head in a parcel.  Miss Barrett was eager to part with her six guineas and rescue her faithful companion from misery.  Was this an occasion for preaching from ethical heights the sin of making a composition with evil-doers?  Yet Browning, still “a fighter” and armed with desperate logic, must needs declaim vehemently against the iniquity of such a bargain.  It is something to rejoice at that he was dexterously worsted in argument, being compelled to admit that if Italian banditti were to carry off his “Ba,” he would pay down every farthing he might have in the world to recover her, and this before he entered on that chase of fifty years which was not to terminate until he had shot down with his own hand the receiver of the infamous bribe.

The journey of Miss Barrett to Pisa having been for the present abandoned, friendship, now acknowledged to be more than friendship, resumed its accustomed ways.  Visits, it was agreed, were not to be too frequent—­three in each fortnight might prudently be ventured; but Wednesday might have to be exchanged for Thursday or Saturday for Monday, if on the first elected day Miss Mitford—­dear and generous friend—­threatened to come with her talk, talk, talk, or Mrs Jameson with her drawings and art-criticism, or some unknown lion-huntress who had thrown her toils, or kindly Mr Kenyon, who knew of Browning’s visits, and who when he called would peer through his all-scrutinising spectacles with an air of excessive penetration or too extreme unconsciousness.  And there were times—­later on—­when an avalanche of aunts and uncles would precipitate itself on Wimpole Street—­perspicacious aunts and amiable uncles who were wished as far off as Seringapatam, and who wrung from an impatient niece—­to whom indeed they were dear—­the cry “The barbarians are upon us.”  Miss Barrett’s sisters, the gentle Henrietta, who preferred a waltz to the best sermon of an Independent minister, and the more serious Arabel, who preferred the sermon of an Independent minister to the best waltz, were informed of the actual state of affairs.  They were trustworthy and sympathetic; Henrietta had special reasons of her own for sympathy; Captain Surtees Cook, who afterwards became her husband, might be discussing affairs with her in the drawing-room at the same time that Mr Browning the poet—­“the man of the pomegranates” as he was named by Mr Barrett—­held converse on literature with Elizabeth in the upper chamber.  The household was honeycombed with treasons.

For the humours of superficial situations and passing incidents Miss Barrett had a lively sense, and she found some relief in playing with them; but with a nature essentially truthful like hers the necessity of concealment was a cause of distress.  The position was no less painful to Browning, and in the end it became intolerable.  Yet while there were obstructions and winding ways in the shallows, in the depths were flawless truth and inviolable love.  What sentimental