courteous or ungrateful. Perhaps," she added, with the sweet smile no heart could resist, "perhaps I am only ignorant."

I was not long in returning with my brother, and I had the comfort of finding, not only that he could arrange everything for her easily, but that his calm reverend demeanour, and that deep appreciation of his high and holy calling which marked every look and word, had their due effect upon Teresa's mind. She listened meekly and gratefully to his words of comfort and exhortation, and when he, forgetting or disregarding the conversation which I repeated to him, raised his hand to pronounce a blessing ere he quitted her, she bent before him with a reverence which proved that she recognised, although perhaps unconsciously, the divine authority of his holy office.

It was seldom now that a day passed without our meeting; she had told us the name of the ship in which her brother expected to sail, and we examined the newspapers together daily, in the hope of finding some notice of its arrival. At last, she one day timidly proposed to join us in our prayers, just hinting, though as if she scarcely thought it necessary, that she knew she need not apprehend hearing anything painful to her feelings.

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'No, indeed, my dear young lady," answered my brother, "if love be not strong enough to bind us in one communion, unkindness and animosity will indeed avail but little."

And so she knelt and prayed with us before the ruined altar of other days, and we walked, and almost lived together, doing our utmost to lighten her anxiety, yet all oppressed by a fear, we had not courage to express, that it would in the end deepen into a greater sorrow.

Some weeks had thus passed away, when my brother found it necessary to visit London for a few days on business, and he determined while there, to make every possible inquiry concerning the fate of the ship in which Ghiberti had proposed to sail. We heard nothing from him however, until the day on which we expected his return, when a letter arrived instead, saying that he had

that day received intelligence of the ship's arrival at Dover, and had resolved to go thither himself, without loss of time, and bring Ghiberti back with him to Kingsleigh. Teresa's gratitude was too deep for words, but she stole softly to my side, and I felt her warm tears upon my cheek, while she whispered something about forgiveness for her former accusation of a want of charity.'

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"There has been, I fear, but too much reason for such an accusation," I whispered, "would that henceforth we might learn to excuse one another's faults, to bear one another's burdens, and walk in love as CHRIST also hath loved us."

Anxiously we waited for the letter of the following morning, which would, as we hoped, tell us that my brother and Ghiberti were already on their way. The letter came indeed, but its contents were far, far more sad than we had anticipated; my brother had discovered Ghiberti and his friends without much difficulty, but the hardships to which they had been exposed during their hurried journey to the coast, and while they lay concealed awaiting a favourable opportunity to embark, had not only prevented his wound from healing, but brought on such fits of fever and delirium, that his life was despaired of. He asked continually for his sister, and to be allowed to see a Priest, but this his friends would not suffer, fearing lest anything might escape from him, which would tend to criminate such of their associates as still remained in Italy. My brother had seen him, but could do nothing except to procure a doctor, by whose aid it was hoped that the fever might abate, sufficiently to allow of his being removed, but as there was little chance of obtaining either his consent or that of his friends without Teresa's influence, my brother advised that she should join him immediately at Dover, and we were in the mean time to prepare a room in our own cottage for the sufferer.

This intelligence, melancholy as it was, was rendered more painful to Teresa, by the fear lest her brother should die, without the last offices of the Church; yet I fancied she derived some consolation from the fact of my

brother's presence, and that the constant intercourse of the last few weeks had lessened, if not removed, many of the prejudices of her early education. She relied implicitly on my brother's advice, and seemed inexpressibly thankful to have found one on whose guidance she could rely. Such guidance, whether in matters temporal or spiritual, is indeed a comfort, which those only can appreciate who find themselves from some unexpected circumstance, or, sadder still, the decay of their early confidence, unable to seek for counsel in the quarter where they would naturally expect to receive it, and who have not been prepared by early training to ask it of those who are the Church's appointed ministers for counsel, instruction, and reproof.

I accompanied Teresa the same evening to Gosport, and saw her start on her sad journey, regretting deeply that I could not accompany her; but every direction that could facilitate her progress had been furnished by my brother, and I feared that my presence at Dover would be of very little use to either of the party, unless there were any change for the better, in which case, we hoped that they would all return to us without delay.

But there was little prospect of any favourable change. Day after day, Teresa's hurried letters brought the same tidings. Short intervals of calm, succeeded by wilder bursts of delirium, each of which left the sufferer more exhausted in body than before, although his mind seemed to gain in composure, in proportion as his physical strength decayed. He had recognized his sister, and had by her persuasion been induced, his friends still insisting on the exclusion of any Priest of his own Church, to allow my brother to pray with him, and to converse with him on such subjects as now, feeling his end approaching, he acknowledged himself to have neglected too much in hours of health and prosperity; and Teresa begged that we also would remember him in our prayers. Her letters became every day more brief; her account of the poor invalid gave less and less room for hope. My brother's presence was her chief source of consolation: and again and again she repeated with grateful affection that Stefano would listen to religious instruction from

his lips, which he had invariably rejected and despised from others.

Sometimes she seemed doubtful whether she were right in allowing her only brother to be visited and consoled on his death-bed-too well she knew all hope of his recovery was gone by a heretic, not that she ever used the faintest approximation to that obnoxious word. Yet it was evident that by little and little, as she learned that the sacramental system of our Church is indeed founded and built up on the faith of the Apostles, that her spiritual discipline is purer, her offices of prayer as perfect, as those of the Romish communion, she began to feel even greater confidence in my brother's teaching, and rejoiced that Stefano should have the advantage of communion with one, who knew so well how to combine, with a sublime spirituality of doctrine, such sober earnestness of practice, such a solid reasonable faith, as conmended itself at once to her brother's simple, practical turn of mind, which hitherto, in its quest of reality, had wandered into materialism.

Now indeed, he saw and confessed the errors of his past opinions, no less than of his conduct, and regretted that rash opposition to the ruling powers, which had laid him in an early grave, and left his sister a homeless stranger in a foreign land. Not that he grieved less passionately than before over his beloved and enslaved Italy, which, from the time of Dante, even until now, has had reason to mourn her "too fatal gifts of beauty,' and the names of his country and his sister were blended in the last prayer that issued from his dying lips. He commended the latter, in calm confidence, to the care of GOD and to the friends who had been raised up for her in her hour of need, and my brother comforted him with the assurance that means would easily be found for providing her with an honourable maintenance, even should the negotiations with the Italian government, by which he hoped to secure at least a portion of their confiscated property, turn out unsuccessfully.

As for Teresa herself, the future entered not for one moment into her thoughts. All her anxieties were centred with her love in that pale wasting form, which was

so rapidly passing away from before her eyes; and even now, she trembled less at the thought of her own bereavement, than with the fear lest anything should be neglected which was really necessary for his soul's salvation. It needed all my brother's strong powers of consolation, and even of argument and persuasion, to satisfy her on this point, but at length all her care, watching, and anxiety came to an end; all power of ministering to his wants, whether bodily or spiritual, ceased. He who had been the gay companion of her infancy, the one best loved through childhood and youth; he who had been the cause of all her anxieties; wasting care for whom had made her young cheek pale, and dimmed the light in her deep Italian eyes; he passed away from this life, leaving her only the sweet remembrance of his parting hour, not overshadowed, as she had once feared it would be, by a doubt whether he had died in penitence and faith, but with a holy and blessed hope, that he was parted from her, only by the dim veil of this mortal existence, and had but preceded her by a few short years, to the Paradise in which all the redeemed of CHRIST shall together await the midnight cry, and the resurrection of the dead.

All this and much more, Teresa told me when she returned with my brother from Dover, after the last sad duties had been fulfilled, and her brother's body laid in consecrated earth. The funeral was solemnized according to the rites of the Anglican Church; and Teresa told me herself that Stefano before his death had with her received the Blessed Eucharist from my brother's hand.

"I thought it could not be wrong," she said as she told me of the circumstance, to me so cheering and consolatory. "I knew your dear brother's reverent belief in the sacrifice of the Body and Blood of CHRIST, and if I erred in my weak and unassisted judgment, I can only pray to be forgiven."

The time assigned to our visit at Kingsleigh was fast drawing to a close. We could not bear to leave Teresa in that lonely cottage which there was no longer any reason for her continuing to inhabit, and where every