grimaces as possible, making in private those which he could not altogether suppress. On the whole no man could have occupied so invidious a position more genially, more inofficiously than Harry did. He was grateful and attached to his father-in-law, and he had a profound respect for him and his judgment, to which unfortunately Mr. Bonamy did not make much response. The Vice-Consul indeed had that half-painful, half-amused sense of being a better man than his son-in-law, which at once increases the pang of such a rivalry and makes it ludicrous. “Having known me to decline on a range of lower feelings, and a narrower heart than mine.” When a father utters in the depths of his own heart such a sentiment as this, it may be somewhat bitterly, but it must be with a sense that it is utterly ludicrous. Mr. Bonamy felt all through like the disappointed lover in the poem “Thou shalt lower to his level day by day;” for indeed Rita herself, when she became Mrs. Harry, soon came to have far less interest in matters above Harry’s level, than she had felt when it was her father’s level by which her eager young being was founded. Then she had been his leader sometimes, his little oracle, with a fineness of perception that filled him with wonder and admiration; now she avoided those fine questions and speculations in which her husband did not share. He was faultless, Mr. Bonamy was just enough to allow; he was not exacting, he would still look on with honest admiring looks when they went beyond his knowledge, and smile and listen to discussions in which he could not take any share. But what Harry did not feel for himself, Rita felt for him. She would not go beyond him. She limited her own impulsive eager steps, which had been so ready for every path of fancy in order to keep upon the beaten ground by his side. Perhaps it gave her a little prick of pain too to leave her father alone, to curb all her natural impulses, to keep to that steady solid pace which suited Harry; and she did it knowing that her father felt it was a decline. But nevertheless her delicate instinctive unspoken loyalty to her husband carried her through. She was “falsely true” as much as Lancelot though in so different a way, belying herself, for Harry’s sake, who did not want such a sacrifice; but Rita felt it to be his due. There, as in all cases where there is a divided duty, the happiness which they possessed was purchased by a little inevitable pain, it was no longer unalloyed. The interloper, the breaker up of that previous blessedness, was the one who felt least drawback in it. For one thing he was naturally very modest and humble about himself, and it did not at all hurt him to acknowledge himself less clever than his wife and father-in-law. He would not have objected had they gone on talking over his head. His taste was less fine, and his perceptions much less acute than Rita’s. And he got the advantage of that _finesse_ of thought and