and then burst out laughing, "Give us
your hand again, my Lord. You are a good fellow, that you are. And for
your sake--"

"You'll not oppose Egerton?"

"Tooth and nail, tooth and nail!" cried Dick, clapping his hands to his
ears, and fairly running out of the room.

There passed over Harley's countenance that change so frequent to
it,--more frequent, indeed, to the gay children of the world than those
of consistent tempers and uniform habits might suppose. There is many a
man whom we call friend, and whose face seems familiar to us as our own;
yet, could we but take a glimpse of him when we leave his presence, and
he sinks back into his chair alone, we should sigh to see how often the
smile on the frankest lip is but a bravery of the drill, only worn when
on parade.

What thoughts did the visit of Richard Avenel bequeath to Harley? It
were hard to define them.

In his place, an Audley Egerton would have taken some comfort from the
visit, would have murmured, "Thank Heaven! I have not to present to the
world that terrible man as my brother-in-law." But probably Harley had
escaped, in his revery, from Richard Avenel altogether. Even as the
slightest incident in the daytime causes our dreams at night, but is
itself clean forgotten, so the name, so the look of the visitor, might
have sufficed but to influence a vision, as remote from its casual
suggester as what we call real life is from that life much more real,
that we imagine, or remember, in the haunted chambers of the brain. For
what is real life? How little the things actually doing around us affect
the springs of our sorrow or joy; but the life which our dulness calls
romance,--the sentiment, the remembrance, the hope, or the fear, that
are never seen in the toil of our hands, never heard in the jargon on
our lips,--from that life all spin, as the spider from its entrails,
the web by which we hang in the sunbeam, or glide out of sight into the
shelter of home.

"I must not think," said Harley, rousing himself with a sigh, "either of
past or present. Let me hurry on to some fancied future. 'Happiest are
the marriages,' said the French philosopher, and still says many a
sage, 'in which man asks only the mild companion, and woman but the calm
protector.' I will go to Helen."

He rose; and as he was about to lock up his escritoire, he remembered
the papers which Leonard had requested him to read. He took them from
their deposit, with a careless hand, intending