Chapter 3 MIDNIGHT.

The Fran?ais was crowded. Thargélie Dumarsais, great in Electre, Chimène, Inès, as in "Ninette à la Cour," "Les Moissonneurs," or "Annette et Lubin," was playing in "Phèdre." Louis Quinze was present, with all the powdered marquises, the titled wits, the glittering gentlemen of the Court of Versailles; but no presence stayed the shout of adoration with which the parterre welcomed the idol of the hour, and Louis le Bien-aimé (des femmes!) himself added his royal quota to the ovation, and threw at her feet a diamond, superb as any in his regalia.

It was whispered that the Most Christian King was growing envious of his favorite's favor with la Dumarsais, and would, ere long, supersede him.

The foyer was filled with princes of the blood, marshals of France, dukes, marquises, the élite of her troop of lovers; lords and gentlemen crowded the passages, flinging their bouquets for her carpet as she passed; and poor scholars, young poets, youths without a sou-amongst them Diderot, Gilbert, Jean-Jacques Rousseau-pressed forward to catch a glimpse, by the light of the links, of this beauty, on which only the eyes of grands seigneurs who could dress Cupidon in a court habit parfilé d'or were allowed to gaze closely, as she left the Fran?ais, after her unmatched and uninterrupted triumphs, and went to her carriage with Richelieu. The suppers of Thargélie Dumarsais were renowned through Paris; they equalled in magnificence the suppers of the Regency, rivalled them for license, and surpassed them for wit. All the world might flock to her fêtes where she undisguisedly sought to surpass the lavishness of Versailles, even by having showers of silver flung from her windows to the people in the streets below; but to her soupers à huis clos only a chosen few were admitted, and men would speak of having supped with la Dumarsais as boastfully as women of having supped with the King at Choisy.

"What you have lost in not seeing her play Phèdre! Helvétius would have excused you; all the talk of his salons is not worth one glance at la Dumarsais. Mon ami! you will be converted to Paris when once you have seen her," said the Marquis de la Thorillière, as his carriage stopped in the Chaussée d'Antin.

Léon de Tallemont laughed, and thought of the eyes that would brighten at his glance, and the heart that would beat against his once more under the vine shadows of Lorraine. No new magic, however seductive, should have strength to shake his allegiance to that Memory, and, true to his violet in Lorraine, he defied the Queen of the Foyer.

"We are late, but that is always a more pardonable fault than to be too early," said the Marquis, as they were ushered across the vestibule, through several salons, into the supper-room, hung with rich tapestries of "Les Nymphes au Bain," "Diane Chasseresse," and "Apollon et Daphné;" with gilded consoles, and rosewood buffets, enamelled with medallion groups, and crowded with Sèvres and porcelaine de Saxe, while Venetian mirrors at each end of the salle reflected the table, with its wines, and fruits, and flowers, its gold dishes and Bohemian glass. The air was heavily perfumed, and vibrating with laughter. The guests were Richelieu, Bièvre, Saxe, D'Etissac, Montcrif, and lovely Marie Camargo, the queen of the coulisses who introduced the "short skirts" of the ballet, and upheld her innovation so stanchly amidst the outcries of scandalized Jansenists and journalists. But even Marie Camargo herself paled-and would have paled even had she been, what she was not, in the first flush of her youth-before the superb beauty, the languid voluptuousness, the sensuous grace, the southern eyes, the full lips, like the open leaves of a damask rose, melting yet mocking, of the most beautiful and most notorious woman of a day in which beauty and notoriety were rife, the woman with the diamond of Louis Quinze sparkling in the light upon her bosom, whom Versailles and Paris hailed as Thargélie Dumarsais.

The air, scented with amber, rang with the gay echoes of a stanza of Dorat's, chanted by Marie Camargo; the "Cupids and Bacchantes," painted in the panels of Sèvres, seemed to laugh in sympathy with the revel over which they presided; the light flashed on the King's diamond, to which Richelieu pointed, with a wicked whisper; for the Marshal was getting tired of his own reign, and his master might pay his court when he would. Thargélie Dumarsais, more beautiful still at her petit souper than at her petit lever, with her hair crowned with roses, true flowers of Venus that might have crowned Aspasia, looked up laughingly as her lacqueys ushered in le Marquis de la Thorillière and le Chevalier de Tallemont.

"M. le Marquis," cried the actress, "you are late! It is an impertinence forbidden at my court. I shall sup in future with barred doors, like M. d'Orléans; then all you late-comers--"

Through the scented air, through the echoing laughter, stopping her own words, broke a startled bitter cry:

"Mon Dieu, c'est Favette!"

Thargélie Dumarsais shrank back in her rose velvet fauteuil as though the blow of a dagger had struck her; the color fled from her lips, and underneath the delicate rouge on her cheeks; her hand trembled as it grasped the King's aigrette.

"Favette-Favette! Who calls me that?"

It was a forgotten name, the name of a bygone life that fell on her ear with a strange familiar chime, breaking in on the wit, the license, the laughter of her midnight supper, as the subdued and mournful sound of vesper bells might fall upon the wild refrains and noisy drinking-songs of bacchanalian melody.

A surprised silence fell upon the group, the laughter hushed, the voices stopped; it was a strange interruption for a midnight supper. Thargélie Dumarsais involuntarily rose, her lips white, her eyes fixed, her hand clasped convulsively on the King's diamond. A vague, speechless terror held mastery over her, an awe she could not shake off had fastened upon her, as though the dead had risen from their graves, and come thither to rebuke her for the past forgotten, the innocence lost. The roses in her hair, the flowers of revel, touched a cheek blanched as though she beheld some unearthly thing, and the hand that lay on the royal jewel shook and trembled.

"Favette? Favette?" she echoed again. "It is so many years since I heard that name!"

Her guests sat silent still, comprehending nothing of this single name which had such power to move and startle her. Richelieu alone, leaning back in his chair, leisurely picked out one of his brandy-cherries, and waited as a man waits for the next scene at a theatre:

"Is it an unexpected tragedy, or an arranged comedy, ma chère? Ought one to cry or to laugh? Give me the mot d'ordre!"

His words broke the spell, and called Thargélie Dumarsais back to the world about her. Actress by profession and by nature, she rallied with a laugh, putting out her jewelled hand with a languid glance from her long almond-shaped eyes.

"A friend of early years, my dear Duc, that is all. Ah, Monsieur de Tallemont what a strange rencontre! When did you come to Paris? I scarcely knew you at the first moment; you have so long been an exile, one may pardonably be startled by your apparition, and take you for a ghost! I suppose you never dreamed of meeting Favette Fontanie under my nom de théatre? Ah! how we change, do we not, Léon? Time is so short, we have no time to stand still! Marie, ma chère, give Monsieur le Chevalier a seat beside you-he cannot be happier placed!"

Léon de Tallemont heard not a word that she spoke; he stood like a man stunned and paralyzed by a sudden and violent blow, his head bowed, a mortal pallor changing his face to the hues of death, the features that were a moment before bright, laughing, and careless, now set in mute and rigid anguish.

"Favette! Favette!" he murmured, hoarsely, in the vague dreamy agony with which a man calls wildly and futilely on the beloved dead to come back to him from the silence and horror of the grave.

"Peste!" laughed Richelieu. "This cast-off lover seems a strange fellow! Does he not know that absent people have never the presumption to dream of keeping their places, but learn to give them graciously up!-shall I teach him the lesson? If he have his sixteen quarterings, a prick of my sword will soon punish his impudence!"

The jeer fell unheeded on Léon de Tallemont's ear; had he heard it, the flippant sneer would have had no power to sting him then. Regardless of the men around the supper-table, he grasped Thargélie Dumarsais's hands in his:

"This is how we meet!"

She shrank away from his glance, terrified, she scarce knew why, at the mute anguish upon his face.

Perhaps for a moment she realized how utterly she had abused the love and wrecked the life of this man; perhaps with his voice came back to her thronging thoughts of guileless days, memories ringing through the haze of years, as distant chimes ring over the water from lands we have quitted, reaching us when we have floated far away out to sea-memories of an innocent and untroubled life, when she had watched the woodland flowers open to the morning sun, and listened to the song of the brooks murmuring over the violet roots, and heard the sweet evening song of the birds rise to heaven under the deep vine shadows of Lorraine.

One moment she was silent, her eyes falling, troubled and guilty, beneath his gaze; then she looked up, laughing gayly, and flashing on him her languid lustrous glance.

"You look like a somnambulist, mon ami! Did nobody ever tell you, then, how Mme. de la Vrillière carried me off from Lorraine, and brought me in her train to Paris, till, when Favette Fontanie was tired of being petted like the spaniel, the monkey, and the parrot, she broke away from Madame la Marquise, and made, after a little probation at the Foire St. Laurent, her appearance at the Fran?ais as Thargélie Dumarsais? Allons donc! have I lost my beauty, that you look at me thus? You should be reminding me of the proverb, 'On revient toujours à ses premiers amours!' Surely, Thargélie Dumarsais will be as attractive to teach such a lesson as that little peasant girl, Favette, used to be? Bah, Léon! Can I not love you as well again in Paris as I once loved you at Grande Charmille? And-who knows?-perhaps I will!"

She leaned towards him; her breath fanning his cheek, her scented hair brushing his lips, her lustrous eyes meeting his with eloquent meaning, her lips parted with the resistless witchery of that melting and seductive sourire d'amour to which they were so admirably trained. He gazed down on her, breathless, silence-stricken-gazed down on the sorceress beauty to which the innocent loveliness of his Lorraine flower had changed. Was this woman, with the rouge upon her cheeks, the crimson roses in her hair, the mocking light in her eyes, the wicked laugh on her lips, the diamond glittering like a serpent's eye in her bosom-was she the guileless child he had left weeping, on the broken steps of the fountain, tears as pure as the dew in the violet-bells, with the summer sunlight streaming round her, and no shade on her young brow darker than the fleeting shadow flung from above by the vine-leaves? A cry broke once more from his lips:

"Would to God I had died before to-night!"

Then he lifted his head, with a smile upon his face-a smile that touched and vaguely terrified all those who saw it-the smile of a breaking heart.

"I thank you for your proffered embraces, but I am faithful. I love but one, and I have lost her; Favette is dead! I know nothing of Thargélie Dumarsais, the Courtesan."

He bowed low to her and left her-never to see her face again.

A silence fell on those he had quitted, even upon Richelieu; perhaps even he realized that all beauty, faith, and joy were stricken from this man's life; and-reality of feeling was an exile so universally banished from the gay salons of the Dix-huitième Siècle, that its intrusion awed them as by the unwonted presence of some ghostly visitant.

Thargélie Dumarsais sat silent-her thoughts had flown away once more from her brilliant supper-chamber to the fountain at Grande Charmille: she was seeing the dragon-flies flutter among the elm-boughs, and the water ripple over the wild thyme; she was feeling the old priest's good-night kiss upon her brow, and her own hymn rise and mingle with the chant of the vesper choir; she was hearing the song of the forest-birds echo in the Lorraine woods, and a fond voice whisper to her, "Fear not, Favette!-we shall meet as we part!"

Richelieu took up his Dresden saucer of cherries once more with a burst of laughter.

"Voilà un dr?le!-this fellow takes things seriously. What fools there are in this world! It will be a charming little story for Versailles. Dieu! how Louis will laugh when I tell it him! I fear though, ma chérie, that the 'friend of your childhood' will make you lose your reputation by his impolite epithets!"

"When one has nothing, one can lose nothing-eh, ma chère?" laughed Marie Camargo. "Monsieur le Duc, she does not hear us--"

"No, l'infidèle!" cried Richelieu. "Mademoiselle! I see plainly you love this rude lover of bygone days better than you do us!-is it not the truth?"

"Chut! nobody asks for truths in a polite age!" laughed Thargélie Dumarsais, shaking off unwelcome memories once for all, and looking down at the King's diamond gleaming in the light-the diamond that prophesied to her the triumph of the King's love.

"Naturally," added La Camargo. "My friend, I shall die with envy of your glorious jewel. Dieu! comme il brille!"

* * *

"DEADLY DASH."

A STORY TOLD ON THE OFF DAY.

On the off-day after the Derby everybody, except the great winners, is, it will be generally admitted, the resigned prey to a certain gentle sadness, not to say melancholy, that will only dissipate itself under a prolonged regimen of S. and B., seidlitz well dashed with Amontillado, or certain heavenly West Indian decoctions;-this indisposition, I would suggest, we should call, delicately and dubiously, Epsomitis. It will serve to describe innumerable forms and degrees of the reactionary malady.

There is the severest shape of all, "dead money," that covers four figures, dropped irretrievably, and lost to the "milkers;" lost always you say because of a cough, or because of a close finish, or because of something dark, or because of a strain in the practising gallops, or because of a couple of brutes that cannoned just at the start; and never, of course, because the horse you had fancied was sheerly and simply only fit for a plater. There is the second severe form, when you awake with a cheerful expectation of a summons for driving "at twelve miles an hour" (as if that wasn't moderate and discreet!), and for thereby smashing a greengrocer's cart into the middle of next week, and running a waggonette into an omnibus, as you came back from the Downs, of which you have no more remembrance than that there was a crash, and a smash, and a woman's screams, and a man's "d-n the swells!" and a tintamarre of roaring conductor and bellowing greengrocer, and infuriated females, through which you dashed somehow with a cheer-more shame for you-and a most inappropriate l'Africaine chorus from the men on your drag. There is the milder form, which is only the rueful recollection of seeing, in a wild ecstasy, the chestnut with the white blaze sweep with his superb stride to the front, and of having, in your moment of rapturous gratitude to the red and blue, rushed, unintentionally, during the discussion of Fortnum and Mason's hamper, into a promise to take Euphrosyne Brown to Baden in August, where you know very well she will cost you more than all your sums netted through Gladiateur. There are the slenderer touches of the malady, which give you, over your breakfast coffee, a certain dolorous meditation as to how you could have been such a fool as to have placed all your trust in Danebury, or to have put in a hole through Spring Cottage just what your yacht costs for three months; which makes you wonder why on earth you took that lot of actresses on to the hill, and threw money enough away on them in those wages of idiotcy (or wages of sin, as your uncle the dean would translate it), of cashmeres, eau de Cologne, gloves, and bracelets, to have purchased those two weight-carriers offered you at ￡600 the pair, and dirt-cheap at that; or which makes you only dully and headachily conscious that you drank champagne up on the box-seat as if you were a young fellow from Eton, and now pay for the juvenile folly, as you know you deserve to do, when that beautiful white Burgundy at your club, or your own cool perfect claret at home, seems to stare you in the face and ask, "Why did you crack all those bottles of Dry on the Downs?"

There are symptoms and varieties innumerable of the malady that I propose shall be known henceforward as Epsomitis; therefore, the off-day finds everybody more or less slightly done-up and mournful. Twenty-four hours and the Oaks, if properly prepared for by a strictly medicinal course of br?les-gueules, as the Chasseurs say, smoked perseveringly, will bring all patients round on the Friday; but during the twenty-four hours a sense that all on and off the course is vanity and vexation of spirit will generally and somnolently predominate in the universal and fashionable disease of Epsomitis.

One off-day, after the magnificent victory of Monarque's unrivalled son, an acquaintance of mine, suffering considerably from these symptoms, sought my philosophy and my prescriptions. A very sharp irritant for Epsomitis may be administered in the form of "I told you so? It's all your own fault!" But this species of blister and douche bath combined is rarely given unless the patient be mad enough to let his wife, if he unluckily have one, learn what ails him. As far as I was concerned, I was much too sympathetic with the sufferer to be down upon him with the triumphant reminder that I had cautioned him all along not to place his trust in Russley. I, instead, prescribed him cool wines, and led him on to talk of other people's misfortunes, the very best way to get reconciled with your own. We talked of old times, of old memories, of old acquaintance, in the twilight, between Derby and Oaks. We got a little melancholy; too much champagne is always productive on the morrow of a gently sentimental tinge, and a man is always inclined to look on the world as a desert when he has the conviction that he himself has been made a fool in it. Among other names, that of Deadly Dash came up between us. What had become of him? I did not know; he did. He told me; and I will tell it here, for the story is of the past now.

"Deadly Dash! What a shot he was! Never missed," said my friend, whose own gun is known well enough at Hornsey-wood House; therewith falling into a reverie, tinged with the Jacques-like gloom of Epsomitis in its severest form, from which he awoke to tell me slowly, between long draughts of iced drinks, what I write now. I alter his tale in nothing, save in filling in with words the gaps and blanks that he made, all-eloquent in his halting oratory, by meditative, plaintive, moralizing puffs from his tonic, the br?le gueule, and an occasional appeal to my imagination in the customary formula of "Oh, bother!-you understand-all the rest of it you know," which, though it tells everything over claret, is not so clear a mode of relation in type. For all else here the story is as he gave it to me.

* * *

"Deadly Dash!" It was a fatal sounding sobriquet, and had a fatal fascination for many, for me as well as the rest, when I was in my salad days and joined the old --th, amongst whose Light Dragoons, it was so signally and ominously famous. The nickname had a wide significance; "he always kills," was said with twofold truth, in twofold meaning of Dash; in a barrière duel he would wheel lightly, aim carelessly, and send the ball straight as any arrow through heart or lung, just as he fancied, in the neatest style anybody could dream of; and in an intrigue he took just the same measures, and hit as invariably with the self-same skill and the self-same indifference. "He always kills" applied equally to either kind of affair, and got him his sobriquet, which he received with as laughing an equanimity as a riding man gets the Gilt Vase, or a "lover of the leash" the Ravensworth Stakes, or the Puppy Cup and Goblet. He was proud of it, and had only one regret, that he lived in the dead days of the duel, and could only go out when he was on French soil. In dare-devilry of every sort he out-Heroded Herod, and distanced any who were mad enough to try the pace with him in that steeple-chase commonly called "going to the bad." It was a miracle how often he used to reach the stage of "complete ruin" that the Prince de Soubise once sighed for as an unattainable paradise; and picked himself up again, without a hair turned, as one may say, and started off with as fresh a pace as though nothing had knocked him over. Other men got his speed sometimes; but nobody could ever equal his stay. For an "out and out goer" there was nobody like Deadly Dash; and though only a Captain of Horse, with few "expectations," he did what Dukes daren't have done, and lived at a faster rate than all the elder sons in the kingdom put together. Dash had the best bow and the brightest wits, the lightest morals and the heaviest debts of any sabreur in the Service; very unscrupulous fellows were staggered at his devil-me-care vices; and as for reputation,-"a deuced pleasant fellow, Dash," they used to say at the Curragh, in the Guards' Club, at Thatched House anniversary dinners, in North Indian cantonments, in Brighton barrack-rooms, or in any of the many places where Deadly Dash was a household word; "a very pleasant fellow; no end 'fit' always, best fun in life over the olives when you get him in humor; shoot you dead though next morning, if he want, and you be handy for him in a neat snug little Bad; make some devil of a mot on you too afterwards, just as pleasantly as if he were offering you a Lopez to smoke!"

Now, that was just the sort of celebrity that made me mad to see the owner of it; there wasn't a living being, except that year's favorite out of the Whitewall establishment, that I was half so eager to look at, or so reverent when I thought of, as "the Killer." I was very young then. I had gone through a classic course of yellow covers from Jeffs' and Rolandi's, and I had a vague impression that a man who had had a dozen barrière affairs abroad, and been "enfant" to every lovely lionne of his day, must of necessity be like the heroes of Delphine Demireps' novels, who had each of them always a "je ne sais quoi de farouche et de fier dans ses grands yeux noirs, et toute la révélation d'une ame usée, mais dominée par des passions encore inépuisables, écrite sur son sombre et pale visage," &c., &c., in the Demireps' most telling style.

I don't know quite what I expected to see in the Killer, but I think it was a sort of compound of Monte Christo, Mephistopheles, and Murat mixed in one; what I did see was a slight delicate man with a face as fair and soft as a girl's, the gentlest possible manners, and a laugh like music. Deadly Dash had led a life as bad as he could lead, had lit his cigar without a tremor in the wrist, on many gray mornings, while his adversary lay dying hard among the red rank grasses, had gamed so deep twenty-four hours at a stretch that the most reckless galérie in Europe held their breath to watch his play; had had a tongue of silver for his intrigues and a nerve of steel for his vendetta; had lived in reckless rioting and drunk deep; but the Demirep would not have had him at any price in her romance; he looked so simply and quietly thorough-bred, he was so utterly guiltless of all her orthodox traits. The gentlest of mortals was Deadly Dash; when you first heard his sweet silvery voice, and his laughter as light and airy as a woman's, you would never believe how often abroad there a dead man had been left to get stiff and cold among the clotted herbage, while the Killer went out of the town by the early express, smoking and reading the "Charivari," and sipping some cold Cura?oa punch out of his flask.

"Of course!" growled a man to me once in the Guards' smoking-room, an order of the Scots Fusilleers to Montreal having turned him misanthrope. "Did Mephistopheles ever come out in full harness, with horns and tail complete, eh? Not such a fool. He looked like a gentleman, and talked like a wit. Would the most dunder-headed Cain in Christendom, I should be glad to know, be such an ass as to go about town with the brand on his forehead, when he could turn down Bond Street any day and get a dash of the ladies' pearl powder? Who ever shows anything now, my good fellow? Not that Dash 'paints,' to give the deuce his due-except himself a little blacker even than he is; he don't cant; he couldn't cant; not to save his life, I believe. But as to his bewitching you, almost as bad as he does the women, I know all about that. I used to swear by him till--"

"Till what?"

"Till he cut a brother of mine out with Rachel, and shot him in the woods of Chantilly for flaring-up rough at the rivalry. Charlie was rather a good fellow, and Dash and I didn't speak after that, you see. Great bore; bosh too, perhaps. Dash brews the best Cura?oa punch in Europe, and if he name you the winning mount for the Granby, you may let the talent damn you as they like. Still you know as he killed Charlie,-" and the Guardsman stuck a great cheroot in his mouth, in doubt as to whether, after all, it wasn't humbug, and an uncalled-for sacrifice, rather scenic and sentimental, to drop an expert at Cura?oa brew, and a sure prophet for Croxton Park, just because in a legitimate fashion he had potted your brother and relieved your entail;-on the whole, a friendly act rather than otherwise? "Keep clear of the Killer, though, young one," he added, as he sauntered out. "He's like that cheetah cub of Berkeley's; soft as silk, you know, patte de velours, and what d'ye call 'em, and all the rest of it, but deucedly deadly to deal with."

I did know: it was the eternal refrain that was heard on all sides; from the wily Jews through whose meshes he slipped; the unhappy duns who were done by him; the beauties who were bewitched by him; the hosts and husbands who, having him down for the pheasants, found him poach other preserves than those of the cover-sides; the women who had their characters shattered by a silvery sneer from a voice that was as soft, in its murderous slander, as in its equally murderous wooing; and all the rest, who, in some shape or another, owed ruin to that Apollo Apollyon-Deadly Dash. Ruin which at last became so wide and so deep, that even vice began to look virtuous when his name was mentioned (vice always does when she thinks you are really cleared out), and men of his own corps and his own club began to get shy of having the Killer's arm linked in theirs too often down Pall Mall, for its wrist was terribly steady in either Hazard, whether of the yard of green table or the twenty yards of green turf.

At last the crisis came: the Killer killed one too many; a Russian Prince in the Bois de Vincennes, in a quarrel about a pretty wretched little chorus-singer of the Café Alcazar, who took their fancies both at once. The mondes thought it terribly wicked, not the deed you know, but the audacity of a cavalry man's having potted a Very Serene High Mightiness. In a Duke, all these crimes and crimcons, though as scarlet, would have been held but the crimson gold-dotted fruit adorning the strawberry-leaves; Deadly Dash, a Light Dragoon whose name was signed to plenty of "floating little bills," could not bid high enough to purchase his pardon from society, which says to its sinners with austere front of virtue, "Oblivion cannot be hired,-unless," adds Society, dropping to mellowest murmur her whisper, "unless you can give us a premium!" So Dash, with a certain irresistible though private pressure upon him from the Horse Guards-sent in his papers to sell. What had been done so often could not now be done again; the first steeple-chaser in the Service could not at last even save his stake, but was finally, irretrievably, struck out.

Certainly the fellow was a bad fellow, and deserved his crash so far; he had no scruples, and no conscience; he spared neither woman nor man; of remorse he had never felt a twinge, and if you were in his path he would pick you off some way or other as indifferently as if you were one of the pigeons at Hornsey. And yet, he had been kind to me, though I was a young one; with his own variable Free Lance sort of liberality, the man would give his last sou to get you out of any difficulty, and would carry off your mistress, or beggar you at chicken-hazard, with the self-same pleasant air the next day: and I could not help being sorry that things had come to this pass with him. He shot so superbly! Put him where you would, in a warm corner while the bouquets of pheasants were told off; in a punt, while a square half-mile of wild-ducks whirred up from the marshes; in a dark forest alley in Transylvania, while the great boar rushed down through the twilight, foaming blood and roaring fury; in a still Indian night with the only target here and there a dusky head diving amidst the jhow jungle three hundred yards away: put him where you would, he was such a magnificent shot! The sins of a Frankenstein should not have lost such a marksman as Deadly Dash to the Service.

But the authorities thought otherwise; they were not open to the fact, that the man who had been out in more barrière affairs, and had won more Grand Military stakes than any other, should, by all laws of war-policy, have had his blackest transgressions forgiven him, till he could have been turned to account against Ghoorkas, Maories, or Caffres. The authorities instead, made him send in his papers, not knowing the grand knack of turning a scamp into a hero-a process that requires some genius and some clairvoyance in the manipulator,-and Deadly Dash, with his lightest and airiest laugh, steamed down channel one late autumn night, marked, disgraced, and outlawed, for creditors by the score were after him, knowing very well that he and his old gay lawless life, and his own wild pleasant world, and his old lands yonder in the green heart of the grass countries that had gone rood by rood to the Hebrews, were all divorced for ever with a great gulf between them that could never close.

So he dropped out of the Service, out of the country, out of remembrance, out of regret; nobody said a De Profundis over him, and some men breathed the freer. We can rarely be sure of any who will be sorry to miss us; but we can always be certain of some to be glad we are gone. And in the Killer's case these last were legion. Here and there were one or two who owed him a wayward, inconstant bizarre fit of generosity; but there were on the other hand hundreds who owed him nothing less than entire ruin.

So Deadly Dash went with nobody to regret him and nobody to think of him for a second, after the nine hours' wonder in the clubs and the mess-rooms that his levanting "under a cloud" occasioned; and so the old sobriquet, that had used to have so signal a notoriety, dropped out of men's mouths and was forgotten. Where he was gone no one knew; and to be sure no one asked. Metaphorically, he was gone to the devil; and when a man takes that little tour, if he furnish talk for a day he has had very distinguished and lengthened obsequies as friendship goes in this world. Now and then in the course of half-a-dozen years I remembered him, when I looked up at the head of a Royal over my mantelpiece, with thirteen points, that he had stalked once in Ayrshire and given to me; but nobody else gave a thought to the Killer. Time passed, and whether he had been killed fighting in Chili or Bolivia, shot himself at Homburg, become Mussulman and entered the Sultan's army, gone to fight with the Kabyles and Bedouins, turned brigand for the Neapolitan Bourbons, or sunk downward by the old well-worn stage, so sadly and so often travelled, into an adventurer living by the skill of his écarté and the dread surety of his shot, we did not know; we did not care. When society has given a man the sack, it matters uncommonly little whether he has given himself a shroud.

* * *

Seven or eight years after the name of Deadly Dash had ceased to be heard among cavalry men, and quoted on all things "horsey," whether of the flat or of the ridge and furrow, I was in the Confederate States, on leave for a six months' tour there. It was after Lee's raid across the border and the days of Gettysburgh. I had run the blockade in a fast-built clipper, and pushed on at once into the heart of Virginia, to be in the full heat of whatever should come on the cards; cutting the cities rather, and keeping as much as I could to the camps and the woods, for I wanted to see the real thing in the rough. In my relish for adventure, however, I was a trifle, as it proved, too foolhardy.

Starting alone one day to cross the thirty miles or so that parted me from the encampment of some Virginian Horse, with no other companions than a very weedy-looking steel gray, and a brace of revolvers, I fairly "lost tracks," and had not a notion of my way out of a wilderness of morass and forest, all glowing with the scarlet and the green of the Indian summer. Here and there were beautiful wild pools and lakes shut in by dense vegetation, so dense, that at noon it was dark as twilight, and great tablelands of rock jutted out black and rugged in places; but chiefly as far as was to be seen stretched the deep entangled woodland, with nothing else to break it, brooding quietly over square leagues of swamp. The orioles were singing their sweetest, wildest music overhead; sign of war there was none, save to be sure, now and then when I came on a black, arid circle, where a few charred timbers showed where a hut had been burnt down and deserted, or my horse shied and snorted uneasily, and half stumbled over some shapeless log on the ground-a log that when you looked closer was the swollen shattered body of a man who had died hard, with the grasses wrenched up in his fingers that the ants had eaten bare, and the hollows of his eyes staring open where the carrion birds had plucked the eyeballs out. And near him there were sure to be, half sunk in swamp, or cleaned to skeletons by the eagles and hawks, five, or ten, or twenty more, lying nameless and unburied there, where they had fallen in some scuffle with pickets, or some stray cavalry skirmish, to be told off as "missing," and to be thought of no more. These groups I came upon more than once rotting among the rich Virginian soil, while the scarlet and purple weight of blossoming boughs swayed above, and the bright insect life fluttered humming around them; they were the only highway marks through the wooded wilderness.

So lonely was it mile after mile, and so little notion had I of either the way in or the way out, that the hallali! of a boar-hunt, or the sweet mellow tongues of the hounds when they have found in the coverts at home, were never brighter music to me than the sharp crack of rifles and the long sullen roll of musketry as they suddenly broke the silence, while I rode along, firing from the west that lay on my left. The gray, used to powder, pointed his ears and quickened his pace. Though a weedy, fiddle-headed beast, his speed was not bad, and I rattled him over the ground, crashing through undergrowth and wading through pools, with all my blood up at the tune of those ringing cheery shots; the roar growing louder and louder with every moment, and the sulphur scent of the smoke borne stronger and stronger down on the wind, till the horse broke pêle-mêle through a network of parasites; dashed downward along a slope of dank herbage, slipping at every step, and with his hind legs tucked under him; and shot, like a run-in for a race, on to a green plateau, where the skirmish was going on in hot earnest.

A glance told me how the land lay. A handful of Southern troopers held their own with tremendous difficulty against three divisions of Federal infantry, whom they had unexpectedly encountered, as the latter were marching across the plateau with some batteries of foot artillery,-the odds were probably scarcely less than five to one. The Southerners were fighting magnificently, as firm in their close square of four hundred as the Consular Guard at Marengo, but so surrounded by the Northern host, that they looked like a little island circled round by raging breakers. Glancing down on the plain as my horse scoured and slid along the incline, the nucleus of Southerners looked hopelessly lost amidst the belching fire and pressing columns of the enemy. The whole was surrounded and hidden by the whirling clouds of dust and smoke that swirled above in a white heavy mist; but through this the sabres flashed, the horses' heads reared, maddened and foam-covered, like so many bas-reliefs of Bucephalus, the lean rifle-barrels glittered, and for a moment I saw the Southern leader, steady as a rock in the centre, hewing like a trooper right and left, and with a gray heron's feather floating from his sombrero, a signal that seemed as well known and as closely followed as the snowy plume of Murat.

To have looked on at this and not have taken a share in it, one would have been a stone, not a man, and much less a cavalry-man; I need not tell you that I smashed the gray across the plateau, hurled him into the thick of the mêlée, dashed somehow through the Federal ranks, and was near the gray plume and fighting for the Old Dominion before you could have shouted a stave of "Dixie." I was a "non-combatant," I was a "neutral"-delicate Anglo-euphemism for coward, friend to neither and traitor to both!-I was on a tour of observation, and had no business to fire a shot for one or the other perhaps, but I forgot all that, and with the bridle in my teeth and a pistol in each hand, I rode down to give one blow the more for the weak side.

How superbly that Gray Feather fought!-keeping his men well up round him, though saddle after saddle was emptied, and horse after horse tore riderless out of the ranks, or reeled over on their heads, spurting blood, he sat like a statue, he fought like a Titan, his sabre seemed flashing unceasingly in the air, so often was it raised to come down again like lightning through a sword-arm, or lay open a skull to the brains; the shots ploughed up the earth round him, and rattled like hail through the air, a score of balls were aimed at him alone, a score of sabres crossed his own; but he was cool as St. Lawrence ice, and laid the men dead in struggling heaps under his charger's hoofs; only to fight near the man was a glorious intoxication; you seemed to "breathe blood" till you got drunk with it.

The four hundred had been mowed down to two; I did as good work as I could, having wrenched a sword out of some dead trooper's hand; but I was only one, and the Northerners counted by thousands. Come out of it alive I never expected to do; but I vow it was the happiest day of my life-the pace was so splendidly fast! The Gray Feather at last glanced anxiously around; his men stuck like death to him, ready to be hewed down one by one, and die game; his teeth were set tight, and his eyes had a flash in them like steel. "Charge! and cut through!" he shouted, his voice rolling out like a clarion, giving an order that it seemed could be followed by nothing short of supernatural aid. The Southrons thought otherwise; they only heard to obey; they closed up as steadily as though they were a squadron on parade, despite the great gaps between them of dying chargers, and of heaped-up killed and wounded, that broke their ranks like so much piled stones and timber; they halted a moment, the murderous fire raking them right and left, front and rear; then, with that dense mass of troops round them, they charged; shivered the first line that wedged them in; pierced by sheer force of impetus the columns that opened fire in their path; wrenched themselves through as through the steel jaws of a trap, and swept out on to the green level of the open plateau, with a wild rallying Virginian shout that rings in my ears now!

I have been in a good many hot things in my time; but I never knew anything that for pace and long odds could be anything near to that.

I had kept with them through the charge with no other scratch than a shoulder cut; and I had been close to their chief through it all. When we were clean out on the plains beyond pursuit-for the Union-men had not a squadron of cavalry, though their guns at long range belched a storm in our wake-he turned in his saddle without checking his mare's thundering gallop, and levelled his rifle that was slung at his aide. "I'll have the General, anyhow," he said, quietly taking aim-still without checking his speed-at the knot of staff-officers that now were scarce more than specks in a blurred mass of mist. He fired; and the centre figure in that indistinct and fast-vanishing group fell from the saddle, while the yell of fury that the wind faintly floated nearer told us that the shot had been deadly. The Gray Feather laughed, a careless airy laugh of triumph, while he swept on at topmost pace; a little more, and we should dive down into the dark aisles of grand forest-trees and cavernous ravines of timber roads, safe from all pursuit; a second, and we should reach the green core of the safe and silent woods, the cool shelter of mountain-backed lakes, the sure refuge of tangled coverts. It was a guinea to a shilling that we gained it; it was all but won; a moment's straight run-in, and we should have it! But that moment was not to be ours.

Out of the narrow cleft of a valley on the left, all screened with hanging tumbled foliage, and dark as death, there poured suddenly across our front a dense body of Federal troopers and Horse Artillery, two thousand strong at the least, full gallop, to join the main army. We were surrounded in a second, in a second overpowered by sheer strength of numbers; only two hundred of us, many sorely wounded, and on mounts that were jaded and ridden out of all pace, let us fight as we would, what could we do against fresh and picked soldiers, swarming down on us like a swarm of hornets, while in our rear was the main body through which we had just cut our way? That the little desperate band "died hard," I need not say; but the vast weight of the fresh squadrons pressed our little knot in as if between the jaws of a trap, crushing it like grain between two iron weights. The Gray Feather fought like all the Knights of the Round Table merged in one, till he streamed with blood from head to foot, and his sabre was hacked and bent like an ash-stick, as did a man near him, a tall superb Virginian, handsome as any Vandyke or Velasquez picture. At last both the Gray Feather and he went down, not by death-it would not come to them-but literally hurled out of their stirrup-leathers by crowding scores who poured on them, hamstrung or shot their horses, and made them themselves prisoners-not, however, till the assailants lay heaped ten deep about their slaughtered chargers. For myself, a blow from a sabre, a second afterwards, felled me like so much wood. I saw a whirling blaze of sun, a confused circling eddy of dizzy color, forked flames, and flashes of light, and I knew no more, till I opened my eyes in a dark, square, unhealthy wooden chamber, with a dreamy but settled conviction that I was dead, and in the family vault, far away under the green old elms of Warwickshire, with the rooks cawing above my head.

As the delusion dissipated and the mists cleared, I saw through the uncertain light a face that was strangely but vaguely familiar to me, connected somehow with incoherent memories of life at home, and yet unknown to me. It was bronzed deeply, bearded, with flakes of gray among the fairness of the hair, much aged, much worn, scarred and stained just now with the blood of undressed wounds and the dust of the combat, for there was no one merciful enough there to bring a stoup of water; it was rougher, darker, sterner, and yet, with it all, nobler, too, than the face that I had known. I lay and stared blankly at it: it was the face of the Southern Leader of the morning, who sat now, on a pile of straw, looking wearily out to the dying sun, one amongst a group of twenty, prisoners all, like myself. I moved, and he turned his eyes on me; they had laid me down there as a "gone 'coon," and were amazed to see me come to life again. As our eyes met I knew him-he was Deadly Dash.

The old name left my lips with a shout as strong as a half-killed man can give. It seemed so strange to meet him there, captives together in the Unionists' hands! It struck him with a sharp shock. England and he had been divorced so long. I saw the blood leap to his forehead, and the light into his glance; then, with a single stride, he reached the straw I lay on, holding my hands in his, looking on me with the kindly eyes that had used to make me like the Killer, and greeting me with a warmth that was only damped and darkened by regret that my battle done for fair Virginia had laid me low, a prisoner with himself, and that we should meet thus, in so sharp an hour of adversity, with nothing before us but the Capitol, the Carroll prison, or worse. Yet thus we did meet once more and I knew at last what had been the fate of Deadly Dash, whom England had outlawed as a scoundrel, and the New World had found a hero.

Though suffering almost equally himself, he tended me with the kindliest sympathy; he came out of his own care to ponder how possible it might be to get me eventual freedom as a tourist and a mere accidental sharer in the fray; he was interested to hear all that I would tell him of my own affairs and of his old friends in England, but of himself he would not speak; he simply said he had been fighting for the Confederacy ever since the war had begun; and I saw that he strove in vain to shake off a deep heart-broken gloom that seemed to have settled on him, doubtless, as I thought, from the cruel defeat of the noon, and the hopeless captivity into which he, the most restless and the most daring soldier that oversaw service, was now flung.

I noticed, too, that every now and then while he sat beside me, talking low-for there were sentinels both in and out the rude outhouse of the farm that had been turned into our temporary prison-his eyes wandered to the gallant Virginian who had been felled down with himself, and who, covered like himself with blood and dust, and with his broken left arm hanging shattered, lay on the bare earth in a far-off corner motionless and silent, with his lips pressed tight under their long black moustaches, and such a mute unutterable agony in his eyes as I never saw in any human face, though I have seen deaths enough in the field and the sick-ward. The rest of the Confederate captives were more ordinary men (although from none was a single word of lament ever wrenched); but this superb Virginian excited my interest, and I asked his name, in that sort of languid curiosity at passing things which comes with weakness, of the Killer, whose glance so incessantly wandered towards him.

"Stuart Lane," he answered, curtly, and added no more; but if I ever saw in this world hatred, passionate, ungovernable, and intense, I saw it in the Killer's look as his glance flashed once more on to the motionless form of the handsomest, bravest, and most dauntless officer of his gallant regiment that he had seen cut to pieces there on that accursed plateau.

"A major of yours?" I asked him. "Ah, I thought so; he fought magnificently. How wretched he looks, though he is too proud to show it!"

"He is thinking of-of his bride. He married three weeks ago."

The words were simple enough, and spoken very quietly; but there was an unsteadiness, as of great effort, over them; and the heel of his heavy spurred jack-boot crashed into the dry mud with a grinding crush, as though it trod terrible memories down. Was it a woman who was between these two comrades in arms and companions in adversity? I wondered if it were so, even in that moment of keen and heavy anxiety for us all, as I looked at the face that bent very kindly over the straw to which a shot in the knee and a deep though not dangerous shoulder-wound bound me. It was very different to the face of eight or nine years before-browner, harder, graver far; and yet there was a look as if "sorrow had passed by there," and swept the old heartlessness and gay callousness away, burning them out in its fires.

Silence fell over us in that wretched outshed where we were huddled together. I was hot with incipient fever, and growing light-headed enough, though I knew what passed before me, to speak to Dash once or twice in a dreamy idea that we were in the Shires watching the run-in for the "Soldiers' Blue Riband." The minutes dragged very drearily as the day wore itself away. There were the sullen monotonous tramp of the sentinels to and fro, and, from without, the neighing of horses, the bugle calls, the roll of the drums, the challenge of outposts-all the varied, endless sounds of a camp; for the farmhouse in whose shed we were thrown was the head-quarters pro tem. of the Federal General who commanded the Divisions that had cost the Killer's handful of Horse so fearfully dear. We were prisoners, and escape was impossible. All arms of course had been removed from us; most, like myself, were too disabled by wounds to have been able to avail ourselves of escape had it been possible; and the guard was doubled both in and out the shed; there was nothing before any of us but the certainty of imprisonment in all its horrors in some far-off fortress or obscure jail. There was the possible chance that, since certain officers on whom the Northerners set great store had lately fallen into Southern hands, an exchange might be effected; yet, on the other side, graver apprehensions still existed, since we knew that the General into whose camp we had been brought had proclaimed his deliberate purpose of shooting the three next Secessionist officers who fell into his power, in requital for three of his own officers who had been shot, or were said to have been shot, by a Southern raider. We knew very well that, the threat made, it would be executed; and each of us, as the sun sank gradually down through the hot skies that were purple and stormy after the burning day, knew, too, that it might never rise again to greet our sight. None of us would have heeded whether a ball would hit or miss us in the open, in a fair fight, in a man-to-man struggle; but the boldest and most careless amidst us felt it very bitter to die like dogs, to die as prisoners.

Even Deadly Dash, coolest, most hardened, most devil-may-care of soldiers and of sinners, sat with his gaze fastened on the slowly sinking light in the west with the shadow of a great pain upon his face, while every now and then his glance wandered to Stuart Lane, and a quick, irrepressible shudder shook him whenever it did so. The Virginian never moved; no sign of any sort escaped him; but the passionate misery that looked out of his eyes I never saw equalled, except, perhaps, in the eyes of a stag that I once shot in Wallachia, and that looked up with just such a look before it died. He was thinking, no doubt, of the woman he loved-wooed amidst danger, won amidst calamity, scarcely possessed ere lost for ever;-thinking of her proud beauty, of her bridal caress, that would never again touch his lips, of her fair life that would perish with the destruction of his.

Exhaustion from the loss of blood made everything pass dreamily, and yet with extraordinary clearness, before me, I felt in a wakening dream, and had no sense whatever of actual existence, and yet the whole scene was so intensely vital and vivid to me, that it seemed burned into my very brain itself. It was like the phantasmagoria of delirium, utterly impalpable, but yet intensely real. I had no power to act or resist, but I seemed to have ten times redoubled power to see and hear and feel; I was aware of all that passed, with a hundredfold more susceptibility to it than I ever felt in health. I remember a total impossibility that came on me to decide whether I was dreaming or was actually awake. Twilight fell, night came; there was a change of sentries, and a light, set up in a bottle, shed a flickering, feeble, yellow gleam over the interior of the shed, on the dark Rembrandt faces of the Southerners and on the steel of the guards' bayonets. And I recollect that the Killer, who sat by the tossed straw on which they had flung me, laughed the old, low, sweet, half-insolent laugh that I had known so well in early days. "Il faut souffrir pour être beau! We are picturesque, at any rate, quite Salvatoresque! Little Dickey would make a good thing of us if he could paint us now. He is alive, I suppose?"

I answered him I believe in the affirmative; but the name of that little Bohemian of the Brush, who had used to be our butt and protégé in England, added a haze the more to my senses. By this time I had difficulty to hold together the thread of how, and when, and why I had thus met again the face that looked out on me so strangely familiarly in the dull, sickly trembling of the feeble light of this black, noisome shed in the heart of Federal Divisions.

Through that haze I heard the challenge of the sentries; I saw a soldier prod with his bayonet a young lad who had fainted from h?morrhage, and whom he swore at for shamming. I was conscious of the entrance of a group of officers, whom I knew afterwards to be the Northern General and his staff, who came to look at their captives. I knew, but only dreamily still, that these men were the holders of our fate, and would decide on it then and there. I felt a listless indifference, utter and opium-like, as to what became of me, and I remember that Stuart Lane, and Dash himself, rose together, and stood looking with a serene and haughty disdain down on the conquerors who held their lives in the balance-without a trace of pain upon their faces now. I remember how like they looked to stags that turn at bay; like the stags, outnumbered, hunted down, with the blood of open wounds and the dust of the long chase on them; but, like the deer, too, uncowed, and game to the finish.

Very soon their doom was given. Seven were to be sent back with a flag of truce to be exchanged for the seven Federal officers they wanted out of the Southerners' hands, ten were to be transmitted to the prisons of the North,-three were to be shot at day-dawn in the reprisal before named. The chances of life and of death were to be drawn for by lottery, and at once.

Not a sound escaped the Virginians, and not a muscle of their English Leader's face moved: the prisoners, to a man, heard impassively, with a grave and silent dignity, that they were to throw the die in hazard, with death for the croupier and life for the stake.

The General and his staff waited to amuse themselves with personally watching the turns of this new Rouge et Noir; gambling in lives was a little refreshing change that sultry, dreary, dun-colored night, camped amongst burnt-out farms and wasted corn-lands.

Slips of paper, with "exchange," "death," and "imprisonment" written on them in the numbers needed, were made ready, rolled up, and tossed into an empty canteen; each man was required to come forward and draw, I alone excepted because I was an officer of the British Army. I remember passionately arguing that they had no right to exempt me, since I had been in the fray, and had killed three men on my own hook, and would have killed thirty more had I had the chance; but I was perhaps incoherent in the fever that was fast seizing all my limbs from the rack of undressed wounds; at any rate, the Northerners took no heed, save to force me into silence, and the drawing began. As long as I live I shall see that night in remembrance with hideous distinctness: the low blackened shed with its f[oe]tid odors from the cattle lately foddered there; the yellow light flaring dully here and there; the glisten of the cruel rifles; the heaps of straw and hay soaked with clotted blood; the group of Union Officers standing near the doorway; and the war-worn indomitable faces of the Southerners, with the fairer head and slighter form of their English chief standing out slightly in front of all.

The Conscription of Death commenced; a Federal private took the paper from each man as he drew it, and read the word of destiny aloud. Not one amongst them faltered or paused one moment; each went,-even those most exhausted, most in agony,-with a calm and steady step, as they would have marched up to take the Flag of the Stars and Bars from Lee or Longstreet. Not one waited a second's breath before he plunged his hand into the fatal lottery.

Deadly Dash was the first called: there was not one shadow of anxiety upon his face; it was calm without effort, careless without bravado, simply, entirely indifferent. They took his paper and read the words of safety and of life-"Exchange." Then, for one instant, a glory of hope flashed like the sun into his eyes-to die the next; die utterly.

Three followed him, and they all drew the fiat for detention; the fifth called was Stuart Lane.

Let him have suffered as he would, he gave no sign of it now; he approached with his firm, bold cavalry step, and his head haughtily lifted; the proud, fiery, dauntless Cavalier of ideal and of romance. Without a tremor in his wrist he drew his paper out and gave it.

One word alone fell distinct on the silence like the hiss of a shot through the night-"Death!"

He bowed his head slightly as if in assent, and stepped backward-still without a sign.

His English chief gave him one look,-it was that of merciless exultation, of brutal joy, of dark, Cain-like, murderous hate; but it passed, passed quickly: Dash's head sank on his chest, and on his face there was the shadow, I think, of a terrible struggle-the shadow, I know, of a great remorse. He strove with his longing greed for this man's destruction; he knew that he thirsted to see him die.

The Virginian stood erect and silent: a single night and the strong and gallant life, the ardent passions, the chivalrous courage to do and dare, and the love that was in its first fond hours would all be quenched in him as though they had never been; but he was a soldier, and he gave no sign that his death-warrant was not as dear to him as his bridal-night had been. Even his conquerors cast one glance of admiration on him; it was only his leader who felt for him no pang of reverence and pity.

The lottery continued; the hazard was played out; life and death were scattered at reckless chance amidst the twenty who were the playthings of that awful gaming; all had been done in perfect silence on the part of the condemned; not one seemed to think or to feel for himself, and in those who were sent out to their grave not a grudge lingered against their comrades of happier fortune. Deadly Dash, whose fate was release, alone stood with his head sunk, thoughtful and weary.

The three condemned to execution were remanded to separate and solitary confinement, treated already as felons for that one short night which alone remained to them. As his guards removed him, Stuart Lane paused slightly, and signed to his chief to approach him; he held out his hand to Dash, and his voice was very low, though it came to my ear where they stood beside me: "We were rivals once, but we may be friends now. As you have loved her, be pitiful to her when you tell her of my death,-God knows it may be hers! As you have loved her, feel what it is to die without one last look on her face!"

Then, and then only, his bronze cheek grew white as a woman's, and his whole frame shook with one great silent sob; his guard forced him on, and his listener had made him no promise, no farewell; neither had he taken his hand. He had heard in silence, with a dark and evil gloom alone upon him.

The Federal General sharply summoned him from his musing, as the chief of those to be exchanged on the morrow under a white flag of parley; there were matters to be stated to and to be arranged with him.

"I will only see you alone, General," he answered curtly.

The Northerner stared startled, and casting a glance over the redoubtable leader of horse, whose gray feather had become known and dreaded, thought of possible assassination. Deadly Dash laughed his old light, ironic, contemptuous laugh.

"A wounded unarmed man can scarcely kill you! Have as many of your staff about you as you please, but let none of my Virginians be present at our interview."

The Northerners thought he intended to desert to them, or betray some movement of importance, and assented; and he went out with them from the cattle-shed into the hot, stormy night, and the Southerners who were condemned to death and detention looked after him with a long, wistful, dog-like look. They had been with him in so many spirit-stirring days and nights of peril, and they knew that never would they meet again. He had not given one of them a word of adieu; he had killed too many to be touched by his soldiers' loss. Who could expect pity from Deadly Dash?

An hour passed; I was removed under a guard to a somewhat better lodging in the granary, where a surgeon hastily dressed my wounds, and left me on a rough pallet with a jug of water at my side, and the sentinel for my only watcher, bidding me "sleep." Sleep! I could not have slept for my ransom. Though life had hardened me, and made me sometimes, as I fear, callous enough, I could not forget those who were to die when the sun rose; specially, I could not forget that gallant Virginian to whom life was so precious, yet who gave himself with so calm a fortitude to his fate. The rivalry, I thought, must be deep and cruel, to make the man from whom he had won what they both loved turn from him in hatred, even in such extremity as his. On the brink of a comrade's grave, feud might surely have been forgotten?

All that had just passed was reeling deliriously through my brain, and I was panting in the sheer irritation and exhaustion of gunshot wounds, when through the gloom Dash entered the granary, closely guarded, but allowed to be with me on account of our common country. Never was I more thankful to see a familiar face from home than to see his through the long watches of that burning, heavy, interminable night. He refused to rest; he sat by me, tending me as gently as a woman, though he was suffering acutely himself from the injuries received in the course of the day; he watched me unweariedly, though often and often his gaze and his thoughts wandered far from me, as he looked out through the open granary door, past the form of the sentinel, out to the starry solemn skies, the deep woods, and the dark silent land over which the stars were brooding, large and clear.

Was he thinking of the Virginian whose life would die out for ever, with the fading of those stars, or of the woman whom he had lost, whose love was the doomed soldier's, and would never be his own, though the grave closed over his rival with the morrow's sun? Dreamily, half unconsciously, in the excitement of fever, I asked him of her of whom I knew nothing:

"Did you love that woman so well?"

His eyes were still fixed on the distant darkening skies, and he answered quietly, as though rather to his own thoughts than my words,-"Yes: I love her-as I never loved in that old life in England; as we never love but once, I think."

"And she?"

"And she-has but one thought in the world-him."

His voice, as he answered, now grated with dull, dragging misery over the words.

"Had she so much beauty that she touched you like this?"

He smiled slightly, a faint, mournful smile, unutterably sad.

"Yes; she is very lovely, but her beauty is the least rare charm. She is a woman for whom a man would live his greatest, and if he cannot live for her-may-die."

The utterance was very slow, and seemed to lie on me like a hand on my lips compelling me to silence; he had forgotten all, except his memory of her, and where he sat with his eyes fixed outward on the drifting clouds that floated across the stars, I saw his lips quiver once, and I heard him murmur half aloud: "My darling! My darling! You will know how I loved you then--"

And the silence was never broken between us, but he sat motionless thus all the hours through, looking out at the deep still woods, and the serene and lustrous skies, till the first beams of the sun shone over the hills in the east, and I shuddered, where I lay, at its light;-for I knew it was the signal of death.

Then he arose, and bent towards me, and the kindly eyes of old looked down on mine.

"Dear old fellow, the General expects me at dawn. I must leave you just now; say good-bye."

His hand closed on mine, he looked on me one moment longer, a little lingeringly, a little wistfully, then he turned and went out with his guard; went out into the young day that was just breaking on the world.

I watched his shadow as it faded, and I saw that the sun had risen wholly; and I thought of those who were to die with the morning light.

All was very calm for a while; then the beat of a drum rolled through the quiet of the dawn, and the measured tramp of armed men sounded audibly; my heart stood still, my lips felt parched,-I knew the errand of that column marching so slowly across the parched turf. A little while longer yet, and I heard the sharp ring of the ramrods being withdrawn, and the dull echo of the charge being rammed down: with a single leap, as though the bullets were through me, I sprang, weak as I was, from my wretched pallet, and staggered to the open doorway, leaning there against the entrance powerless and spell-bound. I saw the file of soldiers loading; I saw the empty coffin-shells; I saw three men standing bound, their forms distinct against the clear, bright haze of morning, and the fresh foliage of the woods. Two of them were Virginians, but the third was not Stuart Lane With a great cry I sprang forward, but the guards seized my arms and held me, helpless as a woman, in their gripe. He whom we had called Deadly Dash heard, and looked up and smiled. His face was tranquil and full of light, as though the pure peace of the day shone there.

The gripe of the sentinels held me as if in fetters of iron; the world seemed to rock and reel under me, a sea of blood seemed eddying before my eyes; the young day was dawning, and murder was done in its early hours, and I was held there to look on,-its witness, yet powerless to arrest it! I heard the formula-so hideous then!-"Make ready!"-"Present!"-"Fire!" I saw the long line of steel tubes belch out their smoke and flame. I heard the sullen echo of the report roll down from the mountains above. When the mist cleared away, the three figures stood no longer clear against the sunlight; they had fallen.

With the mad violence of desperation I wrenched myself from my guards, and staggered to him where he lay; he was not quite dead yet; the balls had passed through his lungs, but he breathed still; his eyes were unclosed, and the gleam of a last farewell came in them. He smiled slightly, faintly once more.

"She will know how I loved her now. Tell her I died for her," he said softly, while his gaze looked upwards to the golden sun-rays rising in the east.

And with these words life passed away, the smile still lingering gently on his lips;-and I knew no more, for I fell like a man stunned down by him where he was stretched beside the grave that they had hewn for him ere he was yet dead.

* * *

I knew when I saw him there, as well as I knew by detail long after, that he had offered his life for Stuart Lane's, and that it had been accepted; the Virginian, ignorant of the sacrifice made for him, had been sent to the Southern lines during the night, told by the Northerners that he was pardoned on his parole to return in his stead a distinguished Federal officer lately captured by him. He knew nothing, dreamt nothing, of the exchange by which his life was given back to the woman who loved him, when his English Leader died in his place as the sun rose over the fresh summer world, never again to rise for those whose death-shot rang sullen and shrill through its silence.

So Deadly Dash died, and his grave is nameless and unknown there under the shadow of the great Virginian forests. He was outlawed, condemned, exiled, and the world would see no good in him; sins were on him heavily, and vices lay darkly at his door; but when I think of that grave in the South where the grass grows so rankly now, and only the wild deer pauses, I doubt if there was not that in him which may well shame the best amongst us. We never knew him justly till he perished there.

* * *

And my friend who told me this said no more, but took up his br?le-gueule regretfully. The story is given as he gave it, and the States could whisper from the depths of their silent woods many tales of sacrifice as generous, of fortitude as great. That when he had related it he was something ashamed of having felt it so much, is true; and you must refer the unusual weakness, as he did, to the fact that he told it on the off-day of the Derby, after having put a cracker on Wild Charley. A sufficient apology for any number of frailties!

* * *

THE GENERAL'S MATCH-MAKING

OR,

COACHES AND COUSINSHIP.

Where the devil shall I go this Long? Paris is too hot; the inside of my adorable Chateau des Fleurs would give one a lively idea of the feelings of eels in a frying-pan. Rome's only fit to melt down puffy cardinals, as jocks set themselves before the kitchen fire preparatory to the Spring Meetings. In Switzerland there's nothing fit to eat. Spain might be the ticket-the Andalusians are a good-looking lot, but they haven't a notion of beer. Scotland I daren't enter, because I know I should get married under their rascally laws. I'd go to the Bads, but the V. P.'s fillies say they mean to do 'em this summer, and I won't risk meeting them if I know it; the baits they set to catch the unsuspecting are quite frightful. Where the devil shall I go?

So spoke Sydenham Morton, whilom Captain of Eton, now, in due course, having passed up to Kings, discussing ham-pie and audit, devils and coffee, while the June sun streamed through the large oriel windows.

"To the devil, I fear, if you only find your proper fraternity," said a man, coming in. Oak was never sported by Sydie, except when he was rattling certain little squares of ivory in boxes lined with green felt.

"Ah, Mr. Keane, is that you? Come in."

The permission was needless, insomuch as Keane was already in and down on a rocking-chair.

"One o'clock, and only just begun your breakfast! I have finished more than half my day's work."

"I dare say," answered Sydie; "but one shining light like you, monseigneur, is enough for a college. Why should I exert myself? I swore I hadn't four marks a year, and I've my fellowship for telling the furbelow. We all go in for the dolce here except you, and you're such a patent machine for turning out Q. E. D.s by the dozen, that you can no more help working than the bed-maker can help taking my tea and saying the cat did it, and 'May she never be forgiven if she ever so much as looked at that there blessed lock.' I say, find a Q. E. D. for me, to the most vexatious problem, where I'm to go this Long?"

"Go a quiet reading tour; mark out a regular plan, and travel somewhere rugged and lonely, with not a crinoline, or a trout-stream, or a pack of hounds within a hundred miles; the middle of Stonehenge, for example, or with the lighthouse men out at the Smalls or Eddystone. You'd do wonders when you came back, Sydie."

Sydie shook his head and puffed gravely at his pipe.

"Thank you, sir. Cramming's not my line. As for history, I don't see anything particularly interesting in the blackguardisms of men all dust and ashes and gelatine now; if I were the Prince of Wales, I might think it my duty to inquire into the characters of my grandfathers; but not being that individual, I find the Derby list much more suited to my genius. As for the classics, they won't help me to ask for my dinner at Tortoni's, nor to ingratiate myself with the women at the Maison Dorée; and I prefer following Ovid's counsels, and enjoying the Falernian of life represented in these days by milk-punch, to plodding through the De Officiis. As for mathematics, it may be something very grand to draw triangles and circles till A meets B because C is as long as D; but I know, when I did the same operation in chalk when I was a small actor on the nursery floor, my nurse (who might have gone along with the barbarian who stuck Archimedes) called me an idle brat. Well, I say, about the Long? Where are you going, most grave and reverent seignior?"

"Where there are no impertinent boys, if there be such a paradise on earth," rejoined Keane, lighting his pipe. "I go to my moor, of course, for the 12th, but until then I haven't made up my mind. I think I shall scamper over South America; I want freshening up, and I've a great fancy to see those buried cities, not to mention a chance of buffalo hunting."

"Travelling's such a bore," interrupted Sydie, stretching himself out like an india-rubber tube. "Talk of the cherub that's always sitting up aloft to watch over poor Jack, there are always ten thousand demons watching over the life of any luckless ?othen; there are the custom-house men, whose natural prey he becomes, and the hotel-keepers, who fasten on him to suck his life-blood, and there are the mosquitoes, and other things less minute but not less agonizing; and there are guides and muleteers, and waiters and ciceroni-oh, hang it! travelling's a dreadful bore, if it were only for the inevitable widow with four daughters whom you've danced with once at a charity ball, who rushes up to you on the Boulevards or a Rhine steamer, and tacks herself on to you, and whom it's well for you if you can shake off when you scatter the dust of the city from the sole of your foot."

"You can't chatter, can you?"

"Yes; my fr?num was happily cut when I was a baby. Fancy what a loss the world would have endured if it hadn't been!" said Sydie, lazily shutting his half-closed blue eyes. "I say, the governor has been bothering my life out to go down to St. Crucis; he's an old brick, you know, and has the primest dry in the kingdom. I wish you'd come, will you? There's capital fishing and cricketing, and you'd keep me company. Do. You shall have the best mount in the kingdom, and the General will do you no end of good on Hippocrate's rule-contrarieties cure contrarieties."

"I'll think about it; but you know I prefer solitude generally; misanthropical, I admit, but decidedly lucky for me, as my companions through life will always be my ink-stand, my terrier, and my papers. I have never wished for any other yet, and I hope I never shall. Are you going to smoke and drink audit on that sofa all day?"

"No," answered Sydie, "I'm going to take a turn at beer and Brown's for a change. Well, I shall take you down with me on Tuesday, sir, so that's settled."

Keane laughed, and after some few words on the business that had brought him thither, went across the quad to his own rooms to plunge into the intricacies of Fourrier and Laplace, or give the vigor of his brain to stuffing some young goose's empty head, or cramming some idle young dog with ballast enough to carry him through the shoals and quicksands of his Greats.

Gerald Keane was a mathematical Coach, and had taken high honors-a rare thing for a Kingsman to do, for are they not, by their own confession, the laziest disciples of the dolce in the whole of Granta, invariably bumped and caught out, and from sheer idleness letting other men beat Lord's and shame the Oxford Eleven, and graduate with Double Firsts, while they lie perdus in the shades of Holy Henry? Keane, however, was the one exception to the rule. He was dreadfully wild, as ladies say, for his first term or two, though equally eloquent at the Union; then his family exulting in the accuracies of their prophecies regarding his worthlessness, and somebody else daring him to go in for honors, his pluck was put up, and he set himself to work to show them all what he could do if he chose. Once roused to put out his powers, he liked using them; the bother of the training over, it is no trouble to keep place as stroke-oar; and now men pointed him out in the Senate House, and at the Senior Fellows' table, and he bid fair to rank with the writer on Jasher and the author of the Inductive Sciences.

People called him very cold. It was popularly averred that he had no more feeling than Roubilliac's or Thorwaldsen's statues; but as he was a great favorite with the under-grads, and always good-natured to them, there were a few men who doubted the theory, though he never tried to refute or dispute it.

Of all the young fellows, the one Keane liked the best, and to whom he was kindest, was Sydenham Morton-Sydie to everybody in Granta, from the little fleuriste opposite in King's Parade, to the V. P.'s wife, who petted him because his uncle was a millionnaire-the dearest fellow in the world, according to all the Cambridge young ladies-the darling of all the milliner and confectioner girls in Trumpington Street and Petty Cury-the best chap going among the kindred spirits, who got gated, and lectured, and rusticated for skying over to Newmarket, or pommelling bargees, or taking a lark over at Cherryhinton-the best-dressed, fastest, and most charming of Cantabs, as he himself would gravely assure you.

They were totally dissimilar, and far asunder in position; but an affair on the slope of the Matterhorn, when the boy had saved the elder man's life, had riveted attachment between them, and bridged over the difference of their academical rank.

The Commencement came and went, with its speeches, and its H.R.H. Chancellor, and its pretty women gliding among the elms of Neville's Court (poor Leslie Ellis's daily haunt), filling the grim benches of the Senate House, and flitting past the carved benches of King's Chapel. Granta was henceforth a desert to all Cambridge belles; they could walk down Trumpington Street without meeting a score of little straw hats, and Trumpington Street became as odious as Sahara; the "darling Backs" were free to them, and, of course, they who, by all relations, from those of Genesis to those of Vanity Fair, have never cared, save for fruit défendu, saw nothing to admire in the trees, and grass, and river, minus outriggers and collegians. There was a general exodus: Masters' red hoods, Fellows Commoners' gold-lace, Fellows' gown and mortar boards, morning chapel surplices, and under-grads' straw-hats and cutaway coats, all vanished from court and library, street and cloister. Cambridge was empty; the married Dons and their families went off to country-houses or Rhine steamers; Fellows went touring with views to medi?val architecture, Roman remains, Greek inscriptions, Paris laisser aller, or Norwegian fishing, according to their tastes and habits; under-grads scattered themselves over the face of the globe, and were to be found in knots of two or three calling for stout in Véfour's, kicking up a row with Austrian gendarmerie, chalking up effigies of Bomba on Italian walls, striding up every mountain from Skiddaw to the Pic du Midi, burrowing like rabbits in a warren for reading purposes on Dartmoor, kissing sunny-haired Gretchens in German hostelries, swinging through the Vaterland with knapsacks and sticks, doing a walking tour-in fact, swarming everywhere with their impossible French and hearty voices, and lithe English muscle, Granta marked on them as distinctly as an M.B. waistcoat marks an Anglican, or utter ignorance of modern politics a "great classic."

Cambridge had emptied itself of the scores of naughty boys that lie in the arms of Mater, and on Tuesday Keane and Sydie were shaking and rattling over those dreadful nervous Eastern Counties tenders, through that picturesque and beautiful country that does permutations with such laudable perseverance on pollards, fens, and flats-flats, fens, and pollards-at the snail's pace that, according to the E.G.R., we must believe to be "express."

"I wrote and told the governor you were coming down with me, sir," said Sydie, hanging up his hat. "I didn't tell him what a trouble I had to make you throw over South America for a fortnight, and come and taste his curry at the Beeches. You'll like the old boy; he's as hot and choleric, and as genial and good-hearted, as any old brick that ever walked. He was born as sweet-tempered and soft-mouthed as mamma when an eldest son waltzes twice with Adeliza, and the pepper's been put into him by the curry-powder, the gentlemanlike transportation, and the unlimited command over black devils, enjoyed by gentlemen of the H.E.I.C.S."

"A nabob uncle," thought Keane. "Oh, I see, yellow, dyspeptic, always boring one with 'How to govern India,' and recollections of 'When I served with Napier.' What a fool I was to let Sydie persuade me to go. A month in Lima and the Pampas would be much pleasanter."

"He came over last year," continued Sydie, in blissful ignorance, "and bought the Beeches, a very jolly place, only he's crammed it with everything anybody suggested, and tried anything that any farmer recommended, so that the house and the estate present a peculiar compendium of all theories of architecture, and a general exhibition of all sorts of tastes. He's his hobbies; pouncing on and apprehending small boys is one of 'em, for which practice he is endeared to the youth of St. Crucis as the 'old cove,' the 'Injian devil,' and like affectionate cognomens. But the General's weak point is me-me and little Fay."

"His mare, I suppose?"

"His mare!-bless my heart, no!-his mare!" And Sydie lay back, and laughed silently. "His mare! By George! what would she say? She's a good deal too lively a young lady to run in harness for anybody, though she's soft-mouthed enough when she's led. Mare! No, Fay's his niece-my cousin. Her father and my father went to glory when we were both smalls, and left us in legacy to the General, and a pretty pot of money the legacy has cost him."

"Your cousin, indeed! The name's more like a mare's than a girl's," answered Keane, thinking to himself. "A cousin! I just wish I'd known that. One of those Indian girls, I bet, tanned brown as a berry, flirts à outrance, has run the gauntlet of all the Calcutta balls, been engaged to men in all the Arms, talks horridly broad Anglo-Indian-English. I know the style."

The engine screamed, and pulled up at the St. Crucis station, some seventy miles farther on, lying in the midst of Creswickian landscapes, with woodlands, and cottages, and sweet fresh stretches of meadow-land, such as do one's heart good after hard days and late nights in dust and gaslight.

"Deuced fine points," said Sydie, taking the ribbons of a high-stepping bay that had brought one of the neatest possible traps to take him and Keane to the Beeches, and springing, in all his glory, to the box, than which no imperial throne could have offered to him one-half so delightful a seat. "Governor never keeps screws. What a crying shame we're not allowed to keep the sorriest hack at King's. That comes of gentlemen slipping into shoes that were meant for beggars. Hallo, there are the old beech-trees; I vow I can almost taste the curry and dry from looking at them."

In dashed the bay through the park-gates, sending the shingle flying up in small simoons, and the rooks cawing in supreme surprise from their nests in the branches of the beech-trees.

"Hallo, my ancient, how are you?" began Sydie to the butler, while that stately person expanded into a smile of welcome. "Down, dog, down! 'Pon my life, the old place looks very jolly. What have you hung all that armor up for;-to make believe our ancestors dwelt in these marble halls? How devilish dusty I am. Where's the General? Didn't know we were coming till next train. Fay! Fay! where are you? Ashton, where's Miss Morton?"

"Here, Sydie dear," cried the young lady in question, rushing across the hall with the most ecstatic delight, and throwing herself into the Cantab's arms, who received her with no less cordiality, and kissed her straightway, regardless of the presence of Keane, the butler, and Harris.

"Oh, Sydie," began the young lady, breathlessly, "I'm so delighted you're come. There's the archery fête, and a picnic at Shallowton, and an election ball over at Coverdale, and I want you to dance with me, and to try the new billiard-table, and to come and see my aviary, and to teach me pistol-shooting (because Julia Dupuis can shoot splendidly, and talks of joining the Rifles), and to show me how to do Euclid, and to amuse me, and to play with me, and to tell me which is the prettiest of Snowdrop's pups to be saved, and to--" She stopped suddenly, and dropped from enthusiastic tirade to subdued surprise, as she caught sight of Keane for the first time. "Oh, Sydie, why did you not introduce me to your friend? How rude I have been!"

"Mr. Keane, my cousin, the torment of my existence, Miss Morton in public, Little Fay in private life. There, you know one another now. I can't say any more. Do tell me where the governor is."

"Mr. Keane, what can you think of me?" cried Fay. "Any friend of Sydenham's is most welcome to the Beeches, and my uncle will scold me frightfully for giving you such a reception. Please do forgive me, I was so delighted to see my cousin."

"Which I can fully enter into, having a weakness for Sydie myself," smiled Keane. "I am sure he is very fortunate in being the cause of such an excuse."

Keane said it par complaisance, but rather carelessly; young ladies, as a class, being one of his aversions. He looked at Fay Morton, however, and saw she was not an Indianized girl after all. She was not yellow, but, au contraire, had waving fair hair, long dark eyes, and a mischievous, sunny face-

A rosebud set with little wilful thorns,

And sweet as English air could make her.

"Where's the governor, Fay?" reiterated Sydie.

"Here, my dear boy. Thought of your old uncle the first thing, Sydie? God bless my soul, how well you look! Confound you, why didn't you tell me what train you were coming by? Devil take you, Ashton, why's there no fire in the hall? Thought it was warm, did you? Hum! more fool you then."

"Uncle dear," said Miss Fay, "here is Sydie's friend, Mr. Keane; you are being as rude as I have been."

The General, at this conjuration, swung sharp round, a stout, hale, handsome old fellow, with gray moustaches and a high color, holding a spade in his hand and clad in a linen coat.

"Bless my soul, sir," cried the General, shaking Keane's hand with the greatest possible energy, "charmed to see you-delighted, 'pon my honor; only hope you're come to stay till Christmas; there are plenty of bachelors' dens. Devil take me! of what was I thinking? I was pleased to see that boy, I suppose. More fool I, you'll say, a lazy, good-for-nothing young dog like him. Don't let me keep you standing in the hall. Cursed cold, isn't it? and there's Little Fay in muslin! Ashton, send some hot water into the west room for Mr.-Mr.--Confound you, Sydie, why didn't you tell-I mean introduce me?-Mr. Keane. Luncheon will be on the table in ten minutes. Like curry, Mr. Keane? There, get along, Sydie, you foolish boy; you can talk to Fay after luncheon."

"Sydie," whispered Fay, an hour before dinner, when she had teased the Cantab's life out of him till he had consented to pronounce judgment on the puppies, "what a splendid head that man has you brought with you; he'd do for Plato, with that grand calm brow and lofty unapproachable look. Who is he?"

"The greatest philosopher of modern times," responded her cousin, solemnly. "A condensation of Solon, Thales, Plutarch, Seneca, Cicero, Lucullus, Bion, Theophrastes, and Co.; such a giant of mathematical knowledge, and all other knowledge, too, that every day, when he passes under Bacon's Gate, we are afraid the old legend will come to pass, and it will tumble down as flat as a pancake; a homage to him, but a loss to Cambridge."

"Nonsense," said Miss Fay, impatiently. "(I like that sweet little thing with the black nose best, dear.) Who is he? What is he? How old is he? What's his name? Where does he live?"

"Gently, young woman," cried Sydie. "He is Tutor and Fellow of King's, and a great gun besides; he's some twenty-five years older than you. His name on the rolls is Gerald, I believe, and he dwells in the shadow of Mater, beyond the reach of my cornet; for which fact, not being musically inclined, he is barbarian enough to return thanks daily in chapel."

"I am sorry he is come. It was stupid of you to bring him."

"Wherefore, ma cousine? Are you afraid of him? You needn't be. Young ladies are too insignificant atoms of creation for him to criticise. He'll no more expect sense from you than from Snowdrop and her pups."

"Afraid!" repeated Fay, with extreme indignation. "I should like to see any man of whom I should feel afraid! If he doesn't like fun and nonsense, I pity him; but if he despise me ever so much for it, I shall enjoy myself before him, and in spite of him. I was sorry you brought him, because he will take you away when I want you all to myself; and he looks so haughty, that--"

"You are afraid of him, Fay, and won't own it."

"I am not," reiterated Fay, impetuously; "and I will smoke a cigar with him after dinner, to show you I am not one bit."

"I bet you six pair of gloves you do no such thing, young lady."

"Done. Do keep the one with a black nose, Sydie; and yet that little liver-colored darling is too pretty to be killed. Suppose we save them all? Snowdrop will be so pleased."

Whereon Fay kissed all the little snub noses with the deepest affection, and was caught in the act by Keane and the General.

"There's that child with her arms full of dogs," said the General, beaming with satisfaction at sight of his niece. "She's a little, spoilt, wilful thing. She's an old bachelor's pet, and you must make allowances. I call her the fairy of the Beeches, God bless her! She nursed me last winter, when I was at death's door from these cursed cold winds, sir, better than Miss Nightingale could have done. What a devilish climate it is; never two days alike. I don't wonder Englishwomen are such icicles, poor things; they're frostbitten from their cradle upwards."

"India warms them up, General, doesn't it?"

The General shook with laughter.

"To be sure, to be sure; if prudery's the fashion, they'll wear it, sir, as they would patches or hair-powder; but they're always uncommonly glad to leave it off and lock it out of sight when they can. What do you think of the kennels? I say, Sydie, confound you, why did you bring down any traps with you? Haven't room for 'em, not for one. Couldn't cram a tilbury into the coach-house."

"A trap, governor?" said Sydie, straightening his back after examination of the pups; "can't keep even a wall-eyed cab-horse; wish I could."

"Where's your drag, then?" demanded the General.

"My drag? Don't I just wish I had one, to offer my bosom friend the V. P. a seat on the box. Calvert, of Trinity, tooled us over in his to the Spring Meetings, and his grays are the sweetest pair of goers-the leaders especially-that ever you saw in harness. We came back 'cross country, to get in time for hall, and a pretty mess we made of it, for we broke the axle, and lamed the off-wheeler, and--"

"But, God bless my soul," stormed the General, excited beyond measure, "you wrote me word you were going to bring a drag down with you, and of course I supposed you meant what you said, and I had Harris in about it, and he swore the coach-house was as full of traps as ever it could hold, so I had my tax-cart and Fay's phaeton turned into one of the stalls, and then, after all, it comes out you've never brought it! Devil take you, Sydie, why can't you be more thoughtful--"

"But, my dear governor--"

"Nonsense; don't talk to me!" cried the General, trying to work himself into a passion, and diving into the recesses of six separate pockets one after another. "Look here, sir, I suppose you'll believe your own words? Here it is in black and white.-'P. S. I shall bring my Coach down with me.' There, what do you say now? Confound you, what are you laughing at? I don't see anything to laugh at. In my day, young fellows didn't make fools of old men in this way. Bless my soul, why the devil don't you leave off laughing, and talk a little common sense? The thing's plain enough.-'P.S. I shall bring my Coach down with me.'"

"So I have," said Sydie, screaming with laughter. "Look at him-he's a first-rate Coach, too! Wheels always oiled, and ready for any road; always going up hill, and never caught coming down; started at a devil of a pace, and now keeps ahead of all other vehicles on all highways. A first-class Coach, that will tool me through the tortuous lanes and treacherous pitfalls of the Greats with flying colors. My Coach! Bravo, General! that's the best bit of fun I've had since I dressed up like Sophonisba Briggs, and led the V. P. a dance all round the quad, every hair on his head standing erect in his virtuous indignation at the awful morals of his college."

"Eh, what?" grunted the General, light beginning to dawn upon him. "Do you mean Mr. Keane? Hum! how's one to be up to all your confounded slang? How could I know? Devil take you, Sydie, why can't you write common English? You young fellows talk as bad jargon as Sepoys. You're sure I'm delighted to see you, Mr. Keane, though I did make the mistake."

"Thank you, General," said Keane; "but it's rather cool of you, Master Sydie, to have forced me on to your uncle's hands without his wish or his leave."

"Not at all, not at all," swore the General, with vehement cordiality. "I gave him carte blanche to ask whom he would, and unexpected guests are always most welcome; not that you were unexpected though, for I'd told that boy to be sure and bring somebody down here--"

"And have had the tax-cart and my phaeton turned out to make comfortable quarters for him," said Miss Fay, with a glance at The Coach to see how he took chaff, "and I only hope Mr. Keane may like his accommodation."

"Perhaps, Miss Morton," said Keane, smiling, "I shall like it so well that you will have to say to me as poor Voltaire to his troublesome abbé, 'Don Quichotte prenait les auberges pour les chateaux, mais vous avez pris les chateaux pour les auberges.'"

"Tiresome man," thought Fay. "I wish Sydie hadn't brought him here; but I shall do as I always do, however grand and supercilious he may look. He has lived among all those men and books till he has grown as cold as granite. What a pity it is people don't enjoy existence as I do!"

"You are thinking, Miss Morton," said Keane, as he walked on beside her, with an amused glance at her face, which was expressive enough of her thoughts, "that if your uncle is glad to see me, you are not, and that Sydie was very stupid not to bring down one of his kindred spirits instead of--Don't disclaim it now; you should veil your face if you wish your thoughts not to be read."

"I was not going to disclaim it," said Fay, quickly looking up at him with a rapid glance, half penitence, half irritation. "I always tell the truth; but I was not thinking exactly that; I don't want any of Sydie's friends-I detest boys-but I certainly was thinking that as you look down on everything that we all delight in, I fancied you and the Beeches will hardly agree. If I am rude, you must not be angry; you wanted me to tell you the truth."

Keane smiled again.

"Do I look down on the things you delight in? I hardly know enough of you, as we have only addressed about six syllables to each other, to be able to judge what you like and what you don't like; but certainly I must admit, that caressing the little round heads of those puppies yonder, which seemed to afford you such extreme rapture, would not be any source of remarkable gratification to me."

Fay looked up at him and laughed.

"Well, I am fond of animals as you are fond of books. Is it not an open question whether the live dog or sheepskin is not as good as the dead Morocco or Russian leather?"

"Is it an open question, whether Macaulay's or Arago's brain weighs no more than a cat's or a puppy's?"

"Brain!" said impudent little Fay; "are your great men always as honest and as faithful as my poor little Snowdrop? I have an idea that Sheridan's brains were often obscured by brandy; that Richelieu had the weakness to be prouder of his bad poems than his magnificent policies; and that Pope and Byron had the folly to be more tenacious of a glance at their physical defect than an onslaught on their noblest works. I could mention a good many other instances where brain was not always a voucher for corresponding strength of character."

Keane was surprised to hear a sensible speech from this volatile little puss, and honored her by answering her seriously.

"Say, rather, Miss Morton, that those to whom many temptations fall should have many excuses made. Where the brain preponderates, excelling in creative faculty and rapid thought, there will the sensibilities be proportionately acute. The vivacity and vigorous life which produced the rapid flow of Sheridan's eloquence led him into the dissipation which made him end his days in a spunging-house. Men of cooler minds and natures must not presume to judge him. They had not his temptation; they cannot judge of his fault. Richelieu, in all probability, amused himself with his verses as he amused himself with his white kitten and its cork, as a délassement; had he piqued himself upon his poetry, as they say, he would have turned poetaster instead of politician. As for the other two, you must remember that Pope's deformity made him a subject of ridicule to the woman he was fool enough to worship, and Byron, poor fellow, was over-susceptible on all points, or he would scarcely have allowed the venomed arrows from the Scotch Reviewers to wound him, nor would he have cared for the desertion of a wife who was to him like ice to fire. When you are older, you will learn that it is very dangerous and unjust to say this thing is right, that wrong, that feeling wise, or this foolish; for all temperaments are different, and the same circumstances may produce very different effects. Your puppies will grow up with dissimilar characters; how much more so, then, must men?"

Miss Fay was quiet for a minute, then she flashed her mischievous eyes on him.

"Certainly; but then, by your own admission, you have no right to decide that your love for mathematics is wise, and my love for Snowdrop foolish; it may be quite au contraire. Perhaps, after all, I may have 'chosen the better part.'"

"Fay, go in and dress for dinner," interrupted the General, trotting up; "your tongue would run on forever if nobody stopped it; you're no exception to your sex on that point. Is she?"

Keane laughed.

"Perhaps Miss Morton's fr?num, like Sydie's, was cut too far in her infancy, and therefore she has been 'unbridled' ever since."

"In all things!" cried little Fay. "Nobody has put the curb on me yet, and nobody ever shall."

"Don't be too sure, Fay," cried Sydie. "Rarey does wonders with the wildest fillies. Somebody may bring you down on your knees yet."

"You'll have to see to that, Sydie," laughed the General. "Come, get along, child, to your toilette. I never have my soup cold and my curry overdone. To wait for his dinner is a stretch of good nature, and patience that ought not to be expected of any man."

The soup was not cold nor the curry overdone, and the dinner was pleasant enough, in the long dining-room, with the June sun streaming in through its bay-windows from out the brilliant-colored garden, and the walls echoing with the laughter of Sydie and his cousin, the young lady keeping true to her avowal of "not caring for Plato's presence." "Plato," however, listened quietly, peeling his peaches with tranquil amusement; for if the girl talked nonsense, it was clever nonsense, as rare, by the way, and quite as refreshing as true wit.

"My gloves are safe; you're too afraid of him, Fay," whispered Sydie, bending forwards to give her some hautboys.

"Am I?" cried Miss Fay, with a moue of supreme contempt. Neither the whisper nor the moue escaped Keane, as he talked with the governor on model drainage.

"Where's my hookah, Fay?" asked the General, after dessert. "Get it, will you, my pet?"

"Voilà!" cried Miss Fay, lifting the narghilé from the sideboard. Then taking some cigars off the mantelpiece, she put one in her own mouth, struck a fusee, and, handing the case to Keane, said, with a saucy smile in her soft bright eyes, though, to tell the truth, she was a little bit afraid of taking liberties with him:

"If you are not above such a sublunary indulgence, will you have a cigar with me?"

"With the greatest pleasure," said Keane, with a grave bow; "and if you would like to further rival George Sand, I shall be very happy to give you the address of my tailor."

"Thank you exceedingly; but as long as crinoline is the type of the sex that are a little lower than the angels, and ribbon-ties the seal of those but a trifle better than Mephistopheles, I don't think I will change it," responded Little Fay, contemptuously, as she threw herself down on a couch with an indignant defiant glance, and puffed at her Manilla.

"I hate him, Sydie," said the little lady, vehemently, that night.

"Do you, dear?" answered the Cantab; "you see, you've never had anybody to be afraid of, or had any man neglect you before."

"He may neglect me if he please, I am sure I do not care," rejoined Fay, disdainfully; "only I do wish, Sydie, that you had never brought him here to make us all uncomfortable."

"He don't make me uncomfortable, quite otherwise; nor yet the governor; you're the only victim, Fay."

Fay saw little enough of Keane for the next week or two. He was out all day with Sydie trout-fishing, or walking over his farms with the General, or sitting in the study reading, and writing his articles for the Cambridge Journal, Leonville's Mathematical Journal, or the Westminster Review. But when she was with him, there was no mischief within her reach that Miss Fay did not perpetrate. Keane, to tease her, would condemn-so seriously that she believed him-all that she loved the best; he would tell her that he admired quiet, domestic women; that he thought girls should be very subdued and retiring; that they should work well, and not care much for society; at all of which, being her extreme antipodes, Little Fay would be vehemently wrathful. She would get on her pony without any saddle in her evening dress, and ride him at the five-bar gate in the stable-yard; she would put on Sydie's smoking-cap, and look very pretty in it, and take a Queen's on the divan of the smoking-room, reading Bell's Life, and asking Keane how much he would bet on the October; she would spend all the morning making wreaths of roses, dressing herself and the puppies up in them, inquiring if it was not a laudable and industrious occupation. There was no nonsense or mischief Fay would not imagine and forthwith commit, and anything they wanted her not to do she would do straightway, even to the imperilling of her own life and limb. She tried hard to irritate or rouse "Plato," as she called him, but Plato was not to be moved, and treated her as a spoilt child, whom he alone had sense enough to resist.

"It will be great folly for you to attempt it, Miss Morton. Those horses are not fit to be driven by any one, much less by a woman," said Keane, quietly, one morning.

They were in the stable-yard, and chanced to be alone when a new purchase of the governor's-two scarcely broken-in thorough-bred colts-were brought with a new mail-phaeton into the yard, and Miss Fay forthwith announced her resolution of driving them round the avenue. The groom that came with them told her they were almost more than he could manage, their own coachman begged and implored, Keane reasoned quietly, all to no purpose. The rosebud had put out its little wilful thorns; Keane's words added fuel to the fire. Up she sprang, looking the daintiest morsel imaginable perched up on that very exalted box-seat, told the horrified groom to mount behind, and started them off, lifting her hat with a graceful bow to "Plato," who stood watching the phaeton with his arms folded and his cigar in his mouth.

Soon after, he started in the contrary direction, for the avenue circled the Beeches in an oval of four miles, and he knew he should meet her coming back. He strolled along under the pleasant shadow of the great trees, enjoying the sunset and the fresh air, and capable of enjoying them still more but for an inward misgiving. His presentiment was not without its grounds. He had walked about a mile and a half round the avenue, when a cloud of dust told him what was up, and in the distance came the thorough-breds, broken away as he had prophesied, tearing along with the bits between their teeth, Little Fay keeping gallantly hold of the ribbons, but as powerless over the colts now they had got their heads as the groom leaning from the back seat.

On came the phaeton, bumping, rattling, oscillating, threatening every second to be turned over. Keane caught one glance of Fay's face, resolute and pale, and of her little hands grasping the ribbons, till they were cut and bleeding with the strain. There was nothing for it but to stand straight in the animals' path, catch their heads, and throw them back on their haunches. Luckily, his muscles were like iron-luckily, too, the colts had come a long way, and were not fresh. He stood like a rock, and checked them; running a very close risk of dislocating his arms with the shock, but saving little Fay from destruction. The colts stood trembling, the groom jumped out and caught the reins, Keane amused himself silently with the mingled penitence, vexation, shame, and rebellion visible in the little lady's face.

"Well," said he, quietly, "as you were so desirous of breaking your neck, will you ever forgive me for defeating your purpose?"

"Pray don't!" cried Fay, passionately. "I do thank you so much for saving my life; I think it so generous and brave of you to have rescued me at such risk to yourself. I feel that I can never be grateful enough to you, but don't talk in that way. I know it was silly and self-willed of me."

"It was; that fact is obvious."

"Then I shall make it more so," cried Miss Fay, with her old wilfulness. "I do feel very grateful, and I would tell you so, if you would let me; but if you think it has made me afraid, you are quite wrong, and so you shall see."

And before he could interfere, or do more than mechanically spring up after her, she had caught the reins from the groom, and started the trembling colts off again. But Keane put his hand on the ribbons.

"Foolish child; are you mad?" he said, so gravely yet so gently that Fay let them go, and let him drive her back to the stable-yard, where she sprang out, and rushed away to her own room, terrified the governor with a few vehement sentences, which gave him a vague idea that Keane was murdered and both Fay's legs broken, and then had a private cry all to herself, with her arms round Snowdrop's neck, curled up in one of the drawing-room windows, where she had not been long when the General and Keane passed through, not noticing her, hidden as she was, in curtains, cushions, and flowers.

"She's a little wilful thing, Keane," the General was saying, "but you mustn't think the worse of her for that."

"I don't. I am sick of those conventional young ladies who agree with everything one says to them-who keep all the frowns for mothers and servants, and are as serene as a cloudless sky abroad, smile blandly on all alike, and haven't an opinion of their own."

"Fay's plenty of opinions of her own," chuckled the General; "and she tells 'em pretty freely, too. Bless the child, she's not ashamed of any of her thoughts and never will be."

"I hope not. Your little niece can do things that no other young lady could and they are so pretty in her that it would be a thousand pities for her to grow one atom less natural and wilful. Grapes growing wild are charming-grapes trained to a stake are ruined. I assure you, if I were you, I would not scold her for driving those colts to-day. High spirits and love of fun led her on, and the courage and presence of mind she displayed are too rare among her sex for us to do right in checking them."

"To be sure, to be sure," assented the governor, gleefully. "God bless the child, she's one among a thousand, sir. Cognac, not milk and water. There's the dinner-bell; confound it."

Whereat the General made his exit, and Keane also; and Fay kissed the spaniel with even more passionate attachment than ordinary.

"Ah, Snowdrop, I don't hate him any more; he is a darling!"

One glowing August morning Keane was in the study pondering whether he would go to his moor or not. The General had besought him to stay. His gamekeeper wrote him that it was a horribly bad rainy season in Invernessshire; the trout and the rabbits were very good sport in a mild way here. Altogether, Keane felt half disposed to keep where he was, when a shadow fell across his paper; and, as he looked up, he saw in the open window the English rosebud.

"Is it not one of the open questions, Mr. Keane," asked Fay, "whether it is very wise to spend all this glorious morning shut out of the sight of the sun-rays and the scent of the flowers?"

"How have you been spending it, then?"

"Putting bouquets in all the rooms, cleaning my aviary, talking to the puppies, and reading Jocelyn under the limes in the shrubberies-all very puerile, but all very pleasant. Perhaps if you descended to a lazy day like that now and then, you might be none the worse!"

"Is that a challenge? Will you take me under the limes?"

"No, indeed! I do not admit men who despise them to my gardens of Armida, any more than you would admit me into your Schools. I have as great a scorn for a skeptic as you have for a tyro."

"Pardon me. I have no scorn for a tyro. But you would not come to the Accademe; you dislike 'Plato' too much."

Fay looked up at him half shyly, half mischievously.

"Yes, I do dislike you, when you look down on me as Richelieu might have looked down on his kitten."

"Liking to see its play?" said Keane, half sadly. "Contrasting its gay insouciance with his own toil and turmoil, regretting, perhaps, the time when trifles made his joy as they did his kitten's? If I were to look on you so, there would not be much to offend you."

"You do not think so of me, or you would speak to me as if I were an intelligent being, not a silly little thing."

"How do you know I think you silly?"

"Because you think all women so."

"Perhaps; but then you should rather try to redeem me from my error in doctrine. Come, let us sign a treaty of peace. Take me under the limes. I want some fresh air after writing all day; and in payment I will teach you Euclid, as you vainly beseeched your cousin to do yesterday."

"Will you?" cried Fay, eagerly. Then she threw back her head. "I never am won by bribes."

"Nor yet by threats? What a difficult young lady you are. Come, show me your shrubbery sanctum now you have invaded mine."

The English rosebud laid aside its wilful thorns, and Fay, a little less afraid of her Plato, and therefore a little less defiant to him, led him over the grounds, filled his hands with flowers, showed him her aviary, read some of Jocelyn to him, to show him, she said, that Lamartine was better than the [OE]dipus in Coloneus, and thought, as she dressed for dinner, "I wonder if he does despise me-he has such a beautiful face, if he were not so haughty and cold!"

The next day Keane gave her an hour of Euclid in the study. Certainly The Coach had never had such a pretty pupil; and he wished every dull head he had to cram was as intelligent as this fair-haired one. Fay was quick and clever; she was stimulated, moreover, by his decree concerning the stupidity of all women; she really worked as hard as any young man studying for degrees when they supposed her fast asleep in bed, and she got over the Pons Asinorum in a style that fairly astonished her tutor.

The Coach did not dislike his occupation either; it did him good, after his life of solitude and study, something as the kitten and cork did Richelieu good after his cabinets and councils; and Little Fay, with her flowers and fun, mischief and impudence, and that winning wilfulness which it amused him gradually to tame down, unbent the chillness which had grown upon him. He was the better for it, as a man after hard study or practice is the better for some fresh sea-breezes, and some days of careless dolce.

"Well, Fay, have you had another poor devil flinging himself at your feet by means of a postage-stamp?" said Sydie one morning at breakfast. "You can't disguise anything from me, your most interested, anxious, and near and dear relative. Whenever the governor looks particularly stormy I see the signs of the times, that if I do not forthwith remove your dangerously attractive person, all the bricks, spooneys, swells, and do-nothings in the county will speedily fill the Hanwell wards to overflowing."

"Don't talk such nonsense, Sydie," said Fay, impatiently, with a glance at Keane, as she handed him his chocolate.

"Ah! deuce take the fellows," chuckled the General. "Love, devotion, admiration! What a lot of stuff they do write. I wonder if Fay were a little beggar, how much of it all would stand the test? But we know a trick worth two of that. Try those sardines, Keane. House is let, Fay-eh? House is let; nobody need apply. Ha, ha!"

And the General took some more curry, laughing till he was purple, while Fay blushed scarlet, a trick of which she was rarely guilty; Sydie smiled, and Keane picked out his sardines with calm deliberation.

"Hallo! God bless my soul!" burst forth the General again. "Devil take me! I'll be hanged if I stand it! Confound 'em all! I do call it hard for a man not to be able to sit at his breakfast in peace. Good Heavens! what will come to the country, if all those little devils grow up to be food for Calcraft? He's actually pulling the bark off the trees, as I live! Excuse me, I can't sit still and see it."

Wherewith the General bolted from his chair, darted through the window, upsetting three dogs, two kittens, and a stand of flowers in his exit, and bolted breathlessly across the park with the poker in his hand.

"Bless his old heart! Ain't he a brick?" shouted Sydie. "Do excuse me, Fay, I must go and hear him blow up that boy sky-high, and give him a shilling for tuck afterwards; it will be so rich."

The Cantab made his exit, and Fay busied herself calming the kittens' minds, and restoring the dethroned geraniums. Keane read his Times for ten minutes, then looked up.

"Miss Morton, where is your tongue? I have not heard it for a quarter of an hour, a miracle that has never happened in the two months I have been at the Beeches."

"You do not want to hear it."

"What! am I in mauvais odeur again?" smiled Keane. "I thought we were good friends. Have you found the Q. E. D. to the problem I gave you?"

"To be sure!" cried Fay, exultantly. And kneeling down by him, she went through the whole thing in exceeding triumph.

"You are a good child," said her tutor, smiling, in himself amazed at this volatile little thing's capacity for mathematics. "I think you will be able to take your degree, if you like. Come, do you hate me now, Fay?"

"No," said Fay, a little shyly. "I never hated you, I always admired you; but I was afraid of you, though I would never confess it to Sydie."

"Never be afraid of me," said Keane, putting his hand on hers as it lay on the arm of his chair. "You have no cause. You can do things few girls can; but they are pretty in you, where they might be-not so pretty in others. I like them at the least. You are very fond of your cousin, are you not?"

"Of Sydie? Oh, I love him dearly!"

Keane took his hand away, and rose, as the General trotted in:

"God bless my soul, Keane, how warm it is! Confoundedly hot without one's hat, I can tell you. Had my walk all for nothing, too. That cursed little idiot wasn't trespassing after all. Stephen had set him to spud out the daisies, and I'd thrashed the boy before I'd listen to him. Devil take him!"

August went out and September came in, and Keane stayed on at the Beeches. They were pleasant days to them all, knocking over the partridges right and left, enjoying a cold luncheon under the luxuriant hedges, and going home for a dinner, full of laughter, and talk, and good cookery; and Fay's songs afterwards, as wild and sweet in their way as a goldfinch's on a hawthorn spray.

"You like Little Fay, don't you, Keane?" said the General, as they went home one evening.

Keane looked startled for a second.

"Of course," he said, rather haughtily. "That Miss Morton is very charming every one must admit."

"Bless her little heart! She's a wild little filly, Keane, but she'll go better and truer than your quiet broken-in ones, who wear the harness so respectably, and are so wicked and vicious in their own minds. And what do you think of my boy?" asked the General, pointing to Sydie, who was in front. "How does he stand at Cambridge?"

"Sydie? Oh, he's a nice young fellow. He is a great favorite there, and he is-the best things he can be-generous, sweet-tempered, and honorable--"

"To be sure," echoed the General, rubbing his hands. "He's a dear boy-a very dear boy. They're both exactly all I wished them to be, dear children; and I must say I am delighted to see 'em carrying out the plan I had always made for 'em from their childhood."

"Being what, General, may I ask?"

"Why, any one can see, as plain as a pikestaff, that they're in love with each other," said the General, glowing with satisfaction; "and I mean them to be married and happy. They dote on each other, Keane, and I sha'n't put any obstacles in their way. Youth's short enough, Heaven knows; let 'em enjoy it, say I, it don't come back again. Don't say anything to him about it; I want to have some fun with him. They've settled it all, of course, long ago; but he hasn't confided in me, the sly dog. Trust an old campaigner, though, for twigging an affaire de c[oe]ur. Bless them both, they make me feel a boy again. We'll have a gay wedding, Keane; mind you come down for it. I dare say it'll be at Christmas."

Keane walked along, drawing his cap over his eyes. The sun was setting full in his face.

"Well, what sport?" cried Fay, running up to them.

"Pretty fair," said Keane, coldly, as he passed her.

It was an hour before the dinner-bell rang. Then he came down cold and calm, particularly brilliant in conversation, more courteous, perhaps, to her than ever, but the frost had gathered round him that the sunny atmosphere of the Beeches had melted; and Fay, though she tried to tease, and to coax, and to win him, could not dissipate it. She felt him an immeasurable distance from her again. He was a learned, haughty, grave philosopher, and she a little naughty child.

As Keane went up-stairs that night, he heard Sydie talking in the hall.

"Yes, my worshipped Fay, I shall be intensely and utterly miserable away from the light of your eyes; but, nevertheless, I must go and see Kingslake from John's next Tuesday, because I've promised; and let one idolize your divine self ever so much, one can't give up one's larks, you know."

Keane ground his teeth with a bitter sigh and a fierce oath.

"Little Fay, I would have loved you more tenderly than that!"

He went in and threw himself on his bed, not to sleep. For the first time for many years he could not summon sleep at his will. He had gone on petting her and amusing himself, thinking of her only as a winning, wayward child. Now he woke with a shock to discover, too late, that she had stolen from him unawares the heart he had so long refused to any woman. With his high intellect and calm philosophy, after his years spent in severe science and cold solitude, the hot well-springs of passion had broken loose again. He longed to take her bright life into his own grave and cheerless one; he longed to feel her warm young heart beat with his own, icebound for so many years; but Little Fay was never to be his.

In the bedroom next to him the General sat, with his feet in his slippers and his dressing-gown round him, smoking his last cheroot before a roaring fire, chuckling complacently over his own thoughts.

"To be sure, we'll have a very gay wedding, such as the county hasn't seen in all its blessed days," he muttered, with supreme satisfaction. "Sydie shall have this place. What do I want with a great town of a house like this, big enough for a barrack? I'll take that shooting-box that's to let four miles off; that'll be plenty large enough for me and my old chums to smoke in and chat over bygone times, and it will do our hearts good-freshen us up a bit to see those young things enjoying themselves. My Little Fay will be the prettiest bride that ever was seen. Silly young things to suppose I don't see through them. Trust an old soldier! However, love is blind, they say. How could they have helped falling in love with one another? and who'd have the heart to part 'em, I should like to know!"

Keane stayed that day; the next, receiving a letter which afforded a true though a slight excuse to return to Cambridge, he went, the General, Fay, and Sydie believing him gone only for a few days, he knowing that he would never set foot in the Beeches again. He went back to his rooms, whose dark monastic gloom in the dull October day seemed to close round him like an iron shroud. Here, with his books, his papers, his treasures of intellect, science and art, his "mind a kingdom" to him, he had spent many a happy day, with his brain growing only clearer and clearer as he followed out a close reasoning or clenched a subtle analysis. Now, for the sake of a mischievous child but half his age, he shuddered as he entered.

"Well, my dear boy," began the General one day after dinner, "I've seen your game, though you thought I didn't. How do you know, you young dog, that I shall give my consent?"

"Oh, bother, governor, I know you will," cried Sydie, aghast; "because, you see, if you let me have a few cool hundreds I can give the men such slap-up wines-and it's my last year, General."

"You sly dog!" chuckled the governor, "I'm not talking of your wine-merchant, and you know I'm not, Master Sydie. It's no good playing hide-and-seek with me; I can always see through a milestone when Cupid is behind it; and there's no need to beat round the bush with me, my boy. I never gave my assent to anything with greater delight in my life; I've always meant you to marry Fay, and--"

"Marry Fay!" shouted Sydie. "Good Heavens! governor, what next?" And the Cantab threw himself back and laughed till he cried, and Snowdrop and her pups barked furiously in a concert of excited sympathy.

"Why, sir, why?-why, because-devil take you, Sydie-I don't know what you are laughing at, do you?" cried the General, starting out of his chair.

"Yes, I do, governor; you're laboring under a most delicious delusion."

"Delusion!-eh?-what? Why, bless my soul, I don't think you know what you are saying, Sydie," stormed the General.

"Yes I do; you've an idea-how you got it into your head Heaven knows, but there it is-you've an idea that Fay and I are in love with one another; and I assure you you were never more mistaken in your life."

Seeing the General standing bolt upright staring at him, and looking decidedly apocleptic, Sydie made the matter a little clearer.

"Fay and I would do a good deal to oblige you, my beloved governor, if we could get up the steam a little, but I'm afraid we really cannot. Love ain't in one's own hands, you see, but a skittish mare, that gets her head, and takes the bit between her teeth, and bolts off with you wherever she likes. Is it possible that two people who broke each other's toys, and teased each other's lives out, and caught the measles of each other, from their cradle upwards, should fall in love with each other when they grow up? Besides, I don't intend to marry for the next twenty years, if I can help it. I couldn't afford a milliner's bill to my tailor's, and I should be ruined for life if I merged my bright particular star of a self into a respectable, lark-shunning, bill-paying, shabby-hatted, family man. Good Heavens, what a train of horrors comes with the bare idea!"

"Do you mean to say, sir, you won't marry your cousin?" shouted the General.

"Bless your dear old heart, no, governor-ten times over, no! I wouldn't marry anybody, not for half the universe."

"Then I've done with you, sir-I wash my hands of you!" shouted the General, tearing up and down the room in a quick march, more beneficial to his feelings than his carpet. "You are an ungrateful, unprincipled, shameless young man, and are no more worthy of the affection and the interest I've been fool enough to waste on you than a tom-cat. You're an abominably selfish, ungrateful, unnatural boy; and though you are poor Phil's son, I will tell you my mind, sir; and I must say I think your conduct with your cousin, making love to her-desperate love to her-winning her affections, poor unhappy child, and then making a jest of her and treating it with a laugh, is disgraceful, sir-disgraceful, do you hear?"

"Yes, I hear, General," cried Sydie, convulsed with laughter; "but Fay cares no more for me than for those geraniums. We are fond of one another, in a cool, cousinly sort of way, but--"

"Hold your tongue!" stormed the General. "Don't dare to say another word to me about it. You know well enough that it has been the one delight of my life, and if you'd had any respect or right feeling in you, you'd marry her to-morrow."

"She wouldn't be a party to that. Few women are blind to my manifold attractions; but Fay's one of 'em. Look here, governor," said Sydie, laying his hand affectionately on the General's shoulder, "did it never occur to you that though the pretty castle's knocked down, there may be much nicer bricks left to build a new one? Can't you see that Fay doesn't care two buttons about me, but cares a good many diamond studs about somebody else?"

"Nothing has occurred to me but that you and she are two heartless, selfish, ungrateful chits. Hold your tongue, sir!"

"But, General--"

"Hold your tongue, sir; don't talk to me, I tell you. In love with somebody else? I should like to see him show his face here. Somebody she's talked to for five minutes at a race-ball, and proposed to her in a corner, thinking to get some of my money. Some swindler, or Italian refugee, or blackleg, I'll be bound-taken her in, made her think him an angel, and will persuade her to run away with him. I'll set the police round the house-I'll send her to school in Paris. What fools men are to have anything to do with women at all! You seem in their confidence; who's the fellow?"

"A man very like a swindler or a blackleg-Keane!"

"Keane!" shouted the General, pausing in the middle of his frantic march.

"Keane," responded Sydie.

"Keane!" shouted the General again. "God bless my soul, she might as well have fallen in love with the man in the moon. Why couldn't she like the person I'd chosen for her?"

"If one can't guide the mare one's self, 'tisn't likely the governors can for one," muttered Sydie.

"Poor dear child! fallen in love with a man who don't care a button for her, eh? Humph!-that's always the way with women-lose the good chances, and fling themselves at a man's feet who cares no more for their tom-foolery of worship than he cares for the blacking on his boots. Devil take young people, what a torment they are! The ungrateful little jade, how dare she go and smash all my plans like that? and if I ever set my heart on anything, I set it on that match. Keane! he'll no more love anybody than the stone cherubs on the terrace. He's a splendid head, but his heart's every atom as cold as granite. Love her? Not a bit of it. When I told him you were going to marry her (I thought you would, and so you will, too, if you've the slightest particle of gratitude or common sense in either of you), he listened as quietly and as calmly as if he had been one of the men in armor in the hall. Love, indeed! To the devil with love, say I! It's the head and root of everything that's mischievous and bad."

"Wait a bit, uncle," cried Sydie; "you told him all about your previous match-making, eh? And didn't he go off like a shot two days after, when we meant him to stay on a month longer? Can't you put two and two together, my once wide-awake governor? 'Tisn't such a difficult operation."

"No, I can't," shouted the General: "I don't know anything, I don't see anything, I don't believe in anything, I hate everybody and everything, I tell you; and I'm a great fool for having ever set my heart on any plan that wanted a woman's concurrence-

For if she will she will, you may depend on't,

And if she won't she won't, and there's an end on't."

Wherewith the General stuck his wide-awake on fiercely, and darted out of the bay-window to cool himself. Half way across the lawn, he turned sharp round, and came back again.

"Sydie, do you fancy Keane cares a straw for that child?"

"I can't say. It's possible."

"Humph! Well, can't you go and see? That's come of those mathematical lessons. What a fool I was to allow her to be so much with him!" growled the General, with many grunts and half-audible oaths, swinging round again, and trotting through the window as hot and peppery as his own idolized curry.

Keane was sitting writing in his rooms at King's some few days after. The backs looked dismal with their leafless, sepia-colored trees; the streets were full of sloppy mud and dripping under-grads' umbrellas; his own room looked sombre and dark, without any sunshine on its heavy oak bookcases, and massive library-table, and dark bronzes. His pen moved quickly, his head was bent over the paper, his mouth sternly set, and his forehead paler and more severe than ever. The gloom in his chambers had gathered round him himself, when his door was burst open, and Sydie dashed in and threw himself down in a green leather arm-chair.

"Well, sir, here am I back again. Just met the V. P. in the quad, and he was so enchanted at seeing me, that he kissed me on both cheeks, flung off his gown, tossed up his cap, and performed a pas d'extase on the spot. Isn't it delightful to be so beloved? Granta looks very delicious to-day, I must say-about as refreshing and lively as an acidulated spinster going district-visiting in a snow-storm. And how are you, most noble lord?"

"Pretty well."

"Only that? Thought you were all muscle and iron. I say. What do you think the governor has been saying to me?"

"How can I tell?"

"Tell! No, I should not have guessed it if I'd tried for a hundred years! By George! nothing less than that I should marry Fay. What do you think of that, sir?"

Keane traced Greek unconsciously on the margin of his Times. For the life of him, with all his self-command, he could not have answered.

"Marry Fay! I!" shouted Sydie. "Ye gods, what an idea! I never was so astonished in all my days. Marry Little Fay!-the governor must be mad, you know."

"You will not marry your cousin?" asked Keane, tranquilly, though the rapid glance and involuntary start did not escape Sydie's quick eyes.

"Marry! I! By George, no! She wouldn't have me, and I'm sure I wouldn't have her. She is a dear little monkey, and I'm very fond of her, but I wouldn't put the halter round my neck for any woman going. I don't like vexing the General, but it would be really too great a sacrifice merely to oblige him."

"She cares nothing for you, then?"

"Nothing? Well, I don't know. Yes, in a measure, she does. If I should be taken home on a hurdle one fine morning, she'd shed some cousinly tears over my inanimate body; but as for the other thing, not one bit of it. 'Tisn't likely. We're a great deal too like one another, too full of devilry and carelessness, to assimilate. Isn't it the delicious contrast and fiz of the sparkling acid of divine lemons with the contrariety of the fiery spirit of beloved rum that makes the delectable union known and worshipped in our symposia under the blissful name of PUNCH? Marry Little Fay! By Jove, if all the governor's match-making was founded on no better reasons for success, it is a small marvel that he's a bachelor now! By George, it's time for hall!"

And the Cantab took himself off, congratulating himself on the adroit manner in which he had cut the Gordian knot that the General had muddled up so inexplicably in his unpropitious match-making.

Keane lay back in his chair some minutes, very still; then he rose to dine in hall, pushing away his books and papers, as if throwing aside with them a dull and heavy weight. The robins sang in the leafless backs, the sun shone out on the sloppy streets; the youth he thought gone for ever was come back to him. Oh, strange stale story of Hercules and Omphale, old as the hills, and as eternal! Hercules goes on in his strength slaying his hydra and his Laomedon for many years, but he comes at last, whether he like it or not, to his Omphale, at whose feet he is content to sit and spin long golden threads of pleasure and of passion, while his lion's skin is motheaten and his club rots away.

Little Fay sat curled up on the study hearth-rug, reading a book her late guest had left behind him-a very light and entertaining volume, being Delolme "On the Constitution," but which she preferred, I suppose, to "What Will He Do With It?" or the "Feuilles d'Automne," for the sake of that clear autograph, "Gerald Keane, King's Coll.," on its fly-leaf. A pretty picture she made, with her handsome spaniels; and she was so intent on what she was reading-the fly-leaf, by the way-that she never heard the opening of the door, till a hand drew away her book. Then Fay started up, oversetting the puppies one over another, radiant and breathless.

Keane took her hands and drew her near him.

"You do not hate me now, then?"

Fay put her head on one side with her old wilfulness.

"Yes, I do-when you go away without any notice, and hardly bid me good-bye. You would not have left one of your men pupils so unceremoniously."

Keane smiled involuntarily, and drew her closer.

"If you do not hate me, will you go a step farther-and love me? Little Fay, my own darling, will you come and brighten my life? It has been a saddened and a stern one, but it shall never throw a shade on yours."

The wild little filly was conquered-at last, she came to hand docile and subdued, and acknowledged her master. She loved him, and told him so with that frankness and fondness which would have covered faults far more glaring and weighty than Little Fay's.

"But you must never be afraid of me," whispered Keane, some time after.

"Oh, no!"

"And you do not wish Sydie had never brought me here to make you all uncomfortable?"

"Oh, please don't!" cried Fay, plaintively. "I was a child then, and I did not know what I said."

"'Then,' being three months ago, may I ask what you are now?"

"A child still in knowledge, but your child," whispered Fay, lifting her face to his, "to be petted and spoiled, and never found fault with, remember!"

"My little darling, who would have the heart to find fault with you, whatever your sins?"

"God bless my soul, what's this?" cried a voice in the doorway.

There stood the General in wide-awake and shooting-coat, with a spade in one hand and a watering-pot in the other, too astonished to keep his amazement to himself. Fay would fain have turned and fled, but Keane smiled, kept one arm round her, and stretched out his hand to the governor.

"General, I came once uninvited, and I am come again. Will you forgive me? I have a great deal to say to you, but I must ask you one question first of all. Will you give me your treasure?"

"Eh! humph! What? Well-I suppose-yes," ejaculated the General, breathless from the combined effects of amazement and excessive and vehement gardening. "But, bless my soul, Keane, I should as soon have thought of one of the stone cherubs, or that bronze Milton. Never mind, one lives and learns. Mind? Devil take me, what am I talking about? I don't mind at all; I'm very happy, only I'd set my heart on-you know what. More fool I. Fay, you little imp, come here. Are you fairly broken in by Keane, then?"

"Yes," said Miss Fay, with her old mischief, but a new blush, "as he has promised never to use the curb."

"God bless you, then, my little pet," cried the General, kissing her some fifty times. Then he laughed till he cried, and dried his eyes and laughed again, and grunted, and growled, and shook both Keane's hands vehemently. "I was a great fool, sir, and I dare say you've managed much better. I did set my heart on the boy, you know, but it can't be helped now, and I don't wish it should. Be kind to her, that's all; for though she mayn't bear the curb, the whip from anybody she cares about would break her heart. She's a dear child, Keane-a very dear child. Be kind to her, that's all."

* * *

On the evening of January 13th, beginning the Lent Term, Mr. Sydenham Morton sat in his own rooms with half a dozen spirits like himself, a delicious aroma surrounding them of Maryland and rum-punch, and a rapid flow of talk making its way through the dense atmosphere.

"To think of Granite Keane being caught!" shouted one young fellow. "I should as soon have thought of the Pyramids walking over to the Sphinx, and marrying her."

"Poor devil! I pity him," sneered Henley of Trinity, aged nineteen.

"He don't require much pity, my dear fellow; I think he's pretty comfortable," rejoined Sydie. "He did, to be sure, when he was trying to beat sense into your brain-box, but that's over for the present."

"Come, tell us about the wedding," said Somerset of King's. "I was sorry I couldn't go down."

"Well," began Sydie, stretching his legs and putting down his pipe, "she-the she was dressed in white tulle and--"

"Bother the dress. Go ahead!"

"The dress was no bother, it was the one subject in life to the women. You must listen to the dress, because I asked the prettiest girl there for the description of it to enlighten your minds, and it was harder to learn than six books of Horace. The bridesmaids wore tarlatane à la Princesse Stéphanie, trois jupes bouillonnées, jupe desous de soie glacée, guirlandes couleur dea yeux impériaux d'Eugénie, corsets décolletés garnis de ruches de ruban du--"

"For Heaven's sake, hold your tongue!" cried Somerset. "That jargon's worse than the Yahoos'. The dead languages are bad enough to learn, but women's living language of fashion is ten hundred times worse. The twelve girls were dressed in blue and white, and thought themselves angels-we understand. Cut along."

"Gunter was prime," continued Sydie, "and the governor was prime, too-splendid old buck; only when he gave her away he was very near saying, 'Devil take it!' which might have had a novel, but hardly a solemn, effect. Little Fay was delightful-for all the world like a bit of incarnated sunshine. Keane was granite all over, except his eyes, and they were lava; if we hadn't, for our own preservation, let him put her in a carriage and started 'em off, he might have become dangerous, after the manner of Etna, ice outside and red-hot coals within. The bridesmaids tears must have washed the church for a week, and made it rather a damp affair. One would scarcely think women were so anxious to marry, to judge from the amount of grief they get up at a friend's sacrifice. It looks uncommonly like envy; but it isn't, we're sure! The ball was like most other balls: alternate waltzing and flirtation, a vast lot of nonsense talked, and a vast lot of champagne drunk-Cupid running about in every direction, and a tremendous run on all the amatory poets-Browning and Tennyson being worked as hard as cab-horses, and used up pretty much as those quadrupeds-dandies suffering self-inflicted torture from tight boots, and saying, like Cranmer, when he held his hand in the fire, that it was rather agreeable than otherwise, considering it drew admiration-spurs getting entangled in ladies' dresses, and ladies making use thereof for a display of amiability, which the dragoons are very much mistaken if they fancied continued into private life-girls believing all the pretty things said to them-men going home and laughing at them all-wallflowers very black, women engaged ten deep very sunshiny-the governor very glorious, and my noble self very fascinating. And now," said Sydie, taking up his pipe, "pass the punch, old boy, and never say I can't talk!"

* * *

THE STORY OF A CRAYON-HEAD;

OR,

A DOUBLED-DOWN LEAF IN A MAN'S LIFE.

I was dining with a friend, in his house on the Lung' Arno (he fills, never mind what, post in the British Legation), where I was passing an autumn month. The night was oppressively hot; a still, sultry sky brooded over the city, and the stars shining out from a purple mist on to the Campanile near, and the slopes of Bellosguardo in the distance. It was intensely hot; not all the iced wines on his table could remove the oppressive warmth of the evening air, which made both him and me think of evenings we had spent together in the voluptuous lassitude of the East, in days gone by, when we had travelled there, fresh to life, to new impressions, to all that gives "greenness to the grass, and glory to the flower."

The Arno ran on under its bridge, and we leaned out of the balcony where we were sitting and smoking, while I tossed over, without thinking much of what I was doing, a portfolio of his sketches. Position has lost for art many good artists since Sir George Beaumont: my friend is one of them; his sketches are masterly; and had he been a vagrant Bohemian instead of an English peer, there might have been pictures on the walls of the R. A. to console one for the meretricious daubs and pet vulgarities of nursery episodes, hideous babies, and third-class carriage interiors, which make one's accustomed annual visit to the rooms that once saw the beauties of Reynolds, and Wilson, and Lawrence, a positive martyrdom to anybody of decent refinement and educated taste. The portfolio stood near me, and I took out a sketch or two now and then between the pauses of our conversation, looking lazily up the river, while the moonlight shone on Dante's city, that so long forgot, and has, so late, remembered him.

"Ah! what a pretty face this is! Who's the original?" I asked him, drawing out a female head, done with great finish in pastel, under which was written, in his own hand, "Florelle." It was a face of great beauty, with a low Greek brow and bronze-dark hair, and those large, soft, liquid eyes that you only see in a Southern, and that looked at you from the sketch with an earnest, wistful regard, half childlike, half impassioned. He looked up, glanced at the sketch, and stretched out his hand hastily, but I held it away from him. "I want to look at it; it is a beautiful head; I wish we had the original here now. Who is she?"

As I spoke-holding the sketch up where the light from the room within fell on what I had no doubt was a likeness of some fair face that had beguiled his time in days gone by, a souvenir of one of his loves more lasting than souvenirs of such episodes in one's life often are, if merely trusted to that inconstant capricieuse, Memory,-I might have hit him with a bullet rather than asked him about a mere etude à deux crayons, for he shuddered, and drank off some white Hermitage quickly.

"I had forgotten that was in the portfolio," he said, hurriedly, as he took it from me and put it behind him, with its face against the wall, as though it had been the sketch of a Medusa.

"What do you take it away for? I had not half done looking at it. Who is the original?"

"One I don't care to mention."

"Because?"

"Because the sight of that picture gives me a twinge of what I ought to be hardened against-regret."

"Regret! Is any woman worth that?"

"She was."

"I don't believe it; and I fancied you and I thought alike on such points. Of all the women for whom we feel twinges of conscience or self-reproach in melancholy moments, how many loved us? Moralists and poets sentimentalize over it, and make it a stalking-horse whereby to magnify our sins and consign us more utterly to perdition, while they do for themselves a little bit of poetic morality cheaply; but in reality there are uncommonly few women who can love, to begin with, and in the second, vanity, avarice, jealousy, desires for pretty toilettes, one or other, or all combined, have quite as much to do with their 'sacrifice' for us as anything."

"Quite true; but-there are women and women, perhaps, and it was not of that sort of regret that I spoke."

"Of what sort, then?"

He made me no reply: he broke the ash off his Manilla, and smoked silently some moments, leaning over the balcony and watching the monotonous flow of the Arno, with deeper gloom on his face than I remembered to have seen there any time before. I was sorry I had chanced to light upon a sketch that had brought him back such painful recollections of whatever kind they might be, and I smoked too, sending the perfumed tobacco out into the still sultry night that was brooding over Florence.

"Of what sort?" said he, abruptly, after some minutes' pause. "Shall I tell you? Then you can tell me whether I was a fool who made one grand mistake, or a sensible man of the world who kept himself from a grand folly. I have been often in doubt myself."

He leaned back, his face in shadow, so that I could not see it, while the Arno's ebb and flow was making mournful river-music under our windows,-while the purple glories of the summer night deepened round Giotto's Tower, where, in centuries past, the Immortal of Florence had sat dreaming of the Paradiso, the mortals passing by whispering him as "the man who had seen hell," and the light within the room shone on the olives and grapes, the cut-glass and silver claret-jugs, the crimson Montepulciano and the white Hermitage, on the table, as he told me the story of the head in crayons.

"Two years ago I went into the south of France. I was chargé d'Affaires at -- then, you remember, and the climate had told upon me. I was not over-well, and somebody recommended me the waters of Eaux Bonnes. The waters I put little faith in, but in the air of the Pyrenees, in the change from diplomacy to a life en rase campagne, I put much, and I went to Eaux Bonnes accordingly, for July and August, with a vow to forswear any society I might find at the baths-I had had only too much of society as it was-and to spend my days in the mountains with my sketching-block and my gun. But I did not like Eaux Bonnes; it was intensely warm. There were several people who knew me really; no end of others who got hold of my name, and wanted me to join their riding-parties, and balls, and picnics. That was not what I wanted, so I left the place and went on to Luz, hoping to find solitude there. That valley of Luz-you know it?-is it not as lovely as any artist's dream of Arcadia, in the evening, when the sunset light has passed off the meadows and corn-lands of the lower valley, and just lingers golden and rosy on the crests of the mountains, while the glow-worms are coming out among the grasses, and the lights are being lit in the little homesteads nestling among their orchards one above another on the hill-sides, and its hundred streams are rushing down the mountains and under the trees, foaming, and tumbling, and rejoicing on their way! When I have had my fill of ambition and of pleasure, I shall go and live at Luz, I think.

"When! Well! you are quite right to repeat it ironically; that time will never come, I dare say, and why should it? I am not the stuff to cogitate away my years in country solitudes. If prizes are worth winning, they are worth working for till one's death; a man should never give up the field while he has life left in him. Well! I went to Luz, and spent a pleasant week or so there, knocking over a few chamois or izards, or sketching on the sides of the Pic du Midi, or Tourmalet, but chiefly lying about under the great beech-trees in the shade, listening to the tinkle of the sheep-bells, like an idle fellow, as I meant to be for the time I had allotted myself. One day--"

He stopped and blew some whiffs from his Manilla into the air. He seemed to linger over the prelude to his story, and shrink from going on with the story itself, I thought; and he smothered a sigh as he raised himself.

"How warm the night is; we shall have a tempest. Reach me that wine, there's a good fellow. No, not the Amontillado, the Chateau Margaux, please; one can't drink hot dry wines such a night as this. But to satisfy your curiosity about this crayon study.-One day I thought I would go to Gavarnie. I had heard a good deal, of course, about the great marble wall, and the mighty waterfalls, the rocks of Marboré, and the Brêche de Roland, but, as it chanced, I had never been up to the Cercle, nor, indeed, in that part of the Midi at all, so I went. The gods favored me, I remember; there were no mists, the sun was brilliant, and the great amphitheatre was for once unobscured; the white marble flashing brown and purple, rose and golden, in the light; the cascades tumbling and leaping down into the gigantic basin; the vast plains of snow glittering in the sunshine; the twin rocks standing in the clear air, straight and fluted as any two Corinthian columns hewn and chiselled by man. Good Heaven! before a scene like Gavarnie, what true artist must not fling away his colors and his brushes in despair and disgust with his own puerility and impotence? What can be transferred to canvas of such a scene as that? What does the best beauty of Claude, the grandest sublimity of Salvator, the greatest power of Poussin, look beside Nature when she reigns as she reigns at Gavarnie? I am an art worshipper, as you know: but there are times in my life, places on earth, that make me ready to renounce art for ever!

"The day was beautiful, and thinking I knew the country pretty well, I took no guides. I hate them when I can possibly dispense with them. But the mist soon swooped down over the Cercle, and I began to wish I had had one when I turned my horse's head back again. You know the route, of course? Through the Chaos-Heaven knows it is deserving of its name;-down the break-neck little bridle-path, along the Gave, and over the Scia bridge to St. Sauveur. You know it? Then you know that it is much easier to break your neck down it than to find your way by it, though by some hazard I did not break my neck, nor the animal's knees either, but managed to get over the bridge without falling into the torrent, and to pick my way safely down into more level ground; once there, I thought I should easily enough find my way to St. Sauveur, but I was mistaken: the mists had spread over the valley, a heavy storm had come up, and, somehow or other, I lost the way, and could not tell where I was, whether St. Sauveur was to the left or the right, behind me or in front of me. The horse, a miserable little Pyrenean beast, was too frightened by the lightning to take the matter into his hands as he had done on the road through the Chaos, and I saw nothing for it but to surrender and come to grief in any way the elements best pleased; swearing at myself for not having stayed at the inn at Gavarnie or Gedre; wishing myself at the vilest mountain auberge that ever sheltered men and mules pêle-mêle; and calling myself hard names for not having listened to my landlady's dissuasions of that morning as I left her door, from my project of going to Gavarnie without a guide, which seemed to her the acme of all she had ever known or heard of English strangers' fooleries. The storm only increased, the great black rocks echoing the roll of the thunder, and the Gave lashing itself into fury in its narrow bed; happily I was on decently level ground, and the horse being, I suppose, tolerably used to storms like it, I pushed him on at last, by dint of blows and conjurations combined, to where, in the flashes of the lightning, I saw what looked to me like the outline of a homestead: it stood in a cleft between two shelving sides of rock, and a narrow bridle-path led up to it, through high yews and a tangled wilderness of rhododendrons, boxwood, and birch-one of those green slopes so common in the Pyrenees, that look in full sunlight doubly bright and Arcadian-like, from the contrast of the dark, bare, perpendicular rocks that shut them in. I could see but little of its beauty then in the fog that shrouded both it and me, but I saw the shape and semblance of a house, and urging the horse up the ascent, thundered on its gate-panels with my whip-handle till the rocks round echoed.

"There was no answer, and I knocked a little louder, if possible, than before. I was wet to the skin with that wretched storm, and swore not mildly at the inhospitable roof that would not admit me under it. I knocked again, inclined to pick up a piece of granite and beat the panel in; and at last a face-an old woman's weather-beaten face, but with black southern eyes that had lost little of their fire with age-looked through a grating at me and asked me what I wanted.

"'I want shelter if you can give it me,' I answered her. 'I have lost my way coming from Gavarnie, and am drenched through. I will pay you liberally if you will give me an asylum till the weather clears.'

"Her eyes blazed like coals through the little grille.

"'M'sieu, we take no money here-have you mistaken it for an inn? Come in if you want shelter, in Heaven's name! The Holy Virgin forbid we should refuse refuge to any!'

"And she crossed herself and uttered some conjurations to Mary to protect them from all wolves in sheep's clothing, and guard their dwelling from all harm, by which I suppose she thought I spoke fairly and looked harmless, but might possibly be a thief or an assassin, or both in one. She unlocked the gate, and calling to a boy to take my horse into a shed, admitted me under a covered passageway into the house, which looked like part, and a very ruined part, too, of what had probably been, in the times of Henri-Quatre and his grandfather, a feudal chateau fenced in by natural ramparts from the rocks that surrounded it, shutting in the green slope on which it stood, with only one egress, the path through which I had ascended, into the level plain below. She marshalled me through this covered way into an interior passage, dark and vaulted, cheerless enough, and opened a low oak door, ushering me into a chamber, bare, gloomy, yet with something of lost grandeur and past state lingering about its great hearth, its massive walls, its stained windows, and its ragged tapestry hangings. The woman went up to one of the windows and spoke with a gentleness to which I should have never thought her voice could have been attuned with its harsh patois.

"'Mon enfant, v'là un m'sieu étranger qui vient chercher un abri pour un petit peu. Veux-tu lui parler?'

"The young girl she spoke to turned, rose, and, coming forward, bade me welcome with the grace, simplicity, and the na?ve freedom from embarrassment of a child, looking up in my face with her soft clear eyes. She was like--No matter! you have seen that crayon-head, it is but a portrayal of a face whose expression Raphael and Sassoferrato themselves would have failed to render in its earnest, innocent, elevated regard. She was very young-

Standing with reluctant feet

Where the brook and river meet-

Womanhood and childhood fleet.

Good Heavens, I am quoting poetry! what will you think of me, to have gone back to the Wertherian and Tennysonian days so far as to repeat a triplet of Longfellow's? No man quotes those poets after his salad days, except in a moment of weakness. Caramba! why has one any weaknesses at all? we ought not to have any; we live in an atmosphere that would kill them all if they were not as obstinate and indestructible as all other weeds whose seeds will linger and peer up and spoil the ground, let one root them out ever so! I owed you an apology for that lapse into Longfellow, and I have made it. Am I to go on with this story?"

He laughed as he spoke, and his laugh was by no means heartfelt. I told him to go on, and he lighted another Manilla and obeyed me, while the Arno murmured on its way, and the dusky, sultry clouds brooded nearer the earth, and the lights were lit in the distant windows of the palace of the Marchese Acqua d'Oro, that fairest of Florentines, who rouges so indiscriminately and flirts her fan so inimitably, to one of whose balls we were going that night.

He settled himself back in his chair, with his face darkened again by the shadow cast on it from the pillar of the balcony; and took his cigar out of his mouth.

"She looked incongruous in that bare and gloomy room, out of place with it, and out of keeping with the old woman-a French peasant-woman, weather-beaten and bronzed, such as you see any day by the score riding to market or sitting knitting at their cottage-doors. It was impossible that the girl could be either daughter or grand-daughter, or any relation at all to her. In that room she looked more as one of these myrtles might do, set down in the stifling gloomy horrors of a London street than anything else, save that in certain traces about the chamber, as I told you, there were relics of a faded grandeur which harmonized better with her. I can see her now, as she stood there with a strange foreign grace, an indescribable patrician delicacy mingled with extreme youthfulness and na?veté, like an old picture in costume, like one of Raphael's child-angels in face-poor little Florelle!

"'You would stay till the storm is over, monsieur? you are welcome to shelter if you will,' she said, coming forward to me timidly yet frankly. 'Cazot tells me you are a stranger, and our mountain storms are dangerous if you have no guide.'

"I did not know who Cazot was, but I presumed her to be the old woman, who seemed to be portress, mistress, domestic, cameriste, and all else in her single person, but I thanked her for her permitted shelter, and accepted her invitation to remain till the weather had cleared, as you can imagine. When you have lost your way, any asylum is grateful, however desolate and tumble-down. They made me welcome, she and the old peasant-woman, with that simple, unstrained, and unostentatious hospitality which is, after all, the true essence of good breeding, and of which your parvenu knows nothing, when he keeps you waiting, and shows you that you are come at an inapropos moment, in his fussy fear lest everything should not be comme il faut to do due credit to him. Old Cazot set before me some simple refreshment, a grillade de chataignes, some maize and milk, and a dish of trout just caught in the Gave below, while I looked at my chatelaine, marvelling how that young and delicate creature could come to be shut up with an old peasant on a remote hill-side. I did my best to draw her out and learn her history; she was shy at first of a complete stranger, as was but natural, but I spoke of Garvarnie, of the beauty of the Pyrenees, or Tourmalet, and the Lac Bleu, and, warming with enthusiasm for her birthplace, the girl forgot that I was a foreign tourist, unknown to her, and indebted to her for an hour's shelter, and before my impromptu supper was over I had drawn from her, by a few questions which she was too much of a child and had too little to conceal not to answer with a child's ingenuousness, the whole of her short history, and the explanation of her anomalous position. Her name was Florelle de l'Heris, a name once powerful enough among the nobles of the Midi, and the old woman, Madame Cazot, was her father's foster-sister. Of her family, beggared in common with the best aristocracy of France, none were now left; they had dwindled and fallen away, till of the once great house of L'Heris this child remained alone its representative: her mother had died in her infancy, and her father, either too idle or too broken-hearted to care to retrieve his fortunes, lived the life of a hermit among these ruins where I now found his daughter, educating her himself till his death, which occurred when she was only twelve years old, leaving her to poverty and obscurity, and such protection and companionship as her old nurse Cazot could afford her. Such was the story Florelle de l'Heris told me as I sat there that evening waiting till the clouds should clear and the mists roll off enough to let me go to St. Sauveur-a story told simply and pathetically, and which Cazot, sitting knitting in a corner, added to by a hundred gesticulations, expletives, appeals to the Virgin, and prolix addenda, glad, I dare say, of any new confident, and disposed to regard me with gratitude for my sincere praises of her fried trout. It was a story which seemed to me to suit the delicate beauty of the flower I had found in the wilderness, and read more like a chapter of some versified novelette, like 'Lucille,' than a bona fide page out of the book of one's actual life, especially in a life like mine, of essentially material pleasures and emphatically substantial and palpable ambitions. But there are odd stories in real life!-strange pathetic ones, too-stranger, often, than those that found the plot and underplot of a novel or the basis of a poem; but when such men as I come across them they startle us, they look bizarre and unlike all the other leaves of the book that glitter with worldly aphorisms, philosophical maxims, and pungent egotisms, and we would fain cut them out; they have the ring of that Arcadia whose golden gates shut on us when we outgrew boyhood, and in which, en revanche, we have sworn ever since to disbelieve-keeping our word sometimes, perhaps to our own hindrance-Heaven knows!

"I stayed as long as I could that evening, till the weather had cleared up so long, and the sun was shining again so indisputably, that I had no longer any excuse to linger in the dark-tapestried room, with the chestnuts sputtering among the wood-ashes, and Madame Cazot's needles clicking one continual refrain, and the soft gazelle eyes of my young chatelaine glancing from my sketches to me with that mixture of shyness and fearlessness, innocence and candor, which gave so great a charm to her manner. She was a new study to me, both for my palette and my mind-a pretty fresh toy to amuse me while I should stay in the Midi. I was not going to leave without making sure of a permission to return. I wanted to have that face among my pastels, and when I had thanked her for her shelter and her welcome, I told her my name, and asked her leave to come again where I had been so kindly received.

"'Come again, monsieur? Certainly, if you care to come. But you will find it a long way from Luz, I fear,' she said, na?vely, looking up at me with her large clear fawn-like eyes-eyes so cloudless and untroubled then-as she let me take her hand, and bade me adieu et bonsoir.

"I reassured her on that score, you can fancy, and left her standing in the deep-embrasured window, a great stag-hound at her feet, and the setting sun, all the brighter for its past eclipse, bathing her in light. I can always see her in memory as I saw her then, poor child!--Faugh! How hot the night is! Can't we get more air anyhow?

"'If you come again up here, m'sieu, you will be the first visitor the Nid de l'Aigle has seen for four years,' said old Cazot, as she showed me out through the dusky-vaulted passage. She was a cheerful, garrulous old woman, strong in her devotion to the De l'Heris of the bygone past; stronger even yet in her love for their single orphan representative of the beggared present. 'Visitors! Is it likely we should have any, m'sieu? Those that would suit me would be bad company for Ma'amselle Florelle, and those that should seek her never do. I recollect the time, m'sieu, when the highest in all the departments were glad to come to the bidding of a De l'Heris; but generations have gone since then, and lands and gold gone too, and, if you cannot feast them, what care people for you? That is true in the Pyrenees, m'sieu, as well as in the rest of the world. I have not lived eighty years without finding out that. If my child yonder were the heiress of the De l'Heris, there would be plenty to court and seek her; but she lives in these poor broken-down ruins with me, an old peasant woman, to care for her as best I can, and not a soul takes heed of her save the holy women at the convent, where, maybe, she will seek refuge at last!'

"She let me out at the gate where I had thundered for admittance two hours before, and, giving her my thanks for her hospitality-money she would not take-I wished her good day, and rode down the bridle-path to St. Sauveur, and onwards to Luz, thinking at intervals of that fair young life that had just sprung up, and was already destined to wither away its bloom in a convent. Any destiny would be better to proffer to her than that. She interested me already by her childlike loveliness and her strange solitude of position, and I thought she would while away some of the long summer hours during my stay in the Midi when I was tired of chamois and palette, and my lazy dolce under the beech-wood shades. At any rate, she was newer and more charming than the belles of Eaux Bonnes.

"The next morning I remembered her permission and my promise, and I rode out through the town again, up the mountain-road, to the Nid de l'Aigle; glad of anything that gave me an amusement and a pursuit. I never wholly appreciate the far niente, I think; perhaps I have lived too entirely in the world-and a world ultra-cold and courtly, too-to retain much patience for the meditative life, the life of trees and woods, sermons in stones, and monologues in mountains. I am a restless, ambitious man; I must have a pursuit, be it of a great aim or a small, or I grow weary, and my time hangs heavily on hand. Already having found Florelle de l'Heris among these hills reconciled me more to my pro tempo banishment from society, excitement, and pleasure, and I thanked my good fortune for having lighted upon her. She was very lovely, and I always care more for the physical than the intellectual charms of any woman. I do not share some men's visionary requirements on their mental score; I ask but material beauty, and am content with it.

"I rode up to the Nid de l'Aigle: by a clearer light it stood on a spot of great picturesqueness, and before the fury of the revolutionary peasantry had destroyed what was the then habitable and stately chateau, must have been a place of considerable extent and beauty, and in the feudal times, fenced in by the natural ramparts of its shelving rocks, no doubt all but impregnable. There were but a few ruins now that held together and had a roof over them-the part where Madame Cazot and the last of the De l'Heris lived; it was perfectly solitary; there was nothing to be heard round it but the foaming of the river, the music of the sheep-bells from the flocks that fed in the clefts and on the slopes of grass-land, and the shout of some shepherd-boy from the path below; but it was as beautiful a spot as any in the Pyrenees, with its overhanging beech-woods, its wilderness of wild-flowers, its rocks covered with that soft gray moss whose tint defies one to repeat it in oil or water colors, and its larches and beeches drooping over into the waters of the Gave. In such a home, with no companions save her father, old Cazot, and her great stag-hound, and, occasionally, the quiet recluses of St. Marie Purificatrice, with everything to feed her native poetry and susceptibility, and nothing to teach her anything of the actual and ordinary world, it were inevitable that the character of Florelle should take its coloring from the scenes around her, and that she should grow up singularly childlike, imaginative, and innocent of all that in any other life she would unavoidably have known. Well educated she was, through her father and the nuns, but it was a semi-religious and peculiar education, of which the chief literature had been the legendary and sacred poetry of France and Spain, the chief amusement copying the illuminated missals lent her by the nuns, or joining in the choral services of the convent; an education that taught her nothing of the world from which she was shut out, and encouraged all that was self-devoted, visionary, and fervid in her nature, leaving her at seventeen as unconscious of evil as the youngest child. I despair of making you imagine what Florelle then was. Had I never met her, I should have believed in her as little as yourself, and would have discredited the existence of so poetic a creation out of the world of fiction; her ethereal delicacy, her sunny gayety when anything amused her, her intense sensitiveness, pained in a moment by a harsh word, pleased as soon by a kind one, her innocence of all the blots and cruelties, artifices and evils, of that world beyond her Nid de l'Aigle, made a character strangely new to me, and strangely winning, but which to you I despair of portraying: I could not have imagined it. Had I never seen her, and had I met with it in the pages of a novel, I should have put it aside as a graceful but impossible conception of romance.

"I went up that day to the Nid de l'Aigle, and Florelle received me with pleasure; perhaps Madame Cazot had instilled into her some scepticism that 'a grand seigneur,' as the woman was pleased to term me, would trouble himself to ride up the mountains from Luz merely to repeat his thanks for an hour's shelter and a supper of roasted chestnuts. She was a simple-minded, good-hearted old woman, who had lived all her life among the rocks and rivers of the Hautes-Pyrenées, her longest excursion a market-day to Luz or Bagnères. She looked on her young mistress and charge as a child-in truth, Florelle was but little more-and thought my visit paid simply from gratitude and courtesy, never dreaming of attributing it to 'cette beauté héréditaire des L'Heris,' which she was proud of boasting was an inalienable heirloom to the family.

"I often repeated my visits; so often, that in a week or so the old ruined chateau grew a natural resort in the long summer days, and Florelle watched for my coming from the deep-arched window where I had seen her first, or from under the boughs of the great copper beech that grew before the gate, and looked for me as regularly as though I were to spend my lifetime in the valley of Luz. Poor child! I never told her my title, but I taught her to call me by my christian name. It used to sound very pretty when she said it, with her long Southern pronunciation-prettier than it ever sounds now from the lips of Beatrice Acqua d'Oro yonder, in her softest moments, when she plays at sentiment. She had great natural talent for art, hitherto uncultivated, of course, save by such instructions as one of the women at the convent, skilful at illuminating, had occasionally given her. I amused myself with teaching her to transfer to paper and canvas the scenery she loved so passionately. I spent many hours training this talent of hers that was of very unusual calibre, and, with due culture, might have ranked her with Elisabetta Sirani or Rosa Bonheur. Sitting with her in the old room, or under the beech-trees, or by the side of the torrents that tore down the rocks into the Gave, it pleased me to draw out her unsullied thoughts, to spread her mind out before me like a book-a pure book enough, God knows, with not even a stain of the world upon it-to make her eyes glisten and glow and dilate, to fill them with tears or laughter at my will, to wake up her young life from its unconscious, untroubled, childish repose to a new happiness, a new pain, which she felt but could not translate, which dawned in her face for me, but never spoke in its true language to her, ignorant then of its very name-it amused me. Bah! our amusements are cruel sometimes, and costly too!

"It was at that time I took the head in pastels which you have seen, and she asked me, in innocent admiration of its loveliness, if she was indeed like that?-This night is awfully oppressive. Is there water in that carafe? Is it iced? Push it to me. Thank you.

"I was always welcome at the Nid de l'Aigle. Old Cazot, with the instinct of servants who have lived with people of birth till they are as proud of their master's heraldry as though it were their own, discerned that I was of the same rank as her adored House of De l'Heris-if indeed she admitted any equal to them-and with all the cheery familiarity of a Frenchwoman treated me with punctilious deference, being as thoroughly imbued with respect and adoration for the aristocracy as any of those who died for the white lilies in the Place de la Révolution. And Florelle-Florelle watched for me, and counted her hours by those I spent with her. You are sure I had not read and played with women's hearts so long-women, too, with a thousand veils and evasions and artifices, of which she was in pure ignorance even of the existence-without having this heart, young, unworn, and unoccupied, under my power at once, plastic to mould as wax, ready to receive any impressions at my hands, and moulded easily to my will. Florelle had read no love stories to help her to translate this new life to which I awoke her, or to put her on her guard against it. I went there often, every day at last, teaching my pupil the art which she was only too glad and too eager to learn, stirring her vivid imagination with descriptions of that brilliant outside world, of whose pleasures, gayeties and pursuits she was as ignorant as any little gentian flower on the rocks; keeping her spell-bound with glimpses of its life, which looked to her like fairyland, bizarre bal masqué though it be to us; and pleasing myself with awakening new thoughts, new impressions, new emotions, which swept over her tell-tale face like the lights and shades over meadow-land as the sun fades on and off it. She was a new study, a new amusement to me, after the women of our world, and I beguiled my time with her, not thoughtlessly, as I might have done, not too hastily, as I should have done ten years before, but pleased with my new amusement, and more charmed with Florelle than I at first knew, though I confess I soon wished to make her love me, and soon tried my best to make her do so-an easy task when one has had some practice in the rose-hued atmosphere of the boudoir, among the most difficile and the most brilliant coquettes of Europe! Florelle, with a nature singularly loving, and a mind singularly imaginative, with no rival for me even in her fancy, soon lavished on me all the love of which her impassioned and poetic character was capable. She did not know it, but I did. She loved me, poor child!-love more pure, unselfish, and fond than I ever won before, than I shall ever win again.

"Basta! why need you have lighted on that crayon-head, and make me rake up this story? I loathe looking at the past. What good ever comes of it? A wise man lives only in his present. 'La vita è appunto una memoria, una speranza, un punto,' writes the fool of a poet, as though the bygone memories and the unrealized hopes were worth a straw! It is that very present 'instant' that he despises which is available, and in which, when we are in our senses, we absorb ourselves, knowing that that alone will yield a fruit worth having. What are the fruits of the others? only Dead Sea apples that crumble into ash.

"I knew that Florelle loved me; that I, and I alone, filled both her imagination and her heart. I would not precipitately startle her into any avowal of it. I liked to see it dawn in her face and gleam in her eyes, guilelessly and unconsciously. It was a new pleasure to me, a new charm in that book of Woman of which I had thought I knew every phase, and had exhausted every reading. I taught Florelle to love me, but I would not give her a name to my teaching till she found it herself. I returned it? O yes, I loved her, selfishly, as most people, men or women, do love, let them say what they will; very selfishly, perhaps-a love that was beneath her-a love for which, had she seen into my heart, she might have disdained and hated me, if her soft nature could have been moved to so fierce a thing as hate-a love that sought its own gratification, and thought nothing of her welfare-a love not worthy of her, as I sometimes felt then, as I believe now.

"I had been about six weeks in the Pyrenees since the day I lost myself en route from Gavarnie; most of the days I had spent three or four hours, often more, at the Nid de l'Aigle, giving my painting lessons to Florelle, or being guided by her among the beech-wooded and mountain passes near her home. The dreariest fens and flats might have gathered interest from such a guide, and the glorious beauties of the Midi, well suited to her, gained additional poetry from her impassioned love for them, and her fond knowledge of all their legends, superstitions, histories, and associated memories, gathered from the oral lore of the peasantry, the cradle songs of Madame Cazot, and the stories of the old chronicles of the South. Heavens! what a wealth of imagination, talent, genius, lay in her if I had not destroyed it!

"At length the time drew near when my so-called sojourn at the Baths must end. One day Florelle and I were out sketching, as usual; she sat under one of the great beeches, within a few feet of one of the cascades that fell into the Gave du Pau, and I lay on the grass by her, looking into those clear gazelle eyes that met mine so brightly and trustfully, watching the progress of her brush, and throwing twigs and stones into the spray of the torrent. I can remember the place as though it were yesterday, the splash of the foam over the rocks, the tinkle of the sheep-bells from the hills, the scent of the wild flowers growing round, the glowing golden light that spread over the woodlands, touching even the distant crest of Mount Aigu and the Pic du Midi. Strange how some scenes will stamp themselves on the camera of the brain never to be effaced, let one try all that one may.

"There, that morning, I, for the first time since we had met, spoke of leaving Luz, and of going back to that life which I had so often amused her by describing. Happy in her present, ignorant of how soon the scenes so familiar and dear to her would tire and pall on me, and infinitely too much of a child to have looked beyond, or speculated upon anything which I had not spoken of to her, it had not presented itself to her that this sort of life could not go on for ever; that even she would not reconcile me long to the banishment from my own world, and that in the nature of things we must either become more to each other than we were now, or part as strangers, whom chance had thrown together for a little time. She loved me, but, as I say, so innocently and uncalculatingly, that she never knew it till I spoke of leaving her; then she grew very pale, her eyes filled with tears, and shunned mine for the first time, and, as an anatomist watches the quiver of pain in his victim, so I watched the suffering of mine. It was her first taste of the bitterness of life, and while I inflicted the pain I smiled at it, pleased in my egotism to see the power I had over her. It was cruel, I grant it, but in confessing it I only confess to what nine out of ten men have felt, though they may conceal or deny it.

"'You will miss me, Florelle?' I asked her. She looked at me reproachfully, wistfully, piteously, the sort of look I have seen in the eyes of a dying deer; too bewildered by this sudden mention of my departure to answer in words. No answer was needed with eyes so eloquent as hers, but I repeated it again. I knew I gave pain, but I knew, too, I should soon console her. Her lips quivered, and the tears gathered in her eyes; she had not known enough of sorrow to have learnt to dissemble it. I asked her if she loved me so much that she was unwilling to bid me farewell. For the first time her eyes sank beneath mine, and a hot painful color flushed over her face. Poor child! if ever I have been loved by any woman, I was loved by her. Then I woke her heart from its innocent peaceful rest, with words that spoke a language utterly new to her. I sketched to her a life with me that made her cheeks glow, and her lips quiver, and her eyes grow dark. She was lovelier in those moments than any art could ever attempt to picture! She loved me, and I made her tell me so over and over again. She put her fate unhesitatingly into my hands, and rejoiced in the passion I vowed her, little understanding how selfishly I sought her, little thinking, in her ignorance of the evil of the world, that while she rejoiced in the fondness I lavished on her, and worshipped me as though I were some superior unerring godlike being, she was to me only a new toy, only a pursuit of the hour, a plaything, too, of which I foresaw I should tire! Isn't it Benjamin Constant who says,'Malheureux l'homme qui, dans le commencement d'un amour, prévoit avec une précision cruelle l'heure où il en sera lassé'?

"As it happened, I had made that morning an appointment in Luz with some men I knew, who happened to be passing through it, and had stopped there that day to go up the Pic du Midi the next, so that I could spend only an hour or two with Florelle. I took her to her home, parted with her for a few hours, and went down the path. I remember how she stood looking after me under the heavy gray stone-work of the gateway, the tendrils of the ivy hanging down and touching her hair that glistened in the sunshine as she smiled me her adieux. My words had translated, for the first time, all the newly-dawned emotions that had lately stirred in her heart, while she knew not their name.

"I soon lost sight of her through a sharp turn of the bridle-path round the rocks, and went on my way thinking of my new love, of how completely I held the threads of her fate in my hands, and how entirely it lay in my power to touch the chords of her young heart into acute pain or into as acute pleasure with one word of mine-of how utterly I could mould her character, her life, her fate, whether for happiness or misery, at my will. I loved her well enough, if only for her unusual beauty, to feel triumph at my entire power, and to feel a tinge of her own poetry and tenderness of feeling stirring in me as I went on under the green, drooping, fanlike boughs of the pines, thinking of Florelle de l'Heris.

"'M'sieu! permettez-moi vous parle un p'tit mot?'

"Madame Cazot's patois made me look up, almost startled for the moment, though there was nothing astonishing in her appearance there, in her accustomed spot under the shade of a mountain-ash and a great boulder of rock, occupied at her usual task, washing linen in the Gave, as it foamed and rushed over its stones. She raised herself from her work and looked up at me, shading her eyes from the light-a sunburnt, wrinkled, hardy old woman, with her scarlet capulet, her blue cloth jacket, and her brown woollen petticoat, so strange a contrast to the figure I had lately left under the gateway of the Nid de l'Aigle, that it was difficult to believe them even of the same sex or country.

"She spoke with extreme deference, as she always did, but so earnestly, that I looked at her in surprise, and stopped to hear what it might be she had to say. She was but a peasant woman, but she had a certain dignity of manner for all that, caught, no doubt, from her long service with, and her pride in, the De l'Heris.

"'M'sieu, I have no right, perhaps, to address you; you are a grand seigneur, and I but a poor peasant woman. Nevertheless, I must speak. I have a charge to which I shall have to answer in the other world to God and to my master. M'sieu, pardon me what I say, but you love Ma'amselle Florelle?'

"I stared at the woman, astonished at her interference and annoyed at her presumption, and motioned her aside with my stick. But she placed herself in the path-a narrow path-on which two people could not have stood without one or other going into the Gave, and stopped me resolutely and respectfully, shading her eyes from the sun, and looking steadily at my face.

"'M'sieu, a little while ago, in the gateway yonder, when you parted with Ma'amselle Florelle, I was coming out behind you to bring my linen to the river, and I saw you take her in your arms and kiss her many times, and whisper to her that you would come again "ce soir!" Then, m'sieu, I knew that you must love my little lady, or, at least, must have made her love you. I have thought her-living always with her-but a beautiful child still; but you have found her a beautiful woman, and loved her, or taught her love, m'sieu. Pardon me if I wrong your honor, but my master left her in my charge, and I am an ignorant old peasant, ill fitted for such a trust; but is this love of yours such as the Sieur de l'Heris, were he now on earth, would put his hand in your own and thank you for, or is it such that he would wash out its insult in your blood or his?'

"Her words amazed me for a moment, first at the presumption of an interference of which I had never dreamt, next at the iron firmness with which this old woman, nothing daunted, spoke as though the blood of a race of kings ran in her veins. I laughed a little at the absurdity of this cross-questioning from her to me, and not choosing to bandy words with her, bade her move aside; but her eyes blazed like fire; she stood firm as the earth itself.

"'M'sieu, answer me! You love Ma'amselle Florelle-you have asked her in marriage?'

"I smiled involuntarily:

"'My good woman, men of my class don't marry every pretty face they meet; we are not so fond of the institution. You mean well, I know; at the same time, you are deucedly impertinent, and I am not accustomed to interference. Have the goodness to let me pass, if you please.'

"But she would not move. She folded her arms across her chest, quivering from head to foot with passion, her deep-set eyes flashing like coals under her bushy eyebrows.

"'M'sieu, I understand you well enough. The house of the L'Heris is fallen, ruined, and beggared, and you deem dishonor may approach it unrebuked and unrevenged. Listen to me, m'sieu; I am but a woman, it is true, and old, but I swore by Heaven and Our Lady to the Sieur de l'Heris, when he lay dying yonder, years ago, that I would serve the child he left, as my forefathers had served his in peace and war for centuries, and keep and guard her as best I might dearer than my own heart's blood. Listen to me. Before this love of yours shall breathe another word into her ear to scorch and sully it; before your lips shall ever meet hers again; before you say again to a De l'Heris poor and powerless, what you would never have dared to say to a De l'Heris rich and powerful, I will defend her as the eagles by the Nid de l'Aigle defend their young. You shall only reach her across my dead body!'

"She spoke with the vehemence and passionate gesticulation of a Southern; in her patois, it is true, and with rude eloquence, but there was an odd timbre of pathos in her voice, harsh though it was, and a certain wild dignity about her through the very earnestness and passion that inspired her. I told her she was mad, and would have put her out of my path, but, planting herself before me, she laid hold of my arm so firmly that I could not have pushed forwards without violence, which I would not have used to a woman, and a woman, moreover, as old as she was.

"'Listen to one word more, m'sieu. I know not what title you may bear in your own country, but I saw a coronet upon your handkerchief the other day, and I can tell you are a grand seigneur-you have the air of it, the manner. M'sieu, you can have many women to love you; cannot you spare this one? you must have many pleasures, pursuits, enjoyments in your world, can you not leave me this single treasure? Think, m'sieu! If Ma'amselle Florelle loves you now, she will love you only the dearer as years go on; and you, you will tire of her, weary of her, want change, fresh beauty, new excitement-you must know that you will, or why should you shrink from the bondage of marriage?-you will weary of her; you will neglect her first and desert her afterwards; what will be the child's life then? Think! You have done her cruel harm enough now with your wooing words, why will you do her more? What is your love beside hers? If you have heart or conscience, you cannot dare to contrast them together; she would give up everything for you, and you would give up nothing! M'sieu, Florelle is not like the women of your world; she is innocent of evil as the holy saints; those who meet her should guard her from the knowledge, and not lead her to it. Were the Sieur De l'Heris living now, were her House powerful as I have known them, would you have dared or dreamt of seeking her as you do now? M'sieu, he who wrongs trust, betrays hospitality, and takes advantage of that very purity, guilelessness, and want of due protection which should be the best and strongest appeal to every man of chivalry and honor-he, whoever he be, the De l'Heris would have held, as what he is, a coward! Will you not now have pity upon the child, and let her go?'

"I have seldom been moved in, never been swayed from, any pursuit or any purpose, whether of love, or pleasure, or ambition; but something in old Cazot's words stirred me strangely, more strangely still from the daring and singularity of the speaker. Her intense love for her young charge gave her pathos, eloquence, and even a certain rude majesty, as she spoke; her bronzed wrinkled features worked with emotions she could not repress, and hot tears fell over her hard cheeks. I felt that what she said was true; that as surely as the night follows the day would weariness of it succeed to my love for Florelle, that to the hospitality I had so readily received I had, in truth, given but an ill return, and that I had deliberately taken advantage of the very ignorance of the world and faith in me which should have most appealed to my honor. I knew that what she said was true, and this epithet of 'coward' hit me harder from the lips of a woman, on whom her sex would not let me avenge it, with whom my conscience would not let me dispute it, than it would have done from any man. I called a coward by an old peasant woman! absurd idea enough, wasn't it? It is a more absurd one still that I could not listen to her unmoved, that her words touched me-how or why I could not have told-stirred up in me something of weakness, unselfishness, or chivalrousness-I know not what exactly-that prompted me for once to give up my own egotistical evanescent passions and act to Florelle as though all the males of her house were on earth to make me render account of my acts. At old Cazot's words I shrank for once from my own motives and my own desires, shrank from classing Florelle with the cocottes of my world, from bringing her down to their level and their life.

"'You will have pity on her, m'sieu, and go?' asked old Cazot, more softly, as she looked in my face.

"I did not answer her, but put her aside out of my way, went down the mountain-path to where my horse was left cropping the grass on the level ground beneath a plane-tree, and rode at a gallop into Luz without looking back at the gray-turreted ruins of the Nid de l'Aigle.

"And I left Luz that night without seeing Florelle de l'Heris again-a tardy kindness-one, perhaps, as cruel as the cruelty from which old Cazot had protected her. Don't you think I was a fool, indeed, for once in my life, to listen to an old woman's prating? Call me so if you like, I shall not dispute it; we hardly know when we are fools, and when wise men! Well! I have not been much given to such weaknesses.

"I left Luz, sending a letter to Florelle, in which I bade her farewell, and entreated her to forget me-an entreaty which, while I made it, I felt would not be obeyed-one which, in the selfishness of my heart, I dare say, I hoped might not be. I went back to my old diplomatic and social life, to my customary pursuits, amusements, and ambitions, turning over the leaf of my life that contained my sojourn in the Pyrenees, as you turn over the page of a romance to which you will never recur. I led the same life, occupied myself with my old ambitions, and enjoyed my old pleasures; but I could not forget Florelle as wholly as I wished and tried to do. I had not usually been troubled with such memories; if unwelcome, I could generally thrust them aside; but Florelle I did not forget; the more I saw of other women the sweeter and brighter seemed by contrast her sensitive, delicate nature, unsullied by the world, and unstained by artifice and falsehood. The longer time went on, the more I regretted having given her up-perhaps on no better principle than that on which a child cares most for the toy he cannot have; perhaps because, away from her, I realized I had lost the purest and the strongest love I had ever won. In the whirl of my customary life I sometimes wondered how she had received my letter, and how far the iron had burnt into her young heart-wondered if she had joined the Sisters of Sainte Marie Purificatrice, or still led her solitary life among the rocks and beech-woods of Nid de l'Aigle. I often thought of her, little as the life I led was conducive to regretful or romantic thoughts. At length my desire to see her again grew ungovernable. I had never been in the habit of refusing myself what I wished; a man is a fool who does, if his wishes are in any degree attainable. And at the end of the season I went over to Paris, and down again once more into the Midi. I reached Luz, lying in the warm golden Pyrenean light as I had left it, and took once more the old familiar road up the hills to the Nid de l'Aigle. There had been no outward change from the year that had flown by; there drooped the fan-like branches of the pines; there rushed the Gave over its rocky bed; there came the silvery sheep-bell chimes down the mountain-sides; there, over hill and wood, streamed the mellow glories of the Southern sunlight. There is something unutterably painful in the sight of any place after one's lengthened absence, wearing the same smile, lying in the same sunlight. I rode on, picturing the flush of gladness that would dawn in Florelle's face at the sight of me, thinking that Mme. Cazot should not part me from her again, even, I thought, as I saw the old gray turrets above the beech-woods, if I paid old Cazot's exacted penalty of marriage! I loved Florelle more deeply than I had done twelve months before. 'L'absence allument les grandes passions et éteignent les petites,' they say. It had been the reverse with me.

"I rode up the bridle-path and passed through the old gateway. There was an unusual stillness about the place; nothing but the roar of the torrent near, and the songs of the birds in the branches speaking in the summer air. My impatience to see Florelle, or to hear her, grew ungovernable. The door stood open. I groped my way through the passage and pushed open the door of the old room. Under the oriel window, where I had seen her first, she lay on a little couch. I saw her again-but how! My God! to the day of my death I shall never forget her face as I saw it then; it was turned from me, and her hair streamed over her pillows, but as the sunlight fell upon it, I knew well enough what was written there. Old Cazot, sitting by the bed with her head on her arms, looked up, and came towards me, forcing me back.

"'You are come at last, to see her die. Look on your work-look well at it-and then go; with my curse upon you!'

"I shook off her grasp, and forcing my way towards the window, threw myself down by Florelle's bed; till then I never knew how well I loved her. My voice awoke her from her sleep, and, with a wild cry of joy, she started up, weak as she was, and threw her arms round my neck, clinging to me with her little hands, and crying to me deliriously not to leave her while she lived-to stay with her till death should take her; where had I been so long? why had I come so late? So late!-those piteous words! As I held her in my arms, unconscious from the shock, and saw the pitiless marks that disease, the most hopeless and the most cruel, had made on the face that I had left fair, bright, and full of life as any child's, I felt the full bitterness of that piteous reproach, 'Why had I come so late?'

"What need to tell you more. Florelle de l'Heris was dying, and I had killed her. The child that I had loved so selfishly had loved me with all the concentrated tenderness of her isolated and impassioned nature; the letter I wrote bidding her farewell had given her her death-blow. They told me that from the day she received that letter everything lost its interest for her. She would sit for hours looking down the road to Luz, as though watching wearily for one who never came, or kneeling before the pictures I had left as before some altar, praying to Heaven to take care of me, and bless me, and let her see me once again before she died. Consumption had killed her mother in her youth; during the chill winter at the Nid de l'Aigle the hereditary disease settled upon her. When I found her she was dying fast. All the medical aid, all the alleviations, luxuries, resources, that money could procure, to ward off the death I would have given twenty years of my life to avert, I lavished on her, but they were useless; for my consolation they told me that, used a few months earlier, they would have saved her! She lingered three weeks, fading away like a flower gathered before its fullest bloom. Each day was torture to me. I knew enough of the disease to know from the first there was no hope for her or me. Those long terrible night-hours, when she lay with her head upon my shoulder, and her little hot thin hands in mine, while I listened, uncertain whether every breath was not the last, or whether life was not already fled! By God! I cannot think of them!

One of those long summer nights Florelle died; happy with me, loving and forgiving me to the last; speaking to the last of that reunion in which she, in her innocent faith, believed and hoped, according to the promise of her creed!-died with her hands clasped round my neck, and her eyes looking up to mine, till the last ray of light was quenched in them-died while the morning dawn rose in the east and cast a golden radiance on her face, the herald of a day to which she never awoke!"

* * *

There was a dead silence between us; the Arno splashed against the wall below, murmuring its eternal song beneath its bridge, while the dark heavy clouds drifted over the sky with a sullen roll of thunder. He lay back in his chair, the deep shadow of the balcony pillar hiding his face from me, and his voice quivered painfully as he spoke the last words of his story. He was silent for many minutes, and so was I, regretting that my careless question had unfolded a page out of his life's history written in characters so painful to him. Such skeletons dwell in the hearts of most; hands need be tender that disentomb them and drag out to daylight ashes so mournful and so grievous, guarded so tenaciously, hidden so jealously. Each of us is tender over his own, but who does not think his brother's fit subject for jest, for gibe, for mocking dance of death?

He raised himself with a laugh, but his lips looked white as death as he drank down a draught of the Hermitage.

"Well! what say you: is the maxim right, y-a-t-il femmes et femmes? Caramba! why need you have pitched upon that portfolio?-There are the lights in the Acqua d'Oro's palace; we must go, or we shall get into disgrace."

We went, and Beatrice Acqua d'Oro talked very ardent Italian to him, and the Comtesse Bois de Sandal remarked to me what a brilliant and successful man Lord -- was, but how unimpressionable!-as cold and as glittering as ice. Nothing had ever made him feel, she was quite certain, pretty complimentary nonsense though he often talked. What would the Marchesa and the Comtesse have said, I wonder, had I told them of that little grave under the Pyrenean beech-woods? So much does the world know of any of us! In the lives of all men are doubled-down pages written on in secret, folded out of sight, forgotten as they make other entries in the diary, and never read by their fellows, only glanced at by themselves in some midnight hour of solitude.

Basta! they are painful reading, my friends. Don't you find them so? Let us leave the skeletons in the closet, the pictures in the portfolio, the doubled-down pages in the locked diary, and go to Beatrice Acqua d'Oro's, where the lights are burning gayly. What is Madame Bois de Sandal, née Dashwood, singing in the music room?

The tender grace of a day that is dead

Will never come back to me!

That is the burden of many songs sung in this world, for some dead flowers strew most paths, and grass grows over myriad graves, and many leaves are folded down in many lives, I fear. And-retrospection is very idle, my good fellow, and regret is as bad as the tic, and flirting is deucedly pleasant; the white Hermitage we drank to-night is gone, we know, but are there no other bottles left of wine every whit as good? Shall we waste our time sighing after spilt lees? Surely not. And yet-ah me!-the dead fragrance of those vines that yielded us the golden nectar of our youth!

* * *

THE BEAUTY OF VICQ D'AZYR;

OR,

"NOT AT ALL A PROPER PERSON."

Bon ami, do you consider the possession of sisters an agreeable addition to anybody's existence? I hold it very intensely the reverse. Who pats a man down so spitefully as his sisters? Who refuses so obstinately to see any good in the Nazarene they have known from their nurseries? Who snubs him so contumaciously, when he's a little chap in jackets and they young ladies already out? Who worries him so pertinaciously to marry their pet friend, "who has ten thousand a year, dear! Red hair? I'm sure she has not! It's the most lovely auburn! But you never see any beauty in refined women!" Who, if you incline towards a pretty little ineligible, rakes up so laboriously every scrap of gossip detrimental to her, and pours into your ear the delightful intelligence that she has been engaged to Powell of the Grays, is a shocking flirt, wears false teeth, is full five years older than she says she is, and has most objectionable connections? Who, I should like to know, does any and all of these things, my good fellow, so amiably and unremittingly as your sisters? till-some day of grace, perhaps-you make a telling speech at St. Stephen's, and fling a second-hand aroma of distinction upon them; or marry a co-heiress and lady-in-her-own-right, and they raffolent of that charming creature, speculating on the desirability of being invited to your house when the men are down for September. Then, what a dear fellow you become! they always were so fond of you! a little wild! oh, yes! but they are so glad you are changed, and think more seriously now! it was only from a real interest in your welfare that they used to grieve, &c., &c.

My sisters were my natural enemies, I remember, when I was in the daisy age and exposed to their thraldom; they were so blandly superior, so ineffably condescending, and wielded, with such smiling dexterity, that feminine power of torture known familiarly as "nagging!" Now, of course, they leave me in peace; but from my earliest to my emancipated years they were my natural enemies. I might occasionally excite the enmity, it is possible. I remember, when I was aged eight, covering Constance, a stately brunette, with a mortifying amount of confusion, by asking her, as she welcomed a visitor with effusion, why she said she was delighted to see her when she had cried "There's that odious woman again!" as we saw the carriage drive up. I have a criminal recollection of taking Gwendolina's fan, fresh from Howell and James's, and stripping it of its gold-powdered down before her face ere she could rush to its rescue, as an invaluable medium in the manufacture of mayflies. I also have a dim and guilty recollection of saying to the Hon. George Cursitt, standing then in the interesting position of my prospective brother-in-law, "Mr. Cursitt, Agneta doesn't care one straw for you. I heard her saying so last night to Con; and that if you weren't so near the title, she would never have accepted you;" which revelation inopportunely brought that desirable alliance to an end, and Olympian thunders on my culprit's head.

I had my sins, doubtless, but they were more than avenged on me; my sisters were my natural enemies, and I never knew of any man's who weren't so, more or less. Ah! my good sirs, those domesticities are all of them horrid bores, and how any man, happily and thrice blessedly free from them, can take the very worst of them voluntarily on his head by the Gate of Marriage (which differs thus remarkably from a certain Gate at Jerusalem, that at the one the camels kneel down to be lightened of all their burdens ere they can pass through it; at the other, the poor human animal kneels down to be loaded with all his ere he is permitted to enter), does pass my comprehension, I confess. I might amply avenge the injuries of my boyhood received from mesdemoiselles mes s[oe]urs. Could I not tell Gwendolina of the pot of money dropped by her caro sposo over the Cesarewitch Stakes? Could I not intimate to Agneta where her Right Honorable lord and master spent the small hours last night, when popularly supposed to be nodding on the Treasury benches in the service of the state? Could I not rend the pride of Constance, by casually asking monsieur her husband, as I sip her coffee in her drawing-room this evening, who was that very pretty blonde with him at the Crystal Palace yesterday? the blonde being as well known about town as any other star of the demi-monde. Of course I could: but I am magnanimous; I can too thoroughly sympathize with those poor fellows. My vengeance would recoil on innocent heads, so I am magnanimous and silent.

My sisters have long ceased to be mesdemoiselles, they have become mesdames, in that transforming crucible of marriage in which, assuredly, all that glitters is not gold, but in which much is swamped, and crushed, and fused with uncongenial metal, and from which the elixir of happiness but rarely exhales, whatever feminine alchemists, who patronize the hymeneal furnace, may choose to assure us to the contrary. My sisters are indisputably very fine women, and develop in full bloom all those essential qualities which their moral and mental trainers sedulously instilled into them when they were limited to the school-room and thorough-bass, Garcia and an "expurgated" Shakespeare, the society of Mademoiselle Colletmonté and Fr?ulein von Engel, and the occasional refection of a mild, religious, respectably-twaddling fiction of the milk-and-water, pious-tendency, nursery-chronicling, and grammar-disregarding class, nowadays indited for the mental improvement of a commonplace generation in general, and growing young ladies in particular. My sisters are women of the world to perfection; indeed, for talent in refrigerating with a glance; in expressing disdain of a toilette or a ton by an upraised eyebrow; in assuming a various impenetrable pla?t-il? expression at a moment's notice; in sweeping past intimate friends with a charming unconsciousness of their existence, when such unconsciousness is expedient or desirable; in reducing an unwished-for intruder into an instantaneous and agonizing sense of his own de trop-ism and insignificance-in all such accomplishments and acquirements necessary to existence in all proper worlds, I think they may be matched with the best-bred lady to be found any day, from April to August, between Berkeley Square and Wilton Crescent. Constance, now Lady Maréchale, is of a saintly turn, and touched with fashionable fanaticism, pets evangelical bishops and ragged school-boys, drives to special services, and is called our noble and Christian patroness by physicians and hon. secs., holds doctrinal points and strong tracts, mixed together in equal proportion, an infallible chloride of lime for the disinfectance of our polluted globe, and appears to receive celestial telegrams of indisputable veracity and charming acrimony concerning the destiny of the vengeful contents of the Seven Vials. Agneta, now Mrs. Albany Protocol, is a Cabinet Ministress, and a second Duchesse de Longueville (in her own estimation at the least); is "strengthening her party" when she issues her dinner invitations, whispers awfully of a "crisis" when even penny-paper leaders can't get up a breeze, and spends her existence in "pushing" poor Protocol, who, thorough Englishman that he is, considers it a point of honor to stand still in all paths with praiseworthy Britannic obstinacy and opticism. Gwendolina, now Lady Frederic Farniente, is a butterfly of fashion, has delicate health, affects dilettanteism, is interested by nothing, has many other charming minauderies, and lives in an exclusive circle-so tremendously exclusive, indeed, that it is possible she may at last draw the cordon sanitaire so very tight, that she will be left alone with the pretty woman her mirrors reflect.

They have each of them attained to what the world calls a "good position"-an eminence the world dearly reveres; if you can climb to it, do; never mind what dirt may cling to your feet, or what you may chance to pull down in your ascent, so questions will be asked you at the top, when you wave your flag victoriously from a plateau at a good elevation. They haven't all their ambitions-who has? If a fresh Alexander conquered the world he would fret out his life for a standing-place to be able to try Archimedes' little experiment on his newly-won globe. Lady Maréchale dies for entrance to certain salons which are closed to her; she is but a Baronet's wife, and, though so heavenly-minded, has some weaknesses of earth. Mrs. Protocol grieves because she thinks a grateful country ought to wreathe her lord's brow with laurels-Anglicè, strawberry-leaves-and the country remains ungrateful, and the brows bare. Lady Frederic frets because her foe and rival, Lady Maria Fitz-Sachet, has footmen an inch taller than her own. They haven't all their ambitions satisfied. We are too occupied with kicking our dear friends and neighbors down off the rounds of the social ladder to advance ourselves always perhaps as entirely as we otherwise might do. But still they occupy "unexceptionable positions," and from those fortified and impregnable citadels are very severe upon those who are not, and very jealous of those who are, similarly favored by fortune. When St. Peter lets ladies through the celestial portals, he'll never please them unless he locks out all their acquaintance, and indulges them with a gratifying peep at the rejected candidates.

The triad regard each other after the manner of ladies; that is to say, Lady Maréchale holds Mrs. Protocol and Lady Frederic "frivolous and worldly;" Lady Frederic gives them both one little supercilious expressive epithet, "précieuses;" Mrs. Protocol considers Lady Maréchale a "pharisee," and Lady Frederic a "butterfly;"-in a word, there is that charming family love to one another which ladies so delight to evince, that I suppose we must excuse them for it on the plea that

'Tis their nature to!

which Dr. Watts puts forward so amiably and grammatically in excuse for the bellicose propensities of the canine race, but which is never remembered by priest or layman in extenuation of the human.

They dislike one another-relatives always do-still, the three Arms will combine their Horse, Line, and Field Batteries in a common cause and against a common enemy; the Saint, the Politician, and the Butterfly have several rallying-points in common, and when it comes to the question of extinguishing an ineligible, of combining a sneer with a smile, of blending the unexceptionably-courteous with the indescribably-contemptuous, of calmly shutting their doors to those who won't aggrandize them, and blandly throwing them open to those who will, it would be an invidious task to give the golden apple, and decide which of the three ladies most distinguishes herself in such social prowess.

Need I say that I don't see very much of them?-severe strictures on society in general, with moral platitudes, over the luncheon wines at Lady Maréchale's; discourse redolent of blue-books, with vindictive hits at Protocol and myself for our disinclination to accept a "mission," and our levity of life and opinions at "a period so full of social revolutions and wide-spread agitation as the present," through the soup and fish at Agneta's; softly hissed acerbities and languidly yawned satires on the prettiest women of my acquaintance, over the coffee at Lady Frederic's; are none of them particularly inviting or alluring. And as they or similar conversational confections are invariably included in each of the three ladies' entertainments en petit comité, it isn't wonderful if I forswear their drawing-rooms. Chères dames, you complain, and your chosen defenders for you, that men don't affect your society nowadays save and except when making love to you. It isn't our fault, indeed: you bore us, and-what can we do?-we shrink as naturally and pardonably from voluntary boredom as from any other voluntary suffering, and shirk an air redolent of ennui from the same principle as we do an air redolent of diphtheria. Self-preservation is a law of nature, and female society consists too exclusively of milk-and-water, dashed here and there with citric acid of malice, to be either a recherché or refreshing beverage to palates that have tasted warmer spices or more wholesome tonics.

So I don't see much of my triad of sisters unless accidentally, but last August I encountered them by chance at Vicq d'Azyr. Do you know Vicq d'Azyr? No? All right? when it is known universally it will be spoilt; it will soon be fashionable, dyspeptic, artificial, like the crowds that will flock to it; its warm, bubbling springs will be gathered into long upright glasses, and quaffed by yellow-visaged groups; brass bands will bray where now the thrushes, orioles, and nightingales have the woodlands to themselves; cavalcades of hired hacks will cut up its thyme-covered turf, and young ladies will sketch in tortured outline and miserable washes the glorious sweep of its mountains, the crimson tints of its forests, the rush of its tumbling torrents, the golden gleam of its southern sun. Vicq d'Azyr will be a Spa, and will be spoilt; dyspepsia and bronchia, vanities and flirtations, cares and conquests, physicians and intrigantes, real marchionesses puffing under asthma, fictitious marquises strewing chaff for pigeons, monde and demi-monde, grandes dames and dames d'industrie will float into it, a mighty army of butterflies with a locust power of destruction: Vicq d'Azyr will be no more, and in its stead we shall have-a Fashionable Bath. Vicq d'Azyr, however, is free yet from the hand of the spoiler, and is charming-its vine-clad hills stretching up in sunny slopes; its little homesteads nestling on the mountains' sides among the pines that load the air with their rich heavy perfume; its torrents foaming down the ravines, flinging their snowy spray far over the bows of arbutus and mountain-ash that bend across the brinks of their rushing courses; its dark-eyed peasant girls that dance at sunset under the linden-trees like living incarnations of Florian's pastorals; its sultry brilliant summer nights, when all is still, when the birds are sleeping among the ilex-leaves, and the wind barely stirs the tangled boughs of the woodland; when night is down on the mountains, wrapping hill and valley, crag and forest in one soft purple mist, and the silence around is only broken by the mystic music of the rushing waters, the soft whirr of the night-birds' wings, or the distant chime of a village clock faintly tolling through the air:--Caramba, messieurs! I beg your pardon! I don't know why I poetize on Vicq d'Azyr. I went there to slay, not to sketch, with a rifle, not with a stylus, to kill izzards and chamois, not to indite a poem à la mode, with double-barrelled adjectives, no metre, and a "purpose;" nor to add my quota to the luckless loaded walls of the Academy by a pre-Raphaelite landscape of arsenical green, with the effete trammels of perspective gallantry disregarded, and trees like Dr. Syntax's wife, "roundabout and rather squat," with just two-dozen-and-seven leaves apiece for liberal allowance. I went to Vicq d'Azyr, amongst other places, last August, for chamois-hunting with Dunbar, of the Queen's Bays, taking up our abode at the Toison d'Or, whither all artists, tourists, men who come for the sport, women who come for its scenery, or invalids who come for its waters (whose properties, miserabile dictu! are just being discovered as a panacea for every human ill-from a migraine to an "incurable pulmonary affliction"), seek accommodation if they can have it, since it is the only hotel in the place, though a very good one; is adorned with a balcony running round the house, twined and buried in honeysuckle and wild clematis, which enchants young ladies into instant promotion of it into their sketch-books; and gives you, what is of rather more importance, and what makes you ready to admire the clematis when, under gastronomic exasperation, you might swear at it as a harbor for tarantule-an omelette, I assure you, wellnigh as well cooked as you have it at Mivart's or Meurice's.

At the Toison d'Or we took up our abode, and at the Toison d'Or we encountered my two elder sisters, Constance and Agneta, travelling for once on the same road, as they had left Paris together, and were together going on to the fashionable capital of a fashionable little toy duchy on the other side of the Rhine, when they should have finished with the wilder beauties and more unknown charms of Vicq d'Azyr and its environs. Each lady had her little train of husband, courier, valet, lady's-maid, small dog, and giant jewel-box. I have put the list in the inverse ratio of their importance, I believe. Your husband versus your jewel-box? Of course, my dear madam; absurd! What's the value of a little simple gold ring against a dozen glittering circlets of diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and garnets?

Each lady was bent on recruiting herself at Vicq d'Azyr after the toils of the season, and of shining après with all the brilliance that a fair share of beauty, good positions, and money, fairly entitled them to expect, at the little Court of-we will call it Lemongenseidlitz-denominated by its charming Duchess, Princess Hélène of Lemongenseidlitz-Phizzstrelitz, the loveliest and most volage of all minor royalties. Each lady was strongly opposed to whatever the other wished; each thought the weather "sultry" when the other thought it "chilly," and vice versa. Each considered her own ailments "unheard-of suffering, dear!-I could never make any one feel!" &c. &c.-and assured you, with mild disdain, that the other's malady was "purely nervous, entirely exaggerated, but she will dwell on it so much, poor darling!" Each related to you how admirably they would have travelled if her counsel had been followed, and described how the other would take the direction of everything, would confuse poor Chanderlos, the courier, till he hardly knew where he was, and would take the night express out of pure unkindness, just because she knew how ill it always made her (the speaker) feel to be torn across any country the whole night at that dreadful pace; each was dissatisfied with everything, pleased with nothing, and bored, as became ladies of good degree; each found the sun too hot or the wind too cold, the mists too damp or the air too dry, and both combined their forces to worry their ladies'-maids, find fault with the viands, drive their lords to the registering of an oath never to travel with women again, welcome us benignly, since they thought we might amuse them, and smile their sunniest on Dunbar-he's heir-prospective to the Gwynne Marquisate, and Lady Marqueterie, the Saint, is not above keeping one eye open for worldly distinctions, while Mrs. Albany Protocol, though a Radical, is, like certain others of the ultra-Liberal party, not above a personal kow-towing before those "ridiculous and ought-to-be exploded conservative institutions"-Rank and Title.

At the Toison d'Or, I say, when, after knocking over izzards ad libitum in another part of the district, we descended one evening into the valley where Vicq d'Azyr lies nestled in the sunset light, with the pretty vendangeuses trooping down from the sloping vineyards, and the cattle winding homewards down the hill-side paths, and the vesper-bells softly chiming from the convent-tower rising yonder above its woods of linden and acacia-at the Toison d'Or, just alighting with the respective suites aforesaid, and all those portable embarrassments of books, tiger-skin rugs, flacons of bouquet, travelling-bags warranted to carry any and everything that the most fastidious can require en route from Piccadilly to Peru, with which ladies do love to encumber and embitter their own persons and their companions' lives, we met, as I have told you, mesdames mes s[oe]urs.

"What! Dear me, how very singular! Never should have dreamt of meeting you; so much too quiet a place, I should have thought. No Kursaal here? Come for sport-oh! Take Spes, will you! Poor little dear, he's been barking the whole way because he couldn't see out of the window. Ah, Major Dunbar, charmed to see you! What an amusing rencontre, is it not?" And Lady Maréchale, slightly out of temper for so eminent a Christian at the commencement of her greeting, smoothed down her ruffled feathers and turned smilingly on Dunbar. I have said he will be one day Marquis of Gwynne.

"By George, old fellow! you in this out-of-the-way place! That's all right. Sport good, here? Glad to hear it. The deuce take me, if ever I am lured into travelling in a partie carrée again."

And Maréchale raised his eyebrows, and whispered confidentially to me stronger language than I may commit to print, though, considering his provocation, it was surely as pardonable as Uncle Toby's.

"The thing I dislike in this sort of hotels and places is the admixture of people with whom one is obliged to come in contact," said Constance, putting up her glass as she entered the long low room where the humble table d'h?te of the Toison d'Or was spread. Lady Maréchale talks sweetly of the equality of persons in the sight of Heaven, but I never heard her recognize the same upon the soil of earth.

"Exactly! One may encounter such very objectionable characters! I wished to dine in our own apartments, but Albany said no; and he is so positive, you know! This place seems miserably primitive," responded Agneta. Mrs. Protocol pets Rouges and Republicans of every country, talks liberalism like a feminine Sièyes or John Bright, projects a Reform Bill that shall bear the strongest possible family resemblance to the Décrets du 4 Ao?t, and considers "social distinctions odious between man and man;" but her practice is scarcely consistent with her theory, seeing that she is about as tenacious and resentful of objectionable contact as a sea-anemone.

"Who is that, I wonder?" whispered Lady Maréchale, acidulating herself in readiness, after the custom of English ladies when catching sight of a stranger whom they "don't know."

"I wonder! All alone-how very queer!" echoed Mrs. Protocol, drawing her black lace shawl around her, with that peculiar movement which announces a woman's prescience of something antagonistic to her, that is to be repelled d'avance, as surely as a hedgehog's transfer of itself into a prickly ball denotes a sense of a coming enemy, and a need of caution and self-protection.

"Who is that deucedly handsome woman?" whispered Maréchale to me.

"What a charming creature!" echoed Dunbar.

The person referred to was the only woman at the table d'h?te besides my sisters-a sister-tourist, probably; a handsome-nay more, a beautiful woman, about eight-and-twenty, distinguished-looking, brilliant, with a figure voluptuously perfect as was ever the Princess Borghese's. To say a woman looks a lady, means nothing in our day. "That young lady will wait on you, sir," says the shopman, referring to the shopwoman who will show you your gloves. "Hand the 'errings to that lady, Joe," you hear a fishmonger cry, as you pass his shop-door, referring by his epithet to some Mrs. Gamp or Betsy Priggs in search of that piscatory cheer at his stall. Heaven forbid we should give the abused and degenerate title to any woman deserving of the name! Generalize a thing, and it is vulgar. "A gentleman of my acquaintance," says Spriggs, an auctioneer and house-agent, to Smith, a collector of the water-rate. "A man I know," says Pursang, one of the Cabinet, to Greville Tempest, who is heir to a Dukedom, and has intermarried with a royal house. The reason is plain enough. Spriggs thinks it necessary to inform Smith, who otherwise might remain ignorant of so signal a fact, that he actually does know a gentleman, or rather what he terms such. Pursang knows that Tempest would never suspect him of being lié with men who were anything else; the one is proud of the fine English, the other is content with the simple phrase! Heaven forbid, I say, we should, nowadays, call any woman a lady who is veritably such; let us fall back on the dignified, definitive, courtly last-century-name of gentlewoman. I should be glad to see that name revived; it draws a line that snobbissimi cannot pass, and has a grand simplicity about it that will not attract Spriggs, Smith, and Spark, and Mesdames S., leurs femmes!

Our sister-tourist, then, at the Toison d'Or, looked, to my eyes at the least, much more than a "lady," she looked an aristocrate jusqu'au bout des ongles, a beautiful, brilliant, dazzling brunette, with lovely hazel eyes, flashing like a tartaret falcon's under their arched pencilled eyebrows, quite an unhoped godsend in Vicq d'Azyr, where only stragglers resort as yet, though-alas for my Arcadia-my sister's pet physician, who sent them thither, is about, I believe, to publish a work, entitled "The Water-Spring in the Wilderness; or, A Scamper through Spots Unknown," which will do a little advertising of himself opportunely, and send hundreds next season to invade the wild woodlands and sunny valleys he inhumanly drags forth into the gas-glare of the world.

The brilliant hazel eyes were opposite to me at dinner, and were, I confess, more attractive to me than the stewed pigeons, the crisp frog-legs, and the other viands prepared by the (considering we were in the heart of one of the most remote provinces) really not bad cook of the Toison d'Or. Lady Maréchale and Mrs. Protocol honored her with that stare by which one woman knows so well how to destroy the reputation of another without speech; they had taken her measurement by some method of feminine geometry unknown to us, and the result was apparently not favorable to her, for over the countenances of the two ladies gathered that expression of stiff dignity and virtuous disdain, in the assuming of which, as I have observed before, they are inimitable proficients. "Evidently not a proper person!" was written on every one of their lineaments. Constance and Agneta had made up their minds with celerity and decision as to her social status, with, it is to be presumed, that unerring instinct which leads their sex to a conclusion so instantaneously, that, according to a philosopher, a woman will be at the top of the staircase of Reasoning by a single spring, while a man is toiling slowly up the first few steps.

"You are intending to remain here some days, madame?" asked the fair stranger, with a charming smile, of Lady Maréchale-a pleasant little overture to chance ephemeral acquaintance, such as a table d'h?te surely well warrants.

But the pleasant little overture was one to which Lady Maréchale was far too English to respond. With that inimitable breeding for which our countrymen and women are continentally renowned, she bent her head with stately stiffness, indulged herself with a haughty stare at the offender, and turned to Agneta, to murmur in English her disgust with the cuisine of the really unoffending Toison d'Or.

"Poor Spes would eat nothing. Fenton must make him some panada. But perhaps there was nothing better than goat's milk in the house! What could Dr. Berkeley be thinking of? He described the place quite as though it were a second Meurice's or Badischer Hof!"

A look of amusement glanced into the sparkling, yet languid eyes of my opposite neighbor.

"English!" she murmured to herself, with an almost imperceptible but sufficiently scornful elevation of her arched eyebrows, and a slight smile, just showing her white teeth, as I addressed her in French; and she answered me with the ease, the aplomb, the ever suave courtesy of a woman of the world, with that polish which gives the most common subjects a brilliance never their own, and that vivacity which confers on the merest trifles a spell to amuse and to charm. She was certainly a very lovely creature, and a very charming one, too; frank, animated, witty, with the tone of a woman who has seen the world and knows it. Dunbar adored her, at first sight; he is an inflammable fellow, and has been ignited a thousand times at far less provocation. Maréchale prepared for himself fifty conjugal orations by the recklessness with which, under the very eyes of madame, he devoted himself to another woman. Even Albany Protocol, dull, somnolent, and superior to such weaknesses, as becomes a president of many boards and a chairman of many committees, opened his eyes and glanced at her; and some young Cantabs and artists at the other end of the table stopped their own conversation, envying Dunbar and myself, I believe, for our juxtaposition with the belle inconnue; while my sisters sat trifling with the wing of a pigeon, in voluntary starvation (they would have had nothing to complain of, you see, if they had suffered themselves to dine well!), with strong disapprobation marked upon their lineaments, of this lovely vivacious unknown, whoever she might be, talking exclusively to each other, with a certain expression of sarcastic disdain and offended virtue, hinting far more forcibly than words that they thought already the "very worst" of her.

So severe, indeed, did they look, that Dunbar, who is a good-natured fellow, and thinks-and thinks justly-that Constance and Agneta are very fine women, left me to discuss, Hoffmann, Heine, and the rest of Germany's satirical poets, with my opposite neighbor, and endeavored to thaw my sisters; a very difficult matter when once those ladies are iced. He tried Paris, but only elicited a monosyllabic remark concerning its weather; he tried Vicq d'Azyr, and was rewarded for his trouble by a withering sarcasm on the unlucky Toison d'Or; he tried chit-chat on mutual acquaintances, and the unhappy people he chanced to name were severally dismissed with a cutting satire appended to each. Lady Maréchale and Mrs. Protocol were in one of those freezing and unassailable moods in which they sealed a truce with one another, and, combining their forces against a common foe, dealt out sharp, spherical, hard-hitting little bullets of speech from behind the abatis in which they intrenched themselves.

At last he, in despair, tried Lemongenseidlitz, and the ladies thawed slightly-their anticipations from that fashionable little quarter were couleur de rose. They would meet their people of the best monde, all their dearest-that is of course their most fashionable-friends; the dear Duchess of Frangipane, the Millamonts those charming people, M. le Marquis de Croix-et-Cordon, Sir Henry Pullinger, Mrs. Merivale-Delafield, were all there; that delightful person, too, the Graf von Rosenl?u, who amused them so much at Baden last year, was, as of course Dunbar knew, Master of the Horse to the Prince of Lemongenseidlitz-Phizzstrelitz; they would be well received at the Court. Which last thing, however, they did not say, though they might imply, and assuredly fully thought it; since Lady Maréchale already pictured herself gently awakening his Serene Highness to the spiritual darkness of his soul in legitimatizing gaming-tables in his duchy, and Mrs. Protocol already beheld herself closeted with his First Minister, giving that venerable Metternich lessons in political economy, and developing to him a system for filling his beggared treasury to overflowing, without taxing the people a kreutzer-a problem which, though it might have perplexed Kaunitz, Colbert, Pitt, Malesherbes, Talleyrand, and Palmerston put together, offered not the slightest difficulty to her enterprising intellect. Have I not said that Sherlock states women are at the top of the staircase while we are toiling up the first few steps?

"The Duchess-Princess Hélène is a lovely woman, I think. Winton saw her at the Tuileries last winter, and raved about her beauty," said Dunbar, finding he had hit at last on an acceptable subject, and pursuing it with more zeal than discretion; for if there be one thing, I take it, more indiscreet than another, it is to praise woman to woman.

Constance coughed and Agneta smiled, and both assented. "Oh yes-very lovely, they believed!"

"And very lively-up to everything, I think I have heard," went on Dunbar, blandly, unconscious of the meaning of cough, smile, and assent.

"Very lively!" sighed the Saint.

"Very lively!" smiled the Politician.

"As gay a woman as Marie Antoinette," continued Dunbar, too intent on the truffles to pay en même temps much heed to the subject he was discussing. "She's copied the Trianon, hasn't she?-has fêtes and pastorals there, acts in comedies herself, shakes off etiquette and ceremonial as much as she can, and all that sort of thing, I believe?"

Lady Maréchale leaned back in her chair, the severe virtue and dignified censure of a British matron and a modern Lucretia expressed in both attitude and countenance.

"A second Marie Antoinette?-too truly and unfortunately so, I have heard! Levity in any station sufficiently reprehensible, but when exhibited in the persons of those whom a higher power has placed in exalted positions, it is most deeply to be deplored. The evil and contagion of its example become incalculable; and even when, which I believe her excusers are wont to assert of Princess Hélène, it is merely traceable to an over-gayety of spirit and an over-carelessness of comment and censure, it should be remembered that we are enjoined to abstain from every appearance of evil!"

With which Constance shook out her phylacteries, represented by the thirty-guinea bracade-silk folds of her skirt (a dress I heard her describe as "very plain!-serviceable for travelling"), and glanced at my opposite neighbor with a look which said, "You are evidently not a proper person, but you hear for once what a proper person thinks!"

Our charming companion did hear it, for she apparently understood English very well. She laughed a little-a sweet, low, ringing laugh-(I was rather in love with her, I must say-I am still)-and spoke with a slight pretty accent.

"True, madame! but ah! what a pity your St. Paul did not advise, too, that people should not go by appearances, and think evil where evil is not!"

Lady Maréchale gave stare number two with a curl of her lip, and bent her head stiffly.

"What a very strange person!" she observed to Agneta, in a murmur, meant, like a stage aside, to be duly heard and appreciated by the audience. And yet my sisters are thought very admirably bred women, too! But then, a woman alone-a foreigner, a stranger-surely no one would exact courtesy to such, from "ladies of position?"

"Have you ever seen Princess Hélène, the Duchess of Lemongenseidlitz, may I ask?" Maréchale inquired, hastily, to cover his wife's sneer. He's a very good fellow, and finds the constant and inevitable society of a saint slightly trying, and a very heavy chastisement for a few words sillily said one morning in St. George's.

"I have seen her, monsieur-yes!"

"And is she a second Marie Antoinette?"

She laughed gayly, showing her beautiful white teeth.

"Ah, bah, monsieur! many would say that is a great deal too good a comparison for her! A second Louise de Savoie-a second Duchesse de Chevreuse-nay, a second Lucrezia Borgia, some would tell you. She likes pleasure-who does not, though, except those with whom 'les raisins sont trop verts et bons pour des goujats?'"

"What an insufferably bold person!" murmured Constance.

"Very disagreeable to meet this style of people!" returned Agneta.

And both stiffened themselves with a little more starch; and we know that British wheats produce the stiffest starch in the world!

"Who, indeed!" cried Maréchale, regardless of madame's frown. "You know this for truth, then, of Princess Hélène?"

"Ah, bah, monsieur! who knows anything for truth?" laughed the lovely brunette. "The world dislikes truth so much, it is obliged to hide itself in out-of-the-way corners, and very rarely comes to light. Nobody knows the truth about her. Some think her, as you say, a second Marie Antoinette, who is surrendered to dissipation and levity, cares for nothing, and would dance and laugh over the dead bodies of the people. Others judge her as others judged Marie Antoinette; discredit the gossip, and think she is but a lively woman, who laughs at forms, likes to amuse herself, and does not see why a court should be a prison! The world likes the darker picture best; let it have it! I do not suppose it will break her heart!"

And the fair stranger laughed so sweetly, that every man at the dinner-table fell in love with her on the spot; and Lady Maréchale and Mrs. Protocol sat throughout the remainder of the meal in frozen dignity and unbreakable silence, while the lovely brunette talked with and smiled on us all with enchanting gayety, wit, and abandon, chatting on all sorts of topics of the day.

Dinner over, she was the first to rise from the table, and bowed to us with exquisite grace and that charming smile of hers, of which the sweetest rays fell upon me, I swear, whether you consider the oath an emanation of personal vanity or not, my good sir. My sisters returned her bow and her good evening to them with that pointed stare which says so plainly, "You are not my equal, how dare you insult me by a courtesy?"

And scarcely had we begun to sip our coffee up-stairs in the apartments Chanderlos had secured for the miladies Anglaises, than the duo upon her began as the two ladies sat with Spes between them on a sofa beside one of the windows opening on the balcony that ran round the house. A chance inadvertent assent of Dunbar's, à propos of-oh, sin unpardonable!-the beauty of the incognita's eyes, touched the valve and unloosened the hot springs that were seething below in silence. "A handsome woman!-oh yes, a gentleman's beauty, I dare say!-but a very odd person!" commenced Mrs. Protocol. "A very strange person!" assented Mrs. Maréchale. "Very free manners!" added Agneta. "Quite French!" chorused Constance. "She has diamond rings-paste, no doubt!" said the Politician. "And rouges-the color's much too lovely to be natural!" sneered the Saint. "Paints her eyebrows, too!" "Not a doubt-and tints her lashes!" "An adventuress, I should say!" "Or worse!" "Evidently not a proper person!" "Certainly not!"

Through the soft mellow air, hushed into evening silence, the words reached me, as I walked through the window on to the balcony, and stood sipping my coffee and looking lazily over the landscape wrapped in sunset haze, over the valley where the twilight shadows were deepening, and the mountains that were steeped yet in a rose-hued golden radiance from the rays that had sunk behind them.

"My dear ladies," I cried, involuntarily, "can't you find anything a little more kindly to say of a stranger who has never done you any harm, and who, fifty to one, will never cross your path again?"

"Bravo!" echoed Maréchale, who has never gone as quietly in the matrimonial break as Protocol, and indeed will never be thoroughly broken in-"bravo! women are always studying to make themselves attractive; it's a pity they don't put down among the items a trifle of generosity and charity, it would embellish them wonderfully."

Lady Maréchale beat an injured tattoo with the spoon on her saucer, and leaned back with the air of a martyr, and drawing in her lips with a smile, whose inimitable sneer any lady might have envied-it was quite priceless!

"It is the first time, Sir George, I should presume, that a husband and a brother were ever heard to unite in upbraiding a wife and a sister with her disinclination to associate with, or her averseness to countenance, an improper person!"

"An improper person!" I cried. "But, my dear Constance, who ever told you that this lady you are so desperately bitter upon has any fault at all, save the worst fault in her own sex's eyes-that of beauty? I see nothing in her; her manners are perfect; her tone--"

"You must pardon me if I decline taking your verdict on so delicate a question," interrupted Lady Maréchale, with withering satire. "Very possibly you see nothing objectionable in her-nothing, at least, that you would call so! Your views and mine are sufficiently different on every subject, and the women with whom I believe you have chiefly associated are not those who are calculated to give you very much appreciation for the more refined classes of our sex! Very possibly the person in question is what you, and Sir George too, perhaps, find charming; but you must excuse me if I really cannot, to oblige you, stoop to countenance any one whom my intuition and my knowledge of the world both declare so very evidently what she should not be. She will endeavor, most probably, if she remain here, to push herself into our acquaintance, but if you and my husband should choose to insult us by favoring her efforts, Agneta and I, happily, can guard ourselves from the objectionable companionship into which those who should be our protectors would wish to force us!"

With which Lady Maréchale, with a little more martyrdom and an air of extreme dignity, had recourse to her flacon of Viola Montana, and sank among the sofa cushions, a model of outraged and Spartan virtue. I set down my coffee-cup, and lounged out again to the peace of the balcony; Maréchale shrugged his shoulders, rose, and followed me. Lo! on the part of the balcony that ran under her windows, leaning on its balustrade, her white hand, white as the flowers, playing with the clematis tendrils, the "paste" diamond flashing in the last rays of the setting sun, stood our "dame d'industrie-or worse!" She was but a few feet farther on; she must have heard Lady Maréchale's and Mrs. Protocol's duo on her demerits; she had heard it, without doubt, for she was laughing gayly and joyously, laughter that sparkled all over her riante face and flashed in her bright falcon eyes. Laughing still, she signed me to her. I need not say that the sign was obeyed.

"Chivalrous knight, I thank you! You are a Bayard of chivalry; you defend the absent! What a miracle, mon Dieu! Tell your friends from me not to speak so loudly when their windows are open; and, for yourself, rest assured your words of this evening will not be forgotten."

"I am happy, indeed, if I have been fortunate enough to obtain a chance remembrance, but do not give me too much praise for so simple a service; the clumsiest Cimon would be stirred into chivalry under such inspiration as I had--"

The beautiful hazel eyes flashed smilingly on me under their lashes. (Those lashes tinted! Heaven forgive the malice of women!) She broke off a sprig of the clematis, with its long slender leaves and fragrant starry flowers, and gave it to me.

"Tenez, mon ami, if ever you see me again, show me that faded flower, and I shall remember this evening at Vicq d'Azyr. Nay, do not flatter yourself-do not thrust it in your breast; it is no gage d'amour! it is only a reward for loyal service, and a souvenir to refresh my own memory, which is treacherous sometimes, though not in gratitude to those who serve me. Adieu, mon Bayard-et bonsoir!"

But I retained the hand that had given me my clematis-spray.

"Meet you again! But will not that be to-morrow? If I am not to see you, as your words threaten, till the clematis be faded and myself forgotten, let me at least, I beseech you, know where, who, by what name--"

She drew her hand away with something of a proud, surprised gesture; then she laughed again that sweet, ringing, mocking laugh:

"No, no, Bayard, it is too much to ask! Leave the future to hazard; it is always the best philosophy. Au revoir! Adieu-perhaps for a day, perhaps for a century!"

And the bewitching mystery floated away from me and through the open window of her room. You will imagine that my "intuition" did not lead me to the conclusion to which Lady Maréchale's led her, or assuredly should I have followed the donor of the clematis, despite her prohibition. Even with my "intuition" pointing where it did, I am not sure what I might have done if, in her salon, I had not caught sight of a valet and a lady's maid in waiting with her coffee, and they are not such spectators as one generally selects.

The servants closed her windows and drew down their Venetian blinds, and I returned to my coffee. Whether the two ladies within had overheard her conversation as she had heard theirs, I cannot say, but they looked trebly refrigerated, had congealed themselves into the chilliest human ice that is imaginable, and comported themselves towards me fully as distantly as though I had brought a dozen ballet-girls in to dinner with them, or introduced them to my choicest acquaintance from the Chateau des Fleurs.

"A man's taste is so pitiably low!" remarked Lady Maréchale, in her favorite stage aside to Mrs. Protocol; to which that other lady responded, "Disgracefully so!"

Who was my lovely unknown with the bright falcon eyes and the charming laugh, with her strange freedom that yet was not, somehow, free, and her strange fascination? I bade my man ask Chanderlos her name-couriers know everything generally-but neither Mills nor Chanderlos gave me any information. The people of the house did not know, or said they did not; they only knew she had servants in attendance who came with her, who revealed nothing, and paid any price for the best of everything. Are impertinent questions ever asked where money is plentiful?

I was dressing the next morning something later than usual, when I heard the roll of a carriage in the courtyard below. I looked through the half-open persiennes with a semi-presentiment that it was my sweet foreigner who was leaving ere I could presume on my clematis or improve our acquaintance. True enough, she it was, leaving Vicq d'Azyr in a travelling-carriage, with handsome roans and servants in imperial-blue liveries. Who the deuce could she be?

"Well, Constance," said I, as I bade Lady Maréchale good morning, "your bête noire won't 'press herself into your acquaintance,' as you were dreading last night, and won't excite Maréchale and me to any more high treason. Won't you chant a Te Deum? She left this morning."

"So I perceived," answered Lady Maréchale, frigidly; by which I suppose she had not been above the weakness of looking through her persiennes.

"What a pity you and Agneta agitated yourselves with such unnecessary alarm! It must have cost you a great deal of eau-de-Cologne and sal-volatile, I am afraid, last night. Do you think she contaminated the air of the salle-à-manger, because I will order Mills to throw some disinfectant about before you go down?"

"I have no inclination to jest upon a person of that stamp," rejoined Lady Maréchale, with immense dignity, settling her turquoise wristband-studs.

"'That stamp of persons!' What! Do you think she is an adventuress, an intrigante, 'or worse' still, then? I hoped her dashing equipage might have done something towards cleansing her character. Wealth is a universal purifier generally."

"Flippant impertinence!" murmured Lady Maréchale, disgustedly, to Mrs. Protocol, as she swept onwards down the staircase, not deigning me a glance, much less a response, stiffening herself with a little extra starch of Lucretian virtue and British-matronly dignity, which did not grow limp again throughout breakfast, while she found fault with the chocolate, considered the petits pains execrable, condemned the sardines as uneatable, petted Spes, kept Maréchale and me at Coventry, and sighed over their enforced incarceration, by Dr. Berkeley's orders, in Vicq d'Azyr, that kept them in this stupid place away from Lemongenseidlitz.

Their anticipations from Lemongenseidlitz were charmingly golden and rose-tinted. They looked forward to consolidating their friendship with the dear Duchess in its balmy air, to improving a passing acquaintance into an intimate one with that charming person the Baroness Liebenfrauenmilch, Mistress of the Robes to Princess Hélène, and to being very intimate at the Court, while the Pullingers (their bosom-friends and very dear rivals) would be simply presented, and remain in chagrin, uninvited to the state balls and palace festivities. And what more delightful than that last clause? for what sauce invented, from Carême to Soyer, flavors our own plats so deliciously, I should like to know, as thinking that our beloved next-door neighbor is doomed to a very dry cutlet?

As Pérette, in a humbler fashion, built visions from the pot of milk, so mesdames mes s[oe]urs, from the glittering court and capital of Lemongenseidlitz, erected brilliant chateaux en Espagne of all their sayings and doings in that fashionable little city whither they were bound, and into which they had so many invaluable passports. They were impatient to be journeying from our humble, solitary valley, and after a month of Vicq d'Azyr, they departed for their golden land, and I went with them, as I had slain izzards almost ad nauseam, and Dunbar's expiration of leave had taken him back to Dublin.

It was five o'clock when we reached its Reidenscher Hof, nine when we had finished dinner. It was stupid work yawning over coffee and Galignani. What was to be done? Maréchale proposed the Opera, and for the first time in his life was unopposed by his wife. Constance was in a suave, benignant mood; she was thinking of her Graf von Rosenl?u, of the Pullingers, and of the sweet, adroit manner in which she would-when she had captivated him and could proffer such hints-awaken his Serene Highness to a sense of his moral guilt in not bringing to instant capital punishment every agent in those Satanus-farmed banks that throve throughout his duchy. Lady Maréchale and Mrs. Protocol assented, and to the little miniature gayly-decorated Opera House we drove. They were in the middle of the second act of "Ernani." "Ernani" was stale to us all, and we naturally lorgné'd the boxes in lieu of the stage. I had turned my glass on the left-hand stage-box, and was going steadily round, when a faint cry of dismay, alarm, amazement, horror, broke, muffled and low, from mesdames mes s[oe]urs. Their lorgnons were riveted on one spot; their cheeks were blanched; their hands were tremulous; if they had beheld a spiritual visitant, no consternation more profound, more intense, could have seized both with its iron hand. My sisters too! the chilliest, the calmest, the most impenetrable, the most unassailable of mortals!

"And we called her, in her hearing, not a proper person?" gasped Lady Maréchale.

"We thought her a lorette! an intrigante! a dame d'industrie!" echoed Mrs. Protocol.

"Who wore paste jewels!"

"Who came from the Rue Bréda!"

"Who wanted to know us!"

"Whom we wouldn't know!"

I turned my Voightlander where their Voightlanders turned; there, in the royal box, leaning back in the fauteuil that marked her rank, there, with her lovely hazel eyes, her witching smile, her radiant beauty, matchless as the pearls gleaming above her brow, there sat the "adventuress-or worse!" of Vicq d'Azyr; the "evidently a not proper person" of my discerning sisters-H.S.H. Princess Hélène, Grand-Duchess of Lemongenseidlitz-Phizzstrelitz! Great Heavens! how had we never guessed her before? How had we never divined her identity? How had we never remembered all we had heard of her love of laisser-aller, her taste for adventure, her delight in travelling, when she could, unattended and incognita? How had we never put this and that together, and penetrated the metamorphosis?

"And I called her not a proper person!" gasped Lady Maréchale, again shrinking back behind the azure curtains; the projectiles she had shot with such vindictive severity, such delighted acrimony, from the murderous mortar of malice, recoiling back upon her head for once, and crushing her to powder. What reception would they have now at the Court? Von Rosenl?u would be powerless; the Pullingers themselves would be better off! Pérette's pot of milk was smashed and spilt! "Adieu, veau, vache, cochon, couvée!"

* * *

When the pitcher lies shivered into fragments, and the milk is spilt, you know, poor Pérette's dreams are shivered and spilt with them. "I have not seen you at the palace yet?" asked her Grace of Frangipane. "We do not see you at the Court, mesdames?" asked M. de la Croix-et-Cordons. "How did it happen you were not at the Duchess's ball last night?" asked "those odious Pullingers." And what had my sister to say in reply? My clematis secured me a charming reception-how charming I don't feel called upon to reveal-but Princess Hélène, with that calm dignity which easily replaced, when she chose, her witching abandon, turned the tables upon her detractors, and taught them how dangerous it may be to speak ill-of the wrong people.

* * *

A STUDY à LA LOUIS QUATORZE:

PENDANT TO A PORTRAIT BY MIGNARD.

She was surpassingly fair, Madame la Marquise. Mignard's portraits of her may fully rival his far-famed Portrait aux Amours. One of them has her painted as Venus Victrix, in the fashion of the day; one of them, as herself, as Léontine Opportune de Vivonne de Rennecourt, Marquise de la Rivière, with her crève-c[oe]urs, and her diamonds, and her gay smile, showing her teeth, white and gleaming as the pearls mingled with her curls à la mode Montespan. Not Louise de la Beaume-le-Blanc, when the elm-boughs of St. Germain first flung their shadow on her golden head, before it bent for the Carmelite veil before the altar in the Rue St. Jacques; not Henriette d'Angleterre, when she listened to the trouvères' romances sung under her balcony at St. Cloud, before her young life was quenched by the hand of Morel and the order of Monsieur; not Athéna?s de Mortemart, when the liveries of lapis lazuli blue dashed through the streets of Paris, and the outriders cleared her path with their whips, before the game was lost, and the iron spikes were fastened inside the Montespan bracelets;-none of them, her contemporaries and acquaintances, eclipsed in loveliness Madame la Marquise. Had she but been fair instead of dark, the brown Bourbon eyes would have fallen on her of a surety; she would have outshone the lapis lazuli liveries with a royal guard of scarlet and gold, and her friend Athéna?s would have hated her as that fair lady hated "la sotte Fontanges" and "Saint Maintenon;" for their sex, in all ages, have remembered the sage's precept, "Love as though you will one day hate," and invariably carry about with them, ready for need, a little essence of the acid of Malice, to sour in an instant the sugared cream of their loves and their friendships if occasion rise up and the storm-cloud of rivalry loom in the horizon.

She was a beauty, Madame la Marquise, and she knew it, as she leaned out over the balcony of her chateau of Petite Forêt, that lay close to Clagny, under the shadow of the wood of Ville d'Avrée, outside the gates of Versailles, looking down on her bosquets, gardens, and terraces designed by Le N?tre; for though she was alone, and there was nothing but her little dog Osmin to admire her white skin, and her dark eyes, and her beautiful hands and arms, and her diamond pendants that glittered in the moonlight, she smiled, her flashing triumphant smile, as she whispered to herself, "He is mine-mine! Bah! how can he help himself?" and pressed the ruby agraffe on her bosom with the look of a woman who knew no resistance, and brooked no reluctance to worship at her shrine.

Nothing ever opposed Madame la Marquise, and life went smoothly on with her. If Bossuet ever reproved her, it was in those anathèmes cachés sous des fleurs d'oranger in which that politic priest knew how to deal when expedient, however haughty and relentless to the world in general. M. le Marquis was not a savage eccentricity like M. de Pardaillon de Gondran, would never have dreamt of imitating the eccentricity of going into mourning, but if the Bourbon eye had fallen on his wife, would have said, like a loyal peer of France, that all his household treasures were the King's. Disagreeables fled before the scintillations of her smiles, as the crowd fled before her gilded carriage and her Flanders horses; and if ever a little fit of piety once in a while came over her, and Conscience whispered a mal à propos word in her delicate ear, she would give an enamelled lamp to Sainte Marie Réparatrice, by the advice of the Comtesse de Soubise and the Princesse de Monaco (who did such expiatory things themselves, and knew the comfort they afforded), and emerge from her repentance one of the most radiant of all the brilliant butterflies that fluttered their gorgeous wings in the Jardin de Flore under the sunny skies of Versailles.

The moonlight glittered on the fountains, falling with measured splash into their marble basins; the lime-leaves, faintly stirred by the sultry breezes, perfumed the night with their voluptuous fragrance, and the roses, twining round the carved and gilded balustrade, shook off their bowed head drops of dew, that gleamed brightly as the diamonds among the curls of the woman who leaned above, resting her delicate rouged cheek on her jewelled hand, alone-a very rare circumstance with the Marquise de la Rivière. Osmin did not admire the rare solitude, for he rattled his silver bells and barked-an Italian greyhound's shrill, fretful bark-as his quick ears caught the distant sound of steps coming swiftly over the turf below, and his mistress smiled as she patted his head:

"Ah, Osmin!-here he is?"

A man came out from under the heavy shadow of lime sand chestnuts, whose darkness the moon's rays had no power to pierce, crossed the lawn just under the balcony, and, coming up the terrace-steps, stood near her-a man, young, fair, handsome, whose age and form the uniform of a Captain of the Guards would have suited far better than the dark robes of a priest, which he wore; his lips were pressed closely together, and his face was pale with a pallor that consorted painfully with the warm passionate gleam of his eyes.

"So! You are late in obeying my commands, monsieur!"

Surely no other man in France would have stood silent beside her, under the spell of her dazzling glances, with such a picture before him as Madame la Marquise, in her azure silk and her point d'Angleterre, with her diamond pendants shaking among her hair, and her arched eyebrows lifted imperiously! But he did; his lips pressed closer, his eyes gleaming brighter. She changed her tone; it was soft, seductive, reproachful, and the smile on her lips was tender-as tender as it ever could be with the mockery that always lay under it; and it broke at last the spell that bound him, as she whispered, "Ah! Gaston, you love me no longer!"

"Not love you? O God!"

They were but five words, but they told Madame la Marquise of a passion such as she had never roused, despite all her fascinations and intrigues, in the lovers that crowded round her in the salons within, or at Versailles, over the trees yonder, where love was gallantry, and all was light comedy, with nothing so foolish as tragedy known.

He clasped her hands so closely that the sharp points of the diamond rings cut his own, though he felt them not.

"Not love you? Great Heaven! Not love you? Near you, I forget my oath, my vows, my God!-I forget all, save you, whom I adore, as, till I met you, I adored my Church. Torture endured with you were dearer than Paradise won alone! Once with you, I have no strength, you bow me to your will as the wind bows the lime-leaf. Oh! woman, woman! could you have no mercy, that with crowds round you daily worshipping your slightest smile, you must needs bow me down before your glance, as you bow those who have no oaths to bind them, no need to scourge themselves in midnight solitude for the mere crime of Thought? Had you no mercy, that with all hearts yours, you must have mine to sear it and destroy it? Have you not lives enough vowed to you, that you seek to blast mine for ever? I was content, untroubled, till I met you; no woman's glance stirred my heart, no woman's eyes haunted my vigils, no woman's voice came in memory between my soul and prayer! What devil tempted you to throw your spells over me-could you not leave one man in peace?"

"Ah bah! the tempted love the game of temptation generally full as well as the tempters!" thought Madame la Marquise, with an inward laugh.

Why did she allow such language to go unrebuked? Why did she, to whom none dared to breathe any but words the most polished, and love vows the most honeyed, permit herself to be addressed in such a strain? Possibly it was very new to her, such energy as this, and such an outbreak of passion amused her. At any rate she only drew her hands away, and her brilliant brown eyes filled with tears;-tears were to be had at Versailles when needed, even her friend Montespan knew how to use them as the worst weapons against the artillery of the Evêque de Comdom-and her heart heaved under the filmy lace.

"Ah, Gaston! what words! 'What devil tempted me?' I know scarcely whether love be angel or devil; he seems either or both! But you love me little, unless in that name you recognize a plea for every madness and every thought!"

The scarlet blood flushed over his face, and his eyes shone and gleamed like fire, while he clenched his hands in a mortal anguish.

"Angel or devil? Ay! which, indeed! The one when it comes to us, the other when it leaves us! You have roused love in me I shall bear to my grave; but what gage have I that you give it me back? How do I know but that even now you are trifling with me, mocking at me, smiling at the beardless priest who is unlearned in all the gay gallantries of libertine churchmen and soldierly courtiers? My Heaven! how know, as I stand beside you, whether you pity or disdain me, love or scorn me?"

The passionate words broke in a torrent from his lips, stirred the stillness of the summer eve with a fiery anguish little akin to it.

"Do I not love you?"

Her answer was simple; but as Léontine de Rennecourt spoke it, leaning her cheek against his breast, with her eyes dazzling as the diamonds in her hair, looking up into his by the light of the stars, they had an eloquence far more dangerous than speech, and delirious to the senses as magician's perfumes. His lips lingered on hers, and felt the loud fast throbs of the heart she had won as he bent over her, pressing her closer and closer to him-vanquished and conquered, as men in all ages and of all creeds have been vanquished and conquered by women, all other thoughts fleeing away into oblivion, all fears dying out, all vows forgotten in the warm, living life of passion and of joy, that, for the first time in a brief life, flooded his heart with its golden voluptuous light.

"You love me? So be it," he murmured; "but beware what you do, my life lies in your hands, and you must be mine till death part us!"

"Till my fancy change rather!" thought Madame la Marquise, as she put her jewelled hand on his lips, her hair softly brushing his cheek, with a touch as soft, and an odor as sweet, as the leaves of one of the roses twining below.

Two men strolling below under the limes of Petite Forêt-discussing the last scandals of Versailles, talking of the ascendency of La Fontanges, of the Spanish dress his Majesty had reassumed to please her, of the Brinvilliers' Poudre de Succession, of the new chateau given to Père de la Chaise, of D'Aubigny's last extravagance and Lauzun's last mot, and the last gossip about Bossuet and Mademoiselle de Mauléon, and all the chit-chat of that varied day, glittering with wit and prolific of poison-glanced up to the balcony by the light of the stars.

"That cursed priest!" muttered the younger, le Vicomte de Saint-Elix, as he struck the head off a lily with his delicate cane.

"In a fool's paradise! Ah-ha! Madame la Marquise!" laughed the other-the old Duc de Clos-Vougeot-taking a chocolate sweetmeat out of his emerald-studded bonbonnière as they walked on, while the lime-blossoms shook off in the summer night wind and dropped dead on the grass beneath, laughing at the story of the box D'Artagnan had found in Lauzun's rooms when he seized his papers, containing the portraits of sixty women of high degree who had worshipped the resistless Captain of the Guard, with critical and historical notices penned under each; notices D'Artagnan and his aide could not help indiscreetly retailing, in despite of the Bourbon command of secrecy-secrecy so necessary where sixty beauties and saints were involved!

"A fool's paradise!" said the Duc de Clos-Vougeot, tapping his bonbonnière, enamelled by Petitot: the Duc was old, and knew women well, and knew the value and length of a paradise dependent on that most fickle of butterflies-female fidelity; he had heard Ninon de Lenclos try to persuade Scarron's wife to become a coquette, and Scarron's wife in turn beseech Ninon to discontinue her coquetteries; had seen that, however different their theories and practice, the result was the same; and already guessed right, that if Paris had been universally won by the one, its monarch would eventually be won by the other.

"A fool's paradise!"

The courtier was right, but the priest, had he heard him, would never have believed; his heaven shone in those dazzling eyes: till the eyes closed in death, his heaven was safe! He had never loved, he had seen nothing of women; he had come straight from the monastic gloom of a Dominican abbey, in the very heart of the South, down in Languedoc, where costly missals were his only idol, and rigid pietists, profoundly ignorant of the ways and thoughts of their brethren of Paris, had reared him up in anchorite rigidity, and scourged his mind with iron philosophies and stoic-like doctrines of self-mortification that would have repudiated the sophistries and ingenuities of Sanchez, Escobar, and Mascarenhas, as suggestions of the very Master of Evil himself. From the ascetic gloom of that Languedoc convent he had been brought straight, by superior will, into the glare of the life at Versailles, that brilliant, gorgeous, sparkling, bizarre life, scintillating with wit, brimful of intrigue, crowded with the men and women who formed the Court of that age and the History of the next; where he found every churchman an abbé galant, and heard those who performed the mass jest at it with those who attended it; where he found no lines marked of right and wrong, but saw them all fused in a gay, tangled web of two court colors-Expediency and Pleasure. A life that dazzled and tired his eyes, as the glitter of lights in a room dazzles and tires the eyes of a man who comes suddenly in from the dark night air, till he grew giddy and sick, and in the midst of the gilded salons, or soft confessions of titled sinners, would ask himself if indeed he could be the same man who had sat calm and grave with the mellow sun streaming in on his missal-page in the monastic gloom of the Languedoc abbey but so few brief months before, when all this world of Versailles was unknown? The same man? Truly not-never again the same, since Madame la Marquise had bent her brown eyes upon him, been amused with his singular difference from all those around her, had loved him as women loved at Versailles, and bowed him down to her feet, before he guessed the name of the forbidden language that stirred in his heart and rushed to his lips, untaught and unbidden.

"A fool's paradise!" said the Duc, sagaciously tapping his gold bonbonnière. But many a paradise like it has dawned and faded, before and since the Versailles of Louis Quatorze.

He loved, and Madame la Marquise loved him. Through one brief tumult of struggle he passed: struggle between the creed of the Dominican abbey, where no sin would have been held so thrice accursed, so unpardonable, so deserving of the scourge and the stake as this-and the creed of the Bourbon Court, where churchmen's gallantries were every-day gossip; where the Abbé de Rancé, ere he founded the saintly gloom of La Trappe, scandalized town and court as much as Lauzun; where the Père de la Chaise smiled complacently on La Fontanges' ascendancy; where three nobles rushed to pick up the handkerchief of that royal confessor, who washed out with holy water the royal indiscretions, as you wash off grains of dust with perfumed water; where the great and saintly Bishop of Condom could be checked in a rebuking harangue, and have the tables turned on him by a mischievous reference to Mademoiselle de Mauléon; where life was intrigue for churchmen and laymen alike, and where the abbé's rochet and the cardinal's scarlet covered the same vices as were openly blazoned on the gold aiglettes of the Garde du Corps and the costly lace of the Chambellan du Roi. A storm, brief and violent as the summer storms that raged over Versailles, was roused between the conflicting thoughts at war within him, between the principles deeply rooted from long habit and stern belief, and the passions sprung up unbidden with the sudden growth and gorgeous glow of a tropical flower-a storm, brief and violent, a struggle, ended that night, when he stood on the balcony with the woman he loved, felt her lips upon his, and bowed down to her feet delirious and strengthless.

"I have won my wager with Adeline; I have vanquished mon beau De Launay," thought Madame la Marquise, smiling, two days after, as she sat, en negligé, in her broidered chair, pulling Osmin's ears, and stirring the frothy chocolate handed to her by her negro, Azor, brought over in the suite of the African embassy from Ardra, full of monkeyish espièglerie, and covered with gems-a priceless dwarf, black as ink, and but two feet high, who could match any day with the Queen's little Moor. "He amuses me with his vows of eternal love. Eternal love?-how de trop we should find it, here in Versailles! But it is amusing enough to play at for a season. No, that is not half enough-he adores! This poor Gaston!"

So in the salons of Versailles, and in the world, where Ninon reigned, by the Court ladies, while they loitered in the new-made gardens of Marly, among other similar things jested of was this new amour of Madame de la Rivière for the young Père de Launay. "She was always eccentric, and he was very handsome, and would have charming manners if he were not so grave and so silent," the women averred; while the young nobles swore that these meddling churchmen had always the best luck, whether in amatory conquest, or on fat lands and rich revenues. What the Priest of Languedoc thought a love that would outlast life, and repay him for peace of conscience and heaven both lost, was only one of the passing bubbles of gossip and scandal floating for an hour, amidst myriads like it, on the glittering, fast-rushing, diamond-bright waters of life at Versailles!

A new existence had dawned for him; far away in the dim dusky vista of forgotten things, though in reality barely distant a few short months, lay the old life in Languedoc, vague and unremembered as a passed dream; with its calm routine, its monastic silence, its unvarying alternations of study and prayer, its iron-bound thoughts, its rigid creed. It had sunk away as the peaceful gray twilight of a summer's night sinks away before the fiery burst of an artificial illumination, and a new life had dawned for him, radiant, tumultuous, conflicting, delicious-that dazzled his eyes with the magnificence of boundless riches and unrestricted extravagance; that charmed his intellect with the witty coruscations, the polished esprit, of an age unsurpassed for genius, grace, and wit; and that swayed alike his heart, his imagination, and his passions with the subtle intoxication of this syren of Love, whose forbidden song had never before, in faintest echo, fallen on his ear.

Far away in the dim, lifeless, pulseless past, sank the memory of the old Dominican abbey, of all it had taught him, of all it had exacted, in its iron, stoical, merciless creed. A new life had arisen for him, and Gaston de Launay, waking from the semi-slumber of the living death he had endured in Languedoc, and liked because he knew no other, was happy-happy as a prisoner is in the wild delight with which he welcomes the sunlight after lengthened imprisonment, happy as an opium-eater is in the delicious delirium that succeeds the lulling softness of the opiate.

"He loves me, poor Gaston! Bah! But how strangely he talks! If love were this fiery, changeless, earnest thing with us that it is with him, what in the world should we do with it? We should have to get a lettre de cachet for it, and forbid it the Court; send it in exile to Pignerol, as they have just done Lauzun. Love in earnest? We should lose the best spice for our wine, the best toy for our games, and, mon Dieu! what embroilments there would be! Love in earnest? Bagatell! Louise de la Vallière shows us the folly of that; but for its Quixotisms she would now be at Vaujours, instead of buried alive in that Rue St. Jacques, with nothing to do but to weep for 'Louison,' count her beads, and listen to M. de Condom's merciless eloquence! Like the king,

J'aime qu'on m'aime, mais avec de l'esprit.

People have no right to reproach each other with inconstancy; one's caprices are not in one's own keeping; and one can no more help where one's fancy blows, than that lime-leaf can help where the breeze chooses to waft it. But poor Gaston! how make him comprehend that?" thought Madame la Marquise, as she turned, and smiled, and held out her warm, jewelled hands, and listened once again to the words of the man who was in her power as utterly as the bird in the power of the snake when it has once looked up into the fatal eyes that lure it on to its doom.

"You will love me ever?" he would ask, resting his lips on her white low brow.

"Ever!" would softly answer Madame la Marquise.

And her lover believed her: should his deity lie? He believed her! What did he, fresh from the solitude of his monastery, gloomy and severe as that of the Trappist abbey, with its perpetual silence, its lowered glances, its shrouded faces, its ever-present "memento mori," know of women's faith, of women's love, of the sense in which they meant that vow "for ever"? He believed her, and never asked what would be at the end of a path strewn with such odorous flowers. Alone, it is true, in moments when he paused to think, he stood aghast at the abyss into which he had fallen, at the sin into which, a few months before, haughty and stern in virtue against the temptation that had never entered his path, he would have defied devils in legion to have lured him, yet into which he had now plunged at the mere smile of a woman! Out of her presence, out of her spells, standing by himself under the same skies that had blooded over his days of peace in Languedoc, back on his heart, with a sickening anguish, would come the weight of his sin; the burden of his broken oaths, the scorch of that curse eternal which, by his creed, he held drawn down on him here and hereafter; and Gaston de Launay would struggle again against this idolatrous passion, which had come with its fell delusion betwixt him and his God; struggle-vainly, idly-struggle, only to hug closer the sin he loved while he loathed; only to drink deeper of the draught whose voluptuous perfume was poison; only to forget all, forsake all, dare all, at one whisper of her voice, one glance of her eyes, one touch of the lips whose caress he held would be bought by a curse through eternity.

Few women love aught "for ever," save, perchance, diamonds, lace, and their own beauty, and Madame la Marquise was not one of those few; certainly not-she had no desire to make herself singular in her generation, and could set fashions much more likely to find disciples, without reverting to anything so eccentric, plebeian, and out of date. Love one for ever! She would have thought it as terrible waste of her fascinations, as for a jewel to shine in the solitude of its case, looked on by only one pair of eyes, or for a priceless enamel, by Petitot, to be only worn next the heart, shrouded away from the light of day, hidden under the folds of linen and lace.

"Love one for ever?"-Madame la Marquise laughed at the thought, as she stood dressed for a ball, after assisting at the representation of a certain tragedy, called "Bérénice" (in which Mesdames Deshoulières and De Sévigné, despite their esprit, alone of all Paris and the Court could see no beauty), and glanced in the mirror at her radiant face, her delicate skin, her raven curls, with their pendants shaking, her snow-white arms, and her costly dress of the newest mode, its stomacher gleaming one mass of gems. "Love one for ever? The droll idea! Is it not enough that I have loved him once?"

It was more than enough for his rivals, who bitterly envied him; courtly abbés, with polished smiles, and young chanoines, with scented curls and velvet toques, courtiers, who piqued themselves on reputations only second to Lauzun's, and men of the world, who laughed at this new caprice of Madame la Marquise, alike bore no good will to this Languedoc priest, and gave him a significant sneer, or a compliment that roused his blood to fire, and stung him far worse than more open insult, when they met in the salons, or crossed in the corridors, at Versailles or Petite Forêt.

"Those men! those men! Should he ever lose her to any one of them?" he would think over and over again, clenching his hand, in impotent agony of passion that he had not the sword and the license of a soldier to strike them on the lips with his glove for the smile with which they dared to speak her name; to make them wash out in blood under the trees, before the sun was up, the laugh, the mot, the delicate satire, which were worse to bear than a blow to the man who could not avenge them.

"Pardieu! Madame must be very unusually faithful to her handsome Priest; she has smiled on no other for two months! What unparalleled fidelity!" said the Vicomte de Saint-Elix, with petulant irritation.

"Jealous, Léonce?" laughed the old Duc, whom he spoke to, tapping the medallion portrait on his bonbonnière. "Take comfort: when the weather has been so long fixed, it is always near a change. Ah! M. de Launay overhears! He looks as if he would slay us. Very unchristian in a priest!"

Gaston de Launay overheard, as he stood by a croisée at Petite Forêt, playing with Osmin-he liked even the dog, since the hand he loved so often lay on its slender neck, and toyed with its silver chain. And, sworn as he was to the service of his Church, sole mistress as his Church had been, till Léontine de Rennecourt's eyes had lured him to his desertion of her, apostate in his own eyes as such a thought confessed him to have grown, he now loathed the garb of a priest, that bound his hands from vengeance, and made him powerless before insult as a woman. Fierce, ruthless longing for revenge upon these men seized on him; devilish desires, the germ of which till that hour he never dreamt slumbered within him, woke up into dangerous, vigorous life. Had he lived in the world, its politic reserve, its courtly sneer, its light gallantries, that passed the time and flattered amour-propre, its dissimulated hate that smiled while plotting, and killed with poisoned bonbons, would never have been learnt by him; and having long lived out of it, having been suddenly plunged into its whirl, not guessing its springs, ignorant of its diplomacies, its suave lies, termed good breeding, its légères philosophies, he knew nothing of the wisdom with which its wise men forsook their loves and concealed their hatreds. Both passions now sprung up in him at one birth, both the stronger for the long years in which a chill, artificial, but unbroken calm, had chained his very nature down, and fettered into an iron monotony, an unnatural and colorless tranquillity, a character originally impetuous and vivid, as the frosts of a winter chill into one cold, even, glassy surface, the rapids of a tumultuous river. With the same force and strength with which, in the old days in Languedoc, he had idolized and served his Church, sparing himself no mortification, believing every iota of her creed, carrying out her slightest rule with merciless self-examination, so-the tide once turned the other way-so the priest now loved, so he now hated.

"He is growing exigeant, jealous, presuming; he amuses me no longer-he wearies. I must give him his congé," thought Madame la Marquise. "This play at eternal passion is very amusing for a while, but, like all things, gets tiresome when it has lasted some time. What does not? Poor Gaston, it is his provincial ideas, but he will soon rub such off, and find, like us all, that sincerity is troublesome, ever de trop, and never profitable. He loves me-but bah! so does Saint-Elix, so do they all, and a jealous husband like M. de Nesmond, le dr?le! could scarcely be worse than my young De Launay is growing!"

And Madame la Marquise glanced at her face in the mirror, and wished she knew Madame de Maintenon's secret for the Breuvage Indien; wished she had one of the clefs de faveur to admit her to the Grande Salle du Parlement; wished she had the couronne d'Agrippine her friend Athéna?s had just shown her; wished Le Brun were not now occupied on the ceiling of the King's Grande Galerie, and were free to paint the frescoes of her own new-built chapel; wished a thousand unattainable things, as spoilt children of fortune will do, and swept down her chateau staircase a little out of temper-she could not have told why-to receive her guests at a fête given in honor of the marriage of Mademoiselle de Blois and the Prince de Conti.

There was the young Comte de Vermandois, who would recognize in the Dauphin no superiority save that of his "frère aine;" there was "le petit bossu," Prince Eugene, then soliciting the rochet of a Bishop, and equally ridiculed when he sought a post in the army; there was M. de Louvois, who had just signed the order for the Dragonades; there was the Palatine de Bavière, with her German brusquerie, who had just clumsily tried to insult Madame de Montespan by coming into the salon with a great turnspit, led by a similar ribbon and called by the same name, in ridicule of the pet Montespan poodle; there was La Montespan herself, with her lovely gold hair, her dove's eyes, and her serpent's tongue; there was Madame de Sévigné and Madame de Grignan the Duchesse de Richelieu and the Duchesse de Lesdiguières; there was Bussy Rabutin and Hamilton. Who was there not that was brilliant, that was distinguished, that was high in rank and famed in wit at the fête of Madame la Marquise?-Madame la Marquise, who floated through the crowd that glittered in her salon and gardens, who laughed and smiled, showing her dazzling white teeth, who had a little Cupid gleaming with jewels (emblematic enough of Cupid as he was known at Versailles) to present the Princesse de Conti with a bridal bouquet whose flowers were of pearls and whose leaves were of emeralds; who piqued herself that the magnificence of her fête was scarcely eclipsed by His Majesty himself; who yielded the palm neither to La Vallière's lovely daughter, nor to her friend Athéna?s, nor to any one of the beauties who shone with them, and whose likeness by Mignard laughed down from the wall where it hung, matchless double of her own matchless self.

The Priest of Languedoc watched her, the relentless fangs of passion gnawing his heart, as the wolf the Spartan. For the first time he was forgotten! His idol passed him carelessly, gave him no glance, no smile, but lavished a thousand coquetries on Saint-Elix, on De Rohan-Soubise, on the boy Vermandois,-on any who sought them. Once he addressed her. Madame la Marquise shrugged her snow-white shoulders, and arched her eyebrows with petulant irritation, and turned to laugh gayly at Saint-Elix, who was amusing her, and La Montespan, and Madame de Thianges, with some gay mischievous scandal concerning Madame de Lesdiguières and the Archbishop of Paris; for scandals, if not wholly new are ever diverting when concerning an enemy, especially when dressed and served up with the piquant sauce of wit.

"I no longer then, madame, lead a dog's life in jealousy of this priest?" whispered Saint-Elix, after other whispers, in the ear of Madame la Marquise. The Vicomte adored her, not truly in Languedoc fashion, but very warmly-à la mode de Versailles.

The Marquise laughed.

"Perhaps not! You know I bet Mme. de Montevreau that I would conquer him. I have won now. Hush! He is close. There will be a tragedy, mon ami!"

"M. le Vicomte, if you have the honor of a noble, the heart of a man, you fight me to-night. I seek no shelter under my cloth!"

Saint-Elix turned as he heard the words, laughed scornfully, and signed the speaker away with an insolent sneer:

"Bah! Révérend Père! we do not fight with women and churchmen!"

The fête was ended at last, the lights that had gleamed among the limes and chestnuts had died out, the gardens and salons were emptied and silent, the little Cupid had laid aside his weighty jewelled wings, the carriages with their gorgeous liveries, their outriders, and their guards of honor, had rolled from the gates of Petite Forêt to the Palace of Versailles. Madame la Marquise stood alone once more in the balcony of her salons, leaning her white arms on its gilded balustrade, looking down on to the gardens beneath, silvered with the breaking light of the dawn, smiling, her white teeth gleaming between her parted rose-hued lips, and thinking-of what? Who shall say?

Still, still as death lay the gardens below, that an hour ago had been peopled with a glittering crowd, re-echoing with music, laughter, witty response, words of intrigue. Where the lights had shone on diamonds and pearl-broidered trains, on softly rouged cheeks, and gold-laced coats, on jewelled swords and broideries of gold, the gray hue of the breaking day now only fell on the silvered leaves of the limes, the turf wet with dew, he drooped heads of the Provence roses; and Madame la Marquise, standing alone, started as a step through the salon within broke the silence.

"Madame, will you permit me a word now?"

Gaston de Launay took her hands off the balustrade, and held them tight in his, while his voice sounded, even in his own ears, strangely calm, yet strangely harsh:

"Madame, you love me no longer?"

"Monsieur, I do not answer questions put to me in such a manner."

She would have drawn her hands away, but he held them in a fierce grasp till her rings cut his skin, as they had done once before.

"No trifling! Answer-yes or no!"

"Well! 'no,' then, monsieur. Since you will have the truth, do not blame me if you find it uncomplimentary and unacceptable."

He let go her hands and reeled back, staggered, as if struck by a shot.

"Mon Dieu! it is true-you love me no longer! And you tell it me thus!"

Madame la Marquise, for an instant, was silenced and touched; for the words were uttered with the faint cry of a man in agony, and she saw, even by the dim twilight of dawn, how livid his lips turned, how ashy gray grew the hue of his face. But she smiled, playing with Osmin's new collar of pearls and coral.

"Tell it you 'thus'? I would not have told it you 'thus,' monsieur, if you had been content with a hint, and had not evinced so strong a desire for candor undisguised; but if people will not comprehend a delicate suggestion, they must be wounded by plainer truths-it is their own fault. Did you think I was like a little shepherdess in a pastoral, to play the childish game of constancy without variations? Had you presumption enough to fancy you could amuse me for ever--"

He stopped her, his voice broken and hoarse, as he gasped for breath.

"Silence! Woman, have you no mercy? For you-for such as you-I have flung away heaven, steeped myself in sin, lost my church, my peace, my all-forfeited all right to the reverence of my fellows, all hope for the smile of my God! For you-for such as you-I have become a traitor, a hypocrite, an apostate, whose prayers are insults, whose professions are lies, whose oaths are perjury! At your smile, I have flung away eternity; for your kiss, I have risked my life here, my life hereafter; for your love, I held no price too vast to pay; weighed with it, honor, faith, heaven, all seemed valueless-all were forgotten! You lured me from tranquil calm, you broke in on the days of peace which but for you were unbroken still, you haunted my prayers, you placed yourself between Heaven and me, you planned to conquer my anchorite's pride, you wagered you would lure me from my priestly vows, and yet you have so little mercy, that when your bet is won, when your amusement grows stale, when the victory grows valueless, you can turn on me with words like these without one self-reproach?"

"Ma foi, monsieur! it is you who may reproach yourself, not I," cried his hearer, insolently. "Are you so very provincial still, that you are ignorant that when a lover has ceased to please he has to blame his own lack of power to retain any love he may have won, and is far too well-bred to utter a complaint? Your language is very new to me. Most men, monsieur, would be grateful for my slightest preference; I permit none to rebuke me for either giving or withdrawing it."

The eyes of Madame la Marquise sparkled angrily, and the smile on her lips was a deadly one, full of irony, full of malice. As he beheld it, the scales fell at last from the eyes of Gaston de Launay, and he saw what this woman was whom he had worshipped with such mad, blind, idolatrous passion.

He bowed his head with a low, broken moan, as a man stunned by a mortal blow; while Madame la Marquise stood playing with the pearl-and-coral chain, and smiling the malicious and mischievous smile that showed her white teeth, as they are shown in the portrait by Mignard.

"Comme les hommes sont fous!" laughed Madame la Marquise.

He lifted his eyes, and looked at her as she stood in the faint light of the dawn, with her rich dress, her gleaming diamonds, her wicked smile, her matchless beauty; and the passion in him broke out in a bitter cry:

"God help me! My sin has brought home its curse!"

He bent over her, his burning lips scorching her own like fire, holding her in one last embrace, that clasped her in a vice of iron she had no power to break.

"Angel! devil! temptress! This for what I have deemed thee-that for what thou art!"

He flung her from him with unconscious violence, and left her-lying where she fell.

* * *

The gray silvery dawn rose, and broke into the warmth and sunlight of a summer day; the deer nestled in their couches under the chequered shadows of the woodlands round, and the morning chimes were rung in musical carillons from the campanile of the chateau; the Provence roses tossed their delicate heads, joyously shaking the dew off their scented petals; the blossoms of the limes fell in a fragrant shower on the turf below, and the boughs, swayed softly by the wind, brushed their leaves against the sparkling waters of the fountains; the woods and gardens of Petite Forêt lay, bright and laughing, in the mellow sunlight of the new day to which the world was waking. And with his face turned up to the sky, clasped in his hand a medallion enamel on which was painted the head of a woman, the grass and ferns where he had fallen stained crimson with his life-blood, lay a dead man, while in his bosom nestled a little dog, moaning piteous, plaintive cries, and vainly seeking its best to wake him to the day that for him would never dawn.

When her household, trembling, spread the news that the dead priest had been found lying under the limes, slain by his own hand, and it reached Madame la Marquise in her private chambers, she was startled, shocked, wept, hiding her radiant eyes in her broidered handkerchief, and called Azor, and bade him bring her her flask of scented waters, and bathed her eyes, and turned them dazzling bright on Saint-Elix, and stirred her chocolate and asked the news. "On peut être êmue aux larmes et aimer le chocolat," thought Madame la Marquise, with her friend Montespan;-while, without, under the waving shadow of the linden-boughs, with the sunlight streaming round him, the little dog nestling in his breast, refusing to be comforted, lay the man whom she had murdered.

The portrait of Mignard still hangs on the walls of the chateau, and in its radiant colors Madame la Marquise still lives, fair type of her age, smiling her victorious smile, with the diamonds shining among her hair, and her brilliant eyes flashing defiance, irony, and coquetry as of yore, when she reigned amidst the beauties of Versailles;-and in the gardens beyond in the summer nights, the lime-boughs softly shake their fragrant flowers on the turf, and the moonlight falls in hushed and mournful calm, streaming through the network of the boughs on to the tangled mass of violets and ferns that has grown up in rank luxuriance over the spot where Gaston de Launay died.

* * *

Transcriber's Notes:

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