carbonic acid, measured six inches less. Short breath, lassitude,
loss of appetite, heartburn, and all that fair company of miseries
which Mr. Cockle and his Antibilious Pills profess to cure, are no
cheering bosom friends; but when a man's breast-bone is gradually
growing into his stomach, they will make their appearance; and small
blame to him whose temper suffers from their gentle hints that he has
a mortal body as well as an immortal soul.

But most fretting of all was the discovery that Lucia knew--if not all
about his original name--still enough to keep him in dread lest she
should learn more.

It was now twelve months and more that this new terror had leapt up
and stared in his face. He had left a letter about--a thing which he
was apt to do--in which the Whitbury lawyer made some allusions to his
little property; and he was sure that Lucia had seen it; the hated
name of Briggs certainly she had not seen; for Elsley had torn it out
the moment he opened the letter: but she had seen enough, as he soon
found, to be certain that he had, at some time or other, passed under
a different name.

If Lucia had been a more thoughtful or high-minded woman, she would
have gone straight to her husband, and quietly and lovingly asked him
to tell her all: but, in her left-handed Irish fashion, she kept the
secret to herself, and thought it a very good joke to have him in her
power, and to be able to torment him about that letter when he got out
of temper. It never occurred, however, to her that his present name
was the feigned one. She fancied that he had, in some youthful
escapade, assumed the name to which the lawyer alluded. So the
next time he was cross, she tried laughingly the effect of her
newly-discovered spell; and was horror-struck at the storm which she
evoked. In a voice of thunder, Elsley commanded her never to mention
the subject again; and showed such signs of terror and remorse, that
she obeyed him from that day forth, except when now and then she lost
her temper as completely, too, as he. Little she thought, in her
heedlessness, what a dark cloud of fear and suspicion, ever deepening
and spreading, she had put between his heart and hers.

But if Elsley had dreaded her knowledge of his story, he dreaded ten
times more Tom's knowledge of it. What if Thurnall should tell Lucia?
What if Lucia should make a confidant of Thurnall? Women told their
doctors everything; and Lucia, he knew too well, had cause to compl