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He made Captain Maumbry's acquaintance in an informal manner at an afternoon tea to which he went in a wheeled chair one of the very rare outings that the state of his health permitted. Maumbry showed himself to be a handsome man of twenty-eight or thirty, with an attractive hint of wickedness in his manner that was sure to make him adorable with good young women.

The spread of the epidemic was so rapid that many left the town and took lodgings in the villages and farms. Mr. Maumbry's house was close to the most infected street, and he himself was occupied morn, noon, and night in endeavours to stamp out the plague and in alleviating the sufferings of the victims.

The scourge of cholera had been laid on the suffering country, and the low- lying purlieus of this ancient borough had more than their share of the infliction. Mixen Lane, in the Durnover quarter, and in Maumbry's parish, was where the blow fell most heavily. Yet there was a certain mercy in its choice of a date, for Maumbry was the man for such an hour.

The latter knew that such things were said, but he pursued his daily' labours in and out of the hovels with serene unconcern. It was about this time that the invalid in the oriel became more than a mere bowing acquaintance of Mrs. Maumbry's.

Even the dispassionate judges who sat by the hour in the bar-parlour of the White Hart an inn standing at the dividing line between the poor quarter aforesaid and the fashionable quarter of Maumbry's former triumphs, and hence affording a position of strict impartiality agreed in substance with the young ladies to the westward, though their views were somewhat more tersely expressed: 'Surely, God A'mighty spwiled a good sojer to make a bad pa'son when He shifted Cap'n Ma'mbry into a sarpless!

The twain are blest Do eastern suns slope never west, Nor pallid ashes follow fire. If hours be years the twain are blest For now they solace swift desire. As if, however, to falsify all prophecies, the couple seemed to find in marriage the secret of perpetuating the intoxication of a courtship which, on Maumbry's side at least, had opened without serious intent.