‘Fetch my father here, and, Mother, you come back with him!’ said Charles, speaking with a strange sternness of tone, and wildly motioning her out of the room. When the parents came, he bade them sit down beside him; and then, with a degree of remorse and anguish that no words could portray, he told them all; whilst they, with blanched cheeks and fainting hearts, listened to the dire confession. ‘And here I am,’ he exclaimed, as he ended, ‘a cowardly scoundrel that has not dared to die! Oh, Herbert! happy, happy, Herbert! Would I were with you!’ At that moment the door opened, and a beautiful, bright, smiling, joyous face peeped in. It was Emily Lovell, the beloved daughter, the adored sister, arrived from London in compliance with a letter received a few days previously from Herbert, wherein he had told her that by the time she received it, he would be a captain. She had come to introduce him to her parents as her affianced husband. She feared no refusal; well she knew how rejoiced they would be to see her the wife of so kind and honourable a man. But they were ignorant of all this, and in the fulness of their agony, the cup of woe ran over and she drank of the draught! They told her all before she had been five minutes in the room. How else could they account for their tears, their confusion, their bewilderment, their despair! Before Herbert’s funeral took place, Emily Lovell was lying betwixt life and death in a brain fever. Under the influence of a feeling easily to be comprehended, thirsting for a self-imposed torture, that by its very poignancy should relieve the dead weight of wretchedness that lay upon his breast, Charles crept from his bed, and slipping on a loose coat that hung in his room, he stole across the garden to the tower, whence, through the arrow-slit, he witnessed the burial of his sister’s lover, whom he had hastened to the grave. Here terminates our sad story. We left T—— on the following morning, and it was two or three years before any further intelligence of the Lovell family reached us. All we then heard was, that Charles had gone, a self-condemned exile, to Australia; and that Emily had insisted on accompanying him thither. DREAM WITHIN DREAM; OR, EVIL MINIMISED. What evil would be, could it be, the Blest Are sometimes fain to know. They sink to rest, Dream, for one moment’s space, of care and strife, Wake, stare, and smile; and this is Human Life. THE SCHOOLMASTER AT HOME AND ABROAD.