nce remarked that, if some keen American lawyer would
really put his mind to the evasion of the Ten Commandments, the High
Heavens themselves might be cheated. This saying would have shocked
the Honourable Hilary inexpressibly. He had never been employed by a
syndicate to draw up papers to avoid these mandates; he revered them, as
he revered the Law, which he spelled with a capital. He spelled the word
Soul with a capital likewise, and certainly no higher recognition could
be desired than this! Never in the Honourable Hilary's long, laborious,
and preeminently model existence had he realized that happiness is
harmony. It would not be true to assert that, on this wonderful June
day, a glimmering of this truth dawned upon him. Such a statement
would be open to the charge of exaggeration, and his frame of mind was
pessimistic. But he had got so far as to ask himself the question,--Cui
bono? and repeated it several times on his drive, until a verse of
Scripture came, unbidden, to his lips. "For what hate man of all his
labour, and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under
the sun?" and "there is one event unto all." Austen's saying, that he
had never learned how to enjoy life, he remembered, too. What had Austen
meant by that?

Hitherto Hilary Vane had never failed of self-justification in any event
which had befallen him; and while this consciousness of the rectitude of
his own attitude had not made him happier, there had been a certain
grim pleasure in it. To the fact that he had ruined, by sheer
over-righteousness, the last years of the sunny life of Sarah Austen he
had been oblivious--until to-day. The strange, retrospective mood which
had come over him this afternoon led his thoughts into strange paths,
and he found himself wondering if, after all, it had not been in his
power to make her happier. Her dryad-like face, with its sweet, elusive
smile, seemed to peer at him now wistfully out of the forest, and
suddenly a new and startling thought rose up within him--after six and
thirty years. Perhaps she had belonged in the forest! Perhaps, because
he had sought to cage her, she had pined and died! The thought gave
Hilary unwonted pain, and he strove to put it away from him; but
memories such as these, once aroused, are not easily set at rest, and he
bent his head as he recalled (with a new and significant pathos) those
hopeless and pitiful flights into the wilds she loved.

Now Austen had gone. Was th