and undefined. Had love and fear only possessed his dark soul between them, the strife might soon have ended, in a division in which the man's own safety would have been consulted. Gilbert Lloyd would have made up his mind that, as his first fancy for Gertrude had passed away, so this eccentric renewal of it would also harmlessly decline. The whole difficulty might have resolved itself into his persuading Ticehurst to go abroad in his company, until the "rich brute" should have escaped all risk of an "entanglement," which Lloyd would have painted in the most alarming colours, and Lloyd himself have recovered from a passing fit of weak folly, which he might have been trusted to learn to despise, on a sober consideration of its bearing on his interests in the career in which he had contrived with so much difficulty to _lancer_ himself. But the look which he had seen in Gertrude's proud calm face--the smile which was so absolutely new to him, that it would have thrilled him through with jealousy to whomsoever addressed, because it revealed to him that she had never felt for him that which prompted its soft and trusting sweetness--the smile which had fired all the evil passions in his exceptionally evil nature--had shown Gilbert a far more terrible truth: she had never given him such a smile. _Soit_. He had had such as he had cared for, and he was tired of them, and done with them, and as bright and beautiful were to be had for love or money, particularly for money. Thus he might have thought, half in consoling earnest, half in mortification, and acted on the reassuring argument. But the smile, the unknown smile, which had not lighted her face upon their bridal day, which had never adorned the happiest hour--and they had had some happy hours--of their marriage, had beamed upon the man whom of all men living Gilbert Lloyd hated most bitterly--and that man was his brother. His brother, Miles Challoner, their dead father's darling son--(and when Lloyd thought of his father his face was horrible to see, and his heart was foul with curses and unnatural hate, for he hated his dead father more than his living brother),--the heir who had been his rival always, his master in their nursery, the object of his bitterest envy and enmity when he was so young that it was a mystery of the devil how such passions could have a place in his childish heart. In the name of the devil,--in whom Gilbert Lloyd was almost tempted to believe as he watched that smile, and felt the tempest rise in his heart, like the waves under the moonbeams,--how had _this_ complication come about! This he could readily ascertain, but what would it avail him to know it? If she loved this hated brother of his, what could he do? Enjoy the hideous revenge of keeping quiet, and letting their mutual love grow into the blessing and hope of their existence perhaps, and then come forward and expose all the truth, and crush the two at once? And then? His own