailing complaint: the other two stood sunk in bitter retrospect. Presently, 'What must we do?' Julia asked in a faint voice. “I mean, what step must we take? Will you let them know?'

'I will see them,' Mr. Fishwick answered, wincing at the note of pain in her voice. 'I-I was sent for this morning, for twelve o'clock. It is a quarter to eleven now.'

She looked at him, startled, a spot of red in each cheek. We must go away,' she said hurriedly, 'while we have money. Can we do better than return to Oxford ?'

The attorney felt sure that at the worst Sir George would do something for her : that Mrs. Masterson need not lament for her fifty pounds. But he had the delicacy to ignore this. I don't know,' he said mournfully. 'I dare not advise. You'd be sorry, Miss Julia-anyone would be sorry who knew what I have gone through. I've suffered—I can't tell you what I have sufferedthe last twenty-four hours ! I shall never have any opinion of myself again. Never!'

Julia sighed. “We must cut a month out of our lives,' she murmured. But it was something else she meant—a month out of her heart !

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(To be concluded.)

THE

CORNHILL MAGAZINE.

OCTOBER 1898.

FIGHTS FOR THE FLAG.

BY THE REV. W. H. FITCHETT,

AUTHOR OF "DEEDS THAT WON THE EMPIRE.'

What is the flag of England ? Winds of the world declare l-KIPLING.

X.'

FAMOUS CAVALRY CHARGES.

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No rational man to-day cares to reflect much on that historical tragedy known as the Crimean War. In that war Great Britain expended the lives of 24,000 brave men, and added 41,000,0001. to her national debt, with no other result than that of securing to 'the unspeakable Turk’a new opportunity of misgoverning some of the fairest lands in the world—an opportunity which made possible the Armenian horrors. As a matter of fact, the Crimean War only secured a truce of some twenty-two years in the secular quarrel between Russia and Turkey, and it was scarcely worth while spending so much for so little.

In the black sky of that mismanaged war there gleams only one star. History can show nothing to exceed, and not much to equal, the quenchless fortitude, the steadfast loyalty to the flag, the heroic daring of the men and officers who kept watch in the trenches round Sebastopol. The Crimean War created only one military reputation—that of Todleben, the great Russian engineer who defended Sebastopol—but it has enriched British military

| Copyright by the Rev. W. H. Fitchett. All rights reserved. VOL, V.—NO. 28, N.S.

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