The poor old clergyman wrote the record himself in the parish register, and died the day after. By one of those fatalities which for a time are permitted, to arrest the course of truth's clear stream, the medical attendant and the nurse, who were the only people present at this melancholy bridal, were laid together in the narrow churchyard of the remote village, and the poor boy was committed to the care of a woman, who, so long as she was regularly paid, was content to let him share her scanty living with her own children. This woman believed the boy to be young Lyle's natural son, for her husband was a new-comer in the village, and neither of them could read, nor had they any acquaintances there. After a while they left it, and carried young Jasper to London. The stipend paid for him was unexpectedly raised to what was to them a considerable annuity. The baronetcy of Manvers, for want of male heirs, passed to the female line, and, at the age of five-and-twenty, John Lyle found himself, by an unlooked-for concurrence of circumstances, Sir John Manvers, with but a slender income for his position. Interest, however, got him a commission, though he was beyond the regulated age--interest placed him on the staff of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and he, whose destinies had once appeared of no account, was now the admired favourite of a showy court, for such might then be termed the official residence of the Duke of L--, in Dublin. His tall, aristocratic form, his grave beauty, his proud reserve, attracted the attention of the elegant and witty Duchess of L--, and her admiration stamped him with a _prestige_ surprising even to himself. His past love! what was it now to him?--a dream-one, however, to which he looked back with uneasiness, for was there not a living witness of this "fantasy?" Every day, every hour, deepened the gulf between him and the dark paths of his young life. He had never made a friend. No one stood at hand to whom he might unburden his soul, and each succeeding week found him placed more irrevocably in a false position. He was looked upon as a rising man, poor in patrimony, but sure to force his way to better things. While he was halting between two opinions, a familiar face suddenly carried him back to the old parsonage, and its dim and silent groves. Although we may not have been intimate with an early associate, our hearts are strangely stirred at sight of one with whom we have been in communion under circumstances different or distant from those in which we again meet. Something of pleasure lit up Sir John's intelligent eye as he recognised the open countenance of Sir Adrian Fairfax, who was younger than himself, and whom he had known during the last few months of his residence at the vicarage; they were the first months of love--months in which life had been presented to him in its happiest phase.