in order to escape the rack and stake, to hide the light of his
great wisdom, not beneath a bushel, but beneath a dunghill;
the age in which the Romish Church had made marriage a
legalised tyranny, and the laity, by a natural and pardonable
revulsion, had exalted adultery into a virtue and a science?
That all love was lust; that all women had their price; that
profligacy, though an ecclesiastical sin, was so pardonable, if
not necessary, as to be hardly a moral sin, were notions which
Eustace must needs have gathered from the hints of his pre-
ceptors; for their written works bear to this day fullest and
foulest testimony that such was their opinion; and that their
conception of the relation of the sexes was really not a whit
higher than that of the profligate laity who confessed to them.
He longed to marry Rose Salterne, with a wild selfish fury;
but only that he might be able to claim her as his own property,
and keep all others from her. Of her as a co-equal and en-
nobling helpmate; as one in whose honour, glory, growth of heart
and soul, his own were inextricably wrapt up, he had never
dreamed. Marriage would prevent God from being angry with
that, with which otherwise He might be angry; and. therefore
the sanction of the Church was the more "probable and safe"
course. But as yet his suit was in very embryo. He could not
even tell whether Rose knew of his love; and he wasted miser-
able hours in maddening thoughts, and tost all night upon his
sleepless bed, and rose next morning fierce and pale, to invent
fresh excuses for going over to her uncle's house, and lingering
about the fruit which he dared not snatch.

"I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honour more."-- LOVELACE.

AND what all this while has become of the fair breaker of so
many hearts, to whom I have not yet even introduced my
readers?

She was sitting in the little farm-house beside the mill,
buried in the green depths of the Valley of Combe, half-way
between Stow and Chapel, sulking as much as her sweet nature
would let her, at being thus shut out from all the grand doings
at Bideford, and forced to keep a Martinmas Lent in that far

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