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fort caused at night by the half-sleeping sense that a door or window has been left unfastened, or in the day by the remembrance of unanswered letters. So does that promise haunt me from time to time, and has done to-day particularly.”

There was a pause, and they smoked on. Millborne’s eyes, though fixed on the fire, were really regarding attentively a town in the West of England.

“Yes,” he continued, “I have never quite forgotten it, though during the busy years of my life it was shelved and buried under the pressure of my pursuits, And, as I say, to-day in particular an incident in the law report of a somewhat aimilar kind has brought it back again vividly. However, what it was I can tel] you in a few words, though no doubt you, as a man of the world, will smile at the thinness of my skin when you hear it....I came up to town at one-and-twenty, from Toneborough, in Outer Wessex, where I was born, aud where, before I left, I had won the heart of a young woman of my own age. I promised her marriage, took advantage of my promise, and—am a bachelor.”

“The old story.”

The other nodded.

"I left the place, and thought at the time I had done a very clever thing in getting so easily out of an entanglement. Bat I have lived Iong enough for that promise to return te bother me—to be honest, not altogether as a pricking of the conscience, but as a dissatisfaction with myself as a specimen of the heap of flesh called humanity. If I were to ask you to lend me fifty pounds, which I would repay you next midsummer, and I did not repay you, I should consider myself a shabby sort of fellow, especially if you wanted the money badly. Yet I promised that girl just as distinctly, and then coolly broke my word,