the bedside and took the baronet’s thin, cold hand in his own warm grasp. “Have you something more to say?”

Chester looked up half vacantly but with an expression of eagerness not to be mistaken.

“Yes. Sit down, my lord.”

“I am sitting. Do you not see?”

“Not plainly; but I can feel your hand.” He paused here, and for a brief space seemed buried in profound thought. At length he turned the poor sightless eyes once more toward his host, and went on, with deep and anxious feeling:

“Lord Allerdale, will you tell me what is your plan in regard to Matthew. Is he to live here always with you?”

“Would it give you relief if I should answer you in the negative?”

“Oh! my lord! Do not think I would seek to drive the boy from his proper home. No! no! no! no! Yet—yet—you will not allow him to—”

“Stop! Stop where you are, William, and let me think a little bit.” With this the earl took a turn across the room with his head bowed and his arms folded on his breast. When he came back his countenance had cleared and a brighter look was on his face than had been there for a considerable time.

“My dear Chester,” he said with frank sincerity, “within these few moments last past I have resolved upon an important step. Matthew has for a long time been teasing me to let him go to school with a friend of his at Oxford. It is a private establishment, wherein youths are prepared for entering college. I have thought it all over, and have come to the conclusion that he will be better off there than here. I shall let him go.”

Sir William tried to speak, but his voice failed him. His face, however, in the quick bright light that flashed upon it, told how much the earl’s speech had comforted him. He had conceived a deep, harrowing dread of the influence of Matthew Brandon over his sweet child.

The sun had set and the shades of evening had fallen when Sir William Chester found strength to ask for his daughter.

She came and laid her head beside his own on the pillow. He kissed her and breathed a whispered blessing; and shortly thereafter the earl took her down into his lap.

A few moments later the dying man gave a sudden start, and put forth both his hands, as toward an object in the vacancy above him—the hands, which for two hours and more he had not been able to lift to his lips. But they were lifted now, and strongly upheld; and at the same time a celestial light beamed in his eyes, and brightened his death-white face.

“George! George!” he cried, in seeming ecstasy, “I come! I come! Oh! this is rest!” And that was the last. His hands fell back upon his hushed bosom. With those words on his lips, and that ecstatic smile upon his face, he died. But the strangest part was to come; though the earl was not unprepared for it. The dying words of Sir William—the evident vision that had called them forth—had impressed him deeply. He could not believe they had been meaningless.

Four months had passed after the death of the baronet, when word came from India that George Brandon, Lord Oakleigh, was dead. He had died not more than three or four hours before Sir William Chester had breathed his last.

And thus, by one of those curious dispensations of Providence, given, it would almost seem, on purpose to puzzle us, a boy in his sixteenth year, more fit for the pillory than for a title—Matthew Brandon—had become Lord Oakleigh.