“Thank you, darling, thank you!  If you want a friend, and I can be that friend and can serve you, you will come to me, will you not?  You may want me some day, and you know that I shall not fail you.  Don’t you know that, my royal Leam?”

“I am sure of you,” she half whispered, shuddering.  To be in his power and to have rejected him!  It all seemed very terrible and confused to Leam, to whom things complex and entangled were abhorrent.

“And now forget all this.  I was only dreaming, dear.  Why, no, of course you could not have married me—­never could—­never, never!  I know that well enough now.  You see I have been ill,” nervously plucking at his hands, “and have had strange fancies, and I do not know myself or anything about me quite yet.  But forget it all.  It was only a sick fancy, and I thought what did not exist”

“I am sorry to have hurt you even in fancy,” said Leam; giving a sigh of relief.  “I do not like to see you unhappy, Alick.  You are so-good to me.”

“And to the end of my life I shall be what I have been,” he said earnestly.  “You can trust me, Leam.”

“I am sorry I have hurt you,” she said again, bending forward and looking up into his face.  “But it was only a dream, was it not?” pleadingly.

He smiled pitifully, “Yes, dear, only a dream,” he answered, turning away his head.  After a while he took her hand and looked into her face, “And now it has passed,” he said, calm that she should not be sorry.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

LOVE’S SEPULCHRE.

  Build for my love a costly sepulchre;
    Not underneath cathedral arches dim,
  Where the sad soul may wake to comfort her
    The stately music of a funeral hymn;

  Nor on some wind-swept hill, whose wavering grass
    Sways to the summer breezes blowing free,
  While the great cedars, rustling as they pass,
    Murmur a cadence of the mournful sea;

  Not in the arched depths of the solemn woods,
    Within the flickering shadows cool and deep,
  Where the still wing of silence ever broods,
    And woos the weary soul to dreamless sleep.

  But build it in the temple of my heart,
    And from the sacred and mysterious shrine
  A flame of deathless memory shall start,
    Tended by Sorrow and by Love divine.

  All sweetest recollections of past joy
    Shall haunt that shrine, to make it heavenly fair: 
  All memories of bliss without alloy
    Shall cluster in undying beauty there.

  There quiet peace shall hold resistless sway: 
    Softer than snow the holy hush shall be. 
  Till even Sorrow gently glide away,
    And Love divine alone keep watch with me.

KATE HILLARD.

LETTERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA.

BY LADY BARKER.

ALGOA BAY, October 23, 1875.