TABLE of CONTENTS

BOOK I—NOBODY’S.

CHAPTER I—NOBODY’S.

CHAPTER II—HER FATHER AND MOTHER.

CHAPTER III—HOW “OLD GASPAR KEPT HIS PROMISE.

CHAPTER IV—MADAME DE LA CAPRÉDE’s LETTER.

CHAPTER V—LES CYPRiS.

CHAPTER VI—MARIS.

CHAPTER VII—MARIE’S STORY.

BOOK II—SOMEBODY’S.

CHAPTER I—QUI FRAPPE?

CHAPTER II—SŒUR ROSALIE.

CHAPTER III—INFLUENCES.

CHAPTER IV—FEVER-FANCIES.

CHAPTER V—ON THE WATCH.

CHAPTER VI—UNMASKED.

BOOK III—EARLY SPRING.

CHAPTER I—EARLY SPRING.. ‘

CHAPTER II—Â MOI.

CHAPTER III—A SHADOW.

BOOK I

NOBODY’S.

CHAPTER I

NOBODY’S.

Ildegonda Trevor, called always, ever since she could remember, Gonda, was sitting on the low wall that divides the neglected graveyard of Chantreuil from an orange-orchard, little less neglected, which clothes the sides of a steep slope: a slope so steep, that when the fully-ripe “golden apples,” which no hand gathers, fall from the loaded boughs, they but seldom lodge in the tufts of coarse grass growing beneath, but, instead, roll and bound, bound and roll, till they reach the barrier wall at the foot of the enclosure, there forming a golden drift, passing from ripeness to rottenness, and, after the winter rains, becoming a mass of festering decay.

Miss Trevor, having behind her the frightful little painted church, tawdry both within and without, and the wild, straggling village of Ghantreuil, looked over this neglected orchard and commanded a scene of wonderful luxuriance and beauty—looking over a land that is par excellence a land of corn, wine, and oil. She looked down gradual- slopes, grey or glowing, according to- whether they wore the hoary garb of the olive, which, seeming as if seen “through a haze of heat, throws a softening twilight veil over the scene, or were clothed with the glossy foliage of the orange, the emerald-green of the white stemmed pine, or the tender brilliance of lines of fresh-springing wheat growing between the vine-rows—gradual slopes which run down to a wide and fruitful plain, stretching away towards a gem-bright blue bay of the Mediterranean, a violet-toned horizon of melting sea and sky bounding all.

It was the close of the golden afternoon of a November day; the sky was stainlessly blue and bright, the air clear as crystal, free from any suspicion of fog or mist; the sunshine had a yellower heat and flash than during the summer. In the morning the wind had blown from the mountains with a searching keenness, somewhat too vigorous for those who could not meet it with vigour, but now, blowing from the sea and the setting sun, it was warm with a peculiarly exhilarating and vitalizing warmth, something as if it were breathed forth from the sun’s mouth and reached the earth without passing through a contaminated and obstructive atmosphere.

The sun had been high in the heavens when Miss Trevor had seated herself where she still sat when it touched the sea. All this time she had hardly stirred. Her hat lay beside her where she had put it then, her hands were folded in her lap as she had folded them then, her black dress fell round her in such lines as it had then taken. Neither, all this time, had her face known much change of expression; it had, indeed, remained curiously devoid of expression, speaking of neither hope nor fear, sorrow nor gladness. It could not look heavy; it was at once a powerful and a thoroughly womanly face, not one of those faces which, when undisturbed by any play of feeling, naturally settle into a sort of serious stolidity; but though it could not look, heavy, it looked blank. Bright masses of fair hair overshadowing a broad brow; a complexion that varied in tint, with almost startling rapidity, from creamy-white to carnation-red; eyes, deep and dewy, that, under dark lashes, held the evening colour of the sea, made Miss Trevor conspicuous in a land of swarthy, dark-browed, strong if not coarse featured women. She was beautiful; and yet any one seeking in feminine beauty more than can be given by form, however noble, and colour, however subtle, after looking at her now would probably turn away with a dissatisfied sense of unfulfilled promise, feeling that the face was more a beautiful mask than a “living soul-index that it had, perhaps, such beauty as that of Pygmalion’s statue before he had breathed into it the breath of life.

Miss Trevor was, for one so young, singularly alone in the world. To a cypress-sentinelled grave in that churchyard — a grave on which she had this afternoon laid a wreath of immortelles, purchased in the village as she came through it—had, not long since, been consigned the “earthly remains” of her last surviving relative, Madame de la Capéde, her mother’s aunt, a native of the south of France, and a woman who had richly possessed the vices considered to be most characteristic of the southern temperament, without the redeeming virtues. Indolent and fiercely passionate, coarse and sensual to brutality, it had been impossible that Miss Trevor should love or esteem her, and she made no pretence of regretting her loss. She had served her for five years, and now she was free and alone. She was three-and-twenty, and this was her birthday.

When, early in the afternoon, after having laid the immortelles on the grave, she had turned away from it and sat down upon that low wall, she had meant to think—to think seriously of the past. As to the future, she had not as yet regained sufficient elasticity and freedom of mind to care to look forward. She was released from hard bondage, she was free to feel the sunshine and breathe the pure air; her nights were peaceful and undisturbed; she could pass’ her quiet days, from morning to evening, as seemed good to her, untaunted and unquestioned. At present, this was enough to make her vaguely feel, through the apathy that had settled upon her, that things were not ill with her, that the world was beautiful, and life not hard to hear.

It is, I sometimes fancy, those whom happiness makes hopeful (the spend thrifts, they should rather economize their present!) who live most in the future. These, and perhaps also those who, young and inexperienced enough to believe in happiness as a birthright to. which all men are horn, and conscious in the present of an ever-unsatisfied hunger and thirst which hinders them from counting themselves happy, naturally turn their eager eyes towards the future, which, they believe, holds all desired good in store for them.

If it is only towards some outward future in this world that these eager young eyes look, they, too, had better strive to be content with what good now is, lest in the time for the coming of which they pine they should be filled indeed, but with bitterness, satisfied, but with misery.

As well may we look for the future to make us “good,” without effort of will on our own part, as for it to make us “happy.”

As surely as each man must work out his own salvation, so must each his own happiness. Are they not one and the same—to be found, both of them, in absolute resignation to God’s will, absolute recognition of that will as good?

That those who are happy now should look forward to further happiness is well and beautiful, if they do this through faith that God’s gifts are not .measured nor stinted. It seems to me that nothing can be more false and ugly than such a view of God’s dealings with man as would lead us to found a claim to happiness hereafter upon present misery, and so induce us, hugging our sorrows and contemning this world—to look upon ourselves as among those who, because they have here but the beggar’s portion, the crumbs from the rich man’s table, are to be feasted and satisfied hereafter. May we not instead, if we indulge in such dreams, find ourselves numbered among those unfaithful and unprofitable servants, from whom will be taken even that which they had? For all of us, the poorest, the loneliest, the lowliest, is there not ever a bountiful table spread, a living fountain flowing?

When the evening sunshine had some time left the plain, had crept up the sides of the hills and died off their summits. Miss Trevor at last stirred; rising, with something that seemed like a sigh, a shiver, and a smile, all in one, she tied on her hat, drew her loose shawl round her, and moved away.

Before she left the grave-yard she paused beside the cypress that guarded the new-made grave. Her eyes fixed on the inscription cut in the stone, she seemed in danger of forgetting herself and the lateness of the horn*, -and falling into a second reverie. Standing there she began unconsciously to sway to and fro as the cypress was swaying in the rising evening wind, and in her attitudes and movements there was a peculiar suppleness and grace. She was not a little woman; neither short nor very slight. A certain dignity that, had it not been softened by singular graciousness of smile and speech, might have been mistaken for pride, was in her carriage, and made her seem older than her years.

After standing thus some time, she stretched out her hand, palm upwards; she looked down upon it with a strange sort of smile, a patient, pathetic smile, such a smile as is more akin to tears than laughter; but her eyes were not tearful. Presently she spoke.

“Nobody’s,” she said, softly, “nobody claims it—not even, with the equality of love, to clasp for a moment. In all this wide and glorious world, this world full of human beings who love each other, I am alone. It seems strange,” she added, speaking, however, as if the curiousness rather than the sorrowfulness of it struck her most. “It seems very strange,” she repeated.

Then she laid that unowned right hand upon her heart, and said again, “Nobody’s!—an empty mansion, swept and garnished; not even haunted.”

Now, as she at last left the church-yard, she wondered “is there any one else in the world so completely alone? What is the use of people in the world who are so alone? Are they meant, being nobody’s, to he everybody’s? Having no life of their own, to live for others? To be at the service of all or any whom they can help and succour?”

When on her way through the village—it was the evening of a féte-day—Miss Trevor saw youths and maidens lingering under the plane-trees, on the open space round the fountain; and when at the house-doors she saw mothers with children in their arms, fathers with children at their knees, friends and neighbours gathered together in groups, she felt her loneliness as lonely.

She lifted up a little one who had fallen in her road, took it up in her arms to carry it to its mother; and something in the soft, confiding way the little hand was laid on her neck (the child was not afraid of her), something in the pressure of the little knees against her breast, and the way the great eyes wondered at her, moved her strangely. When she kissed it, giving it into its mother’s arms, her own eyes were wet and her cheek was very pale.

CHAPTER II

HER FATHER AND MOTHER.

Miss Trevor’s mother had been only seventeen when, half for love and half for pity, she was married by a Cornish gentleman of eight or nine and forty.

Majali de la Capréde was an orphan whom her fierce aunt ruled with most untender and tyrannous away.

Mr. Trevor owned a small estate in Provence, joining that of Madame de la Capréde, and here for many years he spent great part of each winter. He saw something of his fierce, and more of his fair neighbour. He had pitied the little child, and yet more, he pitied the young maiden.

Majali was very lovely, very ignorant, very unhappy; of this last she made no secret. As a child she had told him all her troubles, confiding in him almost from the first time that she had seen him. She learnt no reserve as she grew older. One winter he did not come to Belle-terre. He had parted from a mere child; he found, two years later, a woman little less child-like than the child. Their first meeting after his arrival was an accidental one, in the grounds of Belleterre, where Majali often wandered; those that followed were not accidental. Majali would say: “I have been watching your terrace for an hour, and when I saw you come out I came to meet you and she would hang upon his arm, and press up close against him, and cling to him, as she had done when she was a tall, large eyed, overgrown child. Then she would pour out her troubles, and ask for counsel; would consult Mr. Trevor as to whether he thought it would be like this, her life, always—all the time her cruel aunt lived.

One day, adding, “If I believed so, I should kill myself—or wish her dead!’’ At those significant words the lovely eyes grew gloomy, and the tender young face hard, and something in the words and in the face, made Mr. Trevor shudder.

“Will you be my little wife, Majali, and live always with me?”

The words were repented as soon as spoken. But Majali, with childish fervour, had clasped and kissed his hand, and cried:

“How happy I should be! hut you are laughing at me!”

“I am too old for you,” he answered.

She said nothing, hut her large eyes filled with tears.

Next day Mr. Trevor, having lain awake all night, proposed for Majali’s hand to the ogress aunt. If he could have freed the child —so he still called her, and so she still was to him—in any other way, if he could have adopted her as his daughter, he would have preferred not to marry her; he did not wish to marry, had long ago resolved never to marry.

He was something of an invalid, and fancied himself more so than he was; the mild Cornish climate not being mild enough for him, had led to his purchasing Belleterre. He was much of a student, he believed himself to be already doubly wedded, to his studies, and to the memory of a girl from whom he had been separated, and who had died for love of him in his youth. He was, you see, a “romantic” man; he was also a man of scrupulous honour—all the story of his youthful love he told to Majali before he married her.

But when she heard that story, little Majali knew nothing and thought nothing of such things as love and jealousy. She shed a few tears over the fate of the faithful Eleanour, and then, for a long time, thought of her no more.

To marry Mr. Trevor was, for Majali, to get away for ever from Madame de la Capréde, to live always with one who spoke to her gently, who looked at her kindly, who made her pretty presents, and in all ways petted her—more tenderly, good man, than he himself knew. He would be always good to her, she should be happy with him, life would be one holiday. In return little Majali meant to be very obedient, to be careful to do all the things he liked her to do, not to do such things as he did not like her to do. She would leave off being passionate and wilful, and would never say what was not true. Well, they married. He was good to her, and she was happy till—she began to love him! not with childish love, but as a wife loves her husband.

When she began to love him thus, but had not yet grown up to knowing him, or to loving well, she became miserable,—miserable and “very naughty,” all her efforts “to be good” were failures, the harder she tried the less she succeeded, and what ailed her she did not know.

Poor little Majali! she was possessed by all sorts of jealousies. That story of her husband’s past, to which, when he had told it, she had paid so little heed, was always present to her now, the image of the girl he had loved haunted her.

One day in a fit of jealous anger she took up a miniature of poor Eleanour, which lay upon her husband’s table, and dashed it on the ground. The glass was broken, the ivory scratched, she was ashamed and told a lie, saying it was an accident. How wicked the child felt then!

Of his studies and his love of art she was also jealous, not without reason: Mr. Trevor had been gifted with an ardent and enthusiastic temperament, but denied that strength and force of character which holds its own, and will realize its own views of life.

English family-life, with all its good and beauty, its purity, its safety, and its comparative freedom, is no more perfect than any other human institution.

While it is happy and admirable as a general rule, and in ordinary cases it is apt to press hardly on exceptional individualities, and to lay its fetters and constrictions heavily and narrowingly round originality (which it loves to call eccentricity), it is apt to suppress and repress all tendencies towards idealism; to condemn and contemn all that diverges from ordinary routine; to resent all departures from one order of being, from one safe, sensible, rational, and respectable manner of life.

In the strong—and, perhaps, they alone have a right to be free—the discipline of the necessary struggle is, perhaps, except in extreme cases, no more than salutary. Those, therefore, who succumb, were possibly unfit for freedom; if so, of this number was Mr. Trevor.

The strictness of family discipline had degenerated to tyranny in the Trevor family. He grew weary of resistance, ceased to struggle, yielding to the temptations of ease and luxury, became a mere slave, sacrificing more than himself. When, late in life to begin life, Mr. Trevor found himself free to follow the bent of inclination, he was a melancholy man with a merited remorse eating at his heart, a man who believed that his one chance of happiness was gone, was buried in Eleanour Penrose’s grave. He devoted himself with a serious ardour to study, and to the cultivation of his artistic taste.

The love of his youth had been a beautiful and gifted creature, as much above him in mind and heart, he thought, as his parents held her to be below him in position. She had been the daughter of a poor and.struggling artist, herself gifted with great artistic power.

To love again Mr. Trevor did not-believe to be possible; the idea of doing so was distasteful to him; to devote himself to things kindred to such as had occupied her was to pay her fit homage, to make her the only possible reparation for the weakness that had led to the wreck of her life and his.

Having married Majali, Mr. Trevor at first devoted much thought and kindness to her, striving to make her happy. He sold Belleterre, to which he was much attached, and bought another estate further from Madame de la Capréde. He succeeded in his endeavours, Majali was happy. Once satisfied of this, he left off thinking much about her.

The change that came over her was gradual, for a time he was unconscious of it. At last the fact that his little wife was petulant, irritable, capricious; that she looked ill and unhappy, that she had left off her bird-like gaiety, that, in fact, she was changed from everything she had been, forced itself upon him, He watched her with grave perplexity, he was pained, his peace was disturbed. Sometimes his mornings, usually devoted to study, were spent in. thinking about this strange little possession of his. What ailed her? Why was she so changed? What did she want? What could he do for her?

He questioned her and learnt little from her answers, till one day she turned upon him fiercely, and asked:

“Why did you marry me when you cannot love me? Why did you make me love you when you cannot love me? You were wicked, you were cruel, and I am miserable!”

Before he could answer, while he stood aghast, she fell at his feet and clasped his knees, and cried:

“Oh, forgive me! oh, forgive me! You are good, and I am mad! But, oh! I love you, and I watch you for one look of more than kindness, for one look of love; as my spaniel watches me when I eat, and he is hungry, I watch you, my husband—and from morning to night I get no food—you throw me no crumb. You do not love me; you think always of the dead girl—forgive me, I am miserable!”

She laid her pretty head upon his feet—it rested there one instant, then she was caught up in his arms and pressed against his breast. It was hard to say whether he or she was most moved; but, somehow, bis heart opened, and took her in.

Being a good man, he set himself to repair the mischief he had done, the wrong he had done, as he now clearly saw. He taught his wife, he educated her, he made her his companion, his friend. At first all was very difficult to him, the change of all his habits cost him many a weaiy sigh. But he found a rich reward.

When they had been married ten years, this husband and wife loved fully and well. Majali developed character and rich gifts, which she fused in love; if she could have ehanged herself into one pearl of price which, melting in his cup of life, could have made that life more sweet and costly, she would have done this and rejoiced.

It was at the end of those ten years, and when little Gonda, their only child, was five years old, that Mr. Trevor and his wife left France for England, to settle, if it proved to suit her health, in the family mansion in Cornwall. His affairs wanted looking into, and his health, since he had now new interests in life, was so far re-established, that he ran no danger in taking this step.

Five happy years passed.

Then, one morning, Mr. Trevor rode away from his hall-door in health and spirits—looking back fondly at the wife and child who lovingly watched him.

At evening he was brought home dead. A-n accident had happened in a mine he was inspecting, and he had been killed on the spot.

It was almost immediately discovered that owing to the dishonesty of his steward, in whom he had placed absolute confidence, to whom the management of everything had been entrusted during the years he had lived abroad, his affairs were so involved that when his creditors were satisfied, a few hundred pounds, and no more, remained for his wife and child. Enough for her, the wife; within six months she died, and Gonda, at little more than ten years old, was left an orphan.

At ten years old!

Of the first five years of her life, in sunny Provence, she hardly remembered anything. But standing among the orange-trees in the conservatory, the perfume of the ‘flowers had sometimes vaguely recalled to her another home that had been pervaded by that perfume, and questioning her mother about it, she had been told of the blueness of the sky and the sea, the clearness of the sunny air, and the brightness of the colours in the land where that home had been, till she came to have a wonderful glowing picture of it in her mind, and to be unable to distinguish between memory and imagination.

Her life in the Cornish mansion, in hearing of the green sea beating on the grey crags; the fireside fondlings of her lovely mother; the scampers across the wild heaths on her shaggy pony, by her father’s side; this was the childhood so dear, so near, her own, herself, that, at ten years old, was past, gone.

CHAPTER III

HOW “OLD GASPAR” KEPT HIS PROMISE.

Gonda, with the few hundred pounds that remained to her, was left under the nominal guardianship of her father’s only surviving relative, a cross-grained old bachelor—a man who was spoken of by all who knew him, generally with a shrug of contempt, as “Old Gaspard.”

It had been her mother’s wish that, in the event of her own death, the child should be sent to an English school; any alternative seemed to her preferable to that of consigning her child to the tyranny that had embittered her own youth.

Unhappily for Gonda, death had come suddenly to Mrs. Trevor; she had not expected to live long, she knew her health was failing, but the disease that struck her down without an hours warning, was one of which she was unconscious. Poor thing! she would, but for the child, have been glad to go; she was not fit, she felt she was not fit, to live without that support on which she had leaned, with all herself, in the most absolute trust and dependence, for the fifteen years in which she had lived her life.

It chanced that old Gaspar Trevor was with her when she died. She had not yet left her Cornish home, and he had come down with his lawyer in her interest. Till then she had not known him. That his name was Trevor, that he was related to her husband, had been enough to make her repose in him the most complete confidence. Leaning on his arm, which had been offered her with the stiffest gaucherie, she was slowly pacing the sunny south terrace, holding Gonda by the hand— her lovely eyes turned sometimes to heaven, sometimes fixed upon the ignoble face of her companion, she was talking to “old Gaspar,” in her pretty imperfect English, of her husband, talking of him as if he had just set out on a journey, and she would soon follow him, when she was—to use the expressive country phrase—taken for death.

He could not help understanding the mute agony of appeal with which a quarter of an hour after, when she was lying on her bed past speech, the eyes of the dying woman turned from her terror-struck, tearless child, whom she clutched to her as if she would fain have taken her with her, to fix themselves on the old man’s scared face.

“I will provide for her!” he said, moved beyond his usual caution. “Poor soul, be easy, I will provide for her!” The words were spoken before he knew what he had done.

The dying woman’s face thanked him rapturously; she died in the effort to carry his withered and unworthy hand to her lips.

“Old Gaspar,” that look, had you deserved it, would have been a fair flower to add to your “ bouquet a Dieu.”

Thus it chanced that the choice of a school for little Gonda, the child of so much love, who had been surrounded always with the tenderest wise cares, was left to old Gaspar Trevor.

Ten years old! It was well she was no older. At ten years old the heart is too soft to break; too elastic to burst But, yet, at ten years old, I fancy a child can suffer, as, later in life, we can hardly suffer and live. Mercifully the suffering is short, and the traces of it are soon obliterated; but I think we have too little sympathy with the suffering of children. We are apt to look at it philosophically, from the outside, by the light of our knowledge that it will soon pass; but the little ones do not know that it will soon pass; they suffer absolutely, with all themselves.

It chanced—say rather it was ordered—that the school selected by old Mr. Trevor, chiefly on account of its being a comparatively cheap one, was conducted by a kind and conscientious woman.

In the dull house, of the dull square, of a dull provincial town, Gonda lived for eight years; and was not, when the home-sickness and mourning were past, unhappy. Winter and summer, school-time and holiday-time, that was her only home. She was not allowed to accept any invitations to visit her schoolfellows at their homes. Old Jaspar Trevor had impressed upon Mrs. Falkland that her charge must not, more than was absolutely needful, associate with her companions, whose rank in life was lower than her own.

Had not Gonda possessed a generous sweetness of temper that made her irresistible; had there not been in her winning ways a peculiar fascination, a something that made it impossible to repel her, the unsocial isolation to which she was condemned would have incurred for her general dislike. She had no means of conciliation external to herself; she had no presents from home to share with her companions; no pocket-money through which to make herself popular; yet they all loved her.

Twice a year, having business connected with a mine in which he was a large shareholder, that brought him into Cornwall, old Gaspar Trevor came down from London. On these occasions he always visited his ward. The child had disliked these visits, and dreaded those half-yearly summonses into the formal drawing-room; the grown-up girl hated them.

What passed at these interviews is easily recorded. Gonda was peered at through spectacles, by ugly and short-sighted eyes.

“Do they give you enough to eat here—eh, little girl?” asked the guardian.

“Yes, sir.”

“Are they kind to you here—eh, little girl?’’ “Yes, sir; very kind.”

“Are you learning all they can teach you— eh, little girl?”

“I am trying to be good, sir.” Here, sometimes, the blue eyes would fill.

“You must get all you can for the money, you know, little girl; it’s a great deal of money, you know, that’s paid for your schooling—eh, little girl?”

“Yes, sir.”

After this there was generally a pause; then came the assertion interrogative (if such a thing may be), “Well, then, you are happy here—eh, little girl?”

Again the answer was, “Yes, sir.” Though, as the little girl grew into a woman, her heart cried out against the affirmative answer, though in a dumb, vague manner, not yet awake enough to understand its own voice.

On his last four half-yearly visits this refined and amiable guardian had added, “And I wonder what the deuce is to be done with you—eh, little girl?”

Three times Gronda meekly answered, “I do not know, sir.” And answering thus, blushed richly, and felt ashamed and guilty. Guilty of what it would be hard to say: of being tall and looking womanly beyond her years, perhaps; perhaps of being at all in a world that did not seem to want her.

After he was gone, alone in the little room she had to herself, she would weep passionately, and even pray to be taken out of a world, where no one needed her, to the father and mother who loved her.

The fourth time this question was put—it was a few months before her birthday, on which she would be eighteen—her guardian was startled by an unexpected answer. With quiet dignity, and with a quaint formality that seemed as if, unconsciously, she tried to suit her words to the man she addressed, the girl replied: “I have been thinking, sir, that I am now too old to remain at school as a mere scholar. 1 have talked about this to Mrs. Falkland. She has been most kind.” Here the blue eyes—full, fair, sweet eyes—moistened. “She has offered to give me a situation in the school, as under-teacher, with a small salary of fifteen pounds a year at first, and more when I am able to be of more use to her, if this arrangement should meet with your approval.”

“The deuce she has! Confound the woman’s impudence.”

This not being exactly addressed to Gonda, she disregarded it, and quietly continued:

“I believe I cannot do better than accept her offer. I believe the girls here will be kind and considerate, for they like me. I am attached to Mrs. Falkland. I shall not feel strange here. I think I shall not be unhappy. But, of course, I felt it my duty to consult you before finally deciding.”

“Most obliging of you, young lady, to deign to consult me! I am much indebted to you, I am sure.”

“I do not see why you should be angry with me, Mr. Trevor. You have not made a secret of the fact that what was to become of me was a question that troubled you. I have nothing, and I cannot be dependent.”

“Cannot be dependent! A fine sentiment.

Really, Miss Trevor, you are a most sensible girl. No nonsense about you. Quite a nineteenth-century young miss.”

“I was going to say that I cannot be dependent on those to whom I do not belong, upon whom I have no claim, who do not love me,” answered Gonda: her cheeks were burning and her eyes full of tears.

“What do you know about who does and who does not love you? What do you know about love ?”

“Not much, indeed!” and Gonda rose.

“Not much, indeed!” he echoed; “so much the better.”

“You do not refuse your permission to my accepting Mrs. Falkland’s offer?”

“I do!” he answered, violently. “I remember what you, young lady, seem to forget, and what you dishonour your father’s memory by forgetting, that, whoever your mother was, your father was a Trevor. Sit down again,” he said, in a gentler tone. “Here, sit down by me. I promised your mother to provide for you. I have other views for you. Come, come. We can do better than that. Don’t cry. I am not angry.” (If Gonda had cried it would have been with indignation, not fear or sorrow.) “I like a girl to show some spirit. You didn’t get yours from poor Tristam. I suppose your poor mother could show a spice of the devil on occasion. Those foreign women always can. Well, what have I said to offend you? To business, or we shall never understand one another.” Here he dived into his pocket and pulled out a morocco jewel-case. “The old hear does not always growl. The poor beast has an eye for beauty. You will have a birthday before I come here again.”

Opening the case he displayed to Gonda a set of jewels—necklace, brooch, and bracelet—of pearls and rubies, really magnificent to be given to a school-girl.

“What do you think of that, now—eh, my dear?” Gonda drew hack as he leant towards her. The carnation flush that rose to her face was not a flush of pleasure.

“They are very beautiful,” she said, coldly; but-”

“But you can’t believe they are for you? Eh? But they are, though. Take them, my girl—take them; and I hope old Snaggs” (his housekeeper, well known by reputation to all his acquaintance) “will not find out I have been buying such things. Why don’t you take ’em?”

“You are very kind; but they are not fit for me—they would be no use to me. You are very kind, but I would rather not have them.”

He watched her, his head on one side, his small eyes twinkling queerly.

“You would rather not have them. They are not fit for you. Would be no use to you,” he echoed. “How do you know, young lady, that you may not be one day a countess, a duchess, or the wife of some old millionaire? Come, take them.”

Honda firmly declined.

“Mercenary little wretch! She would have liked a packet of bank-notes or a roll of gold pieces better than these pretty things, I do believe. Well, well, she is a sensible young woman, and no mistake.”

That was half to himself yet spoken loud enough for Gonda to catch the sense of the words.

“Now, what would you like, my dear?” he asked, putting his jewels back into his pocket. “Would you like a gold watch? I can change these for that, and the watch would be useful.”

“I have my mother’s watch. I want and should like nothing that you can give me.” She spoke with curt decision.

“Now, that is a foolish answer, a foolish, hasty, hot-tempered, rash answer. You should never so commit yourself. Now listen quietly to me. You must dismiss this governessing scheme from your pretty head altogether. It won’t do; I assure you it won’t. I promised your mother I would provide for you, and we should have her coming from her grave to haunt us if I didn’t keep my promise. But I am going to keep my promise. I came here to-day determined to offer you a permanent settlement, a provision that will be for life, a home with me, in my house, on certain conditions. I am peculiarly situated —don’t interrupt me, listen quietly.” But here the old man paused, rubbed his hands over his face, ruffled up his hair, pulled up his shirt-collar and pulled down his coat-sleeves—the first was an unnecessary operation, for his collars were tall; the latter was not so unnecessary, for his sleeves were short. Then, with an air of valorous determination, yet lowering his voice from habitual caution, or habitual dread of the eavesdropping propensities of his petticoated tyrant, he resumed.

“Yes, I am peculiarly situated. Snaggs, of whom I spoke just now, my housekeeper, has lived with me forty years. Don’t be frightened, my dear, into fancying that therefore I am very old. I was very young when she came to me first, quite a youth, in fact”

(of not lees than five-and-thirty). “Of late she has not made me comfortable at all. In fact, she makes me very uncomfortable. To speak plainly, she makes my life miserable. She is old, and her temper grows worse and worse. In fact, it is so violent and domineering that I am not master in my own house; absolutely I am not, and I can’t get rid of her. I am positively afraid of her sometimes, she says such dreadful things, and threatens me so grossly. It is no smiling matter, I assure you, young lady. She won’t go. That is bad enough; but worse than that, she wants me to marry her! settle everything upon her! How long should I live afterwards? Ugh! I take care to tell her I have not yet made my will, or some fine day she would poison me to come at the money I’ve almost promised her. There is only one way in which I shall ever get rid of her—by marrying some one else, quietly and quickly, before she gets an inkling of my intention. You see, my dear ? you understand? I’ll pension her handsomely—a pension to be paid only during my life—then I should feel safe. You’ll only have to change Miss for Mrs. You’ll find me very indulgent and kind. Indeed, if you’ll free me from old Snaggs, I shall be deeply grateful to you. You’re taken by surprise? You didn’t see what I was driving at? Well, well, I’ll give you time. You know the old adage, ‘Better to be a young man’s slave than an old man’s-’

No, the other way; ‘Better to be-’ Don’t interrupt, I have not finished yet,” he added, eagerly.

Gonda had risen in consternation.

“You shall have splendid settlements. In the course of nature it cannot be so very many years before you are a widow. All I ask is just that you will enable me to live in quiet and comfort the few years that are left me, and in return I enable you to live in ease and splendour for as many years as you may be spared. Not a bad return that! Not a bad return!”

Gonda began several sentences and finished none. The old man had grown so pathetically earnest that she lost the relief of feeling all this to be as ludicrous as it was disgusting.

“I’ll give you time,” he said, pleadingly.

“Indeed it is not needful;-it would be no use. I-”

“So much the better,” he broke out, delightedly. “Better settle it all at once, much better. A really sensible girl! How did Tristam, poor fellow, manage to have a girl who is so little of a fool?”

“You wholly mistake me, Mr. Trevor. I meant that I needed no time to consider, because I feel—I know at once that it is impossible I should accept your offer.”

If the old man had been a less selfish old sinner, the change that came over his face would have been one to rouse compassion.

There was a long pause. Then he rose from his chair.

“I make you my compliments, young lady. You think that you will one day inherit my money without doing me a kindness which would earn it? Not a farthing; mind you that! You shall never touch one farthing of it. I have kept my promise to the foreign woman, your mother. I have offered you a splendid provision. You refuse it. Well; listen to this. Not in this country shall you drag the Trevor name into the mud. Attempt it, and see if I do not reach you. A man who has gold has power. As you have refused my offer, I insist upon you accepting hers”—throwing a letter on the table. “Much joy may you have of it. You shall have money enough to pay your travelling expenses; enough of that remains of what is yours by law; beyond that you need not expect another farthing through or from my hands.”

With that he went. As he paused in the hall, struggling into his outer coat, he heard a burst of girlish laughter, and the words, “Oh, cruel Gonda! Oh, poor old Gaspar!”

Naturally this added fuel to the fire of his rage. He was the victim of a plot, then, he thought in his unreasoning fury, and should be the laughing-stock of a set of school-girls —through them, perhaps, of a whole county. He banged the hall-door behind him with a violence that shook the house and startled the whole square.

That giddy laugher—a girl who had been, under the pretence of “practising,” alone in the front parlour, the folding-doors ajar, through all the interview, and who had forborne to touch the piano in order to hear all that passed—had the mirth all to herself. Gonda escaped from her, and locked herself into her own room. She did not understand, nor seek to understand, what it was that she was feeling, but there was a burning sense of shame at her heart, a sense of haying been subject to insult and outrage. She thought with positive loathing of the old man who had just left her, and felt as if in herself there must be something she ought to loathe since it had been possible that he should address her as he had done.

CHAPTER IV

MADAME DE LA CAPRÉDE’s LETTER.

About that letter which old Gaspar had thrown upon the table, Gonda consulted her schoolmistress next day.

Twenty-four hours, and that interview with her guardian, had effected a great change in her views and wishes. She no longer felt inclined to remain in this house, or this town, in which she had passed so many uneventful years. She now felt a strong desire to break out of this monotonous existence into something fresh and new. She was unsettled and restless, the fact being that she had sustained a shock that had roused her.

“Old Gaspar’s” offer to Gonda was talked of throughout the house; it was too tempting a subject of vulgar school-girl witticism for there to be any chance that the persecution now commenced would soon cease; the less chance as it was commenced in no unkindness, and would be carried on in perfect ignorance of the pain that was being inflicted.

They did not mean to be cruel, those honest Cornish girls; they had not one of them the slightest comprehension of either the degree or the kind of suffering they caused the girl they all loved a good deal and understood not at all. If the same thing had happened to one of themselves, it would have been freely given up to be the object of the mirth of all— mirth mixed, perhaps, with a little honest anger that old Caspar should dare think that he, old and ugly, could buy a youthful belle. Why should they think that Gonda would feel the affair so differently ? They, of course, were sensible and rational, she foolish and morbid. It thus chanced that Gonda read Madame de la Capréde’s letter when, her present position having become to her so painful as to be untenable, her mind was favourably inclined towards any scheme that opened out before her a new prospect and an untried way of life. Perhaps it seems cowardly that she should be ready to fly before the blunt shafts of girlish malice, yet Gonda was not cowardly. Those who have never known the pain of constantly-recurring wounds inflicted on morbid sensitiveness may condemn her, but only those. However, this “cowardice” was not her only reason for altering her scheme of life. Though Mr. Trevor’s threats did not intimidate her, she did not feel certain that she had any right, he being by her parents named her guardian, to act in direct opposition to his commands. Mrs. Falkland advised her not to do so, hoping, perhaps, that one day the old man’s resentment might abate. Madame de la Capéde dated from “Les Cyprus,” which she explained to be the name of a ruinous old chateau, to which she had retired to end her days.

Misfortunes had overtaken her in her old age, she said. She had speculated in railway shares and been unfortunate, and this place, Les Cyprus, was all that was left to her of her once splendid property. Moreover, she went on to say, for some time past she had been conscious of symptoms which assured her she was touched by the disease that, when it had attacked any of her family, had invariably, sooner or later, proved fatal. Obliged to give up all the active and energetic habits of her life, she needed a companion—a young woman, cheerful, capable, intelligent. The object of her letter to Gaspar Trevor (with whom she had before corresponded about “Majali’s girl”) was to make inquiries about this girl, whose heathenish name she never could remember, to know if she had grown up into anything likely to suit her purpose. If Mr. Trevor thought so, she would be obliged by his put ting her in immediate communication with the young person.

No time was to he lost, she went on to say; she was now almost entirely a prisoner in her house; an all-but completely helpless victim of the rogueries of her bailiff, who defrauded her abominably of the little left to her. .This bailiff—or fermier, as she called him—an old Maitre Siccand, because he was in some left-handed way connected with the family of the De la Caprédes, and because he had lived unmolested on the estate of Les Cypres for fifty years, now seemed to think himself master of it; entitled to annex all he could get hold of while she lived, and expecting to inherit the land, and anything that was left of landed property when she died. An expectation, madame explained, that she was well determined to disappoint, not remembering her husband with such respect or affection as should induce her to make an old hunch-backed, left-handed relation of his her heir.

Not only, she said, had she set her heart upon disappointing him at her death, hut also upon checking his iniquitous peculations while she lived. In this her confidential servant, Marie, a good, faithful soul, was no use to her, for, though ’cuter and cleverer than many a clerk, she could not read or write.

The letter was a long one, and the prospect it opened possessed various attractions. Gonda had a vaguely uncomfortable impression of having heard Madame de la Capréde spoken of by her mother as violent and imperious, but she might be changed—probably she was changed: she was now aged and helpless; age, sickness, and misfortunes had, no doubt, tamed and softened her. Then it seemed to Gonda that she could be useful to this woman— to be useful, and to be useful to a relative of her mother’s—to live with some one she in a way belonged to, and had a legitimate right to love, and by whom, as she hoped, she should be loved —what attractions could be more powerful to such a girl as Gonda? a girl so lonely, that as she often thought, whether she lived or died, could make but a slight and brief difference to any one—so without ties or aims that the faintest wind of circumstance might drive her here or there; and yet full of capabilities of love, of adhesiveness, of devotion, and loyalty.

Then the picture she drew in her own mind of the old French chateau: the pictures that, partly drawn from memory of her mother’s descriptions, and partly from unaided imagination, rose before her as she read passages in this letter which spoke of “crops” of olives, oranges and grapes; of “fields” of rose, jasmine and violet (to lament over them as failing sources of revenue); these things threw a glow, an enchantment, over the prospect opened before her, and that life of strict routine in the dull square of the dull town, a life that had no light, warmth, or beauty in it, of which she had, nevertheless, thought without repugnance, yesterday, to-day seemed impossible. All that was youthful in her— and even the driest life has not withered all youthfulness at eighteen—woke up, and claimed to live a life that should he life, and not a mummifying monotony; and, of course, what was distant and unknown seemed full of promise.

Mrs. Falkland’s advice to her, after having read Madame de la Capréde’s letter, was to wait, and take a few days to think the matter over. Had the good lady been a better French scholar she would have been startled into doubt as to the character of the writer of that letter, by the strength and freedom, not to say the blasphemy and profanity, of some of its expressions, but she was only capable of gathering its general import; so her ignorance, and Gonda’s innocence, let those suggestions of character pass unheeded.

Three days after that interview between Mr. Trevor and Gonda, Gonda was shocked by the news that Mr. Trevor was dead. He had died suddenly of apoplexy—but, before he died he had married his housekeeper! who was, therefore, now Mrs. Trevor, and one of the wealthiest widows in the kingdom.

Her schoolfellows condoled with Gonda, reminding her that she might now have enjoyed this distinction, and because the sudden news startled her to gentler thoughts of the old man who had left her in anger, and to fears that that anger might have hastened his death, they pretended to think that she regretted the rejection of her elderly lover.

“It is very foolish, I am afraid, but I am no longer happy here,” Gonda said to Mrs. Falkland, and before the time that lady had advised her to take for consideration, had quite elapsed, she wrote to Madame de la Capréde, signifying her willingness to join her. By return of post she received a brief answer, bidding her come with as little delay as possible.

She waited only till Mrs. Falkland could send her under suitable escort, then full of youth, health, hope, vague, but brilliant anticipation, she left old England behind her, and started for her new home in her mother’s native land.

CHAPTER V

LES CYPRiS.

Madame de la Capréde lived five years after Gonda joined her. Those five years had told upon Gonda as fifteen happy years of healthy life might not have done.

Those five years had been spent not so much under the gay Provence sky, and in the flowery, perfumed, outer air, as within dull walls, in chill rooms from which the vitalizing sunlight was excluded, in the performance of offices which only love could have sweetened, and which had been unsweetened by love, unrewarded by any gracious gentleness or gratitude.

In those five years Gonda’s youth had faded —perhaps not beyond the possibility of a second bloom—she no longer looked young, not that her face was lined or worn, the white brow was smooth, and the cheek and chin were round—but she had kept herself so severely set to stern duty and difficult endurance, that some change in herself or her life —something more than the mere change from slavery to freedom—seemed needed to relax the long strain that had given it a certain hardness and immobility.

Her life had been such that she might have said, “I’ non mori ’e non rimasi vivo.” It had given a look that said, “I’ non pangeva si dentro impietrai.”

Marie, who was, in her way, superstitious; who, spite of her stirring, fully-occupied life, her half-holidays on Sundays, and her gossip-ings on market-days, felt something of the deadening influence of the place, decided—as she saw the change that came over the young face which, when it first came into that house, had been so bright and emotional—“It is the cypresses—the shadow of the . cypresses!” For there were many stories about this house and those trees, all condemning it and them as of ill omen.

Once settled at Les Cypres, Gonda, on whom no one else in the world had any claim, had felt it her duly to remain with Madame de la Capréde.

Madame de la Capréde was dying slowly, by inches; she was utterly friendless and helpless. If once and again, when stung to the quick by the insults heaped upon her by the fierce sufferer, Gonda told Marie:

“I cannot bear it! I must go! I am growing wicked.”

Marie’s answers, “Then we are lost! What can we do without mademoiselle? Bad words don’t stick on a good conscience. The good God sent you here to help us, it is the devil is tempting you away.”

These and similar answers of Marie’s, accompanied by impassioned declarations of affection, and seconded by Gonda’s own strong conscientiousness, her conviction that in leaving this dying woman she should he abandoning a duty to which she had been called, decided her to remain where she was, and to set herself to fresh endeavour to try to subdue the spirit of her thankless task-mistress, and with redoubled patience and gentleness to endure her unjust revilings. And so the days past, the weeks, and the months, and the years.

If Madame de la Capréde had at this time of her life been capable of love, she would have loved Gonda. But, tortured by an agonizing disease, and her fierce passions further inflamed by the stimulants to which, against the orders of Monsieur le Docteur Vauprez, she constantly had recourse, she was often more like a madwoman or a demon than anything else.

Yet she treated Gonda better, on the whole, than she had treated Gonda’s mother; she esteemed and, to a certain extent, valued her. Trial had matured Gonda’s character early, or had hardened it before it was matured; just now it was difficult to say which, but it had given her a strength and dignity that compelled even in Madame de la Capréde a feeling of respect; against which feeling, however, her words and deeds reacted.

While Madame de la Capréde could not refrain from flinging taunts and insults in Gonda’s face, she spoke of her in her absence -with the pride of proprietorship—to the only people who cared or dared to -approach her, Monsieur le Docteur Vauprez and his wife; who, with Marie, three nights in the week, made up the party of cards, which was now Madame de la Capréde’s only pleasure.

Yet, if Gonda chanced to enter the room while the old woman was speaking in her praise, she would break off to greet her with some stinging sarcasm or harsh rebuke!

Such was Gonda’s life, a dreary life, a weary life, a life that if she had ceased to find painful, would have been degrading.

But the days ground on, the weeks, the months, and the years, and ground Gonda with them, till the grinding process ceased: and left her alone and free—the mistress of a ruinous old chateau that threatened before long to tumble about her ears, and the possessor of an income sufficient for her modest wants.

When Gonda had left the church-yard, where she had sat motionless through the sunny afternoon hours, and the village behind her, her way lay up a steep and narrow lane, that was a twilight lane even in the blaze of noon, for on either side of it grew olives—not the scraggy, stunted bushes of stony hill-tops or burnt hill-sides, nor the slight and graceful young trees of more fruitful plains, but ancient olives, legendary, hoary olives, with trunks of enormous girth, gnarled and knotted into intense significance; olives that seemed to have an atmosphere of their own— to hold among their branches a sacred silence replete with memories of the past, and whose grey tresses met and mingled and dropped low down over the rugged way.

Gonda’s step, as she ascended this dusky road, was characteristic. It was a firm, quick, but unelastic step, a step that needed happiness to render it light. “Why is an empty heart never a light one? For the same reason, I suppose, that an empty balloon is an inert mass, that a body, which, when informed with life was light and buoyant, when dead becomes heavy and ponderous. By and by she left this lane for a little track along the hill-side among the vineyards, running now and then through small orchards —of orange, mulberry, almond, peach, or quince, passing every now and then a great, gaunt fig-tree, showing ghostly through the dusk.

This path ran on to a distant village, and presently she left it to make her way more directly upward, along the low, loose, wide walls that terraced the steeper vineyards. Then she was lost for a while, in the half gloom of a little wood, which was the boundary of her own estate.

This little wood, chiefly peopled by the fantastic, white-stemmed, emerald-foliaged pine, interspersed with cork and oak trees, is studded with luxuriant patches of aromatic under-growth—of rosemary, myrrh, lavender, wild pepper, and thyme. The white-flowered heath, the cistus, white and rose colour, the golden cytisus and broom and other blossoming shrubs and plants, not forgetting the violets in the little hollow the stream runs through, and the curious orchids that grow upon its banks—make of this little wood in the spring-time, a flowery fairy haunt.

By taking these by-ways instead of following the road, Gonda had shortened her walk by half a mile. Clear of the wood, she crossed the little stream on stepping-stones, and was in the Cypress avenue which led from the road towards the house.

Beginning at a large gate that had once been painted white, that was flanked by pillars surmounted by some mysterious, now mutilated, device, this gloomy avenue, the trees of which were lofty and so thick set as to make a vegetable wall, ended at a broad flight of ruinous stone steps, which, guarded by broken balustrades, ascended to a square court, enclosed by walls.

The greater part of this court was tiled in formal kaleidoscope patterns; but in each comer was a small shrubbery of orange and lemon trees; some of which were planted in the ground, some in great vases of red earthenware; but of all, the foliage looked wan and sickly, the fruit begrimed and unwholesome, and as if tainted by some peculiar blight. The wall on all sides was over-topped by cypreses growing outside it, and from it sprang curious tufts of snaky, poisonous-looking plants.

In the centre of the court was the cracked basin of a fountain, in which some tall water-weeds were drooping and dying, while their roots decayed in insufficient and stagnant water. From a fantastic be-shelled pedestal, in the middle of the basin, a dejected statue with downcast eyes seemed to he mourning this desolation and its own naked ugliness.

Just opposite the steps there was an arched doorway in the wall, the door itself lay on the tiles of the court; some of them it had cracked in falling, being massive and iron-studded. The fragments that had been detached lay about, and gave no sign that this had happened recently.

Passing through this doorway you looked up a long tiled path, cypress-bordered, to another flight of steps, a terrace and the house.

If the word chateau suggests substantial respectability, dignity, and quaintness, it is not a fitting word by which to call Les Cypres.

Les Cyprus looked ruinous, but not venerable; it had the ugliness of age unredeemed by its beauties.

It was a large, rambling, pretentious variety of the “bastides,” or “maisons de campagne,” upon which the people of those parts lavish so much bad taste and gaudy paint, of which they seem fond and proud in-proportion to their ugliness, and which, indeed, generally, like some “plain” people, carry off that ugliness by a certain gay grotesqueness that prevents it from being offensive.

It was not thus with Les Cypres. The ground colouring of the house had originally been yellow ochre; on this, in blues, lilacs, greens, and reds, had been imitated ambitious architectural designs. Now, burnt and blistered by the suns of many long and ardent summers, stained and half-effaced by the heavy rains of many springs and autumns, this unrenewed paint had long ago been toned down from its first glaring and daring vigour; but the patchy and partial manner in which this had been effected gave the house a leprous, dismal, uninviting look.

A great part of Les Cypres was not only uninhabited but uninhabitable. In some places blank apertures, where windows had once been, let in all weathers; in almost all instances where window-frames remained, the glass was wanting, and the outside shutters hung loosely on rusty hinges, creaking and flapping in every light breeze, ready at the first strong gust of mistral, to fall with infernal clatter upon the tiled terrace beneath.

As if the double avenue of cypresses through which the house was reached did not lend gloom enough, the sable files that flanked the tiled path, instead of ending at the foot of the steps ascending to the terrace, branched off to right and left and ran the length of the facade. The effect of this—the trees being of great height, the terrace narrow, and not elevated above the garden by more than a few shallow steps—was to raise a black wall before the windows of all the lower rooms of that south facade.

The cypresses bowing and swaying in the evening wind, seemed to be signing to each other significantly, as Gronda passed between them. She glanced up at them, noting how black they showed against the clear pallor of the twilight sky; then her eyes rested upon the olive-clad hill that rose behind the house, upon which a lurid light, “bléme et blafard,” seemed to linger.

“Not a cheerful place,” she said aloud, with a smile and a shiver. “Not a cheerful place,” she repeated.

“What says mademoiselle?” croaked a harsh voice, that came from very near the ground.

Gronda started slightly, to find suddenly in her path, the scarcely human figure of a being who, during the time she had lived at Les Cyprus, had grown ever more and more loathsome to her.

Drawing, with an involuntary action of aversion, her dress close round her, she would have passed on with a quickened step, and a simple “good evening;” but the creature stepped more directly into her path, stood there, cap in hand, bent to an angle, yet with its face upturned towards hers: its eyes, and those of its attendant demons,—two cats of peculiar colour, who followed it like dogs— gleaming out strangely in the darkening path.

“Mademoiselle! a little minute,” Maitre Siccand demanded.

“It is late, my good Maitre Siccand,” answered his mistress. “If you would speak to me, come to the house to-morrow. It is late.”

Again, she would have passed on, but the creature stretched out a skinny hand, as if to detain her.

“Mademoiselle has reason. It is late,” Maitre Siccand began, and he grew violently excited as he went on. “Late, indeed, to talk of turning away a poor, good old man, who has become bent like this,” exaggerating his own infirmity, “in the service of the place; a poor, good old man, who, man and boy, as peasant first and then as fermier, has worked at Les Cyprus for well-nigh sixty years; who, if right had been done, and if promises had been kept, would be master now where mademoiselle is mistress. Late, indeed, to talk of sending the poor, good old man to seek another service; that is to say, starve.”

“I do not know what you are saying, or who has talked of sending you away. If you were sent away you would certainly not be allowed to starve. But if you have any complaint of any one to make, come to the house in the morning. I desire you to let me pass now.” “Is that you, mademoiselle, returned at length?” cried Marie’s voice; and Gronda was glad to see her standing at the head of the steps, peering down the park path, her white cap and apron shining through the dusk.

At the sound of her voice old Maitre Siccand shuffled aside and let Gronda pass.

But he stood looking after her. “Mademoiselle ma maitress, Mademoiselle l’Anglaise, ma belle maitress, sent for here by that old cat to cheat me of my right. It is true, then; you have thought of it! you would send me away —away from Les Cyprus! Ah! ah! ah! nous verrons!”

Muttering, mumbling, and cursing, the inhuman-looking object made its way to its own hovel. Pushing between the cypresses, behind which he had lain in wait for his mistress, whom Marie had told him he could not and should not see that evening, he crossed the formal garden (where blossoms at the best of times, save in the rose-thickets and hedges, were scarce; where tiled paths, broken statues, cracked vases, crumbling rock-work, mouldering shell-inlaid seats, and funereally-shaded grottoes supplied the places of bed and border, lawn, shrubbery, and winding path—so that indeed this garden was less a garden than all the land about) and disappeared behind an angle of the terrace-wall.

Maitre Siccand was a doubly disappointed being, and doubly disappointed by Gonda. According to all his calculations those years of his old mistress’s decay were to have been the richest harvest years of his life: instead, he had in them been compelled to comparative honesty. Madame de la Capréde had instituted a system for dealing with the old rascal, as she always called him, which she made Gonda carry into execution; and to Gonda’s aid came Marie, who hated fraud for fraud’s sake, Maitre Siccand for his own, and who brought to bear upon his proceedings the full force of her ready wit, strong sense, and large experience of the ways of “those others.” Maitre Siccand found himself on all sides circumvented, and was obliged to confine his strokes of business to petty and comparatively unprofitable frauds; and even then, sometimes, had the shame of knowing himself detected.

When Marie came to him, paper in hand— the paper being some account he had carefully prepared—and said, “Mon brave bonhomme, mademoiselle desires me to say that you have here made a great error,” the brave bonhomme knew that he was detected and beaten.

At his voluble remonstrances and explanations Marie would shrug her shoulders, and taking refuge under feigned stupidity and ignorant simplicity, winding her arms in her apron, while a gleam of mingled malice and humour twinkled in her brown eyes, she would answer:

“I—lam an ignorant; I know not to read nor write; I—I am not learned as thou art, my good man. That which I tell thee is that which mademoiselle bids me tell thee. Will it please thee to explain to mademoiselle?”

An offer that was always declined.

To be obliged to be almost honest Was Maitre Siccand’s first trial. His second was this: the ambition of his life-time had been to become master of Les Cyprus; he had indulged in fond dreams that the place, of which he had always to her depreciated the value, talking of the sterility of the soil, might be left to him by his old mistress, in acknowledgment of long and faithful service, and in consideration of his connection (which he always maintained, and indeed believed, was a close one) with her husband’s family; or that, even if this were not so, if the place did not fall to him quite so easily, what he had saved, and should save, with the good fat legacy she would leave him, might enable him to purchase it. And Les Cypres was Gonda’s! A girl was his mistress; a mistress, too, who would be mistress. And as to the expected legacy—not a sous.

A doubly and heavily disappointed man was Maitre Siccand. Latterly he had taken to drinking, and in the lowest cabaret of Chantreuil, among the vilest companions, declaimed about his wrongs, railed against the interloper, and bragged of his determination to be avenged; in one way or another to compass the possession of the beloved land.

And now, because again and again he had come back reeling and brawling, a pack of boys behind him shouting out “sorcier” and “ivrogne,” he was threatened with dismissal— dismissal from Les Cypres!

Surely his wrongs cried out for vengeance.

CHAPTER VI

MARIS.

“You are late, my good demoiselle,” was Marie’s greeting.

“Yes, Marie,” her mistress answered, absently; and, to Marie’s surprise and indignation, added no word of apology or explanation. Her thoughts were occupied with Maitre Siccand. To have him always about the place—to be always liable to come across him at any hour, in any part of the grounds— seemed unendurable. He filled her with inexpressible loathing and distrust. He daily grew more drunken, idle, and insolent. But he was an old man, and infirm, and he had lived on the place for fifty, or, as he said, sixty years.

t “‘Yes, Marie!’” Marie cried, mocking Gonda’s tone. “Is that all mademoiselle chooses to say? I say mademoiselle is very late—much too late. I have had much fear and anger. If mademoiselle had told Marie she was going far and would be late—but not a word! I say it is too late for a person like mademoiselle to be out alone. If mademoiselle desired to go so far, am not I, Marie, here; here at the service of mademoiselle?”

“Don’t scold, my good Marie,” answered Gonda, laying her hand caressingly on the woman’s arm, as they passed in at the heavy entrance-door together. “I am sorry you have been anxious. It grew late before I knew. I have only been to the grave-yard. I sat there thinking, and did not notice how the time went. Don’t scold, my good Marie.”

“I spoke only in the interest of mademoiselle. But enough! Mademoiselle is returned safe. Mademoiselle will be more wise another time.”

She used a soothing tone now, as if addressing a child, towards whom she had been too severe. She clanged-to the door and turned the key in the ponderous lock; shaking the door afterwards, to make sure that it was securely fastened.

They were in a large, low, red-tiled hall, the walls and ceilings of which were painted in much the same taste as the outside of the house. This hall, or vestibule, as Marie called it, was dimly lighted by a lamp that Marie had left; smoking and flaring, in one comer. There were many doors in it; two passages ran from it, and two staircases of red tiles, like the vestibule, wound up out of it. One passage ended in darkness; the other at an open door into the kitchen, where a wood fire was blazing merrily.

“Your kitchen looks fjo comfortable, Marie,” Gonda said, shuddering a little as she looked up the dark stairs; “so comfortable, that I feel tempted to stay there with you this evening.”

“Pas convenable pour mademoiselle,” Marie decided, and taking up the lamp, began to mount the right-hand staircase.

Since the death of Madame de la Capréde, Gonda had used none of ‘the gloomy downstairs rooms, haunted as they were by painful and loathsome memories, and darkened at all hours by black bars of swaying shadows from the cypresses. She was glad to shun them.

“Montez, montez!” urged Marie, turning round, and seeing that Gonda lingered and looked longingly towards that opeU door. “Montez, montez! perhaps also the salon of mademoiselle may look comfortable; who knows? Let us see.”

Gonda followed up the stairs, along a passage, past several doors, till Marie, with an air of triumph, threw open that at the end.

“Le salon de mademoiselle!” she announced. The great room, which Gonda had left looking bare, and cold, and gaunt, was now lighted up with a crackling fire of pine cones, pine logs, and vine branches. Faded red draperies, which looked well enough by the fire-light, and which Marie had rummaged out of some old store-place, had been hung a’cross the four windows, and across the doorway that opened into another room.

Before the fire, on a square of tapestried carpet, and guarded by a screen, oyer which Marie had flung some of the same stuff as that of which she had manufactured the curtains, was a small table, spread with a snowy cloth of fine damask. On it were arranged two massive silver candlesticks with wax-lights in them, ready to be lighted, a vase of flowers that had all the glow and glory of summer, and filled the room with fragrance, a china-bowl of salad, two curious, grotesque, and very ancient china dishes, filled with fruit (grapes, half turned to raisins, and pomegranates), and all the necessary appoint- merits of the table in fine old porcelain and ponderous silver—relics of the once wealthy family of the De la Caprédes—things that Marie did not think it well to have in daily use, and which she jealously guarded from the covetous eyes of that vieux bonhomme, as she always called Maitre Siccand.

Marie was observant; she knew well enough that her young mistress loved pretty things and dainty refinement of detail in the arrangements of daily life—that she was content always with the simplest food, but liked it to be served with nicety and elegance—that she had often turned with hidden disgust from such rich high-flavoured messes as madame had loved, and had found sufficient nourishment in a bit of home-baked bread, a cup of milk, or plate of fruit. And this was the jour de féte of mademoiselle.,

Marie stood by in triumph, while Gonda bent over the flowers, praised the fruit, and expressed her wonder and admiration.

“Mademoiselle did not know she was left bo rich in pretty things! Bien, then, in some sort all this is the present of the poor Marie to mademoiselle, on her birthday! Is it comfortable here, mademoiselle?” she asked, winding her arms in her apron,- while her brown eyes gleamed with pleasure.

“Comfortable, indeed! It is more than comfortable, Marie. Why, Marie, where could you get such lovely flowers—late as it is?”

“Mademoiselle is pleased? Well. That gives pleasure to Marie. For the flowers, they are a present to mademoiselle from my Marie, her bon ami is gardener, far from here, at Belle-vue, and he brought them to my Marie. So it is comfortable, mais oui, comfortable,” she repeated.

Gonda had taught Marie the meaning and pronunciation of this and a few other English words, and was always amused to watch the curious far-away look that came into her intelligent face when she spoke them; almost as if the speaking of a foreign tongue carried her rapid imagination to a foreign land.

“Comfortable!” she again repeated, “and this poor mademoiselle has need of something comfortable. Bat, quick, now, if you please, and while mademoiselle takes off her hat and shawl, I will mount the supper. I could have cried with anger for fear the pretty little supper should be burned and spoiled— As perhaps it is, enfin, nous verrons.”

‘While Gonda was, by and by, supping on Marie’s carefully-prepared and prettily decorated dishes, Marie squatted (the only suitable word to apply to her favourite attitude) before the blazing hearth. She stretched first one long, lean and yellow, but small-honed and well shaped hand, and then the other, towards the warmth, and a meditative melancholy came over her expressive face. By and by, with a shrug and a shiver, a “que diable de temps,” as the wind swept round the house, she turned her back to the fire and her face to her mistress.

“The night seems stormy,” said Gonda.

“The sky this morning was all red—We have a saying, we others,—

‘Efl verai que plou o nfevo,

Quand, rougenas, lou jour se levo’

C’est à dire, en Français, qu’il pleut ou qu’il neige, lorsque, rougektre, le jour se leve.”

“And we, in England, have a saying, that means the same.” And Gonda explained the “red sky in the morning” proverb.

“That is very interesting,” said Marie, abstractedly, “but-”

“But?”

“Mademoiselle says, ‘we, in England.’ She counts herself of England still, then, and will soon return there?”

“Que sais-je?” Gonda answered, with one of Marie’s own answers, and one of Marie’s own shrugs.

Another pause, then Marie questioned again—

“And mademoiselle, in truth, has not one relative to remember her on her birthday?”

“Not one”

“That is sad! For a young person to be so alone. ça me fait de chagrin.”

Marie’s quick eyes were gleaming inquisitively from her sallow face.

“Mademoiselle, je vous demande un peu ——” she began. “Mais, pardon, perhaps mademoiselle will say it is not my affair, but-”

“Ask any questions you like, my good . Marie. I will not be offended at your asking them, nor must you be offended if I do not answer them.”

“Mademoiselle, does she propose to remain at Les Cyprus?”

“For the present, Marie.”

‘‘For example, mademoiselle will not winter in town, at Toulon, we will say?”

“No, Marie.”

“Nor travel a little?”

Gronda smiled—wonderfully her smile lit up her face!—and shook her head.

“How stupid I am!” exclaimed Marie.

“For the time of mourning, mademoiselle will naturally remain here, in the country, it is more suitable she should do so. But a long mourning is not necessary. Et apr s?”

“After is after,’” answered Gonda. “Que sais-je? Que voulez vous que je vous dise? Je ne suis pas savante sur ça!”

JShe smiled again, making use of Marie’s own favourite phrases.

Marie was baffled—she did not, however, believe but that a “young person” like Gonda, must have some schemes, plans, views for the future.

As an interlude to more important questioning, she asked:

“The salad—Is it to the taste of mademoiselle?”

“I find it excellent, my good Marie.”

“That is well.” Marie gave a pitying, almost contemptuous shrug. “We others could not eat a salad like that. No fish, no garlic, so little oil, no taste.of anything. That poor madame she liked it otherwise, she did!

A good strong mess! If the oil were a thought rancid, or the fish a bit tainted—‘tant mieux,’ said she. Without doubt she had l’estomac fort—had madame,” continued Marie, meditatively—“The cognac she drank! Mademoiselle did not know the half of it. And in this country it is not good to drink strong things. When mademoiselle came here first,” —Marie went on after a pause, “so young, so fresh, so pretty, I could not take my eyes off her—and never had madame looked to me so ugly, so big, so brown, with the beard and the voice of a man. It would have made me laugh if it had not made me cry, to see the little gracious cares mademoiselle lavished upon madame, and the way madame repulsed them. Madame asked me one day if you did it to make fun of her, but I answered, you were all simple and good, and wanted to show your sorrow when she suffered.

How mademoiselle wept in those first days; hut soon she left off weeping and worked instead—la brave fille!”

“How good you were to me, always, Marie—always I shall remember, and be grateful. But for your kindness I could not have borne my life.”

“Enfin, it is past now, we will not talk of it. Madame rests in peace, as we trust.” Of this, Marie did not speak confidently. “And we, too, now rest. This is well, for a time; hut mademoiselle must look to the future. Surely mademoiselle has some plans for the future?”

“What plans could I have? And why should I have plans, dear Marie? I am well here; we can be well content here, you and I. I am free—I am just beginning to live. What would you have me do ?”

“II faut que mademoiselle se marie answered Marie, promptly,—in much the same way that she might have said, “II faut que mademoiselle se promene or se repose. It is here, all well, like this, for. a little while. But mademoiselle must reflect that she is still quite young, and, probably, will have to live a long while. Marie will grow very old, and will die, and the house will fall to pieces, and all while mademoiselle is still not past middle-age. Mon Dieu! Quel vie triste, horriblement triste, triste a faire peur, is the life of a vielle fille. II faut que mademoiselle se marie!”

“But, Marie,” said Gonda, laughing, while the rich carnation flush tinged her cheek, and the laugh and the flush took some years off her age at once, “it is very easy to say that; but how would you have me manage it? Shall I put an avertissement in the journals, in L’Aigle de Toulon for instance, stating that here at Les Cypres is a young person who desires to get married, and who—”

“Bah! mademoiselle, that is not pretty, to laugh at Marie, who is serious.”

“Who is seriously wishing to rid herself of a troublesome mistress and a dismal service; is that it, Marie?”

“Mon Dieu, that it is not that!” cried the woman, her eyes flashing through tears. “You do not think then to have Marie for your servant always? You think to part with her when you marry? While I—I would follow mademoiselle anywhere, everywhere, even to that gloomy England where is fog always, where the sun never shines.” Gonda patted her on the shoulder caressingly. “No, no, Marie, we will not part,” she said. “Through the winter we will have merry wood fires, roast chestnuts, and tell stories. In the spring and through the summer we will have a gay life, out-doors always. I have longed for such a life here, where all is so beautiful. I am free to live it now.”

Gonda had long ago finished her supper. Marie rising to clear away, found some relief to her feelings in grumbling at mademoiselle for having eaten so little, telling her she would never become “rouge et bien portante.” Then she said, “That will be well, such a life as mademoiselle speaks of, for one winter, one spring, one summer, if God so pleases; but then, mademoiselle will be tired of liberty. It is good for a woman to have a master.

Again I say, il faut que mademoiselle se marie.”

Gonda made a little rebellious grimace at that word master, but otherwise answered nothing. Marie parsing, tray in band, said solemnly:

“Mademoiselle, love is a wonderful thing. When we are young, when we love, then all things in the world seem beautiful, and all the world is good to us. Love is a wonderful thing—and marriage-” Here her face changed; probably the current of her thought changed, and the stream no longer flowed full of fair memories of girlhood and happy love, but was troubled by darker reminiscences of the toilsome years of a comparatively loveless marriage. She shrugged her shoulders with peculiar emphasis, repeated “and marriage,” to add, “is an ordinance of the good God who knows. It is a yoke women’s shoulders .were made to bear—a rod instituted for their chastisement.” With that, bearing the tray before her, Marie left the room.

Marie was no ordinary person. To the fact that she was a Protestant among Romanists, and southern Romanists, her strong character perhaps owed something both of its distinctive faults and merits. For instance, she had some appreciation of truth for truth’s sake, while all the people round her were consistent and habitual liars; but then her contempt for “those poor Catholics” more resembled the feeling of the Pharisee for the publican and sinner, than the gentle pity of our Lord. She was a woman of great natural intelligence, of powerful and original mind, owing little to what is ordinarily called education, for she could neither read nor write. Her appearance was prepossessing. The fine development of her head promised the .presence of those moral qualities which she possessed in an unusual degree. Her conscientiousness was great, and power of devotion beautiful. The sensitive sympathetic mouth and the vivacious eyes were capable of endless variety of expression. In a moment those eyes would wake from a dreamy melancholy abstraction to twinkle with fun or keen shrewdness, to gleam with fierce anger or to glow with a dangerous red glow in their brown depths; while, with the same rapidity, the mouth would break out of its ordinary lines of depression and sadness, to accord with the sentiment of the eyes; for in Marie’s face the eyes never gave the lie to the mouth, nor the mouth to the eyes.

Marie looked older than her years. Her life had been one of toil and suffering. Her health had never been strong, and her temperament was too irritable and susceptible to take things easily.

Her glossy black hair was streaked with grey, and her face deeply lined. Her complexion varied with her varying moods, from a tint slightly whiter than the ordinary southern sallowness, to different shades of positive yellow. She was aware of this; and to describe how angry she had been would sometimes say that she had had “so much anger” as had turned her “as yellow as a lemon.” Her figure, younger than her face, had a peculiar litheness. She wore the picturesque laced bodice of the district. Her caps, her aprons, her kerchiefs were always of irreproachable whiteness.

CHAPTER VII

MARIE’S STORY.

When Marie had finished her clearing-up— and this took her longer than usual, for she could not be easy till the silver and china were restored’ to their safe hiding-places—she returned to the salon. Marie was of a sociable turn; her one recreation was, now and then, to “have a good gossip.” She thought it a pitiable sad thing to be all alone on one’s birth-day; so she wished this evening to bear her mistress company. Yet she would not sit down without the words, “Is it permitted of mademoiselle?” Marie’s social theories, if she had any, were curious: perfectly free-spoken and independent, she seemed to hold one man to be as good as another; but if she held the doctrine of equality, she recognized that of difference. Between “you others” who are “the masters,” and “we others” who are “the servants,” she drew a sharply-defined line, and never lost sight of this self-recognised barrier. Her manner, at the freest, was as far from being offensively familiar as it was from being servile.

Having seated herself uneasily on the edge of a stiff, high-backed chair, clasping her knees, and looking into the fire, Marie returned to her former subject:

“Oui, il faut que mademoiselle se marie. It is necessary, absolutely. As I said, love is a wonderful thing, a beautiful thing.”

“That is quite true, no doubt, Marie,” answered Gonda, who had remained in one position and had pursued one train of thought since Marie left her. “That is quite true, and love is the best gift God gives us; but—”

“But!” broke in Marie,,“we turn it to a curse often. Sometimes love is frightful, terrible, horrible; making human beings more fierce and wild than the beast of the forest and the wilderness.”

“No, no, Marie; not love. Love does not make people wicked and cruel.”

“Mais oui!” ejaculated Marie. “Mademoiselle is young, and does not know: mademoiselle is not of our blood, and does not know how, sometimes, it is with us. Mademoiselle,” she continued, lowering her voice, “I could tell you stories, true stories; as many almost as there are cypresses on this estate; and, ma foi, that is not a few: stories that should teach you how horrible a thing is, sometimes, love. Would mademoiselle like to hear a story?”

“Not one that is too horrible, Marie.”

“One that is true, mademoiselle, every word of it. But first, mademoiselle, let us be comfortable.”

So saying, she pulled a roomy old red-covered fauteuil round towards the hearth, put a footstool before it, and arranged the screen behind it.

“Here mademoiselle will sit,” Marie commanded, and Gonda allowed herself to be enthroned. “ Like that—that goes well,” added Marie, as she lifted the prettily-slippered little feet on to a stool, and arranged the folds of the black dress according to her notions of elegance.

Gonda smiled her thanks.

Marie, when satisfied with the arrangement, with the words, “And here Marie will sit,” placed herself upon another stool opposite her mistress. Clasping her knees, swaying to and fro, she looked sometimes into the fire, sometimes into the listening fair face, as she told her story.

For economy Marie had blown out the wax-lights when Gonda had finished supper, and for prudence she had put the massive candlesticks away. The fresh wood she had thrown into the hearth blazed so brightly as to make any other light needless; but her lamp and the ordinary candles stood ready to be kindled.

Gonda listened at first with but languid interest, leaning back in the depths of the great fauteuil, one elbow resting on its arm, the hand on which her cheek leaned hidden by the loose drooping of her luxuriant hair, which gleamed and shone in the firelight.

“Yes, mademoiselle, the story I go to tell is true. Not more than fifteen years have passed since it all happened. It was on the Place of Chantreuil, where are the plane-trees; where, over the balustrade, is the fine view; where now they dance, and sing, and drink on fète-days; where they go to draw water and to gossip on working-days, and where the market is held on market-days; it was there that then stood the guillotine, to which they were sentenced, both of them, the young man and his bonne amie.”

“I said not too horrible a story, remember, Marie.”

“Mademoiselle, it is true! What was not too horrible to be allowed by the good God to happen is not too horrible for mademoiselle to hear. Allez!”

When Marie, with a particular look and tone, ejaculated “Allez!” she was not to be trifled with. She used that look and tone now. Gonda did not again interrupt her, though she was far from seeing the force of her argument.

“The young man my story is about was from my country. I have seen him often with my own eyes. He was handsome, handsome as the day, and he was not to say wicked or in any way bad till—— but that I come to later. Qu’ est-ce qu’il y aurait k la fin, si tout ètait au commencement?

“The name of this young man was Antoine—Antoine Beaupin. He had been well brought up, and when his father died he got his father’s place, as fermier to a great lady, who had an enormous estate not far from Nismes.

“The name of that great lady has escaped me, we called her always, we others, Madame la- Comtesse, no more. She was young and very beautiful, and (though when Antoine succeeded to his father, Monsieur le Comte was still alive, and, notwithstanding that he was a little aged—certainly a little aged—was a husband very agreeable and complaisant, doating on his wife) she, unhappy woman, as it came out afterwards, fell in love with her young fermier.

“But, as I said, Antoine was not then a bad heart, nor was he very vain for one so young and si joli garçon. And he had at Rougemont, which is not far from his native village, where his old mother had returned to live on the death of her husband, a bonne amie—not the girl who was sentenced with him to the guillotine, as you will hear, but a girl to whom he had been betrothed when she and he were but children.

“Mademoiselle remembers where is Rougemont: the quiet little village, seated on the top of the small hill, that you can see through a gap in the mountains?”

I remember; I have often noticed it.”

“Bien! There lived Lisette, the fiancee of Antoine. It would have been a very suitable marriage. The two families—I knew them both well—had always been in great friendship.

“Naturally Lisette loved Antoine, fine fellow as he was! naturally she was proud of him; naturally she boasted of him a little to the other girls—that poor Lisette!

“Now Antoine did not love Lisette; did not love her with love, you understand; but while he loved no other girl, he did not know this, and this made no mischief. For Antoine meant to marry Lisette, and Lisette was quite content. She thought Antoine’s way was the man’s way. She did not see her father make love to her mother. Allez! It is not in this country the husbands are aux petits soins with their wives; that is for you English; and so I advise mademoiselle to marry from her father’s country. Antoine did not make love to her, but he made love to no one else. He was kind enough to her. She was content.

“That poor Lisette, so stupid and so good! and so industrious! she knew nothing but hotf to work; to fodder the cattle and milk the cows and the goats, and make the cheese; to gather up the olives and pick the grapes, to dry the figs and to reap the grain, to prune the trees, to tend the silkworms. Enfin, tous. She was big and brown, and, perhaps, Antoine, being used to see Madame le Comtesse, who was blonde et belle, and her fine-lady friends, and her fine-lady Paris maids, thought her, each time that he came back to Rougemont, more ugly and coarse.

“How could she but be big and brown and coarse, the poor girl? She worked like a man, like two men, early and late, from winter to spring and spring to winter, and saved a pretty piece of money, against her marriage, the good, wise girl!

“Well, when it wanted but three months to the day fixed for the wedding, Lisette’s sister Blanchette came to live at home. Till then she had lived, since she was five years old, with her grand-parents at Toulon. Now they suddenly sent her home, saying they would have her no longer, giving no reason but that, as Lisette was going to be married, it would be well that she should learn to fill Lisette’s place.

“Blanchette was as little like Lisette. as mademoiselle is like Marie. She was very fair and small and soft and round. She was gentle-mannered and gentle-spoken. She had hands white as milk, white as the blossom of the white almond, white as mademoiselle’s, and smaller. She was forte coquette mais, a la sourdine, and with une mine si chatte et doucereuse!

“The grand-parents had had her well taught. She had chosen to learn because she wished to be like a lady. She could read, she could write, she spoke good French, and pretended to have forgotten the speech of her country. She could make lace and work the finest embroidery. She had learnt dressmaking, and must wear her dresses in the fashion; and she could dress her beautiful blonde hair, allez, une chevelure magnifique, ça! in a new way every day of the week.

“In short, by the side of Lisette, she looked quite the lady; but—she was no good, innocent girl, for all her fine manners. In Toulon they could tell tales of her, I have heard, which are not for the ears of mademoiselle.

“The very first time Antoine and Blanchette met they fell in love. But she was cunning and he was shy, and Lisette was so simple that she did not see what went on before her own eyes.

“Antoine came more often; but then the wedding-day was near, and he had much to talk over with the parents. While he talked with the parents, Lisette would he in and out, busy always, and Blanchette would sit in the door, working at the linen she was making for her sister, and not raising her eyes, that anybody but Antoine could see, so industrious, so modest, so fair! I have seen them myself just so.

“The sisters lay together always.

“One night, a Sunday night, and Antoine had been at the farm all day, Lisette woke suddenly and missed her sister.

“It was the night of a full moon. Lisette got up to look for Blanchette. She was afraid, though she did not know of what. Finding the house-door open, she thought that perhaps Blanchette had a touch of fever, and had gone to the spring for a drink of fresh water. The weather was hot, and Blanchette had complained of her head all day.

“Without waiting to put on her shoes, Lisette went down the small path before the house to look for her sister. She was not at the spring. But while Lisette paused to listen, just as she was going to call, she heard voices which seemed to come from behind a great olive that grew very near.

“Making no noise, Lisette approached that tree, stole round it, and saw—Blanchette in a man’s arms, Blanchette, just as she had risen from her bed, her little white feet bare, and her neck and shoulders, from which her chemise had slipped down, all shining in the moonlight.

“Blanchette’s hack was to Lisette, and the man’s face was hidden as he stooped and kissed that white neck.

“Lisette, keeping close to the tree, made no noise. At first, perhaps, being of a slow nature, she did not believe her own eyes.

“‘If your sister should wake and miss you,’ said the man—and the voice was the voice of Antoine.

“‘She has not before, and she will not to-night,’ was Blanchette’s answer. * She was sleeping and snoring like an ox.’

“‘La pauvre,’ said the voice of Antoine.

“‘Can you sigh with me in your arms?’ asked the wicked girl.

“Giving some passionate answer, the man lifted his head, and showed the face of Antoine..

“Mademoiselle,” cried Marie, interrupting herself, “can you not think how the heart of that poor Lisette grew to be a live coal? how her blood took fire and flamed through her veins?”

Marie’s flashing eyes showed that she at least could realize this.

“It is a shocking story,” Gonda replied. “I wish it were not true.”

“But it is true, all true. I continue. Like a lioness from whom have been torn her little lions—for is not a jealous woman like a wild beast?—Lisette sprang upon them. She tore them apart with violence, she dashed Antoine against the tree with a suddenness and force that half stunned him. In a moment he recovered, and fearing that in her rage Lisette would kill her sister, he struggled with her. He was not coward enough to strike her, but he struggled with her, and interposed between her and Blanchette, and received many blows. Blanchette sheltered herself behind him, crying and screaming, but not lifting a hand to help him, and presently there struck him such a blow that he fell—fell down in the wheat and lay still.”

“Oh, Marie, I can’t much pity Lisette; she couldn’t have loved Antoine much.”

“Mademoiselle!” cried Marie with an air that said, ‘How ignorant she is,’ “the more she had loved him the more she would now hate him. Mademoiselle! if I had been Lisette, if I had had a knife, I should have stabbed them both on the spot, before I had known what I did. She in her soft, white bosom, that my lover had kissed; he in his black heart, the traitor!”

“No, no, Marie, Marie! you would have been saved from that. You who know so much of the holy Word by heart. You who believe in our dear Lord. You who know that it is written that we must forgive our enemies. You who know that He did forgive them, his enemies, while He was suffering and dying a cruel death. You would have been saved from that sin, Marie; your heart would have been softened, and your hand would have been stayed.”

“Then, mademoiselle, there would have been wrought a miracle, a miracle more wonderful than any those priests make the poor Catholics believe. It is good, very good, to believe; but, in short, what would you? We cannot contain ourselves, we others. When the blood blazes and turns to fire, we are altogether as if we were mad. We stab, we kill, and after—after we are ready to kill ourselves for sorrow. But, my story—when Antoine fell, Lisette caught Blanchette by the arm as she was escaping, and dragged her towards the house. There met them on the way the old father, who had been wakened by Blanchette’s screams; he laid his big stick about Mam’selle Blanchette finely, when he heard the story, driving her before him to the house with so many, and such heavy blows, that Lisette at length caught him by the arm, and held him.

“Then he went back to find Antonie; and Lisette, whose good heart was already softened, went with him lest, in his anger, the old man should kill her lover. Lisette saw him where he lay in the wheat, half-stunned, still. She managed to hide him from her father, saying that she could not find him, that he was gone, she decoyed the father back to the house.

“When all was quiet—Blanchette being locked into her room and lying on the bed too sore and bruised to move—Lisette, who said it was too near milking-time to go to rest again, returned alone, to look for her lover—to ask his pardon for her blows! but by this time he had fully come to himself, and was now really gone.

“‘That’s well! then I did not kill him!’ thought the good girl.

“In the morning it was decided that Blanchette should be sent away—not back to the town she was so fond of, nor was she to be allowed to seek a service as maid, which she would have preferred to remaining at Rougemont. No, she was to be sent far away, up among the wild pastures in the mountains— where, in a very poor, rough chalet, lived a sister of the father: a woman who had a name in the country for her strength and her fierceness, and who would watch the fair Blanchette finely, and work the wickedness out of her.

“When Blanchette heard what was to be done with her, she was in despair; she wept and prayed till the good Lisette was touched by her distress, believed in her penitence, and entreated for her.

“Blanchette feigned illness, and, in truth, was suffering pretty sorely, both from the fright and the blows she had received. Lisette tended her, and gained permission for her to remain at home for at least a few days. Antoine was far off enough, at Nismes, as they believed, at his work again. Aie! A’ie! These few days murdered the poor Lisette.

“Antoine had not left the neighbourhood. He was in hiding, hanging about to find out what they were going to do with Blanchette. He was mad with passion, ready to give up all: his place, his character, anything, for the possession of Blanchette.

“One day when all the family were at work in the vineyards, and only Blanchette, who still feigned illness, was left in the house, she and Antoine met. Then it was that Blanchette told Antoine that he must kill her sister, or she would go away and never see him more. Yes, mademoiselle! she told him he must kill, cut the throat of that good, kind Lisette.

“She showed him the bruises on her soft, white shoulders, made by the old father’s stick, and told him that those were marks of Lisette’s violence, told him such lies about Lisette’s barbarities, as die thought would rouse his hatred, and then she worked upon his jealousy, speaking of a lover of hers in Toulon, young, rich, generous, into whose arms she would throw herself if he would not content her.

“Then she kissed him with her burning kisses, and caressed him and promised him— swore to him—that when Lisette was killed, she would love him, and him only, as no man had been loved before: that she would go with him any where he chose, and live with him and be faithful to him all the time he cared for her, and when he cared for her no longer would go away and die, like a faithful dog chased away by a cruel master.

“Antoine pleaded,entreated,argued, ‘Why should they do this great crime? Why should she not fly with him then?’

“On this Blanchette declared that he did not love her. She drove him wild by feigning to believe (perhaps she did believe, for she was wicked enough to believe in any wickedness), that he would soon desert her, perhaps kill her, come back pretending penitence, and marry the big Lisette for the sake of her fat portion.

“Enfin, Antoine, drunk with love and passion, promised to do her will. Promised! she made him swear it—to do it that very night.

“‘How should he know,’ he asked, ‘in the dark chamber—the waning moon rose late, and would give no light — how should he know one sister from the other as they lay side by side on the narrow bed? Mon Dieu! if he should mistake and cut the throat, the small white throat, of his Blanchette!’

“Blanchette’s wicked wits were ready. She * would lie bare-headed: Lisette should wear a white frilled-cap that Blanchette had worked for her wedding. The room would not he so dark hut that the white cap could be discerned on Lisette’s dark head, or if it were, he could feel the frills.

“The deed must he done suddenly and surely, noiselessly, or they would be lost! So it was settled.

“Think, mademoiselle, of that little chamber! Of the flatteries by which Lisette was persuaded to sleep that night in the pretty frilled-cap. Of the two sisters lying down side by side. Of the honest, hard-working Lisette falling into her last sleep; of the white, wicked Blanchette lying listening beside her! Think of all this, mademoiselle.”

“Marie, I would rather not think of it.”

“Mademoiselle, does it not sometimes happen to you to wonder, where then is our good God when such things are done?”

“We cannot understand these things, Marie, we can only trust. I shall not want to hear more of your true stories, Marie, if they are as horrible as this.”

“Not all,-but enough. The telling of this brings it all fresh to my mind as if it had but happened yesterday---” *

“Did he kill her then, Marie?”

“He killed her, while Blanchette, whose heart, perhaps, a little failed her at the last, waited for him outside the door. He killed her, and Blanchette went away with him. And all so quietly that nothing was known till morning, when the old mother (as she told me herself), wondering at the quiet all about (she was used to hear Lisette singing as she milked the goats), went into the girls’ room, and found—”

“Enough—enough!” cried Gonda, starting up, dreading a too vividly horrible description.

“But you have not heard all; they got away, hut they did not know where to go— Les miserables. The whole country would be aflame, search made far and near. They hid for days and days in a vault under the Church of Mon9eau, where daylight had surprised them; meaning, when the first heat of pursuit was over, to go by night, from hiding-place to hiding-place, further and further. That vault was a dismal place: dark, damp, wormy, horrible. At night Antoine ventured out and prowled about, searching food for Blanchette; sometimes he brought back nothing, sometimes fowls, which they tore to pieces, and eat raw. Les miserables.

“It was this, the loss of the fowls, and feathers being scattered about, that led to their being taken.

“Marie,” interrupted. Gonda, “what a terrible night it is.”

The wind was shrieking about the house, swinging and slamming the loose contrevents, and making strange noises in infirm chimneys.

“Un peu de mistral,” Marie, not liking to be interrupted, answered, with an impatient shrug. “Un peu de mistral, as I said we should have. How I love it, this wind. It renders me light and gay as a bird. I felt the first gust of it blow right from the sea as the sun went down, when I stood on the terrace looking for mademoiselle. It was all one as if my Marie had kissed me.”

“Right from the sea? This wind blows right from the sea? Then God help and keep all who are on the wild waters,” breathed Gonda. “But go on, Marie,” she said, after a few moments of silence; “you must be near the end of your horrible story, and I will not again interrupt you.”

“In truth, mademoiselle, I do not love to be interrupted,” Marie answered. Then she continued:

“As I said, mademoiselle, they were taken. They were thrown into prison; they were tried; they were sentenced to be both guillotined. One night, into the cell of Antoine, a few days before he was to die, there came a woman, muffled and veiled, dressed all in black.

“Left alone with the prisoner, she lifted her veil, and showed him the face of Madame la Comtesse, but changed, pale and thin, and tear-stained.

“* It is for you I am changed,’ she told him. (They listened outside, allez!)

“She must have loved him much as he loved Blanchette; for, when he received her coldly, she dropped on her knees and begged and prayed him to be saved; to let her save him; to fly with her.

“Her husband she told him was dead; and when she told him that, he who had murdered a good, loving girl for the sake of the wicked woman he loved, stepped back from her with a look of horror, and called her ‘murderess!’ telling her he would rather be guillotined with Blanchette than live with her. But she was no murderess, that poor lady. The Count, as all the world knew, had fallen from his horse in a fit of apoplexy, and had never spoken afterwards.

“She still implored him to be saved; she even struggled with him, trying to drag him from the cell. She had bribed the gaolers, all was ready, he had but to follow her—had but to pass through the open door.

“But he would not; he was obstinate; he gave her no good word; did not cease from assuring her he would rather die with Blanchette than live with her. Finally she fainted, and was carried away.

“I know no more of that poor Countess. It was said that she gave all her goods to the poor, and entered a religious community.

“Antoine died by the guillotine.

“Of Blanchette the fate was a mystery. It was given out that she died in prison the day before that appointed for her execution, and that she was buried in the prison-yard at midnight. Some believe she killed herself; but many think that she is alive yet. One story maintains that she worked on the pity of the priests; that they got her pardoned; that, bound by frightful vows—(one story, too terrible to be believed, averred that on the dead head of her Antoine they made her take those vows)—to absolute obedience, she is now a sister of some secret order, pledged to perform any unholy service the holy Mother Church may require of her. That is what the Protestants said; while the Catholics had a tale about the rich lover from Toulon, and the money he had spent in bribes.”

Marie, from natural caution, had lowered her voice. She raised it, adding: “Que sais je? There are always wicked persons to invent lies, and stupid ones to believe them. For me, for once, I think those poor Catholics have reason on their side. There is more probability in the story of the rich lover from Toulon having, in some way, contrived to get her off, than in any of the others. He was immensely rich, being the only son of an old money-lender who had just died, and there are not many things money will not do, if you only have enough of it. It was pretty widely known that, though a cautious, wily fellow in general, he had made a fool of himself about Blanchette, being madly in love with her. Moreover, about this time he disappeared from Toulon, and never was seen there openly again.

“And now, at length, I have finished. Will mademoiselle still say that love is not, sometimes, a terrible, a horrible thing, which makes people wicked?”

“I do not know about poor Antoine—that faithfulness of his was fine; otherwise, Marie, this story is too simply horrible, and there is no love in it.”

“Mais, mon Dieu! What says mademoiselle? It is all about love. Antoine, Blanchette, Lisette, the Comtesse, Turquet (that was the name of the lover from Toulon), they all love.”

“It is all about crime, Marie, and passion; jealousy, hatred, and malice — not love, Marie.”

Marie had lifted her hands in astonishment at this obstinate opposition, and was about to hold forth at length, when, just then, a lull in the wind allowed them to hear heavy blows that were being struck upon the entrance-door.

Marie sprang up, turning her yellowest yellow, crying, “Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!”

Gonda was startled but self-possessed. It seemed to her that she detected voices raised in entreaty.

“We must see who is there,” she said; and with a steady hand lighted the lamp.

“Wait! wait!” shrieked Marie; and dragging Gonda with her, she rushed through the gusty passages to her own room, which was over the hall-door.

Opening the window she leaned out. There ensued then a colloquy; Marie screaming her questions in lulls of the wind, and often losing the answers. It was all in patois, and Gonda could make out nothing clearly; but it seemed to her as if Marie were refusing the entreaties of those below.

She presently drew back and shut the window, saying to Gonda, “I tell them it is impossible; and is it not so, mademoiselle? Those below, two peasants, want us to take in a man they have found lying in the lane up above, dead or half-dead, they can’t tell which, while they go to Chantreuil to seek a doctor. Probably they are robbers, and this is their ruse to get in.”

“Dead or half-dead-”

Gonda waited for no more.

“Mademoiselle, mademoiselle; for God’s sake wait, reflect,” shrieked Marie.

“Too late!” She knew by the gust of wind that swept up the stairs that the entrance-door was already open.

BOOK II

SOMEBODY’S.

CHAPTER I

QUI FRAPPE?

The moon had long ago disentangled herself from the wan embrace of the trees cresting the hill, and was now high enough in the cloudless, wind-swept heavens to flood the olive-hoary plains with crystallizing light. Streaming down between the spires of two of the black cypresses, that marvellous white light fell full upon the group on the terrace —two blue-bloused peasants, bearing between them an apparently lifeless form.

Muttering imprecations on Marie, as a woman without pity, they had been about to move away with their burden, when the door opened, and Gonda stood before them.

A moment after, Marie was there, too.

Having gently laid the body down, the two peasants,—Jacques and Andre, they called themselves,—came to the house door; volubly, and with much gesticulation, they answered Marie’s questioning.

In the hollow way, up above, they had found this man: when they had come upon him a priest was kneeling by his side, who told them he had but just come up, and had found the man lying as they saw; dead, as he believed. They had brought their burden to Les Cyprus, because that was the nearest habitation. They had believed that the priest was following them; but, looking back just before they reached the house, had found that he was not in sight. On the way, cet monsieur, as they called the poor lifeless form they carried, had once or twice groaned faintly.

Asked by Marie if they had met or seen any other person near the place they an swered together, that a man had passed them’ quickly, and without giving them good evening, about a quarter of a mile higher up the hill.

While Marie shrewdly questioned, and the men answered volubly, Gonda approached the sufferer.

The form lying there on the tiles had the heavy helplessness of death; the face upturned to the moonlight had the pallor of death.

Gonda turned sick and for a moment recoiled at the sight of blood, blood disfiguring the face and staining the linen of the sufferer, blood upon the terrace, and blood still oozing from a wound upon the temple; but it was only for a moment that she recoiled; then she wetted her handkerchief in the tank close by, and kneeling down, wiped the soiled brow. As she bent close over it, so close that her warm breath must have fanned it, she fancied she detected a slight stir and quiver pass over the face.

’ Marie was now beside her.

“Mon Dieu! quel dommage!” she cried. “So young, so handsome,—and dead, quite dead!”

“Not dead!” said Gonda.

“She had lifted the head from its cold resting-place, to place it upon her arm. She was watching breathlessly, for a further sign of life. It came: the eyelids quivered, theu unclosed, the eyes looked into hers; the lips seemed to try to form some word, which changed into a moan; a convulsive contraction disfigured the face, but passed quickly, and then all was still, save that the wind tossed and ruffled the dark hair.

“That is death!” cried Marie.

But Gonda said, and her tone had something of pitiful wistfulness in it, “Oh, no, he is not dead.”

She asked the men to carry their charge into the house, and then to fetch Doctor Vauprez, of Chantreuil, promising that they should be well rewarded.

“We want a doctor who can bring back the dead,” said Marie; but she offered no other opposition. She was satisfied of the honesty of the peasants, and the truth of their story, having discovered (they were two brothers) that she had known their mother’s brother’s sister’s husband well, when she was young! and that they knew her native village.”

The men took up their burden, Marie, at Gonda’s request, aiding them to move it gently. Gonda, lamp in hand, preceded them up the stairs, and along the passage to the salon; no time was to be lost, and none of the down-stairs rooms were warmed, or lighted, or furnished with any comfort. Even in the salon there was no such luxury as a couch, and Gonda led on to the inner sanctuary—the dead or dying man was laid upon her bed.

Then Jacques and Andre hastened away, promising, with all possible speed, to bring back Doctor Vauprez.

Madame de la Caprède had, during the last year of her illness, been subject to long and deadly swoons. Gouda seemed now to know instinctively what of the remedies used in that case she might try in this, and what it would not be safe to attempt. Marie obeyed all her. orders, but with many protestations of their uselessness, and with much lamentation and wringing of hands: of all this, Gonda— who did everything mechanically, and with a sort of feeling that she should presently wake and find she had been dreaming—for a long time took no heed; but by and by she looked up into Marie’s face with contracted brows, and with a voice sharper than she often used bade her be quiet; adding, “He is not dead: he is suffering acutely, and your talking distresses him.”

Having cut off some hair that, matted with blood and dust, obscured the wound on the temple, which Doctor Vauprez would need to dress, she laid it aside carefully, saying to herself, “There must be somebody to whom any relic of him will be most precious, if he dies; he must be very dear to somebody.”

“What would I not give to know if there is anything else we might do 1” she thought, presently. Then she told Marie to go to the cellar and see if there was any brandy there— in case Doctor Vauprez should need it.

“Maitre Siccand should be able to tell us whether or no there is any,” answered Marie. “There should be many a bottle of that old cognac madame loved so well; but on the day of the funeral, though I believed I had locked all safely—though I had the house-key with me and could have sworn that I had locked the hall-door—le vieux bonhomme somehow rifled the cellar.”

“He may have overlooked a bottle—go and see, dear Marie.”

Marie was gone a long time.

Strange thoughts, fancies, and superstitions passed through Gonda’s over-excited mind. Presently, the tears welled up to her fair eyes and rained down her cheeks as she thought of those who somewhere loved this man, over whom she, a stranger, watched.

Especially, and with special tenderness of pity, she thought of the women—mother, sister, wife, or bride—who loved him. Think-of them, she uttered a fervent prayer that, for the sake of those to whom it was precious, this life might be spared.

Suddenly those closed lips opened.

The eyes that met Gonda’s Were at first wild, expressing nothing but intense terror or suffering; gradually they grew calmer. A smile, that seemed to Gonda to be one of tender recognition, broke over the face as the white lips formed a name—“Colombe.”

Having spoken that name, the sufferer continued to look at Gonda steadfastly; and as he looked, a doubt seemed to rise in his mind, and gradually to cloud his face.

Presently, he half lifted his head from the pillow, but only to drop it with an anguished moan, and again he lost consciousness.

“We may render thanks!” said Marie, returning at that moment, a bottle in her hand and another under her arm. “Here we have two of them, which ce bonhomme must have overlooked. And we may render double thanks,” she said, setting down her booty hurriedly, as the sound of sabots was heard on the terrace; for here, Dieu merci, is that good man the doctor!”

Gonda left the room a few minutes after the doctor entered it; she went to the vestibule where Jacques and Andre were waiting for their promised reward. A gold piece given to each wakened a great amount of gratitude and good-will.

The hall-door stood open while Gonda spoke to them: just as she was going away, her attention was arrested by something moving across the garden-path: something, too erect to be Maitre Siceand, just crossing it to disappear behind the wall of cypresses.

“Have you any one with you, or waiting for you, she asked the men.

They answered “no.”

She then bade them search the garden, and see if some one was not hidden there.

While they did this, she waited at the door and watched.

After some minutes, they returned, to tell her she had not been mistaken; she had no doubt seen some one cross the path; but that it was only the priest—the priest who had been bending over that monsieur, when they had found him in the lane, up above. He had followed here to learn tidings of the injured man—to know if he yet lived. Probably they suggested, in order to ascertain if he were required to administer l’absolution sacramentelle.

“Where is he, the priest, at present?” Gonda asked.

“Across there, in the house of the fermier of madame.”

“Alone? or is the fermier there?”

“A bent old man talks with the good father.”

Gonda could not have told why—she would have said that she was full of foolish presentiments and strange fancies to-night. But her fair brows knitted themselves with displeasure at this news, and it was full of vague uneasiness that she returned to the salon.

She stood there, listening. The doctor had finished his examination of the wounded man. He spoke lightly of the hurt upon the temple, but there were injuries on the back of the head (the skull was slightly fractured and pressed upon the brain) which gave him grave uneasiness. As far as he could judge, he said, the poor fellow’s chance of life was small.

Fever and delirium must inevitably set in within a few hours, unless, as was possible, the stupor in which the sufferer now lay should imperceptibly deepen to death.

The setting in of delirium would in some sort be a good sign. The issue of events would chiefly depend upon the constitutional health and strength of the patient. He might conquer the fever or it might consume him.

Gonda heard all this, and then she heard an altercation between Marie and the good doctor. Marie was artful enough to speak softly; not so the doctor, Gonda could hear each word he said, and from his replies learnt that Marie urged, first, the impossibility, and, secondly, the impropriety, of having a man nursed through a long illness at Les Cyprus, her mistress being “une jeune personne et demoiselle.”

That remonstrance was characteristic of Marie. She devoted herself with a single-ideaded, dog-like devotion to the interests, as she conceived them, of one person, and this dogged devotion blinded her eyes and shut her ears, blunted her moral sense, hardened her heart, and rendered her callous to all conflicting claims.

Doctor Vauprez answered to Marie’s final remonstrance with a shrug, of which Gonda, knowing the good man so well, was conscious, though she did not see it.

“Mais oui, certainement. Send for a carriage, tonight, at once; move him, jolt him over these roads, frightful, execrable, infamous, in such a carriage as you can procure at Chantreuil. And afterwards, much good would the nursing of the blessed Virgin herself—God pardon me if I am profane—do him. Still, as you please; what is he to us? Sick, wounded, and a stranger, let us rid ourselves of him; he cannot fail to be troublesome. I should say that he is gently born and bred, that he is probably brave and amiable. I, Achille Vauprez, am something of a physiognomist; I should say that there are foolish women somewhere who love him, whose pride, whose joy, whose life, perhaps, he is. But what is that to us? Away with him! He will be inconvenient; away with him!”

“Mais, mon bon Monsieur le Docteur-”

“Away with him, I say. Only, my good woman, here, take my knife. If this poor fellow’s life is to be sacrificed to your notions of les convenances, it will be a gentler, tenderer, more Christian act to draw this knife across bis throat here, so, as he lies unconscious. That would be, at most, if he roused, a short, sharp pang; the other would be a long, excruciating agony. Listen and learn. It is held that the brain is the seat of life, the centre of sensation; it is more densely defended than any other part of the frame. But in this case it has been exposed. Approach, look; do you see? But what’s the matter with you? Are you going to faint? Look no more then, but understand that in the slate in which this poor fellow lies any jar to the physical system, any mental emotion, even—in fact, anything that quickens pulsation causes excruciating agony. Nevertheless, what must be must. But mademoiselle is mistress; we must put the matter in her hands.”

“Good Doctor Vauprez,” said Gonda’s voice, soft and tremulous, “there is no need for me to decide, our dear Marie is well convinced. Your patient will not leave this roof till you sanction his doing so, and Marie will help to nurse him as heedfully as yon could wish.”

Doctor Vauprez returned Gonda no immediate answer; instead, he asked Marie for water and a towel, with which she sullenly supplied him.

After washing his hands, he came to Gonda in the salon, still adjusting his coat-cuffs.

“Mademoiselle is always herself,” he said. “That is to say, is always just, gentle, and good. I make to you my respectful and devoted compliments. I demand the pleasure of kissing your hand.”

“Shake it instead, Doctor Vauprez,” Gonda answered, smilingly extending it.

Doctor Vauprez was a short, rather stout man, swarthy of complexion, with grizzled hair and thick, coarse black brows, overhanging small eyes, at once kindly and fiery. He was warm in heart and temper; free and blunt of speech. He had a certain chivalry of nature that made him gentle to the fair and gentle, and to Gonda, from her first coming to Les Cypres, he had been both kind and courteous: he had seen her treated with ignominy and contempt, and for that had been always the more profoundly respectful in his kindness. But with Madame de la Caprède he had taken, necessarily, another way; sharp, sound, strong lecturings he often gave her, sparing neither her whims nor her vices; bringing her to reason when no one else could.

Bending over the hand Gonda extended to him, the good doctor said:

“Mademoiselle has the true heart of woman. I do not blame the good Marie. She has a mistress of whom she cannot be too careful: Where a young woman is concerned it is better ever to err on the side of a too strict regard for ‘les convenances.’ I am a father. I have brought up and given in marriage a half-dozen daughters, I know. But there are limits. This is an affair of life and death.”

“You heard all there was to hear about the matter from the men who found him? Gonda asked, partly to divert Doctor Vauprez’s eloquence into another channel.

“Yes,” he answered, briefly, with a shrug and a darkening face.

“You have no suspicion of them? of their knowing more about the affair than they chose to tell?”

“Jacques and Andre? Honest fellows! I have known them from their birth. I defy them to keep a secret from me if their lives depended upon their doing so. No, no, no; it’s a dark business, and light won’t he thrown upon it by them.”

After stepping hack into the inner room to give Mane some further directions, the doctor prepared to take his leave. He could not resist paying Gonda some further compliments about her “ good heart,” to which she answered, that it must have been a strangely cold, cruel and selfish one if it had led her to decide differently, “more especially,” she added, “as I am so alone that, there being no one to be pained or vexed for me, I have, I think, more right to he, in a good cause, independent of the opinion of the world than have those who are more happily situated.”

To this answered Doctor Vauprez:

“In these country districts, next to Monsieur le Cur in importance stands Monsieur le Docteur. In truth, were I not a modest man, naturally retiring, I do not know that I should set myself second, seeing that many good Christians care more tenderly for their ‘miserable bodies’ than for their ‘precious souls.’ What I am and have of skill, of importance, of influence, enfin, my little all, will be always at the service of mademoiselle. I am not a romantic knight for so fair a’ lady; I prophecy that, soon, will come some other; but there is something of knight-errantry lurking in the bosom of Achille Vauprez, which takes fire always in the service of women »who are women indeed; tender of heart, noble of sentiment, ready of hand.”

“You are good and kind always, and I am indeed grateful to you,” answered Gonda.

She spoke, and Doctor Vauprez knew it, with sincerity, yet something in the quiet dignity of her manner checked him, as it had often done before; but Gonda’s coldness was so sweet and gracious that it had never wounded or offended him, even when it had most chilled his southern nature and most completely cut short his high flights of eloquence. Now, Gonda swiftly passed on to another subject. “You will procure for me, as soon as possible, a suitable nurse,” she said. Lowering her voice, not to be overheard by Marie, she added, “If possible, one who is softer-voiced and less rapid and abrupt in movement than our dear and good Marie. I need not say,” Gonda went on, blushing a little—but she knew that Doctor Vauprez was as poor of purse as he was rich in kindness—“I need not say that if it should prove that this gentleman has been robbed, as is probable, I shall be answerable for all expenses incurred.”

“We will arrange, we will arrange. I will do. my utmost to secure a suitable person—a sister of charity, if possible. I shall be with you again with the first light of morning. I would not leave you for so long, but that it is necessary. Were madame at home, I could trust to her, having given her my instructions, for preparing the medicines, also for the selection of a nurse; though, I fear, in that matter, there will be no great choice; it is a sick season. But madame is away, beyond Rosan n, nursing our youngest daughter’s child.”

Gonda lighted Doctor Vauprez down the stairs, receiving, as she did so, his last exhortations and instructions.

“I expect,” he said, “that in the state of stupor and half-consciousness in which I have left the patient, he will lie till my return; but if it prove otherwise—courage, keep yourself calm—it will be but the order of nature, and no bad sign.”

As Gonda stood at the open door, the sight of the lighted window of Maitre Siccand’s hut, glimmering through the cypresses, reminded her of the priest waiting there. She spoke of him to Doctor Vauprez, fearing lest he should by and by demand admission and disturb the sufferer. The doctor promised to see him before he left the premises, if he were still about.

“Those priests, those priests!” he exclaimed, for all that he was a good Catholic, “how often they send a soul upward and downward, as the case may be, that we would have kept a little longer upon the earth! Those priests, those priests!”

A few minutes afterwards, Gonda saw the doctor and the supposed priest go down the cypress-bordered path together, apparently engaged in earnest talk.

CHAPTER II

SŒUR ROSALIE.

For some hours the wounded man lay motionless and speechless. Often and often during those hours, Gonda, who shared Marie’s vigil, bent down over the pillow, approached her cold cheek to the slightly parted lips to feel if the breath of life still passed from between them.

As the hours went by in this silent watch Marie dozed frequently.

Long, strong blasts of wind shook the windows, sometimes the house; the lamp wavered and flickered, fantastic shadows thrown by the moonlight, shining throug1h the tost boughs of a tall almond-tree, contested in grotesqueness with those cast by its wavering light.

Gonda’s wakeful eyes did not weary; but seldom were they drawn from that suffering face.

Towards morning, when she was beginning to watch for the moonlight on the floor to fade out, and the lamp-light to show yellow and dim, as she had so often watched for them to do through the frightful nights she had passed by Madame de la Capréde, the patient’s state changed. The face wore a look of more conscious and acute suffering; now and then he moved, or moaned, the ghastly pallor of the cheeks was exchanged for a flush of fever, and the eyes that opened widely and wildly, by snatches, burnt with a painful light.

There set in that incessant restlessness which is so weary a thing to watch, and so hopeless a thing to assuage; muttering, moaning, tossing, the sufferer knew no moment of quiet.

Later still there followed what was yet more terrible: violent movement, short sharp cries, vehement exclamations, sometimes in English, sometimes French or Italian; uttering which the sufferer would start up, struggle as if with some unseen enemy, then groan and fall backwards, overcome by the agony which this physical and mental agitation induced.

The last hour, the hour of dawn, was a terrible one to Marie and Gonda: hut before the stars had all faded from the sky, before any rosy light had smitten the pale cheek of the olive-covered western hill, while all the plain lay wan and colourless, and the distant bay looked grey and cold, Doctor Vauprez came, and with him a nurse, a woman in the dress of a sister of charity, whom he named, as she had named herself to him, Sœur Rosalie.

She had been recommended to him as an experienced nurse, a person who would be invaluable; whom they might think themselves most fortunate to have secured. So Doctor Vauprez, rubbing his bands together in a self-congratulatory manner, informed Gonda in a whisper, while Sœur Rosalie silently and noiselessly laid aside her cloak, and began to unpack the contents of a small basket she had carried on her arm:

“And it was by the merest accident that I secured her—but of this by and by—now for our patient.”

Having heard from Gonda all there was to tell of the night, Doctor Vauprez passed from the salon into the inner room.

Gonda approached Sœur Rosalie and spoke a few gracious words to her; to these the sister answered courteously, and in a soft, smooth voice, but without lifting her eyes from the contents of her basket, or turning her head towards the person who addressed her.

Presently Doctor Vauprez, needing assistance, summoned both Gonda and the nurse to the inner room. Gonda he called to him at the bedside; the nurse he bade prepare a sedative and restorative draught, the ingredients for which, stood ready on a little table against the wall.

Without a word, without a look towards the bed, Sœur Rosalie began to do as she had been directed.

The part to which Gonda had been called was not an easy one; when she had done all that was required of her she passed to the foot of the bed, and there, hidden by the curtain, quietly but completely fainted. What she had had to look on at, and the agonized moans of the patient, as the doctor examined and dressed his wounds had been too much for her exhausted nerves.

The sufferer was lying pallid and motionless, in temporary exhaustion, when she moved from his side.

Doctor Vauprez, bidding Sœur Rosalie now administer the draught, passed into the salon, Marie following him, they both believing that” Gonda had left the sick room before them.

Gonda’s swoon could have been but very brief, she had risen from the floor, stood leaning a moment against the wall, still in the shadow of the curtains of the bed, when the low-spoken exclamation of Sœur Rosalie. “Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!” thrilled and startled her.

The sister stood by the bed-side, which she now for the first time approached, cup in hand. Gonda saw her set down the cup, clasp her .hands, stand gazing, heard her repeat that half-stifled cry: “Mon Dieu! mon Dieu?”

Suddenly catching sight of Gonda, she changed her attitude; taking up the cup, she explained, “I thought, for the instant, that he was already dead.”

Then she passed her arm under the patient’s pillow, raising his head with an ease that showed she must have great strength for one so small and so delicately-framed, she caused him to swallow the medicine, laid back his head and smoothed the pillow, adjusted the tumbled coverings, and turned away.

Gonda thought: “Her heart is not dead, then, though her face is like a dead face.”

But, except on one other occasion by and by to be recorded, never again, not for the briefest moment, did Gonda detect in Sœur Rosalie any show of interest, sympathy, or emotion.

A very brief observance of Sœur Rosalie convinced Gonda that Doctor Vauprez had not said too much in her praise as to her merits as a nurse.

There was an absolute quiet about Sœur Rosalie which should have been soothing— which Gonda for a long time did not doubt was soothing to the patient, though it oppressed her—oppressed her most painfully and strangely, made her think, sometimes, that to see a corpse rise up and go through the duties of a sick-room, day and night, would be no more frightful than to watch the soulless face and noiseless movements of Sœur Rosalie.

When these thoughts and fancies troubled Gonda, she, as far as she was able, accounted for them to herself, by remembering that she was certainly in a state of over-strung excitement, and that this, probably, made her mind morbid and unhealthy.

But as the days and weeks went on there grew and strengthened in her an unconquerable aversion to this perfect nurse. She catalogued to herself all her admirable qualifications. Her voice, not the elaborately-subdued conventional voice of the hired nurse, but a voice that somehow seemed to stir the quiet as little as silence itself (and yet it jarred on Gonda’s nerves, and seemed to set her whole being in painful vibration). The soft, swift decision of her movements, the lightness of her touch, the noiselessness of her footfall, her unwearying patience, her unremitting vigilance, her unfailing resource; on all these things Gonda dwelt, and yet she had absolutely, day by day, to fight with herself, to reason with herself, in order to suffer this woman’s presence in the house. Each night she was weary of the struggle, and each morning she had to begin it afresh.

Doctor Vauprez did not tire of praising the sister: “She was,” he said, “the realization of his ideal of a nurse.”

To his praises Gonda answered with such reserve that, at last, one day the good man questioned her:

“How, then? Mademoiselle has something against Sœur Rosalie?”

«No-”

“That * no ’ is ‘yes!’ What is it?”

“Nothing—absolutely nothing.”

“Which means, sometimes, everything! Speak freely—she does not please you?”

“She does not please me.”

“She does not inspire you with confidence?” “In her skill?—Yes. In herself?—No.”

“But it is her skill only we want;” said the doctor, after some reflection.

“Perhaps—if—I do not know-! She is a mere machine—she shows no heart— she-”

“You do not require her to love her patient?”

“Doctor Vauprez, I cannot jest. I do not believe in human beings who are mere machines—if we are not actuated by good feelings and motives we are likely to he by bad ones.”

“I do not see that she can nurse well from bad motives.”

“No; nor do I. I have striven, therefore, with my instincts against her; but, now, I feel sure that her effect on our patient is not good—that-. In short, Doctor Vauprez, you yourself say that, just now, he does not progress as you could have expected him to do—having got so far, so well.”

“That is true; but with that, probably, Sœur Rosalie has nothing to do. Mademoiselle, que voulez vous? We have nothing against her, you or I. I could not replace her —-que voulez vous?” and .Doctor Vauprez shrugged his shoulder.

“She is peculiar in appearance, corpse-like at times, and ghastly,” the doctor went on; “but our patient is not particularly nervous or fanciful; not fanciful, except in as far as some memory, some association, or some delusion causes him to hang on your presence; for which I am sorry, for I fear he is wearing you out. It is your over-strung state that accounts for something, for much, perhaps even for all of your prejudice against the poor sister.”

“But Marie shares it.”

“Marie is a woman full of prejudice and jealousy. In appearance, as I was saying, our nurse is not prepossessing; yet she must have been pretty enough once. Often some terrible history attaches to these sisters. Such may be the case with Sœur Rosalie. Some mortal blow may have killed her heart; some terrible shock whitened her hair, and given her that corpse-like pallor. If we knew all, she might, instead of repugnance, inspire us with the deepest commiseration.”

“Yes,” acquiesced Gonda, but absently; for she.was pondering—feeling about to find some reason for her dislike.

“The whiteness of her hair, of her brows and lashes, gives an unnatural look to so smooth and unlined a face,” continued the doctor, “and confirms me in my idea that she has been, as it were, paralyzed at heart by some terrible shock.”

Doctor Vauprez wished, by awakening Gonda’s compassion, to help her to conquer an unreasonable and inconvenient dislike.

Again Gonda answered, “Yes,” in that absent, mechanical manner. Then she added quickly,.almost passionately, “You will think me unchristian and uncharitable; but I have an invincible and an increasing aversion to Sœur Rosalie. Something in her face, in her voice, in her manner, makes my flesh creep and my blood congeal. My distrust of her is as deep as it is vague. I can no longer live in the same house with her.”

Doctor Vauprez laid his finger on Gonda’s wrist. “Anxiety and want of sleep, following upon the shock your nerves sustained on the night my patient was brought here, are doing their work,” he said, “My good young lady, I shall prescribe for you some calming medicine; and I shall reprove Marie for indulging her jealousy by ministering to mere fancies.” “Dr, Vauprez, you have never told me— How did you hear of the sister? What do you personally know of her?” asked Gonda, without noticing in any way the doctor’s last words.

“Well, enfin, not much; but then a sister of charity is always a sister of charity. That fact suffices as guarantee for character and capability. They are admirable women, all of them. It is an admirable order. We doctors know its saving and healing merits.”

“But suppose this woman is not really a sister of charity. Marie solemnly declares that she is convinced she is not. How did you hear of her? You have not answered me that. There can be no great difficulty surely in procuring and assuming the dress.”

“But some difficulty,” the doctor answered, “in imagining a motive for her doing so. I heard of her from the priest who was waiting here that first night.”

“And who was that priest? You knew him?”

“No, he was a stranger from a distance, merely passing through this country.”

“And what did you learn of the sister from him?”

“That she was from the hospital of Bigorre, was returning there from a Village to which she had been sent. He knew her, he said, only from what he had seen of her a few days before at the bed-side of her last patient, to whom he had been hastily summoned, when passing through the place, in the absence of her own confessor. And he named that last patient of hers—a woman I knew.”

“And who died?”

“Who died. Good nursing cannot keep old people alive for ever. Yes, she died,” the good doctor added, with a comical shrug, “she died suddenly. She was a capricious old woman, and it was found that she had left all her property—she was wealthy and had always been avaricious—to a man who, a stranger to her only a few months before, had mysteriously become her legal adviser, agent, and factotum.”

“And you saw Sœur Rosalie at her bedside?”

“No, not at the bed-side; I met her leaving the house as I entered it,” said the doctor, meditatively. “I was not summoned till too late. I arrived after the old lady was dead. As I said, she died suddenly. I found neither nurse, priest, nor lawyer in the house. Only the corpse of my old friend, and an old crone watching by it.”

“Had any one any reason—that man you spoke of, for instance—for wishing to keep you out of her way? Was it done designedly?”

“I might fancy so, if I had not the good opinion I have of human nature,” the doctor said, with a smile and a curious twinkle in the eyes, which had been moistened by emotion as he said “ my old friend.” “As my old friend had often promised me a handsome legacy, giving rein to my imagination, I might construct a whole romance of crime, in which a sister of charity, who was no sister of charity, should be the accomplice of a rascal in accelerating the death of an old woman, whose money they feared might escape them if she lingered.”

“Might there not enter into your romance a priest who was no priest, and-”

“That probability forbids,” interrupted the doctor, hastily and emphatically. “If the priest had been cognizant of crime in that affair, would he not have taken good care not to bring it to my mind in connection with this nurse he was recommending?”

“Unless he knew that you had seen and thought you must recognize the nurse, and wished by this apparent openness to throw you off your guard.”

“My dear young lady, we are talking, both of us, flagrant nonsense. I have no objection to a romance; but I must have motive to give probability to the incidents introduced, before I can take any interest in them.”

“Utterly in the dark as we are as to the history of your patient,” Gonda replied, speaking very earnestly; “only knowing that he has been the victim of violence (you, yourself, speak confidently so far, Doctor Vauprez), and that fact, according to your own reasoning, proving that there is some one who has motive for injuring him, it is quite impossible for us to say that the same hand which gave those nearly-fatal blows, is not now busy in weaving some ‘subtle plot. What was motive for one crime may surely be motive for another. On the very first evening my suspicions fastened, almost without my own knowledge, upon the supposed priest (I do not for a moment imagine that he. is really a priest); and now you tell me that this very man recommended as nurse the woman whom you think I wrong by my mistrustful thoughts.

Indeed, Doctor Vauprez—”

“Indeed, mademoiselle,” interrupted the doctor abruptly, and with nothing of his usual courtesy, “you are not yourself; you are suffering a diseased imagination to run away with you. -I would, at all events, choose a sound Pegasus. To return to the region of common life and sober sense, what Were we speaking of? Oh! of my old friend. I must confess that I did her injustice She had always promised me a handsome remembrance of her, and a handsome one she left me. A portrait, a miniature of herself; and I can assure you in her youth she had been a beauty. Thereby hangs a tale you may hear from Madame Vauprez.”

Gonda having followed Doctor Vauprez down-stairs when he took his leave, had been talking to him in the vestibule, looking out of the open house-door. She now, at some slight sound, suddenly turned from him towards the stair, in time to see, what Doctor Vauprez had already seen, and what had occasioned his abrupt change of manner, Sœur Rosalie going up it, in her hand a steaming cup of potage, the lunch of her patient. They had left her in the sick room—when had she descended? How had she contrived to do so unobserved? How much had she heard of what had been spoken between them ?

Gonda looked at Doctor Vauprez significantly; he shrugged his shoulders.

“I could believe she is set to watch me” said Gonda; “she is everywhere at once; always at my elbow; I never can escape from her.”

“Watch her, if you will; report to me anything, however trivial, that you deem suspicious; and do not fail to take the medicine I shall send you.”

So saying, Doctor Vauprez took his leave, not well satisfied to-day either with his patient or his patient’s hostess.

Gonda stood a few moments in the patch of sunshine that the break in the cypresses, made by the terrace-steps, allowed to fall upon the tiles; stood there reasoning with herself, till the sunshine left her and the shadow fell on her. She might have stood there longer; bnt there reached her and touched her a now familiar cry. She started, Kin swiftly up the stairs, down the passage, across the salon, to the sick-room.

A familiar cry—a cry upon “Colombo! Colombo!”—a cry that, night and day, at frequent intervals, through all the time, since the wounded man was brought to Les Cypres, rang through the house; a cry that only Gonda could answer and silence by her presence, by her voice, by her touch.

Who was this loved Colombo, whose fancied presence worked like a charm? Where was she this long while during which a stranger filled her place?

How often and how often Gonda asked herself these questions, profoundly pitying the absent Colombe.

The sick man all this time had never been conscious and calm enough to be safely questioned. Doctor Vauprez had opened the pocket-book that had been found upon him, and had, as well as he was able, examined the few papers it contained; but they threw no light upon the question of where his friends resided. They gave him a name. Hotel bills were made out to Monsieur de Triancourt; letters were addressed to the same name at posies restantes in various parts of the continent. One letter, that seemed to be from some English friend began, “My dear Henri,” but bore no address of the writer, and was only signed with initials. The wounded man had not been robbed. The purse found in the breast-pocket of his coat contained a considerable amount in gold and notes; a valuable watch and chain, and a massive ring, holding a fine diamond, were also found on him.

The day after he was brought to Les Cyprus one of the peasants who had found him had picked up a small valise near the spot where the “accident” had happened. The key of this was wanting; and, as Doctor Vauprez had, before its arrival, supplied from his own wardrobe what was required, it remained unopened.

Plunder had evidently not been the object of the savage attack made upon a defenceless man. An attack as cowardly as it was savage, blows given from behind with a bludgeon felling him to the earth almost before he knew he was assailed. This was what Doctor Vau-prez considered had been the nature of the “accident.”

CHAPTER III

INFLUENCES.

Sometimes now, and always at such times as he seemed most himself, the eyes of the invalid would rest on Gonda with a questioning look, as if some doubt of her identity dimly visited and troubled his weak and uncertain mind. Gonda, judging from the name that his Colombe was not English, had hitherto spoken to him always in French, to run the less chance of disturbing his illusion. It was in French that he spoke to her, therefore, though, in his delirium, English came freely and familiarly from his lips.

“I have called you so often,” he said, in a faint voice of gentle reproach, when Gonda stood by him. “Where were you that you did not hear me? It is not often that I call you and you do not hear me. You have been away a week; so long that I began to believe it must he true what they told me long ago that you were dead. I am weary of waiting for you to come hack!”

“Monsieur called hut twice, and mademoiselle had been away not a half-hour,” Marie interposed.

Of this he took no notice, but asked Gonda (Colombe, as he called her,) to put her hand upon his forehead, as she had often done before, for he thought if she did so he could sleep.” She sat down by him, laying her hand lightly upon his hot forehead. And, by and by, Sœur Rosalie, bending over the bed, whispered:

“He sleeps!” adding, “I shall not he wanted just now therefore, so I will go out for a little moment, pour respirer un peu de fraicheur!”.

Gonda had grown to have such a pro- found distrust of Sœur Rosalie that, if the woman gave her a reason for what she did,.or was going to do, Gonda always instinctively, though she reproached herself for doing so, said inwardly, “That is a lie, told to conceal something she does not wish me to know!”

She wished, now, that she could have watched the sister: Marie had told her that once or twice lately, when Sœur Rosalie had left the house, she had gone to the hovel of Maitre Siccand. Truly, a strange place to seek “de fraicheur!”

But Gonda could not move, and Sœur Rosalie knew she would not. Often, before, Gonda had remained for hours by the sleeper’s side, her hand laid, as now, upon his forehead; sometimes, it is true, moving it away for a few moments because it grew cold and heavy, hut only to replace it when it had recovered its natural warmth.

His sleep, to-day, seemed restful and profound. As Gonda watched it, she almost grudged the drawing of the needful breath* so. much she dreaded to disturb it: so truly she read in the deepening look of ease that this sleep was blessed sleep.

With a strange mingling of pity and of envy, Gonda, as die watched, thought of the woman whose place she filled, by whose name she was called. She thought of her with pity} because her place was filled; with envy, because it was hers to fill.

As she gazed and gazed upon the wasted face, she realized how deeply and how dearly such a face must be engraven on the heart to which its owner’s love was given, and did not think to fear that it was now, already, very deeply lined upon her own.

Lately she had realized in her imagination, for the first time, something of the deeper sweetness and sadness, something of the more exquisite bliss and pathos of loving and of being loved. Of loving—for did she not realize how Colombe must love? Of being loved—for did she not—when the dark eyes she thought so soft and beautiful welcomed her entrance, dwelt upon her presence, and with a pathetic pleading pain seemed to deprecate even a brief absence—did she not then thrill to feel how Colombe was loved?

As if she had been Colombe, she suffered in the suffering of this man, whom Colombe loved. As if she had been Colombe, she prayed passionately for the prolonging of his life, so precious to Colombe. Suffering for Colombe—praying for Colombe—did she begin to love for Colombe, too?

On this day on which Gonda watched such easeful sleep, the sick man had lain ill a month; only a month. Yet Gonda seemed hardly able to remember the time when care for him, thought for him, this stranger, so strangely cast upon her, had not been her waking and her sleeping life.

This stranger l Her own face in the glass was not now more familiar I

This stranger l And her life now centred in his life!•

All# times and seasons were alike to her now, save as they affected him.

Only this morning Marie had startled her by speaking of “le jour de Noel” as at hand. Till then not one thought of Gonda’s had gone forth to meet the day, which, though it had often been a sad day for her, because its social festiveness pointed her loneliness, she had always, with her own heart, tried to keep with grateful gladness, and which this year, being free to please herself, she had meant to keep by gladdening it for those, a few poor neighbours, round her.

Hour followed hour as Gonda watched alone and undisturbed: now and again Marie looked in, smiled, nodded, and retired. Sœur Rosalie continued absent.

Late in the afternoon the patient woke: softly, and yet suddenly, his eyes met Gonda’s, and in his eyes, clear and calm, was that happy languor of dreamy pleasure, that drowsy reluctance to come back to the waking world, that look which is so exquisitely dear and sweet to a loving nurse and watcher, telling of delicious ease, and of the lingering, balmy influence of life-restoring sleep, that differs from the heavy opiate-produced stupors, from the nightmare-haunted slumbers, which have seemed worse than waking, even as in our imagination heaven differs from hell—a look indescribable, not to be imagined by any one whose heart it has never set beating with glad gratitude. Gronda understood this look; her beautiful eyes moistened and filled, even to the falling, while she smiled, of two large tears.

Taking her hand, feebly lifting it to his lips, he thanked her for that smile, those tears, murmuring:

“It is sweet to live when one is loved!”

“How much better you seem! How glad I am!” breathed Gronda.

“Yes; I am better, much better! you. care for me so well. When you are with me I am always better!”

After swallowing the broth which Marie now brought, after a glance round the room, which Gonda fancied noted with satisfaction the absence of the sister, he fell asleep again.

It was not till after dark that Sœur Rosalie reappeared.

To account for her absence she said that, while pacing the Cypress walk, down there, between the white gate and the court, she had remembered that in the morning she had omitted to ask Doctor Vauprez two or three questions about the administration of some new medicine, which she had thought it’ important to have answered at once. She had, therefore, walked to his house at Chantreuil: at the moment when she arrived the doctor had not yet returned from his rounds, and she had waited, perhaps, an hour.

She produced a bottle of medicine from the basket she carried—the medicine that Doctor Vauprez had ordered for Gonda: the directions upon it were in his hand-writing; she had, therefore, really been to Chantreuil; this proof, however, was hardly needed for Gronda was well assured that Sœur Rosalie would not tell, so easily to be disproved, a lie!

The evening wore on, and the patient still lay in that easeful rest.

Gronda was looking particularly white and worn to-night: when Marie commented on this, Sœur Rosalie suggested that, perhaps, it might be well for mademoiselle to rest now, while their patient rested so profoundly; towards morning he would probably grow uneasy, and if so, would call for her.

The suggestion was reasonable, and it was only a suggestion, offered quite mechanically and indifferently: any anxiety or urgency would at once have put Gronda on her guard. As it was, feeling, as she did, on the very edge of an utter breakdown, she yielded to Marie’s entreaties.

“But first, mademoiselle, you will take your medicine,” said Marie.

The sister had not in words reminded Marie of this medicine, but she had put the bottle into her hands, begging her to remove it, lest it should get mixed with the phials of her patient, and some mistake should be made.

“Not too well corked,” said Marie, as she removed the stopper and poured out a dose.

“Possibly I hurried the good doctor in its preparation—I was impatient to return,” answered the sister.

Gonda took the glass obediently from Marie’s hand, and drank its contents; then having made Marie, who was to watch with Sœur Rosalie the early part of the night, promise to awake her if she were wanted before she woke of her own accord, she went away to the room at the other end of the long passage which she occupied now.

She threw herself at once, still dressed, upon the bed: she was very weary, weary to the extent of feeling stunned and stupid, but not, she imagined, sufficiently at ease to sleep. Yet, presently she felt so heavy a torpor coming over her, that she thought, “This will not do—I will get up; if I once sleep I shall never wake again!”

That she might hear more easily if she were called for, she had left her door ajar: she had meant to lie upon the watch, dozing perhaps at intervals, but lightly, and ready to rise at a moment’s warning; feeling now that this would be impossible, she sat up in bed: but her heavy head fell back upon her pillow, her eyes closed, and while she fancied she was rising she fell asleep.

She knew nothing more till morning. The sudden opening of her door (which she had left open) roused her; she’ started up, feeling sick and giddy, miserably confused and ill, and there stood Marie by her bedside, yellow, hollow-eyed, her hair and dress in great disorder.

“He has been much worse, on the point of death, cet pauvre monsieur!” cried Marie.

“The doctor has been—is gone—will return —gives little hope!”

Marie sank down upon a chair, and began to weep and to wring her hands. Gonda had sprung to her feet, but she was so faint and giddy that she was forced to lean back against the bed.

“Oh, Marie!” she cried, “how cruel of you! I can never forgive you! You did not call me, and you promised!”

“Marie is mortal, like another,” answered Marie, sullenly. “I have watched much and worked much. I suddenly, before I knew, fell into a heavy sleep. When I fell asleep he slept, too, breathing softly as an infant. When I roused, he was raving violently. He had burning fever.

“Mais, mademoiselle, what is it? What is the matter? Tell me then!”

A frightful suspicion had chilled Gonda, had seemed to turn her heart and brain to stone; the sudden spasm of it had shown in her face.

“Did you, too, leave the room last night, Marie?” she asked, when she could speak.

“Have I not promised mademoiselle not to do so in her absence?”

“You slept in the room, Marie! and slept so heavily that-Who, then, fetched the doctor?”

“Cet vieux bon homme!” pointing towards Maitre Siccand’s hovel. “He is always lately prowling round the house at night. She spoke from the window to him; she says she could not wake me.”

“You found my door shut this morning? I left it open.”

“Oui, mademoiselle, mais, c’est facile, to account for that! The sister said, and rightly, that the open door would give you cold—the wind up this passage is something frightful. I therefore came and shut it.”

“Did you drink or eat anything after I left you, Marie?”

“Mais, mademoiselle-” Marie paused— reflected. “It is that, then, she suspects,” she muttered to herself. “But why?-No, no; that is not possible.”

“You have not answered me, Marie.” Gonda’s voice was authoritative.

“I drank—yes, a good cup of tea; the. sister made it. She said- But what does mademoiselle suspect?’

“I cannot wait to explain now, Marie; hut watch her, Marie, and never again drink, or let him drink, anything she has prepared. We will arrange how to prevent this another time.”

So saying, Gonda hurried to the sick-room, feeling still so strangely weak and confused that she groped her way along the wall for fear of falling.

Sœur Rosalie met her with the excuse— “Monsieur le docteur hearing that you slept, would not permit me to rouse you.”

To this Gonda answered nothing.

Marie, loving always to produce a strong effect, had represented things as worse than they really were. She found the sick man changed for the worse from what she had left him on the evening before certainly altogether weaker, both mind and body; but the change was more disheartening and disappointing than alarming.

Later in the day Doctor Vauprez came again; he looked grave, perplexed, anxious; he questioned Sœur Rosalie sharply and closely, but he spoke of the change for the worse as only a temporary relapse, occasioned, perhaps, by the new medicine which had been given first that night. When he said those words, Gonda’s eyes and the sister’s met; a chill came over Gonda, felt to the marrow of her bones.

Gonda followed Doctor Vauprez from the house when he was leaving; she told him of the strangely heavy sleep into which both she and Marie had fallen; though she had shut the house-door behind her she told him only of facts, said nothing of suspicions, but her pale face and dilated eyes, her look of mental and physical suffering, were not lost upon the doctor. He pretended to laugh at her.

What was there strange, he asked, in that sleep of hers? She had hardly closed her eyes for a month, he believed, and that evening had taken a sedative medicine, which, possibly, he had made too strong. If she had slept the day through as well as the night, he should not have wondered!

“And Marie? she took no medicine!”

“As to Marie!” here he shrugged his shoulders, and was not ready with an answer.

“I see,” he added, “we must send away Sœur Rosalie, and that quickly, or else you will end with a nervous fever; there are, I know temperaments which act and re-act on each other most strangely, either in attraction or repulsion. We have in this house, at present, both phases of this phenomenon. By the by, let me have that bottle of medicine, I will examine what remains, to see if I made it a stronger opiate than I intended.”

Gouda re-entered the house to look for it; the bottle was not to be found. She did not care then to question Sœur Rosalie about it; but the fact that she was searching for something, did not escape the sister.

If it was the medicine of mademoiselle, for which mademoiselle looked, the nurse said, she had met with a misfortune, she had overset and broken the bottle—broken it to fragments, which she had thrown upon the fire.

“Bah! What carelessness!” cried Doctor Vauprez, when this was repeated to him. Then looking into Gonda’s white face, he said, “I see, I see, we must send away Sœur Rosalie. As soon as it is possible, very shortly, I will fetch home my wife, then we will send away Sœur Rosalie. Meanwhile,” he added, softly, “do nothing to show that you mistrust her. Resist as well as you can your morbid fancies.”

Doctor Vauprez went down the steps along the cypress-walk. Gonda returned to the house, and Maitre Siccand, who, hidden under the terrace-wall in a corner darkened by the cypresses, had made a third at this interview, sidled back to his own den.

CHAPTER IV

FEVER-FANCIES.

Two days passed uneventfully. They were passed by Gonda and Marie in the most unrelaxing vigilance. The state of his patient perplexed Doctor Vauprez. While he was more rational and collected in look and speech than he had yet been, in other ways he was less reasonable.

Through all his illness, in all intervals of consciousness, and even through his delirium—though at times, Doctor Vauprez declared, his suffering must have been agonizing —the sick man had shown a touching patience and docility, a consideration for those round him, and a gratitude for services rendered him so pathetically beautiful, that it had once and again filled Marie’s eyes with moisture; but now he was preyed upon, not only by incessant restlessness, which Doctor Vauprez declared was wearing out his strength, but also by an excessive irritability, the struggle against which was even more disastrous.

Gonda found, or fancied a new expression in the wasted face—a look that haunted her: the eyes which during acute physical suffering had preserved a sweet serenity, now often seemed to her to be full of strange anxiety, to be strained to a watchful horror; after dwelling on Sœur Rosalie to turn to Gonda in significant appeal.

It seemed to Gonda that the sick man. watched and waited to he alone with her; that there was something straying through his weakened mind that troubled him.

But it chanced, or was by the sister so contrived that, though Gonda and Marie were never both absent from the room, Gonda was never there in the absence of the sister, except when the patient slept.

He seldom called her “Colombe” during these days, and if he did, when he had used the name, his eyes would question hers, he seemed to wait to hear the name disclaimed. Yet he still treated her with that familiar and unscrupulous exactingness, which is the truest and’ the tenderest use the sick can make of those whom they know love to serve them, those whom they instinctively feel hold life dear only in proportion as it may he devoted to their need—value health and strength only as treasure to be spent and blessed by that loved and loving use.

On the third day following the night which had wakened in Gonda such terrible suspicions, as she sat by the sick man through the afternoon, .reading to him, because the sound of her rich, character-full voice seemed, just then, more than anything else, to soothe him, it appeared to her that Sœur Rosalie was restless and ill at ease.

Twice she had risen from her usual place— a chair placed with its back against the wall,

, and beside the table on which were set the glasses, bottles, cups, which accumulate in a sick room, but which Sœur Rosalie kept always in nicest order—had risen from this place—where she would often for long intervals sit passive, immobile as a waxen effigy, her bands folded on her lap and her white lashes drooped over her eyes—to move aimlessly about the room, then gradually to approach the window, stealthily to look out and watch, when she thought herself unwatched. Was it for Marie to return? Marie was absent on this afternoon—gone to Chantreuil, to execute a long list of errands—the day but one after this would be Christmas-day.

Gonda read on, and did not look towards the sister; but in a mirror that had been taken from its place because the light reflected in it annoyed the invalid, and which was leant against the wall, she could watch her movements.

When the daylight failed, Gonda laid down her book; she too was now attracted to the window, by the graduated wealth of colour in the glowing sunset sky.

It was one of those wonderful winter sunsets of the South, which come up to and far surpass one’s richest imaginings of burning Oriental magnificence.

In the southern west, where the sun had some time sunk into the deep violet of the distant bay, was concentrated the most intense glory; but above and on either hand, radiating from this spot, the more delicate and subtle harmonies were played on that keynote— blooming on distant lines of olives that, catching the exquisite half-tones, seemed to mingle with the coloured atmosphere and to breathe out the beauty they had received;— dying away on the far horizon in ethereally lovely, nameless tints, for which one vainly seeks some less material and more descriptive name than tint, tone, colour. For the colour which was over all the scene, in the sky, the sea, the air, was to ordinary colour as the soul to the body, as poetry to prose, as love to life, a something to be heard, felt, experienced by the spirit rather than merely physically seen.

Nor was this a mere momentary passing glory.

Gonda had stood absorbed some ten minutes or more, during which it changed indeed, but did not fade, when she felt Sœur Rosalie’s breath upon her cheek. She turned quickly.

“What is it mademoiselle regards so earnestly?” asked the sister, pressing to the window. Gonda noticed a slight quivering of the white lashes, an almost imperceptible twitching of the nerves or muscles round the eyes, which made her think there was something to be seen which Sœur Rosalie feared lest she should see.

“The beauty of the heaven and the earth,” Gonda answered, tranquilly} but she shrank away from this close contact, and left the window.

“Let me, too, see,” spoke a faint low voice.

“Lift me up, and let me look out into the world, once again.”

One on either side of him, Gonda and Sœur Rosalie raised the invalid upon his pillows.

The dark cavernous eyes gazed out eagerly and earnestly, a hectic glow came upon the hollow cheek.

“Life is beautiful enough to be worth a struggle,” he said in English, and as if speaking to himself.

After a few moments, this beauty seemed too much for him, it touched him too. deeply: his eyes appealed to Gonda. “Lay me down again,” he said in a voice that struggled with a sob.

They laid him gently back, and Gonda noted that tears made their way from under the closed lids; and that his face worked convulsively: noting this, before she knew it, her hand had stolen towards his, and was quickly clasped by fingers that to their weakness owed in great part their strength.

A slight smile came over his face, as he said, “I am a mere child, no man now, you see.”

Then he lay motionless. By and by Sœur Rosalie, having lighted the shaded lamp, shuttered the window, noiselessly set the room in evening order, came and bent over him; satisfied that he slept she went away.

Gonda heard the house-door open and close stealthily; it seemed as if the invalid also heard this, for suddenly his eyes opened, he slightly raised himself leaning on one arm, and looked round the room.

“At last!” he said, “she is gone! and you are here! It is the difference to me of heaven or hell, but- —” And he began to talk excitedly. “She will be back. I must lose no time. I must tell you. I have been much in hell of late, and one demon there especially torments me. Tell me his name and why he hates me. You can tell me, for you are one of the sweet saints who bend above us, and look down upon us, and drop on us tears and balm.”

“Speak quietly, keep calm,” pleaded Gonda, and laid her hand upon his brow. “There is something you have to tell me.”

“Yes,” he answered, plaintively; “and now I cannot find it, and I speak wild words, and you will not know it. Oh, help me, help me!” “With all I have or am, I will,” said Gonda. “Do not grow agitated. There is time. She will not return yet.”

He turned his head, under her light touch, and looked at her so steadfastly that she felt an inward quailing.

“To know who you are would help me,” he said, presently, “would help me out of this confusion, in which the dead and the living, angels and demons, are jumbled together. Bring the lamp, hold it in your hand, so. Let the light shine full on your face. Ah! I begin to remember. You are not Colombo.” The voice was faint and sad. The lamp trembled in Gonda’s hand. She would have turned away to hide her tears, but he prayed: “A moment longer. Do not move yet.

Oh, I have been a long time mad! You are not Colombe.”

He sank hack then, repeating his last words in a mournful, low, pathetic voice.

Gonda set down the lamp. Hurriedly she dashed aside her tears, and she tried not to know how her heart was sinking. Then, returning to the bedside, she asked:

“Where is your Colombe? Tell me, that I may find her, that I may bring her to you, that she may take her place. If I had known where to reach her, she should have been by you long ago.”

“She is dead,” he answered, gently.

There was a pause. If Gonda had loved him less, her heart might have leapt with gladness, but the tone of his gently-spoken, brief answer was inexpressibly sad. Presently:

“Try to believe that while you need her she lives again in me, to serve you. Try to believe this,” she pleaded.

An exquisite smile broke over the pallid face as he raised her hand to his lips.

“May God reward you for your goodness,” he answered, fervently; but then his weak mind began to wander again.

“I know who you are. You are an angel. You have been, and you will be, my guardian angel,”

Then presently, after gazing long on Gonda, his tone and look once more calm, he continued :

“It is growing clear to me. I begin to remember. The moonlight night—the deep shadows in the lane—something stealing from behind the trunk of a great olive—a crash, horrible pain, fire before my eyes, blood blinding them, and then darkness. Afterwards light and your face. A stranger, and you took me in; sick and wounded, and you, night and day, have tended me, God reward you, my sweet hostess.”

He continued for a few moments tranquilly to gaze on Gonda, and she, though so greatly wishing to know what it was he desired to tell her, feared to disturb him.

But his face soon changed; first to an expression of perplexed straining to remember, then to one of anxious trouble.

“Sweet hostess, are you a Catholic?” he presently asked, abruptly.

“I thank God that I am not,” replied Gonda. “I answer you in the spirit in which Marie would answer you. In this country we are apt to incline to thank God, with the Pharisee, that we are not like those others— Catholics and sinners.”

He smiled at her answer; but his smile was brief, and his tone trembled with eager haste as he questioned:

“Was it with your knowledge that a priest, or, at least, a man in a priests dress, came here, into the room, up to my bed, some nights ago?” .

“No, certainly.”

“I see you do not believe it was so; but it was. I was not delirious that night. It has happened before, as I believe; but then all was such wild confusion that seemed no more strange than all the rest. I am afraid to hear you speak, afraid to hear you say, as she says, that white woman, that this is but a fever fancy. It is no fever fancy. That night I remember two wakings. The first to feel as if.I were in heaven, to find you by me; the second, to feel as if I were in hell, to find a man bending over me,’ so close that his hot breath was on my face, and the gleam of his eyes seemed to scorch me. Now tell me, who can he be? What does he want? Why does he hate, me? for the eyes were full of hate. What do they plot together, he and the nurse? I feel too weak to disentangle all my fancies. Speak to me, answer me.”

‘“I can only hope,” said Gonda, timidly, speaking after a long pause, “that Sœur Rosalie is right, that you are visited and deceived by some horribly vivid dream.”

‘He half turned his face from her with a gesture of despair.

“If you do not believe me, you cannot save me,” he said. “You lifted me but now to look into the beauty of life, and more than the beauty of the world, and something sweeter than the sweetness of life I have seen in your sweet face; but I have done with life and all the beautiful things of this world if you will not save me~and yourself,” he added, to’ himself.

Gonda took his hand.

“I will believe you, I do believe you,” she said, with an earnest face. “Tell me all you suspect. Tell me what I can do.”

“What you can do I cannot tell, sweet hostess. It is hard to be weak, to lie here helpless, helpless in mind and body, when I cannot but fancy that danger threatens you as well as me. What I suspect is soon told, is briefly this, that very slowly, very cautiously; I am being poisoned—if so, surely by the same hand that dealt me those deadly blows.” Gonda hid her face in her hands, and for a time all was silent. She was no longer self-deceived. She knew now that for herself and not for any other she loved this man, whose life was threatened by such strange perils; Bitterly, how bitterly, she felt her helplessness, her weakness, the hardness of having to be the stronger of the two. A sob broke from her. Gently he pulled her hand from before her face. When she looked up there was an agony of appeal in her eyes. The eyes that met hers and the voice that next spoke to her had extreme power in their heart-reaching, heartsearching tenderness.

“It goes to my soul to feel how I have hurt you,” he said. “You must not feel this so; you must not grieve and suffer so. God is good indeed, unspeakably and infinitely. If die I must, it will be in loving arms.”

“But you must live,” cried Gonda; “you must, you must. How, how can I save yon? Oh, if only there, were some one strong and wise for you to trust to instead of such a reed!”

“Is there not always One strong and wise for us all to trust to always?” he asked, with ineffable gentleness, laying, as he spoke, a weak hand lightly on her hair, as she knelt’ beside the bed, “One strong and wise and infinitely loving?”

‘Poor Gonda’s heart felt ready to burst. The touch of that hand overwhelmed her with longing just to bow her head down beneath it and let the tempest of her feelings take its way; but after a few moments she looked up, and said quietly:

“Yes; and He can put power into weak hands. I will pray to Him to do so now. He will hear me and let me save you.”

He took the part of comforter in what more passed between them. She promised him to expose herself to no risk she could avoid, and to strive to be calm and hopeful. A wonderful quiet stole over the sick man’s face. Before long he n6w really slept. ’ ~

And Gonda watched; Gonda, who was as if horn into a new world, and whose birthright such frightful phantoms threatened to wrest from her.

There is something in the sight of a strong man reduced by suffering and sickness to the utter helplessness of a child, bearing all things with the fortitude of a brave man and the docility of a gentle child, which appeals to every fiber of what is truest and most distinctive in womanhood. If the sufferer has been loved before, he is loved afresh now, and with a strangely complex and an exquisitely tender love; a love that forgets and disuses nothing of the reverent respect of the former love, the grateful love paid to the benefactor, the admiring love paid by weakness to the glory of strength, but adds to this former love the love the stronger pay the weak, the love wakened by the consciousness of being necessary to what we love, the love that longs to pour out life in love, to give life for the life we love; a love that seems to combine what is most sweetly, dearly, familiarly human with what is most pure, spiritual, and immaterial in all love.

If the sufferer has not been loved before, the love wakened now will be subtle and strong, tangled and twined with the heartstrings, woven into the texture of being.

With such a love, Gonda loved, gazing on that wasted face, for her so beautiful. She knew this first, now, to-day; knew that she loved with love which, is once for all given, never taken back.

Knowing this, she bowed to the knowledge. She did not seek or question, did not look before or after.

What better could she do than love? And this sufferer was one of those who seem, as it were, to love love, to lean on it and feed on it, to breathe painfully in its absence, easefully in its atmosphere.;

Gonda had realized this. What better could she do than pour out life for him, to lengthen life for him, or, sweeten what was left of life for him? What better could she do than spend herself in love? She who had no call or claim upon her, who belonged t9 no one in all the world, if not to him.

CHAPTER V

ON THE WATCH.

Marie returned while the patient still slept: while Sœur Rosalie was still absent. This was what Gonda had desired with prayerful eartnestness.

In a few words Gonda told Marie what she had heard, and what she believed had hap* pened that night, when both she and Marie had slept, what she did not now hesitate to Say had been drugged sleep.

Marie affected to believe nothing of all Gonda suspected, but she turned her yellowest yellow, and a curious watchful fire kindled in the eyes above which her fine black brows gathered themselves gloomily.

“With what you believe, and what you do not choose to believe, I have nothing to do, Marie answered Gonda; “but I shall act as I see fit. First, you must go, or let me go, immediately, to Doctor Vauprez, You are tired; I am not afraid.”

“Quite useless! As I came home I met him driving out of Chantreuil, he is gone to night to fetch back his wife—they cannot be at Chantreuil till morning.”

That pews fell on Gonda like a heavy blow. What might - not happen during this night? She believed that Sœur Rosalie suspected that she was suspected: die augured ill from her restlessness, and from this, her long absence. ‘“No help—no hope—no human hope or help!” thought poor Gonda, and felt herself driven as if by scourges and sharp swords to the One source of hope and help.

Marie had sunk upon a chair, she was gnawing her thin under-lip fiercely, her eyes were fixed and contracted; she seemed to be lost in sullen and profound meditation.

“Marie! you have heard and seen something that confirms what I have told you. Tell me all you know!” said Gonda.

Marie gave no immediate sign of being aware that her mistress had spoken.

By and by she roused herself: “Enfin, nous verrons,” she exclaimed. “Each night I myself lock the great door-—how can any one get in? Enfin, nous verrons.”

She would say nothing that allowed that she gave credence to any part of the story, hut Gonda knew well that she disbelieved nothing of it, nothing of the possibility that even her worst suspicions might’ but hit the truth.

Marie was in a hard, impracticable mood, anxietv with her would take that form, and in this mood she was not easy to deal with, not safe to contradict: she would not soften or yield to persuasion, and opposition yet more hardened her.

“If mademoiselle will be ruled by me, we will know the truth of this, and run no danger,” she by and by said. “If that man came here on Monday night—which, mind you, I do not for a minute believe—he will come again to-night. If the sister drugged us on Monday night, which I do not believe, neither, she will try it again to-night. I have seen the same signs—no matter for whatt-r that I saw then: I made no account of them then, nor do I now—but, enfin, will mademoiselle be ruled by Marie?”

After some hesitation, some discussion, Gonda decided to do as Marie wished hex’ to do.

They had but just arranged their plan, when the slightest possible noise in the salon warned them of Sœur Rosalie’s presence there. To-night the sister said nothing in explanation of her long absence; her walk, if, indeed, she had been walking further thah Maitre Siccand’s hut, and the dingle in the wood (from which Marie had heard voices, as she came home), had done her no good, her corpse-like pallor was more than usually striking, and her eyes, when Gonda looked into them, seemed to have a scared and tortured look. Her movements, quiet and exact as those of a noiseless, well-regulated piece of mechanism, were, this evening, sometimes aimless—now and again coming to a sudden stop.

About eleven o’clock Marie came to Gonda, who was reading, or affecting to read, in the salon, and began to persuade her to go to her room for a few hours’ rest. Their patient was asleep to-night, seemed more easy and composed than for these three past days and nights, and Gonda, as Marie represented, could not much longer go on as she was doing, knowing no rest.

Sœur Rosalie was in and out, heard all that past. She quietly, with well-assumed indifference, confirmed Marie’s statement. The invalid was settled for the night, with every prospect of passing it in tranquil slumber.

Gonda for some time resisted—and so earnestly that Marie suspected (what was the truth) that she repented of her promise—but at last, though not till Marie grew angrily excited, she consented to comply with her wishes. As she left the room, she complained of thirst, and asked Marie to make her a glass of lemonade. This had been agreed between them.

Coming to Gonda’s room some moments after,, glass in hand, Marie emptied away its .contents, saying:

“She has had her chance if she wished to doctor it, I left the glass full of water and lemon-juice in the salon, when she was there, and went into the other room to fetch the sugar—pretending not to find it, I gave her ample time.”

And you, yourself, Marie? Oh, Marie I take good care she does not prove too cunning for you.”

“Allez! mademoiselle may trust to Marie:” So saying, Marie, whom Gonda was anxious not. to detain, even for further warning or remonstrance, returned to her post.

The sick man still slumbered; all was as she had left it, except that Sœur Rosalie sat by the fire in the salon, instead of at her usual place in the inner room. This was what she had never done before, but to-night she, who generally seemed to know nothing of heat, cold, hunger or thirst, frequently shivered: her white lashes twitched and quivered perpetually: her white hands were unfolded and refolded, constantly and causelessly.

Marie, after having looked at the sleeper, cowered over the fire, stretched and yawned —complained of great fatigue, having walked so far, and in such great haste, that day: spoke of the hardship of such constantly-broken rest—just the same thing over again that she had endured so long for Madame de la Capréde. Then she talked, always in a low tone, and in a voice of complaint, of the difficulty she had had in her marketing, of the dearness and scarcity of provisions, of how different everything was when she w£ls young. She began to show signs of gradually-increasing sleepiness, speaking in a more and more monotonous manner.

On Sœur Rosalie’s asking, led on by Marie to do so quite naturally, if sbe should make a tisane good to help one to keep awake, Marie, pretending to rouse herself, looked up sharply, with a “Non merci, ma Sœur; I should prefer to make something for myself.”

She thought it would look more genuine —would throw the sister more off her guard, after all that had passed—to show some slight suspicion, than to appear quite confiding. So she rose, nodding sagaciously, saying she had slept too well after the sister’s cup of tea, and would try something else.

She mixed in a cup, water, sugar, orange-flower-water, and the juice of some herb, about the merits of which she discoursed the while; then she covered the cup, and set it down in the ashes to be a little warmed, as she explained. Meanwhile, she would go and ascertain if that poor mademoiselle slept.

Lies for a good end cost Marie’s conscience nothing, though, as has been said, she rose to some appreciation of the beauty and duty of truth.

Returning, she announced that Gonda slept profoundly, “un sommeil sain et pur.”

She had been aware of all the sister’s movements: had seen her pass into the inner room, and return from it, and while with one hand she set a little saucepan containing broth among the wood-ashes, with the other pour from a phial some drops of a dark fluid into Marie’s cup, removing and replacing the cover deftly.

Marie waited her opportunity, and when Sœur Rosalie was engaged in trimming the failing lamp in the inner room, she emptied the cup upon the great heap of ashes on the hearth. Soon afterwards, moving about the rooms, she began to counterfeit the gestures of a person struggling against the overpowering influences of a narcotic: and by and by, in the inner room, sat down upon a low stool, muttered, “Je ne puis plus,” leant back her bead against the wall, after a time sank down upon the floor in a heap.

Meanwhile, Gonda had put out her light, and cautiously placed herself, as Marie had directed her to do, at that window of her room which, turning the angle of the house, looked eastward, and towards the hovel of Maitre Siccand,

She stood there keeping wide-eyed and breathless watch, shuddering with cold and excitement.

The clock of Chantreuil had struck twelve and one while she stood there, and she had seen and heard nothing: except that twice, within the last hour, cautious footsteps, felt rather than heard, which she recognized as Sœur Rosalie’s, had come down the long passage, and paused outside her closed door.

All was dark in Maitre Siccand’s hut; this was somewhat unusual, for the habits of cet vieux bonhomme did not seem to admit of his sleeping at night: it was this, combined with the constant companionship of his unearthly-looking cats, his incessant jabbering to himself, and his strange and malignant aspect, that had won for him the reputation of being a sorcerer, and a possessor and exerciser of the baleful gift of the evil eye.

On fine and moonlight nights Maltre Siccand, unless he was absent on a drinking bout with his vile associates of the low cabaret at Chantreuil, was always to be seen moving about the olive-ground, the orchards, or the vineyards, doing his day’s work; while, during the day, he was frequently to be found sleeping a drunken sleep, at the foot of some tree.

On dark nights his hovel was always lighted up, and the door set open: he was generally visible within, cowering over the fire, engaged in sorcery or cookery j but, it might be, if the night was dry and still, and not cold, that, his oil-lamp set on the tiles beside him, he would occupy himself outside his cottage, in washing and mending his clothes, sorting olives, preparing vegetables for his potage, or in some other light domestic labour.

To-night, however, though it was too obscure for this creature, resembling a four-footed beast more than a human being, to be occupied out-doors, his hovel had remained dark, till—probably, about half-past one—a long and narrow ray of light, of which Gonda saw the end only, fell upon the house-terrace, slanting, from the direction of the sick man’s room.

Was it a signal?

Gonda believed so: believed that the ray of light came from between two shutters, opened cautiously, just a chink, and was a signal to some one hidden outside.

If so, the signal was answered from Maitre Siccand’s cottage: a light flashed there, as if from the striking of a match: a lamp was kindled and placed in the window—meant, doubtless, to throw light enough outside to guide a stranger safely to the steps, which must be descended into the garden, before the Cypress-walk and the house-terrace could be reached.

A few moments after the light had been kindled, the hut door opened, and two persons came out. They showed distinctly as they passed out of the door, and paused outside the window; Gonda had no difficulty in recognizing in one of them, Maitre Siccand; the other was a man who looked tall beside that decrepit wretch, and who was well enveloped in a large, long cloak.

Gonda saw Maitre Siccand, lifting himself to an attitude nearer erectness than she had thought was possible to him, scan the whole façade of the house, and then the window where she stood, before he closed the hovel-door behind him: she knew that it was perfectly impossible that he should distinguish her, and yet a creeping chill came over her and, involuntarily, she shrank back.

The hovel-door closed, the figures passed into darkness. What next would happen?

Gonda had that night assured herself that the great door was firmly locked; the key she had laid under her own pillow. As far as she had been able, without noise that should rouse the attention of Sœur Rosalie, she had secured the doors of all the empty rooms down-stairs that opened into the passages. The back entrance of the house had been securely fastened up long ago, in the time of Madame de la Capréde; and at the top of the unused staircase was a closed-up door that shut off all the upper part of that side of the house.

Some few minutes passed: then Gonda distinguished a slight sound, which she believed to be the grating of a key in a lock.

There was, therefore, no time to lose: she left her room and noiselessly closed the door behind her; then she felt her way along the passage to the head of the stairs, her soft black dress and her wadded slippers rendered her as noiseless as the darkness and not in the darkness, to be distinguished from it; but, naturally, Sœur Rosalie would come, light in hand, to meet her visitor, or, even, if not, the light from the opening salon-door would dart along the passage, and might reveal Gonda.

She recognised this peril, hut, doubtful of having time to gain the ambush Marie had prepared for her before the intruder should have mounted the stairs (she now heard cautious whispering in the vestibule), she knelt down beside an old cabinet standing against the wall, projecting in such a way as to screen her. She had but just done this, when the salon-door opened, Sœur Rosalie came down the passage to the head of the stairs, held the light she carried over the balustrade, and so waited.

Standing thus, she was so close to Gonda, that Gonda stretching out her hand, could have caught hold of the sister’s dress. If ft should chance that she turned to the left instead of to the right, which would be the more natural, when she should move to go back to the salon, she could hardly fail to see Gonda: the light must fall down upon the fair hair and the white face, and could hardly fail to draw the sister’s eyes after it.

The whispering in the vestibule still, for a few moments, continued, then one person began to ascend the stairs.

Gonda’s clasped hands tightened convulsively, and got so firmly locked, that when she tried, she was for a moment troubled to unclasp them; she breathed an inward prayer, fervid as our poor prayers seldom are, and crouched lower, further back, pressing against the wall.

The stranger mounted the stairs slowly: Gonda saw first the top of a head, not shaven, then a head and shoulders; then almost the whole figure; the light fell full upon a mild-enough pale face turned towards the sister; in the aspect of this intruder there was nothing terrible.

, Sœur Rosalie moved to precede her guest down the passage to the salon. Moving, she turned to the left, apparently to glance towards Gonda’s closed door. Gonda gazed up into her face; not, strangely enough, with the fascinated gaze of the victim but with a steady, repellant gaze that dared the sister to see her. Never had Gonda looked on anything so ghastly as that corpse-like face. The convulsed dead face of Madame de la Capréde had not been so terrible.

The wide eyes did not look as if they saw; they did not fall to the level where Gonda crouched. Sœur Rosalie passed on; the stranger, who had paused a moment at the head of the stairs, following her.

The salon-door closed behind them: all was again darkness.

As soon as she was able, that was not instantly, Gonda rose and groped her way after them; counting the closed doors she passed as she went down the passage—they were four—the fifth was ajar, she pushed it open, that room she entered: all was darkness there, save for one narrow streak of light at its far end.

This room was used as a sort of lumber-room and store-room. Here Marie kept her stock of dried figs, from strings slung across the room bunches of grapes depended, festoons of orange and lemon-peel drooped from the lofty ceiling and large provision of Indian corn: in one comer, great gourds were grouped; in another, the handsome but tasteless apples of the district were laid on straw. The room was strongly pervaded by the odour of drying orange-flowers, an odour which overpowered all others, though the room contained besides many other strongly-scented things—both herbs and flowers—garnered up by Marie, for use in making her favourite tisanes.

It was not an easy room to cross safely and noiselessly. The old family-trunks of the de la Caprédes were piled up here: also great heaps of ancient journals and some hundreds of dingy and greasy volumes of that order of literature which had been in vogue in Madame de la CaprMe’s youth and which Gonda, after a glance between the covers, bad directed Marie to use, by degrees, for lighting her fires, saying that so they would, at last, be put to innocent use.

This room contained, too, objects of pathetic interest for Gonda: in an old, worm-eaten, wood wardrobe, of many shelves and drawers, were stowed away things that had belonged to her mother—lesson-books and music, on which her name was written “Majali de la Capréde”—toys, dolls, and clothes.

Slowly and cautiously Gonda felt her way across the room towards that streak of light. It came from a large closet, or small dressing-room, the door’of which stood wide, which had once opened by another door into the room where the sick man now lay. That door had been fastened up and was partly concealed by the hangings of the bed; but Marie’s quick wit had discovered a gaping chink in the old over-dry wood that, by a skilful arrangement might be made—while the door itself should still be pretty well concealed, to afford a fair view of what passed in the room; it was this chink which showed in the darkness as a streak of light.

When Gonda first stood at her post, there was no one in the room but the invalid, sleeping profoundly, and Marie lying on. the floor in so lifeless and shapeless-looking a way that Gonda was shocked and startled.

From the salon came the subdued murmur of voices: subdued at first, but, by and by, Sœur Rosalie’s was strained to a higher and more passionate note than Gonda could have imagined she would use; but it was only for a moment, then it fell again to a mere submissive murmur.

Gonda had been in the closet, perhaps ten minutes, when Sœur Rosalie and the supposed priest came into the inner room; he had thrown his large cloak aside to be unencumbered, and showed himself to be a slightly-made man, mild-featured and of middle-size and age; a man in no way remarkable.

In no way remarkable except when you met his eyes, or noticed the pitiless lines of his thin-lipped mouth. As he entered the room his quick glance scanned it, and seemed to Gonda to penetrate the wood-work behind which she was concealed and to scorch her.

His first act was to go up to, and examine, Marie; he touched her with his foot, as he might have done a sleeping dog—then stooping down he lifted her hand and let it fall—it fell so heavily, so helplessly, that again a horrible fear chilled Gonda.

Apparently satisfied, the intruder turned from Marie and came to the bed; in doing so he seemed to he advancing directly and designedly towards Gonda’s ambush—making her feel as if, the next moment, the hangings would be torn aside, the door discovered, and her watch suspected.

But it was* not this that set her heart beating with such violence as made her dread lest it should suffocate her, and made her feel as if the whole house must throb with and be conscious of its pulsation.

To see the tranquil helpless slumber of $he sick man, while his enemy, his deadly enemy, as she believed, bent over him, seemed more than she could bear; he bent over him so low, in such close scrutiny, that, for some seconds, which might have told as hours, she saw only the top of the bent head; then rising a little, he lightly touched the pale, damp brow, laid a finger on the wrist, counting its pulsations. After that, with a darkening face—a face over which the hidden tiger nature flashed—he turned upon Sœur Rosalie: she stood beside him, still as a statue, one arm raised, holding the lamp, the other drooped beside her. He said something, but in a low, veiled voice; some sentence of which Gonda did not catch a word. Gazing straight before her, with her fixed eyes looking like the unclosed dead eyes of a corpse, the sister did not change her attitude, nor give any’ sign of having heard him.

He took the lamp from her hand; when he had done so, the hand fell heavily by her side.

When he had set it down, he shook her by the shoulder with some violence.

Having thus roused her, he spoke something close in her ear, offering her a small packet; she raised her hand and took it, she thrust it between the starched folds of white muslin that were crossed over her bosom; but then, suddenly, she fell on her knees at the man’s feet.

Again, her voice was raised to a shrillness of appeal.

The name “Antoine,” was spoken by her lips and echoed by his. And when he echoed it he seemed to lose something of his self-control, his voice grew louder, and Gonda heard these words, spoken in a tone of withering contempt:

“Let him escape! and because he is like that cursed Antoine, for whom you played me false!—Let him escape to execute what he has planned! Let him escape to enjoy the fruit of his treachery! to live in peace and pleasure with the girl of whom he has robbed me! And you pretend now to believe he is not the man! You want me now to believe he is not the man! And was it not you who told me, how her name, in his ravings, was always on his lips?”

Her answer was some further pleading.

She laid her head upon his feet, she clasped his hands when with them he tried to silence her; and when he struggled with her, striving to drag her from the room, she clasped his knees.

In the struggle, her quaint and formal head-gear was displaced, and all the silver-white wealth of silken hair was trailed along the floor.

Failing in his endeavours to drag her from the room, the man bent over her and whispered in her ear, and as he did so he slipt from under his sleeve some small, sharp weapon, of which he showed her the shining blade, with which he pointed towards the bed.

What followed immediately on this, Gouda did not know. With all her might she had been trying to preserve her self-command, to hold her senses together; but now, somehow, quite suddenly, she escaped from her own mastery.

A shrill scream rang through the house; but whether she herself screamed, or Marie, or the sister, Gonda did not know. She rushed from her hiding-place, and in her desperate, blind haste, bewildered by the blackness round her, her forehead came into violent contact with the door of the room, closing herself in; stunned for a moment, she fell upon the floor.

CHAPTER VI

UNMASKED.

How long she had remained there, upon the floor, without consciousness, whether minutes or hours, Honda did not know when she came to herself; and what might not have happened in the interval? Sick to the heart, and in blind bewilderment, loading herself with bitterest reproach, she rose to her feet. The streak of light was gone; the black darkness was unbroken.

At that scream, as Marie told her afterwards, the intruder had dashed down the lamp, uttered a frightful imprecation upon Soeur Rosalie if she did not do his bidding, and made his escape. Even as Gonda passed out of the door of thq room where she had been concealed the house-door closed with violence. She reached the salon just as Marie, having struck a light and kindled a candle in the inner room, was regarding with feigned bewilderment the broken glass and the spilt oil upon the floor, and calling upon Sœur Rosalie, who was not to be seen, for an explanation of all this disorder and confusion. Just, too, as the weak voice of the sick man was raised in anxious inquiry as to what had happened, and where was Marie’s mistress.

“I go to seek her,” answered Marie, who looked like a shaking yellow leaf, adding “La voila!” as at that moment Q-onda entered. An eager hand was stretched out to her; eager eyes sought to assure themselves of her complete, unharmed safety. She clasped the hand and met the look with the best smile she cOuld call to her white lips. Not a word was spoken by either of those two just then.

Gonda was white as the blossom and Marie as yellow as the fruit of the lemon. They were both fearfully agitated; while the sick man, clasping the cold hand of his hostess, knowing her unharmed, seemed calm, at ease, without any curiosity as to what had passed, or any dread of what might further happen.

Where meanwhile was Sœur Rosalie?

A few moments and she came in. Her hair was again hidden under her head-gear; the pallor of her face was a thought more livid than its wont perhaps; and she kept one hand beneath the white apron she always wore, and which now was stained with blood (that hand had been slightly and accidentally cut in the struggle); but there was nothing very perceptibly different from usual in her aspect.

“Mais, mon Dieu, ma Sœur, what is it then that has happened?” cried Marie, directly the sister came into the room. “So much noise; such confusion; the lamp thrown down; the glass broken; the oil spilt about. Is it theft?—is it murder? Say, then, what is it that has happened? Mon Dieu! but you are injured. Look there at the blood upon your apron.”

“Gently, my good woman,” answered the sister; “you will yet further, alarm monsieur, and there is no cause. It is all quite simple. I have had a misfortune; have overthrown the lamp, and cut my hand. At the noise you woke and screamed.”

But here her eyes met Gonda’s, and her face changed a little as she noticed that Gonda was completely dressed, as she had been when she left the room in the evening.

“I!—I did not scream,” cried Marie; “and before the lamp fell and was broken I half woke, and I saw, or believe I saw, a man in this room —a man with whom you struggled; but I was heavy with sleep, and held it for a dream, till some one screamed. It was at that I started up* and then the lamp was thrown down and all was dark.”

“The man of Monsieur le Docteur, who came even at this hour with the new medicine, was the man you saw; for the rest, the fancied struggle, you may thank your dreams,” was answered without a second of hesitation; but again those eyes sought Gronda’s face and seemed to question it.

“New medicine! What had you to do with new medicine?” asked Marie, sharply. “I, myself, my good sister, heard the doctor desire that the old medicine should be continued.”

“That is quite true; but I judged the patient’s state had changed for the worse this afternoon. I dreaded for him such a night as that he passed on Monday; for I saw the same symptoms I had noted then.” (Talking ostensibly to Marie, her eyes did not leave Gronda’s face.) “I said no word, not to alarm mademoiselle; but while she watched here, I did what I have done before, ran to Chantreuil to speak to the doctor.”

“But the doctor was gone before you could reach Chantreuil.”

“He was; but, as it was ordered, he returned, having forgotten something. Even as I stood at his door he drove down the street.”

Marie grunted. A struggle went on within her. She longed to say simply, “You lie, my good sister, you lie from first to last but prudence restrained her. Many hours of night and darkness had yet to be got through; and how far they were in the power of Sœur Rosalie’s accomplice she could not tell; but while she thought it wise to appear to be duped, she could not submit to the appearance of being duped so completely and so easily.

So she now asked: “And the man of Monsieur le Docteur who, past midnight, came with this new medicine—how did he enter?”

“By the hall-door; how else?”

“But the key?—the key was under the pillow of mademoiselle.”

“Que vous êtes bête, ma bonne femme. Is it possible you did not remember that naturally the good Maitre Siccand has also a key?” “Thank you for that bit of knowledge,” muttered Marie.

Sœur Rosalie now directly addressed Gronda, who stood there by the bed, white and still, her hand clasped in that of the invalid, and who had not yet spoken a word since she came into the room.

“I have a thousand regrets that mademoiselle should have been thus disturbed; but apparently,” looking at Gonda’s dress, “mademoiselle had not disrobed. To lie down without disrobing is hardly to rest. If mademoiselle will now retire—it still wants some hours of morning—all will now be tranquil. I go to give monsieur the composing draught needed after so much agitation; then he will sleep profoundly, if only mademoiselle will retire.”

The clasping hands tightened. Having spoken, Sœur Rosalie, standing motionless, and waiting for an answer, gazed at Gonda full in the eyes with a peculiar gaze, trying her power.

Gonda simply answered, “I shall not go but she spoke with strange difficulty.

Sœur Rosalie having had her answer, still, for perhaps half a minute, continued that gaze; then she turned to the little table and began to squeeze, a lemon into a glass. She bad lost something of her silky softness of manner; her tone, though low and controlled, had a reckless hardness. She had a desperate game to play, and -had to play it somewhat in the dark; for how much (Honda knew or suspected she could not discover; and how far a power she had found successful before would stand her in stead now, she could not tell.

Marie, who was engaged in picking up the glass, and wiping up the oil from the tiles, seemed to pay no heed to what was passing.

Gonda tried to speak again, or to move, but she stood as if rooted to the spot. Her tongue seemed turned to iron; her heart to lead; her limbs to stone. Statuesquely still and cold and white, her eyes only seemed alive, and they followed every movement of Sœur Rosalie with fascinated intentness.

Bending, over the table, her hack to Gonda, the sister, tolerably satisfied with the result of her experiment, was unaware of this keen watch.

When the draught was fully prepared, turning, she approached the bed; doing this she lifted her white lashes, and again with that peculiar gaze fixed her eyes on Gonda’s. She advanced slowly, the power of her look increasing as she drew nearer and nearer.

The sick man, in his blind faith that in the presence of his guardian-angel no evil would befall him, even before she was close, stretched out a feverishly eager hand to take the cup she held. Gonda knew this, but her eyes would not leave Sœur Rosalie’s; her tongue would not move in her mouth; her feet would not stir on the floor; her hand would not be lifted from her side.

A moment and the cup was in the eager hand. Poor Gonda! still those baleful eyes defied, controlled, and held her spell-bound. She said afterwards that the seconds that passed then—as in some horrible nightmare dream—were like hours. That as she gazed and gazed, though she remained conscious, all power of will and motion seemed to be drawn out of her. By degrees all things seemed to fade to nothing. It was as if she were conscious of vast space, and knew it to hold nothing but a sort of haze of ugliness, of loathsomeness, of horror, that centred in the snake-like, contracting pupils of those white-lashed eyes.

The cup was raised to the parched lips. Already Sœur Rosalie triumphed; but she did not release her victim, or relax her gaze. Gronda realized the agony of supreme vain effort, feeling, perhaps, much as one must feel who, through the trance veil of death-like sleep, is conscious of being already numbered with the dead.

The sick man paused before he drank, as if some doubt crossed him, or some instinct warned him. He paused, and lifting his eyes to Glonda’s face, asked, “Shall I drink, dear lady?”

The white lashes, till now unwinking, flickered. The spell was broken. Gronda could move and speak. No doubt, to her own state, to the nervous exhaustion consequent upon long want of sleep, and such an ordeal as she had lately passed through, was greatly owing the power that evil gaze had been able to exercise over her.

“No! no! no!” she now cried, with what was almost a shriek; and sinking down upon the floor beside him, took the cup from his hand.

Sœur Rosalie sprang forward, perhaps to dash down the betraying cup; but Marie caught her by the arm, and held her in a clutching grasp, from which all her efforts to writhe herself free were vain.

With a great sobbing sigh, and the fervently breathed words, “Thank God,” Gonda finally threw off the remaining influence of the sister’s gaze.

“This new medicine will not suit your patient,” she said, as she rose to her feet, now again complete mistress of herself. She gave the cup to Marie, telling her to put it away for Doctor Vauprez to see in the morning. She followed Sœur Rosalie, who now retreated before her, to the table at which she had mixed that draught, saying quietly, when they were as far from the bed as the room permitted, “Give me the rest of it—of the new medicine that came to-night; give me the packet that is in your bosom.”

No motion from Sœur Rosalie and no answer.

Gonda went very close to her, and speaking yet lower, said—a sudden intuition of the truth had flashed upon her—“I know you; I know all your story. You were once called Blanchette. You are a murderess, though you made another hand hold the knife! As you hope for any mercy, obey me—give me the packet.”

Gonda’s face was one of pale command. In it her wide blue eyes (dilated with horror of the woman to whom she spoke) were burning with a strange lustre.

Sœur Rosalie, erect against the wall, met their gaze a moment with a scared, awe- stricken look: then one of her small, white, soft, and stealthy hands drew forth the packet from the starched folds across her bosom. Without a word she yielded it to Gonda.

“Why would you have poisoned him? What harm had he done you or any one?” asked Gonda, in that same low voice, thrilled now with reproach and wonder.

“I begged his life, the life of the man you love, at peril of my own life, because he was like the man who died for me, whom I loved,” the woman answered.

After those words, spoken in a dull and sullen tone, Sœur Rosalie maintained an obstinate silence.

Gonda stood before her, pondering. When she spoke to her again, there was no fear, no loathing in her face or voice, nay, there was even something of pity. She bade the woman follow her to an empty chamber, where she must be locked in till morning.

Marie, seizing the sister by the arm, took her prisoner again; but she seemed submissive enough now, seemed to have no thought of resistance.

“You have no reason to fear me,” said Gonda, as she was leaving the room to which she had consigned her; “I could do you no harm if I would. What punishment can be worse to you than such a life?”

Gonda and Marie returned to the sick-room. Approaching the bed, they discovered that the invalid, whom they had feared to find dangerously agitated by thought of the peril he had escaped, was tranquilly sleeping.

Gonda was profoundly and painfully impressed by the absolute confidence, the utter resignation to patiently suffer circumstances, being for the time helpless to control or contend with them, which alone could have made this sleep possible. Painfully impressed, because it seemed to her so awful and so unnatural a responsibility that was thrown upon her weakness. Full as she was of fears and forebodings for the future—such fears and forebodings as such trust in God as most of us are alone able to rise to cannot prevent (and perhaps was not meant to prevent) our flesh shuddering at for those we love—for we may bow to God’s will even while we faint under it—she was, nevertheless, overcome by gratitude for the present. She knelt down by that unconscious form and tried to realize that not on her weakness but on Omnipotent power was it dependent for life and safety; tried to realize this, and to pour out her soul in thankfulness. But all the while, in her woman’s heart, there was unspeakable longing for the time when she should no longer be obliged to play the part of the stronger, the protector; when no longer forced to lean on her weakness, he should rise up and stretch out his strong hand (through all this temporary powerlessness of physical prostration there had penetrated to her a feeling of his strength— how else could he have suffered with such fortitude as had always made gentleness possible?) to take hers, and should bid her now in her turn, for all her life, rest on him.

Neither Gonda nor Marie heard any unusual noise, either within the house or outside it, during the hours that intervened before daybreak; yet in the morning Sœur Rosalie was gone.

When Doctor Vauprez came, he listened with profound attention to all the patient, Marie, and Gonda had to tell him; hut when they all had finished, he frowned, he sighed, he gesticulated, and said little.

“You have been so unfortunate as to make a bitter enemy,” he said to his patient. “C’est dommage.”

But though so backward in suggesting explanations of what had passed, he was ready enough to devise for his patient’s safety in the future; which was, after all, more to the purpose.

He had brought madame, his wife, back to Chantreuil with him this morning. He had meant to devise some quiet means of getting rid of Sœur Rosalie without offending her or those by whom she was protected, and to offer that Madamie Vauprez should take her place.

He now proposed that he as well as madame should for a time be Gonda’s guests, an offer accepted by Honda with glad and. heartfelt gratitude.

So Madame Vauprez—the kindest-hearted, quickest-tongued, blackest-browed, brightest-eyed and swarthiest of elderly Proven9euses —installed herself as nurse in place of the stealthy, white-handed Sœur Rosalie.

From the time of this change, the sick man’s progress was, as Marie declared, miraculous. Indeed, within a fortnight after the change, Madame Vauprez carried off her patient to Rosan n, to which’ place the good doctor had recommended that he should, for a short time, repair, in order that change and sea air might complete the restoration of his health and strength.

During this brief absence, Madame Vauprez wrote daily to Gonda. It was curious that her letters should be found so interesting; certainly never before had the good woman’s letters been found of such absorbing interest. There was a great sameness in them, too. The bulletin of improving health, the announcement that her patient .had walked so many times up and down the Allies without too much fatigue, had afterwards eaten of such a dish with good appetite, that a tinge of natural colour was now sometimes upon the cheek and life and light in the eyes (especially, the old lady added, when we talk of mademoiselle), was daily followed by such phrases as, “Ah, how amiable he is, how good, how perfectly the Christian gentleman! Having known him and mademoiselle, I will never more speak against you Protestants. If I were the greatest lady in the land, he could not treat me with more honour. If I were his mother, he could not show me more gentleness. I, who never had a son, feel now as if I had a son. I love him as a son.”

So would run on these letters. And such scrawls as they were! requiring time and patience to decipher them. Time Gonda had, and to this task she brought unfailing patience, which seemed to be its own reward, for over these letters her eyes would grow glad and bright, and her cheek would flush and pale with emotion.

During this time (Monsieur de Triancourt had begged that it should be so) Doctor Vauprez continued to be Gonda’s guest and guard.

BOOK III

EARLY SPRING.

CHAPTER I

EARLY SPRING

It was about the middle of February when Madame Vauprez returned with her patient, who was no longer in any sense her patient, to Chantreuil. Monsieur de Triancourt had, she declared, begun to assert himself so vigorously latterly that it had been impossible to detain him longer at Rosançon. During the last days of their stay there, instead of playing the absolute part of sick-nurse, she had been compelled to submit to be overwhelmed with all manner of pretty attentions, to which, in all her life, she had never been habituated.

The-day after his return, Monsieur de Triancourt, with Monsieur and Madame Vauprez, at whose house he was for the present, all dined together at Les Cyprus.

Madame and Marie had arranged between them that this should be quite a state occasion. Marie exerted herself to the utmost. Madame Vauprez’s Toinette and madame herself had come to her aid, and the “little dinner for four” which was prepared was a triumph of delicate and tasteful cookery.

By the middle of February that year the sudden southern spring had blown all the land about Les Cyprus into its first and most exquisite, though not most gorgeous, blossoming.

The great gaunt salon was gay and sweet with flowers, which Gonda—who had slept little that night—had been out early in the soft-breathed morning to gather.

Bunches of those pale-coloured and most fragrant violets, which blossom so abundantly in the hedges, lanes, and in all waste places, clustering among the roots of the old olives, and springing from the crevices in loose walls, embedded in moss and set round with minute blood-red young ivy leaves, were placed between each cover at the table.

On the cracked, disfigured, once-white marble above the hearth were vases filled with the first-blooming anemones, varying in tint from the faint, cool, bluish-grey of those that come earliest of all to the richest, deep crimson-tinged purple. These Gonda had gathered from between the vine-rows, and from a hill-side waste field, once a vineyard, but where the brier and bramble now choked up the untended vines. Masses of these same anemones, mingled with plumes of their feathery green leaves, and interspersed with blossomed twigs from trees of cherry, peach, and almond, filled a curious old epergne in the centre of the table, while on an ancient, almost giltless, gilt console, beneath a mirror that reflected the stainless blue of the sky, was a large, richly-blossomed branch of the white almond.

The faded flowers and Cupids on the ceiling and the walls might be well satisfied that, in the presence of such fresh loveliness, they would pass unheeded, yet even they had something less of dinginess than had for years been upon them. Marie, and the peasant girl who carried her basket home from market, and sometimes staid a few hours to help her, had been busy even with them, freeing them from much dust and many cobwebs.

At dinner, Marie served to perfection and talked to distraction,.and the tongues of Monsieur and of Madame Vauprez were hardly ever silent. Afterwards, great quiet fell. Marie retired to her own domain, Doctor Vauprez had been forced to leave the house almost before dinner was over, to visit a patient. Madame, who had taken a glass or two more of Madame de la Capréde’s excellent wine (a few bottles of which still remained in the cellars, in spite of Maitre Siccand’s researches) than was her temperate wont, soon began to nod over her knitting; but not before she, in her capacity of nurse, had prevailed upon Monsieur de Triancourt — for whom the walk from Chantreuil to Les Cyprus had proved a long one, and who still, in spite of all her boasting, looked frail enough to invite the bestowal of tender and loving cares—to allow himself to be established in the roomy old red fauteuil, in which he had passed so many hours of delicious convalescence.

“If I am to submit, as in old times, all the rest must be as in old times,” he said, in English, to Gonda, drawing the chair in which she had been used to sit close beside his.

“Ah oui, certainement, 9a va sans dire, that mademoiselle will sit beside you,” commented the old lady, who, nevertheless, understood not a word of English.

The wind to-day was that marvellously soft perfumed wind, which Marie called the wind from Spain, and which made the drawing of each breath a luxury. A window, looking over garden, orange-orchard, slopes of velvety pine wood, and olive hoary plains, to the far away blue Italian hay, was open, and it was near this they sat.

“.The world is a .wonderful world, just now,” said Gonda, by and by, breaking a long silence that had fallen after they had been talking some time to an accompaniment, not not altogether musical, from Madame Vauprez. What she said now, bore close relation to the last words that he had spoken. “So much beauty all about,” she continued; so much more than we seem able to take in, makes me think sometimes that surely ‘heaven ’ will be the life on earth, of a race more perfect and more gifted than we are, or perhaps our own lives after long ages of discipline. I never felt the beauty of the world before as. I feel it this spring; or, if I did, it was differently when I was a little child and was with my mother—since then, till now, it has not much touched me.”

“That school-life you told me of—(do you remember?—the day before I went away, when we talked together so long, and the time seemed so short, and good madame scolded)—did not leave you much room to live—in any sense worth calling life: nor did that life here withy our old aunt, that dreadful life which both madame and Marie have spoken to me about—speaking of your angelic patience with wondering admiration.”

“They are greatly mistaken in speaking of my patience as angelic—it was not that, or anything in any way beautiful. It was quite soulless and mechanical. If I had died a few months ago, when she died, it would, I fancy, have been like waking up out of a dream—a dream in which I had dreamed that I dreamed —that is the sort of feeling I used to go about with. For life was nothing but a husk: a monotonous succession of soulless doing. But now,” she added, with a flush and sparkle, marvellously warming and lighting her clear face, “I seem to live and to be. When I was out this morning, I felt as if it were well worth suffering, through long years, loneliness, desolation and darkness, just to stand, at last, if for ever so short a time, on the warm earth in the transfiguring early sunshine, and feel, as I felt then, the beauty and the glory of existence.”

Her eyes were fixed on the sunny shimmer of distant water on the horizon; his were on her face. He did not immediately speak. When he did, it was in a low voice, saying:

“And the thought that we should meet to-day—I may believe that had some place in your heart; that had something to do with your gladness.”

She turned with a smile to meet his look, the rich carnation tinge rushed to her cheek, but she answered unhesitatingly:

“That thought was the soul and centre of my delight. Have I so many friends, that you, who are my friend, can be so little to me that it should not be so?”

By and by they began to talk of the “accident” that had befallen him on the night when he was brought to Les Cyprus, and of the events that had followed it.

The happiest accident of his life, the most richly-compensated pain, he called it. And he spoke, looking at her with his soul in his eyes, in a fervid tone, that thrilled Gonda with a sense of unknown bliss.

She asked him: “And have you remembered nothing that throws the least light on all that happened?”

“Nothing. I am as ignorant of who my enemy is, and of why he is my enemy, as you can be. Of what was done and attempted by the woman calling herself Sœur Rosalie, I make no account, well convinced that she was a mere tool. She is a dangerous tool, however, and much as I should hate to proceed against a woman—especially a woman who for the first weeks served me so faithfully, nursed me so perfectly—as patiently as if she loved me — I do not see how, if she crosses my path again, I can reconcile it to my conscience that she should be left free, to go, a wolf in lamb’s clothing, into any sheep-fold. It is quite true that those who employ her, failing one tool, will find another: but that is not the question. However, that she will cross my path again is most unlikely.”

“It is strange, terribly strange, that there should be any one who hates you so. Who can hate you so? Why should any one hate you so? We who have known you only for a time that, counted by weeks and months, is short, are as sure as if all our lives we had known you, that you could do nothing cruel or wrong. We all feel this, Marie feels it, madame and the good doctor feel it.”

“That you, sweet hostess, feel this, is enough for me. May God in heaven bless you for your generous confidence,” he cried, leaning forward and taking her hand, while his sparkling eyes thanked her far beyond his words. “Sternly I have been taught one lesson—that love without trust is madness, bitterness, and death; the lives of all I have most loved have taught me this with curious persistence.

“My poor young mother, whom I remember so lovely and so loving, failed to trust my father, when she should have clung to him most closely, with absolutely blind trust. When all things seemed to condemn him and all men’s tongues and hands were lifted against him (some day I may tell you the whole sad story), her falling off from her allegiance was the blow he could not stand against; he was too proud and too deeply wounded to defend himself or explain; ruin and undeserved disgrace he let sweep over him, caring for nothing when she had left him. She learnt her error later, and came back to his feet—literally to his feet. I was old enough then never since to have forgotten that scene; she was pardoned instantly; indeed, she had been sorrowed over and not condemned; but the evil she had wrought was irreparable: never able to forgive herself, or for a moment to forget her fault, she pined slowly, and just as brighter prospects were opening before us all, in France, my father’s country, to which he had returned, she died.

“My sister’s story is not much less sad, our pretty pet—the soft-eyed little Colombe I have told you of, to whom my father gave his favourite name—his mother’s, because she had his mother’s eyes; she was born shortly before our mother died, and somewhere has a foster-sister bearing the same name. Poor child! she was most lovely! But she failed in trust towards an absent lover, of whom a treacherous woman, who had gained her confidence, spoke ill; and she died of the grief of it. That story I must tell you too. Bearing her sorrow silently, it ate into her life; before we knew of any danger she was beyond hope. On the day of her burial her lover returned, ardent and eager. It was a blow he got. Such a blow as men do not rally from, however they may seem to do so.

“My young brother, left to my guardianship (for our father died while he was but young), failed to trust my love and my honour; I was proud and impatient, and would not defend myself or explain my actions. We were both wrong, and we quarrelled and parted, he drifted away from me and I have never ceased to reproach myself for his loss during the fifteen years that have passed since. I shall never see him again in this world; the ship in which he sailed was wrecked. Not a bright family history,” he added, with a mournful smile.

He had spoken with a growing excitement that had alarmed Gonda—used for so many weeks to study every change of his face— alarmed her, lest the fatigue and agitation of the day had proved too much for him.

* Ceasing to speak, still clasping the hand he had taken, he leant back in the old fauteuil, and Gonda did not, for a long time, break the silence that fell between them.

Henri de Triancourt’s was a face to win both trust and love: other and sterner judges than this confiding woman would have thought so. The brow had a really saint-like beauty, an indescribable beauty; a look a few, and a very few, human brows have, of not being able to take ignoble lines; above it, the head was grandly developed, the dark eyes deep-set beneath it could express intense concentration of thought and power, piercing keenness of inner insight; or could be merely soft and calm, and sweet, gently loving as a woman’s, making of each glance a mute caress. The almost black hair sprang from the brow in fine and vigorous lines; but it had a trick of falling forward in heavy masses, so that the throwing of it back had come to be a characteristic gesture. The chin was finely modelled, the mouth, at once sensitive and firm, in repose perhaps somewhat severe, but its smile was sunny and complete, most loving and indulgent. The complexion was too dark to be English; unmistakably Southern in its shadow tints, and with that mellow luminousness in its high lights to be seen in a few fine portraits by Italian and Spanish painters.

There was a something in this face, perhaps the something that made it peculiarly an index of the mind it mirrored, that had made Gonda think at times-

“If I had done something wrong, something mean and ignoble, and had to meet his eyes, the consciousness of what I had done, of what I was, though I knew he did not know it, would make me long for the earth to open and hide me! And yet, I think he would forgive any one any sin of which they repented —hating the sin, but pitying the sinner.” Only that day at dinner-time, when Doctor Vauprez had mentioned a base and treacherous act committed by a man he knew, watching the listening brow contract, seeing the indignant flash from the eyes, hearing the terse words that fell from the lips, Gonda had felt an inward shrinking of pity for the creature whose deed was thus condemned. ‘

Gonda would have been no true woman, if her heart had not gone forth towards this stranger who had been thrown upon her pity and her love: upon her love as fully as upon her pity, for she had instinctively felt that his nature needed to have pity sweetened by love.

Now, in this long silence, suddenly there fell upon Gonda a veil of previsionary fear: it dimmed the lovely eyes, for them darkened the brilliant day: confused images of things past and phantoms of things to come, crowded upon her.

She shuddered, shaken with a sudden gust of dread—it was as if a vault had opened, and the chill damp of the charnel-house had blown upon her.

“Who can hate you so? Oh! who can hate you so?” was all of her thought iat found utterance.

But he felt the thrill that ran through her, in the trembling of the hand he held; he looked at her and noticed her extreme pallor:

“No matter how I am hated, or by whom, if only you will love me always.”

Leaning forward, taking both her hands, he spoke with energy and fire.

A sudden crimson bloomed over that visionary pallor, and quickly passed away; too quickly, be thought, as he watched her.

He continued: “I cannot play with words or feelings. It is all or nothing I want from you. To be mine, and me or-”

“Va t’en au diable done!” was the somewhat startling exclamation that just now interrupted him.

A fly, settling upon the nose of the good doctor’s wife, had disturbed her sweet slumber. But half-awake, it was with this exclamation that she knocked it off.

The bathos of such an interruption was irresistible. Both Monsieur de Triancourt and Gonda laughed, though both of them felt some pained annoyance.

CHAPTER II

Â MOI.

“Pardon, ma bonne demoiselle,” cried poor Madame Vauprez, in confusion, fully roused by their laughter. “Je crois que jallais lacher quelque sottise.”

“Dear madame, were I superstitious, I might find in your exclamation no good omen.”

“Mais, mon Dieu, what would you say? It was not on monsieur, but on a little vilain bète of a venomous fly, that I cried out.”

He answered her jestingly, pretending incredulity. She defended herself, appealing to Gonda.

Gonda had disengaged her hand, had risen, and was leaning in the window looking out, when Madame Vauprez, threatening Monsieur de Triancourt with her needles as she passed him, came to her side.

At that moment Gonda turned from the window quickly. All the mirthful light had left her face. She had met the eyes of Maitre Siccand, who, standing at some distance, holding by a young tree, was looking up towards, and apparently watching, the windows. This was the first time she had seen him since that strange night. Either he had been absent, or he had kept out of her way.

The observant eyes of Monsieur de Triancourt marked a change in her face. Turning to Madame Vauprez, he said:

“I fear, madame, that Miss Trevor’s friends have much to forgive me. Is she not altered from what she was before I was brought to her door? She has gone through what would have sorely tried and taxed the nerves of the strongest of women; and I fear she is not strong.” “Certainly, mademoiselle is altered,” answered the old lady, smiling significantly. “Certainly you have much to answer for; much for which to make amends.” With an air of mock solemnity, and a roguish twinkle in her black eyes, she added, “It will never again be with mademoiselle as it was before you passed her door—that I know. I am old now; but I know well ‘the bite of the mosquito,’ as we say in our country.” Passing suddenly to real earnestness, she continued: “And I would not desire for mademoiselle that things should be with her as before. For a woman nothing is so sad, nothing so morally and physically evil, as a solitary life. Better love, and therewith trouble, trial and want, than peace, ease, and plenty, and solitude of the heart. So say I, Térèse Vauprez, and believe me, my children, I know. I have tried the two lives. Before I knew Achilles I had lived for years in lonely luxury. Marrying him, I offended my guardian and forfeited my money; and he was poor, and we had many children. And did I ever for a moment repent? Mon Dieu, non! I have suffered; therefore I may speak. I have pinched and saved, and I have gone hungry that the children might not want; but did I ever for a moment regret the flesh-pots of Egypt? Again, no. I have suffered; therefore I may speak. You young people, you think you know so much; you think you are so wise; you think you know what is life. But it is needful that age should afflict us—one must have wept, one must have groaned; then, but often all too late one sees and one knows.” Here Madame Vauprez knocked a tear away with her brown hand, much as she had knocked away that fly but now.

Then with a brisk and cheerful tone she cried, “And now, after my little sermon, I go make the coffee and gossip a little with that good Marie. Good-bye, and be wise enough to be foolish, my children.”

So saying she went away.

Gonda remained at the window, now again looking out. Maitre Siccand was no longer in sight.

Some moments passed.

Then the hand that hung by her side was taken in another hand; she was gently drawn from the window, and back to her former place. The weight of Madame Vauprez’s words weighed down her eyelids. She let Monsieur de Triancourt lead her to her chair. She sat down, and she had not raised her lashes.

He stood before her. “My words were strangely interrupted, and have found no answer,” he said. “I need hardly now say I love you. You must have known that long: yet I say it. I love you! The words are nothing, and yet everything. I will not add to them; and now my heart is greedy to hear your lips say you love me, and to hear your promise that you will love me always, as my wife.”

She lifted her look to his face now. She said, after her eyes had for a few seconds met his (and there was, when she began to speak, a slight smile upon her sweet mouth), “If I did not need to hear your words, surely you need to hear no answering words; but if you love to have them, they are yours. I love you; I will love you always, as your wife.”

As she spoke, still looking up into his face, her own so eloquently meek and proud, so loving and so tender, involuntarily, nay even unconsciously, she lightly laid her folded hands upon her breast. At that instant she was very beautiful; her face expressed, in its saint-like purity, the religiousness, in its woman-like devotion, the rapture of true love.

Yet her voice trembled and was very low. He looked down upon her even after she had ceased to speak. Meeting that look, it was easy to understand why he did not at once find any way to answer her. After a few seconds he bent over her, kissed her forehead gravely, reverently; and then suddenly drew her into his arms, gathered her closely to his breast, with an almost convulsive clutch, with broken, passionate sentences of love and blessing.

They had each known, what now seemed long ago, that they belonged one to the other; yet the happiness of this hour was none the less supreme.

‘She felt him thrill and tremble, almost as if this great, strong joy were more than he could bear. She drew him down to the great chair again, and sat beside him, both her hands in his, her head resting against him. For a while they were absolutely silent.

By and by he said, “It has sometimes seemed to me that that which I have done would be a rash, wrong thing to do, linking your life everlastingly to mine, while this dark mystery hangs over me.”

“And have you done this?” she asked, smiling up into his eyes. “I think you had no more to do with it than just by being you. I had no life till I began to live for you and love you. My life grew out of yours, and from the beginning was yours. And now you have taken me home, and to be at home is sweet. To have such a home is unutterably sweet.”

Laying a hand on the fair head that, when she had spoken, she drooped again upon his breast, he said, solemnly, “God only can reward such generous and noble faith, such love as you pour out for me; and He makes such things to be their own exceeding great reward. On this dear head I pray that always there may fall God’s choicest blessings; and that, if possible, only on mine-”

She interrupted him. “Remember,” she said, “that on me already his choicest gift has fallen, bowing me down with gratitude. Remember that henceforth I have no separate life. You are my heart, my brain, my life, my soul. Oh, we will not ask at all, not anything, except His blessing on our love, power to be grateful for His gift, and, in the future, strong hearts to bear His will; for surely some trial will ‘be visited upon us, or this would be heaven, not earth, our happiness being so supreme.”

She had slipped from her place, and was now kneeling on the ground beside him.

He took her head between his hands; tenderly pushing hack her hair, he read her face, looking long, deep down into her lovely eyes.

“Absolute truth and trust will be, in all trial, the best safeguards of our happiness in love,” he said. “Absolute truthfulness and trustfulness are what I read in your dear eyes. I hold myself to be blessed, therefore, beyond the blessedness of mortals.”

She answered rejoicingly: “You read right so far as this, that I absolutely trust and love you; that I am and will be absolutely true to you. But the praise of this is yours, not mine. It is just simply because you being you, it cannot be otherwise.”

She felt no shyness and no strangeness in speaking of her love. Already it seemed to her as if she could not remember the time when she did not love. Even the blessed face of this her happiness already seemed familiar. There was no boldness in its eyes nor in its speech to startle her. She would have poured herself out in one rich promise, and not have listened for an answering promise; for she would never have given herself away in love, had she not felt that he to whom she gave herself was in himself her sufficient pledge and promise.

To love with but part of herself, with doubt and reservation, was not possible to Gronda. Is it to any completely pure and thoroughly true woman? In the perfection of her happiness, and her unhesitating abandonment to it, there was childlike simplicity and noble womanliness.

Gently resisting his effort to raise her, she went on:

“I was nobody’s—in all this great world, nobody’s! I was lonely—a stranger, a wanderer! and now it is as if I had been called home. To be somebody’s is something—but to be yours is everything!”

“And you love me so, my sweet? How comes it? Can you tell?”

“Rien de plus facile, as Marie says, for the reason I gave you but now—-just that you. are you. And you—can you give me a better reason for loving me?” she. asked; “that seems to me so much more wonderful!”

“It is!” he answered with mock gravity, “but then, my child, I have a wiser reason. I loved you for pity—of your loneliness; for love—yours of me, mine of myself!”

Then he laughingly told her how madame and Marie had both been traitorous—talking to him by the hour on the subject to which he loved to listen, dwelling on her loneliness, and even hinting at her love.

“So I loved you for pity,” he said, lifting her up and drawing her very close.

“No matter for what you loved me, so that you do love me: so that you are happy in loving me!” was the proud answer.

“Do you not want to know a thousand things about me?” he asked her by and by. “You ask no questions? Have you no woman’s curiosity?”

“Not much to-day,” she said; “I seem to know enough. Some day I shall like to hear all you like to tell me. Now, knowing I am leaning here,” laying her head against him, “knowing I have the right to lean here always, I feel to know enough. You see I am tired—with happiness—and this is rest!”

After that he did not speak for a long time: his eyes were moist, and some feeling too exquisite for expression was quivering on his lips.

Presently Marie, having made more noise than there was any need in mounting the stairs, came in with coffee on a tray. The coffee that Madame Vauprez, more than an hour since, had left the room to prepare; Gronda, knowing who it was that came in, did not immediately take her hand from her lover’s, nor lift her head from his shoulder.

Marie’s sagacious brown eyes glanced from one to the other, danced with pleasure, then dimmed with tears.

**C’est ça!” was, however all her comment, and she handed them the coffee.

Monsieur de Triancourt, instead of taking the cup she offered, put his hand on Gonda’s head, saying simply: “A moi.”

And Gonda, rising then, took both the cups from Marie, and having put them down, threw her arms round Marie’s neck, sobbing out: “I am happy Marie. Oh, so happy!”

Marie, released, wiped her eyes, and went away.

But that night, following Gonda to her bedroom, she hoped for a good long gossip, and a good deal of information about the family, prospects, position, estates, and so on, of her mistress’s fiance.

Beginning with the invariable “Mademoiselle, je vous demande un peu,” she prepared herself for the asking of a hundred of questions: but when to some half-dozen she 4 received gentle, but absent and indefinite answers, she broke out irritably: “II faut que vous soyez bien de votre amour pour de pas savoir cela!”

“Marie! it is that exactly—his love and my loving fill the world for me,” said Gonda, and she kissed her.

Mollified by the kiss, Marie began to praise “Monsieur Henri.”

“Any way, for certain, rich or poor, landed or landless, he was a ‘gentilhomme,’ that was clear, clear as the day! He had, too, a fine manner with him, grand and gracious—was so amiable, also, thinking always of others before himself. Certainly he was grave, often a little sad-looking, but, doubtless, that was through what he had suffered, and, any way, was better than to be too light and frivolous. He was dark, too, very dark compared with mademoiselle; that was well, rendering mademoiselle more fair. Undeniably, he had a face bel and bon, and which was a pleasure to look upon, and.nowhere would there be a finer pair!

“In her country,” she added, “they had a saying:

Terro negreto

Adus toujours bono seissetto,

E sort di raisin negre un yin que fai trepa.

(Terre noiratre toujours apporte bon froment —-et sort des raisins noirs un vin qui fait danser.)

Marie chattered on, and Gonda sat at her open window, feeling the balmy breath of the spring night. Long after Marie had wished her good-night and gone away, Gonda still sat there, conscious of little but of a sense of being wrapped round with marvellous peace, marvellous bliss.

CHAPTER III

A SHADOW.

The last day of February was to be Gonda’s wedding-day. There seemed not only nothing to wait for, but every reason for not waiting. It was not likely that any man loving his promised bride as Monsieur de Triancourt loved Gonda, would choose to let her, a day longer than he could help, live so solitary and unprotected a life as hers at Les Cyprus.

It was curious how little either Gonda or Henri spoke, or planned for the future—any future beyond the day that should bind them indissolubly to each other.

Neither of them seemed to think of doing otherwise than of living at Les Cyprus: they both loved the old chateau now, as the place where they had first known each other, and Gonda was aware that Henri loved the neighbourhood for the sake of old associations, as well as with an artist’s love of its rich and varied beauty.

His mother had here passed the last winter of her life—he took Gonda to see the house where she had died, the garden where he remembered to have sat at her feet, and, looking up in her lovely face, wondered about death and beauty.

He had had a special object when he crossed from Italy the previous autumn, beyond that of wishing to revisit the old scenes. He had hoped to find out the family of his sister’s foster-mother, wishing, should the foster-sister (who had also been called Colombe) of his little pet Colombe, be alive, to make her some substantial present, or in some way to be of use to her.

He had learnt that the family, many years ago, had crossed the mountains to the Italian pastures on their further slopes; returning to the old father’s native place. Any information regarding them more definite than this, he had failed to obtain.

Monsieur de . Triancourt was absent from Chantreuil for two or three days before the wedding-day—forced to go to the little Italian port of Mentaldi (which had been for some time his home before the eventful expedition into Prove e), to make arrangements for the packing and removal of his property there, property which chiefly consisted of valuable pictures and engravings, of books, ancient and modem, costly and curious many of them, of articles of vertu, of interest for their antiquity or their beauty, and of his own pictures, sketches, canvases, and easel.

Those two or three days of his absence were busy days with Gronda: she was very anxious to give a less desolate aspect to the ruinous old house, before it should receive its beloved master.

Though she had very quickly learnt to lean upon her lover all her spiritual and intellectual life, looking to him with reverence, as to a stronger and superior intelligence, she had not unlearnt to regard him as one on whom should be lavished a thousand minutely tender, protecting cares, almost such as a mother would lavish on a darling child.

On one of the days of Monsieur de Trian-court’s absence from Chantreuil, Gonda went with Marie to make various purchases at Rosangon, which, though a small town, was a port, and a much more important place than either Rougemont or Chantreuil.

They drove first to the hotel where, a few weeks ago, Madame Vauprez had been staying with her patient. Leaving the carriage there, they went on foot from one shop to another, in the dark, narrow, and ill-smelling chief street.

Coming to the door of one of these shops for a better light, by which to judge of the colour of some ribbons—seeking to find one of the exact shade of some anemones that Henri, putting in her hair, had said harmonized marvellously well with its tint—Gonda’s attention was attracted towards the opposite shop—a jeweller’s.

It was the extreme prettiness of a peal of laughter that first made her look across the narrow way, and the loveliness of the laugher, and the quaint grace of her costume, made her continue to look.

A girl of twenty, or thereabout, stood in the jeweller’s doorway. Her broad hat hung by its ribbons over her arm, so that the magnificent braids of her hair were uncovered. Her hand was full of the jeweller’s wares. She seemed to be examining, with now a laugh and now the prettiest air of critical gravity, the toys she held, turning every moment to say something over her shoulder to some one in the interior of the dark little den. To what class she belonged it was not easy to decide. Her singular beauty was too refined, and the clear dark complexion was too delicate to be that of a mere peasant. The dress she wore was a graceful, rather fanciful modification of the peasant-dress of the district, made in fine and costly materials; the bodice, for instance, of rich violet velvet, laced with silver. The feet and ankles, displayed by the short skirt, were small and fine, and the brown hand that came out of the full plaited white sleeve was small, too, and beautifully shaped. In spite of her girlish gaiety, there was now and again a little tender air of matronhood about her that made Gonda say to herself, “It is to her husband she speaks when she turns from the door.” Looking up presently, and meeting Gonda’s admiring gaze, with half a smile and half a blush she withdrew a little. Gonda blushed too at having caused her embarrassment; but she thought she had never seen anything so altogether and unusually lovely as this young girl in her quaint dress, and the desire that rose in her mind was that Henri should be able to see and to paint her. She bent over the things she held in her own hand, but presently her eyes were again irresistibly drawn across the narrow street.

The old bald-headed jeweller had kindled a lamp. The girl was now looking at things upon the counter by its light—as she did so, leaning familiarly against a man who was also bending over them.

The old jeweller took up some coral ornaments. The girl received them from his hand, and seemed to question her companion about them, whispering in his ear, one arm passed round his neck to draw him down. Taking them of her, he gently pushed her from him almost to arm’s length, and then held up the ornaments, trying their effect against her clear, olive, oval cheek. As he raised his head, he faced Gronda. He shook back, with a gesture familiar to her, the dark hair that had tumbled forward across his brow. The light from the lamp fell full upon his face. Whose face?

Honda did not stop to gaze on it; she shrank back, away from the door, into comparative darkness. For a moment her cheeks flamed, her eyes flamed, the throbbing pulses of her heart and head seemed to suffocate and deafen her, then all at once she was white, still, and cold. She reached Marie’s side, and sat down, turning her back upon the street and the opposite shop.

Marie had been wholly absorbed in choosing a gown and a shawl. Both were to be as costly as she pleased. They were to be a present from “monsieur le futur de mademoiselle,” as he had explained to the good woman of the shop, a friend of hers.

When Gonda sat down by her, Marie looked up to ask her counsel; but seeing the change that had come over her mistress’s face, from which all life seemed to have been smitten back, Marie, for the time, forgot both shawl and gown, and talking of the closeness of the magazin, hurried Gonda out of its stifling atmosphere through a back door that opened upon the Allies bordering the sea.

Having seated Gonda there, procured for her and administered the medicine she believed to be infallible for every complaint— a glass of cold water with a teaspoonful of orange-flower water in it—and seen a little colour and mobility come back to her face, Marie demanded:

“And now, what is it that has happened to mademoiselle?”

“I cannot tell you, Marie. It will pass, it is passing,” Gonda answered.

She had held by Marie’s arm, and walked as if she had been blind when she left the shop. The physical shock had been sudden and sharp. .

Marie, hurt by an answer that, she thought, showed want of confidence, sat moodily silent.

Presently, Gonda turned upon her with a smile, and said:

“It is past. I should like to rest here a little longer, but the pain is past.”

“The pain! What pain? Where was the pain?” demanded Marie.

“At my heart;” but it is gone,” Gonda answered.

It was true; the pain had passed. Faith and love were too deep-seated, too life-engrained, too instinctive for it to be possible that the darkness of doubt should be of any but the briefest duration.

For perhaps ten minutes she sat under the budding acacias, looking over the blinding bright blue sea, the light wind, fresh and sweet, blowing upon her; and When, at the end of that time, she rose, she wondered at herself. All round her was pure, wholesome, sunshiny daylight, and she felt as if she had just wakened from an evil and noxious dream.

There remained on her mind a painful impression, but it was one of shame that it had been possible to her to feel what she had felt —as if all her world were failing from under her feet.

In spite of Marie’s feeble remonstrances, Gonda returned to the shop to finish her purchases. Marie’s remonstrances were feeble, because, having fixed her warm affections upon an altogether magnificent silk dress, her heart greatly desired to conclude its purchase and carry her prize off with her. Gonda, entering the shop from the Allees, did not once look across the street. If it had been Henri, who was there, then he had returned earlier than he had expected from Mentaldi. She should see him this evening. He would tell her what he chose her to know. If it had not been Henri, then it was no affair of hers.

Very soon, Gonda and Marie were jolting homewards in the rough carriage over the rougher roads. Marie was quiet, quite subdued by the fulness of satisfaction of possession. Not only had she for herself the wonderful dress, and a shawl as completely to her taste, but also another, less splendid, robe, and aprons, ribbons, stockings, handkerchiefs for her Marie, her eldest and best-beloved child, who was shortly to be married, aU purchased with the money that monsieur had given her to employ in buying herself a present from him.

When Gronda reached home, a letter awaited her from Henri. This letter was dated from Mentaldi, and said that he ‘would he with her to-morrow.

What did she do with that letter? a letter, each word of which seemed to her to breathe with power and dignity, the very spirit of true and tender love. As if she tried to make it amends for the momentary wrong done its writer, she kissed each line, each word, each letter, each stroke of each letter, and then she laid it in her bosom, for her heart to beat against; and that night she slept holding it clasped in her hand under her pillow., But before she slept, alone in the night and the darkness, she laughed.

“It is much easier to doubt my eyes then my heart,” she said. “I would rather believe,” she went on, “that some evil spirit, jealous of my too great happiness, had been allowed to try and tempt me, than allow my self to be possessed by an evil spirit that should lead me to doubt his goodness, his stainless honour, and his perfect truth.”

Is this something like idolatry? Perhaps Gouda was not free from the superstitions of that district—superstitions of which she had heard early from one who had deep faith in them, her good old Proven9euse bonne. Anyway, over-much believing is not a vice against which we need to be warned; nor surely is faith in the goodness of His creature, what some seem to hold it, a blasphemy against the Creator.

Gonda never spoke either to her lover or to her husband of the man so strangely like him she had seen that day. At first, because of the painful shame of having doubted him. She felt as if she could not bear him to know that she had doubted him. This was why she did not tell her lover. Afterwards, when the first vividness of the impression she had received had worn off, she was vexed with herself that in any man she had found like ness enough to him of whom her heart was always saying, ** There is none like him, none!” to be even for a moment deceived. That is why she did not tell her husband.

When the time came that she understood and could have told him all, it was too late, so he never knew the shock she had that day sustained. Yet once he had been very near hearing of it. On the evening before their wedding-day, just before they were going to part never to part again, standing behind him as he sat, leaning on his shoulder, playing with his hair, Gonda said. to her lover:

“Henri, you are sure, quite sure, that it is for your happiness that what we think is to be to-morrow should be? I could bear to lose you now, perhaps, but I could not bear to know hereafter that for my sake, because you knew I loved you, because you knew you held my life, you had endangered or sacrificed your happiness or peace, or-”

But here she broke off; her voice failed her,. From the beginning she had spoken with difficulty.

He was aware that she was painfully agitated; he felt the fast and heavy beating of her heart. Putting his arm round her, he tried to draw her forward as he said, playfully:

“I did not think we were so proud. It rankles then, does it, that nonsense of mine, that told you I loved you for pity? I did not think it was such a foolish child.”

She laid her head upon his shoulder, she folded her arms round his neck, resisting the movement that would have brought them face to face.

“It is not that; you know it is not that,” she said. “Do not jest with me, Henri.”

“Why does my love question thus?” he asked, with tender gravity; and his twining arm now drew her, spite of all resistance, to his breast.

She hid her face there a moment, but would not be held there* She slipped through his arms to kneel on the ground at his feet.

“What have I done or said, what have I not done or said, that my love can question thus? I must have been barbarously cruel.”

Leaning her arms upon his knees, she looked up in his face. It seemed to her that of an angel.

“You barbarously Cruel!” she cried. “It is I who have been weakly wicked. I am not what you think me* for, once, I doubted you. Can you love me any longer now you know it V’

He might have questioned further if her agitation had been less. Ah, had he done sol Then, perhaps, what was to be would not have been. As it was, he bent all his power to soothing, reassuring, calming her, that he might leave her with a happy face. And when he left her she felt as if a long life service of love could not suffice to wipe out her sin, sinned against one so purely good, by that momentary doubt.

Her sin? Sudden and unpremeditated, a physical shock more, perhaps, than anything else, it hardly deserved to he called a sin— otherwise—no sin of doubt is a small sin in love. To doubt anything is to doubt all, and love leavened with a little doubt becomes—no longer love and beauty.

END OF VOL. 1.