point. Now for the medical. Your liver must be out of order.”

“I assure you, sir, I never felt better in my life.”

Mr. Carriston’s face now assumed a grave expression as he put the last question to his host.

“And the religious point?”

“I am not troubled on that score, sir.”

The Rev. Stephen looked doubtful.

“Whatever my religious views may be,” resumed Maurice, seeing the Rector was but half convinced, “and I am afraid they can hardly be called orthodox, I at least can safely say that my past life is not open to misconstruction.”

“Good! good! I always had confidence in you, Maurice. 16Yours is not the nature to find pleasure in gutter-raking. Well, it seems that none of those three points meet the case. Can you not give me some understandable reason for this melancholy which renders your life so bitter?bitter?”

16

bitter?

bitter?

“No. I went to London full of joy, energy, and ambition; but in some way—I cannot tell you how—I lost all those feelings. First joy departed, then ambition fled away, and with these two feelings absent I felt no further energy to do anything. It may be satiety, certainly. I have explored the heights and depths of London life, I have read books new and old, I have studied as far as in me lay my fellow-men, I have tried to fall in love with my fellow-women—and failed dismally. In fact, Mr. Carriston, I have exhausted the world, and find it as empty as this.”

He held up a nut which he had just cracked, and it contained no kernel—an apt illustration of his wasted life.

The rector shook his head again in some perplexity, and filled himself another glass of port, while Maurice, rising from his seat, sauntered to the window, and looked absently at the peaceful scene before him. The moon, rising slowly over the tree-tops, flooded the landscape with her pale gleam, so that the gazer could see the glimmer of the white marble statues far down in the dewy darkness of the lawn, the sombre woods black against the clear sky, and away in the distance the thin streak of silver, which told of the restless ocean. A 

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