a hard thing to have no one in the world to care for me in illness;
d-----n affection when I am well!"

After this strange burst, which very much frightened Mr. Howard, Lumley
relapsed into silence, not broken till he reached M-----. The best
physician was sent for; and the next morning, as he had half foreseen and
foretold, Lord Vargrave _was_ delirious!



CHAPTER VI.

NOUGHT under Heaven so strongly doth allure
The sense of man, and all his mind possess,
As Beauty's love-bait.--SPENSER.

LEGARD was, as I have before intimated, a young man of generous and
excellent dispositions, though somewhat spoiled by the tenor of his
education, and the gay and reckless society which had administered tonics
to his vanity and opiates to his intellect. The effect which the beauty,
the grace, the innocence of Evelyn had produced upon him had been most
deep and most salutary. It had rendered dissipation tasteless and
insipid; it had made him look more deeply into his own heart, and into
the rules of life. Though, partly from irksomeness of dependence upon an
uncle at once generous and ungracious, partly from a diffident and
feeling sense of his own inadequate pretensions to the hand of Miss
Cameron, and partly from the prior and acknowledged claims of Lord
Vargrave, he had accepted, half in despair, the appointment offered to
him, he still found it impossible to banish that image which had been the
first to engrave upon ardent and fresh affections an indelible