THERE it stood, dark and frowning, that gloomy old house in Bloomsbury; its high iron railings and massive porticoes, its heavy balconies and grey stone walls all weather-beaten with the storms of many a winter. Many a long year had passed over it since any hand had touched it, so long that none could remember it, so desolate a looking place that even strangers passing by, hurried on, muttering that it looked like a haunted house, or had surely been the scene of some dark deed. Was it in Chancery? was it inhabited? who owned the large neglected dwelling? no one ever seemed to go in or out; lights were never seen there; the blinds were always closed, yet the neighbours said that the owner lived there, and was a very rich man, though they could never make out more than two servants, and those were never long the same. It was a haunted house, then, or at least had long got that reputation to such an extent that it damaged the letting of the two houses on either side of it; and, indeed the landlord told one of his tenants and the people who had the opposite side, that he had offered the owner, Mr. Morton Delaware, a large sum for the house. That gentleman's solicitor had answered him: "Sir, my client would not sell his house if you offered half a million of money."

      Why not? what was the owner of that dark and gloomy house?

      Yet actually one day a pianoforte van was seen to stop there. Mrs. Carleton, who lived opposite, saw it herself; there were four men who all were admitted; they came out bearing a grand piano; and they bore in the new grand which they had brought. Mrs. Carleton instantly summoned her man out of livery, and bade him get hold of the men, stand treat, and find out all he could about the mysterious house. John obeyed, and an hour afterwards returned with a face of grinning delight.

      The men said that the house was splendidly furnished, only like as if nobody ever used anything, especially the drawing-rooms, the only rooms they had seen in fact; further, they had culled from the servants gossip that their master was going to bring home a young wife, a second wife, an actress they believed. The first wife had been dead these twenty years; perhaps, John ventured to surmise that was why the house had been so neglected. But his mistress shook her head, she had determined that there was something dark about Morton Delaware and his house, and she was not going to accept any such simple story as that as the secret of the mystery. However, John received half-a-crown for his information, and gladly retired to the kitchen to repeat his delicious budget of gossip.

      "I wouldn't give one of my girls to that man for all his money," said Mrs. Carleton, energetically, "to be mewed up in that horrible house; if I were the new Mrs. Delaware I'd sooner stop on the stage than marry off it at such a price, a marriage de convenance I suppose, of course beauty (I suppose) in the actress, and money in him."

      The speaker learned one day how she had wronged Victorine La Cordellaine. Morton Delaware had one night saved the young and beautiful girl from insult, voilà tout, and not till the day he brought her home did she know whether he was rich or not.

      What a day that was! surely he had better have kept her away from her future house that day. A steady downpour that never ceased once, and made the pavement so wet that Morton Delaware just lifted her straight from the carriage to the steps; such a young, light, girlish form that it was no great weight. Is it a wonder that she shuddered as she passed into that house, and paused trembling on she threshold, looking round for him to come to her side. It was an odd 'coming home,' a sad one, no kith nor kin to welcome her. She was an orphan, a stranger in England, and if he had any kindred, he had long ago severed all connections with them, or they with him perhaps.

      The heavy door closed between her and the outer world, and the two servants came forward courtseying as their master's mellow voice said:

      "This lady is your new mistress, I hope I think you will give her no cause to complain."

      "No, indeed, Sir, thanking you kindly for your good opinion," said the cook; "misses shan't have a word to say against me or Janet."

      "Thank you," she said, with her pretty foreign accent and sweet voice; "we shall be good friends, I am sure," and with that passed upstairs with her husband. A handsome couple, for he was as handsome as she was beautiful; but a strangely matched couple, too. He was over forty, though his slight figure and dark face made him look ten years younger despite the careworn lines; and she was not yet twenty She shivered as she entered the drawing-room, and he saw it.

      "Are you cold, Victorine?" he said, quickly.

      "No, only — the house feels like a vault," she answered, half timidly.

      Morton Delaware started and glanced round, almost fearfully it seemed.

      "Not so bad as that, ma chère, surely," he said, lightly; "only cold, as houses always are that are little used."

      But it was something more; there was a heavy oppression on her which she could neither shake off or define.

      "No," she said, almost clinging to the arm on which she leaned; "it feels like the Morgüe."

      He started violently, and cried " Hush " so suddenly and sternly that she shrank from him — startled, frightened, poor child!

      "Pardon, darling," he said, instantly recovering himself, "but the idea is horrid; see, try your new piano, while I stir the fire into a blaze."

      The firelight flashed up on the handsome room, and the slender girl at the piano, from which the skilful fingers in a moment drew forth such melody as those desolate walls had not heard for many a long year; not that room, the master's piano was below in the library. From the instrument she looked up smiling in his face.

      "Ah, thank you for this; how good of you to think that I should love it. Oh, Morton, are you sure you will not be sorry that you have married an actress?"

      "Sure, my wife; my own living wife."

      It was so singular an expression that it sank into her heart and troubled her; had he loved the dead wife? did he love her, or was there something invisible and sorrowful between them? an unseen barrier beyond which neither could pass? and was she feeling it so soon, or was it after all only the gloom of the house? It was such a change too, from the life she had just left, where at least if the work was hard and thankless — for she had held only a second-rate position — at least, there was variety and change, both dear to youth, perhaps especially to the young French girl. True, she might draw up the long-closed blinds and let in daylight and sunbeams, or at night light the rooms and passages with a blaze of gas-light, but do what she would, by garish gaslight or sun's rays Victorine Deaware could not make that house look bright or dispel the strange gloom that hung about it, and about her too, from the moment she had crossed its threshold. She noticed one or two things, too, after a little while; the servants, she fancied, never left each other alone where they could avoid it, and two or three times she heard them whispering; once she caught the words from Janet:— "He do leave her too much alone; if she only knew what they do say about this house. "I declare, Sarah, I cant bear' it much longer, for all her being so pleasant."

      Morton Delaware was shut up in his library at the time, and the young wife, shivering, stole out to discover from strangers what she dared not ask her husband. The dark, strange, careworn man, so much her senior, known but so short a time, that she half feared his strange moods, even while she loved him. She turned into a confectioner's shop in the very next street, and while taking some cakes alluded to that house.

      "What a sombre place that is in — street, No. 15," she said; "who lives there, surely no one?"

      "Oh, yes, ma'am, a Mr. Delaware has it, but he can't never keep his servants."

      "Comment! is he a harsh master?"

      " I never heard so, madam, only it is such a gloomy place, and they do say that the house — is — haunted," said the woman, dropping the last words out slowly.

      "Haunted!" Victorine started. "What, who by?"

      "Oh, ma'am, of course I can't say, only Mrs. Delaware died there years ago, and they do say that she walks."

      "She walks," repeated the French girl, rather puzzled by the odd English expression.

      "Yes, ma'am, — walks — the poor lady's spirit can't rest quiet in her grave — though, indeed, no one as ever I heard, saw any funeral leave the house; but then most likely she was buried at night. I've heard say that the Delaware's always buried their dead at midnight — many old families do. Another cake, madame?" as Victorine laid down a coin.

      "No, thank you," and taking up the change, Mrs. Delaware left the shop.

      "They do say that she walks;" the grim phrase rang in her ears, haunting and troubling her. Were such things true? Could the dead revisit the earth, and if so, for what reason? Was it this that lay between her and her husband? something that had not been there in their short wedding tour, but only from the moment he brought her home.

      "All that he had ever told her was that his wife had died twenty years ago, and save that once, her name had never passed his lips, nor had the second wife ever dared to cross the threshold of his silence. But now there came into that young heart a new feeling, not jealousy, but an aching pain; why did Morton leave her so much alone to shut himself up in that library? Did he love her, or had she a rival in that dead wife of whom he never spoke, of whose unseen influence or presence about that melancholy house, she began to have a morbid dread, fearing to be alone, especially in the evening, yet fearing to tell her husband so; and more than once as she sate alone in the drawing-room a bitter wish came over the sometime actress that she were back in the glare, and brightness, and toil of the theatre. With this wish too, came another, a longing to learn something about her predecessor — to know what she was like; she even once asked Janet about her, but the girl had not been there long, "only," she added, "the housemaid before her told her that she had heard that there was a portrait of the poor lady, perhaps in master's library, or else," and Janet whispered, "in the locked room below stairs."

      Victorine started: "A locked up room, Jeanette? Where is the key?"

      "Good Lord! ma'am," said the girl, "if you had twenty keys you didn't ought to go in there!"

      "Why not, why not! girl?" said Victorine, flushing painfully, as her black eyes filled with the tears which anything supernatural often brings.

      "I hardly know, ma'am; its a horrible room I know; it's been shut ever since her death, and the key in master's possession. Once, years ago, a servant stole it from under his pillow and actually got the door ajar —"

      "What did she see — what did she see?"

      "She caught a glimpse, ma'am, of something white in the middle of the room, only a glimpse, for master was down on her like a thunder clap! Law, ma'am, she thought he would kill her, he looked so awful; she was out of the house in an hour, my lady; it's my belief that if you, even your own self, was to get in there the master would turn you out."

      "And send me back to the theatre," said Victorine, with a half laugh that was uneasy; "is Mr Delaware in his library?"

      "He is out, I think, ma'am."

      Mrs. Delaware turned back into the drawing-room, but she was restlessly miserable and nervous, even the piano could not soothe her. Only a few months since her marriage and yet so miserable in that great sad house — a solitary being in its midst. She shut the piano abruptly and left the room, paused outside a moment, and then with a sudden impulse of escape from self, went straight to the mysterious sanctum, the library. Morton Delaware had never actually forbidden his young wife this room, but he locked it usually whenever he was out of it, and somehow made it tacitly understood, that no foot save his own was to cross that threshold; yet Victorine now boldly turned the lock, in which by some strange oversight the master had left the key, and entered the library. Was it a chamber of horrors? no, it was like the private library of any man of money and cultivation, save that it was gloomy and sombre; she drew back the heavy window curtain and looked round; yes, there was something unusual, a veiled picture, veiled with crimson velvet that could not have been stirred for years, so thick the dust lay upon it. Victorine started, and her heart beat fast and heavily as she lifted her little white hand. Did that pall rather than veil conceal the likeness of the dead wife, who stood between her and the man she loved? was she fair, young, beautiful? the white trembling hand was laid on the velvet, drew it back, and the dead and the living wife were face to face; the one so young and beautiful, the other —

      Was that the face which Morton Delaware had loved? that the woman he could still mourn after twenty years? A face fair indeed, but so full of stormy passions and fierce temper that the slight girl looking upon it shrunk back almost as if it had had life. Such passions she had acted only too faithfully, but never wished to see off the stage. She did not hear a step, or see the tall dark figure, till two hands were laid heavily on her shoulders.

      "Victorine!"

      "Oh, Morton, Morton!" she cried, passionately, "what is it in this horrible house that is ever between us? not that woman — not that fierce woman! take me away from the place, or let me go back to the stage!"

      Delaware fell back as if she had struck him.

      "Something between us — us! child? there is nothing — nothing!"

      "There is something strange and dark, that I cannot analyse or fathom, that makes me dread my very shadow, and fear even you," she rejoined; "what is it?"

      "Nothing, I tell you, child; nothing but the fancies of your over- vivid imagination."

      "Fancy! is it fancy that you no longer care to be much with me? is it fancy that you leave me constantly alone? Ah, is it fancy that when I first spoke your lips even grew livid? Oh, Morton, if you could not forget her; if your memory still clung to her, why did you ever teach me to love you? why did you ever tell me you loved me?"

      "Hush," he said, glancing almost fearfully round, and speaking low, but with a passionate force that seemed to shake his whole being; "because it was true — a thousand times true! because I love you as I have never loved before; because till I saw you I never loved mortal woman. My darling, my wife, there is, there shall be nothing between us!"

      He spoke almost as if defying some living thing, but though he clasped her to his breast and held her there; though she dared not speak it, it was there still, the unseen presence, the something that stood between them. Did he only feel it like her, or did he know it, that with a sudden shiver he gathered the veil over that portrait, as if the fierce face gazing down was intolerable to him, and then, without a word, drew the living wife from the silent presence of the dead one. But after that he did not leave her so much alone, especially in the evenings, and in the charmed inspirations of Mendelssohn or Beethoven strove to scare away the weight that was ever upon him. Yet do what he would it was there, and she saw it; what true wife would not? The handsome face never lost its careworn lines, nor the fine brow its gloom; and often he would start and glance round like one who has some secret terror upon him; a haunted, miserable, sorrowful man.

      "What was it, what was it?" Victorine asked herself, but dared not ask him. Was the secret in that horrible locked-up room on the basement floor.

      One night, after the servants were in bed, she saw him from the corridor above, leave his library and go towards the kitchen stairs. She might have thought that he was only as usual going to see that all was safe below, but that a certain stealthiness in his light step and quick look round, as if to assure himself that nothing save himself was there, made her suspect that that was not his only if his primary object, and as he disappeared down the stairway, Victorine, with step and movement noiseless, both by nature and training, stole after him, trembling half with fear of him, half with intense nervous dread of she scarce knew what. He passed along the stone passage to the end, yes, straight to the door of that room, and put a key in the lock, and paused as if the effort to enter was almost too much. Then with a shiver, so strong that it shook the lamp he held, he pushed the door, entered, shut it, and Victorine was suddenly left in darkness and alone.

      The feeling, the sense of terror was so strong, that she had almost sprung forward and shrieked to him not to leave her, but her old fear of him arrested the cry on her lips, and she sank down on the stairway covering her face. There she was at least near her husband; she shuddered at the mere idea of returning alone to the far off drawing-room. Yet if he found her there! poor child! she could hear her own heart beating, all else was dead silence in that midnight hour:—

"When churchyards yawn, And graves give up their dead."

      The words got into her head and would not be driven away, and with them a question. "Where was that fierce-faced woman buried?" In all the gossip about her, nothing of this had ever been said, save what had been told her; that the Delawares buried their dead at midnight, but no one remembered seeing a funeral leave that house. So Victorine sat, every nerve, every sense strained to an agonised pitch; how cold it grew, was that a draught of wind, or was the chill breath that swept over her face and shook the lock of that door, fancy? Was it fancy, too, that a low whisper reached her straining ear? Fancy! well, well, perhaps it might have been, but she heard, felt nothing more. Her wild cry, "Morton! Morton!" rang along the stone passages, and with it consciousness fled. When she again came to herself, she was lying on the sofa in the drawing-room with her husband bending over her.

      "What — where am I?" she began; "don't leave me — don't leave me!"

      "Hush, my darling! leave you — no."

      His face was white to the lips, and so haggard that she was startled out of all alarm, save the one thought of him — her husband; she lifted herself, and threw her soft arms round him, clinging close.

      "Oh, Morton, mon cœur, you are ill and suffering, and you will not tell me what it is; what is in that horrible charnel room that comes between us?"

      He started violently at her strange expression, and stooped over her yet lower so that his face was hidden.

      "Nothing, nothing, nothing? Why do you call it a charnel room?" he almost whispered.

      "Because it is, because the whole house is like a morgue, because there is surely some curse upon it and us, while we are in it! Oh, Morton, leave it, leave it! I cannot stay here. Morton, there cannot be two wives under one roof."

      "What do you mean, child? Great Heaven! what do you mean, Victorine?" he cried, springing to his feet as if he had been struck by an electric shock. "There is but one wife beneath this roof! Death at least has power to break the chain of that miserable marriage. Oh, I am bitterly punished for that false step!" he said, lifting his locked hands above his head; "it has followed me like a curse — a curse! as she said she would!"

      His wife rose suddenly and laid her small hands on his arm firmly. "Morton, when first I felt and knew that there was something between us, I thought that it was the memory of a love which even twenty years could not obliterate; when I saw that portrait I knew I was wrong; you never could have loved her."

      "No, no! God knows I never could," he murmured.

      "But now," Victorine went on, "you have said too little or too much, I cannot bear it! I tell you a dead and a living wife cannot be under one roof."

      He fell back almost gasping for breath.

      "Victorine, child! there is nothing, nothing! What should there be?" he said, more firmly.

      "You know best," she answered; "do you know what they say? that this house is haunted."

      "Tush," said Delaware, but his laugh was forced, and his glance round restlessly uneasy; neither escaped her notice. "You cannot surely believe such idle nonsense, Victorine."

      She shuddered. "Is what I see and hear, nonsense, Morton? Did I not tell you long ago that this house was like a morgue? Why has it been so shut up ever since for twenty years? Why is that room locked up? Why will you not leave the place?" she said, clasping her hands passionately.

      Morton Delaware turned away.

      "I cannot, I cannot!" he said, hoarsely; "do not ask me, Victorine."

      "Why not? am I not your wife? I see that you are suffering; that there is a dark shadow on your life, and I would drive it away; whatever it is it stands between us, and it will kill me!" She broke down, hiding her face on his breast. "You think that I do not love you so much, because you are so much older than I am; they tell you that the actress only married to escape the stage; but it is not, it is not! it was because you are more to me than the whole world, and it breaks my heart to see you as you are, and to feel that there is something between us."

      "I would to Heaven there were not!" he broke out, suddenly and passionately. "My darling, my wife, my only love; and Morton Delaware clasped the slight form close to him again. "Could you face poverty, the struggle for bread, worse, face cruel sneers, and harsh judgment, aye, injustice?"

      "I can face anything with my husband and for his sake," she said, touchingly; "you forget, too, that I can return to my profession. Hush! no forbidding; with my husband's protection what harm could happen? Poverty, work, anything, anything, so that the gloom were gone from this dear face."

      He kissed the sweet face uplifted to his in silence, and turned from her till he had mastered his own strong emotion.

      "It was a miserable mistake from the first," he said at last; "a mistaken idea of honour; and then, I was very young, not twenty, and I was stricken down with fever in her father's house, fever so virulent and contagious that none would approach me, none save Helen, and she nursed me back to life; can you wonder that in my impulsive gratitude I vowed I would do anything for her, anything but what she claimed! How should I have dreamed of that? I was younger than she — poor, a younger son; she was an heiress, and, oh! Victorine, I never could have loved her; gratitude is not love, and when she claimed that as her reward —"

      "Morton!" the crimson rushed to his wife's brow in very shame for her sex, "she forgot her womanhood, and sued where she should have died before one whisper or look escaped her."

      "Aye," he said, bitterly, "but she had little of womanhood save its form and its passions. Well, enough; I had no father to forbid, no mother to counsel; my brother cared nothing for me, and was besides abroad. I stood alone, cursed with an exaggerated sense of honour, and I married her, if that is marriage which is such a mocking of the Divine institution, the symbol of the union between God and the Church. Oh! those five years that followed; they seemed a life-time, for the misery that fierce, jealous woman crowded into them, when she found that even the gratitude I had once felt was turned by her own acts into loathing. Then her father died, leaving a singularly worded will. His wealth was all in founded property, and he left it to his daughter Helen and her husband, as long as his said daughter was above ground, then to her children if she had any, if not, to her cousin James Maberley, when his daughter was no more above ground. Mark, the word death was never used. Well, another year passed, and then Helen caught — a fever a fatal fever; but even on her death bed, she did not forget her jealousy, or the hatred to which what she had termed her love had long turned. She knew, she said in her fierce way, that I should marry again, and revel in her money with her rival; she vowed that I never should, that none other should take her place, and that as long as she was above ground, she would, living or dead, be the curse of me and mine. Then she suddenly changed, and raved that I should be glad to hide her away under the ground, but she would not be buried, and so between the two ideas, both offsprings of jealous hate, it was hard to choose a course. I was so unnerved, so morbid, so worn out with years of such a life, that either way it seemed as if her fierce curse would be upon me, and in that state, poverty was so hard to face, unequal as I felt to the struggle, that I —"

      He paused, shuddering all over.

      "Oh, Victorine! will you love me less; will you deem me mercenary if I confess, that horrible as it is you were right; there is a morgue, a charnel house, a grave; the dead and the living under one roof. She lies there in that room, coffined in stone, above ground. Now, now do you see how she has been between us; why I have remained in this horrible house, a broken, haunted man, and how —"

      "And now!" she said, clinging closely to him, "all that is at an end; let her be buried, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, and let her gold go with her. You know how I love you, Morton; we will begin the world together; what matter, no honest work can degrade a Delaware or the wife of a Delaware. You have talent, energy —"

      "Ah, my darling, but neither youth or friends; I am a man dead these twenty years," he said, sadly.

      "Let them be buried; you have talent and energy, and I have a profession; each will work for the sake of the other and our children. Not a word, Morton, of your English prejudice against the stage;" she said, with her pretty French vivacity; "I must feel that I am helping, working for you; and we shall be happy away from this horrible house, and the curse that is upon it."

      "My darling wife, my blessing!" and never perhaps till then had he thoroughly realised what she was to him; "you have won, let it be as you will."

      And with the dawning light of the new day went forth the evil shadow that had been between them. Whether it had been the offspring of his own morbid misery, or whether it had been something mysterious beyond our comprehension, we know not. Who shall say that it could not be?

      One dark midnight, a coffin was borne from that old House in Bloomsbury, and those opposite saw the black hearse and carriage move slowly away, but they never guessed that that coffin should have been carried out twenty years ago. They wondered, and wondered still more when the neglected House and its furniture were put up for sale, and they talked for nine days, when they discovered shortly after, that its late owner, Morton Delaware and his young wife had gone abroad, for James Maberley was probably dead. Certain it was that no one ever claimed the dead wife's money, or troubled Morton Delaware.

(Conclusion.)