Lady Muriel was most grateful to Dr. Wilmot for the care and skill which he exercised in Madeleine's case. Scarcely Kilsyth himself was more unremitting in his inquiries after the patient, more anxious as to the result. But husband and wife were actuated by totally different motives. The man feared lest the hope of his life should be quenched, the woman lest the object of her ambition should be frustrated; the man dreaded the loss of his darling, the woman the confusion of her scheme. For Lady Muriel had a scheme in connection with Madeleine Kilsyth, which it may be as well at once to declare. It is Mr. Longfellow who informs us that no one is so accursed by fate, no one so utterly desolate, but some heart, though unknown, responds unto his own. When Lady Muriel Inchgarvie was running her career of two London seasons, waiting for the arrival of the man whom she could persuade herself into marrying, and whom she could persuade into marrying her; while Mr. Burton and Sir Coke Only were fluttering like moths round her brilliant light,--the world, which thinks it marks everything, and which hugs itself in appreciation of its wonderful sagacity and perspicacity, and which had already supremely settled that Lady Muriel had no heart to lose, little knew that its sentence was a just one--simply because Lady Muriel had lost her heart. There was a connection of the house of Inchgarvie, a tall thin Scotchman, named Stewart Caird, a barrister of Lincoln's-inn, who had been a long time settled in London, and who, in virtue of his aristocratic connections, his perfect gentlemanliness, and his utter harmlessness--for everyone knew that poor Stewart merely lived from hand to mouth, by the exercise of his profession, and by writing in the law magazines and reviews--was asked into a good deal of society. He was a languid, consumptive-looking man, with a high hectic colour, and deep-violet eyes, and a soft tremulous voice; and after he had claimed kinship with Lady Muriel, and had his claim allowed, he found plenty of opportunities of meeting her constantly, and on every occasion he was to be found by her side. This was the one chance which fortune had bestowed on Muriel Inchgarvie of loving and being simultaneously beloved; and it is but fair to say that she availed herself of it. Not for one instant did either of them think of the hopelessness of their passion. Lady Muriel well knew that a marriage with Stewart Caird was simply impossible; and Stewart Caird knew it too, possessing at the same time the additional knowledge, that even if family affairs could have been squared by his coming into the immediate heritage of fabulous wealth, there was yet a slight drawback in the fact that his lungs could not possibly hold out beyond six months. And yet they went on loving and fooling: to her the mere fact that there could never be any ties between them was, as it always has been, an incentive to a quasi-romantic attachment; to him, with the