TABLE of CONTENTS

I—THE EVE OF PASCUA

II—THE MOTHER OF TURQUOISE

Ill—THE TRIBUTE OF THE KISS

IV—A SIGHT CURE

V—WANTED—A KING

VI—HOW CAREY CAME BACK TO THE MINES

VII—THE PRETENDER

VIII—THE KING'S CATARRH

IX—A GAME OF ECARTE

X—JOHNNY’S CASE

XI—AN IMPRESSION

XII—THE END OF THE COTILLION

XIII—HIS DECEASED WIFE’S SISTER

XIV—A PERFECT CURE

XV—AN ASCOT HAT

XVI—A MAKER OF COMEDIES

I

THE EVE OF PASCUA

I

SHERINGHAM ALWYN, for a reason known to him alone, if suspected of one other, had turned his back on London in the nipping rigours of the early spring season to find that Paris, with her rouge and powder peeling in the blizzards of March, her dyed bandeaux garish in the light of a cold white sun, had failed to please or enliven. Thus, almost without active volition, Alwyn had found himself in the Sud Express, being hurried to a more genial dimate through the raw mists of a wintry dawn. When interrogated at Bordeaux as to his destination, he had delivered up the neat leather-bound volume comprising passport and railway-ticket with the air of a pladd fatalist, and resigned himsef to sleep. When compelled to descend at the Spanish frontier and submit his traveling-bag and suit-case to the inquisition of the adnaneros, he had complied with the mechanical promptitude of an automaton. An hour later, as he followed a laden porter out of the station at San Silvestro, he looked up with a sensible stirring of pleasure at a sky thickly studded with blazing white stars, and snuffed with enjoyment a breeze that was salt and mild. And he nodded his head with a certain satisfaction, recognising that the old prescription had not failed of its effect. He was already beginning to forget a woman who had troubled his days and fevered his nights lately. Or so be told himself.

He had dined on the Rapide. Now, the stains of travel removed by a bath and change, you saw him, as he stood smoking on the steps of an hotel upon the Avenida, to be a well-graced specimen of the modern travelling Englishman, whose tall, lightly-built frame, well covered with lean flesh, tough muscle, and pure dean skin, is set off by the elaborately plain and simple clothes that hail from the ateliers of Bond Street, and who speaks the language of the country in which you may happen to encounter him with the dipped consonants of Eton, the drawl of West End Clubhand, and the supreme confidence of his conquering race.

It was half-past ten. A dear greenish-blue night with tawny or purple shadows had settled on the recollected hush of Holy Saturday. The bells had ceased to toll; the throngs of black-dad worshippers had quitted the churches; the streets of San Silvestro were packed with men, women, and children, of all ages, ranks, professions, or employments; the atmosphere was heavy with combined odours, smells, and fragrances; the drums of the ears vibrated with the clamour of inumerable tongues. On this the night of the Church’s solemn mourning, music and song, those inseparable factors to the enjoyment of a Latin crowd, were, of course, conspicuous by their absence. If a man hummed some snatch of popular melody, it was done behind shut teeth; if a woman turned a scrap of tune upon her tongue, it was sure to be a stave of the Dies Irae or a line of the Stabat Mater. To-morrow, after the Easter Mass, when the fashionably-trimmed hat would, in nine cases out of ten, replace the black mantilla, the throb and tinkle of the guitar, the waspish buzz of the mandolin, and the reedy moaning of harmonica or mouth-organ would time the tapping feet of the tavern-dancers and accompany the gipsy couplet, the rough serenade of the Basque mountaineer, or the latest music-hall ballad from Barcelona or Madrid.

And yet, despite the lack of music, it was a joyous crowd. There were laughter and jest, a certain amount of frolic and horseplay, and plenty of that rapid forceful gesticulation which gives such illuminating, picturesque vividness to dialogue between the children of the sun-favoured South. Over and over again you caught the same word pronounced with every variety of meaning and emphasis:

“Toros, toros, toros!" and again: "Los torosf”

A man would hold up his hands high above his head, the palms level, the fingers pointing downwards, the thumbs elevated like horns. ... A boy would imitate the sharp, downward stroke of the espáda; a woman would curve an arm as though to spread a cope of gold-bedizened, infuriating scarlet under the irate eyes of the baited bull.

To-morrow will be Easter Sunday. Of course the people will have their bull-fight,” thought Alwyn, shrugging in disgust at the recollection of the bloody, brutal, tawdry, barbaric splendour of a kindred spectade seen in the Campo Pequeno near Lisbon a year or so before. He had shot rhino and elephants on the Zambesi, and did not share the humanitarian’s views as to the inhumanity of killing big game. But the sight of gaunt and superannuated horses being disembowelled by skewered, burned, and bleeding bulls did not appeal more to the Englishman than to the refined and educated Spaniard. The opening ceremonial, with its old-world, archaic interest, the preliminaries of the corrida with all their wealth of music, colour, costume, suggestion, and detail—these had charmed and delighted Alwyn; and these he made up his mind to enjoy upon the morrow, and, with their savour keen upon his mental palate, to get up and leave the bull-ring before the butchering began.

Even as he framed the determination, Alwyn smiled, remembering why he had got up and left London. He could not have stayed without committing himself to some definite course of action. Well, he had preferred to come away. "Retreat may be inglorious, but it is safe," said Alwyn, as he knocked the ash from one of the excellent Havanas he had brought from home. And he exhaled a long cloud of the mild and fragrant smoke, and pushed bade the gray felt dfcer-stalker from his forehead, and became aware that a pair of spectacled eyes were eagerly regarding him from the level of a lower step than that on which he stood, and that in guttural accents slightly flavoured with garlic, the owner of the spectacles was inviting him to buy a ticket for the Easter lottery.

"Which will, by the high favour of Heaven, be drawn to-morrow forenoon. I can offer you the tenth of a billet costing one thousand pesetas, or the dicimoquinto of the tenth. For one hundred, or for seven pesetas, Seiior, you will enjoy the opportunity of sharing in a prize of five million pesetas—in currency of Inghilterra amounting to one hundred and eighty thousand of your pounds. Reflect, caballero, he added, drawing from a dilapidated leather pocket-book some crisp oblongs of bank paper printed in pink and blue and green. . . . "Consider that to refuse may be to reject a winning number. ... I say no more and no less . . . you have a lucky face!”

"I fear,” returned Alwyn in as fairly fluent if badly pronounced Spanish as the previous speaker, an individual revealed by the excellent electric light of the municipality as of lean, spare, and pallid physiognomy, and less than middle size, attired in a black-cape waterproof cloak of palpable antiquity and an aged silk chimney-pot hat, limp in the brim and shaggy with wear and grease, “that I cannot with candour return the compliment. If Life be a lottery—and there are intelligent persons who have pronounced it to be one—your countenance testifies that you have not drawn the prize.”

'The people of Inghilterra I believe to possess no equivalent to our State-patronised sorteof‘ hinted the black-caped man after a pause of bewilderment. “If I err,” he added, with a bow that combined dignity with servility, “pardon is craved beforehand.”

“You have been correctly informed,” said Alwyn. “To gamble at will with his own money my countryman must belong to a dub, West End or the other thing. To gamble with the money of the taxpayer he must be First Lord of the Admiralty at least, if not Chancellor of the Exchequer. Our limitations in this respect are very accurately defined'.”

“Then, Señor,” replied the small, shabby man, “since the loteria be disagreeable to your national prejudices, purchase a ticket for the corrida to-morrow, and witness the glorious spectacle—my country's pride and boast!—• which will take place precisely at two of the dock under the protection of the vested representatives of Government. His Majesty the King does not honour us before the summer season, but for eight pesetas you can have a seat in the sombra near the box of the Alcalde of the Ayuntamiento; or for a silver piece of one duro, a place in full view of the Civil Governor, the Military Governor,

the Comandante of Marine Affairs, or the President of the Provincial Tribunal. Or if you prefer to take your amusement economically, the unshaded side of the arena is not less than agreeable at this time of year, and to tell you the truth, it is the side with which my own humility is best acquainted. I have a little daughter, cdballéro, an angel of six, who is as good a judge of how a bull should be killed as His Excellency the Alcalde himself! I tell you with my hand upon the altar! . . . Her mother had a wish for the black meat of a baited bull, Seiior, but a month before the angels brought us our little darling. As a result, she has the cleverness of a woman with the spirit of a man. She would have her favourite torero, Señór —like all the grown-up ladies, she adored Pepe Azcaraga, ‘Bombarla’ as the people called him, and prayed every night to her saint that he might not get a cogida in the arena, and that the black Miura bulls might show him plenty of fight. And when he died, Señor—died like any vulgar, ordinary person!—she cried herself into a fever, I pledge you my word. No one can say I boast of her,” the lean man added, with an air of humility. "But when the child has reached thirteen she will give us news. The women’s school of bull-fighting at Seville is the summit of her ambitions, and to this end every penny I can save is hoarded away. They are few, for there are not many persons as generous as yourself, I assure you. Pardon the natural emotion of a parent, and allow me to sell you a ticket for the fight.” And thrusting the dingy oblong of printed card on Alwyn with one hand, and flourishing a blue-checked pocket-handkerchief in the other, the. meagre man ostentatiously blew his nose.

"If you have no objection to an English half-sovereign,” said Alwyn a little doubtfully, producing the coin from his waistcoat pocket, "I will buy you this ticket at eight pesetas. Otherwise I must wait and purchase elsewhere,”' he added, as the meagre Spaniard clutched the piece of gold. “The change, at the usual rate of twenty-six pesetas to the sovereign, is four and a half pesetas, I rather think?”

“Señor, I possess no change, but as I do not hesitate to let you have the ticket in return for this piece of foreign money/’ returned the meagre tout, putting Alwyn’s half-sovereign carefully away in a compartment of the greasy pocket-book, snapping its elastic band and swiftly returning it to its lurking-place beneath his venerable cloak, “it occurs to me that you might extend to me a similar confidence.” He sidled nearer, breathing cheese and garlic, and exhaling a strong odour of ancient doth and musty cupboards; and the rapacious entreaty glaring through his large round spectacles was not to be brooked. Alwyn was about to tell him to keep the odd pesetas and go to the devil, when he started with feigned joy, fumbled in another unseen pocket, and said, pressing another slice of dog’s-eared printed cardboard on the Englishman.

“Stay, I can discharge my obligation. Here is an entrada for the festival performance at the Teatro del Rey to-morrow. It costs one peseta for one fourth of the whole evening, Señor. You can go from eight to nine, from nine till ten, from ten till eleven, eleven till twelve, exercising your privilege of choice whether you will witness one of our national dramas, a vaudeville imported from Paris, a farce, or a ballet of action.” He added, with a slyly confidential air: “Between ourselves, as men of the world, I would not choose the ballet. The chief dancer is neither young nor beautiful, a thought too stout indeed, but she is a respectable person of unblemished reputation; and no man, young or old, has ever been known to commit a folly for her sake. Though if you had but seen Victorians in our Basque dances, you would have had your eyes washed, you may take my word! Hombrel—but that was grace! However, now that she has danced away the soul of the greatest torbro that ever entered the bull-ring—a man of San Silvestro and a Basque of the pure blood!—she will never return to this city, you may depend on it, while the kinsman of Bombarla keep long memories and carry long knives. And as for that, there is scarce a fisherman in the Old Town or a herdsman on the hills that has not a drop of blood in mourning for him; and as to the women—but I say no more! Though when one remembers how he died - Not a rip of the bull’s horn, a cogida in the throat or the belly—the priest administering the Viaticum in the little lazareto behind the arena!—every knee to earth outside, and every soul in the plaza praying and weeping. . . . But poison, Señor, I tell you with my hand on the altar) a bottle of pasttllas bought at the chemist’s, and a death like a poisoned rat in a Paris hotel. And Victoriana danced at the theatre that night and the people pelted her with flowers. But let her show her face in San Silvestro for one hour, and she will be pelted with mud, and garbage, and fish-heads out of the market! Let her sleep in the town one night and she will wake amongst the souls in Purgatory! We are people of very strong feelings, caballero, and though her family are pious Catholics of exemplary life- An appointment calls me elsewhere.

Will it be convenient to you that I wait upon your honour to-morrow with the other pesetas of change?”

“My good friend,” interrupted Alwyn in his fairly fluent if faultily pronounced Spanish, his considerable stock of patience exhausted by the thin man’s flux of speed), "I beg you to accept the sum in return for the information you have so ungrudgingly bestowed on me.

I congratulate you on possessing such a daughter as you have described. I sympathise with the family of Señor Bombarla in their bereavement. But you would do well to warn them that if their regret assumes the acute form of daggers or arsenic, they may find themselves brought too prominently before the notice of the Commissary of Police. With regard to Victoriana—perhaps the less said of that young person the better, in the interests of morality. Buenos noches, and may your saints accompany you! I propose to indulge in a little exercise before I go to bed.”

And leaving the lean man, hat in hand, and bent in an acute angle of gratitude and politeness, Alwyn stepped down into the Avenida, and mingled with the dense and moving crowd that packed the thoroughfare from wall to wall.

II

There is no more stimulating, exciting experience than to walk along through the thronged, lighted streets of an unknown city, on the eve of a day of festival. Tall as the hawk-featured, keen-eyed Northern Spaniard is, Alwyn’s six feet two of stature ensured him an unimpeded view over the heads of those about him; and whenever the solid, crushing pressure of warm human bodies relaxed from his lean flanks and strong ribs, he expanded his broad chest, and smiling, for no reason that he could have explained to you, drank in deep draughts of fresher air. Certainly it was tainted with the reek of garlic and the fierce odours of rancid oil and salt cod-fish; and heavy with the sour-sweet smell of cider, and the alcoholic tang of aguardiente. But it savoured, to-night, of adventure if not of romance. He was conscious of a quickening of the mental palate, of a keen enjoyment of sights and smells and sounds. He liked, as the huge resistless torrent of hot humanity rolled and roared through the streets that were so strange to him, to glance in at the open doors of churches, and snatch beyond the inner curtain or propped-back swing-door some passing impression of the orderly activity prevailing within, as monks, nuns, and lay religious of various Orders, aided by devoted elderly ladies and pretty young girls, hurried here and there, lowering and folding away the sable draperies that had swathed columns and shrouded tabernacles, concealed images and blotted out pictures, hanging gorgeous tapestries in their stead, and decking the altars with golden candlesticks set with snowy tapers, and jewelled vases filled with an overflowing wealth of rich foliage and perfumed blossoms wearing the Paschal hues of white and red.

Hemmed in and prisoned as Alwyn seemed to be, the denseness and solidity of the crowd were deceptive. Fluid as water, its constituents were continually changing; there was no permanence in the relations of its globules each with each. Now he walked between a gray-coated, slouch-hatted carabineer, and a tall hawk-faced Basque with the striped shoulder-blanket and boino; or a cassocked and shovel-hatted priest, haggard with the fasts of Holy Week, would neighbour him on one side, and a peasant woman in cotton head-kerchief and woollen shoulder-shawl would support him on the other. Before him, the pair of muscular velveteen-clad shoulders and the thick brown neck that upheld some small square head, crowned with the glossy ebon pigtail of the bull-fighter, would suddenly give place to some slighter shape whose brown or jet-black locks were veiled with the mantilla. And before the English stranger had observed more than a creamy nape, a delicate ear, an oval cheek, and a sweeping valance of eyelashes, she would be gone; her place usurped by an under-sized infantryman, or a half-grown hobbledehoy in the schoolboy’s belted blouse and shiny peaked ki pi.

You are to suppose that, overtopping the olive-skinned or tawny throng about him by so many goodly inches, the blue-eyed, ruddy-haired fair-skinned Briton could hardly pass unnoticed under the excellent electric lamps of the municipality, whose light, combined with the splendid radiance of the stars, rendered night, in the thoroughfares of this coast-town of North Spain, little less clear than an English winter evening. Thus, ever and anon, as Alwyn moved at a foot’s pace under jewelled skies or overshadowing brandies of avenues of tamarind-trees, the heterogeneous odours of the crowd would yield place to the meretricious allure of mimosa or the musky challenge of Eau de Chypre, a light hand would curl about his arm, a stealthy foot press upon his instep; while in a whisper significant as a snake’s hiss, painted lips would offer the harlot’s wares, and shameless painted eyes would unmask their batteries in vain. For though not at all insensible to the imperious allure of sex, Alwyn belonged to the large, continually augmenting and widening class of men to whom unwasted virility and conserved force mean more than the gratification of sensuous caprice or passing desire. He had learned to recognise in Vice the deadly enemy of physical and mental health, vigour, strength, and beauty, the chief factors, with Opportunity, in the making of a successful worldly career.

And, safe-guarded by his desire to succeed, he had escaped the springes of licit love no less than the man-traps of unlawful passion. It was his secret pride that he had never yet committed a folly for a woman. Discretion is so cold a virtue that one hesitates to attribute it to a man both handsome and young. But the fact remains that to free himself from the influence of a woman whose alluring charm he felt to be sapping his powers of resistance, Alwyn had quitted London a few days before.

“There's nothing for it but to make yourself scarce while you have yourself in hand!" he said aloud, as though he spoke to a companion.

The poison worked in his veins yet. He wondered as, borne by the slow resistless onflow of the crowd, he traverse! the Avenida and passed under the arclights of the wide and stately Alameda, shaded with cork-trees and fine Cantabrian oaks, whether she guessed why he had gone away?

On the Place of the Nautilus, its larger, outer curve outlined with sumptuous hotels and palaces of greenish-white stone or pinldsh granite, blazing with electric light, there was room to move independently and draw unhampered breath. Freed from the crush, leaning upon the seaward balustrade of white enamelled, finely-wrought iron, crowning the pillared arcades of snowy marble where in summer San Silvestro finds refuge from the heat of the sun, Alwyn drew in deep breaths of the salt freshness, and bathed his eyes in the beauty of the green sky studded with myriads of diamond splendours, the green land, and the yet greener sea, whose long rollers, crested with silver foam, broke on the pale crescent of sands in a diapason of sonorous booms and crashes; while from a plateau beneath the summit of Monte Aralda, rising at the crescent shaped Bay’s western extremity, the light of the pharos burned, a stationary, earth-borne splendour, vying with the radiance of Orion, throbbing low upon the sea-horizon, paling under the radiance of Capella and the glories of the Gemini. And from the islet of Santa Teresita, lying like a basking turtle upon the surface of the Bay, the ray of a revolving searchlight leaped out intermittently, now touching the frowning heights of Monte Orlia, rising upon the Bay’s northern horn; now wheeling seawards; and— where some lugger-rigged sardine-boats tacked against the land-ward-blowing breeze—revealing every patch of their rust-brown sails, and every rope of rigging, and the sturdy shapes of the fishermen who manned the craft with such an instantaneous clearness that—when the light passed on—it was as though a little fleet of phantom craft had melted into their constituent air. And so keen a longing woke in Alwyn to share these things with one who would have revelled in their beauty that he entertained, for the first time, suspicions of the efficacy of his cure.

“Steady!” you might have heard him say to the other man within him. "This is no use. I came here to forget, and I will do it.”

He turned from the seaward balustrade as he said the words, meaning to plunge once more into the crowd where it was of the densest. In the wide carriage-road running between two public promenades shaded with tamarind-trees for the whole length of the Place, he found again the human proximity that he sought. The narrower thoroughfares of the city had been occupied solely by a surging mass of pedestrians, but here men and women on wheels mingled with men and women on foot, and through their ranks the drivers in charge of luxurious automobiles, private broughams drawn by slender-limbed, long-tailed Spanish horses, mule-carriages, donkey-trucks, or even bullock-carts laden with their complement of sight-seers, recklessly pushed their way. There were no accidents, nor quarrels arising from casualties. A jest or a curse of the lighter kind rewarded the author of grazed shoulders or crushed toes. Indeed, the peace of San Silvestro might not have been broken once upon that eve of Piascua, had not the slender woman in the pale green-enamelled “Faublas” landau-limonsine, with the silver peacock displayed as a mascot on its bonnet, poshed aside her white silk veil and showed her white face.. . .

III

So white a face, and with such dark-ringed shadowy eyes of fixed and tragic anguish, that as they swept over and past him, searching along the broad sidewalk that borders the splendid crescent-curve of hotels and restaurants, banks and palaces, that look upon the fountained gardens adorned with tree-ferns and palms and statuary, and the public promenades shaded with tamarind, and the white sands and the green and silver and opal sea, Alwyn knew a pang of pity. She was wrapped in a long coat of snowy ermine, a cap of the same fur covered her head. She was alone in her car, which was driven by a liveried chauffeur who had another man beside him, neither of the servants seeming at ease, it appeared to Alwyn, nor anxious to court the attention of the crowd.

Nor would this have been diverted in their direction, but for the action of their mistress, as the slowly moving car passed a noble church that stands upon the corner of the Street of the Princes, its western porch upon the Place, the red lamp of a little shrine within the Hispano-Gothic archway swaying on its iron chain in the breeze from the sea. For, as though unwilling to believe her eyes, she shook her head, and yielding to a sudden impulse sprang upon the seat of her car, and supporting herself by resting a small bare hand, flashing with diamonds, on the lowered hood, looked out again with desperate eagerness over the heads of the moving multitude towards the empty porch. And then it was that a grizzle-headed Basque donkey-man, supported as he straddled on the end of his thin beast’s crupper by some native art of adhesion peculiar to the Latin race—clapped his thigh, plucked off his flat red cap, waved it, and yelled out something that, as though one jarring wire had been jerked, or a thousand, turned every head in the assemblage and \ riveted every eye on the green car and the pale slender woman in the coat of ermine furs, who stood upon the seat as though elevated upon a stage above all those faces that slewed, and stared bade.

“Ola! arrimada! So you are back among us, after all, Victoriana? Vile murderess, slayer of the souls of men!”

It seemed to Alwyn that she would have spoken, for she threw back her head and stretched out her slender jewelled hands with an appealing gesture, and her pale lips moved, but no words came forth: or if they did, they were drowned in jeering outcries and furious insults hurled at her in Spanish and the Basquenth, a dialect which is particularly rich and fruitful in abuse. And through all the clamour a woman’s voice, powerful as the steam-whistle of a locomotive, made itself heard, screeching:

“Dance for us, “you she-devil up there! Dance the death of Bombarla Azcaraga! Do not the papers say you can tell any story you will by the wavings of your head and body and hands and feet!”

There were shouts of Brava! and laughter—the terrible ironic laughter of Spain. The pack of bodies about the green car became more solid every moment. But Alwyn, wedged in the thick of it, did not feel the crush. The mute tragic anguish on the sharp white face, held stiffly up under the rake of all those mocking glances, the despair in the haunted eyes, roving desperately here and there as though searching for a face that had some human kindness in it, drove him beside himself with pity. He had prided himself on the good sense that had plucked him, times out of number, out of the danger of being involved in a scrape with a woman. Where was it now, as with the unforgotten science of a skillful football-player he wedged himself inch by inch through the heaving mass of bodies, impelled by the desire to champion—what? A woman of light fame, an Opera dancer in difficulties. As the intolerable voice blared on above the clamour:

“What, suciaf—do you tell us that you cannot dance because it is the eve of Pascua? It was the eve of Noel when my Pep6 took away his life. Yet you danced at the Opera, though he who loved you lay dead by his own hand! You were dancing for the guests at the Black One’s midnight banquet when the priests in the churches were elevating the Sacred Host! . . . What says she?” She had said nothing, only her eyes had roved and quested and prayed for help and protection. “She cannot dance for want of music? Be it so! we will rattle her a fandango on her bones with knives and cudgels! Ah, filthy sorceress! Face accursed of Heaven! Take that . . .!”

The proprietress of the intolerable voice had raised herself above the crowd by some means unseen of Alwyn. He saw the distorted face of a coarse black-haired woman and the straining bust from which the shoulder-shawl had slipped. He saw the bare brawny arm upraised and the fat fist gripping the knife that next moment whistled within two indies of its snow-white target—that would not have missed its mark, but for a hand that jerked aside the woman’s arm. It was a man’s hand, sinewy, brown and powerful, and the face of its owner was swarthy and fierce and strong. His large eyes, coal-black and fiery bright, burned under level brows that were sternly knitted, and his hair, long as a woman’s, strained back from the shaved forehead and temples, and coiled upon the summit of the head in a magnificent pigtail, revealed him as a hull-fighter to Alwyn’s eyes.

These recorded events transpired in less time than it takes to write them. The knife was thrown, the toréro had intervened, the dancer had leaped down from the seat of the green automobile—its top was rocking and swaying under the hands of the frightened servant who strove to raise it—when the crowd, infected by the frenzy of the woman who had meant bloodshed, made a determined onslaught on the car. To get Victoriana out and make her dance, under threat of death or torture, seemed to be the prevailing notion; and they would have got her out but for the Englishman.

You are to suppose Alwyn—his principle of never getting, without excellent reason, into any kind of scrimmage —thrown to the winds—back up against the door of the car and exceedingly busy with both fists and feet. His hat was gone, his collar had burst from its moorings, his tie was skewed under one ear, his stick was smashed, his tweed garments were soiled with the blood of several Spanish noses, by the time a sergeant and patrol of the Guardia Cvil appeared upon the scene, and by dint of spurring their horses into the thick of the surging mob, and using the butts of their carbines with zeal and discretion, restored order in a very short time. The Place cleared, the people melted away like snow in summer, the green car rolled away under the protection of four of the fan-tailed leather hats. . . . Alwyn found himself, with a great deal of space to move in, standing panting by the edge of one of the kerbed-in oblongs of public lawn (decorated with fountains, and beds of foliage-plants in patriotic colours), his watch yet dangling at the end of its chain, thanks to a patent lode-swivel, his gray felt deerstalker a dusty pancake in the centre of the roadway, and a long thin-bladed wooden-handled knife lying at his feet He stooped, took it in his hand, held it up, examined it by the electric light It was no labourer's nova jo or town-bird's gully, but the long, lean, angularly pointed blade with which the woman of the market cuts sausages, cheeses, and charcuterie. Even now the wooden handle smelt of perspiration and bacon-grease. And in a nick of the thin steel blade two or three human hairs were sticking. Fine, silken brown, with a wave that made them catch and cling about your fingers. And a faint subtle perfume that belonged to them, clung to the fingers too.

He freed the wisp of hair, and as he did it he caught the eye of a man who, not far off, stood leaning against a red-and-yellow banded green lamp-post, with his arms folded on his broad breast, and his black eyes watching Alwyn, it would seem. A swart, vigorous, athletic man of twenty-eight or thirty, in a short velvet coat, a gaudy silk tie splaying over the embroidered shirt-front, a tight waistcoat of striped flannel, tight trousers ending in brown, buttoned gaiters and shoes. Without the looped and knotted pigtail that crowned his -hatless head, Alwyn would have known him for a bull-fighter. His dark stem face was that of the man who had jerked the market-woman’s arm. Therefore, as with a sudden impulse and a bowler’s aim, Alwyn pitched the knife into the basin of a municipal fountain that was in the middle of the green patch of bedded lawns he stood near, he nodded and called out:

"Out of mischief there, anyhow! . . . Congratulate you on your promptness, caballéro. Not a doubt about it—you saved that girl’s life! . . .’’ lie bad spoken in English—of course the bull-fighter had not understood him. But as Alwyn proceeded to translate his words into bungling Spanish, the toréro raised an arm and jerked his thumb significantly over his shoulder toward a red light that burned on the farther side of the Place. Then he must have moved away, for Alwyn saw him no longer, though he had not knowingly removed his eyes from him. Perhaps the jerk of the thumb meant, “Come over to that red lamp there and stand me a cigar and a botétta of red wine!” Alwyn delayed but to unwind the wisp of hair from his finger and stow it in the outer case of his watch, before he moved diagonally over the grass, carefully avoiding the municipal flower-beds; crossed the asphalt of the boulevard, and stepped on the pavement where the red lamp burned, not above the doorway of a restaurant or tavern, but in the wide, deep porch of a church.

IV

Perhaps you know the church? It is dedicated to Our Lady of Good Counsel, and stands at the comer of the Street of the Princes, its west porch facing the sea. It was towards this porch that Victoriana’s sorrowful eyes had been so wistfully directed. Even now, before an image of Our Lady that is guarded by a blue, gilt-tipped railing, a slender woman’s figure knelt, absorbed in prayer. The red glass lamp, burning at its chain-end, swayed in the sea-breeze, making her shadow sway upon the ancient pavement. She was immovable as death: a statue of supplication in a gown of shabby black merino, woollen shoulder-shawl, and common net mantilla. Her pose, the shoulders bowed, the face sunk sidewise on the hands that clung to the blue railing, showed her to be passing through some ordeal of mental pain. Sobs and moans burst from her, and as Alwyn, shocked at his own intrusion on such grief, would have moved out of earshot of the gasped-out sentences, a name that reached him fixed him where he stood.

“Victoriana!” More sobs followed, and the pitiful cry: "Sweet Mother of God, aid me to find what has become of her! O Dies mio! how could they treat her so! Send her Thy aid—Thou hast so many angels. Hast Thou not said that they rejoice over one sinner that repents!”

Here Alwyn coughed as the best means of attracting the supplicant’s attention. As she did not directly turn, he spoke.

“Señorita, I ask forgiveness, but I heard you praying, and you seemed in trouble. ... If there is anything I can do to help you, it seems to me that you might let me know.”

“Jésu, Mario! Who speaks?” She crossed herself and turned wide, dark, tear-drenched eyes, and a pale, thin, pensive face towards Alwyn. Perhaps she had a wild idea that here was some winged equerry from the Court of Heaven. But the sight of this tall young man in dusty tweed clothes, striving to adjust an uprooted collar and bring a dishevelled necktie into some kind of order, forbade the thought, and wakened her womanly instinct of helpfulness. In pity of his plight, she looked for a pin; and as she took it from her dress and offered it to him, Alwyn made a discovery, and put a question before he could check the words upon his tongue.

“You are like her. Can you be her sister?”

“Ah, no, no, caballéro. Victoriana—the poor, poor Victoriana!—is the daughter of my aunt, and the foster-child of my mother, who is capellana of the Church of the Convent of Miracor (it lies on the mountain road two miles from here, Señor, near the village of Zaragorria), and has wept so much for all these miseries that she is blind!—she will never see the light of Heaven again!”

She sobbed and held her breasts while Alwyn waited. "We grew up side by side, I and Victoriana. She was, to her misery, strong and beautiful!—I a poquita, a thing of no account. Ah si, sil and she would laugh at me for saying that I would take the vows when I readied sixteen years, for nuns may not dance, and dancing was her passion. Bombarla swore she reminded him of nothing so much as a blown leaf dancing in the wind, and it was true.”

“Bombarla was the man who—”

“Si, si, Señor, the surly boy who was our playmate, the boy who dreamed of. becoming the chief of a cuadrilla and the greatest bull-fighter in Spain, and who fulfilled his dreams, became afterwards the man who died, despairing, for my sister’s love. But Fate would have it! Was it not Fate that gained Victoriana permission of the Madre Superiora to join the dandng-dasses of the younger pupils of the Convent? Was it not Fate that caused the dancing-master to speak of her to his cousin, who was master of the ballet at the Teatro National? Was it not Fate, again, that won her a place in that master’s school— that caused his second dancer to injure her ankle on the eve of a‘new spectade at which the greatest in the land were to be present, and gave Victoriana the opportunity of appearing in her place? Our ancient Basque dances were to be performed by the best artists. . . . Ah, how should I ever forget Victoriana’s triumph? Her performance carried San Silvestro by storm. Si, Sil And Bombarla, who loved her, and to gain fame for her sake, had chosen the profession of a bull-fighter, and was already spoken of as promising great things—Bombarla sat with the men and youths in the gallery and led the applause that night.”

The girl, whose name turned out to be Eufemia, did not tell her story succinctly, but with gasps and gulps and quaverings and pauses. As Alwyn remembered it afterwards, so it is written here. She spoke as a woman of the people, but without coarseness. She was intensely in earnest, that was easy to see.

“That wonderful night, two years ago,” she went on, "Dios voluntad—it was written that should be the turning-point, and Victoriana but seventeen! She came home to our little lodge within the great iron gates of Miracor, wild with delight and pride and happiness. She had a carriage full of bouquets and bonbons, and such tales to tell. . . . The Queen had smiled at her and sent her a jewelled bracelet and a great box of crystallised pralines; the people had clapped themselves weary, and shouted themselves hoarse. And a Prince, a tall, white-haired old man with strange eyes that made you tremble, had come round behind the scenes with the manager, and kissed her hand—such an innocent little hand then, senór! —and asked her whether she would not like to dance in a great spectacle at the Theatre Chatelet in Paris and charm the people there? Whether she would not like to live in a marble palace in one of the great avenues, full of palms and statues, and have servants, carriages, horses, and the most costly furs and jewels? Ah, thus he tempted her to her ruin, the ambassador of Satan! and now she is perdido, perdida, perdidat She is forever accursed, for she has slain a soul!”

She wrung her hands and harped upon her burden of "perdida." Alwyn waited. There was nothing else to do.

"So she goes to the great gilded city of Paris, where the State sets its heel upon the neck of our holy religion and the people have forgotten Clod. A lady of estimable and pious character, a friend of the wife of the manager of the Teatro National, undertook to be a mother to Victoriana. How could we suspect that the Prince who seemed so benevolent. . . . Ah, Jesu Maria ay di mir

Alwyn began to see light of an ugly colour. He had known from the first, he told himself, that the anguish in those tragic eyes was that of outraged innocence and trust betrayed. He knew very well what was coming, as Eufemia wrung her hands and struck her breast, and went on, pouring out her story:

“He meant but ill, that white-haired man who was un anciano in years, but lustful, subtle, and cunning as a profligate of thirty. What did Victoriana know of wickedness when his shape first crossed her path? I went with her to the classes at the school and the rehearsals at the theatre. I knew her heart as none else but Our Lord. She loved Him! He knows she did! She could have laid her soul like a flower at the feet of Our Lady and She would have seen it spotless! The Saints were her friends. . . . Señor, I tell you—I who have seen!— she would come from Communion with Heaven’s light upon her face.”

Alwyn could believe it. An immense pity waked in him.

“We at Miracor know little of how the world goes. My mother’s eyes began to fail, she wept so much when Victoriana was gone; and I, who hoped to take on me the vows of a lay sister, was compelled to perform her duties as capellana. Thus the months went. But newspapers may reach the homes of the very poorest. Bombarla brought one in his hand one day, and spread it before me on the table and pointed to some printed lines that spoke of Victoriana. 'If the man who wrote that has lied,’ he said, I will kill him with one stroke, as I would kill a bull1 But if he has told the truth . . Then he went away, for he had an appointment at the plaza de toros. Six bulls he met and killed, one after another, with the lightning-swift downward stroke that they say has never been equalled by the greatest of dies-tros, even Rafael Guerra himself. And the people shouted, and pelted him with cigars, flowers, money, and hats; but his heart, too well I knew, was torn with sorrow. Victoriana had given no thought to him, but who did not know that he held her as the apple of his eye? His face was always before me after that day of which I have spoken, and in my ears I had ever the sound of his voice as he said, ‘If he has told the truth!’ . . . For the paper said, Señor, that my Victoriana was the harlot of the foreign noble, and that at his splendid house near Paris —the great house bought from the State—that had been a holy Convent of barefooted Carmelites—she had taken part at feasts where things were done that might bring down fire from Heaven!

"It cannot be. It is impossible I I will not believe it!”

Alwyn heard himself saying so. The girl went on unheeding:

“Next came news that Bombarla had broken all engagements for himself and his cuadrilla, and gone away to Paris. One had to wait for the papers to tell us what he did there. By art and bribery, because he was of the Basque and subtle as handsome, and because he had made money in the arena, and used it to bribe with—late, very late one night after the performance at the theatre, he gained admission to that house of evil fame, and mingled with the fashionable guests, and saw, Señor! . . .and saw . . . Oh! Maria Virgen! . . . And next morning they found him dead in his room at the hotel.”

She fell against tile railing of the shrine, and the tears burst from her closed eyelids, shining like pearls as they raced over the bosom of her worn blade gown.

“Thus my mother lost her foster-child and I my more: than sister, and both of us the respect of the world. For the people heaped curses on the woman for whose sake Bombarla had committed the sin that damns the soul for ever. ‘If Victoriana comes here,’ they said, ‘we will kill her. Or we will so spent her beauty and her dancing that she shall for ever be the jest and scorn of men!' By a sure hand we sent Victoriana a warning. . . . She was nothing any more to us, but still we sent it. . . .

“Then why did she venture—” Alwyn began.

The girl lifted her hands and let them fall by her sides with the gestures of despair.

“That has to be explained. She gave no reason. I am in Biarritz,’ her letter said; I must see you. Meet me in the porch of the Church of Our Lady of Good Counsel at ten o'clock upon the Eve of Pascua. If you do not keep the appointment I shall kill myself even as he. . .' How could I help coming, when we were nourished at the same bosom? So I did net go to bed at nine o’clock to-night. I sat up sewing, and when my mother was asleep I slipped away. But hurry as I would, J was late, though I had reached the Place of the Nautilus when Victoriana drove through in the green car with the peacock. She did not see me, she was locking for me near the church. . . ., And then the woman cried out and threw the knife. . . . She is a relation of Bombarla, and loved Victoriana much when she was a nina—she has given her many a slice of sausage, many a vine-leaf of cream-cheese from her stall. Now she would strike her dead if it were possible. She— who 0,vida mia!—who is this?”

Her eyes stared, her finger pointed to something behind Alwyn. Before he could glance around, something pushed past with a gleam of blue and a silken rustle, and a subtle, delicate, remembered perfume made sweet the air. It was Victoriana, on her knees and clinging to the other, with, dry shaking sobs and gasping repetitions of her name.

“Oh, Eufemia! Eufemia! I am miserable, but not the guilty creature that you think me! Oh, Eufemia! I swear it upon my soul!”

The sighing music of the voice captured the listener before he realised that this was Victoriana. With feminine subtlety she had turned her ermine coat and cap, showing the lining of blue satin that had been hidden by the snowy fur, before she made the desperate venture of herself upon the streets that were so full of peril. One need hardly explain that Alwyn did not arrive unaided at this explanation of her disguise. He heard her gasp out the explanation to Eufemia, who looked across the drooped young head as though she would have appealed to him against its owner's recklessness. Pity and something else dried up his palate and impeded utterance. He signed to Eufemia over the bowed head. “Let her weep! I will keep watch and warn you if anybody is coming!” And stepped out of the red blotch of light thrown by the shrine’s red lamp, and turned his back upon the tearful pair.

The night was waxing old, sky and sea had darkened, the faces of the stars were veiled by linked trains of cirriform clouds of black and white, scudding eastwards at the bidding of a chilly landward breeze. The Place had refilled, but with isolated knots and strolling groups rather than the compact masses of humanity. Good-nights were being exchanged, with jovial reminders of appointments for the morrow; footsteps passed the church, but no curious glance was cast at the girls who whispered together near the feet of the sacred image, or at the man who stood with folded arms upon the threshold of the porch. Gosing his ears to the confidences of the couple behind him, Alwyn was yet conscious of their murmuring and sighing; their stifled sobs and exclamations of horror or sympathy not to be repressed. But when an uncontrollable cry of joy burst from Eufemia, followed by the words: “You swear that on the Crucifix? ... So then! It is not as . . . Blessed be Our Lord and His sweet Mother! Here, indeed, is comfort for us! Come! . . Come! . . .” he glanced about in time to see Eufemia drag her sister to the blue, gilded railing, and sink down with her in passionate thanksgiving before the image of the Mother with the Child. . . . Then they kissed wildly and rose, and kissed again and tore themselves, with sobs asunder; and Eufemia ran to Alwyn and caught him by the arm.

“Caballiro—pardon! but you asked me just now if you could help—” She choked in tears and controlled her self, and hurried on. “This sister of my soul has brought me news from Heaven! She is not guilty, as we thought— all—all has been explained! I go to break the news to my mother at Miracor; will you of your noble goodness follow more slowly with Victoriana? You do not know the way, but she will show it you. Across the bridge, past the bull-ring, and up the Zaragorria road. Thanks!— thanks!”

She hardly waited for Alwyn’s assurance, but pulled her net mantilla dose, hurried out of the porch, and darted round the corner. Her scudding footsteps had already grown faint in the distance when Alwyn stepped back into the swinging circle of red light cast by the chained lamp, and met Victoriana face to face.

V

She was no longer pallid and tragic. A new light shone in her eyes, a faint colour flushed her. She looked weary almost to death, but not like one about to die. Her fatigue showed in her voice, that was not more than a faint lisping whisper. She spoke first He guessed rather than heard her say:

“Muchisimas gracias, caballéro, for your goodness to my sister!—” She broke off, looked at him more intently, and a light of recognition dawned in her eyes. “More thanks,” she added, “for myself! for I think it' was you who resisted the people when they would have dragged me from the car.”

“I rendered a very slight service,” returned Alwyn, “for which thanks are unnecessary. Though to that countryman of yours who stopped the knife—or more correctly, diverted the aim of the woman who threw it, is due the “ credit of having saved your life.”

She repeated, with a slight bewildered pucker of the brows: “My countryman, Señor . . .”

“I speak loosely,” said Alwyn, "but he was certainly more a Basque than a Spaniard, and moreover wore the short velvet jacket and coléta of the toréro."

Her body seemed to shrink. Her eyes, their pupils widely distended, were fixed searchingly on Alwyn’s. She whispered with pale lips: “A toréro. You are sure?” And after a pause: “What were his features?”

“I should describe them,” answered Alwyn, after a moment’s thought, “as dark even for a swarthy Spaniard's.

And his eyes were certainly the blackest and most piercing I ever saw. Bat otherwise there was nothing noticeable about his face—unless,” he hesitated and resumed, “unless it might be that on the left—yes, it was the left side— on the bluish skin where his temples were shaven, there showed a whitish, crescent-shaped scar,”’

“Ah, Mother of us all!” she said, with a sharp intake of the breath, as though some fine-pointed blade had stabbed her. “Again! That makes the second time!

Yet how I have prayed—” She looked up, meeting Alwyn’s gaze, and put the question:

“When you met the eyes of that man, Señor, did it occur to you that he was—ghostlike?”

“Como un eséctro” . . . Alwyn repealed her words before he fully grasped their meaning. “Like a ghost? Why, if so, a ghost can exert a considerable amount of muscular force upon occasion. No, Señorita. You, yourself, standing before me in this uncertain light, look—though you are not so pale as when I first saw you—more like a ghost than he.”

She said, touching her breast and her forehead with a slender finger: “I had so suffered. No sleep, no rest, no peace. . . . But now I have seen and told Eufemia, and she will tell my mother that I am not—what they thought me—and then—”

“Then you will go bade to Paris?”

She shook the slender finger before her face with the negative gesture.

"No, no, no! What!—return and be again-Death would be preferable.”

Alwyn said, borrowing a Southern simile:

“Death is your shadow while you remain here!”

She shuddered, and little points of moisture broke out upon her forehead and temples where the heavy waves of her reddish-brown hair massed out from under her cap. He heard himself saying:

“Can nothing be done to prove your innocence to the people? Can I be of no assistance towards this end?” She looked at him full, and said:

“How do you know that I am innocent? Because my sister has told you so?”

He answered: “It is written in your face!”

“Ah!” she sighed. “Perhaps if you knew all—you might—in some way that I cannot imagine now—be able to help me. . . . For I think you must have helped a great many unhappy women!—is it not so?”

Alwyn grew hot, remembering not one single instance. He heard himself boasting to his associates of Clubland that he, Sheringham Alwyn, had never in his life committed a single folly for the sake of a daughter of Eve. He wondered, glancing at his soiled clothes and involuntarily putting up a hand to his pinned-on collar, what they would have said had they seen him half an hour previously. And then it occurred to him that their opinion was not valuable. But Victoriana was speaking in that smooth liquid voice of hers:

“You have fought for me—you have earned the right to know the truth that I risked my life to tell with my own lips to the beloved Eufemia. I am guilty, and yet I am innocent, the Queen of Heaven hears me speak!” She thrust a slender arm across the railings and nipped a fold of the blue painted draperies. “Thus—and thus, with my hand upon Her robe!”

Alwyn would have spoken, but her look stopped him. It seemed that she had made up her mind to justify herself in the opinion of the man who had saved her from the mob.

“listen!” she said. “When I went to Paris a woman accompanied me. To my foster-mother she had said ‘Victoriana shall be as my daughter.’ And as time went on I grew almost to love her—she seemed so gentle and kind. When the Prince—”

A shudder took her and her voice failed and quavered. She mastered herself and went on:

“When the Prince visited often at our hotel in Paris she said that it was not for me to reject the friendship of a great and generous nobleman. When he offered me the use of a house, servants, carriages, she asked, ‘Why not?’ It was he, we knew, who had obtained me my engagement at the Chatelet. But the power that crowded the great beautiful theatre night after night with men and women, rich and poor, noble and humble, who came to applaud Victoriana, the dancer—that was hers, , hers alone!”

She drew a long breath and went on:

“Men said they loved me. I was offered—what did they not offer? for a rose, for a smile, for a signed portrait, for a supper at a restaurant. But I knew the evil that they meant me. Madame de Malvais—that was the woman who was my guardian—she told me what pitfalls lay under the flowers they strewed. She bade me take note how that he—the Prince Waldemir—never made love to me. And it was true: a kiss upon my hands was all. He took us to concerts and picture-galleries and ^luncheons at the great restaurants. Madame was always third of the party. He never visited us after the performance at all. He would come to my dressing-room where Madame was always near me, and say: ‘Take the child home, my good Malvais, and give her her supper, and put her to bed with a tisane. She is too young and delicate to keep late hours.’ ”

She heaved a shuddering sigh and tightened her hold upon the blue-painted draperies.

“So she would take me home; and when I was in Bed, she would look in to ask if I needed anything and to give me the tisane the Prince advised. It was always the same, the warm, strange-smelling brownish mixture in the little cup of green jade that was carved so queerly. And when I had drunk it I would sleep like the dead in the campo santo. Only with dreams, Señor—such strange and dreadful dreams.”

A shadow of terror crossed her face.! Her lips were dry and she moistened them.

“Such dreams, that I would wake weary to death, and aching in every bone. Such dreams that I began to wonder if they—”

“Do not tell me more,” said Alwyn, in a low voice, “if it so pains you.”

But she did not seem to hear. She was saying:

“Once—in my dream, I fell and hurt my foot. . . . When I woke up the ankle was swollen and in bandages. Perhaps I have not made you understand that in these dreams of mine I appeared before strange assemblages of evil, luxurious people. There were banquets in a great hall that had the appearance of a church. While the guests feasted and revelled I would dance. But not as I danced at the theatre. . . Some evil influence—”

A shudder took her, and beads of moisture sprang upon her temples. She controlled her trembling with an effort of the will.

“One day, after the accident I told you of, which prevented me from appearing at the Chatelet for some evenings, I read, in a newspaper—something about myself. Something false, and vile, and slanderous, Señor, but— nevertheless, it frightened me. . . .”

She was silent for a moment, nipping her lower lip between her teeth. Then she said, releasing it:

“When I was well enough to dance again . . . When next that wicked woman brought me the jade cup, I dared not refuse to drink the tisane, and yet I was afraid. So great a fear seized me that my hand shook. Unseen, I spilled more than half the drink as I swallowed it down. Then I slept, and woke. Woke—to find myself in that great church-like hall with the painted windows, and the blazing tapers and the perfumed, incense-clouds, dancing. Dancing to the strangest, most terrible, music, before the Prince and a great company of wicked men and women, who were lying on couches by long glittering tables that were magnificently spread for a feast. Jewels were in my hair, and I wore a girdle of jewels; but for the rest-

Oh! shame to have to tell it” . . .

“The shame is not yours,” said Alwyn, with emotion. “You were drugged and hypnotised too, perhaps, by a wretch as ingenious and perverted as he is wealthy and powerful. Too high for earthly scorn to reach, perhaps, but one day he will reap as he has sown. Let me hear no more, since it cost you such pain to tell it!” he added, and took within his own her small and icy hand.

“Little remains to tell,” said Victoriana, drawing the hand away from the clasp that prisoned it. “I woke and found myself there and thus, and then a man leaped out from the velvet curtains that hung between the columns, and there were some that tried to seize him, but he threw them off as though they had been men of straw. And he cried shame on me and cursed me. It was Bombarla! and my senses went from me—and I fell and I knew no more. When I revived I was in my house, and I drove that wicked woman from me, and gave orders that the Prince was not to be admitted. But he came, for the house was his, and told me that Bombarla had killed himself. And I took what was mine, and went from that house, leaving everything that its master had given me. . . . And I sent for the manager of the theatre and closed my contract—I said I would never dance again, I would go home to Eufemia and my mother, and be at peace, and forget the wickedness of men. But a letter came saying that henceforth I was to be a stranger even to those two who had so lpved me. Dios! it nearly turned my brain. I was alone—outcast—accursed. I made up my mind to drown myself and end it. But when I reached the edge of the quay, and would have leaped over, a man’s shape rose up between me and the muddy rushing water. It was Bombarla. He held up his hand, pointed to heaven, laid his palms together. Words would not have said more plainly: ”Keep back! You shall not lay another sin upon this soul of mine. Live! pray for the soul that was lost for love of you. I was deceived—it may be that Our Lord will stoop to hear f Now, Cabelléro, you know why I said, 'That makes the second time /’ And why I have come home, hoping to be let live with Eufemia and my mother at Miracor. I shall not be a burden upon their poverty—I have money—plenty of money. It was earned by my dancing—it is honestly mine. I shall dance no more—I have sworn it upon the holy Crucifix. For I have drunk of the world’s success and seen the life of splendid cities. And the demon that men and women call Pleasure—has scorched me with its breath.” She added: “I can never forget—never be as I used to be. But if Our Lord permit, my life will be one of humility and prayer.”

VI

In the pause that followed her words, while she leaned against the blue and gold railing, breathing deeply, the hour chimed in the steeple overhead. Far and near, other docks announced it, the porch harboured the deep melodious notes like a veritable cave of echoes, the pavement thrilled under their feet. And as the last deep tone throbbed out and died, a lantern-carrying night-watchman, turning the comer of the Street pf the Princes, struck his steel-shod staff upon the stone and gave out in harsh, professional accents:

“Eleven o’clock upon the eve of Pascua! A night of stars, quiet and serene!”

He cleared his throat noisily and spat upon the pavement. A passer-by, a squat man, wearing a peasant’s striped blanket, called out cheerfully:

“How goes it with the bonfires, ’Tio Antonio?” and got the answer:

“They have been alight since ten, they are roaring like a row of chained lions across the road below the Ring. When the bulls are driven down from the corral on the hills above Miracor it will be a brave toro that charges through. Buenas noches and a good Easter to you!

“Noches!” and the colloquists moved on in different directions, whilst Alwyn turned to his companion with the words:

“Now, Señorita Victoriana, I am at your disposal. Do we follow your sister on foot, or do you choose to use your car?”

“My car,” she repeated, a little vaguely, and frowning. “It is at the Hotel Alberdi, on the Place of the Sun. Can you drive, Señorrf”

“Not a strange car in a strange country after nightfall.”

"Then the car is of no use to us, and we must walk. My chauffeur and his companion have been frightened by the people. Nor would either of them venture on the Zaragorria road to-night.” She added, seeing Alwyn’s slight frown of perplexity: “Because of the bulls that are to fight in the Plaza to-morrow. They will be driven down at twelve, led by the tame belled bullocks that are always kept with them, and followed by a great crowd of men with whips who ride on strong swift horses. There is great noise of bellowing and shouting. And very often there are accidents when people have not been warned and do not keep out of the way.”

"But your sister?”

“Eufemia is safe I—she will have reached home by now, and, as I have said, the bulls will not be driven down before midnight So, if you are ready. Caballiro, we will go. 'Stay!” the slender white hand shot out from the blue satin sleeve and was laid on Alwyn’s arm an instant. “The Señor knows that he risks much in accompanying me? In spite of this disguise I may be recognised, and then ...”

The shrug of her slight shoulders under the fur-lined blue garment was significant. Looking in her eyes, Alwyn smiled. He had never courted danger for its own sake, but shared with this strange, slender creature peril had curious charms for him. He drew deep breaths, and as though the night-air had been laden with the germs of some drug both subtle and intoxicating, his blood raced through his veins, and his body seemed as light as air.

“Come!” she said, then dipped a slender finger in the vessel of holy water upheld by a sculptured angel at the right of the porch, crossed herself upon brow and lips and breast, bent her head reverently to the blue draped image behind the railing, and passed out before Alwyn into the Place. Its wide crescent was still populous, the Street of the Princes was filled with a sauntering crowd, but no curious glance was turned on Alwyn and his companion. As they crossed the marble bridge spanning the broad, deep estuary that almost severs San Silvestro from the mainland deserted now of its fruit-peddlers and sellers of roast chestnuts, baked sweet potato and fried sardines, a leaping red and yellow light filled their eyes, and a roaring, crackling sound was varied with detonations like pistol shots. Victoriana said, meeting Alwyn’s glance:

“The bonfires. . ., Do you not remember, Señor?"

•  •  •  •  •  •  •

And pushing on, they passed between the stacks of blazing pine-faggots that were ranged in a double row across the road, below the wide brick-paved slope that gave the proletariat entrance to the bull-ring. High overhead the sinister shape of the great amphitheatre towered, its red walls licked by the fierce lights and shadows cast by the leaping flames; the roar of voices and the barking of dogs augmented the roaring of the fires, fed by swarthy bare-armed navvies. Men and boys, chiefly of the humbler classes, basked in the heat like salamanders, and every imaginable breed of mongrel snuffed at strange heels, fought pitched battles among themselves, or squatted in rings round the baskets of the fried-sardine peddlers, ready to snap up rejected heads. Few women mingled with the crowd. And as the Englishman and his companion passed between the double row of blazing pine-stacks, a brown-faced, sweat-dripping fire-tender called out to Alwyn:

"Ola, hombrel Are you crazy to be taking your sweetheart in blue for a stroll upon the Zaragorria road at this hour? Have you not heard of the new edict of the Ayuntamiento? I tell you, if you meet the toros, there will be no more kissing for one or both of you—unless you bear charmed lives!”

"Thanks for the warning!” Alwyn called back in his faulty Spanish, hurrying his companion beyond the double barrier of leaping fires into the deep shadowed thoroughfare beyond; and another man called out roughly to the first speaker, throwing another faggot on the blazing pine-logs:

"Let be I they are English and mad with the love of danger. That the bulls come down at eleven instead of twelve, that is their reason for the frolic. The walk would be nothing to them, if it were not for the bulls!”

"An unintentional compliment to the spirit of my country," said Alwyn below his breath to his companion, "which I regret not to have been able to acknowledge with a bow. But you are panting. Is that coat too heavy? Will you not let me carry it?”

"It is not the coat,” answered the stifled voice of Victoriana. "It is—what that man has said. . . . O Dios! did you not understand? To-night the bulls come down an hour earlier.” She caught Alwyn’s arm and shook it fiercely. "Think—Señor! What if Eufemia met them— what if—”

An uncontrollable cry escaped her. She released her hold on Alwyn's sleeve, and ran.

There was nothing to do but to run after her, and Alwyn did so. The road lay uphill, between villas couched In gardens full of palms, tree-ferns, and acacias. High hedges of yellow jessamine, mimosa, lilac, and blossoming veronica, rose behind fantastically wrought-iron railings and wooden fences of quaintly-fancied elegance. The electric lamp-posts of the municipality at longer and longer intervals split pools of light upon the way. And underfoot it became stonier, rougher, and more difficult for the pursued and the pursuer.

In days not so very far behind, Alwyn had been noted as an athlete and runner. He found now, to his chagrin, that the flying shape before him kept easily ahead. And as he ran, husbanding his breath, staying for the moment when her lesser forces should weaken, the passion of the hunter wakened in him. Nimble fancies quickened as he ran, keeping pace with his own hurrying shadow. He was Apollo chasing the flying Daphne through the spice-perfumed laurel woods. He was a savage warrior running down the wild mate of his choice. He was Sheringham Alwyn, who had quitted London in the season to avoid falling in love with a woman. Well! he had effected his purpose. Her spell was broken. Another's charm enchained him. On the flying heels of a newer passion he was running—perhaps to death.

For above the panting of his own lungs, tried by the strain of the increasingly upward gradient, the runner heard sounds of tumult, furious shouting and deep, angry bellowing, on the road ahead. The gallop of hoofs, unshod and shod—the onward rush of heavy bodies shook the sandy earth beneath the feet of the runner. Unintelligible shouts cleared into a warning:

“Plaza! Plazal Clear the way! Los toros! los toros!

“Victoriana!” Alwyn shouted to the slender figure in the distance.

But unhearing or unheeding, she ran on, lightly as a deer, towards the rolling clouds of dust that veiled the fierce curled fronts and the curved sharply-pointed horns and the avalanche of massive, sinewy bodies that thundered down from the mountain corral, led by their lifelong companions, the tame belled bullocks, and followed by a yelling cavalcade of mounted meft, attended by barking dogs. And knowing her in direst peril, Alwyn made a desperate effort to overtake her. Breath failed him with the cry, “Victoriana! For Heaven's sake, stop!”

The voice may have reached her ears, but it was not that that stopped her. The foremost beasts of the stampeding herd were almost upon her when—or so it seemed to Alwyn—the pale, luminous figure of a man started up in the road ahead of her, and stood in the well-known attitude of the toréro awaiting the charge of the advancing bull. And in that instant she seemed to swerve, stumbled, reeled aside, and fell in the shadow of the hedgerow. And in the same instant Alwyn knew himself environed by an atmosphere of dust, smelling of mountain herbs and the sweetest of clover, and felled by the blow of a powerful heavy shoulder—pounded by galloping hoofs that beat on his prostrate body like the blows of paviour’s rams, the starry skies whirled round, his mouth was full of blood and gravel. ... He tried to cry out to Victoriana, and then he knew no more.

VII

(When Alwyn opened his eyes it was to shut them again, for the light from a window hurt them horribly. A man’s footstep crossed the floor, a shutter was dosed, a curtain adjusted, a soothing shadow fell upon his smarting eyelids, and a masculine voice asked him in French whether he was sensible of any pain? Opening his eyes in assent, for in truth he ached in every bone in his body, Alwyn realised that he lay in a narrow hospital bed in a bare, deanly room with a lofty ceiling. The person who addressed him was a spectaded, sallow, bearded man, with a high forehead and aquiline features. His unstarched shirt, black ribbon tie, and round-ended collar vaguely awakened in Alwyn’s associations not unconnected with a dentist’s reclining chair, and his black vest and shabby gray frock-coat showed, like the nether garments, traces of arduous wear, and exhaled odours of ether and chloroform.

“Permit me to introduce myself as Doctor Isidro Vac, resident physician and surgeon of the Clinica of Zaragorria; in which establishment,” he added, reading the question in Alwyn’s look, “we had the pleasure of receiving you, when a bullock driver and his companion brought you here at a late hour last night They had found you in a swoon by the roadside after the passing of the bulls, they explained to me. Your condition was easily accounted for by the fact that you are a foreigner. No native of the town nor dweller in the suburbs would have ventured late upon the Zaragorria road.”

“Was I—alone when they found me?” asked Alwyn, lifting his hand to his aching forehead, and not surprised to find a bandage there.

Before the surgeon of the clinic answered, he went to the door and opened it softly, spoke in a low tone to someone without, and returned with a little tumbler in his hand.

“Drink this. It will compose your nerves, which have been severely shaken.” He added, as his patient gulped down a draught tasting of chloric ether, and gave him back the glass: “If the person accompanied you was—of the opposite sex, I cannot disguise from you that a casualty occurred. But, mon cher monsieur, is it not better, in the case of a young and beautiful woman, to rester sur le car—reau rather than to live an object of pity? Had the unfortunate Victoriana survived,” he went on, noting the change in Alwyn’s face, "she would never have known another peaceful hour. I tell you—I who know the Basque—go where she chose, her life would have been continually in danger from the revengeful spirit of her countrymen. Believe me, cher monsieur, what has happened is for the best I”

Alwyn asked: "How soon shall I be able to leave?” thickly:

“Where is—it?”

The spectacled man understood the question Alwyn had asked thickly, and with eyes that were averted. He answered:

‘‘The men who brought you here returned and conveyed the body of the unhappy girl to the house of her mother”

“And her sister, Eufemia?”

The surgeon replied: “She was unhurt. It was she who instructed the bullock-drivers to bring you here.” Alwyn asked: “How soon shall I be able to leave?” “This evening, cher monsieur ” said the surgeon, with an accent of regret which he was unable to conceal. “For though you are severely bruised and have sustained an ugly cut upon your forehead—which I was happily able to stitch before you revived!—no bones are broken. Your escape,” he added, “has been one of a thousand. You should bum a candle to-But—zut! of course you are Protestant, being English. Or you are Agnostic, .which is more fashionable nowadays. For your return to San Silvestro I can arrange easily. The loan of a carriage can be obtained from the Convent of Miracor. For the present, adieu—sleep if you can!”

But sleep did not come to Alwyn. It was Easter Sunday. High Mass was over, the hour of noon would find the approaches to the bull-ring blocked with a solid mass of clamorous humanity, red-hot with excitement and thirsting for the sight of blood. Thus down the mountain road that showed a dusty ribbon beyond the garden of the sanatorium, flowed a broad stream of Basque peasants in festal garments, anxious not to miss their places on the broad stone benches under the scorch of the bright March sun. And as they went they said of Victoriana: “She has met death as she deserved! The poor sinner. One may spare her a Paternoster now that Bombarla has been avenged!”

“Better to die, indeed,” thought Alwyn, turning restlessly in his pain of body and mind, “than to waste her strength and youth in the endeavour to combat a deadly prejudice fixed in minds as ignorant as these. But how beautiful a being to meet so vile an end! And yet—had she escaped the deadly thrust of the horn that killed her— had her mother, a peasant even as these, refused to believe her story and receive her—what could Eufemia’s advocacy have done? What would have become of Victoriana? Would she have returned to Paris once more to fall into the clutches of that loathsome debauchee? Or would she have gone back to London—with me?”

Daylight brings counsel. Lying on the narrow iron bedstead, stiff with bruises and aching from head to foot, Alwyn knew that he would have offered the dancer the protection of his name and title, in defiance of the ridicule, of the censure of the world. Envy or blame, he would have been as indifferent to the one as to the other: he who had never been guilty of an amorous folly, who was esteemed as prudishly solicitous of his good reputation as he was economical of strength and health. Everything, thought Alwyn, has its breaking-point; I was vain of my powers of resistance—I held weaker men in scorn and showed it. Did I not come here to forget a woman, and in the course of a angle night have I not forgotten her, only to rivet upon me heavier chains, and court a newer bondage? Let me never again strive to mount a pedestal above my fellows. I have learned my lesson—I am humbler from henceforth. . . . “Who is that knocking at the door? Come in!”

The door opened a crack, but no one entered. A feminine voice explained in Spanish that Ignacio from the Convent was waiting with the carriage; a feminine hand inserted a hot-water can. The bath was not warm, this being a festa, the unseen speaker added, and Alwyn crawled out of bed and made his toilet as he might. The absence of a bath, and the presence of yesterday’s shirt and the day-before-yesterday's beard, did not add to the freshness of his appearance; his hand shook, he was unsteady on his legs. But when he went downstairs, settled his account with the hospitable proprietor of the sanatorium, and got into the ancient brougham, drawn by an emaciated long-tailed black horse and driven by a check-shirted Basque in a blue boino, he bade the man drive first to the capellana’s lodge beside the Convent gates.

“At your honour’s command,” assented the Basque, shutting the rickety door of the antique vehicle upon the passenger. He looked in over the door to say: “Shall I pull up the caballo where the miserable girl met her end last night? There is blood on the grass by the ditch—one would say there a goat has been slaughtered! To set up a wooden cross upon the spot would be a good deed, and keep her spirit from walking, by reason she was a bad one. And plégue a Dios! that will be done!”

He shut the rickety door upon Alwyn and the conserved and musty odours of the ancient vehicle, and climbing to the box, whipped up the debilitated beast.

The lodge at the gates of Miracor was a white-washed cottage with a flat roof of the deep chocolate-red tiles common to the country. The green shutter-blinds were dosed; the shards of a broken earthenware water-vessel lay, in some strange significance, beside the doorstep. High railings, and a huge porte-cochére of rusty wrought-iron, separated it from the road, here no more than a cart-track. And behind and below it the grounds of the Convent rolled down into a valley, and up a grassy mountain-side patched with orchards, where the great building of creamy stone stood on a gravelled plateau under the shoulder of a boulder-topped hill-summit, fringed with stone-pines, and dwarf oaks.

Alwyn rang a bell to which the driver pointed with his whip-end, and a thin, bent woman in a rusty Mack dress and checked apron, a black net mantilla over her gray hair, a green shade over her eyes, came round from the back of the cottage. She felt her way with the aid of a thin knotted stick, a lean brown hand was stretched out before her: its fingers waved incessantly as its owner moved with the timid, clumsy gait and trepidant air of one who has but recently become blind. He knew it was the mother of Victoriana and Eufemia, even before he saw that from beneath the green shade the tears were streaming in two thin rivulets, and that her mouth worked convulsively. But she reached the porie-cochére, and with surprising strength pulled down and began to turn an iron windlass, which worked an endless chain by which the massive gate was opened. It screamed in its groovings, and began to move back heavily and clumsily. And Alwyn passed through.

“A visitor for the Madre Superior!"

The woman was speaking. He answered:

"No, Senora."

"No! and is not the Caballero going to the Convent?”

She turned her blind face towards him, wiping away the flowing tears with a corner of a gray-checked apron. He heard her whisper to herself, “A stranger!” before he - spoke.

"I came, Senora, to see the Senorita Eufemia, if it be permitted?”

"It is permitted, if you are the Englishman she spoke to in the town yesterday. But you will not find her in the house. Follow the path that leads through the grove of chestnuts. You will find her in the little chapel that is at the upper end of it, praying beside the dead.”

The tears flowed faster down the furrowed face from under the green shade. Sighs burst from her, and words.

“She who lies there was our disgrace, for who could doubt her guilt when the story was printed in the newspapers. Written things may be slanders, but printed words cannot lie. Are not the Holy Gospels printed, and the Breviary? Should I not have sinned had I believed the child? So I sent back Eufemia to tell her not again to show her face in the house of mine, never! And Eufemia pleaded, and I sent her from me in tears. ‘Disobey me, and I who have but one daughter will have none at all!’ I said. Then she came back, not an hour after, and told me—‘Mother of mine—Victoriana is dead I” And the voice was not her own, but Victoriana’s. I am blind, but my hearing is good. And they brought the body in and laid it on the bed in Eufemia’s chamber, and blood dropped on the threshold as they carried it—there is a pool of blood upon the road, they say, where she lay and bled to death. And Eufemia thrust me from the door and went in and locked it! She was alone with the body nearly all the night. And when the women came this morning to wash the corpse she said to them: ‘You are not needed! All has been done! Remains nothing but to carry my sister to the chapel of the dead/ And still her voice was not like hers, but Victoriana’s. Can grief change faces as well as voices? Ay, de mi! If I only had my sight, that God has taken away!” . . .

She was a hard woman, but Alwyn pitied her, drying incessantly with her coarse apron the tears that flowed from those sightless eyes. He presently left her and walked towards the chapel, along the rising path that traversed a grove of splendid chestnuts, leaning heavily on a stick that had been lent him by Dr. Isidro Vac. Midway he stopped to rest, and with a side heart glanced back, and saw a fiery orange sunset burning behind sienna-brown and purple-black mountain ranges, and the pharos of Monte Aralda holding up its light, a throbbing, silvery star. And then the sunset threw his shadow across the cracked marble threshold of a heavy oak door that stood open. Two tapers burned upon a little altar; and six tall candles of brown beeswax, in wooden candlesticks, stood about a coffin that was supported on trestles and covered with a black pall traversed with a white cross. And at the head of the coffin, with her face towards the altar, a slender figure in shabby black knelt with hidden face. . . .

Not as Eufemia had knelt on the previous night before the shrine of Our Lady of Good Counsel. The exquisite, alluring grace of the figure, and its pose, went home to the man who looked, even before he suspected. And a remembered perfume came to him like a whispered secret, on the still air in which the flames of the candles barely wavered. And he trembled from head to foot as he had done upon the previous night, when a slender hand had been laid upon his arm.

“It is the English stranger?” . . .

She had not turned, yet the whisper came clear and audible. Moving hat in hand up the tiny nave, Alwyn halted and softly answered:

“Yes!”

The dear whisper reached him again.

“I recognised your step. I have reason to remember it.”

“Neither have I forgotten,” returned Alwyn, speaking with a certainty that surprised himself, “your shape or your voice, or the perfume of your hair, Victoriana.”

There was an instant’s pause, hardly of dismay. She said:

“Of your goodness, shut the door!”

And when Alwyn had obeyed:

“Now move to the head of the coffin,” she bade him, “lift up the pall and place your hand upon the forehead of her who lies there.”

“Ah, Victoriana!” said Alwyn sorrowfully, “do you not believe that I would keep your secret, even without the oath you ask of me? How I guessed that it was your sister Eufemia who met her death last night and not you, and that you have somehow taken her place, I cannot tell you—but I did guess it! The seed of suspicion may have been sown by what your mother said about your voice: for I knew it could be no other than Victoriana when you spoke.”

“Yet lift up the pall, Señor, and look upon the face of her who lies there. It will not shock you. She died of a thrust in the side, dealt her by one of the bulls. Then the herd passed on, leaving her lying by the roadside. She knew me when I found her, and before she died she spoke to me.”

And Alwyn lifted the pall. What an image of pure, serene, unearthly loveliness lay beneath the coarse black-and-white veiling! In life the dead Eufemia had been a plainer, humbler likeness of her sister. In death these relations were changed. The living face now revealed by the parted folds of the mantilla, looking steadily at Alwyn between the candles that burned at the foot of the coffin, was now infinitely less lovely than the dead.

“You see how beautiful she is,” murmured Victoriana. “If I ever get to Heaven I may look as she looks now. For, simple as she was, she was a saint. Now lay your hand upon her brow, and swear upon that sacred head never to reveal our secret. For a promise is good," she added, with a touch of peasant caution, “but not as good as an oath!”

So Alwyn took the oath Victorians! dictated:

“Now you shall know," she said, “that in doing as I have done I obeyed Eufemia’s dying wishes. For when the toros had passed on, leaving me unhurt, because once more that dead man had interposed to save me—whether you doubt it or believe. . . ."

“I believe because I saw," said Alwyn. “I know you speak the truth.”

“I have never spoken else than truth," Victoriana answered, with her deep gray eyes fixed sorrowfully upon the face that lay between them. “Knowing her so pure, could I have lied to her? Not even if I had been wicked as the world would have believed me to be. When I found her bleeding by the roadside, she stammered out that our mother would never receive me, that there was nothing left but that I should wrap her in my ermine furs and leave her to be discovered by the peasants, that I should put on her clothes, take her place, and bear her name. 'Hide you in my humbleness, sister beloved of met,” she said. ‘The only thing I fear is that my face may betray us. For I was never beautiful like you. . . .’ And now it is I who am the ugly one. You will never forget her face, Señor. It will be always in your eyes. Kiss her once—I think he would have wished it! And now . .

He remembered afterwards that she had led him like a child to the door of the chapel. He kissed her slender, hot, white hand, and went away from her down the path leading through the chestnut grove. The sunset had well nigh burned out behind the Cantabrian ranges. The pharos of Monte Aralda shone pale gold against the rosy glow.

Her words of farewell were in his ears as he passed through the open gate, and stepped with pain into the ancient brougham:

"Adiost Say to yourself whenever you remember the eve of this Pascua: “Eufemia lives not. Victoriana is dead!”

II

THE MOTHER OF TURQUOISE

A STORY 0F THE MINES OF HATHOR

I

I have just finished reading Professor Flanders’s book, “My Expedition from Suez through the Sinaitic Peninsula.”

To the Professor I accorded respect To the memory of my dead friend Majendie, that swelling of the heart, that dimness of the eyes, which, in a woman would herald the sure relief of tears.

The Professor is absolutely correct in recording that many of the finest of the wonderful mountain-inscriptions at Rekhareh have been broken and defaced. Wantonly bashed into pieces by a hammer—-the perpetrators of this act of brutal ignorance being "certain English adventurers searching for deposits of turquoise under a concession from the Egyptian Government, now mercifully annulled.”

Quite correct, Professor. The bashing was done under my personal superintendence by half a dozen brawny Arab workmen, animated by the distant hope of bakshish and the present stimulant of leathery-tasting water, warm out of the camel-bags, and sprinkled with millet-meal.

Were it necessary to commit the wanton act over again,

I would do so, despite the shriek of the Egyptologist,

showing due respect to the nobly-sculptured image of King Ketrah of the First Dynasty, whose reign dates back to 5291 B.C. There was no devilry in the few lines of hieroglyphics recording His Majesty’s victory over the twin rebel chieftains of the Bedawy, represented as crouching in halters before their conqueror. But FI ran and Abou Musa and their relations were warm to work, and spoiled the fine bas-reliefs before I could prevent it.

Three years before the War I answered an advertisement, and interviewed the Directors of the Sinaitic Turquoise Syndicate, Limited, at their offices in Bowchurch Street, City. They wanted a mining engineer with qualifications as an assayer and no objection to a hot climate, and I wanted a shop—out of England for choice. To tell the truth, there was a woman at the bottom of my desire to get quit, for some years at all events, of my native land. The Head-Director of the Turquoise Syndicate was a smug, white-faced, chop-whiskered man in a glossy, tightly-buttoned frock-coat and elaborately-creased trousers, who, when I had signed on as engineer and assayer to the Expedition at fifteen pounds a month, rations, camels, and travelling expenses found, laid himself out to a great extent in moral and religious counsel, and I can see his face now as he held forth to me about Syria being full of temptations for young men with unbridled animal passions and no religious principles. He quoted the Israelites, of whom there fell three and twenty thousand in one day; and promised to put up prayers for the guidance and protection of the Expedition. I saw my fat-faced friend’s name by accident in a police-court case, a year later, and agreed that he knew something about temptations. As to the prayers, he wanted them all for himself, I judge, going by the things that happened at Rekharet.

I suppose the scrapping with Turkey about Akabah induced the pre-War reader to rub up his geographical knowledge of that naked, scorching tongue of barren desert and naked mountain, known as the Sinaitic Peninsula. The ancient Egyptians worked turquoise mines in the Wady Maghara when the Great Pyramid was building under the lash of Menkaura. The Bedawy knew of the mines in Wady Rekharet, but they kept the secret as only Arabs can, until the Nineteenth Dynasty saw the departure of the Hebrews from Egypt, and the pent-up waters of the Bitter Lakes swept down from the north-west upon the hosts of Menepthah, the Pharaoh of the Exodus. Thenceforward the glory of Egypt reached its climax and began its decline.

At least, so Majendie told me one day on the journey out, and he gave one the feeling of being a man who knew. Majendie and I were the Expedition, not counting my fox-terrier Vic, and the Arabs and camels we chartered at Suez.

Majendie was a well-knit, broad-shouldered, keen-eyed fellow of twenty-five or six, quiet, well-bred, and full of knowledge and information. The son of a well-known consulting-physician with a handle to his name, Majendie had incurred the paternal indignation for betaking himself, after securing at the age of twenty-four, his degree as Doctor of Medicine at University College, to fields of research particularly his own. In physiology and experimental chemistry he won distinction, and having a fine talent for the acquirement of living languages (he had French, German, Spanish, Modem Greek, Hindustani, and Arabic at his tongue’s end) young Arthur began, much to the disgust of the distinguished consulting physician in Brooker Street, to ferret at the roots of dead tongues. He spent months at the British Museum in the study of Egyptian hieroglyphic and Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions, and ended by accepting the berth of surgeon on the steamship Delta, a vessel employed by the Government of Egypt for lighthouse service in the Red Sea.

“In the intervals of Krooboy colics and Arab eye-diseases, I managed to make some expeditions into the Hedjaz and the Arabian Desert,” he told me, “but just as things were getting interesting came the tug of duty at the other end. Now our friends in Bowchurch Street, if not liberal where cash is concerned, are generous as regards time. When we leave Suez and head our camels south for the historical three days' journey into the wilderness, we are at liberty to be lost for six months, so long as we turn up at the other end of the time—”

“With plenty of turquoises,” I chimed in.

“The real article,” said Majendie. “Half the so-called turquoises on the London, Cairo, and Jaffa markets are odontolite, Fossil bone of mammoth or dinotherium impregnated with phosphate of iron. The bony structure may be detected under the microscope by anybody who cares to look; but I have a belief that people are fond of being swindled.”

He lifted his brown, well-shaped left hand to flip the ash from his cigar, and I caught a blue gleam from a splendid stone in a rough native-worked setting of yellow gold worn upon the little finger.

“At any rate,” said I, “you got your money’s worth when you bought that seal.” For the turquoise was the size of a large hazel-nut with a segment sheared off one side. The setting was curious: three eagle-daws, nipping the stone tightly, so that while its rounded part was next the hand, its flattened surface was exposed to view.

“This intaglio? ... I did not buy it,” said Majendie, quietly glancing at the ring and then at me, in a baffling sort of way. “Nor was it given me,” he added, in the same tone—then added, “I found it—with several others—where I hope to find some more by and by, luck being with us.” And his expression showed how keen he was on the Expedition turning out a success.

We sat on a couple of long Indian cane chairs on i veranda overlooking the freshly-watered courtyard of the hotel at Suez. The dragoman who had bargained to furnish us with dromedaries, drivers, a cook, and a guide had just made his salaam and departed, and we were waiting for my "brudah,” who had undertaken through his fraternal rogue to purvey our supplies. It flashed on me then that instead of merely being an employee of the Turquoise Syndicate, engaged to travel to a given centre and prospect for the gem desired, Majendie was the originator of the Expedition and the sole proprietor of the secret of our destination. I taxed him with this upon the spot, and he owned up that an Arab stoker on board the Delta whom he had cured of eye-worm, or filaria—one of the many horrible diseases mainly due to the habitual drinking of bad water—had "put him on to something.” 'More he would not say. But he struck me as being more quietly exultant and less excited than a man would be who was striking out in an unknown direction towards the attainment of an uncertain end.

We squared matters with the dragoman and his “brudah” in about three days, and started with quite an imposing string of mules, dromedaries, baggage-camels, and Arabs. It was mid-June, and the scorching pebbly slopes, the stunted tamarisks and acacias, the baked and splitting rocks, and dried-up watercourses endlessly succeeding made up a cheerless panorama which would have depressed me, had Majendie proved a less pleasant travelling companion. But in three days’ time, when we reached the first oasis of Wady Gharandel, and then made straight jfor the mountains, I was ready to be cheerful on my own account. The elastic desert air, the boundless shy, the wonderful colour of the rocks, blue, green, black, crimson, lilac, golden, pink, and white, the soaring brown and white eagles of the heights, the silver-gray rock-falcons and the rock-pigeons, red-legged partridge, and other game that occasionally fell to my gun reconciled me to Syria, its scorpions, beetles, and plague of flies. We passed Wady Magarah, where the first tablets of hieroglyphics are found, and then, bearing to the left, came upon the Written Valley.

Other travellers have devoted pages to that wonderful spot I am not good at descriptions. Briefly, then, let me say that for four miles our caravans defiled through a lofty gorge of red granite, the smoothed surfaces of Whose rocks are literally covered with irregularly-carved inscriptions, some larger, others smaller, in characters measuring from a foot high to half an inch. High up upon the towering face of the precipice rising left and right I could distinguish others, and almost every large boulder at our feet bore similar records, less deeply cut, in some instances scratched on the stone.

"Who did them? What are they? Historical records or votive tablets, or prayers—or what?" I sang out, shutting up my Dollery binoculars after a long satisfying stare, and addressing the back of Majendie’s solar topee.

Majendie looked back over his shoulder as we slowly forged along in single file, narrowing his eyes in the dazzling, blinding sun-flood that came tumbling on our heads from between the double ranges of fantastic limestone peaks above.

"If anybody knew for certain, old man, there wouldn’t be much good in our being where we are,” he said, with a dash of triumph in his tone. “When the old Coptic monks built the Convent of 'Mount Sinai this character of hieroglyphic was unknown, and since a Teutonic wiseacre, Beer of Leipzic, published a so-called key to it at Paris in 1840 nobody has managed to decipher them. Lepsius calls them the work of the Shepherd Kings, Layard never saw them, Dr. Flanders means to come here one day. . . . But he has not got here yet,” said Majendie, jerking at his dromedary’s heavy single rein. And as the desert ships began to pitch fore and aft in preperation for kneeling: “And we have,” he added in that oddly exultant tone. Aiwa Musa, we camp here. . . . This is our journey’s end, Randolph.

We pitched no tent that night, but had our carpets spread and our wooden native bedsteads set up in a roomy curve that yawned in the face of the red granite precipice. The Arabs lighted fires, and when the splendid Syrian moon rose and looked down into the gorge we were supping on kabobbed mutton, tomatoes, and macaroni, and feeling—at least I was—like a band of brigands in an opera. After supper Majendie and I smoked and chatted, and he told me that in the streaks of red marl running in the faults and cleavages of the granite and in the veins of matrix permeating the red sandstone, as in scattered nodules of the same, knocked from the precipices by mountain torrents or struck by lightning from their face, the jewels we were searching for would be found. True rode turquoises, susceptible of receiving a brilliant polish, and reflecting fight from under the surface.

“Like that stone in your ring,” I said, pointing to it with the stem of my briar-root pipe. For the peculiar property possessed by —unreadable— give out radiance and colour, had never struck me so forcibly as at that moment. In the combined light of the blazing dry-wood fire and the flare of an Arab torch of rags dipped in resin, and held on the end of a deft stick stuck into a crevice in the rock-wall, the turquoise seemed to bum with an azure flame. And as Majendie drew off the ring and put it in my hand—a thing he had never done before—he said a thing I remembered afterwards:

“The stone of the goddess remembers its ancient home. The Child of Hathor knows she is near her Mother, whose shrine and temple are here, in the heart of the granite hills”

I held the gleaming stone up where the mingled lights drew out its fullest beauty. Cut upon the level face of the turquoise, was the profile figure of a woman, naked save for a girdle, and crowned with a crescent, holding a serpent in one hand and in the other a lotus-flower. Majendie had probably found the ring somewhere near, possibly in the temple of which he spoke. But I gave it back without question.

That night, lying on my native bedstead of bamboo and native webbing, with a valise under my head and a rug over me, I had a queer dream. It seemed in my dream that a shining figure stood in the entrance of our cave which glowed with radiant light that streamed from her crescent-shaped coronal. Facing us full, she stretched towards me a lotus-flower and towards my sleeping companion a writhing snake. And my blood was chilled by the look of malice in her brilliant eyes, blue and hard as turquoises beneath black bow-like, joined eyebrows, and by the mockery that smiled upon her scarlet lips. And cold to the very heart, and with an indescribable sensation of suffocation, I awakened.

The valley outside the cave we slept in was flooded with dazzling white moonlight, the sleeping camels, the tethered mules, the Arabs under, their improvised shelters of felt or blankets, or garments laid across sticks, the strangely-shaped boulders and dwarfed trees, showed as distinctly as by day. Beside me, a few feet away, (Majendie breathed heavily. Indifferently I glanced towards him, realised the dreadful meaning of the slender semi-upright Thing that swayed above the sleeper’s broad heaving chest, and then—rousing my torpid energies with a desperate effort—I softly reached down, picked up a loaded stick that lay beside me, and with a long arm and a well-directed swipe, sent the snake flying.

“What is it?” shouted Majendie, waking up.

“Only a puff-adder on your chest, that’s all!” I had got my gun by this time and was thoroughly awake. “There he goes over that patch of sand between those tamarisk-bushes.”

Sitting on the bottom of my bed I took aim as I spoke, meaning to riddle him with a dose of shot.

“Stop!” Majendie shouted. He leaped from his own ankareb and gripped my arm. “Don’t kill it. Confound you, man! you’ll ruin everything! Why didn’t you let the snake alone?”

He was ghastly pale, or else it was the moonlight, and the hand that gripped me burned—I felt it through the sleeve of my flannel shirt as I lowered the gun.

“Why—the damned thing would have bitten you!” I protested.

“It was a message—can’t you see? A message!” persisted Majendie, shaking.

Convinced that he had got a touch of fever, I offered him quinine and Eno. He declined both, but judging by his haggard looks in the morning, he slept no more that night Worrying about the intercepted message, no doubt The message! Why a sane man should suppose a snake—deadly poisonous at that—would come crawling to his bed in the middle of the night to give him a message, I couldn’t imagine. It was easier to say to myself that too much swotting over Egyptian hieroglyphics had made Majendie cranky, that, in fact, though a pleasant man to associate with, he had a tile off, and so on.

We unpacked the picks and crowbars, grappling-irons and wired ropes we had brought along, also the box of dynamite blasting cartridges we had with discretion tied to the bade of the quietest mule. Our Arabs had found a spring of good water in a cave marked out by the fresh verdure growing about its base, and the sheikh of a tribal family of Bedawy found us out and sent a messenger with a present of dhurra cakes, to ask if we wanted to hire labourers. From him Majendie learned that the gorge was locally called Wady Rekharet. The sheikh added, with great certainty, that no turquoises had ever been found there within the memory of man. Majendie laughed harshly as he translated to me the Bedawin’s utterance.

“Man is such a short-lived kind of animal, with such an uncommonly feeble memory,” he jeered, “one can’t rely much upon him. Unless he writes his records in the imperishable rode, and makes that his witness which Time itself cannot destroy, as these Egypto-Semitic miners did who kept their ledgers there I” He pointed to a row of inscriptions baking in the noonday glare on the predpice high above, and began to red off in English:

“Therefore we bless thee, fecund Hathor, the blue-eyed Mother of the Jewel of the Rocks, that thou hast been favourable unto us, Khita the Syrian, Gad the Phoenician, and Tanirhat the Egyptian, sent hither by Menepthah the

King, the conqueror beloved of Amen, Pthah and Hctr-machis, we, duly making oblation of incense and burnt sacrifice—”

"Of a kid,” I put in, vaguely reminded of Scriptural passages I had heard droned out on Sundays by our good old vicar at home.

"Of a kid—that’s just it,” said Majendie with an awkward-sounding laugh, "and some time or other I’ll show you the temple where they offered it.”

He turned to the Bedawy chief then, whose name was Erbkam, and began bargaining away at a great rate for able-bodied workmen with pickaxes and maktafs, the shallow baskets the Arabs carry dirt and tailings in. The Bedawy were encamped a mile farther up the gorge, and when the last haggle about the rate of pay had ended in an arrangement for two piastres a day, their bread and dhurra-water to be brought by the women, we accompanied Erbkam to the camp.

There was nothing to be seen but a group of villainously dirty felt tents, some hobbled camels diligently eating nothing off the bare boulders, a starved mule or two, a ribby horse, a gang of sore-eyed children, and some prematurely aged women. Then out of a tent came a pretty young creature with gazelle-eyes and a gold coin among the silver ones in her black hair, leading a frail little figure bowed into a hoop and covered with a mass of rags. This was Erbkam’s great-grandmother, a lady of ancient family, celebrated through the whole peninsula as a prophetess, the sheikh explained through Majendie.

"Certainly, if rags and dirt and old age make a prophetess, she ought to be one,” I said to Majendie. "The young lady, now, is more in my line,” and I lifted my hat in my best style to the owner of the gazelle-eyes and the gold coin. I could swear she blushed, a manifestation of shyness as unusual with the Arab as with the camel; and I learned that her name was Aissa. The prophetess, who was blind, was called Thorah. Whether she was blind really I never knew. Only where eyes should have been were folds of wrinkles, shaded by the ragged fringe of her headcloth, and being toothless and palsied as well, she moved and chattered like a rock-monkey. Not that she could not get over the ground easily enough: daily she accompanied the pretty Aissa, who was the chief’s daughter by his youngest wife, down to our camp with the women who brought bread, and I have seen her standing on a boulder near where some of our workmen were quarrying, mowing and mopping and pointing her stick as if in derision at our futile attempts to strike the turquoise vein.

For day by day the “blue jewel of Hathor” eluded us. Neither in the red marl or the limestone did we come upon a trace. There was plenty of copper ore, genuine and bastard, but we were not in search of copper, and three months had gone over our heads; it was August, and sandstorms harassed us terribly. The spring we had relied on showed signs of drying up, and many of the tins of Chicago meat supplied by the Suez contractor proved, when opened, to contain nothing that a self-respecting carrion-crow could eat. We gave the contents of them decent burial, and lived on dhurra-bread, fried bacon, and jam, washed down with coffee. In turns Majendie and I superintended the quarrying-gang and the very primitive crushing-machine we had set up on a plateau of smooth rock. And, I am grateful to say, I learned sufficient Arabic to understand, and to make myself understood. So weeks went by, and the turquoise vein eluded us. Though on either hand of us the living rock testified to the riches the ancient miners had wrung from the place.

“Mistress of Mafkat”—Mafkat means the copper country—“great are thy gifts” ran the inscription on another tablet Majendie translated, and which I copied down in my notebook. “For of copper three hundred ingots, one camel's load; and of the turquoise of the rock three baskets and half-a-basket we have received of thy favor, duly making oblation and sacrifice in thy Temple of Dreams.” “Why did they call it the Temple of Dreams?” I asked. “Because, after making oblation and sacrific2, they slept in the precincts of the sacred place,” returned Majendie, “and in dreams they were shown where the veins of ore and jewel matrix were to be found.”

“Look here!” I said, knocking out the dottle of my pipe and getting up from the boulder I had been sitting on. “I want to see that temple now.”

“You don’t mind a stiff climb?” Majendie asked. I shook my head, filling my pipe anew, and we set out, with a flap of bread and a bottle of water, it being Saturday afternoon.

A three-mile tramp up the Written Valley brought us to the place, copper ores liberally outcropping in the rock, and huge mounds of black slag marking the smelting-places of the ancient miners. The ruins of the temple were perched on a platform of pinkish sandstone jutting out from the face of the precipice about a hundred feet above our heads. Square bevelled holes in the rock-face showed where the wooden steps of a kind of ladder had once been fixed, and beside them dangled a hide rope, securely fastened, as we found by hauling on it, to a stone or beam above.

It was a stiff climb, but the place was worth it. The front elevation of the temple had been carved out of the solid pink sandstone, and the great central chamber went back into the heart of the mountain, whence it had been hollowed for sixty feet or more. There were altars of the shape one sees upon Egyptian temple friezes, great beds of wood-ashes, layers nearly petrified and others comparatively fresh, the fuel for which must have been brought from great distances, a variety of tanks and basins for ceremonial washing—one wondered where they had obtained the water to fill them—and, round the central chamber, a honeycomb of cells, each furnished with a stone bench for the sleeper, a stone pillow for his head, a quantity of lively black nipper-tail beetles, and one or more active scorpions.

“You see, the walls are covered with inscriptions of thanks, and each of the pillars is a memorial of some lucky find,” said Majendie. “When I was here two years ago—

“I knew you had been here before,” I said, sucking my finger, which I had barked rather badly during the ascent, “although your not knowing the real name of the Wady puzzled me.”

“Every wandering desert tribe have their own names for places,” said Majendie, “and on the return journey the names are changed as often as not. Historical and geographical purists may suffer; but you can’t whack into an Arab’s head that a hill is a hill when he is coming down it. See, there is the image of the Mother of Turquoise herself, above the middle altar. Don’t go too near!”

"Why not?” I queried, staring at Majendie. “You don’t hold that there’s any sanctity about the place, do you?”

Then, as he turned away, I went off to the altar, for the likeness of the profile figure carved on a great rode tablet above, to the figure cut on the turquoise on Majendie’s ring strangely attracted me. There was the crescent-shaped headdress, and in the outstretched hands of the figure were the lotus-bud and the snake. The altar was broken, but a deep channel to carry off the blood of the sacrifice ran round it, and there were little culverts at the corners. And a long-shaped bundle, apparently of stained and weather-beaten native cloth, lay across the stone at the feet of the inscrutable smiling statue. I could not imagine what the bundle might contain, until, stretching my arm over the edge of the altar, I had touched it lightly with my finger. Then I pulled back my hand (the damaged one) quickly enough, as I shouted to Majendie:

"Why, here is the mummy of a child!”

Majendie made an incoherent sound in answer, and I took another observation of the poor little corpse. The dry desert air had withered and desiccated it until it must have been as light as a roll of palm-fibre. The withered little monkey-hands were folded on the breast, the feet crossed together. What had induced its parents to bury it there I was at a loss to conceive. Then a dark series of stains upon the altar-stone running to the channel chiselled at the edges enlightened me to the hideous truth. When, I could not guess; but it flashed upon me that at some not very distant time that native child had been offered up to the goddess-demon of the sandstone temple. Now I knew the kind of sacrifice with which those ancient miners, Khita the Syrian, Gad the Phoenician, Tanihat and Co., had rewarded the lady of the homed headdress. And I did not admire the lady. But unwittingly I had paid her tribute in the fluid she preferred, for a drop or two of fresh blood from my tom finger was soaking into the dry surface of the sandstone altar. /

"Come away, come away!" cried Majendie, angrily, as I began to express my opinion of Egypto-Semitic deities. “I was a fool to bring you here. Shut up and come away!”

II

We scrambled down by the hide rope which was made fast with a very workmanlike turn and clove-hitch, to one of the memorial pillars, and tramped back over the scorching boulders to our camp.

Next day, from a nodule of sandstone, one of our workmen chipped out the first turquoise. A little later I found one myself, a fine and perfect stone. Two others were found, and then the fog of bad luck settled down upon us again. The Arabs chipped and picked and crushed— the supplies got scarcer, and Majendie took to disappearing for hours ever day. When he came back he would explain that he had been yarning with the sheikh. And being slightly smitten in that direction myself, I suspected him of carrying on a flirtation with Aissa, and taxed the wearer of the gold coin with giddiness next time she came down to the camp, in the broken Arabic which she herself had taught me.

Aissa shook her head and looked at me out of the corners of her gazelle eyes.

“Aissa say no, she is no fountain for the Angleezi lord to drink at, nor palm-tree to cover him from the sun.” She shook her head again energetically. “And if you want to know with whom the Angleezi make sweet talk, it is Thorah. Thorah always.”

Thorah, the blind prophetess, great-grandmother to Erbkam the sheikh. The notion of Majendie making love to the old lady and braving in the violence of his infatuation the swords, rusty spears, and wool-tufted, muzzle-

loading guns of her descendants, tickled me to laughter. But Aissa looked grave.

“Thorah nothing to joke about, great magic-woman," she said. I know that ‘es sehr’ meant magic of the black or evil description, and certainly the old woman had a witch-like look. I made my peace with the gazelle-eyed maiden, treating her to brown sugar from the camp store-box, a delicacy in which she revelled. And I was racking my brains to find a reason for Majendie’s suddenly developed preference for the society of the sorceress when he returned, very haggard and nervous and with a bandaged arm, and ordered the Arabs to strike their quarrying operations and transfer themselves, their baskets, and their tools to a new spot on the opposite side of the valley, about a quarter of a mile below our camp. Then he went away again, and did not reappear until the gold and crimson sunrise rolled down from peak to peak of the solemn mountains and the blue shadows of night fled back to the caves.

That day we struck a rich vein of splendid size and quality. The bottom of the cotton-wool-lined tin box that held our finds began to be covered, and the prospects of the Turquoise Syndicate looked up day by day. We stored away a rich collection of pieces of matrix on our own account, that being our perquisite, before Fortune deserted us again. The vein became unfruitful—suddenly ceased. The Arabs idled and smoked, convinced that until the Djinn who had bewitched their tools relented, business would remain at a standstill. And Majendie took to straying again by day, and groaning and talking in his sleep of nights. One night, when he was more hag-ridden and voluble than usual, I’ll own I sat up and listened, as he argued with somebody who wanted him to give in and do, once, just once more—something that would bring untold wealth to all of us. He held out against the invisible persuader until the sweat rolled down his livid, working face —shown as plainly as by day in the white moonlight tint poured into our sleeping-cave. Thoughts of a girl in England—you see there was one in his case too!—seemed to hold him back from doing what must stain his honor and imperil his soul in the effort to gain riches for her, and earn him her loathing instead of her love, if ever she should come to know it.

“What matters the girl? Thou shalt drink of the cup that kings have coveted, and taste the joy of joys!”

The voice was not Majendie’s, but a woman’s, of wonderful sonority and sweetness. It came from nowhere, woke the sleeping echoes in the rock-hollows with its utterance and then ceased. And the pronunciation of the Arabic words was not what I had learned from Aissa. A foreigner who should painstakingly acquire English from a London flower-girl, and then hear it spoken by the greatest of all English-speaking actresses, might have found the same difference as I did. Next morning I awoke to find Majendie gone, and an hour afterwards two Arab women came down from the camp above, looking for the sheikh’s youngest child.

“At dawn we saw the child Zelim outside his mother’s tent playing with a jerboa Aissa tamed and gave him. Perhaps it strayed and Zelim followed. The girl Aissa sobs and weeps, for this is an evil place for babes to stray in, as other tribes have learned, Ahi! Awaits!”

They uttered shrill cries, shutting their mouths with their joined fingers so as to produce a vibrating sound. The howl was exactly like the whillelu of Irishwomen at a wake. They should never see the child again, they said; he had been snatched away by Djinnis, as his elder brother had been, two years ago, in that very place.

‘'Why not search for him in the caves?" I asked. And then an idea struck me, and I questioned: "Was the kiddy adventurous enough to have strayed higher up the Valley of Writings, and sufficiently active to have climbed up where the camel’s-hide hung down from the mouth of the holy place above?”

I designated the Temple of Hathor by the Arabic word for shrine, because I did not know how otherwise to express myself. The women clapped their hands and shrieked in horror. That a holy place, forsooth! Why, it was the home of every devil, literally speaking, in the peninsula. Not a man, woman, or child of the Araba would set foot in the accursed place, and so on.

And yet my thoughts ran continually on the pink temple in the sandstone cliff where the two-years-old mummy, of what I guessed to be the child Zelim’s elder brother, lay under the image of Hathor, the mother of turquoise. And as I drew lines with my stick in the red-hot gravel, and watched the ants running in and out of them, I wondered if the accidental spilling of the blood from my torn finger on that channelled stone had had anything to do with our first find of turquoise, and also, whether Majendie’s bandaged arm had had anything to do with later discoveries? And then, with a horrible leap and sinking of the heart, the new link of evidence joined to the old, and I saw a motive in the abduction of the child Zelim.

"Horrible! Impossible!” I muttered to myself. But suspicion had fixed her fangs in me. I made an excuse that saved me from breaking bread with Majendie that night. He loomed hideous in the hew light that had broken in upon me. I remembered that double play on words about "the kid,” the dream I had had, and the awakening. I recalled how Majendie had forbidden me to shoot the snake—the reptile he had treated as a messenger—and his chagrin and vexation at my discovery of the mummied corpse of the native child in the bundle that lay upon the altar of Hathor in the pink temple. Why had he taken me there?

Was he in the habit of going to the place? Next time he left the camp I would follow him—“peeled,” as the Americans say—with my dagger-knife and revolver.

He did hot go to bed that night, but sat in the moonlight by the remains of our camp fire, with his eyes fixed on the glowing embers. He had grown haggard, was terribly changed, in the last few months. I could see him from where I lay, and then my eyes closed against my will—I was dozing when a long wailing cry came down the Wady from the Arab camp. I woke up. I saw that Majendie no longer sat by the fire, whose ashes lay dead. And I rose up and-slipped on a pair of rubber-soled cricketing shoes, and set out, up the shadowed side of the Written Valley, walking with long, noiseless strides in the direction of the Arab camp. The wailing had come from there; a funeral dance was in full swing as I slunk past. Evidently the lost boy was figuratively being interred with honors.

Poor little devil f What had happened to him? What was that odd, humped-up figure fifty yards ahead of me, getting over the moon-bleached rocks and boulders with the agility of a frightened spider? I quickened my pace to gain a nearer view. It was the prophetess, Thorah. Blind or not, the way in which that old bundle of rags got over the ground was wonderful. She ran like a quail, and listened like a sleuth-hound at times for the foot-fall of any pursuer. She was not up to india-rubber soles, perhaps, Or her hearing was blunted by her great age, for she went on after each pause, without suspicion. Presently,on the moonlit side of the Written Valley, loomed the wonderful facade of the pink temple; I could see the holes in the rock and the spider-thread of the camel’s-hide rope hanging down from the platform. Up the difficult ascent went the prophetess, as nimbly as any spider, in spite of the fact that she carried a bundle tied upon her back, and if she had thought to pull the rope up after her, I should never have crossed the threshold of discovery.

But I was meant to prevent the consummation of her intended crime, and rob the demons she worshipped of a victim. I climbed noiselessly by the road she had travelled, and, sheltered by a group of sandstone pillars, votive offerings for favors received, I looked into the temple. On a bed of ashes before the central altar a fire of wood had been kindled; it roared and blazed as though gum or resin had been smeared upon the fuel. The mummy had been removed from the altar of the goddess with the crescent tiara. At her feet there lay another bundle, covered with a clean, white linen cloth—and the bundle was alive and wriggling feebly under the covering. Then a face of terror came out of the darkness at the other end of the temple, and it belonged to Majendie. He was bareheaded, wearing only a silk shirt and a pair of flannel trousers. At his elbow actively hobbled the hag, Thorah, persuading, entreating, scolding, threatening, persuading him—to what deed I trembled to guess.

“It is nothing, Angleezi. What is the life of a child? A little milk, a few kisses, a little play—then sleep. This one sleeps now; I have given him conserve with afigoon (opium). One touch with a sharp blade across the throat, and the babe awakens in Paradise. Also She is greatly propitiated. Be bold. Strike, and win the reward!”

“Strike—and win the reward!” I heard Majendie repeat, in a voice very unlike his own. The withered old witch at his elbow gabbled faster:

"Twice twelve moons ago, and five more, and thou didst prove the troth of my saying. The child Nulad strayed from the tents and tried to climb the Ladder in the Rocks, and fell, and he was dying beyond doubt, and I told thee if thou wouldst carry him up the Ladder and lay him on the altar of the Mother of the Blue Jewels thou shouldst reap a great reward. One of them thou hast on thy finger, blue as Her own eyes, because thou didst bring up the child at my bidding, and lay him here before the breath was out of him, so that She received the oblation of a life. Then thou didst go away and return with the tall yellowhaired Angleezi, whom the girl Aissa loves. Think, did not he spill blood upon the stone, and did not She reward? And again, when thou didst creep here in the silence of the night and open a vein in thy upper arm and pour the hot blood upon Her stone, the Mother of Turquoise smiled on thee. But now she calls for a complete oblation and a sacrifice followed by burnt offerings, for She is thirsty and hungry, and incense has been denied Her nostrils for more than three thousand years. Take this, and throw it into Her fire, and thou shalt see.”

The hideous creature had loosed her grasp of Majendie’s sleeve to thrust something into his hand, and as he obeyed her fierce, urgent gesture and dropped whatever it was upon the fire, a pungent, fragrant smoke arose and curled in bluish columns towards the carved stone beams of the roof. Ousters of bats, depending from them, broke up and wheeled about wildly, and Thorah dropped her skinny monkey hands mid cackled in delight. '

“A good omen, Angleezi! All will go well!” Then from under cover of her rags, she plucked a sharp crescent-shaped knife—such a sacrificial knife as the artists of the Egyptian wall-frescoes represented in the hand of the (officiating priest—and thrust it upon Majendie. As his nerveless hand dosed on the evil-looking thing, the wrinkled face of the hag underwent a hideous convulsion of joy; the cavity of her toothless mouth stretched wide in silent laughter, and suddenly, as she faced me, the bagging folds of flacdd brown skin that filled her orbital cavities were lifted, and—Merdful Powers, what eyes looked forth! Lambent-blue, malignant, devilish I—I have no words in which to describe the horror of that awful gaze. Then the fire leaped higher, and the douds of incense rolled more heavily, completely enveloping both figures. When I could see again the prophetess had disappeared. I stepped from my place of concealment, meaning to wrest the sacrifidal knife from Majendie, who with a deliberate intention expressed in every line of his hitherto nerveless body was now rolling up the sleeve of his silk shirt. And above the level of our heads, upon the broken altar, the drugged child silently squirmed under the linen covering-doth. . . .

“Majendie. ... Frank, old man!. . . For Heaven’s sake, don’t do hi" I cried, and seized him as he stepped forwards.

He was as strong as twenty men when I grappled with him for the knife. And as our eyes met, I saw that in his stare was no recognition, only the frenzied determination to kill. Twice I tore from him the murderous crescent blade, twice he wrested it from me, the second time nearly severing the musdes of my left thumb. And, as the warm blood jetted, I distinctly heard a woman’s laugh. Not the cackle of the accursed Thorah, but the melodious bell-like laugh of a young woman—a beautiful woman.

•  •  •  •  •  •  •

I glanced upwards. The bas-relief above the central altar, the tablet with the sculptured image of Hathor, was blotted out. In its place was a living splendor, a form of terrible beauty, crowned with the new moon, sheathed in tissues of jewel-hues, her beautiful scarlet lips curved into a cruel smile, her jetty arch of eyebrows vaulting the insupportable blue radiance of the eyes I had seen in my dream. In one hand, golden-tinted, with finger-tips of rose, she held a lotus-bud; in the other a writhing snake. And at her bare and lovely feet writhed the child whose innocent blood those red lips thirsted for, the sacrifice by which alone guerdon of her hidden jewels might be won from the Mother of Turquoise.

I saw the vision first, as I and the man who was my comrade struggled between the sacrificial fire and the sacrificial stone. Majendie must have caught in my dazzled eyes the reflection of that hellish glory, for he glanced over his shoulder, and, loosing his grip of me, swung round to face the altar, and with a gasping cry of rapture and desire, fell upon his knees and stretched out his arms.

"I come not to thee in sleep this time, O my votary,” said the slow sweet voice that belonged to those scarlet lips. “With the waking eyes shalt thou and this doubter behold me. Lo! I am waiting the fulfilment of thy vow. Make an end. Strike the blow, and not one but both of ye shall reap the reward that is mine to bestow on those that serve me.”

The lotus waved as if beckoning. Majendie rose: in his hand was the knife. He approached the altar. The snake hissed at me as if in warning, and I could not cry out or advance a step from where I stood.

But I could move my right hand, and with a desperate effort I plucked my Colt’s revolver out of my hip-pocket, and fired. 'Straight between those blue, gleaming eyes my bullet sped to its mark. There was a shrill, terrible cry, followed by a heavy, rustling fall, and when the smoke cleared off and the affrighted bats ceased to wheel and dart about my confused eyes I saw that prone upon the altar of Hathor, covering with her dead body the body of the drugged child, t'e Bedawin sorceress, Thorah, lay face downwards, her crooked finger-tips touching the sandstone floor, upon which, in drifts, lay the light dust of countless ages.

TJie child Zelim, beyond a bruise or two, was practically unhurt.,I carried him down the hide-rope staircase, and then went back for Majendie. I found hint delirious and raving, and how I got him down the sheer descent I hardly know.

The Bedawy chief had his youngest-born bade again, and in the rejoicings that followed the tribe seemed to overlook the absence of its ancient prophetess. Blind or not, Thorah was a witch of the deepest dye—or else one of the most powerful hypnotists who ever lived. I do not reject either conclusion.

As for Majendie, poor fellow, whom she had so bewildered, he died of fever at Suez, thanking me gratefully almost with his last breath for having saved him from committing an abominable crime. The Turquoise Syndicate were fairly satisfied with the results of their initial venture, but when they wanted me to go out again to the Sinaitic Peninsula and tap the sandstone rocks for fresh deposits of the ‘blue jewel of Hathor’ I declined, and they sent out another man.

I wish him luck with all my heart, but I do not think he is likely to have it. For one thing, the uncanny Thorah is lying dead with a bullet in her brain, over the altar of the pink sandstone temple; and shrivelled to a mummy, I suppose, by now. For another, I paid the Arab to smash all the inscribed tablets within their reach, that I knew advocated the necessity of human blood-sacrifice to the Mother of Turquoise on the part of those who desired to reap riches from her favor. So, even if my successor happens to be a reader of the Egypto-Semitic hieroglyphic character, he will not make out much.

But I am sorry Professor Flanders has been disappointed—really!

Ill

THE TRIBUTE OF THE KISS

UPON a certain smiling Vigil of Ascension, Gui de Bernart, hereditary Count of Quercy and Pond in the Province of Auvergne, aged eighteen years, and plucked from the cloister but a twelvemonth since to reign in a kinsman's stead, fared bade out of Spain with the train of the Queen of Navarre, and entered his own territory to receive the homage of his vassals and the tributes of his feudatories in the public square of his town of Pond.

A twelvemonth spent in the service of Madame Marguerite had ripened Gui. You are to suppose that eighteen years meant the fullest bloom of manhood, at a date when the youth of sixteen might command a company, strike a Knight’s shield in challenge and do battle in the lists. By reason of his two years in the cloister the young Count had a look of meekness; the brown lashes of his full white upper lids were often dropped upon his cheek, which had a boyish bloom, and was sun-speckled like a linnet’s egg. His nose was straight and square-ended, and his lips had a full curve; his eyebrows were darker than his light brown hair, and met over his nose, and his gray eyes looked out from under them sagely and shrewdly. He was broad-shouldered, flat-breasted, and narrow-hipped, lithe and muscular as a hunting leopard, and vary well graced the brave array that had come to him in a pack on a sumpter-mule; a pourpoint of green doth, charged on the left skirt with the three silver sea-horses of Poncé, the arms of the lordship; a shield vert, goutie d’eau, with a fesse cotised, and these beasts, or fish, crampant argent, being emblazoned on each corner of the palfrey's housing. His hose were parti-colored carnation and white, he had a short crimson cloak and a cap with a feather. I believe his boots had been bought of a Jew at Toulouse; they were of lightly tanned deers’ leather with gilt cross-spiked spurs, and he had a gilt-hilted sword in a gredn sheath shod with gilt, and a dudgeon-dagger. Not many crowns were left in the purse that swung at his girdle, though it had been plump and heavy a twelve month before.

After climbing the last steep wooded hill, whose loose stones rolled dangerously under the hoofs of the horses, they saw Ponce mapped out far beneath them, a white city of turrets, belfries and gables, set in the middle of a wide plain, green with the young barley, threaded by a shining river in whose cool arms Gui had sported through many a day of drought, and -ringed towards the east by a broken amphitheatre of high mountains. Bringing the eye down from their black precipices and shining snow-peaks, one could trace the high-roads radiating over the plain, dotted with specks that were men, and dots that were carts drawn by oxen, mule-litters, horse-wains, and the like, coming from or winding to the town.

“Oh, let us go down quickly!” said Gui, flushing as though a sweetheart had beckoned to him, and feasting his eyes upon the Castle of Panel with her hexagonal towers, double-battiemented and roofed-in-like bee-hives, the ramparts bristling with arbalests and trebuchets, old-time engines of war side by side with the cannon that had superseded them; the portcullis up, showing the gape of her great gateway; the banner flying, and the silver river winding at her feet The party did go down, by a break-neck pass that made the horses sweat freely, despite the nip of the keen mountain air. The vessels on the river that bounded the north side of the town were gay with bunting streamers, flags were flying, every gable had its green garland, every vane and spirelet its dab of gilding, and every window and balcony its drapery, cheap and gay, or costly and brilliant. Silken pavilions had been pitched upon the walls, each with its group of cavaliers and ladies. A conduit ran over and the fountain in the great square, opposite the Church of the Holy Saddle, was to spout wine at intervals from the moment the new Count should set foot upon the drawbridge of the town gate, to that wherein he should enter the castle. All the beggars and topers were assembled in the square waiting for the first red gush, to drink healths and prove their fealty. An arch with Renown and Glory at the summit, who should only descend in a machine with a duologue of welcome, had been erected by the chief burgesses. The Bailiff had executed a happy idea in concealing a choir of children in an artificial cloud, their heads—rose-crowned and with cherubic wings attached—only appearing. And those persons from whom special homage was due, were waiting in their best array to pay it, some willingly, some murmuringly, one at least rebelliously. But of her later. Her cheek was not redder than Gui’s when the drawbridge fell and the gates flew open at a blast from the Castle trumpeters, and the feudal lord of the township rode in with his men.

They were in the public square set about with its lofty wooden houses, their carved gables set to face the fountain in the middle, with its three river-horses. Under the carven porch of the town hall—bearing Adam and Eve, the Tree of Knowledge, and the serpent, very cunningly wrought—a chair of estate was set up on a green dais besprinkled with silver tears, and seats for the Prior of Holy Saddle, and the chief of the nobility on either hand of it. The three river-horses began to vomit wine when my Lord Count took his seat; a great huzza! went up, the town beggars and topers fought to fill mugs and cannakins at the three gushing gullets, and three addresses were read: one by the Prior; another by Messire Hugues de Be mart, cousin to Gui, an old gentleman with purple gills, in a blade velvet cowl and a gown trimmed with vair, who sputtered when it came to wishing the heir, whose heir he was, health and long life; the third by the Bailiff, and then the homage began.

The square was packed, but a lane broke through the faces as the Baron of Montaugne, the first of the feudatories, approached in the dress of a jester, with one leg bare, to do homage for his fief. The Baron was as lean as Death in the miracle play, and ordinarily wore sheepskins within his hose to hide it; the ladies tittered, the gentlemen smiled, everything of lower. rank guffawed aloud at the contrast between the {Jump crimson velvet leg and the thin buff one. The Baron touched knee to the dais-step, put his hands between Gui’s, and took the oath with a very decent grace.

“I greet you very gladly, sir,” said his supreme lord, “and continue you in your possession, whatever it may be. In your approaching me as after this fashion I spy a very pregnant meaning, which is, that without my countenance you have but one leg to stand on. Let me counsel you to retire, and clothe the other as speedily as may be, for this breeze has a sharpish edge.”

Another nobleman approached as the Baron limped haughtily away. This was Sir Boudcaut de Roze, the Knight of Toix, who brought two bottles of blue-flies in discharge of his feudal obligation.

"The butchers of Toix shall thank you, sir,” said Gui, as the captives buzzed. "For me, you ate discharged. The Saints go with you; and take your flies, we have maggots enough in the town of Poncé, I take it.”

There was a buzz of assent that drowned the drone from the bottles, and a languid perfumed gentleman in a doth-of-silver pourpoint and yellow velvet hose, his short cloak embroidered with pearls and an heron’s plume in his cap, lounged up to the dais and presented Gui with a grasshopper in a cage of golden filagree. This was the Sieur du Lude. Gui retained him in his fief, and kept the cage, meaning to free its prisoner at a suitable opportunity. The Sieur du Lude dealt with, there followed a couple of sturdy spurred and belted gentlemen, each of whom held his fee by Knight’s service, and wanted nothing better than helms to crack and corselets to pierce. Gui promised to have a tiff with a neighbouring lord paramount as soon as possible, and the honest swashbucklers departed content. Then came a rich peasant driving a wheeled litter with leather hangings, drawn by a bull. On the carriage roof was a cage with a canary-bird in it.

“By the pillow of St. Helena!” said Gui, “this is a very curious thing.”

"Lord, we have done it since three hundred years,” said the peasant, "and with the same vehicle, more by tokens.”

"If the canary-bird is the same too,” said Gui, "I should judge him to be weary of the business. Now, what remains? For I will own to you, Prior, that I am both tired and hungry.”

“There comes the Tribute of the Kiss,” said the Prior, exchanging a glance with the Bailiff as much as to say, this was more in the department of a layman to explain.

“I begin to understand,” said Gui, when the Bailiff had hummed and hawed a while. “The Tribute of the Kiss consists in this: that all the pretty unmarried women of Poncd and its suburbs defile singly before their feudal lord, each maiden delivering to the said lord as the passes a kiss and a chaplet of roses.”

He was pale but calm, at least outwardly. Within, was a swinging whirlpool Think of the situation. A novice yesterday, to-day a Caesar sitting at the receipt of tribute; tribute of oaths, knees, flies, grasshoppers, canary-birds, hands, lips . . .

“If,” he hinted, the Bailiff’s fat face and the Prior’s good ear close to his brown curly head—“if I as the overlord of these young ladies were to disallow, this tribute?”

“My very dear son, it could not be,” said the Prior, rounding his blinking aged eyes.

“There are seven hundred ladies?”i said Gui, a little aghast.

“Seven hundred and a score all told,” said the Bailiff, “and not a garden but goes naked for their garlands. As to being ladies, they are of all ranks, from the Lady Bertha, your lordship’s cousin, the Damozel de Grichelle, the lord Prior’s grandniece, and my own plump pair of girls, Ursula and Noeline, down to Master Donnet the pastrycook’s Suzanne, and Gilda, the strapping daughter of Vede, our town sweep.” He spread his hands. “Speak I not sooth, my masters”, and the burgesses hummed confirmation.

^ It was dose on the second Angelus, and when the bells of the churches rang the first triple, a breath of silence passed over the thronged square;, and upon the bared heads of men, black, white, yellow, and brown, and the down-bent coifs of women, as many-coloured as a bed of tulips, the sunset threw a hazy mist of rose. And then the kissing began, for the Prior wished the wanton show well over, and the Bailiff’s womankind urged him by signs from a window of his own house to come to the pleasant ceremony without further preamble. . . . There was a moving and shifting of the thousands of people in the square; the men were thrown to the edges like scum on a pond, the middle about the fountain, whose monsters had economically ceased to spout wine when the ceremonies began, was a solid block of womanhood.

Those who should advance to the dais to render homage must be maids unwed, virtuous approved, and of comely behaviour, it was well understood. Therefore the hearty roar of laughter that greeted the young woman who took the first step towards the green doth may be construed as you please. She was a buxom creature bursting out of her tight scarlet bodice with plumpness, and having a look half sleepy, half sly, under sulky level black brows. With her, for they were to approach two and two, was a pallid little seamstress, poorly clad and with wistful blue eyes. Ready to sink into the ground she seemed, as the billow of merriment broke over her and her defiant companion.

“By the body of a goose!” roared a stentorian voice, “there’s that gadabout Gina, the head-tire maker, setting up for a maid.”

Jests split upon jests. Gina, the black-browed, stood fire whilst she might, then dropped her rose-garland, turned tail and ran. . . . The bleached and shuddering seamstress, clutching her wreath in shaking little hands, stood her ground; another girl stepped from the throng behind and joined her, and together they came forward to the dais. Gui received two prickly garlands, kissed two mouths, one cold and dry, the other warm and wet-tish. The ice was fairly broken, thenceforward the ceremony went on wheels. Five minutes and the dais was covered with garlands; ten, and Gui stood in them to his ankles, they presently reached to his waist; smelling, as the historian of the town-records has it, right pleasant and sweetly cordial. It may be credited what a variety of kisses the young lord of Ponce received that day, in return for his courteous and chaste salute— kisses cold and kisses hot, kisses dry and kisses moist, kisses old and young, kisses hearty and flabby, kisses that tasted of perfume and sweetmeats, kisses that were flavoured with garlic and strong waters, and coquetry. By the grace vouchsafed him Gui went through with the ordeal, but long before the seven hundred damsels had been kissed, the oil-lanterns hanging on poles thrust out of the house-gables had to be lighted; as also the cressets on the church and town hall, and the torches of the men-at-arms and the train-bands. There was a ring of leaping, uncertain fire about the square now, and in the midst, shadow, and a purple dome of night-sky overhead, in the north-west arc of which the young moon sailed splendidly. .The Prior had slipped away to Compline, the Bailiff dozed in a comer of the town-hall porch, the on-lookers were bone-weary, and not more so than the principal actor in the play.

“Ha, blessed Face!” thought Gui, when but ten girls remained to be kissed, “here is the end of a distasteful duty.”

And even with that thought there alighted full upon his two lips a kiss so kind, so warm, so soft, so fragrant, that a thrill of delight shot through him from head to heel. His hand clenched hard upon her garland, a thorn in it piercing his thumb, the giver was gone, ere he caught a glimpse of her, into the darkness slashed and dagged with torchlight, and whether the remaining candidates received their due or not, Gui could not have said, vibrating as he was in every nerve with that delicious memory.

And so the business was over, and he rode home with his mesne, lords, fee-holders, and burgesses, to the Castle, where a banquet was spread. The lord of the Castle slept on a down bed of estate that night, and slept none the better for it. His heart tossed like a coble at sea in a tempest; his soul cried out, it seemed to him, but it was really the voice of his body. What of his case? Yours, my good reader, when the first pair of lips with kindling breath between them kissed you from a boy into a man. From essaying dreams he fell to making verses and did better. He was sitting up in bed writing very busily upon his tablets when the valet brought him his posset, and urged him to make the most of sugared opportunities.

“For you must either eat or be eaten,” said the fellow, “and now is the time to choose. Doff your cowl, forget that ever you conned the beatitudes in a cloister, the part for you to play now is a man’s and not a monk’s, and gallantry in the recreation of a gentleman. Courage, then, and to the game with a will. Surely among all those ladies in taffeta with Sashes and gold-stitched hoods, with whom you bandied courtesies at last night’s banquet, there must be one that pleases you! Unless,” Laurisse grinned a little, “you are really in love?”

The last answer he looked for was what he got.

“Oh! Laurisse, I am sure of it. I am so happy and so miserable, and they say it comes like that I cannot look upon these ladies either without thinking of her, Laurisse, and all that I would give to see her! And I cannot tell you her name because I do not know it Nor could I describe her face and shape because it was so very nearly dark. What I do know is, that I love her”—Gui was getting more definite—“and that if I cannot marry her I had rather die!”

The story came tumbling out without a break. There was very little of it Laurisse took the withered garland, turned it over, and instantly recognized the staylace for what it was. A chuckle nearly escaped him. His lord’s anonymous princess had busked herself with this soiled string, ergo she was no princess at all. But his gravity did him credit when he begged the loan of the treasure, and left his master despoiled.

That noon the town criers of Ponce made the round of the streets by tuck of drum, proclaiming a reward of ten silver crowns Paris for the feminine maker, or giver of a certain garland bestowed upon the puissant and mighty Gui de Bernart, Count of Quercy and Ponc6 and Constable of Faisiol, upon the Vigil of the Ascension, during the ceremony known as the Tribute of the Kiss. The garland in question was to be hung up in the Hall of Audience at the Castle, near a gilded lattice in the woodwork of the great window, communicating with a private closet which had been^put to many odd uses in it? day. ...

“There you may sit at your ease, my very good lord, having previously given out that you are indisposed, or at the chase,” quoth Laurisse, “and watch for the giver of this unforgettable kiss.”

Gui hugged him and installed himself. The Castle courtyard was packed already. The visiting virgins, irrespective of rank or degree, were marshalled in procession by the indefatigable Laurisse, and admitted to the Hall of Audience in single file to inspect the wreath, touch it if necessary, and then pass on. It was like a visit to a royal corpse, or a new-born Dauphin. Watching the procession, Laurisse grew giddy with the constant succession of faces, young, old, comely, plain, hideous and beautiful. But he was conscious that the eye at the gilded lattice never flickered.

At last when more than four hundred virgins had filed by, a tall girl in a patched blue bodice, and petticoat of brown drugget fringed with rags at the hem, set her two hands squarely on her hips and cried in a mellow voice that not all the buzzing of voices and trampling of clogs could drown:

“Hey, hey! why, that's my old staylace!” She blushed then and bit her lip, but nobody remarked it. Everything was confusion in an instant, and when Laurisse and a party of archers rescued the girl, rather scratched and very hot, from her townswomen, she was found to be Gilda, the daughter of Vede, the town chimney-sweep.

The wench had beauty certainly. She was clear red and white in colour, ox-eyed and full-throated too, with lumps of squirrel-coloured hair tumbling from under her old linen coif. She was breasted and hipped like a goddess, and long were her well-shaped limbs. She was as pleased as St. Anthony’s pig at the thought of having won the ten silver crowns, by reason of the excellence of her garland-making. She wanted the money to buy the bed and the blankets, the crockery, the three-legged stools and the plank table, necessary for the plenishing of the whitewashed hovel by the meat-market, in which she meant to live with her sweetheart when she married him. He was Lonque, the tanner’s man, a stout, red-haired fellow with bow-legs and very long arms, made so, he said, by stretching wet skins. But they were also useful for hugging, as Gilda very well knew.

She was brought before her lord in a room apart from the clamour. Gilda only saw a wistful youth, hedged about with splendour. Gui beheld a goddess in disguise. His eyes were keen enough to see through the common husk. She of his dreams was before him. There were the fragrant lips that had dwelt on his so fully, so frankly, with such a womanly sweetness, that he could dream of nothing but tasting them again.

When he could speak, he said, standing as though she were the noble and he the basely-born:

“It is you! It was you! . . .”

She bit off the end of a sob.

“My princely lord, the wreath is mine, sure enough, by the token of the string I tied it with, and if I have done wrong, I pray you pardon!”

"You have done nothing wrong,” said Gui. “There can be no error in such divinely absolute perfection—”

at which high compliment she opened her chestnut-brown eyes. “The wreath being yours, it is of the kiss with which you gave it that I would speak. Dearest gentle damsel, how came you to kiss me, a stranger, so sweetly and so well? I beseech you tell me!”'

“Alack, my noble lord!” said she with a great blush, “this is the way of it I had waited in the crowd for hours with my garland, and wearying to be through with the business and back to the hut where I dwell with my father, and where, it being the Vigil of the Feast of the Ascension, a half-holiday, my lover was waiting for me.” “You have a lover!” Gui quivered and turned white. “But proceed.”

She fumbled with her apron. The Saints knew she meant no wrong, she confessed, but the thought of kissing a strange man, count or no count, lord or no lord, had gone so against her that she had shut her eyes when the press pushed her forward to the dais, and made up her mind to make believe her lord her lover. And having done so she had given the buss right heartily.

“That was why, then—” Gui broke off. That celestial lass of true love had been in reality conferred upon himself, in intention bestowed upon another man. “And your lover, what is he?” he asked, keeping the smarting tears back from his eyes with difficulty.

“He is a tanner,” said the tanner’s sweetheart, “saving your lordship’s presence; and the tannery of Master Peter, nigh to the Pigmarket, is where he earns his wage. A stinking trade for sure, and a Jewess that lives in our quarter has said to me that among her people a woman can win divorce from a man for no other reason than taking to it. But Lonque is a good lad; and smells as sweet as a nosegay when he is washed and dressed for Sundays and feast-days. And moreover—” she stopped for breath.

“And moreover you would love him even were it otherwise?” asked Gui, and was dazzled by her transfiguring smile. He bade her a ceremonious farewell, sent her home to her alley in a horse-litter with Laurisse as her escort, caused to be delivered her by the same trustworthy person a purse of gold, which got transmuted into silver upon the way; then sat down to write verses and fan the embers of glowing Love into the chaste white flame of abnegation.

He made early occasion to ride by the tannery of Master Peter with his retinue. A foul smoke went up from the sheds where hides were being seasoned; in the yard stood a red-headed, thick-necked, short-legged workman stirring the fetid liquid in a pit with a long pole. He shot a crafty glance at his lord form under his white.eyelashes, threw down his pole, and walked deliberately away; it was Lonque, as Gui guessed. Three days later, as my lord was brooding under a great Persian lilac in one of the Castle gardens, a messenger came praying him to confer an audience on the daughter of Vede the sweep.

The first thing Gui noticed about his divinity was that she looked weary and had lost her sweet colour; the next that she wore good garments pitchforked on as though under protest. The next, her round chin quivered, and two streams of clear tears spouted from her eyes, ran down her cheeks, and vanished in the valley of her lovely bosom. Her speech sent his face scarlet as hers was pale.

“Messire, I am yours, make of me what you will, and the sin be on your head and the heads of those that drove me here!”

"Who has driven you?”

Little by little he got the story from her. The litter, the escort, the honour, the crowns, had wrought on her mankind to delirium. A virtuous daughter was good, said Vede, the sweep; a chaste sweetheart better, said Lonque, the tanner, but best of all was a young person of discretion, whose hands, having by wonderful good luck got hold, of the handle of a money-pump, should vigorously direct the golden stream into the pockets of her father and her lover.

"I do not know either of them any more. They are mad or possessed, an’ it please your lordship,” she said. "Since they ate and drank the purse of crowns, have either of them done a full day’s work? No, by this light! The skins may lie rotting in Master Peter’s tan-pits for all Lonque heeds; half the chimneys in town might choke with soot for my father, and yet. . .” Her bosom rocked with the sobs she kept back. “They sit dicing, and drinking .red wine at home. They never leave me—they are never apart. Sometimes they fondle me, other times —” she plucked up her sleeve and showed a barred weal on the white arm that Gui would have died to kiss. “I can bear blows well enough, but their foul words bruise my heart. And now my father has commanded me, under pain of his curse, to come to you, and Lonque also —” the tears welled again. “I am. a weak girl, I can strive against them no more.” Her hands went oat in a passionate gesture of compelled surrender. 'Take me, and pay my price to them that would sell me. I never thought to live in shame, and it seems to me I must the of it; but at least I shall carry my soul dean before Him that made me.”

“You did well to obey your father and come,” said Gui, and saw the dropped head sink lower. To him she seemed a stately hind with two crop-eared ban-dogs tearing at her flanks. He had dreamed of chivalry in his convent, and of Love whilst sitting at the feet of the lovdy Queen of Navarre. Wdl, here was the chance to be a chivalrous lover with a vengeance. He guessed that the zealous Laurisse had been at work; and that the dropped seed of gross counsel had fallen in fat soil. Dolts! to take it for granted that such love as his must be the mere carnal greed of possession. And yet he had an instant’s wild impulse to snatch her to his craving heart and pay back the kiss she had once given with interest. But he controlled himself, not venturing to touch even her finger-tips.

“Pearl of damsels, paragon of daughters, lovely soul encased in spotless flesh,” these were some of the things he called her, all palpitating with doubt and bewilderment, wonder and confusion. He ended by asking her is she thought that she could ever bring herself to love him, Gui de Bemart, as a wife should love her wedded lord?

“Marry me!” Her great eyes glazed. You are jesting, my lord. The world would laugh if you were not!”

“What should I care for the world, fairest Gilda, if you were to care for me?”

She dried her tears and shook her head. She explained in homespun words, with the purple thread of a royal nature running through them, that a chased gold ewer and an earthen pot were not made to sit on one shelf. Never would she merit honest scorn by climbing to the high seat she was not meant for.

“Yet you were ready just now—” He hit off the rest of the speech.

“Oh! I will tell you, since you are so unlike what I thought you. I meant to kill myself—it is quite easy if you know where to thrust” She drew a wooden-handled shoemaker's knife from her bodice,, where it had hidden under her pure breast. . . . Gui had a vision of the martyr-maid of France.

. "Listen to me!” he said, when he could speak. “Do you still love Lonque? Are you still willing to be his wife? Remember, he would have sold you to shame!”

She pondered. The colour ebbed and flowed with her thought.

“Sir, I love him still. It isn’t altogether of our own choice where we love—at least I think not And he is more weak than wicked, more greedy than vile. For my father, I say nothing. I pray Our Lady to pray for him; Ah yes, I would be Lonque’s wife!”

“Then you shall be married to him to-morrow. The dowry shall be my affair. But if I reward him in your honour, I must chastise him for my own. Now, return home, tell your father and lover that all goes well for their prosperity and yours. Do you understand?”

“Yes—no! I—I humbly thank you, most gracious lord!”

She was gone, and the sunshine with her. Laurisse came snuffing for news, found his master with his feet among the daisies and his head in the clouds. Thus was he greeted.

“You have been too zealous, Esquire.”

“Body of me!” said Laurisse, “great lords do not often find this fault with those who serve them.”

“Serve my good parts henceforward, and not my vices,” said Gui.

“By the Pig of St. Anthony!” swore Laurisse, “if your honour had any you would be easier to deal with.”

His lord, thus eulogised, gave him his orders:

“Take a body of men-at-arms, a cart, ropes and scourges. Go to the dwelling of Vede, the sweep; you will find him dicing with Lonque, the tanner. Bind both knaves to the cart's tail, flog them throughout the town, see that you give no offence to the daughter of Vede, or by the Rood, you shall hang for it! Get you then to Peter, the tanner, buy his tannery of him at a fair price; then to-morrow, this business being well done, have Vede and Lonque, well washed and dad in good vesture, brought fasting to the Church of the Holy Saddle. I will see to it that a priest be there to sing the marriage Mass, and the daughter of Vede be ready to meet them, for then shall the tanner's man marry her, and be master of the tannery that shall be her dowry, or else wed the gallows. I have spoken!”

And as my lord Gui had spoken, thus was it done. It is nowhere recorded that the Count of Ponc6 ever married,. from which one may draw the conclusion that Gui never forgot the sweep’s daughter.

Here endeth this eventful history.

IV

A SIGHT CURE

THE consulting-room door opened on noiseless hinges.

A little lady with plentiful, wavy hair, tastefully dressed in accordance with a straitened purse, and wearing the smoked glasses which distinguished so many of the visitors to that particular house, glided over the thick carpet and took a chair at the large square centre-table, devoid of the usual litter of books and periodicals. She placed a little bag beside her, and looked shyly round. There were only four other patients waiting to see the surgeon: an unhealthy child in leg-irons, with gauze goggles, under care of a fresh-cheeked nurse; a stout old gentlemen in clothes of country fashion and sporting cut whose left arm and right eye were in slings, and whose red healthy face bore traces of a cropper amongst brambles; a pale clerk with a cough, straining eyes already too hardly taxed with a private copy of a comic illustrated paper; and the rather lax and drooping figure of a broad-shouldered, heavily-built man, dressed in a golfing suit of greenish tweeds well-cut and badly creased. He did not raise his head or look up as the gray-haired little lady in smoked glasses glided into the chair next him. He coughed and hunched his heavy shoulders more disconsolately, leaning forwards and vacantly conning the pattern of the Turkish carpet, his elbows on his knees, a rough ash stick gripped in both hands. He only coughed and did not look up, but a familiar note in the cough caused the gray-haired little woman to start violently and flush a vivid painful scarlet, while under the shelter of her cheap little cloth mantle her hands gripped at her heart. For her the next sixty seconds made an hour of painful suspense, during which she nerved herself to encounter once-familiar eyes with fortitude. But when they did at last rest upon her, there was no light of recognition in them, nor did their thick, rather reddened lids droop in shame. This man, who had won the love of her youth, who had been her husband, and now had lightly forfeited the title, did not know his wife.

"Am I so changed? Yes ... I am so changed,” she asked herself, and replied to the question in the moment when the large, vacant blue eyes visited her and went away again. He, too, had changed. His reddish-brown hair was unkempt and needed cutting, and there were gray hairs plentifully sprinkled upon the temples and above the brow. The face was swollen, and reddish, the mouth irresolute and hanging under its light moustache; the hands that gripped the stick were puffy, the nails uncared-for. It is a little, sordid detail, but this, and the fact of his wearing a frayed collar and a hideous tie, pierced the heart of the woman who had been proud of his good looks, his physical strength, his well-tubbed, well-groomed nattiness of appearance—“So unlike artists, as a rule,” she used to boast. That had been ten—twelve years?go, when the domestic skeleton, by consent of both husband and wife, had been kept in the cupboard of the residential studio, only to emerge grinning and rattling his bones on certain occasions. The too frequent recurrence of these occasions culminating in the refusal of the cupboard’s grisly occupant to be shut up any longer, had terminated in the break-up of the ménage.

”Cranbourne and his wife have parted. On yes, they’ve parted. Incompatibility of temper, did you say? Call it so, if you like. . . . When the husband has a double share of temper and the wife has none at all, I suppose it does amount to incompatibility of sorts . . a crony of Cranbourne’s replied to a questioning outsider. But the secret of the rupture lay, the crony knew, in Cranbourne’s success. Suddenly, unexpectedly, after years of obscurity, of patient hope and plodding labour, Cranboume grasped the heel of flying notoriety, became a fashionable painter, had a following and then a vogue. Critics who had previously passed him over in silence, or relegated his works to the bottom paragraph of a ’Last Notice,’ now gave him place, prattling of ‘subtlety,’ of ‘colour-inspiration,’ of ‘happy audacity’ and brilliant execution.

‘Vivacity carried to its extreme point is the chief characteristic of this young Welshman . . .* wrote the great Toboggan of the Daily Phonograph. ‘No other living artist,’ wrote Honks of the Splutterer, ‘understands the values of blade better than Mr. Arthur Cranboume.’ People who had never seen the work of Ingres were reminded of that master upon viewing the canvases of Cranboume. And praise, and puffery, and money—for these three things were poured out lavishly at the feet of Cranboume—‘wrought like poisons in his erst wholesome blood’ . . . and turned his head, never screwed on too securely. Twelve years ago Fame had come to Cranboume, and'Mrs. Cranboume had been swept out of the little poky fifty-pound per annum studio with the rusty bits of Wardour Street armour, and the moth-eaten Bradford Bokhara carpets, and the Japanese odds and ends that were no longer the pride of Cranboume’s heart. Indeed, within a month or so he moved to Kensington Gate, where a vacant studio of vast proportions, with a glass dome not distantly unlike that of the Palm-House at Kew, was to be had at a moderate rental of £500. Under that glass dome Cranboume painted no great pictures, but speedily blossomed into a bankrupt, while Mrs. Cranboume, resuming her maiden name, supported herself and the single infant pledge of Cranbourne’s affection by embroidering ritualistic vestments (she had, before Cranboume married her, been a member of the ‘Guild of High Art Needleworkers’) and reproducing ancient tapestry designs in modern materials for a West End firm. And she had overworked her eyes, . . . perhaps overcried them, though twelve .years are twelve years, when it comes to the healing of scars, and she had nerved herself ‘for Arty’s sake’—Arty was the pledge previously referred to—to go through the ordeal of paying two guineas and undergoing a preliminary examination, which involves having belladonna dropped in your eyes, and not being able to use them for twenty-four hours. And here, in the consulting-room of the Harpole Street oculist, . . . she had encountered . . . her husband, . . . and her husband did not know her. . . . One may have long ceased to care for ... a person, . . . one may have become quite indifferent to ... a person, but to realise that one has ceased in . . . that person’s memory to have any existence . . . is to reap a bitter sheaf of humiliation and pain.

The door opened. The sporting old gentleman with the bramble-scratched features was summoned by a name which could belong to nothing under a M.F.H. and J.P., and with a parting glare out of his one obvious eye at a stuffed fox in a glass case, rose and lumbered out. The child in goggles snivelled, and was consoled with peppermints by its nurse; the pale young clerk folded his thumbed comic paper over to get at a fresh place; and Mrs. Cranbourne nearly jumped out of her chair. For Cranboume was speaking to her, and pointing with a shaky finger to the soiled and frayed cuff that timidly showed beyond the boundary of his right sleeve.

“I feel,” observed Cranbourne, “that I owe an apology to a—to any lady for presenting myself”—his language was good and his tone, as always, gentlemanlike, but his words came haltingly from a tongue that seemed to be too large for Cranboume’s mouth, and he seemed to feel about for his words, gropingly and uncertainly—“for presenting myself before her in a state like this,” he pointed with a shaky finger to the soiled cuff. “But there are ex—there are exten- It is most curious,” observed Cranbourne, “but the word has slipped away.” It was plain, as he rubbed his forehead with his flabby, trembling hand, that he suffered because the word had evaded him. “But,” he resumed, “when a man depends on paid people to do things, a man, madam, is apt to be neglected. Ups and downs are the rule of this world, . . . and when I

see children playing-The name of the game—played with a keg and a plank and a child at each end of it—has escaped me,” said Cranbourne apologetically. “It makes me think of Life. For once, though you may not think it possible”—he drew a little near her, and fixed his dim, worried blue eyes appealingly upon a face" that, all strange to him as it seemed, yet tempted his confidence—though you may not think it possible, I was a celebrated man. My pictures hung on the Line, commissions flowing in like—like anything that does flow in, you know,” he rubbed his worried forehead, “and my name was a household word. A householdd word, by Gad!” He sat suddenly upright. A look of blank puzzlement was upon his face. He rubbed and rubbed at a forehead with apparently blank space behind it. “My name . . ."be whispered to himself. “What was my name,"

For several reasons the woman whom Cranbourne had addressed could not trust her voice. But Cranbourne unconsciously spared her by forgetting that she had not answered.

“You will understand, madam, that in conesquence of this curious inability to remember things—most ordinary things—a man is rather at a disadvantage. For instance, people suspect him of being a little off ... I mean— out of his mind." The vague blue eyes visited the smoked glasses of the quiet little listener appealingly. “Others think him a silly ass—and a bore at that. Now no man cares to be thought mad, or a silly ass, and consequently he keeps out of people's way . . . gets into a habit of doing it, until to sit in a decent room talking to a well-bred stranger becomes a rarity. You will excuse my seeming rather forgetful of the ordinary usages of good society. . . . The fact is ... I have forgotten ’em. . . . But quite a short time ago I was," Cranbourne laughed foolishly, “ a man rather run after. The thing began when I painted my first successful picture. . . . You must know it, it was the sensation of the Academy in- I can’t quite hit the date, but a dozen years ago, quite. It was bought by a millionaire . . .

Manchester man, head of the great firm—The name of the firm, for the moment, slips my memory. But the picture. ... It was borrowed, shown about everywhere, reproduced in a dozen mediums . . . sold dear for the minority . . . sold cheap for the masses. . . .

It was called-My God!" said Cranbourne, with a spasm of pain which would have drawn his features into rigid lines had they been less flabby, “I can't remember even that!”

"Never mind,” she said, with compassionate gentleness. "Don’t bother about the name of the picture!” "It's gone!” Cranbourne waved his hand clumsily, "but I remember everything about it as though I’d only painted it yesterday. But surely you . . . Surely you must have seen it? The scene was laid on the Brittany coast, . . * the background was the wall of the cottage, . . . rough stone with green and slaty purple veins in it, and a thatch, low, and of weather-beaten straw; and over it you get the line of the tumbling, lumpy gray sea. There’s a casement window, crooked and deeply sunk, and an old blade bench of drift-oak. They . . . he and she, have been sitting there through the night, dose together. He . . . her sweetheart sails with the dawn for f the Newfoundland cod-fishery. He has dozed with his cheek resting on her hair, . . . that fine, gold, spunsilk hair. . . . And he wakes with the sunrise, cold and gray like everything else in the picture, . . . to find her hand cold and stiff in his. She is dead, the has died of sorrow while he was sleeping, and . . . Odd!” said Cranbourne, plucking at his lips with the shaking hand, "I can’t remember that picture’s name.” His listener, anger and resentment and contempt drowned in the pity that flooded her, said very quietly: "Was it not—‘With the Flood Tide’?”

Over Cranboume’s face broke quite a beautiful expression of joy and relief.

“ ‘With the Flood Tide.’ Yes, madam, you are right She had sailed before him, you see, the young wife, or sweetheart, or whatever the public liked to think of her. . . . For the public like a picture that has an obvious story with a doubtful ending, as a friend of mine used to say. Before I took that studio at Holland Gate I used to rely a good deal upon my friend’s judgment.

Hut we Dave not met tor years." Cranbourne drew a pattern with his stick upon the carpet “We have not met for years,” he repeated.

The woman spoke almost without conscious volition.

"Do you miss her? Are you sorry!”

Cranboume’s reply was swallowed in the opening of the door. The fresh-faced nurse, in response to the summons of the solemn man-servant, led out the little boy in gauze goggles, now snivelling deplorably and refusing the solace of peppermints.

“My turn next, I think,” Cranbourne said, as the door closed. "Good man for eyes’, this fellow. At least, so I’ve heard. But he doesn’t seem to do mine much good. There’s a bright haze . . .” He pointed to his vague, blue eyes. . . . "A bright haze over everything I look at, and then things swim and curtsey and I catch at railings, or a wall, or a passer-by. Should come a cropper if I didn’t, but the man, ... if it happens to be a man, . . . doesn’t allow for that. If it’s a lady, she calls a policeman, and then I, . . . then I have to explain that I’m not a drinking man. Never was, in my best— I mean my worst days.”

No! the woman who had been his wife agreed, looking at the dull, inert, nerve-wrecked figure of the man who had been her husband. Cranbourne had never been a drinking-man.

“The doctors talk of overwork, nerve-prostration, . . . aphasia, and so on.” Cranbourne proceeded to explain. “I remember their crack-jaw medical lingo when I can’t recall the commonest ordinary words. They say, in the early days before I painted my picture, I overdid it. Potboiling takes it out of a man. She wanted to work at High Art embroidery and leather-embroidery and all that fiddling rubbish, but I wouldn’t let her.”

No, it was quite true: he never had let her.

"Then came the success, and the paragraphs, and the society invitations, and commissions on commissions. I believe,” Cranboume suggested foolishly, "it sent me a bit wild. She . . . she couldn’t understand. . . . I never could explain. ... I ran amok, as the . . . Is it the Chinese who run amok or the . . . the other yellow, slanting-eyed beggars with sampans . . . and krisses . . . and pigtails? Something drove me on, as it drives the yellow beggar with the slanting eyes . . . But I am afraid I tire you with talking so much about myself!” said Cranboume ruefully. "Being out of sorts gives a man odd ideas, I suppose. Because, when you came into the room and sat down near me, I’d the impression ... It has gone now, but I felt it quite strongly for a minute at least, . . . that we had met before.”

It was Cranboume’s turn, as the door opened and the solemn servant beckoned, to follow that dismal guide into the conjectural regions beyond; but he waived his claim, or forgot it, and the weak-eyed clerk pocketed his paper and went instead. And Mrs. Cranboume was alone with the man who had been her husband, and the May-day light was mellowing as it filtered through the tinted window-panes, and the voice of a coster crying wallflowers died away in the distance quite melodiously. It is wonderful how the most commonplace surroundings will assume the tinge, mud-brown or rose-colour, of one’s mental horizon. It is more than wonderful how small a balance in one’s favour will set one’s heart throbbing with joy. It is most wonderful of all that we should wonder at these things, knowing that human nature has been and always will be the same. But Mrs. Cranboume did not philosophise. Sight was coming back to the dimmed eyes behind the smoked glasses. She was beginning after twelve years of separation to understand her husband. And viewed through the medium of the new light his conduct appeared many shades lighter. All this while Cranboume maundered on about that first impression of his, with regard to their having met before.

"You are not mistaken," she said. She took off the smoked glasses and looked him full in the face. "We have not . . . been always the strangers we are to-day. Years have passed since we last met, and I am changed, but I want you to look at me, and try whether you can* not remember my name?"

“Certainly, ... if you wish . . .” Cranboume’s blue eyes, vague and misty at first, steadied as they rested on the others, liquidly hazel and long-lashed, though wearied with High Art needlework destined to adorn the persons of Ritualistic curates. A moment Cranboume stared, then he dosed his eyes, which blinked and watered, and rubbed his forehead in the old, heart-breaking, puzzled way. "I . . . can’t! It hurts, rather,” he said, like a good child who has been asked to bear a mustard plaster a minute longer. Mrs. Cranboume drew off her glove then, and reached forth her right hand, white and still pretty, despite the embroidering of many vestments, and laid it upon his.

“You are Arthur Cranboume. . . .”

"Thank you, that’s the name,” said Cranboume gratefully.

“And I was once a friend of yours. Quite a dear friend, quite a dose friend, quite a near friend, when you painted your great picture ‘With the Flood Tide,' and made your name known. Thep, little by little a friend estranged, put by and neglected, replaced, by—others; gradually driven quite away. Did you never regret me? Did you never miss the old homely, laborious days of comradeship? Did you never fed that the love that lessened the bitterness of failure and the sting of disappointment would have helped you to bear success, and cope with Fame? I mean, Arthur, the love of your wife.”

“Wife,” Cranbourne repeated and brought his heavy hand down flabbily upon his knee with what he meant to be a triumphant smack. “Wife. . . . That’s another of the words that I’d forgotten. That friend estranged . . . my wife. . . . My wife ...”

“I am your wife,” said Mrs. Cranbourne, uttering every word with desperate distinctness. Cranbourne laughed softly, and not unpleasantly, but the sound was as hideous in the ears of the woman as the howl of a maniac would have been. . . .

“You . . . my wife . . . Ha, ha! I should like you to see my wife. . . . She was a pretty girl when I married her. Slight, with eyes not so unlike yours. Stuck to me while I ground and sweated, like a . . . like a bit of true grit. What feasts we’ve had upon a couple of kidneys, or a half-pound of boiled ham, in the old studio days! She used to darn my socks and patch my coat-cuffs—one’s right coat-cuff always gets frayed—and coax the landlord to wait for the rent, and bring the tax-gatherer round to the idea of calling again. There was a courtyard with a plane-tree and a patch of grass, and we’d sit outside in the hot, dark August nights when we had no money to get away to Brittany, . . . and I would smoke and listen while she talked of the days to come when I should be rich and famous. ’Fame, fame!’ was her cry, and one day Fame came knocking at my door, and before the golden glow had died and the bells in my brain had stopped ringing, I met my wife’s eyes and knew that the was jealous.”

"Oh! Arthur!”

The name came in an irrepressible cry of pain. Bat Cranbourne, rejoicing in an unwonted flow of speech and liberty of expression, shook his blunt head and charged on.

“She was suspicious of me. She must have always secretly believed that if success and money came, I should change to her. She said nothing—or little or nothing, but Tier eyes continually prophesied. Her smile had a pale writhe in it like the belly of an adder, and her hands were always folded as though she were waiting for the worst. When I looked at her over a newspaper that had praised me, there she sat waiting for me to change. When I asked her to come out and see the world make much of me, the shook her head and sat at home waiting for the poison to work. She took it for granted that I was bad at the core. She loved me, and yet she was the readiest to think the worst of me. And she waited for the worst to show, and . . . When a woman is like that she always proves right in the end, .because the believing and the waiting work together. ‘Estranged’—you used the word just now. . . . 'Neglected, driven quite away.* She might have guessed that the love that . . . what was it?— ‘sweetened the bitterness of Failure and softened the sting of Disappointment* would have helped him—me, I mean!—to bear Success and cope with Fame.**

Mrs. Cranbourne slid from her chair to the floor. She was crying bitterly—a little Niobe in a cheap mande and a hat pushed absurdly awry. Cranbourne’s heavy hand was wetted with her tears as she kissed it and prayed, "Arthur, Arthur, Arthur,” to forgive her, with iterations and reiterations of the ordinary emotional kind, extraordinarily absurd when employed by a deceived, ill-used, and deserted wife in addressing a husband who has behaved, not to put it too delicately, like an unmitigated blackguard. At this juncture the door opened and the ultra-respectable man-servant was pained by witnessing a somewhat unusual spectacle.

“The doctor . . . Oh, please thank him and say that I won't trouble him to-day.”

Mrs. Cranboume straightened her hat and rose. There was an unwonted pink upon her tear-wet cheeks, and a most unusual brilliancy in the hazel eyes that had been so tired. And you, dear ...”

To the solemn man-servant's surprise she thus addressed one to whom she had behaved upon entering the room as to a total stranger. “Shall I wait for you? No? Then—will you kindly call a cab, only one cab, please!” She impressed this direction upon the memory of the solemn servitor with one of her few half-crowns.

So the cab came, and Mrs. Cranboume assumed the command of her wreck so lately derelict, and carried the submissive if surprised Cranboume triumphantly away. Why her eyes, previously overtired, you will remember, should be permanently benefited by working for three instead of two, is one of those problems, physical and moral, which present themselves with such pleasing frequency to the bewildered human student of Human Nature.

Cranboume is much improved bodily and mentally, and has lately taken to painting pot-boilers. His linen, it may be remarked, is no longer frayed. And the trio, Cranboume, Mrs. Cranboume, and the pledge . . . have returned to the original fifty-pound studio, at the door of which, it is to be hoped, for the sake of that weak- brained genius . . . Fame will never knock any more!

V

WANTED—A KING

“AS there’s a funny bit under that ’eadin’ in the Evening Cram,” the Missus says, ‘‘an’ mention bein’ made of the country our Mr. Mason impoiks some o’ that sour foreign wine from—though pronounce it I could not if I 'ad to, or to swing at the bar of the Old Bailey next minute—’e might like to look it over with ’is tea, so take it up along o’ you, Loosha gal, when you go up.”

An’ I takes the paper up on the tray, with the teapot and the sugar an’ butter an’ the Scotch scone made by the German baker. Mr. Mason was our second floor, ’aving the bedroom acrost the landin’, an’ it bein’ Saturday ’ad come ’ome early from 'is office in Finsbury Square with Billingsgate Fish in a flagbasket, one ’ot day in the June before the War.

’E was a small, spare gent, say thirty-nine, with a complexion like a pale cigar, or golden syrup, an’ silky straight gray an’ black 'air brushed backwards an’ cut off square as it comes to ’is collar. ’Is eyes was black an’ sparklin’, an’ 'is eyebrows was blade too, an’ kep’ time with ’is ’ands when ’e worked ’em about in talkin'. ’E was always plain-dressed, but as neat as new pins, an’ 'is manners was lovely—with a sweepin’ bow an’ a gracious smile for the gal what come to do the doorsteps on Thursday mornin’s; an* as to lettin’ me carry a coalscuttle up to the second floor if 'e ’appened to be cornin' upstairs be*ind me—I believe that man would ’ave blushed for ’isself, strite I do. Which shows the truth of the sayin’ about what’s bred in the bone—though it were to bust upon me afterwards ’ow different Mr. Mason’s bones was to other people’s.

’E was leaning back in the easy chair smokin’ a cigarette —as the other gentlemen complained of ’is usin’ such double hextry superfine tobacco it spiled the flavour o’ their pipes—but ’e throwed ’is fag away in a wasteful way ’e ’ad when I come in with ’is tea, which was a special kind of green ’e brought from the City, that weak in appearance a Blue Ribboner would ’ave shrunk from it, an’ that strong in reality ’as ’eadache was not the word after I’d tried a cup of it. All round the room was pinned colored posters advertizin’ of drinks what Mr. Mason dealt with in ’is business, which were that of a agent for several ’olesale spirit merchants an’ dealers in wines an’ liquors. "Swash, our matchless summer beveridge,” an’ “Opp’s Unrivalled Family Ale,” an’ “Kurrants”s British Port,” an’ the new sparklin’ silver-foil shampane Chateau Groseflle, an’ the celebrated vintages of Moldonia, spesh-ally imported in bottles with straw overcoats which vinegar were not the word for 'em, though drunk by Mr. Mason regular at meals an’ never visibly seemin’ to disagree.

Well, Mr. Mason thanks me for the paper with a pleasant smile.

"Anything speshally interesting in the way o’ news?” he asts. The winders was open wide, it bein’ a ’ot day in early June, an’ in ’is white dude trousers, aerated shirt, an’ blade silk waistband, with a blade velvet smokin’ coat,' you never see a gentleman look more cool an* comfortable.

"The Royal Drawin’-Room,” I says, as Mrs. Smee ’ad read out bits ’ere an’ there, an’ I’d ’ad a ’asty glimp myself while the old lady were checkin* the clean laundry.

“Ah!” says Mr. Mason in ’is quiet way, droppin’ back into ’is armchair an’ crossin' ’is legs. “Was it a crowded funkshun?” ’e asts.

“All the nobs seems to 'ave bin there,” I says, mentionin’ several ’igh an’ 'aughty names.

“I should presume,” says Mr. Mason, “that several of the most exclusive corns in the United Kingdom were crushed last night.”

“It must ’ave bin a beano,” Lsays. “A regler show— it must!”

“Of shoulders,” says Mr. Mason, pouring out ’is tea an* smiling quiet to ’isself, “an’ of dimonds.” An’ ’e smells at a rose ’e ’ad in ’is button’ole, an* smiles in the quiet way ’e *ad.

“Tiararas,” says I, “as ’igh—”

“As the temperatoor,” says Mr. Mason, leanin* back an’ . joinin’ the tips of ’is fingers as I cut ’is bread an’ butter.

“There’s three columns of trains,” I says with a sigh, “an* do you ’appen to know, sir, wot’s the noo shade?”

"In complexions?” says Mr. Mason careless like. “That pale lilac,” ’e says, “what one usually sees in ’Yde Park an* Picadifly.”

“I wasn’t thinkin’ of complexions,” says I, “as I meant trains. There’s three columns of trains. Ob!” I says with a soft sigh, “what it must *ave bin to be there!”

“Imagine a Turkish bath,” says Mr. Mason, sippin’ ’is tea, “took in full dress, and without the customary wet ead-rag—and you ’ave it. Those poor people!” *e says, shaking Is little ’ead. “ *Ow I pity those poor people!”

“The people oil the kerb in the crush at Buckman Gate?" I says.

“No,” says ’e, “die Crowned 'Eads on the carpet” An’ ’e brings out ’is fine snow-white pocket ’andkerchief, for never were a faddier gentleman about ’is linen, an* wipes away a tear.

“If Life is ever ’ard on Them they can take it out in glory,” says I, with a sigh. ’Ave you ever thought, sir, wot a splendid satisfyin’ thing it must be to be a Somebody?”

" ‘As it ever occurred to you, my good girl,” asts Mr. Mason, “that the satisfaction of being a Somebody may pale before the full an’ perfec’ rapture the mere Nobody may hextrac’ from hexistence? Return the paper to your mistress with my compliments,” ’e says, “an’ thanks; I fear it contains nothink of suffishent interes’,” says ’e, “to justify peroosal.”

“There’s a speshal little bit,” I says, “as Mrs. Smee did think you’d like to run your eye o’ver.” An’ I turns to the leaf the old lady 'ad turned down. ‘“Wanted—a King!’ was the ’eadin’ of the paragraft.”

“Ah!” says Mr. Mason, taking a piece of thin bread and butter, “please read that. You know I like to ’ear you read, Loosha,” which was queer, ’im being able to do it so much better. So I reads:

‘“The Recent Collapse of the Constitushion, dissolu-shun of Parliament an’ disorganisating off the National Counsil and councel of States ’ave shivered to hatoms the Smallest Republic in the Sivilised World, an’ the Mon-archial Party is Sear chin’ eagerly for the runaway King of Moldonia-’ ”

Crash! goes the teacup on the carpet. ’Eedless of the biling tea which ’as splashed 'is snowy dudes most cruel, * Mr. Mason stares at me over ’is bitten dice of bread an’ butter, more like the graven image of a second-floor City-lodger than breathin' life.

"Go on, go on, woman!” ’e says, ’arsh and ’oarse-like,

when he sees my putrefied stare, and ’e chucks Is bread an’ butter amongst the ferns in ’is fireplace, an’ jumps up an’ leans ’is dbers on the mantelshelf as ’e 'olds 'is ’ead between 'is ’ands. Overlooking the insult because I can see Mr. Mason ain’t quite 'isself, I goes on:

“ ’The runaway King of Moldonia, who, ten years ago, when the Revalushionists stormed the Royal residence at . .

“Karkova,” says Mr. Mason.

’’’At Karkova—evaded the fury of the insargents by dianging clothes with one of the Royal pages, and escaped —wither?” I-reads. ‘What country afforded a refuge to the unlucky Monarch of an upheaved and rebellious Kingdom, ’as never bin assertained. 'E ’as vanished without leaving a ripple on the duckpond of Europe, an’ we confidently prophesy that the advocates of the Right Divine in Moldonia will search in vain for-’ Please, Mr.

Mason, sir,” I says, ’’excuse, as I can’t get the ’ang of ’is crackjaw name.”

“Antonoth Maniswell Luthonon Grebold the Fourth,” says Mr. Mason, an’ I couldn’t spell it for kingdoms if I ’adn’t got it wrote down in 'is august Italian ’and.

“As it is certainly a crackjor name, my good girl,” says ’e, “an’ for my part I prefers William Mason.”

“An’ to think they’re a-looking for the King of Moldonia to offer ’im back ’is rights, an’ can’t find ’im,” I says. “Oh! don’t it seem crool ’ard, an’ don’t you ’ope they will?”

“Will what?” says Mr. Mason sharp like.

“Find ’im!” I says.

"Great *Eavens, gal, no!” he bounces out, and adds something in a foreign language which sounds like swearing. “Is the man ’oo ’as ’appened to be born with ’is 'ead in a wopses’ nesk likely to want to put it in agin once ’e ’as got it out?”

“As I should expose not!” says I, “which have been stinged myself, and blue-bags no normal use, with a face swull to that degree the Rector ’isself called in to ast mother to keep that bright, intelligent gal from attendin' Sunday-school until recovered from hobvious mumps.”

“The case of a man ’oo ’appens to be bomed with ’is ’ead in a Crown,” says Mr. Mason, “is simpularly the same as the case of the man I ’ave previously menshun.”

“Do you mind a-moving, sir,” I says, as ’ad bin improvin’ the shining hour by layin* the cloth, “for the to get the cruet out!”

iMr. Mason larfs a quiet sarcastic laugh, an’ I gets the cruet out as was a 'air-loom, ’e 'ad told me, as 'ad bin in 'is family for many years. A more batterder-lookin’ thing with jagged edges in dingy silver-gilt as full of 'oles as a cullinder, an’ without any divisions to put the salt an’ pepper in, you never see, an’ eleven-an-six would 'ave covered quite a ’andsome bit of Britannia Plate; but it was Mr. Mason's fancy to 'ave it on the table, an' bein’ a pleasant gentleman, I 'ave smiled at many a joke of 'is. But what was not my surprise when, with a wild larf like what the ’eroes in the Penny Romancer gives when their wits is on the totter at the revelation of the wicked young lady’s treachery, Mr. Mason snatches the cruet, tips the bottles out of it, an’ sets it, upsy-down, on ’is 'ead.

“Look at me, young woman,” says he, “decked in the sacred cymbal of authority, and listen to the ’istory of the Royal Race of Moldonia. Two ’undred years ago, Mol-donia was a slice of neutral ground shaped like a nibbled ’am sandwich, between the Kingdoms of Bui mania and Rugaria. It 'appened to be populated by a race of goose 'erds. The wealthiest goose-’erd was a abitious man. 'E ’ad bred geese, an' fed geese, an' sold geese, an' It came into 'is ’ead that 'e’d like to role geese before 'e 'ad done. A coolness springed up between the Kingdoms of Bul-tnania and Rugaria just then. The wealthy Moldonia goose-’erd grasped of the opportunity. . . . *E called 'is fellow-countrymen, most of 'oom owed ’im money, together, an’ proclaimed ’isself sole Monarch, Antonoth Maniswill Luthonon Creobold the First. That was the way in which the Royal 'Ouse of Moldonia was founded,” says Mr. Mason, “an' the ambitious goose-’erd was my—was the great-great-grandfather o' this 'ere Missin’ King. And, from the 'our in which 'e founded 'is die-nasty, to the 'our that seed Antonoth Maniswill Luthonon Crebold the Fourth drop out of the back window of the pallis on to a soft 'eap of manure,—for we ain't quite as particular about sanitation of Royal Residences in that part of the world as we are 'ere—there was only one 'ope for the 'arassed ruler of that agitated an* un'appy Kingdom,” says Mr. Mason, breathin' quick an' croupy, an’ lookin’ ard at me. “An* what’ think you, my good gal, was that sole an’ single ’ope?”

“As I’m sure I dunno,” I says, “unless as they’d leave off die-nastyin’ an’ live nice an’ pleasant as they did afore.”

Mr. Mason shakes 'is 'ead sadly.

“I, too, dreamed thus, my pore girl,” says 'e, “but that ended in a Republic. No, the only chance remaining for Moldonia is that Rugaria an’ Bulmania should move up.”

“Move up?” I says.

“A warnin’ from Berlin on one side,” says Mr. Mason mysteriously, “A intimation on the other, from Constantinople, hinspired, as you may guess, by our Friend in Furs at Petersburg—an* the hupshot would hultimately he as I 'ave said.”

“But wot good would it do, sir,” I says, "Moldonia,” says I, “if them two countries on heach side of it was to move up?”

"Figger to yourself two express trains,” says Mr. Mason, “on the same line, chargin’ towards each other from opposite pints—full-steam—an' a cattle-truck on the line between ’em—an* tell me wot becomes of the cattle-truck.”

“Smashed, sir!” says I.

“A better simmilly,” says Mr. Mason, liftin’ ’is finger. “Suppose, agin, two uncommon stout parties of the work-in’ class, asleep in bed, with an equally uncommon small an’ weakly babby, on which the Insurance ’as recently bin paid, bewteen ’em. Wot ’appens to the babby?”

“It gits overlaid,” I says.

“Exadly,” says Mr. Mason, “an* that is the best thing as could ’appen to my mis’rable an* un’appy country.” An’ ’e pulls ’isself sharp up at that, as if ’e ’ad said more than ’e meant to.

"My gracious, sir!” I calls out, “as you don’t mean to say, you came from there!”

“I will not deny it,” says Mr. Mason, lookin’ a bit took aback. 'But England bein’ the chosen land of my adaptation, so to speak, you will oblige me by not mentionin’ it in the kitchen or elsewhere.”

As I give the promise willing and free, never being one to carry tales.- An* as I lays the table, Mr. Mason ’aving took off the cruet an’ put it back in the middle of the doth, he tells me of his early years in Moldonia, where the wine come from, an* where 'is Pa ’ad ’dd a official post under Govinment.

“Did 'e wear a uniformed?” I asks.

"My pore father’s ’ole existence was a kollodoscopic seris of changes into different uniforms,” says Mr. Mason.

"Was ’e a temperary footman, sir?” I asks, as ’ad knowed a young man of good appearance in that line. Mr. Mason shakes 'is ’ead dreamily, as ’e sets in ’is armchair, and I asks as delicate as I could whether the workin’ ’ours was long?”

“ ’E usually rose at five,” says Mr. Mason, "so as to gain time for private study and correspondents before workin’ with the Cabinet.”

“Was *e a cabinet-maker, sir?” I asks.

“He tried to be,” says Mr. Mason sadly, “but ’oo could make a reliable Cabinet out of Moldonian materials.”

"Unseasoned wood ain’t no good, as my Uncle Joe said to ’is dyin’ day,” says I; "and what other kind of work did your Pa do, sir?”

“He held reviews, conferred decorations, signed death-warrants, or Pardons,” said Mr. Mason, clinkin’ the teaspoon in the empty cup, "an’ opened new Hospitals, Town Halls, Museums, Bazaars, an’ so forth.”

“As *e must ’ave bin kep’ on the ’op,” I says, an’ makes up my mind Mr. Mason’s Pa ’ad a job like them gentlemen ’ave at the British Museum an’ the Nashunal Gallery, as walk about ’aughtily with wands in their ’ands a-seein’ as the Public don’t shoot black-leaded peas at the picturs, or write their names on the marble statutes. An’ then Mr. Mason shakes ’isself out of ’is wakin’ dreams and says with a smile:

“It may interes’ you to know, Loosha, as I am betrothed for to be married.”

“Which may ’appiness be yours and ’ers,” I says, "ooever she may be, an’ shall you keep on the rooms? as not me alone but the ’ole ’ouse’old would be sorry to lose you.”

“I thank you, my good girl,” says *e, in ’is smooth, gracious way, “for myself and for her. She is of a noble family of Clapham, the daughter of Mr. Henry ’Opp, whose Family Ale I 'ave bin privileged to push in trade circles.”

“Why, Mr. 'Opp is quite a large brewer, sir,” says I, astonished at the unpretendin’ Mr. Mason ’aving aspired to such a onion.

"He is the largest brewer I ever remember to ’ave seen,” says Mr. Mason, ’an then he takes ’is fiansy’s por-trick out of ’is letter-case an’ shows it to me with a ’appy smile, jest as there come a thunderin’ double rap at the' 'all door.

“Wherever 'ave you bin, Loosha gal!” Mrs. Smee calls through ’er pants as I come downstairs. “As quite a party of strange gentlemen are askin’ for Mr. Mason!”

“Yes, yes, yes,” says one of the visitors as ’ad quite blocked up the ’all, an’ a stouter man I never did lay eyes on, breathin’ like a underground Tube borin’ engine, with assmy, an’ upright black ’air cut like clothes-brushes, an’ a sailer complexion leanin’ to green in the gaslight.

"Mr. Mason, Wine and Spirit Importers’ Agent, as ’as a office in Finsbury Square? We have bin there—we find him not, we follow—here. Lead us to him.” An’ he planks a suvrin’ in my ’and.

“As I couldn’t undertake to, thanking you kindly all the same,” says I, offerin’ the money bade, which the stout gentleman waves back with a kind of stage flourish, “unless you ’appened to be Mr. Mason’s Pa-in-law as is to be, Mr. ’Opp from Clapham, as it ain’t likely ’e’d deny ’issdf to.”

“It is well!” says the stout gent, breathin’ jerkier than ever. "Behold me, Mr. Clapham 'Opp, and direct me to the room of Mr. Mason.”

As I leads the way upstairs, the fat man an’ the four foreigners ’e ’ad with ’im follerin’ at my ’eels.

"Here’s your Pa-in-law as is to be from Gapham, sir,” I says, thro win’ open the door, an’ Mr. Mason runs forward beamin’ with ’is ’and out.

“My faith, dear friend, but this is a surpri—”

No further ’e gets, but falls back agin the table as gashly in complexion as the very cloth on it “Marshal Tiniswill!” says ’e. "You have fathomed my inconnito. Woman, you have betrayed me,” e’ says, throwin’ a scorchin’ look at me. “All is lost I”

“Oh, ’ow, Mr. Mason, sir?” I busts out, and then I ’ad no breath left to protesk my innercence, for down goes the fat gentleman as speaked English an’ the five foreigners bare-’eaded on their knees. The fat gentleman begins to jabber like a Eyetalian with a organ, but Mr. Mason ’olds up ’is ’and.

“Speak English, Marshall” says 'e, coldly, “it is the langwidge of my adoption. . . ’

“Representative Members an* chosen Deligates of the iMonarchial Party, an’ faithful vasslse of the Crown,” says the stout gentleman, strugglin’ with assmy an’ emotion, “be’old your King. ’Ale!” says ’e, “Ale! Antonoth Maniswill Luthonon Creobold, the Fourth King of Moldonia!” And the five foreigners gives a kind of foreign ’ooray.

The room seems to swim round, what with the strangeness an* the surprise, but when I opens my eyes agin, lo an’ be’old! the fat man, in a kind of agony of reverence, is kissing the cruet which ’e ’olds in ’is ’ands. That cruet were the identical Royal Crown of Moldonia, what Mr. Mason 'ad took with ’im when ’e flowed from the fury of the Revalushunists years before, an* the ’oles in it was the empty settin’s of the jewels as ’e ’ad sold for a livin’ an' used to embark in trade.

“Return,” says ’e, in the 'earing of my own ears, me being jammed against the wall-paper beyond release by two of the stoutest of them Moldonians. “Return with my own consent, to be your drudge, your tool, your whippin’-boy! Gentlemen, Representatives of the Loyalist Party—my answer is conveyed in the single word— Never!”

I “Look out, Mr. Mason, your Majesty!” I shrieks, for they were advancin’ on 'im as if to drag 'im from ’is own ’earthside by force. Mr. Mason ’olds up ’is ’and majestic-ilke, an* them cowardly Moldonians drawed bade. ’E ’ad often complained about the orful yellin’ of them late-edition newspaper-boys, bein’ that plainly ’eard in ’is second-floor room, but ’e must 'ave breathed a blessing afterwards on the ’ead of that steam-whistle-voiced kid what went by just then under ’is winder, yellin’: i "Speshul! Hextry speshul! Extryornary Event in Eastern Urope! A Kingdom Snuffed Out! Concerted Haction of Two Powers! Speshul Hextry—”

“Mr. Mason was at the winder in one jump, an’ throwed it up, with three o’ them loyal Moldonians ’angin’ to ’is coat-tails. “A shillin’ for a copy of that paper!” he shouts. “Boy—bring it up!” An’ in ’arf a tide the boy was in the room an* the paper in Mr. Mason’s ’and. *E tore it open gashly white, cast ’is eye over the collums, an’ ’anded the paper to the fat Moldonian gent ’e’d called Marshal with a lovely bow. “I regret that you an’ the deligates of the Loyalist Party should ’ave hincurred the trouble,” says ’e, “an’ expense of a frootless journey,” ’e says, “while I rejoice in the fortooitus event that 'as made it so. Gentlemen,” says Mr. 'Mason, “I am no more the King of Moldonia than you are my subjex. Thankx be to the Powers, Bulmania an* Rugaria ’ave moved up,” Mr. Mason says, “an’ Moldonia as a Kingdom ’as ceased to jexisk!”

An’ with a stately gracefulness what I never see equalled in Royalty at the Drury Lane Panto, ’is late Majesty of Moldonia waves the delegates from the room. . . .

’E married the Gapham young lady soon afterwards, an’ I ’ave ’eard tell is a ’enpecked ’usband. An’ there’s quite a Royal family at Gapham now, with a double pram full up, an’ a ’ospital nurse at two guineas a week a-carryin’ of Number Three. An’ I ’ave wondered, if Mrs. Mason should ever ’appen to ’ear of the narrer shave she’s ’ad of ban’ a Queen . . . whether . . . But wonders will never sease.

VI

HOW CAREY CAME BACK TO THE MINES

HE was a long-limbed, lean, silent man, whose naturally dark complexion the fierce sun of the East had tanned to a deep terra-cotta. He had once been handsome, in swarthy Spanish-gipsy style, but the ravaging hand of disease had effaced his good looks. His black eyes had the opium-eater’s glaze, and his teeth were stained by perpetual tobacco. And he lay in his old and battered deck-chair, inert, supine, his brown felt hat with its cheap spotted blue pagri thrust well back, staring at the clean white deck with a faint queer smile just visible under the heavily soaped ends of a coarse black moustache which was evidently out of training.

We were off Massouah, and it was the fifth of November. Sinai was growing dim on the horizon, the last time I had peeped, blinking, outside the double tent that shut us in, hiding both sea and sky. Nobody went below for meals in this heat, oppressive, prostrating, enervating. The steamer threshed her way through fiery air and boiling water, that had the dull opaqueness of molten glass. And the fitful conversation had dwelt for the last fifteen incandescent minutes upon the Reality of Things Unseen.

This topic brought a dull gleam of interest into the glazed eyes under the heavy brows of the silent man. He furtively scanned the speakers, as he twisted the ill-trained moustache with a long, supple, slender handsome hand,

smooth, not scarred like his face. Then he spoke. We were listening to him before we knew that he was talking. His voice was a sweet, lisping monotone. And he spoke with a cultivated English accent, broken by strange Oriental inflections and studded with exotic words. He believed in ghosts, and in spirits, and in devils, particularly the Burmese and Chinese variety. He had seen a few things, gentlemen, out there—the supple hand indicating the Far East—calculated to convince a man who didn’t believe. ... *

"But tablerapping, for instance,” put in a pink-cheeked, newly-fledged subaltern on his way to join the Second Battalion of "Ours” at Rangoon—a tiling of beauty arrayed in faultless linen and crowned with a Bond Street panama—“you don't mean to say you think there’s anything but Egyptian Hall humbug in that sort o’ thing, do you?” The subaltern’s pink cheeks became scarlet as he realised that the long, laconic man might, probably did, know Egypt, but knew nothing of the Egyptian Hall.

He explained, in that soft, lisping voice, that he had quitted the Old Country at the age of seventeen. Had only been back once in twenty years. Did not suppose-

The inscrutable black eyes dropped to the deck, leaving listeners to fill in the blank. As for table-turning, had tried it once at the Roby Mines in Upper Burma. And table-turning had “guts in it,” he begged leave to say.

“There were seven of us. It was in a shanty near the post-house at Mogok, a place at the head of the pass where we fellows used to get together to smoke and play nap and euchre, and watch for the mule-trains coming up from Rangoon. There were a few broken chairs, and there was a square wooden table, native made—you know the sort of thing, hewn with those little Burman adzes out of a solid tree-trunk”—a stout tea-planter nodded—"and the mule-post was late, and several of us had bets on (some of our fellows having gone down on leave) as to which of them would get cleaned out and broke soonest. Maugham was a chum of mine. I’d laid ten rupees on seeing Maugham’s sad, sweet, stony smile before any of the others chipped in with their pockets inside out. And ten rupees are ten rupees to you when you’re overseeing Burmese coolies at three pounds a week, paying for your own house and grub and servants, finding your own ice when you get sun-fever, and your own vaseline when you get frost-bitten. For it’s one thing or the other at the mines. And I had the notion of starting the fellows on a game of tableturning then and there.” The blade eyes were still veiled under their long lashes, the ragged moustache with the soaped ends were still teased and twisted by the supple, handsome hands.

“Well,” asked the stout tea-planter, "did the table respond?”

“Not at first. You see the seventh man was a kind of Roman Catholic and had a rosary about him. Not that he ever used it, but he’d worn it so long he’d got to feel chilly without it. And as he didn’t see his way to taking it off, we pitched him. Then we—six of us then—joined the tips of our fingers about that solid square block of timber. And felt it move," said the silky, drawling voice. . . .

“Hah?” said the tea-planter interrogatively.

“With six men—” began the pink subaltern.

“Standing round with their finger-tips just touching, and their bodies inclined well away from it,” went on the quiet narrator. "Yes, gentlemen, it was odd. Odder still when that table heaved itself up on its hind-legs like a wooden elephant trying to be playful.”

“Go on!” said a voice dersively.

“I don’t use lies,” said the sweet, drawling voice, “as a habit.” The narrator of the table episode lifted his heavy lashes and looked straight in the direction from whence the derisive voice had proceeded and a mattered apology came back. Then he went on, “It stood on its front ends then, and rocked from side to side—the table, you understand, gentlemen, while we kept touch of our finger-ends with some trouble. The* it rose off the ground steadily and quietly, but with irresistible force.”

Nobody commented. Everybody listened.

“Higher and higher it rose until we were hanging on to it with the ends of our fingers. Then I thought it was time to ask the things that were doing the lifting a few questions. The boys tipped me the wink. Says I, ‘Who comes up from Rangoon this post? Tell the truth and shame the-’ but I bit off the end in time. Couldn’t begin by being personal, you see. “I’ll run over the English alphabet—give us the initials of the names, knock and pass.’ And I began to patter ‘A.B.C.* like a giddy kid again. At C. there was a knock. ‘That’s Carey,’ says I. ‘No giddy fear,* says one of the boys. ‘Carey’s gone home,’ and sure enough, Carey had sold up his chattels and chucked his post as sorter and taken his ticket for England, Home and Beauty six weeks before. Well, I began again, but they were nuts on Carey. Carey every time. . . . Two other men they rapped out; but Maugham—they wouldn’t have Maugham at any price.”

“And in the end—” hazarded the subaltern.

“The table quieted down and we played a game of nap on it. I had all the luck—and just as Pd scooped the kitty for the third time on a string, there was a Winchester shot-salvo, and we crowded out to see the mule-post came up the frail. They climbed into sight, all of ’em pretty well used up with pass-climbing and heat, and cold, and coolie-whackings, and short commons. And White and Jarvis—the other fellows who's been named —were there, as large as life. But no Carey until the coolie drivers unroped a long package wrapped in a Manchester cotton cloth, from the back of the biggest mule, and that was Carey. You’ve hit it. Died of pneumonia in the hospital at Rangoon, and the authorities had mailed him bade to the mines in a native coffin. Don’t ask me why?—it’s a conundrum. But the point is, that the source from which we got the information had proved reliable.” From the ladies’ cabin' came the gasping tinkle of an exhausted piano. The tune was dimly recognisable as "Le Cure de Pomponne.” Somebody looked out, gasping, from under the double awning, and hailed with rapture a faint blue shadow on the glare of the water, a sense of freshening in the hitherto scorching atmosphere, that heralded the"coming of that welcome novelty, a breeze. Everybody got up and went out to meet it. Only the mercury stood obstinately at 100 degrees, and the long quiet man lay back, inert and immovable, in his old and battered deck-chair.

VII

THE PRETENDER

'‘MR. KEINNA, mem,” the white-haired butler, announced, “will be waiting on you in the library.’.’ “Ah—I suppose I must go to him!’ said the mistress of the house.

“Mr. Kenna,” said the butler, “will be glad to wait until you have lunched, mem. He said—”

Miss Macrail of Cauldstanes did not seem to be interested in what her factor had said. She dropped her scarcely-touched pheasant-wing into the slobbering jaws of the deerhound at her side, and pushed back her heavy carved chair and rose looking very tall and very fair in her craped mourning garment.

“Shall I come too?” asked her guest and bosom friend, the pretty daughter of a county magnate—womanfully restraining the pangs of a keen appetite and pushing her plate away.

“No, my dear Effie, what possible use could you be? Stay and look after Mrs. Bellair!” Miss Macrail ordered, and as Mrs. Bellair, a little pink-eyed, silver-haired old lady, once governess, now companion to the heiress of Cauldstanes, looked out from amongst her Shetland shawls with a faint bleating murmur, Ellis Macrail swept out of the oak dining-room, and crossing the great hall, ruddy with the blaze of a great fire and glimmering with suits of ancient armour and trophies of weapons, turned down the stone-flagged corridor that led to the library, where Mr. Kenna was waiting.

The said Kenna, chief factor to the late Gilspial Macrail of Cauldstanes, if only upon the strength of his admirable appearance, was worth a more civil greeting than he received from Mr. Macrail’s adopted daughter and heiress. Three inches over the six feet in height, admirably proportioned and superbly handsome after the eagle-featured, hazel-eyed, ruddy-haired fashion of the fair Gael, it is doubtful whether the most confirmed man-hater could have looked upon him with genuine aversion. And Ellis Macrail, Osborne by birth, was very far from being a female misanthrope. But her greeting was frigid, and Kenna bit his lip when she pointed to a rather stiff and inhospitable chair, saying, as she chose a small Bramah key from the bunch that dangled from her chatelaine:

“Please sit down. I will not detain you longer than is absolutely necessary. . . . You can imagine that I am as anxious to get over the business as you can possibly be.”

“One moment!” said Kenna, with a slight frown, as Miss Macrail unlocked a heavy old-fashioned cabinet and drew from a lower compartment a tin deed-box, labelled in white paint with the initials of the late owner, ‘G. M.’ He cleared his throat in a rather embarrassed way, though his hazel eyes met the girl’s, cold, brilliant and blue as sapphires, boldly. “It is true that a clause in the 'dear old—” a twitch of Ellis’s fine nostrils warned him to amend the familiarity of the reference to his departed employer—“in Mr. Macrail’s will,” he went on, “provided that the contents of this particular deed-box should be examined by you and myself, together and without witnesses, after his death—supposing both of us alive at the time of its occurrence. . . .”

“Well?” Her cold eyes dwelt upon his handsome face for an instant. “With regard to the clause?—”

“I propose that we leave the examination of the contents of the deed-box alone for the present,” said Kenna. “Say—until you are married . . She flushed a vivid crimson. “Or at least for a year and a day! . . . There is something rather romantic and attractive about the idea,” he laughed a little awkwardly, “of waiting a year and a day for anything!”

“I think,” said Ellis, in a quiet level tone of utter contempt, “that you already know I am not romantic. As to neglecting to fulfil the wishes of my more than father, and procrastinating as you have suggested—I repudiate the suggestion.” She did not bang the deed-box down upon the solid leather-covered library table as another woman in a temper might have done. She set it down, however, with some decision, and looked in a compartment of her purse for the little rust-spotted key.

“Let us get through with the job, then,” said Kenna with a sigh of disgust, “as quickly as we can, in Heaven’s name! But before you lift up one of those papers,” the decision of his tone stayed her white jewelled fingers in the very act, “let me make it quite dear to you that the—that Mr. Macrail—so far as I am concerned—was never the wiser ... I never gave him a hint of your—of the rebuke I received at your hands two years ago for my presumption in thinking that you ... in asking you ...” a dark flush burned upon his sunburnt cheeks—“in trying to find out that you could ever care for me as I— used to care for you.”

She gave a hateful little icy laugh.

“Spare yourself the explanation. That you have remained in Mr. Macrail’s employment is suffident proof that the secret of your—”

“Presumption—” suggested Kenna, with an odd dancing light of mockery in his hazel eyes.

“I will say—your ambition—remained hidden from him,’* continued the heiress of Cauldstanes.

“I can testify to one thing,” said John Kenna, looking up at the portrait of his late employer, a worn, sensitive looking, high-bred man of sixty, roughly dressed in gray homespun, his right hand, holding a blue Lowland bonnet, resting on the head of a deerhound that pressed against his knee. “He would have been pitiful of me, whether he condemned an unluckily-placed love as 'ambitious’ or not. For I say with all my heart, and I wish you to remember that I have said it, now at the moment of opening this accursed box, that he was a good man, and never meant to be anything but a just one, in any of his dealings!”

The note of authority in Kenna’s tone bad roused the girl’s antagonism. Something warning, foreboding, anticipative in his words pricked her with a momentary sense of fear. The top tray of the deed-box contained a yellow packet of letters endorsed *From my Brother Kenneth. The Year 1872. Read these first/

“What an indecipherable handwriting . . .” said Ellis in rather a dismayed tone as she handled the packet.

“It is not indecipherable to me!” said Kenna.

“Of course not. It is like your own!” said Ellis, with a tinge of malice. “Will you read them, please? Kenneth was the elder brother of Mr. Macrail, I believe.”

"Yes,” said Kenna moodily, “he was the elder brother.” And he read Letter the First.

"Uncle Kenneth—I feel as though I ought to call him so,” observed the heiress of Cauldstanes—'“appears to have had rather low tastes!”

"He loved a herd-girl, it is true,” said Kenna hotly,

“and married her secretly. He was flung out of doors for it, deprived of present means, though, as he says here, • his father could not cut off the entail.”

“So he enlisted as a private in a Cavalry regiment,” said Miss Macrail, “and was drafted to India.”

The next letter was dated from barracks at Ootacamund. The writer was suffering from prickly heat and low spirits, and repeatedly urged his brother to befriend the wife he had left behind him. She was in lodgings at Perth, he said, and gave the address where a kind word and a little money might be sent. He himself had sent all he could spare, . . . there was present need, and there might be more when the child came. Gilspial, then reading for the Law in Aberdeen, would stand by the mother, Kenneth knew. He signed himself in a shaky, fever-scrawl, ‘Your loving Brother.*

Kenna read on, and Miss Macrail’s delicate nostrils quivered with open disgust. Annie Govan, in her lodgings at Perth, babbling to her baby boy about his father in India, did not awaken her sympathies more than Kenneth himself, recording his first experiences of Eastern warfare, ‘Trouble brewing with the Afghans,’ he wrote. The actual trouble was not to break out until six years later. But in a scrimmage on the frontier Kenneth Macrail was shot through the lungs. His last letter, written from the Field Hospital, asked his father’s forgiveness and recommended to his protection his wife Annie and the boy. A note at the bottom of the letter, in the handwriting of Gilspail Macrail, added: ‘My father deceased a month before this tetter arrived.—G. M.’

“And I suppose Mr. Macrail had to break the news to the woman his brother had married,” hazarded Ellis.

“There are other letters in the box,” said Kenna, evading any direct answer. "Let us look at them.”

The letters were found, two of them ill-written, ill-spelt, but infinitely touching in their homely expression of grief for the husband whom the whilom herd-girl had lost. 7 have soar ill healt,” she wrote, 'and it will no he long or I look in my Kenneths een again. Be kind to the titlin' . . .for his sake, that ever thought the world o' you.'

“Of course he was kind to the child!” said the heiress of Cauldstanes, her fair rounded chin propped upon her white hands. "But I suppose it must have died—as he succeeded to the property?”

There came no answer to her question. She looked up and saw the struggle in Kenna’s face, and repeated the question that was half an assertion.

“It died, of course . . . Did it not?”

Kenna was livid as he said in a low, broken voice, not looking at her but at her white hands:

“No. It did not die. It—is alive to-day!”

A flash of comprehension came into her eyes.

“Ah! I understand . . . .The marriage was not legal, the boy was illegitimate.”

"He was legitimate!” said Kenna, fastening blazing hazel eyes upon her face. He held out to her a faded slip of paper taken from a packet she had handed to him. “Here are his mother’s wedding lines. She was as honest a woman as-’ ’

He pulled himself up, biting his lip.

“You were about to say—as mine?” said Ellis with a faint superior sneer.

“No, I was going to say, ‘as my own'!” Kenna returned. His fine, eagle-featured face was set like iron as he looked at her. Her own was white with anger as she cried:

“Then—as you say this boy—the dead woman's sou_*

“It would be as well to call her Mrs. Macrail,” suggested Kenna quietly. “It is—or was—her legal name.”

“Then, as this boy is alive—”

“He was born in 1870, and is now a man of thirty-two!”

She suspected mockery in his tone, where none existed, and bit her lip sharply to keep her temper down.

"This man being alive—how is it that he does not own the property now? My!—Mr. Macrail was the younger brother.”

Kenna repeated with a white, pained look:

“The younger brother—undoubtedly.”

“And he knew from the beginning that his brother left an heir.”

"He did know. But—the boy was brought up in ignorance of possessing any expectations whatever. He was sent to a school near Glasgow—he was educated at an Agricultural Training College, to be what he afterwards became . . . a bailiff .'. . a steward!”

Ellis blazed fairly out.

“You shall not insult a good man's memory. You shall not make out that my adopted father was a scoundrel— a swindler. I will not consent to sit here—in the room that was his—and hear such imputations made. He was a good man!” She towered in her wrath. A hairpin had shaken out of her superb coils of silvery-blonde hair, and a great glittering coil had loosened itself from the mass, and fallen upon her shoulder, shining like silver against the background of blade. “He was a good man'” she cried between her pants of indignation. To her surprise her adversary agreed with her.

“He was. I always thought, him so. You cannot accuse a man of dishonourable concealment, when the person who alone might be injured by that concealment is a party to it—aids and abets! Mr. Macrail’s nephew was a man grown when his unde made confession to him of the truth so long concealed. He had never cared much about money—he had no ambitions.”—he caught his breath— "that money could have gratified. He sympathised with the man who had suffered for years under a torturing secret—for the sake of one who was very dear to him.”

"Of whom do you speak?”

"I speak,” answered Kenna, "of my uncle's daughter.”

His listener shrugged her shoulders with open disdain.

"He had no daughter,” she said impatiently. "He adopted me after the death' of his wife. She had never had any children.”

"That is true,” returned. Kenna very quietly. "But— another woman bore him a daughter, nevertheless. You are she.”

All the blood in her seemed to rush to her face. She was crimson, from her collar to the roots of her silvery-gold hair.

"I—I illegitimate—the child of a vulgar intrigue! . . . You lie!”

"He told me so himself. The particulars are in this deed-box.” His tone softened with pity. "Your mother's letters—his! He said you would learn from them that— much as the world might condemn Mrs. Osborne—she was—she had many excuses. Her husband was cruel, intemperate—unjust. When she left him and sought your /father's protection she had not another friend in the world.”

"Oh!” she cried, with a note of anguish in her voice that pierced Kenna to the heart. "Oh, is there nothing left of him—the man I loved more than God! He robbed his nephew—he betrayed a friendless woman . . . he . . . What else is there that he has done? Pour the cup full— let me drink it—and make an end. Where is this man— the rightful master of this house, who has been silent for my sake? Send for him—tell him—let him take his own!" She put both hands to her throat, and tore at the filmy cambric collar that encircled it as though it had been a tightening band of iron. “Or—stay—I will write to him myself. Let me know where he is to be found," she cried in the old, imperious way—“at once ... at once!"

Kenna said, with lowered eyes and an unwilling accent:

“He—is not very far off."

A gust of wind smote the old house as he spoke. Its gray granite walls were too solid to tremble at the shock, but the windows rattled in their leaded casements and icy sleet pelted on the panes.

“Will you send for him?" she said. “Let one of the grooms take a telegram to the office at Creigellan, asking him to come at once!" Her tone was pleading now, not imperious; her breath caught every now and then upon a sob. She was not amiable, perhaps, but she was so beautiful! And she had been spoiled and humoured from her childhood. . . . Kenna’s heart brimmed with sudden pity.

“Even if there were any necessity to send . . ." he said, with a glance at the window, “it would not be possible. The best horse in the stables could not do it. The roads lie under six feet of snow, and some of the drifts on Blackmuir are double that depth. You know we have had no mail since Thursday. And—I have a message * for you—from your uncle’s son."

“You!"

“He says," began Kenna, ignoring her look and tone of scorn, “that he i9 conscious that the revelation contained in your father’s deed-box, and to the making of which he has always been averse • . . has caused . . . would naturally cause you deep pain. He begs you to remember always that he was a party to the concealment.”

“Why?” she asked, with a choking sob.

Kenna did not answer the question, but went on as though she had not spoken.

“He is not—never has been—fond of money, desirous of luxury. He knows that he is not capable of keeping up a great establishment; that the claims of Society—if they are claims—would prove irksome to him. He has long desired to travel. He can, supposing a moderate sum of ready money—say two thousand pounds—were placed at his disposal, gratify this taste. He asks you to write him a cheque for this amount—”

“He asks me to draw a cheque upon funds that are his —not mine!”

“They are yours in the opinion of the world,” said Kenna steadily. “He stipulates that you shall remain in the world’s opinion—as you are now—Miss Macrail of Cauldstanes, and all the other places—until he returns. He proposes to be away at least a year; his idea is to join a party of friends who are projecting a scientific expedition into Central Borneo. There is a chance—there are always such chances—that he may not return. As to that, you need be under no apprehension. He is unmarried, there are no legal heirs to this large property. No one is robbed, no one is injured if he dies and you retain it-

It must lapse to the Crown if you do not. What do you say to my proposal?”

There was dead silence in the room, broken only by the swirl and beat of the sleet upon the windows, the sputtering of the logs upon the hearth. The truth had broken upon her with paralysing force. She was like an ebony statue with ivory hands and an ivory face, and hair of silvery gold wound in seemingly endless coils. The silence seemed to have lasted for an hour when she spoke at last.

“You are the man—my father’s nephew—who consented to be defrauded and set aside for the sake of my father’s illegitimate daughter?”

“Yes ... I was clumsy ... I never meant to own . . .” He looked away from her and clenched his hands upon the chair-back it rested on until the knuckles showed white through the fine tanned skin.

‘When,” she asked, “was this degrading bargain made?”

“Two years ago.”

“After I so civilly, so courteously rejected your proposal of marriage—or before?”

“After—if you must have it!”

“Ah!” she moaned, “you took a terrible revenge!” “Miss Macrail . . . Ellis!” he cried in pain . . . “don’t say that! Revenge! How could I! You wrong me cruelly; I never dreamed of revenging myself upon you. You chose to reject me—you had the right. And I should never have dared to speak had I not thought that you . . . It is all over—all done with,” he said hastily, as a sunset glow dyed the snow of her cheeks and brow and throat. “It hurt for a time, and then I went back to my plans and dreams of travel. Help me to realise them—take care of the property while I am away—”

“I am to be your factor, as you were mine, just now?” “It does not sound well,” he owned in distress; “and) yet, God knows, I meant nothing derogatory.”

“To your uncle’s illegitimate daughter. OH no!” she said, “it is your consideration that wounds to the quick.' Mr. Macrail”—he started at the name—“I will ask yoi^ now to let me leave you. I have had a shock ... I' shall be better able to listen to your very considerate proposals later on.” She moved to the door, looking back at him with a piteous, quivering smile; and as he sprang to open it for her, she held out a trembling hand. “Will you?” she asked, and as he caught the hand to his breast and pressed passionate lips upon it, two great tears brimmed over the underlids of her blue eyes and dropped upon her black dress. "You will pension poor Mrs. Bellair, won’t you?” she said timidly. “She is an invalid and has no friends.”

He made a choking sound that might have been assent, and she went away quickly. His brain was whirling, his heart beating at the touch of her, denied so long to his hungry heart. He went over all she had said, pacing the library from end to end, and the snow sputtered less loudly as the logs upon the hearth burned down. Once he started at the opening and closing of a distant door. But he returned to his reverie until some change of light, or distant stroke of bell, warned him of the passing of the hours. Then there came a discreet rapping at the door. It opened, and a little elderly, white-haired, pink-eyed lady stood upon the threshold.

“My dear Ellis,” she began in a high-pitched, feeble voice, "you must be starved. You had no luncheon, and the tea is nearly cold. I am sure Mr. Kenna will excuse you ...” She peered blinkingly through her gold-rimmed spectacles. “Dear me!” she exclaimed, “you are alone, Mr. Kenna. Where is Miss Macrail?”

An hour hence, the quiet old Scotch mansion might in spite of the mourning liveries of the servants and the hatchment over the hall-door, have been supposed abandoned to the revels of a large house-party intent upon blindman’s-buff. Voices called, people ran hither and thither, lights blazed in the windows, doors banged, and the echoes in long deserted chambers and unfrequented corridors bandied the name of the house’s supposed owner. But Eilis was nowhere to be found. Then her sable-lined cloak, a toque and a pair of snow-boots were found to be missing from her room, and a frightened maid announced her belief that her mistress had left the house.

“Left the house!” cried Mrs. Bellair and Effie Graeme in chorus. “It was impossible . . . madness to suppose it!” they added in the next breath. But Kenneth Macrail knew better. He remembered that parting request that the old governess might be provided for—he recalled the sound of the closing door—and before he knew it he, too, was out of the house, buffeted by the sleety winds and wading knee-deep in the snow of the avenue. He had a small silver flask of brandy in his waistcoat pocket; a lantern, set down by one of the servants and snatched from the hall table; and a stout thorn-stick to aid him in his battle with the elements. And besides, he had the unconquerable force of love.

At first he sank in the snow, softened by the sleet of the afternoon. Out beyond the park-gates on the steep rise towards Blackmuir the icy crust bore better. He battled on against the icy wind and driving snow in the direction which some instinct told him Ellis had taken.

“After all but a girl! Poor thing, and so young— only twenty-three. And she thought I was taking it out of her in my revenge ... If she could have seen my heart she would have known.”

And uttering these disconnected sentences sometimes aloud, sometimes silently, John Kenneth Macrail, son of the herd-girl and the prodigal gentleman, fought upon his way. Near the crest of Blackmuir he stopped, rendered dizzy for the instant by the beastlike roar and pounce of the freezing wind as it came round the rocky shoulder driving whole drifts of powdery snow before it. He was still upon the path, that instinct better than conjecture assured him. To his left was the mouth of a deserted quarry. Had he been weaker and less determined to push on, he would have yielded to the deadly prompting that urged him to turn into the shelter for a moment’s rest A woman would have done it. “Ah! . . .’’he cried, illuminated by sudden conviction, “she is there!” and he ran for the quarry in desperate haste. It was half-full of snow, he could see by the white glimmer of light reflected from the dead-white surface.

“Ellis!” fie called. "Ellis!” but no answer came. Then wading thigh-deep in the soft, fine, powdery drift, his foot strode against a mass of something soft. He fell upon his knees, smitten with an awful fear, and in the bluish-white freezing darkness his groping hands went out and touched her, and he rose from the drift with her body in his arms, reached the mouth of the quarry and ran in the direction of Cauldstanes, hampered by the inert weight, haunted by a terrible fear. There he saw moving lights in the distance creeping unsteadily towards him, knew that a search-party had followed him from the house, and presently staggering in amongst them, wild-eyed, haggard, terrible—a man of snow carrying a woman of ice.

When she was able to receive him they sent to ask him to come to her, and he obeyed. Her eyes went eagerly to his face as he entered the boudoir where she lay, and a flush stained the whiteness of her cheeks. He was master of himsdf and his emotions, but the wistful look set his heart leaping.

“You. brought me back out of the snow—you followed me alone and found me. Let me thank you,”' she said, and gave him her hand. “I suppose I ought not to have left the house; but my head was bewildered, I could not think of anything but getting away—”

“From me!” said Kenneth, covering a pang. “And now you will let me go as I have asked. No one knows the truth—there is no need any other than ourselves should ever hear it.”

"Oh! but I have told them!” she said.

“And they do not believe you!” he returned with a spice of grimness. “They believe the pneumonia has left some feverish delusions behind, which will wear away as you recover.”

She put up her hand to hide her tears.

"Let them go on thinking as they do now,” he urged. “Sign the cheque I asked for and let me set out upon my travels, unhampered with hereditary acres and the responsibilities of a rich man. See—here is your chequebook”—he brought it from her writing-table with pen and ink, and gave it into her hands with an entreating look. Mastered by it, she began to write. But before the cheque was fully drawn the tears gushed from her eyes and the cheque-book fell to the carpet.

“Ellis!” he urged in concern, “Ellis—what is the matter?”

“I—don’t—want you to go—” she gasped, between her sobs.

John. Kenneth Macrail picked up the cheque-book. The blotted, shakily-written cheque was rather a curiosity, for Ellis Osborne Macrail had been made payable to bearer.

“Do you mean that you—” He stared at the cheque with dazzled vision.

She said between gasps, entreatingly:

“I want you to stay—and take what is your own!”

“Thisf" He held the cheque before her. “This is what I covet to take for my own!”

He took it—some minutes later.

VIII

THE KING'S CATARRH

GOLKY,” said Rodelph II. of Sofaria, stretching out his booted legs upon the deerskins which carpeted the Monarch’s private sanctum at the Summer Palace of Mihl, I want your advice. Four years have elapsed since the Princess Gisela of Runkelberg-Stollwied became the Queen of Sofaria.” He tugged furiously at his huge red moustaches. "There is an English idiom which describes the condition of things between us: We don’t ‘hit it off.' And, in so many words, I am jealous!” said the King.

His venerable Prime Minister smiled subtly.

"As your Majesty’s personal staff comprises several of the handsomest men in Europe, sire,” he remarked, "possibly it would be well—”

“To dismiss the best-looking of my equerries? Pshaw!” said Rodelph. “This is not a question of equerries. Count, my wife is faultless in fidelity. And as for the admiration of enterprising young officers, were I as suspicious as Bluebeard and as jealous as Othello, I should have no cause for disquiet as long as Gisela continues to be accompanied, whereever she goes, by her wolf-hound bitch Ruda. For, by Pan and St. Otilov! Ruda is no respecter of persons. I am going to prove it to you. Come with me.” The Monarch rose, and preceded his aged Minister from the apartment. They crossed an anteroom full of pages, traversed a gallery, passed through a dressing-cabinet, where were kept in racks the Royal boots and the Royal swords; where, in glass-fronted oaken cases not unlike sentry-boxes, the Royal uniforms, fitted upon wooden dummies of the Royal proportions, reared against the wall; and where in the bedchamber were immediately opposite a masterly portrait of a blueeyed, fair-haired spirituelle beauty of twenty-three, stood the iron camp-bedstead of the King.

The Count pointed to the portrait. “A speaking likeness,” he observed. “It seems actually to smile, presiding over your Majesty’s slumbers.”

“It is more amiable than the original, then,” said Rodelph grimly.

A fit of sneezing overtook him. The Count observed: “Your Majesty must really .be careful of that cold!”

“It is the result of a dull, Count, contracted by arguing, remonstrating, and pleading,” said Rodelph, “at the keyhole of a locked door” then he swept aside the porttire communicating with the apartment adjoining. Sure enough, the door was firmly fastened.

“Your capital possess several noted blacksmiths,” said the Count, “and Love, in order to laugh at some of them, might call others to his aid.”

"Sapristt!" said the King; “I make little of a locked door, or even a fastened window. But when Ruda sleeps inside it . . .” He pointed to a brocaded dressing-gown which hung upon a deer-horn rack, and from the skirt of which a large piece was missing.

The Count inspected the wounded garment through his famous tortoiseshell eyeglass.

“Your Majesty’s person, I trust, escaped laceration?” “Narrowly,” admitted the King. “But my heart, Golky —my heart bleeds. I tremble and rage by turns—I weep —I thirst for the blood of my rival, who is, unhappily, beyond my reach!”

“Do I understand,” said the Count, “that—”

“Golky, you understand nothing,” said the King. “My wife is beyond suspicion, without fault; the purest and most perfect woman in the world. But she exists upon a higher plane than it is possible for me to reach: it is a passion of the spiritual, unearthly order which alienates her heart from mine. You are already aware that Gisela is a passionate admirer of the genius of the dead English poet, Keats. You may not know that her whole existence is spent in glorifying and exalting the incomparable talents of that gifted rhymester. Well, then, John Keats”—the King pronounced the name as “Jonkitz”—“Keats is my rival! It is Keats with whom the Queen is in love! It is Keats with whom she spends not only whole days, but entire nights, téte-â-teté in the Persian Rose-garden!” cried Rodelph, as emotion choked his accents. “And I, her husband, am 'made of no account. Count, if you can give me no help, let me, at least, have your sympathy, for I am very miserable!”

“My King, be composed,” said the aged Premier. “The estrangement which desolates you is not for ever. Be patient for a few days longer, and trust to me.”

“Hitherto, in the interests of my King and my country,” he said to himself, as he hobbled away, “I have kept one *ye on Constantinople and the other on Berlin. It appears, now, that both of them must be fixed immovably on the round Ruda. For, if a thousand Kings were of the opposite opinion, I should still be convinced that the happiness of a doting husband, the honour of a flighty young wife, and the title of Prince, which a certain eminent statesman has long merited, depend upon my discovery of the existence of a certain individual, name unknown, whom Madame Ruda does not bite.”

The veteran diplomatist joined the Court Circle at teatime in the Painted Drawing-Room. Queen Gisela extended to him a gracious greeting. She wore a white dress, cinctured with a girdle of silver repousse work. Her magnificent hair of silvery blonde was piled upon her small head in apparently endless colls, and behind her rose a screen of blue passion-flowers which matched her wonderful eyes. At her feet reposed the great cream-coloured hound, her red Albino eyes watchfully blinking beneath her shaggy brows. Handsome diplomats and brilliant officers approached one by one, paid their devoirs to their Royal hostess, and were dismissed with a word. But, though Ruda frequently growled, Ruda’s tail paid no more regard to the courtly butterflies that hovered about the passion-flower screen than if the caudal appendage had belonged to a dog of marble. The Premier had arrived at the conclusion that it was not in the Court Circle that one must look for the cause of the Queen's nocturnal wanderings in the Persian Rose-garden, when he became aware that Gisela was beckoning him to her side. It was to ask for a State paper preserved in the archives at Mihl. And the Count despatched instructions to his Under-Secretary and amanuensis, with the request that he would attend in person with the document. A few moments elapsed. The door opened; a slight movement followed the entrance of a young man of middle-height, dressed in rather rusty black, who approached with a very ill grace and downcast mien, carrying a paper in his hand, and a dull thud on the rich carpet announced that Ruda had wagged her tail for the Secretary!

“Wuff!” remarked Ruda joyously.

M. Rimnik's flashing hazel eye turned upon the hound; he lifted one finger slightly, and the great beast sank meekly down upon the carpet as the Secretary bowed and glided ^om the room.

The Queen had noticed nothing, and, as soon as Count Golky could with decency escape, he resorted to the library, which, with the suite of apartments adjoining, was set apart for his occupation whenever he visited Mihl. In a large chair the Secretary sat reading. The Count, moving noiselessly, came behind him and glanced over his shoulder. The young man was absorbed in a volume of Keats’ Poems, which he held open at an engraved portrait which opposed the title-page. It struck the Count, as he looked from the portrait to the Secretary, that there was a likeness between the pictured face and the real one.

“Don't let me disturb you,” said the statesman sweetly. “You were reading—or admiring the view?” He pointed a lean finger towards the pine-clad precipices of the Faunus, now redly illuminated by the setting sun. “Historic mountains, our country’s pride,” he quoted from a I local author. “Heroes have been reared amongst those Alpine ranges, beautiful women are to be found there, and a noble breed of dogs. You have observed the wolfhound of Her Majesty, it may be?”

“I think so, Excellency,” replied the Secretary. “A

large black animal, is it not, with—”

“You are an accurate observer, Mr. Rimnik,” said the Count, and he rang for his valets, and went to dress for dinner.

He retired early from the reception which followed the repast, and, replacing his coat by a warm dressing-gown of black velvet got into list-lined slippers, and sent his attendants to bed. Then he pulled on a woollen night-cap, tied a cashmere scarf round his lean throat, lowered the lights, locked his bedroom doors, unbolted the French-window that opened upon the balcony, and slipped out.

The night was marvellously beautiful. Below the balcony lay the Royal gardens, accessible to everyone, and surpassed in loveliness only by the Persian Rose-garden which was guarded by a high hedge of cactus, and sacred to the Queen. It lay in a mountain defile wooded with ilex and oleander, and fringed with forests of pine. Terrace after terrace of dazzling white marble led up between thickets of roses to the highest platform of all, where, supported by a low pedestal and sheltered by a marble cupola, was the statue of Keats. The poet was represented as lying bade in a low chair. One thin hand held a volume dosed upon his knee; the rapt, spiritual face, the hollow, passionate eyes, gazed out over the dream-like beauty of the landscape to the solemn Alpine ranges beyond. Upon the pedestal was carved a quotation from "Endymion.” The Premier was about to peruse the lines, putting up his tortoiseshell eye-glass, when a sound of hasty footsteps came to his ear, and he diplomatically climbed a tree. Between the dark masses of ilex foliage the tortoiseshell eye-glass obtained a perfect focus, and when a man’s figure came into sight, running swiftly between the rose-thickets, and leaping from stair to stair in desperate, breathless hurry, the Premier at once recognised his Secretary.

M. Rimnik readied the last platform, and stopped before the statue of Keats. He was bareheaded, and in the dazzling moonlight his handsome face looked livid, his eyes gleamed with frenzied brilliancy. He had made certain alterations in his dress which brought out his extraordinary resemblance to the deceased poet more strikingly than ever.

“Dead Englishman! you and Ruda have served me well,” said the Secretary, with a mocking gesture towards the stone. “I thank you! Serve me best of all to-night »

A slight, rustling sound came to his quick ears. The Secretary leaped like a hare into the rose-thicket as Queen Gisela glided upwards from terrace to terrace, her silken draperies whispering over the stone, and stirring the heaps of fallen rose-leaves, the great wolf-hound of the Faunus padding watchfully behind her. She reached the space before the statue, and as she gazed upwards, her gleaming 'draperies flowing about her exquisite limbs, the moonlight lying on her hair and in her wild, wistful eyes, and upon the whiteness of her throat and bosom, while her rubies and emeralds blinked from amongst her laces like sleepy serpents, even the batrachian blood of the veteran Premier warmed to admiration.

“I am here!” said Gisela, in low, thrilling accents. “I have accomplished the days of mortification, I have purified my spirit from the dross of earth. Soul of my dead Poet! I charge you by the mystic communion following the revelation so wondrously made beneath these starlit skies three nights since, reveal yourself to me!”

A voice, the Secretary’s, answered, apparently issuing from the lips of the statue:

"O Queen! O Woman, I come!”

“A ventriloquist!” muttered the Premier. “I possess a clever Secretary, by Pan and St. Otilov!”

And then there was a slight rustling sound ... a faint scream from the Queen. The Secretary had emerged from his perfumed lair of roses, stepped from behind the statue, and thrown himself.at the Royal lady’s feet. He sought to kiss her hand; there was a moment of silence . . . The Premier looked on from his tree and Ruda wagged her tail.

"O thou who hast summoned me from the faint abode of Shadows,” said the Secretary, who had not read his Keats for nothing, "thy Poet thanks thee for this perfect moment!”

"It will be a perfect moment for me,”’ thought the Head of the Government, "when I unmask a singularly consummate rascal."

"O loveliest,” continued the Secretary, “of thee, still unborn, lying in the core of things to come, was all my hymning and my harmony! By Cupid’s dove! of thee I dreamed while thou wast not, and the dream is realised now that I no longer am ( Let Night and the Moon witness our mystic meeting . . . Let—”

There was a rustling in the branches of the ilex-tree, and Ruda uttered a fierce growl.

"Night and the Moon, M. Rimnik,” said a dry, rasping voice from overhead, "have too strict a sense of propriety to aid a charlatan like you!"

The daring Rimnik became feeble as a child at the sound of those rasping accents. The Queen, pale and breathless, cried: “Oh! What? Who-?”

“I beg of your Majesty not to be alarmed," said the voice from the Ilex. “I am Count Golky!”

“Count!” cried the Queen indignantly, “will you tell me what you are doing in my private garden?"

"Madame,” returned the Premier, “if truth’ must be told, my purpose in visiting your Majesty’s private garden was to look for my Private Secretary.”

The great eyes of Gisela dilated at the home-thrust. The horrible truth stood bare. She gave the wretch one look of withering scorn, and pointed down the terraces with relentless, imperious hand.

“Away! Out of my presence, knave and charlatan!’* she panted, “or Ruda shall tear you limb from limb!’*

“I should welcome such an end,” said the miserable Secretary, with the phantom of a smile; “but Ruda loves her old master too well to do him such a service.”

“You were worthy of her love,” Gisela sneered, “who could sell her to a dealer for a few hundred florins!”

“The Queen had commissioned the dealer to procure her a wolf-hound of the Faunus,” said the Secretary. I loved Ruda, but I loved the Queen more. The money I threw into the torrent of the Prelus; the hound went to the Palace, to guard from any touch less worshipping than mine the woman I adore. Then I, a penniless noble of the Faunus, in whose veins runs the purest blood of ancient Rome—I became a servant, a drudge of the pen! I stooped to the service of a senile statesman, that I might one day be near my Queen. The day came. Your ideal passion, Madame, for a dead man whose face was singularly like my own furnished me with a fulcrum of a plan that should have succeeded but for the astuteness”— his lip curled bitterly—“of His Excellency in the ilex. Three nights since I obtained a key to this garden. I concealed myself behind the statue, and the voice that breathed a poet’s love in the Queen’s ear was mine!”

“You are a singularly hardened scoundrel, sir!” said the Count, in whom the term “senile” rankled bitterly. "Get out with you!”

“Wait,” said the Queen. Pity strove with anger in her looks. “Reproaches are useless,” she said, “addressed to one who would have traded upon the romantic folly of a sentimental girl—for I was one, sir, until this moment!— to gain a contemptible did. I will only echo the Count: I will bid you go and take your dog with you!”

She called the hound to her. Ruda came, expectant, and Gisela stooped and kissed her shaggy head. Then she waved her hand, and Rimnik slunk from her presence. "Follow, Ruda, follow!” the Queen said, and Ruda gave a sonorous bark of joy and bounded down the terraces after her master. A cold breath came from the mountains; the song of the nightingales slurred; a distant gate opened and clashed . . . and, as the eye of day looked coldly over the mountains, the Premier came down from the ilex. The Queen, in whom grief and shame had not slain the sense of humour, could not repress a smile at the quaint figure of the venerable statesman:

“Count, you will not betray my folly!” she said.

"I pledge myself to inviolable secrecy,” the Count said, turning up the collar of his dressing-gown, 'oil a single condition.”

‘'Oh, there is a condition, then?” said the Queen. “Madame,” said the diplomatist, “His Majesty the King is suffering from a cold in the head, caused by a chill—sustained I know not know. The condition is that you remove the cause and prescribe for the effect.”

“Ah, my friend,” said the Queen, extending her hand, "it shall be done to-morrow.”

"To-day, your Majesty means!” said Count Golky. “To-day, then,” assented Gisela.

And the Royal lady and the ancient diplomatist descended the terraces arm-in-arm.

IX

A GAME OF ECARTE

AS Count Golky, the veteran Prime Minister of Sofaria, whisked away from his official duties in the Dofschina by an imperious telegraphic summons from the King, drove in a hired hack-cab through the magnificent gates of gilded iron, surmounted by the dynastic geese, into the Courtyard of the Summer Palace at Mihl, the observant glance, framed by the statesman’s famous tortoiseshell eyeglass, failed to detect any presage of impending unpopularity in the salute of the green-uniformed sentries, or any equally ominous abatement in the number of the chamberlains assembled in the great glass porch to receive their soverign’s most trusted councillor. With the reddish dust of his rapid transit still nestling, in the creases of his antiquely-cut frock-coat, and marring the irreproachability of his old-fashioned strapped nankeen trousers and square-toed polished boots, the Count was ushered into the presence of his royal master.

Rodelph II. was in his private sanctum, an apartment the polished parquet of which was strewn with skins and Oriental rugs. Leather hangings, stamped with the Royal cognisance of the gilt goose, adorned the walls, which bristled with the spoils and trophies of the chase. The King sat in a large leather chair, his long booted legs outstretched before him. His brow frowned and he tugged at his huge red moustaches, a habit peculiar to the Monarcft when irritated or perplexed in mind.

“Golky,” he said, as the Count, bowing profoundly, shook his extended hand, “I have never yet known your sagacity to fail me in the hour of need. But the problem which at this moment confronts me, my friend, is of so complex and delicate a nature that I shall scarcely be surprised if you confess yourself incapable of its solution. Be seated, my friend, whilst I unroll the tangled web before you.’*

The ancient diplomat, accommodated with a chair, composed himself to listen.

“A twelvemonth has elapsed,” said the Monarch retrospectively, "since I led to the hymeneal altar the Princess Gisela of Runkelberg-Stollwied. The intoxicating glamour of the honeymoon once dissipated, Gisela has discovered that I am neither god nor hero, but an ordinary human being”—the faintest twinkle scintillated in the sandy-brown eyes of the Premier—“while it has been irresistibly borne in upon my own consciousness that my wife is, all said and done, nothing more than a mere woman.”

“The recent fortuitous event, which augmented the Royal family of Sofaria by a Crown Prince, affords valuable testimony towards that conclusion,” observed the Count; “and your Majesty will give me leave to doubt whether an angel or a goddess would, had you married her, have rendered the State so valuable service.”

“Yet there is something of the angel in Gisela,” said the King, tugging at his huge red moustaches until the tears came into his eyes, “or the goose, I am not sure which.”

“If the latter deduction lie correct,” remarked the Count, “your Majesty should find no difficultly in managing her.”

“There is something in that,” admitted Rodelph II.

“My great-great-grandfather drove geese, my great-grandfather bred and sold geese; my late father ruled geese, and so do I. But I happen to be in love with this one, and, 'unfortunately, she is aware of it.”

The Premier moved his partially bald head in his high stock in rather a chameleon-like fashion. His projecting sandy eyes, squinting slightly outwards, as though, in the interests of his King and country, the diplomat were keeping one eye upon Constantinople and the other on Berlin, converged upon the moody features of his Sovereign. "Nothing,” he observed, “breeds such unholy pride in the heart of a woman as the consciousness that she possesses the power—”

“Of making a man supremely uncomfortable,” said the King. “She is ungrateful—yes, ungrateful,” he added, with bitterness. “For her sake I pensioned off Mdlle. Blin of the Hippodrome, and packed the Baroness Glicka off to join her husband, whom I had previously created perpetual Governor of Fodolia—”

“A spirited action, furnishing an example of the loftiest rectitude to every newly-married man in your Majesty’s dominions,” remarked the Premier, with a dry, rasping little cough. “Yet, had the villas occupied by the circus-rider and the Baroness remained untenanted, your Majesty’s claim to the gratitude of the Queen and the admiration of the nation had rested upon a firmer basis.”

“I would remind you, Count, that your own political watchword is 'Moderate Reform,*” said Roddph. “To sweeping changes and drastic measures I have always deemed you opposed, and with reason, since their adoption might involve a change of ministry.”

The Royal jaw was set rather grimly as the King added this brief sentence, and the stagnant blood of the aged diplomatist quickened in its course. He rose stiffly from his chair.

“I am no longer young," he said, revealing in his glittering smile the triumph of an American dentist. “When my King and country deem the Privy Seal too heavy for my enfeebled grasp, it will be time to resign it in favour of the quill which shall indite my memoirs. In the compilation of these at my country estate in Polkovia, the remaining years of my life shall be passed; and as my private diaries and notes are most exhaustive, and I have retained copies of all the interesting correspondence which has passed through my hands during a protracted term of office—the work for which I have already found an English publisher—will, I flatter myself, one day create a sensation."

"May the day be far off, my beloved and venerated friend," cried the King, springing to his feet and clasping the aged diplomatist impetuously to his bosom, "that deprives me of an adviser as valued as yourself. But the time flies and you have not yet been made acquainted with the state of affairs. It has not," he continued, "escaped your memory that a twelvemonth previously to my marriage, in recognition of certain important services previously tendered to the Throne, I created the Baroness Glicka, Perpetual Grand Mistress of the Robes. There were no robes at the time, and no Queen to wear them, arid the Baroness received the large emoluments belonging to die post, as the executed the duties appertaining to it, with perfect grace. Then—I married. The Queen was at first inclined to make a warm friend of her Mistress of the Robes, but the serpent tongue of Rumour having hissed into her Majesty’s mind a suspicion—”

“Perfectly baseless, no doubt,” said the Count.

"That my relations with Madame Glicka were not as Platonic as they appeared,”’ continued the King, “Gisela conceived a prejudice—how unreasonable I will leave you to imagine—against the Baroness, which ended—”

"Which ended for her Excellency in change of air,” said the Count. “I understand that the climate of Fodolia is extremely bracing. Has the Baroness profited by its recuperative qualities so far as to return without, leave?”

"Your perspicacity is not at fault, my friend,” said the King. "Information has readied Gisela that Evodia— I should say, the Baroness—has set out upon the return journey with her maids and couriers. She has made no secret of her intention of being present at the christening of the Crown Prince—which, as you are aware, takes place at the Cathedral of St. Tuik upon the twelfth of June under the holy auspices of the Chief Patriarch of Mihl—nay, she threatens not to forego the right which is hers in virtue of her office.”

"Of holding the Royal infant at the font?” said Count Golky quickly.

"By Pan and St. Otilov, you have hit it!” burst out the King. "Consequently, Gisela is furious, the child upset. I am distracted——”

"And I am sent for,” ended the Premier. "One obvious course of action has, under these circumstances, been contemplated by your Majesty.” He produced his amber snuff-box with a quiet air of mastery, and waited, with a pinch between his left forefinger and thumb, for the royal response.

“Sapristit” ejaculated the King. “I am giddy with contemplating obvious courses. But this—”

"Is,” said Count Golky, "the dismissal of the Baroness from the position she occupies in her Majesty’s House* hold. Appoint a new Mistress of the Robes.”

The King smote his brow resoundingly.

"Alas, Count,” he cried, "you mock my anxiety. Yon must be aware that the appointment by a special edict issued by myself, in a moment of excusable weakness, was made for life, and is consequently the Baroness’s to the last moment of her existence; and as she comes of a long-lived family, and as Gisela is determined to delay the christening of the Crown Prince until the obstacle—insurmountable to her pride—is removed, my son may ultimately the of old age—a heathen.”

Sobs choked the utterance of the Monarch. The Premier spilt a little of his snuff.

“A life office,” he repeated musingly.

“Unless voluntarily resigned, or forfeited by some act of glaring imprudence or indiscretion.”

The Count, who had been nursing his right knee, released it, and rubbed his chin contemplatively.

“And—the Baroness is never imprudent or—indiscreet?” he asked. Nothing could have been subtler than the intonation.

“Never!” replied the King emphatically, “when she knows that it is expected of her. Alas! my friend, she is now upon her way from Fodolia with the basket of Pandora amongst her luggage. It will be opened at the christening of my son; the scandal will be disseminated to every quarter of the globe, my domestic happiness will be for ever shattered, and I shall become the laughingstock of Europe. I shall the of it!”

“Your Majesty has hitherto survived,” remarked the Count The King, whose little eyes had assumed a pinkish tinge, looked fiercely at the venerable statesman, but the Count, narrowing his eyelids, and flickering his pale leathery tongue for an instant between his lips, after the fashion of a lizard about to dart at a fly, continued: “Your Majesty has hitherto survived all calamities threatening your anointed person and sovereign State, with the aid of one whose best abilities and most strenuous efforts have ever been expended in your service. I ask you to disburden your mind for the present of all anxiety. Soothe Her Majesty personally and the Crown Prince vicariously, and leave the Baroness Glicka to me. I am ready to pledge my reputation as a diplomat that Pandora is not present at the christening of your heir.” The Premier rose, and Rodelph, with a burst of relief, hurled himself into the lean arms of the aged diplomat.

“Be but as good as your word, my friend,” he cried; “let but the State ceremony pass over without scandal or disturbance—and—do you know what I shall say to you?**

“I cannot imagine,” said the Premier with dovelike guilelessness, “unless it were, Thank you, Prince'!” The Monarch, who had intended to promise the Order of the Split Locust, mentioned the fact.

“My Eng is too munificent,” said Count Golky. “Nevertheless, I will not disappoint the regal generosity. Let the Order be conferred simultaneously with the princely rank. I shall know how to wear the one and bear the other to the honour of my King. In the meantime, active measures must be taken without delay.”

And the Premier bowed over the Royal hand and retired. Within the next few hours the outlying military depots had received orders from the War Office, extra picquets had been stationed upon the northern frontiers of Sofaria, and the mountain roads communicating with the recently-acquired province of Fodolia were incessantly traversed by armed patrols, the leader of each party being furnished with an exhaustive description of the person of the Baroness Glicka, and having authority to turn back any feminine traveller whose appearance should correspond in any marked degree with the official chart of personality.

"A superb brunette, with large black eyes, the eyebrows, however, rather straight than arching,” ran the description, which ill-natured gossips afterwards pretended was furnished tty the King. "Strikingly handsome,... a form of Juno, full of fascinating charm; possesses the nonchalance of a woman of the world, in unison' with an actress’s love of sensation and a schoolboy’s delight in practical jokes. A combination of the gitana, the gavroche, and the lady of fashion; in a word, original. Teeth perfect, the nails exquisite, but injured by playing on the baldika. Middle joint of the forefinger of the right hand stained by cigarettes. A daring horsewoman, a fencer, and a markswoman with rifle or revolver. Passionately fond of gambling and private theatricals. One would be brutal to suppose her more than thirty.”

A smile hovered upon the handsome lips of the Baroness Glicka, as, upon the fourth hour following upon the summons of Count Golky to the palace, her large leather travelling carriage, replete with every convenience and balanced upon springs resembling the hind-legs of a locust, was stopped upon a mountain road by a patrol of the Sofarian Yeomanry Cavalry, and the commanding officer, a handsome young man, handed to her, in excuse of his high-handed proceeding, the official list of her attractions. At the final clause she frowned a little and r said, lifting her large and lustrous eyes to the face of the Captain:

“Does this infer that there are grounds for such a supposition?”

She threw back her veil and leaned out of the carriage window.

“By Pan and St Otilov, Excellency, no!” exclaimed the dazzled young soldier. “Five-and-twenty might be guessed at—in open air and sunshine such as this.”

“In a boudoir, with a semi-light, rose-tinted,” hinted Madame Glicka.

“The age of Eve when she sprang into being by Adam’s side amidst the orange groves of Eden,” breathed the handsome Captain, who was rapidly qualifying for a regular commission in the Army.

“Then this about my nails, so manifestly unfair,” pouted the Baroness. She drew off her loose white leather gauntlets and exhibited two perfectly white and irreproachable hands. “ ‘The forefinger of the right hand,’ ” she quoted on, “‘stained by cigarettes.’ Be frank, sir, and tell me if you perceive any such blemish?”

“I am unfortunately short-sighted,” replied the Captain, “but if her Excellency would permit me to look a little closer. ...”

The Baroness Glicka permitted. He kissed the maligned hand, then the other, then both, while an old Turkish woman mumbled prayers by the roadside, and the patrol sat like equestrian statues of wax, melting in the sun. •

“And my eyebrows are rather straight than curved,” continued the Baroness, as though there had been no interruption.

“Half-moons, veritable crescents—I will sabre the man who contradicts the statement,” stuttered the Captain,

whose brain was beginning to spin. “I mean it, by Pan and St. Otilov!”

“Then, since you are ready to become a regicide (or my sake,” remarked the Baroness, “you will not hesitate at a breach of military obedience. Drive on!” she called to her coachman, who awakened from a doze and prepare to obey.

“Excellency,” cried the alarmed Captain, “you must not. It is against orders that you proceed. I dare not permit it.”

' “But I,” said the Baroness, with flashing eyes, “I dare attempt it. What, sir, do you hinder a high functionary of the Court from hastening to fulfil her duties to her Sovereign? I hold a post of which I cannot be deprived,” she cried. “I have not forfeited—I will not resign it. Permit my carriage to proceed. You have not the shadow of a right to stop me. Drive on!” she cried again.

“We are upon a singularly unfrequented mountain road,” said the Captain with a sigh. “I have my troopers, as your Excellency perceives. Should your Excellency repeat that order to your coachman, it will be my painful duty to gag, bind, and convey your Excellency to the Fortress of Kobitza, where my regiment is at present quartered.”

“I am a prisoner, then, it seems?” said the Baroness after a pause.

“Only if you insist upon continuing your journey to the capital,” sighed the Captain.

The brilliant eyes of the lady scanned the handsome young soldier from the topmost spike of his helmet to the tips of his spurred jack-boots. She did not fail to note one of his strong points. As for his weak ones, they were those of every man who had conversed with her for twenty minutes.

“If I am doomed to be a. prisoner,”' she said, displaying the perfect teeth' in a ravishing smile, “I may at least ask the name of my jailer.”

The Captain bowed till his fair moustaches touched his pistol-holsters.

“Count Istvar Gdza, at her Excellency’s service.”

The Baroness, who had already formulated her plan, cast a rapid glance about her.. The sun had abated its meridian heat, and was slowly descending the western sky, the snow-covered mountin peaks, the blue marble rocks, the forests of dull-green pines, and the splashing yellow torrent of a mountain river that coursed beside the road, were beginning to lose distinctness of outline and individuality of hue, bathed in a hazy violet light that would have been at once the rapture and the despair of a great scenic artist. At one hundred paces from the carriage the five Yeomanry troopers, with the sergeant, slept calmly in their saddles, while their wiry, ragged Bosnian mounts gratefully cropped the herbage on the river-bank. On the carriage-box the coachman and her armed attendant snored; in the rumble the Baroness’s maid and footman yielded to the slumberous influences of the hour; while the old Turkish woman squatting by the roadside told her clattering wooden rosary with unabated energy. Then the lady spoke in melodious accents.

“Since this flattering inventory ascribes to me a passion for gambling, I may at least justify an action which I cannot refute. I have here in my carriage a pack of cards, also a folding table appropriate for their use. At picquet or écarté I challenge you, Count Istvar, to play me for a stake—equal on both sides. Your military honour against my woman’s pride. If I lose, I turn back upon the road to Fodolia accompanied by yourself and your escort. If I win—I proceed upon my journey to Mihl, while you return to Kobitza and place yourself under arrest"

"It is ruin if I lose," said the young man sorrowfully, "for my hopes of a commission in the Guards—money to purchase which I, like many another ruined noble, cannot procure—will vanish with your retreating carriage. But yet... it is what the English call ‘a sporting offer.’" '

Count Istvar was a soldier, but he was also a Sofarian. In his blood the gambler’s fever also ran. He looked at the Baroness, whose voluptuous outlines were suggested rather than revealed by an enveloping dust mantle of tussore silk, and whose teeth and eyes shone more brilliantly as her skin gleamed more dazzlingly white, by contrast with the Spanish mantilla of black lace she had wound about her head. He reflected, and while he did so the violet radiance endued the rocks, the trees, the river, with a yet more irritating glamour, and the fragrance of Turkish coffee rose from the' roadside, .where the old woman had built and lighted a little fire iof sticks, upon which a brass pot seethed and bubbled. The delicate nostrils of the Baroness Glicka inhaled the fragrance of the berry.

“Why should not we, too, have some coffee?" she| cried gaily, and leaning from the carriage-window opposite to that which framed the flushed countenance and admiring eyes of the young Count, she beckoned to the beldame, addressing her at the same time in Turkish, which language she spoke to perfection, as she held up a small coin of gold.

“Ah, what accomplishments!" cried Count Istvar. "You speak Turkish?”

"As you hear ’t” nodded the Baroness over her shoulder, "are you ignorant of the language?"

“As a stone,” said the young Count dismounting.

“Ah, you accept my challenge!” cried the Baroness, as with sparkling eyes the young soldier opened the carriage door and got in. “But just permit me to complete my directions to this good umma about our coffee.”

And quickly opening the carriage door she sprang lightly to the ground, and engaged in an animated but unintelligible conversation with the veiled and mummy-like figure which approached her. Finally the umma bowed and returned to her bubbling pot as the Baroness resumed her seat in the carriage.

“She will sell us her coffee,” she said as she shuffled the cards. "How absurd it was to see her pull up her veil when you leaned forward to look at her, as though your glance might increase her ugliness.”

“Turkish women are all hideous after twenty,” said the Count, admiring the white hands as they shuffled the cards.

“It is the abuse of sweetmeats,” said the Baroness.

“And opportunity—and opium,” said Istvar carelessly —“that hag has a store of the drug about her at this moment, depend upon it Ah, Heaven! how clumsy I am.”

For his spurred jack-boot had pressed rather heavily upon the delicate slipper of the Baroness, and the lady had started and uttered a slight exclamation.

"It is nothing,” she said, as the Turkish woman appeared at the carriage-window, bearing on a small brass tray two steaming cups of thick coffee. “Pray deal the cards.”

"The blue cup is for the hanum,” droned the pilgrim nasally, “the white one with red flowers for the zabtieh, whom Heaven and the Prophet punish! with eternal burnings.” She glared over the edge of her veil at the unconscious Istvar, who was dealing rather awkwardly without removing his eyes from the Baroness’s .face.

“Chabuk, chabuk, good mother!” said the Baroness. “Have you made the coffee strong?”

“As Rustem,” said the dervish, hobbling back to her fire, as Count Istvar turned up the eleventh card. It was a King.

“I congratulate you, Count,” said the Baroness, as she handed him his coffee. “I propose.”

“And I—considering the stake for which I play—am compelled to refuse,” said Istvar.

“Ungallant!” said the Baroness, sending a piercing shaft from her black eyes. “I will console myself with a cigarette.” She lighted one and gave the Count another from her case. “They are Turkish, like the coffee,” she said, “and I think fairly good. Ah, you have failed to make your three tricks. I count two.”

“Strange, with the trumps I held!” said the young officer, passing his hand over his handsome forehead, which at the Baroness’s request he had relieved of the helmet’s weight “Ecarte was first played in the salons of Paris at the dose of the eighteenth century,” said the Baroness, sorting a fresh hand. "Its name then was *TriompheDo I weary you?” '

“I entreat pardon for my rudeness, Excellency,” cried the young man, crimson to the temples. “I believe I was actually guilty—”

Speech failed him.

“Of a yawn,” said the Baroness, laughing lightly. "Do not look so horrified, Count. I could find it in my heart to pardon you, even though you were to fall asleep before my face.”

Which the Count did before the game was well over. Then the Baroness put her head out of the carriage window and called softly in Turkish to the old. woman: “Come here, my mother. All goes well.”

“Ya Allah! Did not I tell you it would?” croaked the hag.

And she hobbled to the carriage and got in. In a few minutes she emerged, veiled and shrouded as before in ample swathings of dust-soiled yellow sheeting, beneath which peeped her blue cotton trousers. A moment she hesitated. Then, grasping the bridle of Count Istvar’s charger, which was peaceably grazing from a bush, she. sprang to the saddle with wonderful lightness, and digging her sandals into the flanks of the surprised animal, galloped away en cavalier upon the road that led towards the capital.

Later on, Count Istvar waking from an extraordinarily heavy sleep of some hours’ duration, found himself opposing the cloaked and veiled figure of the Baroness who also seemed to slumber. Between them lay the écarté board.

In the brilliant moonlight the upturned faces of the three winning tricks of the final hand testified to Istvar’s success. The shadow cast upon the board belonged to the coachman, now awake and hungry, who said, addressing the reposeful figure of the Baroness: “Excellency, shall we not move on? Nadjesda (the maid) is crying, Hamak and Voloka are swearing with hunger, and the horses will stand no longer!”

"Her Excellency advocates a move, but in the opposite direction,” said Istvar, waving the man aside and springing out of the carriage with less agility than usual.-"So turn your cattle towards Fodolia. I and my men will accompany you as far as Polkyna, where supper may be obtained and comfortable accommodation for the night.”

And he would have mounted his horse, but the noble animal was nowhere to be seen, nor could his troopers furnish him with any information.

“It is certainly Fate,” he said, and got back into the carriage.

‘‘Forwards! Trot!” he cried from the window as the vehicle turned. The jingle of cavalry accoutrements responded as his troopers spurred their horses into a trot. Count Istvar Geza was once more alone with the Baroness. She still feigned sleep, the young man listened to her breathing and smiled as he noted the quick uneven respirations. Should he venture to lift the veil of Spanish lace through which bright eyes were certainly peering? Why not?

"Triotnphe,” he quoted to himself, “was, in a previous century, the name of the game now known as écarté.”

And he cautiously extended! his arm, nippped the border of the lace between a daring thumb and finger, and lifted it aside.

“By Pan and St. Otilov! Witchcraft!” he cried, for the face revealed was that of a dried baboon.

“O pig! O dog! O son of a burnt owl!” shrilled a voice that was very unlike the Baroness’s.

And the Count, without understanding Turkish, realised that he had made a mistake. It was at a late hour that night that the staunch charger he had lost stopped dead-beat and exhausted at the gates of a modest villa situated outside the gate of Mihl. It belonged to an elderly lady, a distant relative of the Baroness Glicka, who had been her gouvemante and was now her confidante. One can guess what a reception the Turkish pilgrim met with here! Meanwhile the distracted Count Istvar had reported himself to his superior officers, who had communicated with headquarters, and the telegraphic wires were clicking: 'Stop her I stop her! stop her!’ as hysterically as an old lady whose purse had been snatched in the open street by some young female thief.

But nobody stopped the Baroness Glicka. On the contrary, when a handsome carriage rolled in between the tutelary geese of the Palace entrance-gates, and the Mistress of the Robes, in virtue of her unresigned and unforfeited office, crossed the vestibule with its waiting pages, traversed a gallery and went unannounced to the apartments of Queen Gisela, it was as though the pulse of life had ceased to beat in the Royal residence, such a breathless pause ensued. For having gasped and crossed themselves, people waited for the explosion. In his sanctum, to which retreat the news had been carried by a faltering chamberlain, the King held on to his moustaches in suspense. “What has happened? What is happening?” he asked himself. The Celtic legend of the Kilkenny cats had not penetrated to Sofaria, so the monarch was guiltless of plagiarism when he cried: “What? By Pan and St. Otilov! they will annihilate each other. Nothing will be left!”

Something was left, as it turned out. The Queen, sitting with the CJrown Prince in her white morning-room, had answered to the scratch demanded by courtly etiquette, “Come in!” when the door opened admitting the Baroness.

She looked marvellously handsome; perhaps that is why the anger of Gisela flamed up so instantaneously.

She placed the baby in the nurse’s arms, rose and confronted the intruder. Her silvery-gold hair was piled like a helmet upon her head, and her eyes, bluer than the blue passion-flowers that filled a great bowl of white faience upon a table near her, were almost terrible in the cold, merciless anger of their regard.

“Why are you here, madame?” The Queen spoke scarcely above her breath, but every word fell like a polished crystal.

"Your Majesty,” returned the Baroness, unmoved, “I am here because my position as a member of the Royal household privileges me to approach the person of the Queen without formal preliminaries. The office I hold—”

“You have never so presumed upon it before,” said the Queen icily; “and you are now made aware how that presumption is likely to be requited by me* You spring from a noble house; the blood which flows in your veins, Baroness, is at least derived from uncontaminated sources. Rise superior to the brief infatuation which placed in your hands the means of wounding—humiliating—degrading a woman who has never injured you—a sovereign whom you should revere. Resign this post, since it may not be taken from you!”

“Ma foi!’ said the Baroness, with an airy shrug. “That is exactly what I have come here to do. Had my progress not been barred by the Royal orders, had I not, like the wife of our historic chieftain Volpik, drugged one of my captors and galloped away from the others upon a stolen horse—I had been prevented from doing what your Majesty so much desires.”

“But the christening, .. . your determination,” gasped the Queen, almost overcome by the relief imparted by the Baroness’s announcement.

“A whim,” the other answered, “which I renounce with the appointment—and with more regret—” Her brilliant eyes were misty, and her finely-cut lips, scarlet as the japonica blossom, quivered as she unflinchingly encountered the cold blue eyes of the Queen. Then those icy orbs of Gisela’s suddenly melted. They swam in the softest, most pitying tears as the Royal lady stepped hurriedly forward, took her rival’s hand, and kissed her on the brow.

“By Pan and St Otilov!” muttered the King into the keyhole. For he had been drawn to the threshold of the White Room by irresistible suspense and maddening curiosity, and once there, and the corridor being vacant of chamberlains or pages, he-

Well, we are all human at times, and this was one of Rodelph’s. He managed to escape before the door opened, however, and a moment later crossed the grand central vestibule, as the Baroness came from the Queen’s apartments. She curtesied with a provoking smile. She was handsomer than ever.

“So you have returned from Fodolia, Baroness,” Rodelph began.

“That is not your Majesty’s fault,” returned the Baroness provokingly. "Yet here I am, and the Court Gazette must announce the post of the Mistress of the Robes as vacant, because I have resigned it.”

She shrugged her shoulders. She was handsomer than ever and more provoking.

“Considerable emoluments were attached to the post,” the King said, turning as red as his huge moustaches. “If you are disposed to accept an equivalent, Baroness, I should esteem myself as bound in honour to—-to—grant whatever you desire.”

"Eh, Mon Dieu! A sop to the lioness!” cried Glicka. "Yet there is one thing. I should like a commission in the Queen’s Lifeguards—for a friend of mine.”

"Might I ask the gentleman’s name?” The King tugged his moustaches.

“It is Count Istvar Geza. He is, or was, until a lew days ago, a Captain, Mounted Yeomanry, stationed at—” a dimple danced in her cheek, and a demure sparkle came into her eyes—“the Fortress of Kobitza.”

“Why, by Pan and St. Otilov!” shouted the King, “that is the idiot who allowed you to escape.”

“And to whom you owe it,” said Glicka, “that I am no longer inclined to make myself disagreeable. So, whatever honours you designed for the person who should smooth me—rugged, stern, implacable me—into compliance, I will ask your Majesty to betsow upon Count Istvar.”

“A Princedom—the Order of the Split Locust. . . . These were promised,” cried Rodelph II., “and by Pan and St Otilov it is too much!”

“Your Majesty has pledged your word,” said the Baroness.

“And I will keep it” grumbled the King—"but— Evodia! What qualifications does the fellow possess that you—that-? Come, you must tell me. I request—I

command that you tell me!”

The Baroness swept a curtsey.

“Oh, if your Majesty commands! Sir, the young gentleman appears to me to—”

“To be perfection, I suppose,” sneered the King.

“To need a few lessons in—écarté,” responded the Baroness.

“You cannot deceive me,” said the King. “This young man attracts you. Sopristi!' I see it in your eyes—I hear it in your voice. By Pan! And he is to have a commission in the Lifeguards—a princely coronet and a decoration form making me look foolish! As for those lessons in Ecarte, you will remain in Mihl, no doubt, for the purpose of imparting them!” Anger choked his utterance.

“Your Majesty may have reason for doubting the disinterestedness of a woman’s motives,” said the Baroness Glicka, “but as a matter of fact, I am returning to Fodolia.”

The eyes of the King became circular with' surprise.

“To your husband!”

"Why not! I have never quarrelled with the Baron. -As for this young Count Istvar—prince that is to be—I hope that he may never set eyes on me again!”

“Why-? Ah!” exclaimed the King. “You are certainly in love with him. And he—he is in love with you?”

“Perhaps . . .” admitted the Baroness. “But I am a bad judge of hearts, and he—”

“He? Sopristit let us have it!”

“He is a bad judge of coffee,” said the Baroness.

X

JOHNNY’S CASE

I

SHOWING HOW JOHNNY BOBLASB EARNED THE REPUTATION OF A LADY-KILLER, AND WHY THE COUNTRY BEGAN TO CALL DAVINA LUTTRELL THAT KIND OF A GIRL!

MAY I speak of the awfol Ibbetson Draper Bulpit,

C.S.I., late President at Coorgwara, and Chief, Commissioner of Mourash Kuttegar, and inaugurator of a Reign of Terror in the county of Deershire? I must not omit to mention the Commisisoner’s hooked parrot-nose, round greedy eyes, and thirsty scarlet ears, curiously mottled with purple blotches, as organs which were employed with relentless determination and unflagging energy in the investigation of other people’s affairs. And I should describe, in as few words as possible, the hideous red-brick villa with the belvedere upon the roof, designed by the Commissioner himself in triumphant violation of all established architectural traditions, and erected by astonished artisans under his bullying superintendence upon the summit of an unlovely eminence, locally known as Gabshill. ’The Residency, Gabshill, Deershire,’ was the address imprinted upon the dreaded card, which, when 'drawn from the Commissioner’s terror-inspiring shagreen case, turned men and maid-servants pale with fear, and brought consternation into the bosom of peaceful county families.

One sunny morning, in late spanner of the year 1902, Commissioner Bulpit awakened early in the blindless bedchamber, surmounted by the flagstaff-turret that commandingly blighted the landscape for miles upon miles. He had in fact been roused before his usual hour by the unaccustomed clangour of a bell, a small church-bell of the tin-pot variety, rung with short aggressive tugs, suggestive of amateur handling.

‘Blarum—blarum—blarum? went the tin-pot. It flashed upon the Commissioner that the new Rector of the church at Cottiswood must have bought the bell for the purchase of which he had been soliciting subscriptions from its parishioners ever since his presentation to the living. As an ascetic young man of Anglican tendencies, who was understood to advocate, by wilful example, the propriety of clerical celibacy, and intoned portions of the church service, the Commissioner disapproved of the Rev. Capel Amyse. The Commissioner had loudly refrained from contributing his mite towards the projected purchase of the bell. He had pointed out that the church tower had never, within the memory of the oldest inhabitant, possessed a bell; that it had done very well without one; and had deduced from these premises the logical inference that no bell was wanted. And now the fellow had got it, and was ringing it before breakfast on a weekday.

‘Blarum—blarum-—blarum!' said the bell derisively. The Commissioner, his white macaw-crest of stiff hair erect with rage, bounded out of his complaining couch, alighting with a heavy thud of stout bare feet on the uncarpeted floor, and padded to the window. If he had not done so, there would have been no story to tell.

But Fate ordained that he should. Destiny arranged the complementary parts of the picture which greeted his eyes. There was the Rectory, all oaken gables and pargeting, standing in its grounds, beyond his own plantations, on the other side of the road. There was the churchyard lych-gate, two new, shining bicycles leaning up against its solid oaken beams; there the sacred edifice, a pure example of Early English and a feather in the county’s cap.

And in the porch, festooned with honeysuckle and the clusters of a Glorie de Dijon rose, were Johnny Borlase and Davina Luttrell. . . . There was no mistaking the angle at which Johnny carried his chin, the set of his broad shoulders, the pose of his well-knit figure, even without the binoculars which were never far from the Commissioner’s hand. As for Davina, though a sense of the shortcomings of his costume prevented the Commissioner from throwing up the window and leaning boldly out of it, there was no doubt of her identity. . . . One might swear to her tall, lithe shape, her twisted ropes of black hair, her impertinent nose, the cream-white oval of her cheek, and the jetty sweep of her arched eyebrows, anywhere: ’two such handsome gipsy minxes’—I quote the Commissioner—‘were not to be found in the county.’ The bell jangled away above the heads of the young people as they stood together—Davina’s hands on Johnny’s shoulders, his downbent face inclined towards hers, her tearful eyes upraised to his. Tears! why tears? the Commissioner asked himself, while his carefully-focussed glasses assured him of the genuinenesss of the pearly drops that chased one another down Davina’s fair cheeks.

He grunted as Johnny produced a spotless and carefully-folded silk handkerchief from his pocket, and with an appearance of profound sympathy pressed it on the acceptance of the weeping girl. Then the bell sounded once more and stopped. . . . Davina, holding the hand* kerchief to her face, passed into the church,.. . leaving the Commissioner transfixed with delight at the idea that he had been the unseen witness of a clandestine love* scene. The male actor in this drama of passion strolled down to the lych-gate, where the two bicycles, ignorant of the emotions that agitated their owners, leaned peaceably side by side. The young man produced a cigarette-case. And by the shape and motion of his lips, it was plain to the Commissioner that he was whistliiig.

“Good-for-nothing young reprobate!” said the Commissioner as the indignant warrior shut up his binoculars with a snap. Yet Johnny, to an ordinary eye, looked very far from a reprobate as he struck a vesta on the churchyard gate—an action which seemed to the Commissioner’s excited mind a minor kind of sacrilege—and leaned there smoking and smiling, his checked tweed cap pulled down over his handsome nose: a replica in less time-worn material of the nose of Sir Gervase the Knight Templar, and the nose .of Sir Ralph, Master of the Horse to Edward IV.; anld the nose which once belonged to Sir Lancelot the Cavalier, killed at Naseby, and was akin to several other Borlase noses in ancient stone and blackened brass reposing in the church within a stone’s throw. It was at this moment that an electrical idea volted through the brain of Ibbetson Bulpit. He had lately invested in a kodak; the diabolical machine stood within reach of his hand upon the dressing-table. . . . Why, ah! why had it not occurred to him before? Now he cautiously reached out for it, and, presto! in the twinkling of an eye the photographic image of the contemplative young gentleman at the church-yard gate was transferred to the telltale gelatine. Then, scarlet with excitement, the Commissioner waited until the cigarette was finish, and Davina reappeared in the porch. The Rector at the same moment issued from the vestry side-door with the verger. "Used to be called a parish clerk when I was a boy" was the invariable comment of Commissioner Bulpit, when this term was applied to the functionary in his hearing. They passed into the Rectory grounds by the fence-gate, and Davina, who had apparently constituted in her single person the entire congregation, rejoined Johnny. She held his handkerchief in her hand, but her eyes were dry and her cheeks no' longer dabbled and stained with the traces of emotion. The young man strode forward to meet her, . . . she lifted her face to his, he bent down and earnestly gazed into her eyes, and the kodak, which was of the latest model and furnished with a repeater, twice registered the group for future reference. Then Johnny, under the interested observation of the lens, wheeled Davina’s bicycle out into the road and held it as she mounted. Before she did so, she leaned down towards the handle-bar, where the strong hard knuckles of the young man rested, and . . . did she press her cheek fondly against Johnny’s hand, or print a fervent kiss upon it? The Commissioner, as he snapshotted the action, inclined to the latter, belief. Then the couple parted, cavalier and damsel noiselessly vanishing in opposite directions, enveloped by a cloud of dust “I’ll have that too,” said the Commissioner, with a diabolical chuckle, and he had it. His sensations .were exquisite as he realised what he had done. In ten minutes Johnny Borlase and Davina Luttrell would be sitting down to breakfast, the one at Borlase Park, the other at Luttrell Priory, little dreaming that their meeting had not been private, that their actions had been recorded by a witness whose candour could never be called in question. At this juncture Commissioner Bulpit became alive to the fact that his own matutinal kidneys (invariably set upon the table at a quarter-past eight) were growing cold; while the most elementary stages of the toilet of an official and a gentleman remained to be completed. He had lost quite a large slice out of his day; he had probably caught cold .. . the Commissioner’s colds were no joke, for other people! but he had caught something else!... When those tell-tale films should be developed and printed, it would be time to explode the mine; until, then he, Ibbetson Draper Bulpit, would wait in silence— that silence which is more eloquent than words, or content himself by dropping a hint here and there. Yes, he would drop hints.

That afternoon the Commissioner, wheezing behind the overtaxed buttons of his frock-coat of ceremony, crowned with the curly-brimmed silk hat, adorned with the cameo breast-pin and shiny satin cravat sacred to social field-days, paid a baker’s dozen of calls in the neighbourhood.

A few hardy spirits were not at home; the weaker majority would have liked to be out, but did not dare The result was that ere set of sun, six or seven people had learned a secret that the Commissioner’s manly delicacy forbade him to reveal, except under certain conditions. Some were credulous, other unbelieving, but the general verdict was that if Davina Luttrell and Johnny Borlase had actually been seen together in the porch of Cottiswood Church at seven o’clock in the morning, the meeting must have been previously arranged; that for a young lady to cry publicly into a handkerchief, borrowed form a young gentleman, argues the existence of great, if not excessive familiarity between them, . . . and that if Davina really forgot herself so far as to kiss Johnny Borlase’s hand, it was Johnny’s bounden duty to repress so unmaidenly a manifestation. The whole thing was most extraordinary! Because nobody would ever have suspected Johnny of being a lady-killer, while the younger Miss Luttrell never impressed one as being that kind of a girl! What kind of girl that kind of girl might be was left to the imagination. And all were agreed that though it was hardly fair of the Commissioner to have taken those photographs, it would be very interesting to see them when they were developed!

II

SHOWING HOW ONE SWALLOW MAY MAKE A SUMMER, THOUGH SMOKE DOES NOT ALWAYS MEAN A FIRE.

Davina reached home in eight minutes thirty seconds, and with a fine appetite for breakfast, which was usually laid in the charming ground-floor room under the east gable, whose deeply-recessed French-windows opened upon a stretch of turf lawn, thickly sprinkled with daisies, and therefore ideal to the poet’s eye, if agonising to the gardener’s.

A double hedge of ancient yews, clipped into some distant resemblance of the human shape, and known as the Twelve Apostles, guarded this pleasuance, so continually invaded by kodak-armed emissaries from the London offices of illustrated papers, wandering artists, and enthusiastic amateurs of old-world arboriculture, as to induce Mrs. Luttrell, in harassed moments, to plaintively bemoan her fate as mistress of a show house. The mistress of Luttrell Priory was a light-complexisned little woman, whose age does not matter in the least, and who seemed almost fragile in comparison with her tall, womanly stepdaughters. She owned a slight figure, surprised eyes of china-blue, and a quantity of crimpy blonde floss silk hair, which might have belonged to the doll that originally owned the eyes; and really, ever since the day when Mr. Luttrell introduced his newly-married second bride into the nursery of his two little motherless daughters, respectively aged six years and four, their stepparent had served them in the doll-capacity, being alternately worshipped and bullied, snubbed and admired, petted and quarrelled over, and submitting to all such usage as unquestoningly as any waxen inhabitant of the Lowther Arcade. To the old servants of the house her introduction into it was merely the arrival of a bigger child, not the instalment of a new mistress; and they behaved excellently well, treating the little lady and her basket of keys with respectful tolerance, and doing in all things as seemed good to them down to this very day, when the butler appeared at her elbow with a frothing cup of cocoa, as after pouring out coffee for Jenny and Davina Mrs. Luttrell’s thin little be-ringed fingers hovered wistfully over the handle of the teapot “Your cocoa, ma’am,” Jephson said, ignoring the look exchanged between Jenny and Davina.

“Thank you, Jepson,” returned the little lady; “but I think I will take tea this morning.”

"Cook said, ma’am,” responded Jephson firmly, "that the doctor considered cocoa more suitable to you.”

Mrs. Luttrell instantly gave in. Jephson, victorious, retired to the sideboard. This battle of the cocoa-cup versus the teapot had been waged every day with the same result for eighteen months—in fact, ever since Mrs. Luttrell had had influenza. Then the poor little woman’s system, weakened by the scourge, had required fortifying with cocoa. There was not the slightest reason now existing why she should not have indulged in the cheering beverage she craved for. But she drank her cocoa submissively, and thought of four o’clock. There was no tabu upon the afternoon teapot Conversation in the Luttrell home-circle was usually commenced, upheld, and maintained by Davina, who from early childhood had been distinguished by a fine flow of language, and a desire to make herself heard. Davina was unusually sharp-set this morning, therefore little was said until she had deftly beheaded her third egg. Then she asked whether anybody had heard the bell that morning?

“I think I did, but I am not quite sure,” said Mrs. Luttrell, who was never positive on any subject.

"I heard it” said Jenny, one of her dimples—Jenny’s dimples were delicious—coming into play. “It sounded as though some giant baby were banging a colossal iron ladle on a Brobdingnagian tin tea-tray.”

“Dearest, how dreadful!” cried Mrs. Luttrell with lifted eyebrows.

"It is not a musical bell,” admitted Davina, “but it came cheap. It had been returned to the foundry, where it was originally cast by the congregation of a Tabernacle, and the Rector picked it up for a mere nothing.”

"Who told you so?”

“The Rector. I was at church this morning, and we had a few words as he came out of the vestry.”

“In his chasuble! . Davina!”

“There was no other lay-person in the church besides myself, except Haybittle, the verger, who was ringing the bell.”

“He rings it like a fiend,” said Jenny.

“If he rang like an archangel it would make no difference,” replied Davina. “It is a beast of a bell!”

"Then why have it?”

"It is not the bell itself; it is the symbol expressed by the bell, upon which the Rector lay stress,” Davina responded, with a little air of erudition that was vastly becoming.

"A cymbal is an instrument of brass, Davina dear,” said Mrs. Luttrell, rather bewildered, “or it used to be when I was a girl”

Her stepdaughters laughed, as though the amiable, silly little woman had made the best joke in the world.

“We are not talking of brazen anythings, beloved Goose,” said Jenny, “but of the cracked tin-kettle upon which the Reverend Capel Amyse lays stress.”

“Tin-kettle or not, there it is,” retorted Davina, with some testiness, “and you will in future be called to church by it”

"Unless I stay at home,” said Jenny, with a glint of defiance under her sleepy lashes.

“And be called a heathen by the county, my darling. That would never do,” expostulated Mrs. Luttrell, her china-blue eyes wide open in alarm, and her plaintive eyebrows lifted to the verge of her Alexandra fringe.

“If to refuse to respond to the summons of the Rector’s bell is to be a heathen,” said Jenny, who seemed reluctant to let the subject drop, “there was not a single lay Christian in Cottiswood this morning—except Davina.”

“And Johnny Borlase,” added Davina carelessly. Jenny opened wide gray eyes.

“Johnny at church—and on a weekday!”

“He was not in church—he stayed outside. He had intended to ride over to Foxley Bushes before breakfast, but he turned out of his road when he heard the bell. He wondered what on earth could be kicking up such a confounded racket’*

“Davinat" exclaimed Mrs. Luttrell.

“I quote literally. 'Confounded racket’ is Johnnyese. And we ran into each other opposite the churchyard gate.”

“Ran into each other?”

“I had something in my eye. ... A fly, or a bit of straw, or a grain of dust . . . What it really was I don’t know; but the pain was awful.” Davina winced and blinked at the recollection. “I was quite blind on one side, and the other eye cried,for sympathy. And so we collided.”

“Were you hurt?” asked the stepmother anxiously.

“I got a spill. John jumped off and picked me up. He looked in my eye, but could not see anything. So he lent me his handkerchief, to swab the decks, he said; and when I came out of church I found him waiting; I suppose for his handkerchief, though I forgot to give it back to him. ... Oh! . . .” and her tone became more animated. “If either of you are going to drive into Foxshott Overton this afternoon, I wish you would leave my bicycle-watch at Pigott's in the High-street,” she continued, helping herself liberally to scalded cream and home-made jam. “It must have had a knock when I cannoned up against Johnny this morning. Because, when I came out of church I noticed that the glass was cracked right across, and when I put down my ear I could not hear a tick. ... So annoying, when I had only just bought it,” she concluded.

Readers may or may not arrive at the conclusion that Commissioner Bulpit had made a mistake. Davina’s tears—how simple and naturally are they not accounted for by a fly in the eye? The impassioned gesture with which she had stooped over the handle-bar of her bicycle —might it not after all be prompted by anxiety to ascertain whether a newly-purchased horologe of a popular but inexpensive brand had, or had not, suffered irreparable injury?

But the cloud of scandal no bigger than a hand had already appeared on the horizon. It was foredoomed to cumulate suddenly, to spread, to break in whirlwind and disperse in storm. For a while Commissioner Bulpit might ride on the one and direct the other with the proofs of those negatives in his pocket, but his meteorological steeds were soon to relieve themselves of their elderly Phaethon, and continue in their wild career unguided, save by Fate and Destiny.

III

IN WHICH IS PROMULGATED THE THEORY THAT A YOUNG MAN WHOSE FRIENDS WILL PERSIST IN CALLING HIM ‘JOHNNY’ IN FLAT DEFIANCE OF THE FACT THAT HE HAS BEEN CHRISTENED 'LANCELOT,' CANNOT POSSIBLY BE POSSESSED OF THE HEROIC CHARACTER.

Fortune had not hitherto been prodigal of her favours to Johnny Boriase, whose real name, Lancelot, was still brand-new for lack of handling, though twenty-five summers had bloomed and faded since it was bestowed upon him at the baptismal font Amongst women he was usually known as a ‘nice boy’ by men he was merely considered a ‘decent sort of fellow, and Johnny cherished a strong if secret desire for popularity.

At Harrow he had snuffed the incense of public adulation, being captain of his house-team in both cricket and football, an expert racquet-player, and ‘no bigger bungler at Latin verse than a great many other chaps. But he had never allowed his love of study to interfere with the more serious pursuit of sport, hence the fact that his brief University career ended in anything but a blaze of glory. True, Johnny had rowed No. 5 in the Oxford boat, but in a losing race. True, his sideboard boasted a handsome array of huge pewters, and several silver cups; but no academical laurels decked his brow, no scholarships rewarded the consumption of the midnight carbon.

“They ought to have sent me from Harrow to a coach, and bucketed me into the Army,” Johnny said, as he kicked his books into their deal cases, and packed away the pewters in chamois-leather. “But they wouldn’t see reason. A lawyer or a banker or a parson—they’d set their minds on my turning out one of ’em, or all three. And consequently what am I? A Failure—and serve ’em right for flying in the face of Providence!”

Whereupon Johnny went home to the bosom of his family, and met with as genial a reception in Deershire as might be accorded to the younger brother of a wiry valetudinarian baronet, who was a confirmed bachelor, and therefore might be expected to marry at any moment; and the son of a strong-minded widow who wore divided skirts, patronised home manufactures, drove a four-in-hand of pony cobs, and was otherwise remarkable for nothing, except a passionate hatred of callers. An opening was found for Johnny in a Foxshott Overton Bank, and Johnny sat upon a shiny stool in a varnished deal hatch with ground-glass panels and bungled calculations in clients’ deposit-books, and, without being soured by the knowledge, knew himself for a Failure, a Failure so complete and absolute that it yielded him a certain amount of cynical amusement to think that another man had recdved a medal from the Humane Sodety for saving his life!

But all this was to be changed. Johnny’s humble obscurity was soon to give place to a dazzling notoriety. The human chrysalis was to become a butterfly, and to be no more conscious than the real grub of the why and wherefore of its gorgeous metamorphosis.

Within a month from the morning when the retired Chief Commissioner of Mourash Kuttegar had looked out of his bedroom window and jumped to a conclusion with the aid of a kodak, a subtle change manifested itself in the attitude of the county towards the young man. Invitations to croquet and tennis-parties, garden teas, and Cinderella dances, were showered upon him; he was asked to several stately dinners and treated with the distinction that is not often the portion of the penniless younger son, and while several domineering married beauties openly made eyes at him, while cherishing secret designs upon his scalp, vestals added the oxygen of their discreeter sighs to the stimulating atmosphere in which Johnny’s latent social gifts burst into full flower.

Of course, wherever he went he encountered Davina Luttrell. They were purposely thrown together in a hundred ways by people who had seen those proofs— faded now from over-much handling—which Commissioner Bulpit carried in his note-case. There was a widespread conspiracy to compel them to acknowledge their engagement, if they were engaged; or to hasten the hour of their formal betrothal, if they were merely making love for a pastime, and without any definite intention of building a nest. Indeed, so constantly did they meet, and so persistently were they thrust upon each other at dinners, dances, rag-parties, and bazaars, that both began to rebel.

“We seem to see a good deal of each' other this year,” remarked Davina, at a social function of the feeding kind, in the more or less solemn pause which precedes a movement to the dining-room.

She had, not without a secret smart, observed the appropriation by Ethel Bantock of the Rev. Capel Amyse, Rector of Cottiswood—‘Father Amyse,’ as he loved to be called (as he had been called) by the congregation of the Eleven Thousand Holy Vestals, Cavendish Street, London, a celebrated Ritualistic centre, consuming annually vast quantities of flowers, wax-lights, and incense, owning a vast working-staff of tonsured curates, a tremendous cUentile of fashionable lady-penitents, and generally denounced by Boanerges Botherum, the celebrated leader of the Protesting Protestant Society, and his followers, as the Halfway House to Rome.

“Yes,” admitted Johnny, in a more cheerful tone, in answer to Davina’s last-recorded remark, “we are always meeting. The fact is, I am asked about a good deal this season—more than I ever remember to have been before. People are so uncommonly kind, in fact, that I’ve scarcely time to breathe. Do yon still combine early church-going with all this?”

Davina assented, with a wistful glance in the direction of the Reverend Capel, whose manner had become unaccountably chilly of late.

And should the reader incline to reproach the writer for not hinting ere this that Davina was attracted by the Reverend Capel, that for her a halo seemed to glimmer round his fair ascetic head—his wan, perhaps bilious, blue eye possessed a saintly lustre; his long, narrow figure, arrayed in cord-girdled cassock, or coat of strictly Anglican cut, a poetic grace; his hollow Gregorian tones a compelling sweetness—let him pause and reflect. Did I not say at the very outset that she attended Early Service at seven o’clock?, And.there are people.who will not always credit young ladies, reared in the comfortable tenets of the Established Church of England, with invariably attending Early Service at seven o'clock without ulterior motives.

The return glance Davina received from the saintly blue eye of Mr. Amyse caused her to wince and gasp a small gasp. One may conjecture that Commissioner Bulpit's story, backed by the mute but irrefragable evidence of the kodak, had reached Cottiswood Rectory.

“If this is why she comes to church ..." the Reverend Amyse had said. The priestly comment remained unfinished, but the inference was none the less scathingly severe.

It was balm to him just now to observe that the condemnatory glare delivered over the heads of some twenty shorter people reached its mark in the conscience at which it was hurled. His gratification made his tones more resonant, as, in obedience to Lady Foxshott’s pretty timid smile and appealing eyebrows, he presently said grace. In the volley of conversation that followed on the heels of the Amen, he turned to Ethel Bantock—if I have not brought Ethel Bantock out of the box in which my marionettes are tucked away in the intervals of the performance ere this, it is not because she is not an attractive puppet, but that her entrance, like that of other dramatic heroines, requires a little working up—and began to talk about the South African War!

IV

IN WHICH SEVERAL PERSONS TALK AT CROSS-PURPOSES— JOHNNY HAKES HIMSELF QUITE RIDICULOUS—ETHEL BANTOCK REACHES THE HEIGHTS OF THE SUBLIME.

“So the Commissioner has taken them together at last!” The Reverend Capel Amyse referred to the capture of two prominent Boer leaders by a popular commander of our own. He was not prepared for Miss Bantock’s rejoinder, made with quivering lips and suddenly tearful eyes.

“Oh, please don’t talk about it! It is too utterly horrid for anything!”

“You may not be aware,” persisted the Reverend Amyse, who had been called at the University ‘a tactless prig,' and who, even if he had blossomed into a saintly example, was capable of what was called pig-headedness by his foes and determination by his admirers—“perhaps you do not realise how completely civilisation has obviated the horror of captivity. The Commissioner, depend upon it, will treat diem with every courtesy. He will keep them safe, now that he has got them; but they will fare rather better in his hands, depend upon it, than they did before.”

“But he is such an old gossip,” said Miss Bantock, in evident distress, “and he takes such delight in parading them about He carries them in his letter-case wherever he goes. . . . Papa has seen them and so has mamma.” “Really!” ejaculated Mr. Amyse. He had read of cases of suddenly occurring insanity. He wondered whether, in the interests of the community, it would not be wise to deprive his charming neighbour of her table-knives?

/‘Everyone is crying shame because they won’t announce it if they are engaged,” went on Miss Bantock, with a little catch in her breath. “Everyone is setting traps to get them to acknowledge it. Why don’t people let them alone? They know their own business best—or they ought to!”

A great light broke upon the Reverend Capel Amyse. The story and the photographs, after traversing half the country, had paused at Squire Bantock’s for a brief breathing-space before taking to their travels again. He shot a glance across the bank of orchids, gemmed with electric dewdrops, that ran down the centre of the table, to where Johnny Borlase and Davina Luttrell were sitting. Both were depressed and somewhat pale, Davina especially so. Johnny ate with stern determination. Davina merely pretended to. Why did they keep silence? Why make a mystery of the engagement of a commonplace, rather vulgar young man without money to an exquisite girl with a character capable of being moulded (by a friendly hand) into the noblest ideal of Anglicanism—and a dot of ten thousand pounds?

And Ethel’s thoughts ran, perhaps, in the same groove. Why should stubborn secrecy be maintained about the bethrothal of an ordinary kind of girl (though some people admired lumps of black hair and a skin tinged with olive) to a ... to a ... in fact, to a Johnny Brolase, whose broad shoulders and wavy brown hair, straight-cut, tanned features and kindly gray eyes might adorn any maiden’s secret Ideal? As Ethel thought this she met the earnest glance of the gray eyes directed across the table, and foolishly blushed from brow to chin. Johnny had always been a welcome guest at Copcut Elms ever since he wore a Harrow straw, round collar and shell-jacket, and taught Ethel to set mole-traps, whose hapless little victims she would bitterly weep over, unconsoled by the promise of a pair of winter gloves lined with their velvety skins.

Some magnetic message must have half-unconsdously passed between Ethel’s appealing blue eyes and the gray ones, for on the dispersal of the diners—gentlemen were not encouraged by Lady Foxshott in the ungallant antique habit of lingering over their wine—Johnny found his way to Ethel’s side.

“Ages and ages since we had a talk,” he said breathlessly.

“You are too much engaged, naturally, to spare any time to old friends,” Ethel returned, with a little air of primness.

"I have beat going out and about a good deal lately,” said Johnny. "More than I ought; because when a man has got to get his living by sitting on a wooden stool in' a glass hutch, with a pen behind his ear” (the young man alluded to his clerkship at the Poxshott Overton Capitalists’ Bank, Limited), "he ought to stick to it.”

“We never used to think,” said Ethel, a little wilfully, "that you would turn out a business man!”

"Which shows,” returned Johnny, "that first impressions are generally correct. The directors are much of the same opinion, and the manager . . . perhaps a little more so. Why, they give me the little depositors’ books to add up—and I’ve seen the cashiers splitting their sides over my totals. They’ve taken away my ink lately, because they say I’m wasteful with it . . . and pencil rubs but more easily.” ... It will be deduced from this specimen of his conversation that Johnny was not a profound or brilliant talker.

“How rude of them!” said Ethel warmly.

"I’ve no right to be there, bungling over columns that a Sixth Standard Board School boy would add up without winking,” Johnny explained. “I ought to be in South Africa, where a man who can sit a fidgety young ’un and shoot straight is as good a man as is wanted. But old Normal—” this was Johnny’s nickname for the Baronet, whose constant solicitude about his own temperature was never rewarded by its being anything else—“Normal wouldn’t stand my kit, and my mother didn’t see why she should; and I didn’t care to borrow, in case I should get sniped and not be able to stump up, and ...”

“And you had some other reasons for stopping at home,” said Ethel. They were sitting in a miniature teahouse in a Japanese garden, three yards square, which Lady Foxshott had made in the conservatory, with the aid of a celebrated native artist from Regent Street. Before them a blood-red temple, twenty-six inches high, peeped out of a grove of dwarf pines; there were cherry-trees and maples in the foreground, and a pond for goldfishes, crossed by a bamboo bridge.

"There’s one reason I’ve always wished to have for stopping anywhere,” burst out Johnny, with fervour strong in proportion to the weakness of his grammar. “A sweet, dear girl to care for me! A girl like . . . Oh, Ethel! You know so jolly well why I keep away from Copcut Elms, and Portland Place, too, when we’re both in town. Yes, you’re right to take your hand away. Even if you’d let me have it for a while I’m too poor to hold it always.” And he plunged up on his long legs, making the tea-house quake to its foundations and mixing his hair up absurdly with the thatch.

“I don’t take my hand away because you’re poor, but because you have no right to talk to me so,” cried Ethel indignantly. “If you were free it would be another matter, but—”

“Free!” groaned Johnny. “Yes, I know I'm tied by the leg to my Bank stool, but you needn't rub it in.” He was not at his best, it will be seen, in impassioned moments, not possessing a supply of language fervid and eloquent enough to meet the case. There were straws in his hair, and some dust had fallen on his hitherto speckless shirt-front, but otherwise he was unchanged from poor Ethel's ideal. She softened—she couldn't help it.

“You know I wasn't thinking of the Bank,'' she said, with suffused blue eyes. Her blonde skin and yellow hair were dazzling in the light of the electric globes; she seemed somehow akin to the tall lilies near her, which, like herself, were white and gold. “You know—you should know that everybody in the county knows . . . how . . . how things are between you . . . and her?

Johnny's eyes assumed a circular shape. He visibly flushed under his tan.

“Between me and ...” The corners of his mouth curled in spite of him. Could it be that Ethel was jealous of this airy figment of her imagination! He lingered over its flavour as the ambrosia of gratified vanity melted upon his palate, and the gratified smile gradually usurped his whole face.

“You see, now you are boldly taxed with it, you cannot . deny it,” said Ethel, who had read a novel called ‘Paul's Angel Bride,' which contained a scene much akin in poignancy to this, and was now adapting the author's text to her own immediate needs. “Oh, Paul!—I mean Johnny! —how could you hide the truth from me! You have said you love me, and I do not doubt it”—it is certainly a helpful thing to have an excellent memory for what one has read. “Love is of the soul; and there have been moments when I have seen your soul in your eyes. I did just now.” Johnny's face assumed a vacuously puzzled expression. “But you are’ a man. You could not resist a gilded lure.” Ethel was thinking of Davina’s ten thousand pounds. “And when she told you her secret-

“Oh, come! I say!” expostulated Johnny.

“When she told you her secret that day at the church, you were flattered—dazzled—and yielded. She—”

“Couldn’t you tell me her name and have done with it?” entreated Johnny in desperation.

“How can you pretend ignorance of her,” cried Ethel, “when her name is written on your heart! When she .kissed your hand—”

“I’ll swear she didn’t, whoever she was!” broke in Johnny.

“I did not mock the impulse ... A woman is always openly or secretly the vassal of the man she loves,” Ethel went on. “And how could she know that your meeting was spied upon; that those proofs would be shown about all over the county by that horrid old man!”

“What proofs, and what old man?” groaned the harassed Johnny.

“Mamma saw them—the photographs, I mean. Of course, they are small, but very like. One is the image of you, mamma said; but Davina’s face is blurred.”

“Davina’s face?”

“It is a little blurred. Perhaps, as she had been crying-

“Somebody will do some crying—of a kind,” said Johnny, with grimness, “when I find out who has been spreading this cock-and-bull story about Davina Luttrell and me. You must know it to be false—you can’t believe it!”

Ethel would have given worlds to be convinced, but there were the photographs.

“I must,” she said with a sigh, forgetting what 'Paul’s Angel Bride’ would have remarked under the circumstances.

“Then good-bye!” said Johnny Borlase, “until I have proved to you and Deershire that Deershire and you are mistaken.”

He bowed before her with a dignity which must have come down from one of those battered old Borlases recumbent in Cottiswood Church, and left her.

Ethel dropped a few tears into the goldfish pond before she dried her eyes, and went back to the drawing-room.

Meanwhile, not without some rebellion of the spiritual man against the earthly attraction which moved the fleshly one to cross the drawing-room to Davina’s comer, the Rev. Capel Amyse had gravitated in her direction. Against an Oriental background of crimson and gold brocade, her rich Murillo-like colouring, and the pale Fra Angelico head of the saintly Amyse, appeared in picturesque juxtaposition. Lady Foxshott drew the attention of several people to the picture, and said how odd it was that Davina should have preferred a dark man I One generally looked for one’s own antithesis in marriage. Souls should harmonise, but complexions ought to contrast.

The Rector, who could not be charged by his most Protestant opponents with ‘Romish subtlety,’ had made up his mind to speak plainly to the youngest Miss Luttrell, representing the impropriety of a secret engagement in vigorous terms, and urging, her to publish the news of her secret betrothal to Johnny Borlase. He skated coyly round the subject, made ineffectual swoops and dashes at it, approached it gently from behind, but never succeeded in touching it until he had completely exhausted himself and completely bewildered Davina.

"We see you regularly in the week at Early Service,” he began, putting out a cautious feeler. “You are a more constant church-goer than your sister, Miss—ah! Miss Jenny!”

Davina’s eyes brightened. She had been in doubt of late whether she had been seen.

"It—it is a good habit,” she said, a little confusedly. "And Jenny does not shine at getting up, while I always wake with the starlings and thrushes. And then, even when it is wet, a spin before breakfast freshens one up so splendidly.”

"The roads between the Priory and Cottiswood are lonely, I take it, at that hour?” fished the Rector.

"Sometimes I meet a labourer, with his tea in a tin can, and his bread and bacon in a handkerchief,” said the girl. "And once—”

"Once?”

"Once I met a hedgehog.”

This was merely flippant. The Rector’s next remark was tinged with acerbity.

"Would we were all more like the creatures of the field,” he said, a deep sigh agitating the fine black doth covering his saintly bosom. "Would we were as innocent —as unconsdous of guile as they! . . . Would we had as little to regret—as little to conceal!”

"The hedgehog had something to conceal!”

Davina, without being actually conscious of irritation, was nettled at his tone.

"Had she?”

"She had—if you call six little hedgehogs anything. They were walking in a string behind her. When she saw me coming she gave a little squeak, and they all curled themselves up into prickly balls, and rolled into the ditch.”

Was this girl very deep or very simple? The Rector would have given his last new pair of votive silk braces, embroidered with ecclesiastical emblems, to know.

"The domestic ties, even amongst the lower animals, are holy and ennobling,”’ he said, in his deepest tones. “But so solemn a thing as the union of two reasoning beings, gifted with eternal souls, should be approached in a spirit of reverence. The atmosphere should be kept pure, no rude touch should soil a thing so sacred; the crystalline medium of perfect candor and simplicity should interpose between the relations of those persons and the eye of the world. . . . Anything clandestine should be scrupulously avoided. Above all—I quote from the 'Councils* of Edwy, Abbot of Withending, martyred by the Pagan Saxons in 685—let there be no profaning of venerable places (one may take it that the saint alluded to church-porches) with love-meetings and amorous talk. Let the woman be guarded, having respect to the tongues of observers, who might be passing upon the road, or looking out of windows. And it is desirable that her choice be made under the advice of some holy person. This may be understood as referring her to the guidance of the nearest clergyman, ere that she make choice of a mate.”

“Saint Edwy must have been kept busy,” said Davina, almost pertly, “supposing that all the young women took his advice in their love affairs, and there did not happen to be any other holy persons disengaged!”

Her red lips were mutinous; her dark eyes had a rebellious sparkle; her creamy cheeks so sweet a tinge of rose, that the Reverend Capel Amyse admired even while he condemned her.

“I am no saint/’ he said, with a smile which would have suited a stained-glass window. “And I am much occupied as a rule. Yet, . . . had you chosen to come to me shedding light on your path of life at the moment when it seemed about to—to join with that of another, I should have earnestly striven to aid and counsel you.”

Davina's pale roses became crimson ones. She Hashed with sudden, painful vividness.

"You are very kind,” she said stiffly.

“Bat you have made your choice without direction; that is what you would convey,” said the Rector, with some tartness. “Let me advise, if not as a clergyman, at least as a friend. Let the whole county see that you have made your choice and are not ashamed to own it. Bring daylight into the business.” It flashed on him that the sun had already betrayed what Davina and Johnny would fain conceal. "Speak the truth and shame the—”

The Reverend Amyse was much too well-bred to mention the devil in a lady’s drawing-room.

V

IN WHICH COMMISSIONER BULPIT CALLS UPON MRS. LUTTRELL, AND THE KETTLE OF FISH BOILS OVER.'

May it not have been—I am inclined to think it was*— upon the very day succeeding the dinner party at Foxshott Overton, that Commissioner Bulpit appeared in force at the gates of Luttrell Priory, stormed the hall-door, took the drawing-room by escalade, and, once entrenched there, lost no time in establishing over the poor little unprotected lady, trembling behind her afternoon tea-table, the horrible domination of his scarlet macaw beak. He began by regretting the absence of 'the young ladies.’

“They have gone to a tennis-party at Copcut Elms,” explained their stepmother, devoutly wishing they had not.

The Commissioner smiled, and waggishly elevated his thick white eyebrows. Simultaneously his white cuckatoo crest of hair erected itself upon the summit of his scalp, and his mottled ears twitched in sympathy. He hinted that the charming piece of news which had lately readied The Residency might not be considered either welcome or delightful by at least one member of Squire Bantock’s household.

“Pretty Miss Ethel is not the first young lady whose no9e has been put out of joint by a prettier.” The Commissioner laughed his whinnying laugh and wagged his ears skittishly. “Not that I suggest for a moment that there was anything serious in young Borlase’s attentions to her. But girls will be girls, ma’am—and young men will be young men. ‘Fools till we’re forty, dupes after,” as somebody says in a French play. Not that Borlase has behaved like a fool. On the contrary, he and Miss Davina have been very discreet Close as wax, both. Not a soul in the county knew of their engagement until I surprised the young couple billing and cooing in Cottiswood Church potch. Pretty group they made, too, I couldn’t resist a snapshot, 'pon my word. And I may be charged with indiscretion in doing it, but Miss Davina will know how to make allowances for an old fellow with a hobby,” chuckled the Commissioner, with bloodshot eyeballs. “Hobbies, ma’am, are our only resources when . . . Where did I put those photos?”

As the visitor alternately wheezed and chuckled and panted in the effort of getting a stout note-case out of an inner breast-pocket, the poor lady regarded him with blank astonishment.

"Davina . . . Johnny Borlase . . . Oh, Commissioner, it is some absurd invention. There is no such thing as an engagement between them.”

“Then, by George! my dear madam,” said the Commissioner, victorious in the struggle and master of the pocket-book, “permit Ibbetson Bulpit as a blunt old East Indian to say—there ought to be!” And he spread before the dilated eyes of the poor palpitating lady the three thumbed little photos, welcoming her little mouse-like shriek of horrified recognition with a morose chuckle of diabolical joy.

“Keep 'em, if you like, ma’am; you're welcome,” he said, and rose to go, though Mrs. Luttrell gaspingly strove to detain him. “If you should accidentally destroy 'em it don’t matter—there are the negatives at home.” With this parting shot he took his leave, delighted with his afternoon walk. He wandered down the flagged path between the ancient peacock yews, with his chin in the air and his Malacca cane over his shoulder, swelling out his chest and stepping out right and left in his square-toed old-style boots, slit with loopholes for the relief of garrisoned corns. Outside the gates he punched the dusty road with the ferrule of his cane, and swore aloud in his huge delight. Then he struck across the fields by a well-known footpath which led to Borlase Park. Would Lady Borlase see him? But Lady Borlase was entrenched behind her pamphlets and her invincible determination to discourage visitors, and the baffled Commissioner had to beat a retreat.

But the gallant veteran would have been amply consoled for his disappointment could he have been invisibly a witness of the drama enacted in the Luttrell drawing-room some hours later. There were tears and reproaches on the part of Mrs. Luttrell, passionate denials from Davina, expostulations and regrets from Jenny, sufficient to have sent him to bed the happiest man in all Deershire. As it was, he rose in high good-humor, forgetting for once to objurgate the Cottiswood Church bell. Though he looked from his window for Davina, she did not come; the bell dingled in vain, whilst Davina, fully dressed—for who would not rise early when the couch is metaphorically one of the thorns?—sat upon the edge of her bed clutching her temples and wondering by this thing had befallen? and the early postman trudged up the avenue of Borlase Park, bearing a letter addressed to Lancelot Borlase, Esq., in little Mrs. LuttrelPs giant handwriting—a letter the contents of which deprived Johnny of all appetite for breakfast.

“I cannot suppose that you really intended to compromise my poor darling, to whom I owe a mother’s duty and a mother’s care,” ran the missive. “But the county is ringing with the scandal, and as a gentleman it is absolutely incumbent upon you to come honourably forward, or prove the whole story a fabrication from beginning to end, which, in face of certain proofs placed in my hands by a person whom I cannot but thank for opening my eyes in time, seems impossible. I will own I should have looked for a more suitable match in point of worldly advantage for my dear girl, but as she has chosen for herself—”

The letter ended “Yours frantically, Floretta Luttrell,” and really, when Johnny entered upon the stage of the Priory drawing-room later in the day, the scene that ensued reached a fine pitch of tragic intensity.

“Can you deny—can you deny that this is a photograph of you?” shrieked the little woman.

“I can't,” said Johnny, frowning with the intensity of the scrutiny to which he had subjected the portrait in question. “And though Darina’s face is a little blurred in this one, and her back is turned in—in—” Johnny blushed handsomely—“in—the third—”

“In which she is kissing your hand!”

"She never did, I'd swear!” blurted out Johhn.

“Then how came Commissioner Bulpit to photograph her in the act?”

"Did he! Was it that old . . f Look here,” said Johnny with determination. “I’ll go over to the Residency this very day and break every bone in his beastly skin!”

"If you could break the negatives of these" said Davina, who had remained very white and silent, sitting in a corner of the huge old chintz settee, until this moment, “it would be of more immediate use to us, though I suppose” —she only guessed the exact truth—"everybody in the county has seen them.” Mrs. Luttrell uttered another of her horrified little mouse-like shrieks.

“Davina—Miss Davina,” said Johnny, turning honest, bewildered eyes upon her, "you know as well as I do that you’ve never given me a single thought—in the sense of being in love—and that . I have never said one word to you of the spoony sentimental kind. I’m not a matrimonial catch—nobody knows that better than myself,” he went on, growing very red, "and I don’t go about angling for heiresses. Yet here we are photographed together in Cottiswood Church porch,”—he referred to Commissioner Bulpit’s pieces of conviction—“behaving as though we were engaged at the very least. It’s puzzling to find out that we’re on such affectionate terms when neither of us had the least idea of it.” Davina nodded idly, and then shook her head decidedly. “But here we are, all the same, though how we got there ...”

Words failed him.

“I only remember our meeting at Cottiswood once,” said Davina. “Six weeks ago. I had something in my eye—I don’t know what, only it was painful—and——”

“And I looked in to see what was wrong. You asked me . . . By Jove!” shouted Johnny, “we’ve got it at last—”

“I believe we have!” Davina breathed quickly. Her cheeks were roses, her eyes black lodestars; she had never looked so handsome. “And I, you will remember, had broken my bicycle-watch. Wheii I saw that the glass—”

“Was smashed, you-?”

“I put down my head to listen whether it was going or not?”

“The whole thing is as dear as mud!” Johnny beamed upon his audience, two of them were utterly unconvinced.

“We can explain everything—to everybody now!” said Davina, glowing with triumph. “We will begin with Mr. Amyse. He puzzled me so last night by some things he said . . .”

“You ought to have heard Ethel Bantock! The Sphinx was A.B.C. to her!” said Johnny, blowing a sigh.

“But everything will be put straight.”

"When people believe you,” said Jenny Luttrell, in a still, small voice. “The question is—Will they?”

A chilling silence descended like a pall upon the room.' Davina was inwardly certain, as was Johnny, that people would not believe. The silence was broken by a despairing moan, uttered by one or the other, or by both together.

“Then what is to be done?”

“I do not pretend to be clever—like Davina,” said Jenny Luttrell, as the despairing stepmother sank, for the eleventh time that morning, in tears upon the sofa, “but I think the best way out of the difficulty would be for Johnny and Davina to pretend to be engaged, for a month or six weeks, or as long as it takes for two people to get a little tired of each other. Then they can pretend to quarrel and part for ever—really the best of friends.”

With the flush of conscious achievement upon her cheek, she waited a reply. It came from Johnny.

"It is the only way out of the difficulty!” He blushed healthily and looked at Davina. “If . . . Miss . . . If Davina cannot suggest anything better.”

Davina replied with a gesture of utter abandonment.

“All right,” said Johnny, Borlase resignedly. "I’ll get an advance from the Bank, and buy you a ring this very day!”

And he did.

VI

TREATS OF THE CONTRADICTORINESS OF HUMAN NATURE, AND SHOWS HOW CERTAIN PERSON’S PIGS WERE GOT TO MARKET BY BEING DRIVEN THE OTHER WAY.

The county lost interest in the supposed lovers, when their engagement was announced, and the day after a photograph of Johnny and Davina (panel size) holding hands and smiling, with a waterfall and three Ionic columns in the background, appeared in the show-case of the principal photographer of Foxshott Overton, Commissioner Bulpit broke his negatives, and Ethel Bantock sent to Mudies’ for another copy of ‘Paul’s Angel Bride.' Johnny’s family showed entire contentment .with the prospective union. Sir Norman announced his intention of allowing Johnny an income of i500 per annum with which to confront the expenses of married life, and Lady Borlase not only called, but received Davina with extended homespun sleeves when she returned the visit.

Johnny, to properly sustain his character of betrothed lover, was obliged to be a good deal at Luttrell Priory, and to kiss Davina occasionally when strangers were present. He supported this with a deal of quiet heroism, and Davina was not lacking in fortitude. She used to attend early service in Cottiswood Church, except upon special festivals, while Ethel Bantock now regularly represented the congregation. Ethel had treated Johnny's clumsy attempts at explanation upon the lines laid down by the author of that transcendental novel, ‘Paul’s Angel Bride.’ She had offered to remain unwedded, save in the spirit, for his dear sake, but she begged him to own the truth, to confess that wealth had allured him to plight his troth to Davina. She could pardon all, but she must have absolute candour, white sincerity, hiding nothing, divulging everything, even faults, crimes (Paul, the hero of the ‘Angel Bride,’ had been an accidental parricide). The interview ended in hopeless misunderstanding. . . .

Johnny, who had a visit of duty to pay his supposed fiancée at Luttrell Priory, found himself hurrying to his martyrdom with unexpected eagerness. At any rate Davina was sensible. She was not high-flown—wouldn’t expect a man to mix up Theosophy and thought-transference with his love-making. . . . While Ethel cried a little, and then rushed upstairs to bathe her eyes and powder over the traces of emotion, because it was the second Thursday in the month, and somebody might call. Somebody did call, in the person of the Reverend Capel Amyse, and to his ghostly ear I believe Ethel was induced to confide her sorrows. He preached a little extempore sermon especially for her.

She had bowed herself before an idol of common clay, he said, with a side-slap at Johnny, and it was shattered. He bade her cease to weep over the fragments which might never be cemented together, and take up her burden and go upon her way, confident that the mate of her most ideal aspirations would yet be hers, in this world or another. As his deep voice dropped to a musical murmur, as his lustrous eyes beamed upon her and his thin hand swept from his blue-veined brow his locks of pale gold, who shall wonder if the girl forgot the parson in the man, and the man in the divine unconsciously crowded out the parson?

But with Ethel and the Reverend Capel Amyse we have no more to do except that their actual betrothals were made public just as the time approached for the imaginary engagement between Johnny Borlase and Davina Lut-trell to be dissolved. The six weeks were nearly up; it was time to exhibit a growing coldness, ... to disagree, to work up the final quarrel, to break off what had never existed.

“It will seem awfully sudden to people,” Johnny remarked discontentedly, “because we have always got on so well! But if we must quarrel, it had better be done properly.”

“We had better give out,” said Davina, lowering her lashes, “that since you asked me to marry you in Cottiswood Church porch you have met—somebody else, whom you would like better to spend your life with.”

“I haven't!” said Johnny fiercely. “You have seen some man whom you prefer to me!”

There was a pause, more or less fateful.

“I haven’t,” breathed Davina in a whisper as faint as the Gnat’s in ‘Alice.’

What Johnny did or what Johnny said can only be conjectured. But when he went away, striding down the flagged path between the green peacocks, Jenny, who with Mrs. Luttrell, had waited with burning sisterly curiosity to learn the result of the final interview, sought Davina in her room, to which she had retired. I am compelled to own that she found her younger sister performing a pas seul before the looking-glass.

“Are you dancing for joy?” the elder Miss Luttrell queried mischievously.

“Yes,” said Davina, with an affirmative flourish of frills.

“It is all over, isn’t it?” asked Jenny.

“Not quite,” said Davina. "In fact, you may tell Commissioner Bulpit, with my love, that it has only just begun!”

XI

AN IMPRESSION

HE had painted her a year ago.

That was in the vintage-time, when the low chain of hills that binds together the Val d’Arao and the Val di Pisa were crowned with purple grapes and bronze leaves; and nightingales, hoarse from the ardours of summer, sang the song of the nest on the branch, and its gray-and-brown, wide-throated cheepers, destined—if no limed twig caught them, no greedy cat devoured them, or no mercenary peasant-proprietor shot them, to sell in the town or up at the grand old castle-villas on the pine-dad heights —to become sweet, passionate singers like their parent-birds.

Cerrina was Only a peasant maiden; but no more was Gretchen, and no more was Jeanne d’Arc, before Love troubled the white bosom of the one and Heaven called in the ear of the other. She was extraordinarily beautiful, even in a country where beauty of human form and feature is so often seen. Daughter of a fattore of the Piari di Cerri, above Mosdano, where there is a wonderworking image of Our Lady, famous for the cure of all diseases, she was quite uneducated, of course. But that did not prevent her loveliness from being a thing to wonder at. Her hair was brown, reddish tinted like the kernels of the new chestnut; her skin was fairer than is many a softly nurtured lady’s; and her eyes were gray, with golden lights in them; while her features were of classic beauty there was not a line of her form that was not sculpturesque and noble.

He was a Parisian, and a man of note among famous wielders of the brush. His name was Raoul Delzan, and the school he followed was that of the Impressionists who had, as they thought in those departed days, the last cry in Art. With them Effect was all, and Line nothing. Composition, proportion, and so forth were words that had no meaning. They borrowed from the terminology of music to express their creed. Symphonies, nocturnes, fantasies, they played with the colours of the palette, the prismatic hues of the rainbow they described as a scale of sound, a splash of red in the middle distance of a monochromatic landscape was a ‘chord. It was all very clever and very decadent, and not at all worth while; it would have made Botticelli choke with derisive laughter, and killed Raffaelleo Sanzio again, not of love, but of disgust; but was certainly clever.

Raoul Delzan had come for inspiration to Tuscany. Among the knolls and spires of the Apennines he found Cerrina, with a great sheaf of cones and grasses on her back, and a sickle in her hand. She was coming down from the hills with fodder for the cattle of the fattore, chained to their low manger-racks in the stifling sheds, close prisoners through summer and autumn, poor beasts! He put a silver five-franc piece in her hand when, in answer to his prayer, Cerrina pleaded that she had to go and tend her cows, and when she hesitated, dropped another in the pocket of her apron.;

“Ten francs a day for two hours, only two hours of your time, when the sun is setting behind Monte Albano, and the long shadows are purple, and the Ave Maria rings. Your father will not be angry, it would not be bad pay for ' a model even in Paris,” pleaded Raoul Delzan.

“What is a model?” asked Cerrina.

She stood on the hillside near a rained fountain, to which the water of the hills had once been guided by a little aqueduct, now broken. A headless statue presides over the dry fountain, and so tattered and moss-grown is the figure that nobody can tdl for certain whether it is a Silenus or a saint, save that saints are draped. Standing near the dry fountain, with the pine-crowned, vine-clad hills for her background, and the sunset flooding sky and earth with a glory of colour, Cerrina made a picture worthy of the brash of Titian. But only an Impressionist was to paint it, and hence the story.

"You are beautiful,” said M. Raoul Delzan, as he painted, and the rare, hot colour mounted in Cerrina’s fair cheeks, and dyed her temples under her hair, and spread down to the string of corals about her pillared throat, and died out beyond the line of her workaday neckerchief, which was of yellow cotton. She could earn enough to buy a yellow silk one—nay! an embroidered apron and a silver buckle—by sitting to this artist, who spoke Italian with the dipped accent of a Frenchman, and whose handsome dark eyes looked at her with such profound comprehension of the value of beauty in the world. Flavio the woodcutter admired her, but he had very little time to spend in looking at Cerrina, except on Sundays and holy-days, for the nobleman who owned the estate where Flavio worked was cutting down his ancient pine-forests to pay his gambling debts in Paris and in Rome, and in the green solitudes up there among the hills the axes were ringing from morning till night.

So for a fortnight Cerrina drank in the French painter’s honeyed phrases and made ten francs a day. Flavio scowled, but the fattore, old Virginio Sari, saw no harm.

“If the gentleman is fool enough to pay good gold for the mere pleasure of looking at your lass," said he roughly, “why should you deny him? My Cerrina is honest, and we are poor, and if you will be married at Easter, you are none the worse 'for something to jingle in the stocking. ’Twould be empty enough, otherwise, when you have paid the wedding fees and the Syndic’s charges for registration in the town yonder.”

At the fortnight’s end the picture was finished. Cerrina had never seen it; Monsieur Delzan had drawn the cover over the canvas when any inquisitive intruder approached. But she knew it must be astonishly beautiful. When it should be exhibited in Paris . . . Dio l what a sensation it would make. Delzan had said to her: “It will create a furore.” And to Cerrina he had described the gallery where it would hang—even the colour of the draperies and decorations and carpets, and the throng of critics and persons 'famous in Art and Letters, and the crowds of ladies of the great world marvellously attired.'

“I shall call it *A Colour Chord Smitten on the Hills above Mosdano,” he had said; “or ’Cerrina: An Impression from the Apennines,' or simply ‘An Impression.' ”

“I should like the people who look at it to know my name,” said Cerrina wistfully.

Delzan laughed a little, smoking one of his innumerable cigarettes. Always it amused him, the conviction invariably entertained by the model, professional or otherwise, that she has some personal share in the artist’s success.

“We do not know the name of the model who sat for the ‘Madonna di San Sisto’ of Raffaello,” he said, knowing that what he said was Greek to Cerrina. “And if the Fomarina had never been heard of, we should love his ‘Saint Caterina’ and the others more. Now I have finished. The name of the exhibition in which this will be displayed is the Salon. Oh yes, there is rubbish there —often utter rubbish. Domestic and genre pictures, and horrible pretentious mediocrities, and portraits to drive you to despair or to suicide. But—every now and then you come across something great. A gauntlet of colour, thrown by some defiant genius in the face of the world. That is what this study will be. A picture? Oh no! It is not a picture; it is an Impression; and if ever it is shown in Rome and Florence—I have thought of sending a collection of my works to be exhibited in Italy—then, signorina, you will see.”

He lifted Gerrina’s hand with the grace of his nation, and kissed it, and slipped a gold twenty-franc piece into the palm, and said good-bye, and went down the hillside, leaving Cerrina in a bewildered tumult of sorrow and of happiness.

“He kissed my hand,” she repeated over and over again. “He kissed my hand.”

Someone stole up on noiseless bare feet over the brown scattered leaves of October. Flavio it was who threw a sinewy brown arm about his sweetheart's waist and kissed her with a hearty smack upon her reddening cheek.

“Is it of me you were thinking?” he said in her ear, “or the painting popinjay in the velvet coat? Come Easter, I will cure you of dreaming of any man but me. That I promise you!”

Cerrina wrested herself from the woodcutter's arm and walked, with a swelling sense of injured dignity, down the hill to the homestead.

She put away the gold piece in the money-drawer of the great chest that had been her mother’s, and made the oil soup with slices of bread in it and put a flask of rough wine on the table, and sat down to the rough fare with old Virginio Sari and her brother Tonio. And across the flickering light of the three-wicked lamp she saw her counterfeit presentment hanging in the great gallery in Paris, with throngs of great and grand and brilliant ladies and gentlemen gathered before it, saying with one voice, "How beautiful she is! Cerrina Sari, that is her name; only daughter of Virginio Sari, the fattore of the Piari de Cerri, above Mosdano, and promised in marriage to a poor woodcutter. What a pity! She is worthy to be a queen.”

The autumn went by, and the winter came, and the great loads of felled pine-trees were brought down on mule-drawn sledges 'from the hills. Christmas came, Easter went by, and without a wedding, for Cerrina had it put off, and old Virginio, who did not relish the coming of a housekeeper to the homestead in place of his daughter, swore he was in no hurry to have Cerrina wed. So Flavio went back to his labour in the Marchese’s pine-forests with a black brow and a heavy heart People whispered and winked; one or two girls were glad. Flavio was such a handsome fellow, and if you once put off a wedding, who knows if it will ever come off? Spring came, the vines budded, the com sprang, and the lowing cattle were prisoned in dark byres. Cerrina went up the hillside twice a day with her sickle, but when she came down with her load of green fodder there was no darkeyed, black-curled, velvet-coated painter waiting by the dry fountain with the broken statue to say, as the roseate sunset filled the valley, and the long purple shadows stretched downwards from the hills: "How beautiful you are!”

Autumn came and the vintage passed. No news came to her of the painter or of the picture.

“Christmas is nearly upon us,” said Flavio sullenly to her, one evening. “Tell me, Cerrina, shall Easter come and go, and leave me a man unwed? The cobwebs dangling from my cottage roof are as large as napkins, my mother is too palsied to brush them away or do the cooking and washing, poor soul; at eighty years of age she needs a woman to look to her. And plainly, if you are unwilling to keep your word to me, I will knock at another door—ay, by the pig of San Antonio!—and I know who will open it.”

Cerrina turned great lustrous eyes of scorn upon the woodcutter. She lifted one round arm with a gesture full of authority.

“Go to her—now!” was all she vouchsafed to say, and with a bitter curse the woodcutter left her. Next came the news that he was to be married to another girl. Old Virginio Sari was the bringer of the intelligence.

“Flavio is an honest fellow, and you have led him the devil’s own dance, that is certain,” he grumbled. “Agnese Forli, mother Netta’s fair-haired niece, is his new choice, they say. Bursting out of her bodice for pure joy, they tell me, of getting the man you have flung away. He says that you have been ice to him since the foreign painter made your picture up there by the dry fountain on the hill. Matteo, the mule-driver, has seen something about him in a newspaper down in the town yonder. It seems that people will pay to look at such daubs as his kind put on canvas—the bigger fools they! And in the city, so it is said in the newspapers, this Signor Raoul Delzan has a roomful on show for the payment of a franc each person. A whole silver franc to see a string of pictures! Good or bad, ’tis an accursed squandering of good money—the Saints be my witness.”

Cerrina burned all that night with a purpose which was carried out next day. Matteo, the mule-driver, carried her down in his cart. The noise of the city dazed her; yet she found the gallery, where were exhibited the works of M. Raoul Delzan. She paid her silver franc, and passed the turnstile, and moved with a queenly gait, unhampered by her Sunday shoes, which she carried in her hand. There were only twenty pictures. With shining eyes and heaving bosom she scanned them one by one.

Where was the picture of Cerrina on the hills, superb in beauty, the portrait before which the great world of Paris was to bow? Was this it? This long, narrow canvas covered with strangely-shaped blotches of colour? Why, the woman, if that thing in the middle was meant for a woman, was nothing but a shapeless blur. Oh, horror, it bore her name! She spelt out in fantastic letters of white on the bottom of the blade frame, ‘Cerrina: An Impression.*

“Impudent rogue!” screamed the enraged Cerrina, and threw her shoes full in the face of the caricature.

"She is mad,” said the custodian of the gallery, hastily summoning the police, and Cerrina was carried off to gaol. When she came out, Flavio was not married to Agnese Forli. And the humbled Cerrina makes the woodcutter a good wife.

XII

THE END OF THE COTILLION

TWO men were being whirred in a taxi over the greasy West-end thoroughfares. One was attired in the costume of Friar Tuck, the other represented Prince Rupert. Both looked as solemn as only Englishmen can look when disguised and bedizened for a fancy ball. This particular fancy ball was to be a notable affair.

“They’ve spent eight thousand pounds on the thing, lode, stock, and barrel, I hear as a dead fact,” said Friar Tuck; “and they find costumes for some of the smartest women. Only got to find jewels, I’m told; everything else found for 'em. All London—I mean little great London—to be there to-night. And the joke is”—the speaker stopped to chuckle—"that hardly any of the people who’ve been asked know their host and hostess by sight.”

“They’ll leave their cards afterwards, and their names will be in the newspapers, and that's all the Vanderpacs want. Something in print, to send to New York and have copied into the society columns of the American papers.

The envy of their equals, the rage of their contemporaries —the unavailing frenzy of their old friends, jostled out of the great dollar-scramble, and left stranded on what they’d call the ‘sidewalk of life'—these are the things Vanderpack and Mrs. V. are contented to buy with their money.”

Prince Rupert was long-winded. A prosy man has a chance when you are jammed into a taxicab with him, and the taxi, in its turn, is embedded in a solid block of wheeled vehicles.

“If I had known,” reflected Friar Tuck, “that petticoats were such draughty things, I’d have come in a hired brougham with a hot-water bottle and a rug in it. Hang it ! Tithedale!” he exploded, as a sharp point jabbed him in the ankle, “can’t you manage your beastly spurs? You seem to forget I’m wearing tights and sandals.”

But the taxi had extricated itself from the scrum, and was stopping opposite the illuminated doorway of the Vanderpack mansion in Bdgrave Square, and Friar Tuck for got his lacerated ankle as he jumped out of the machine, and headed in the direction of a Pierrette who stood balanced on the foot-board of a neat motor-brougham, looking for the bald wig-head and the brown-hooded habit of her clerical friend.

“Punctual, for a wonder!” Pierrette said, as she jumped down. “Now, Riddles, you must tell me what this man and woman are like, or I shall be doing the polite to perfect strangers under their noses, and cutting my host and hostess under the impression that their home belongs to somebody else.”

“You’ve too much tact not to get out of it nicely if you -did. By Jove! Lady Moira, that get-up is ravishing!”

“I took Vanderpop’s—isn’t his name Vanderpop?— 'Vanderpack’s card to the Paris firm he told me of through you, and they have turned me out uncommonly well,” said Lady Moira. “I wonder how many other women haven’t bought their own costumes? They must have spent the money saved in getting their jewels out of pawn,” she added, as she looked round. “I haven’t seen such a show of stones since the Turbotshire House Costume Ball in 1912.”

“That was all Vanderpack insisted on,” said Friar Tack, putting up his eye-glass. "Real jewels and no paste. There’s to be a cotillion as a wind-up to the evening—figures designed by Freddy Prideau—”

“Yes,” said Lady Moira, "Freddy is bursting with pride about it. In the last figure, in which twelve of the most be-diamonded women in Europe dance, there is a sort of undressing scene—”

“Really, my dear Lady Moira!” protested Friar Tuck. “It’s quite proper,” rejoined Pierrette, with a gleam of dazzling teeth and a saucy twinkle of her black eyes. “They only take off their diamond pendants and so on, and lay ’em on a decorated Greek altar, dedicated to Aphrodite. And the woman who looks handsomest without her jewels takes the cake—I mean the prize, which is an uncut ruby, pure pigeon-blood Burmese, worth £2,000. A dove is to be let down from the ceiling, and the ruby’s to be in its little bill. Rather tricky idea, I think, don’t you?” added the lively little lady. "Bless us and save us!” she whispered, with a pinch of Friar Tuck’s arm, “are those odd figures up there under the date-palms alive? Really! And—what? No! Impossible! Not Van and Mrs. V.? Oh! how delicious! Come up and say how-do!”

And she dragged Friar Tuck to the landing, where a tall, solemn man with a soft creasy shirt-front, and a small, stiff lady attired in silver brocade, and ornamented with clusters of diamonds as large and brilliant as electric lights, stood together, looking very uncomfortable, and shaking hands mechanically with the double stream of gay and chattering notabilities that poured unceasingly up their fine Carrara marble staircase, adorned with garlands of roses, and into their brilliant rooms.

Everybody was there, to laugh and chat, eat, drink, and dance; and the wonderful Sorta, the king of conductors, with his band of musical marvels, occupied the orchestra. The dullest must have capered to such music, and few of the guests were dull.

“I surmise,” remarked Mr. Vanderpack, to the correspondent of the Glass of Fashion, “they are a chirpy lot. I gave a wholesale order, if I may say so, for the chirpiest lot in London; me and my wife, marm, as you see, we’re plain folks—”

"I guess we are, Tisha!” said Mrs. Vanderpack.

“And,” went on Mr. Vanderpack, “if we were to try for to set ourselves up for high-toned people, I allow we shouldn't pass muster. But the pile we’ve made gets us the privilege—as to-night, for Instance—of gatherin’ the toney folks round us, of supplyin’ ’em with champagne and amusement free, gratis, an’ an opportunity of settin’ bade quiet an’ seein’ how they take both. And seems to me, they take both a good deal. Look at ’em dandn’. In the States, how, if that amount of rompin’ took place among the young folks at a cherry-pickin’, the minister would have a word to say come Sabbath.”

“They call it Sunday over here, ’Lidia,” said Mrs. Vanderpack meekly.

“They call it proper here,” said Mr. Vanderpack, “and that’s enough for me.”

“Mr. Prideau, sir!” he exclaimed, as a fair, handsome young man, dressed as Charles Surface, passed by with Lady Moira, “A word with you, if you’ve no objection.”

“Excuse me one moment,” whispered Freddy to his partner. “This old bore wants to know something about the cotillion.”

“Maybe your ladyship would sit down a moment?” said Mrs. Vanderpack, with homely hospitality. “Leastways,” she added, "if you’re not a ladyship I hope you'll excuse me; most of them are that’s here to-night.”

Lady Moira looked down with kindly, half-contemptuous pity upon the dowdy little woman in her gorgeous clothes and barbaric jewels.

“You have an exquisite house,” she said; "and I don’t think I ever saw anything so well arranged. I hear Mr. Prideau has been very useful to you.”

"Useful enough,” replied Mrs. Vanderpadc, with a tinge of offence in her manner. “But without my old man’s—without Mr. Vanderpack’s dollars, what could Mr. Prideau hev’ done? Not but what we’re obliged to the young gentleman,” she added, “though if you think my ’Lisha is the sort of man to use another man’s brains ’thout payin’ for ’em you’re vastly mistaken. He’s had the worth of all he’s done for us—you may lay your pile on that!”

“Ohf* exclaimed Lady Moira, with a little shudder, as the keen sandy eyes of the bejewelled little woman glittered expressively at her Paris gown. She shrugged her shoulders and smiled herself away in her most tactful manner. She had been a widow now for three years, and of late Freddy’s prospects had so materially improved that she had almost promised that, if her next season’s engagements permitted, she would marry him. Now she knew whence the funds were obtained.

It was the sort of thing, she reasoned, she did herself occasionally, and that other people did every day. To be the paid lieutenant, the salaried major-domo, of Mr. Vanderpadc, perhaps was not degrading. But to be the wife of the major-domo was not a distinction, Lady Moira 'felt.

Now Freddy rejoined her. "All right, all right!” he cried as he wrenched his button from Vanderpack’s stalwart finger and thumb. Don’t you worry, President, it will work as smooth as butter. I’ve seen to it myself, I tell you, and of course no one dreams of what will happen. The surprise, and the prize, will be the hit of the evening. Don’t look worried. Go and have some of your 1880 champagne, or stroll round and look at the diamonds. You’ve got six of the finest sets of family jewels in the possession of the English peerage in your rooms to-night, and the Marchesa Spagnolini has got on the Media necklace.”

The dull eyes of M. Vanderpack lighted up. A strange expression was in them as he said eagerly, clutching at the handsome Freddy’s peach-blossom silk lapel.

"Will she—will the Dago woman dance in the cotillion?”

"Will she? Won’t she?” retorted Freddy. "She’s heard of the pigeon’s-blood ruby, and she believes herself, with diamonds or without, to be the loveliest woman alive.”

"With diamonds or without.” The phrase seemed to have taken Mr. Vanderpack’s fancy. He chuckled and smeared his brown veinous hand over his laige lipless mouth. "It’ll be a mighty fine sort of sight,” he said, from behind his hand, "seein' them high-toned womenfolks, duchesses, countesses an' markay—what d'ye call 'ems? pullin’ off their diamonds. Like parrots piddn' out their feathers, hay?” He chudded convulsively. "You’re sure each lady has given you the correct weight of her fal-fals?” he asked, relapsing into gravity. "The hull plan, the hull surprise, I mean, depends on—”

"Tisha!” said Mrs. Vanderpack from behind him warningly; and the long, lean man became silent.

A cold little thrill shot down Lady Moira’s pretty bade from the roots of her hair. She had thought it so odd to be asked—in common with the eleven other women, chosen on account of their beauty and their jewels to dance in the cotillion—to furnish the exact weight of the ornaments she intended to wear. Why did the whole plan depend on-But Mr. Vanderpack was speaking.

“Wal, so long!” He nodded grimly to Freddy, and Freddy hurried back to Lady Moira, breathless and apologetic.

“I know he kept you. I wasn’t bored. He interested me, that Yankee. His mouth is like a rat-trap,” she said, "and his eyes are like the rat’s, peering out of it. Freddy”—they had reached an exquisite alcove, where a fountain played amidst the ferns, and a dancing faun in Parian capered movelessly to the silent music of his cymbals—“I wanted to tell you—don’t think me unkind— I’ve changed my mind about next season. You’re not going to get me into St. George’s, Hanover Square, except as a guest at some other woman’s wedding.” She played with her fan, but her mouth was set firmly.

"Why—Moira!” he gasped. “I thought—you promised!”

“I promised to think about it, and I have thought I can’t marry you until you have got some respectable employment Dancing attendance upon Mr. Vanderpack for hire-money is not respectable. At least, I can’t respect the man who does it, though Vanderpack’s dollars paid for the frock I’ve got on!”

“I’m obliged to you,” said Freddy grimly. "Anything else? You seem to have made up your mind that I’m to have a pleasant evening!”

“There is one thing else,” said Lady Moira, with a little fold between her delicate dark eyebrows. "I do not intend to dance in the cotillion.”

“You’re going to lose the chance of winning the Bumese ruby? You who, with jewels or without, are the prettiest—”

“Don’t!” she said.

“But,” cried Freddy, “you’ve got on all your diamonds!”

“I know. And as I haven’t got anything in the world but the diamonds—which are not worth a great deal, perhaps, but still are better than jewels worn by women with fifty times my income—I don’t mean to ride them!” said Lady Moira.

Freddy’s blue eyes grew circular with surprise.

“Ride them?” he repeated. “Why, with the gown he paid for on your bade, do you mean to say Vanderpack’s a swindler?”

"I shall write him a cheque for the sixty pounds the costume cost when I get home,” said Lady Moira, with flashing eyes. “I despise myself for ever having accepted it. I shall go home now, take it off, and give it to my maid. Good-night. Don’t follow me. I forbid you!”

And, slipping from the alcove, she gained the landing, hurried down the grand staircase, where only a few couples lingered, and gained the hall.

“Call a taxi for me,” she said to the footman; and sending another for her opera-wrap, she turned to look at a Corot that hung upon the wall dose to a door that stood partly open.

The door must be that of the dining-room. Lady Moira pushed it open and glanced in, surprised to see no preparation for the gorgeous supper at three guineas per head, which, according to Freddy, a celebrated restaurateur had contracted to supply. She entered. The vast room was quite empty, almost dark and silent. The long table, that was wont to groan beneath the costly feasts provided by the American plutocrat, had been pushed aside; a high staging of carpentry occupied the centre of the room, reaching almost to the ceiling. The plaster had been removed from a square patch, the joists sawn away, revealing the plank flooring of the ballroom, and in the planking was plainly visible a trap-door of neat construction, beneath which a green baize sack was suspended, its open mouth yawning as though hungry—for what? And .upon a table, dose at Lady Moira’s right hand, stood a semi-theatrical property, a gilded classical altar, from the horns of which hung garlands of roses. It was furnished with poles 'for portage, thrust through gilded rings. Lady (Moira bent over and looked at it, resting her little gloved hand upon its flat top. She leaned more heavily than she had supposed, for the top gave way with a dick, and Lady (Moira uttered a little cry. And then the fangs of suspicion met in her. She felt her blood thickening and chilling in her veins. The staging, the green baize sack, the altar with the spring top, the trap-door in the ceiling, danced and spun before her wavering eyes. She put her hand to her heart.

“Freddy ... Oh! Freddy!” she moaned, with lips whitened by an awful dread. And then she started. To tills day Lady Moira cannot account for the impulse that made her, as the dining-room door opened, dive beneath the dinner-table.

Three persons entered the room—Mrs. Vanderpack, Vanderpack and—thank heaven!—a stranger, and not Freddy, as Lady Moira had feared. The stranger, a dark, dapper man in a tweed travelling suit, shut the door carefully behind him.

“I guess it’s all right, Sley,” said Vanderpack, with a grin that transformed his long, severe countenance into something distinctly criminal and rather diabolic. He slid his hand within his ill-fitting waistcoat and showed the shining butt of a revolver. “Young Foolhead tells me the jewel business works slick; it’s the only thing I haven’t dared to show too much interest in, an’ by thunder! if it goes wrong, we must put the best face we can on matters, an’ lay low for another try. But here’s the programme. You an’ Garissy will be ready down here—Garissy with her sack an’ hood an’ travelin’ wallet ready to cut and run. I shall be at the door o’ the cotillion room, ready to give the signal. When young Foolhead an’ three other Johnny boys sets down the altar over the trap door, work the lever. Trap opens same minute, supposin' the proper weight of joolry to have been piled on the altar; an’ that this is the risky spot in the plot you know as well as I. The top of the altar, bein’ a patent specially invented for this game, goes down, as the smoke from the incense* sticks goes up, and the hull kit an’ boodle o’ di'monds falls through inter the sack. Then, I guess,” he said, turning to the dark slim man, “you and Garissy don’t want me to tell ye what to do.”

Garissy and the man called Sley chuckled at the irony. And after a few more whispered sentences the three conspirators left the room.

“Better not lock the door,” Vanderpack said. “Young Foolhead might suspect somethin’. It proves beyond doubtin’ how almighty well the name fits him that he ain't suspected somethin’ before!” And with a chuckle he went out as Lady Moira, pale and shuddering, crawled from beneath the table. She listened a moment to the sound of the retreating footsteps, then with an effort opened the door of Bluebeard’s chamber, and, hurrying out, met Friar Tuck face to face.

“My dear Lady Moira, what on earth is the matter?” asked Sir John Ridley, for this was the name of Lady Moira’s tonsured friend when divested of his false tonsure, frock, girdle, and sandals.

“Don’t ask me riddles,” she gasped, “but do as I tell you. Slip out of the house, take a cab, drive to Scotland Yard like greased lightning, and ... Ah! you think me mad. Time is horribly precious, the cotillion is to be danced at 1.30, and it’s now”—she glanced at the hall dock—“a quarter past twelve. But I’ll condense like a Press reporter, and oh! when you've heard all, act on what I’ve told you, and for heaven's sake don't let the grass grow under your sandals!”

•  •  •  •  •  •  •

Special music had been written for the cotillion. The figures were charming and the dances had been well rehearsed. Figure after figure, each newer and more inventive than the last, passed off with applause. Then came the final event, foreshadowed by the arrival upon the scene of the gilded and garlanded altar, solemnly borne by four gentlemen of whom the dispirited Freddy was one.

“Thank goodness! Moira has made up her mind to dance. The last figure would be spoiled, and perhaps she’ll have me after all. She's sure to get the pigeon’s-blood ruby—not a woman in the room could hold a candle to her, with diamonds or without!” he thought, as he marshalled his human puppets, signalled to the leader of the band, and resolved that the cotillion should end in a blaze of glory.

But it did not end quite as its inventor had intended. As one by one the votaries of Venus danced up to the High Priest (represented by Freddy), removed their jewels, and placed them on the slightly hollowed surface of the garlanded altar, from which rose up the thick smoke of scented pastilles, Lady Moira’s heart beat more quickly, and her dark eyes dilated still more widely with apprehension and fear.

“Stage fright,” thought Freddy, and tried to send her a consoling glance, but it missed fire.

Last of all the dancers she approached the altar; she raised her hand irresolutely to her tiara ...; it fell helplessly to her side. She had heard the elide of the trap-door in the polished oaken planking. She knew that beneath the treacherous little gilded altar yawned the green baize bag. And in one glance she took in the expression on the face of Mr. ’Lisha Vanderpack as he waited amongst the spectators at the door.

A moment only she hesitated.

“Go on, go on!” urged half a dozen voices.

“I won’t go on!” said Lady Moira, in a loud, ringing voice that sounded strangdy in her own ear3. “And I’ll show you why!”

And as she dragged the altar aside, revealing the yawning trap in the floor beneath it, Vanderpack, with a bitter curse, turned to bolt, but a heavy hand gripped his shoulder, and two stalwart constables, pinioning him, relieved him of his revolver.

“Don’t be anxious about your good lady, sir,” said a detective blandly in his ear. “We’ve got her safe downstairs with number three of your gang. Sam Sley, on an extradition-warrant from New York. A cleverly put-up thing, but, thanks to a lady’s pluck and presence of mind, it hasn’t come off.”

Need we dwell on the excitement, the revelation of the cunningly contrived balance by which the altar was to have transferred its load of votive tiaras to the green baize bag?

Need we hint that Freddy was cleared of all suspicion of complicity in the attempted confidence-trick by the testimony of Lady Moira, and the confession of Vanderpac himself?

By the latest advices he has obtained a secretaryship at the Tin-Tack Office which brings him in seven hundred per annum, and Lady Moira has reconsidered her decision with reference to not being Hanover-Squared.

XIII

HIS DECEASED WIFE’S SISTER

IT WAS in a country villa of prosperous if not opulent appearance, within as well as without, and to the protecting embrace of its mistress, an aunt unknown to Jimmy, that Mrs. Jeffcoat had retired upon her separation—privately arranged, and upon a basis of acute incompatibility of temper—from the man who had vowed to love and cherish her. She was quite pretty, and of neat, even tempting figure. As for her age, let us call it thirty, though her male friends said it was much less and her female friends declared it to be much more.

Jimmy, the most enamoured of men at the time of his engagement, had married Mrs. Jimmy ten years previously, and gone into what Mrs. Jimmy vaguely called the “Stock Exchange brokering” provided with a good' temper, a sound liver, a considerable cash capital, and a profound belief in his own powers as a pathetic ballad vocalist. At the expiration of five years nothing remained but the final asset upon the list above. And after an execution, followed by bankruptcy, such wild and whirling words were spoken by Mrs. Jimmy, such fiery retorts were made to her upbraidings by the infuriated husband, that the glamour of early nuptial days, when Mrs. Jimmy, giggling in repressed ecstasies of enjoyment —why, Jimmy never could understand, played the accompaniment to Jimmy’s ballad—for he had but one, and never got through that without breaking down at least once—the glamour and the glow, I say, departed forever.

“Let Dosie take her annuity—if she ever thought I would stoop to live upon it she’s confoundedly mistaken,” said Jimmy—"and go and live at Fowler’s End with her aunt. It’s fifty miles from Kennington (where the bankruptcy had taken place), and a dashed good job. As for me, Cato of the Knock’ems Varieties has promised me a chance to touch the British Public with ’Darling, when Morning Breaks,’ and once I get fairly heard it’ll be a case of ‘Home, sweet home,’ and a nice bit to put by against the rainy.” I have endeavoured to convey the fact that Jimmy and Mrs. Jimmy were of the middle classes middle-classy—let me hope with success.

Mrs. Jimmy, with her annuity, her name, her personal belongings, including the cat that had been such bad friends with Jimmy’s fox-terrier, and the parrot that had learned to imitate their contests with such astounding fidelity, went down to her aunt at Powler’s End in the i Thames Valley; and Jimmy, who felt forlorn at her departure, after threatening to go to the devil, compromised by going on the halls. He sang his one pathetic ballad in the dolorous falsetto that contrasted so excruciatingly with his comic face, his Cockney accent, and his potty little figure; and the British Public took him as a joke, roared over him, and applauded him until patches of gilded plaster fell from the dome of the Knock’ems Theatre of Varieties. Then suburban houses fought to have Jimmy, the kings of the West End laid offerings of contracts at his feet, a special brougham conveyed him from stage-door to stage-door. There was only ode thorn in his triumphal garland, and that was there because the packed audiences, like Mrs. Jimmy, laughed instead of crying.. He got other ballads written for him, formed a repertoire, and erelong kept a poet and a composer in a continual frenzy of pathetic inspiration at so much a week.

He was getting quite rich when he received a letter from a twin-sister of Mrs. Jimmy, a person of whose existence he had never before heard, containing the news of Dosie's demise—'Mrs. Jimmy’s name was Theodosia—and signed Josie Pennefeather—Pennefeather had been Dosie’s maiden name. He was very rich indeed, and a full-blown Lion Comique of the largest size, when he found himself in the train whizzing down to Fowler’s End to pay a visit (which he had not been invited to pay) to his deceased wife’s twin-sister.

He was beautifully dressed in half-mourning, though he had been widowed now three years. He liked the neat village and the trim villa, and the pretty drawing-room into which he was shown by a rosy maid. Hat and cane formally held in his gray-gloved hand, he looked round the room nervously. There were things that had belonged to his deceased wife. Then her voice said, “Kiss me, Jimmy, darling,” in the well-known accents of early-married days, and he crimsoned to the bald spot on the crown of his head and dropped into a chair. A cat-and-dog fight followed, superbly rendered, and the voices of cat and dog were also well known to Jimmy. Then he heard his own voice saying “Damn the cat! Come here, Fidget”; and, amid peals of eldritch laughter, realised that Mrs. Jimmy’s gray red-tailed Australian parrot was the source of these gramophonic records of a long-buried past. And then a distinctly good-looking, prettily dressed, rather plump young woman of, say, thirty-five, entered, and except that her hair was some eight shades lighter— Jimmy, always a rabid enemy of ‘bleach,’ had sternly discouraged every tendency on the part of Mrs. Jimmy to follow fashions in hair—save for the hair, Jimmy saw before him—in the flesh, and plenty of it—his deceased wife.

The Lion Comique possessed a sweet and affectionate nature, which had been temporarily soured and warped by the malign fluctuations of the Stock Market and the constantly menacing spectre of the fortnightly pay-day. And he had mourned his deceased Dosie more than Dosie would have believed. He turned poppy-colour, and then the hue of a pale-green hollyhock, several times before his normal complexion reasserted itself, and gulped down a series of emotional cricket-balls before he could regain his customary ease of address. Employed in battling with his own retrospective emotion he did not observe the agitation of Miss Pennefeather. But presently they were sitting side by side on the sofa, and, while Josie worked at a strip of Art embroidery—a chaste, conventionalised pattern of ranunculuses with their hands in their pockets, bordering a five-o’clock teacloth—Jimmy said:

“The—the letter which first conveyed to me—the news of your existence conveyed to me a—a more crushing blow than she—than my poor Dosie would have believed.”

Josie cut off an end of silk with precision. She was very, very like Dosie, more so than Jimmy would have believed even a twin could be, especially when she cast down her eyelashes, and, compressing her lips into a thin red line, breathed hurriedly through her nose.

“I—I went to the Lake of Como, where you told me she—she was drowned,” Jimmy said, feeling for his pocket handkerchief. Then he jumped, for Josie had cried:

“Why did you? I told you it was not necessary. Why did you?”

"I—I couldn’t find the village where you said you were staying together when the fatality occurred,” Jimmy said humbly.

"There was not necessity you should find it,” snapped Josie. Really, Dosie to a hair. Jimmy put up a stout hand dad in an accurately fitting glove.

“Pardon me, Miss Pennefeather,” he said, with a slight access of dignity, “but a husband has rights—”

“Not a separated husband,” said Josie idly, absolutely wonderfully in the Dosie style.

“After all,” said Jimmy, gulping a sigh as he traced the outline of a cheerful carpet pattern with the end of his neat ebony stick. “I never found the place. ‘A fishing village called Maladetta,’ your letter said.” He sighed. “Perhaps it was because I don’t speaK their beastly Italiano-ice-creamo kind of patter that I couldn’t make the natives understand; even the people who spoke English defied me to my teeth to point out such a village on the map or off it. ‘Try Bellaggio,’ they kept on rubbing into me; ‘try Menaggio, Cadenabbia; try Varenna, Belano; try Dervio; go and have a look at Cernobbio, that’s on the opposite bank, hang it! Try Como itself; try everywhere, and be hanged to you.’ And I tried ’em all, and nobody—not even the priests and the police—had ever heard of Maladetta except as a swear.”

Josie was crimson to the little curls upon her brow. "You ought never to have gone—never!” she said, with emphasis.

“Oh yes, I ought,” said Jimmy; “and what I did in the memorial line—they’re all set up now, my agent tells me! would prove to the—the poor dear, if she sees ’em— which is—is quite probable, you know, that though gone, she is”—he coughed—“not forgotten.”

Josie was staring at him with circular brown eyes, larger and rounder than Dosie's had ever been. “Why —why?” she asked, in a muffled sort of voice, “what on earth have you been doing?”

Jimmy rose with dignity—he felt taller on his feet— and took up his station on the hearthrug.

“I put up a white marble memorial at every one of those places I've named, and some others, ‘Sacred to the Memory of My Wife. Drowned, while Bathing, in June, 1904. I shall hear Her Dear Voice No More. Peace, Perfect Peace! James John Jeffcoat.' ”

Josie spoke in smothered accents, keeping her profile to Jimmy, “It must have cost you a frightful sum.”

“Pretty well,” said Jimmy modestly; “but I didn't grudge it.”

“For the sake of ‘peace, perfect peace'?” Josie’s accent was slightly ironical.

Jimmy looked at her in a puzzled way, and said:

“For the sake of what she used to be when we were married first.”

“So all the fault was on her side, was it?” asked Josie bitterly; and Jimmy squared himself to say:

“Things were about fairly divided between us. But since she went—I've often thought how much I'd give to have her play the accompaniment to ‘Dearest, When Morning Breaks.' She was the first to laugh at my ballad singing, and I used to be regularly wild. Now everybody roars—and I've got sick of being made game of.”

There was a silence. Then Josie rose from the sofa, and Jimmy jumped up, clutching at his immaculate Lincoln and Bennett and the ebony cane. But Josie did not bid him good-afternoon. All she said was; “I know the accompaniment of that ballad. Would you mind singing it for me? I should like to hear you again.”

Her voice trembled.

“Don’t tell me you’ve ever been to a Hall!” Jimmy exclaimed.

For answer, Josie sat down at the piano and played the opening bars of “Dearest, when morning—” And Jimmy sang his best, warring with a throat-lump of football size, because Josie was so awfully, awfully like Dosie. She broke down in the very same place where Dosie had always done. Only at the final falsetto note she did not openly shriek with, or suffocatingly repress, mirth. No. Upon the contrary she burst into a regular flood of tears, and as she sobbed hysterically, with her head upon the keyboard, striking extraordinary chords with the backs of the hands that held a damp handkerchief pressed to her eyes, and her convulsed and quivering chin, Jimmy found himself putting a consoling arm round her waist and saying in a tone he had not legally used for years:

“Don’t, dear, please don’t!”

I will not prolong the agony. He left the villa a man in love. In love, I say, with his deceased wife’s sister. He returned again and again, lured by the fatal flame that consumed him. He met the vicar—a good-looking clerical bachelor of thirty-five—on the neutral ground of the hearthrug, and became a victim to the slings and arrows of outrageous jealousy. He might have become thin, and lost the cherubic plumpness that made his dismal love-ballads such screaming jokes, but that the Bill passed, and amidst the protesting outcries of bishops and clergymen Jimmy heard the Wedding March. He went down to Powler’s End to the tune of it, panted out by a twenty-five horse-power four-cylinder laudau-limousine-bodied “Flygoer.” And—

•  •  •  •  •  •  •

Jimmy had just put what novelists of the early nine-

Josie, when Josie’s aunt—whom he had never before met, although he had visited the villa at Powler’s End six times at least—came in. She was a dear old thing in rustling plum-coloured satin, with a round, smiling, face, and a lavender-trimmed cap; and she uttered a cry of genuine delight—contrary to the usual procedure of an aunt who discovers her niece in the act of being kissed by a stranger.

“Good heavens! you two have made it up at last. Oh, Mr. Jeffcoat, if you knew how bitterly Dosie has regretted her precipitate—”

“Dosie!” said Jimmy, stepping suddenly back.

“Oh, Jimmy, it is ... I mean I am ... Forgive me; forgive me, dot” cried Dosie, falling on his smartest waistcoat in a hurricane of repentant protestations. “It was wrpng and wicked of me to tell you such a—to pretend I’d been drowned bathing in the Lake of Como; but oh! what a dear old goose you were to be taken in so easily! And when I think of all the memo— ha, ha!—memorials stuck up everywhere, I don’t know whe—he, he!—whether to laugh'or cry.”

She did both, while Jimmy stared and stared. He was not eloquent by nature, and the situation demanded too much. Finally he said, with a smile breaking out at the corners of his mouth and gradually invading his cherubic face:

“We—we might go and pay a visit to each of those— those bally tombstones on our second wedding trip? What —eh?” And Dosie agreed.

XIV

A PERFECT CURE

THE story begins with a man who for long, yearning, famine-stricken years had been the slave of a devouring passion for that young woman whom I prefer to call Leila Paynter—I hope you don’t want to know who Leila really is? (though sadly changed, she is still)— because such ignorance would label you at once as a person on the outside edge of Society, and you are not that— oh! surely, never that. You remember the Adjutant portrait 'of Leila, exhibited at the Royal Academy of 1913, a magnificent scheme of surprises—‘a hurricane of magnificent colour-chords,’ as Raphael Sludge, the Art Critic of the Daily Boomer described it—with Leila in the middle, with eyebrows like viaduct-arches and long curly finger-ends, and a straight, wide red mouth that a Philistine male visitor pretended to post a letter in when Leila herself happened to be looking that way. She was there i every day for a week, counting the Private View, in heliotrope-and-London-smoke-coloured draperies, with a sable-tail cape of extraordinary length, and a brimless hat with a perpendicular feather sticking out of the crown, and always in front of the portrait. “The Art that conceals Art,” Credesby Snygger termed the pose. He is so determined at any cost to be original, poor worm! that he explained in an article of a thousand words, published in the Weekly Babbler, that, going by the classic standards of beauty beloved of our forerunners, Leila is simply hideous; while as the “Physical flower of the dunghill of decadent Modernity,” she may be admitted to be perfection. Nobody quite understands this, but it constitutes Shygger’s reputation as a subtle phrase-maker, and he has flourished upon it.

To return to Leila Paynter—you, of course, know she was a professional. Not an artist of the stage, something more diaphanous. Not a concert-room singer, nor a public elocutionist, nor actually a drawing-room reciter. She stuck no bills, yet her merchandise had a good sale. If you wished to enhance the attractions of an exclusive At home, you arranged that Leila Paynter, wearing one of her astonishing gowns, always on the point of falling off her exquisite angularities, yet never gratifying the apprehensions they aroused, should drop in late and be pressed, with a great deal of trouble, to recite one of her delicious morceaux. Either morceaux or gems, you were at liberty to call them—but, of course, you have heard Leila. Poems of eight lines, or even less, without any perceptible beginning, and ending with a break, were Leila’s specialty, and they always had queer titles such as ‘When White Lids Fall* or ‘Broken the Sighs,’ or ‘Water of Hearts’ Drouth,'Why My Lips Avoid?’ or ‘Till Waves of Song’ or ‘Though Withered Boughs I View the Wingless Skies.’ She would recite them to a piano accompaniments of chords in the minor, through which an occasional trickle of melody wandered, and these chords and melodies were always evoked from the instrument by the plump fingers of the Hon. Dorriswood Blewberry, the musical younger son of an ancient and distinguished tory family. Race might have been visibly stamped on the young man’s personality had it not been for superabundant fat, which imparted to his evening shirt-front and white waistcoat the curve distinctive of the pouter-pigeon. He was fair-haired and of a complexion so pink that the rimless monocle which nestled under one of his white eyebrows—the left one—looked like a splash of rain in the heart of a huge rose-peony. His colossal legs were of peg-top shape, in spite of trousers almost as wide as divided skirts. His arms were huge Bologna sausages, his hands of extraordinary thidcness, his chins manifold, his small, aristocratic ears quite hidden between his bulging cheeks and creasy rolls of neck-fat. A human hippopotamus with the soul of a troubadour, and a superficial knowledge of thorough bass and harmony.

The Honourable Dorriswood Blewberry and Leila Paynter were friends and comrades, bound together by mutual sympathy and community in Art—with the capital A. Dorriswood Blewberry had discovered and fostered .Leila’s talent for those exquisite little gems without perceptible beginnings or positive endings, some time- after unearthing his own peculiar genius. They reaped the fruitful field of Society of cheques to the tune of, say, two thousand a year, a sum which' was honourably divided. But though Dorriswood Blewberry would gladly have shared his name and domicile with Leila, and proposed to her regularly on rehearsal mornings, he would first sit ponderously down on the piano-stool, screw his eyeglass firmly into its place, adjust his elephantine legs to a nicety beneath the instrument, stick out his fat fingers like the antennae of obese snails, before suffering them to alight with synchronous effect upon the keyboard, and say, with the good-tempered smile that caused his eyes to vanish in adipose crinkles: “This is a new little thing; tell me how it strikes you? I’ve called it ‘The Heart’s Bauble” (or something else, as might be), “and we might drop it in in place of *Rosebud, Thy Dirge’—ids quite as rotten, and the idiots,” as the irreverent young man designated his Society patrons, “the idiots are sure to tumble to it. First a bit of vamp-and-rumpty, like this, then take breath and begin a note above the middle of your voice:

“‘Heart played with a baublle

Of bells, on a day-'/>

Put your hands behind your back, keep your chin well out and and your shoulders rather high—look straight before you, like the girl with the pomegranates in the Albert Moore picture they’ve just sold at Christie’s for a whack. Moore is all the rage just now, and these are the little things that count in our business. Capital! you’ve got the hang of it already; go on, please.

“‘Fate gave the token;

Thy bauble is broken—

Chime,

Rhyme,

Never more to all time!

Weary the day,

Poor Heart, well-away!*

The man who wrote that ought to have his head boiled— what? But.it’ll take, and we’ll try it at the Duchess of Aberbrockinbrae’s and Baroness Strumpf’s on Tuesday —that is, if you think you can rdy on yourself? Thanks so much! And now, I think, that’s all for the morning! Leila, will you marry me? No? Why, your mother told me only yesterday that she thought you were coming round. Hang it! ought the girth of a man’s waistcoat always to stand in the way of his happiness in life? I love my Love with a D, because she is Divine and Diaphanous. She hates me with another, because I am Doughy and Dumpy. Well, I won’t grouse, you know;

but you have made me beastly wretched and—”

“And you will never, never ask me again—at least until next practising-day?” Leila’s playfulness was of the clumsy order. Her fragile and diaphanous body was inhabited, as some spiteful person had once said, by the placid soul of a Jersey cow. Whereas, in the carcase of a pachyderm, Dorriswood Blewberry entertained the psychic guest of Panurge or Chicot.

“One comfort,” he said, with dimples beginning to reassert their reign in his large cheeks, “there is nobody else you prefer. And I feel convinced that you only do not love me because I am fat. That is my tragedy— adiposity. If you knew how many sovereigns I have dissipated in quack remedies against my evil, how many dieting obesity physicians have bowed me out of their consulting-rooms, how grimly I observe hard-and-fast rules of regimen—I, who adore made-dishes—only to find that the straps behind my waistcoat are getting too short again and my buttons require another removal! They are at the edge of things—so am I. Last September I tried a German watering-place. From Bad to worse —not a bad pun that!—I came home heavier by half-a-stone. When this season ends, I go-^mark me—I go to Plynwydrodd Springs. I know a Dark Blue who has left a considerable portion of his form there, and now registers at nine stone nine pounds* I saw the Eight shoot Barnes Bridge yesterday in 16.38, and though Bow seemed to collapse after Chiswick—if, indeed, the limp thing they were trying to thump into life with knotted mufflers were he!—there is a proverb that one must venture somewhat to win all. Only let me be sure that you who have liked me as a fat man will love me as a thin one. . . .”

Leila would not commit herself, but she owned that up to the present dear, dear Dorriswood’s size had been against him. She was sensitive to ridicule—as a friend it would not wound her; but, once flesh of Dorriswood’s flesh, she would not be able to help feeling, she knew, that there was a great deal too much of it.

“And yet I presume to offer myself. ... It is casting a swine before a pearl,” said Dorriswood, whimsically; but I shall not relinquish the hope of wearing the pearl in my snout one of these days. Where do you go for your change, en petit”?

Leila told him that she, with her mother and sister, had determined to spend their holidaying time at a small newly-discovered health-resort among the vineyards on the eastern bank of the Rhine. You inhaled the nourishing tonic pollen of the early vine-bloom; that was the cure, and it worked wonders, especially when you had nothing particular the matter with you, which was just Leila's case.

The end of the season parted the comrades, sending Leila to her vine-cure and Dorriswood to his forlorn hope at Plynwydrodd Springs. Plynwydrodd is a South Welsh village-town of a prevailing bleak grayness on a high line of coast where razor-edged winds prevail, and painfully active black-haired cattle graze upon the scant herbage when they are not chasing the Sassenach visitor. Spartan accommodation may be had at hotels and lodging-houses at the price of Sybaritic luxury.

“The waters possess the flavour of ink,” wrote Dorriswood to Leila amongst her Rhineland vineyards, “and not a good brand of ink either. I imbibe vast quantities at stated hours. I skip, goat-like, over stony hills for five hours a day. Sandwiched in between are soakings in earthenware baths with ridgy wooden gratings upon the bottoms of them, which make proof-impressions as of trellis-work upon the human personality. With my great aim in view, judge what it is to me to be told by the weighing-machine day after day that I am shrinking. It is even so. My eyeglass no longer tits me, or anything else for that matter. Where my third chin chin used to be there is a transparent frill of skin, such as a chameleon wears, only not pinked at the edges. My hands frighten me, so that I hide them in my pockets and then can’t find them. My garments hang in folds, my boots are boats. A man in whose company I travelled to this place, and whom I met several times afterwards at the table d'hote— such a grim mockery of a table (f hotel—no longer recognises me; and I hardly like to look at the baggy young man in my toilet-table glass. But courage! Un de perdu, deux de retrouvis. I am losing my old self, in the hope of finding another self in you.” Every letter ended in the same way.

Leila Paynter answered the letters faithfully. She had found the German vine-pollen cure everything that was most delightful, she said. She described ruined castles, dismantled fortresses, and village gasthofs. The tonic vine-pollen gave a tremendous appetite. After lachsbrut in vinegar-pickle with eiskuchen, coffee, and compot for breakfast, one came back to a midday dinner of roast veal with prunes, badwerst with cream, salad, and dieese omelette. One had to have sandwiches of sausage, even then, with one’s afternoon coffee, and gingerbread; and a heavy supper before retiring to rest seemed an absolute necessity in a country where indigestion seemed unknown. On the other hand, save for an occasional performance in the little theatre or a Sunday concert in the beer-gardens, there were no amusements. "But I keep my fingers busy by altering my gowns,” wrote Leila. "I shall want a great many new ones for our next season’s campaign, and am thinking out a new style—I don’t think the old one suits me as well as it used to.” Trivial as the sentence was, it filled Dorriswood Blewberry with a vague disquiet. His nerves, no longer shielded by layers of adipose tissue, were irritable now. He fretted and fumed himself even thinner with impatience for the day that should reveal him—changed at the cost of what bodily discomfort!—to the adored eyes of Leila.

The afternoon of reunion came. Dorriswood Blew-berry, in a new and stylish frock-coat of a cut that could only be sported by an excessively slim man, fluttered from a taxi-hansom and bounded up the eight flights of stairs leading to Miss Paynter’s Victoria-street flat—the lift pertaining to which was out of repair—as nimbly as a goat of the Welsh mountain breed. He arrived at her door without turing a hair, pressed the electric door-bell, electrified the maid who answered it by the astounding change in his appearance, and was shown into the dear, dear drawing-room that had a mediaeval daus at one end and a Japanese alcove with a Buddha in it at the other. A large, massive woman rose languidly from a capacious armchair. It was Leila, grown stout beyond belief.

A situation poignant in the extreme. The slender diaphanous young man gazed at the bulky young woman and gasped, there being circumstances under which nothing but gasping is possible.

“Oh, Dorriswood, you have done it! . . . what— what a change!” There was a new tone in Leila’s voice— it was the note of admiration. No longer transparent and willowy, but solid, and doomed by the strange reversal of conditions to become more so, the hitherto, unyielding object of Dorriswood Blewberry*s passionate devotion, the vainly-wooed for years knew herself conquered. The love-side slave had but to speak and become master of his Leila’s affections. Alas! by the ironic disposition of Fate, the change in his idol had instantaneously effected the cure of the worshipper. His new eyeglass dropped with a click. He pressed her hands kindly and released them, saying, as though they had only parted yesterday and not six weeks ago:

“Here is a new little thing; tell me how it strikes you. I’ve called it ‘Slim Willow Wave by the Wan Water’s Marge.’ This is how it goes.” He perched as lightly as a swallow on the piano-stool, too wide now by many, many indies, screwed his eyeglass firmly in its place, whisked his slim legs airily under the keyboard, spread out his now slender fingers above it, and looked critically at Leila as she took up her old position on the left of the miniature grand. “First a bit of vamp-and-rumty, then . . . Noll I shall have to write you something else. You are changed, do you know, quite wonderfully changed!” He looked at his watch and got up. “By-the-by, I forgot an appointment to see a man at the Gub, five sharp. Excuse me.”

He was skipping away—Dorriswood could skip now, remember, when Leila blocked up the doorway—which she could block up . now, recollect.

“There is no man at the Gub. . . . You only want to get away. You don’t love me any longer, Dorriswood, I see it in your eyes.” She burst into tears. “We have changed places somehow. . . .”

They have. They are still professionally associated, though the character of the entertainment has altered. Leila, who becomes more ponderous with each revolving season, now plays the piano accompaniments, . . .

Dorriswood Blewberry, who has never gained back an ounce of his banished bulk, now recites the little poetic gems that have no perceptible beginning and no actual end.. He is a frail, spiritual personality, with lambent, hollow eyes and phantom hands. Women adore him, and Leila’s passion becomes more desperate and hopeless with every practising-day. Her corset is thirty-three inches waist-measure at this present reading, though she has on three separate occasions subjected herself to the regime at Plynwydrood. Here is one of Life’s tiny tragedies— the Petit Guignol, where the players are not of wood.

XV

AN ASCOT HAT

ONE would not say that Sir Harry actually meant any harm, but he was a handsome fellow, with a manner voted irresistible even by the women of his own world. And he told her—this girl who belonged to quite another world than his—(she was a trimmer working at twenty shillings a-week at a Bond Street milliner's)—he told her his name was Harry Lean, and that he made a bit of money now and then by training racehorses for a sporting man of title. He did not think it necessary to mention that the racehorses were his own, and that he had omitted the first syllable of his surname. Because “Lelean” would have set Poppy Mason thinking, and, once Poppy should have begun to think in earnest, Sir Harry's game—harmless little game enough, from his point of view—was up.

But until a girl in the show-room found out and told Poppy that her admirer, Mister Harry Lean, was none other than Sir Harry Lelean, Poppy had looked out upon life with enchanted eyes, and dreamed of a wedding—in church, because none of the Masons had ever demeaned themselves by going before a registrar—and the face of the bride, surmounted by the loveliest hat you ever—! was her own; and the shoulders of the bridegroom— there was no mistaking their muscular squareness—were the shoulders of Harry Lean. She thrilled at the memory of that dream, poor child! even when she knew it could never be realised. And she was full—need it be said?— of bitterness and grief and rage. And she said to herself that she would “have it out” with him and let him know how she could reckon up a gentleman that went about telling lies to girls! But when the time came, on Saturday afternoon, and they were together in Regent’s Park, and the afternoon sun was drawing fullest sweetness from a bed of early heliotropes dose to the seat where she and Harry would sit no more—all the scathing sentences she had thought out were forgotten, and Poppy could only cry in a broken-hearted way and say, “How could you I How could you!” over and over.

He pulled his moustache in perplexity, and tried to slip his arm about her shoulders; but Poppy’s shrinking from him was unmistakable, even to his rather blunt perception, and he did not try again. “There’s no doubt of it: I’ve been a brute to you, Poppy—but not the worst kind of a brute.” He tugged at his moustache. “We’ve walked together, and talked together, and you’ve given me a kiss or two, and—”

“And all the while you were engaged!”

“Ah! that is the dirtiest bit about it—that all the while I was engaged!” Sir Harry said, frowning. He punched remorseful holes in the gravel with his stick, but Poppy was not appeased.

“I’d like to know which you think you've behaved the worst to,” she said, with a shrillness in her usually rather flat, level little voice that indicated latent hysterics, “me or Lady Gwendolen Haste? If she thinks you—”

But Sir Harry had risen and stood looking down at her, and there was a fold down the middle of his smooth, broad forehead, and the lower part of his usually debonair, good-humoured face might have been carved stone.

“Oblige me by not mentioning that lady’s name. It does not enter into any discussion of the situation; it is not to be coupled with any expression of opinion as regards my conduct to you. Be good enough to bear that in mind!”

“You talk as if I was’nt fit to name her!” cried Poppy, flushing scarlet. “And yet I’m as good a girl as her!”

“I know you’re as straight as rain, Poppy,” said Le-lean, softening; “but—she is to be my wife.”

“And you let me think that I—”

“No, no!” cried Lelean. “I never was so base as that. Think, Poppy, think!”

“It’s true, you wasn’t,” admitted Poppy, after a moment’s consideration. “I did the deceiving myself when it comes to that. We were so happy—at least I was!—it seemed as if it must go on. And now, will you go, please, sir, and leave me?”

“Perhaps I- had best,” said Lelean ruefully, “But before I go, tell me, is there nothing I can do that would be—that would help—”

“To make me think more kind of you?” said Poppy, choking back a little hopeless sob. “Don’t you mistake and offer me money. It’ll take something more than golden salve to heal my trouble!” She unpinned her hat and threw it on the bench beside her, sticking the long pins viciously in the crown.

“You poor little soul!” burst out Lelean. “You make me feel-Look here, Poppy, believe me or not as you like, but I’d give everything I’ve got in the world, except Double Blank, to undo the past three months, though our friendship has been innocent enough, God knows!” “Oh, I believe you fast enough!” returned Poppy. “And I’ll be honest and say plain—if I could undo the past and blot you out of my remembrance, I wouldn’t do it, Harry. So you can keep your property, and Double Blank as well. Is be really bound to win the Gold Cup this year?” She talked at random; her blue eyes had a strained, wild look, and her throat was swelling.

“Dead certain!” said Double Blank’s confident proprietor.

“And, if he does, you’ll get something handsome from your noble employer, his owner?” said Poppy, with the ghost of a laugh, pushing back the soft rings of yellow hair from her forehead. '

“I’m the noble employer, and confoundedly ashamed of myself, too!” burst out Lelean, “for not playing a straight game with a good, holiest girl like you. Good-bye, Poppy, and try to forgive me!”

“Stop a minute!” The girt sat up, a slender figure in her closely fitting blade gown, and pointed to the bed of heliotropes. “Pick me a sprig or two of that before you leave me, I’d like to keep something that belonged to this day by me to look at sometimes”—her little chin trembled and two great tears over-brimmed and fell—“just as a warning not to be so easily took in again.”

“I’m sorry, Poppy, but I can’t give you this,” Lelean said, standing near the gray-and-violet, perfumed Bowers. "Heliotrope’s an unlucky flower to people of my name.” “I shan’t ever Bear your fiame,” said the girl with a smile, “so give me what I’ve asked for.”

“I wouldn’t refuse you for the world,” returned Lelean, “if it were possible to do what you ask. But, frankly, I daren’t.”

Poppy sat up, and turned blue, astonished eyes upon the hill young man.

“You’re afraid! Afraid to touch a bit of a plant—a common flower! My word!”

“It’s an inborn antipathy—a congenital dread.” Sir Harry grew red and tugged at his moustache. “Don’t you understand, child, that I can’t bring myself to touch it f I have been wondering, as we sat near, what scent it was that dogged the air so unbearably. Now that I see, I understand the horrible feeling.” The big, muscular fellow actually paled and shuddered. “Laugh as you like, that flower is positively ill-omened where I and mine are concerned, and for about twenty-four hours I shall smart for having set eyes on it. Everything I undertake will come to grief; everything I’ve set my heart on doing or getting will be done and won by some luckier fellow. I shall be awfully careful,” said Sir Harry, looking with disgust at the heliotrope, “until the effect has worn off. For instance, I shan’t go within a mile of—”

Poppy cried out wildly, “Of her, you mean!” She covered her ears with her hands; her lips were set bade from her teeth in the grimace of unbearable pain. “Oh, go away t Never let me see or hear of you again! Oh, go!”

Sir Harry took his hat and stick from the bench and left her without another word. She sobbed a little, but with dry eyes, as his tall figure went away down the broad gravel-walk, his shadow obediently trailing at his heels. Then she got up, trembling, and went home to Nichols Street, Soho, where she lodged with a friend who was a saleswoman at a Bond Street florist’s. And she had her cry out when the sympathetic friend came in from her outing with her young man, who was a waiter at a West-End Club.

“Oh, the deceiving thing!” said the friend vidously. “And yet he believes he’s acted honourable, I dare say. With his ’orror of ’eliotropes and all. I declare he deserved to—”

Her eye gleamed and she became thoughtful. After tea, she unfolded the plan which had crystallised in her mind, and”

“No, I couldn’t consent to it!” Poppy protested. “I don’t want to be revenged on him!”

“Lord! it’s only an idea!” said the Gub-waiter’s young lady, who was also a florist’s saleswoman. “But he gets his buttonhole-bouquets from us, and my Alfred waits at his table and is a friend of his man, Simmons. And if Double Blank doesn’t get the Cup, perhaps”—her eye gleamed again—“perhaps Lady Gwendolen, won’t be in such a hurry to marry him.”

“She ordered a hat for Gold Cup Day at Madame Bibi’s yesterday,” said Poppy. “She said it was to be packed very carefully, and she would tell her maid not to undo it till it was to be worn. It’s to be copied from a Paris model, and I shall have the trimming of it. I do think I shall feel doing it.” And the gave a little gasp. “It’s to match a gown of .pale-mauve chiffon. Purple violas she chose, and those lavender ones with the—”

Then the florist’s saleswoman who was also the Gub-waiter’s sweetheart, rose tip with both eyes gleaming with dire and deadly purpose, and leaned over Poppy Mason and whispered rapidly in her ear.

"Oh, gracious!” Poppy cried. “Why, Madame would be as mad as mad, and I should get the sack!”

“Not you!” said the florist’s saleswoman. “You’re too smart a hand to be got rid of, and Lady Gwendolen isn’t a regular customer. Take your scolding and vour revenge together. You've got a spark of spirit in you! Why, the thing can be done as easy'as eating muffins. Them two—Sir Harry and Lady G.—are going to stop at 'The Windles’ for the Ascot Meeting. It’s a lovely place, and Pertz has took it—Pertz is one of them Yankee millionaires, an’ sweet as anything on Lady G., if Society papers ever do tell truth. And my Alfred will arrange everything with Simmons, and Simmons will soft-soap Lady G.’s maid into doin’ her share, and yon shall see what will happen. It’s too splendid a chance to miss, it really is!”

And, saying she would ne’er consent, Poppy consented.

' Lady Gwendolen was, perhaps, too lazy to be passionately in love, but she was warmly interested in her future husband, and that is saying a good deal. She had done some manoeuvring to obtain a téte-d-teté with Sir Harry in the conservatory after dinner. Pertz had to be dodged, for one thing, and to dodge Pertz was not easy. So she felt, naturally, a little aggrieved at not being effusively thanked for her kindness.

“One would think we had been married—and married a year!” she said, with a little pout of disgust, as she settled into a deep cane lounge, just big enough for two.

“Forgive me, Gwen, my darling J” her lover said penitently.

She looked wonderfully fair, a human flower amongst flowers, and the light from the Japanese-lamps hanging amongst the wistaria reddened the crip edges of her dark waves of hair, and cast the shadows of her long eyelashes down upon her ivory-tinted cheeks, making her wonderful and mysterious.

"Poor boy! You’re anxious about Double Blank, I know,” she said, letting her white hand be captured and her waist embraced.

"Double Blank is an absolute certainty for the Cup,” said Sir Harry. “Even if the balance of the field didn’t hail from Australia and France, I should stick to that. Eight years old, with legs as dean as a yearling's and sinews like bars of steel, where are you to meet the equal of him? Nothing on earth can beat that horse but—”

“Then, why are you depressed and dismal?” asked like Ascot, it’s true; but, feeling as you do about your racing-prospects, it seems to me—”

“You didn’t let me finish what I was saying,” said Sir Harry. “I said nothing on earth could beat my horse. But if things that aren’t earthly conspire against him— and me!” He shook his head solemnly as he pulled out his cigar-case.

“Mercy I Have you turned spiritualist?” cried Lady Gwendolen in astonishment.

“One needn’t be a spiritualist to believe in adverse Fates and evil destinies,” said Sir Harry rather glumly. “May I smoke?” As the hand upon his arm gave a little pressure of consent, he opened the case. Then he uttered a shout and dropped it as though it had burned his fingers. ’

“My dear Harry, don’t be so explosive! What is the matter?” said Lady Gwendolen.

But he had risen to his feet and stood staring at the case as it lay upon the ground, “Again !” she heard him say: “more of that beastly thing! How did it get in there?”

- “How did what?” Lady Gwendolen leaned down and lifted the cigar-case. “Really, dear, you are absurd to make a mountain out of a molehill. Some jocular idiot has emptied your case of the cigars and' put in a piece of-

"Of heliotrope!” burst out Sir Henry, “and the morning I left town there was heliotrope upon my breakfast-table at the Gub—none of the waiters knew how it got there, though I ragged ’em all round. And the buttonhole that came from the florist’s was of heliotrope, though they knew how I loathe the stuff. And yesterday, when Simmons took my hat out of the box there was a bouquet of heliotrope inside it, . . . and the scent of heliotrope is on everything I've toadied since then, it seems to me. You don’t know how I've been upset. It fairly scares and unnerves me. Yesterday, I didn’t pull in a single fiver and last night—well, you remember what Pertz said about my luck at baccarat”

Lady Gwen’s heart was touched. She threw away the obnoxious bit of hdiotrope, and called Sir Harry a poor, poor, stupid, superstitious old darling, and promised him to weed all heliotropes from the path of life when they should tread it together. And Sir Harry was comforted, and actually won a game of pool that night, "touching” Pertz for a tenner. But he found a sprig of heliotrope upon his pillow when he went to bed, and dreamed badly. Lady Gwen, on the contrary, slept excellently, and awakened radiant She breakfasted in her room, and then, arrayed in the wonderful mauve gown, the latest creation from a great Parisian atelier, posed, smilifig, before the long triptych mirror, as her maid unpacked from a Bond Street bandbox the hat designed to be worn with the dress.

"The amethyst and diamond hat-pins,” she said thoughtfully as the rustling of the silver-paper ceased. Almost mechanically she took the hat from the maid and placed it on her beautiful head. It crowned the rich, dark masses of hair with wonderful effect, and gave the last touch of perfection to her toilette, she knew. But Lady Gwen’s great black eyes dilated with dismay as she realised that the flowers upon the hat were not mauve and purple violas, but heliotropes. Sir Harry’s unfortunate antipathy recurred to her mind; she lifted her hand and partly pulled out one of the amethyst pins, then pushed it back again. She had not another hat that suited with that dress. Her vanity and her love fought, and vanity conquered. Lady Gwen, in her mauve chiffon confection, crowned with the wonderful heliotrope hat, was Queen of the Beauties in the Paddock. She forgot Sir Harry and his inherited antipathy when she found herself the cynosure of so many admiring eyes; and, when she remembered, she said to herself that he must be reasoned out of bis foolish prejudice.

He was looking far from fit. He had found a sprig of heliotrope in each of his boots that morning, and another in the button-hole of his light overcoat. He felt and looked a haunted man. Women were voluble in their sympathy, and men said nothing, but hedged.. It was believed that Double Blank had broken down, or had been cast in his box, or hocussed. Surprise was manifest when the beautiful favourite paraded in the pink of condition.

“Oh, the darling—the love!” cried Lady Gwen. “I should so like to kiss him for luck!” In her excitement she caught Sir Hairy by the lapel of his coat, and her beautiful face was nearer his than strict propriety warranted. But a man of ice could not have borne the touch of her beautiful hand more coldly. Sir Harry’s eyes met her own, under the shade of the heliotrope hat, and there was anger in them and cold disgust.

“Thank you for wearing my family badge,” he said with a tight-lipped smile. “You know how fond we Leleans are of the flower you have mounted.”

"Oh, Harry, let me explain!” she began. “I did not order the hat; it was sent, and there was no other that matched, and—”

“Pray do not apologise,” said her lover. “Wear from henceforth what you will—be worn by whom you choose; it will not affect my peace of mind, I assure you.”

“Harry P she gasped, appalled by the contempt of the look, the insult of the tone. But he lifted his hat, and turned upon his heel and left her.

•  •  •  •  •  •  •

Those who saw Double Blank win the Ascot Cup of that year’s meeting will recall the curious attempt—people said it was an attempt—made by a clean-shaven man in blade, who might have been a waiter, to bungle the start of the favourite by throwing a bouquet of flowers full in the jockey’s face. But Sam Griggs did not lose his nerve, the lost ground was soon recovered, and of the Australian and French rivals Double Blank made a terrible example. His lucky owner, Sir Harry Lelean, was reputed to have landed eleven thousand But even the favour of fortune did not soften his rigorous attitude to Lady Gwendolen.

“The horse won, it is true,” he said, “but you wore the heliotropes. You knew, and yet you wore them. Could there be a plainer proof of want of love, even of common consideration? Impossible! Under the stress of suffering and excitement, I spoke to you rudely. I apologise. But I must reiterate my request to you to release me from our engagement.”

So Lady Gwendolen married Mr. Zekiel K. Pertz.

“And if she don’t sport ’eliotropes on ’er weddin’ day, out of scorn and defiance of Sir ’Arry,” said his faithful and intelligent valet, Simmons, “my knowledge of ’uman nature is out completely.”

Simmons was hot at fault. The chancel of St. George’s, Hanover Square, was a veritable bower of the white variety of the perfumed bloom, and the bride’s bouquet consisted of white heliotropes and trailing orchids. So much the newspapers recorded, but nobody ever knew how near Lady Gwendolen’s wedding came to being broken off. For Sir Harry, pole and breathless, forced mmseii into ner presence on the eve of the ceremony and revealed to the betrothed bride of Mr. Zekiel K. Pertz a secret confessed to him in a repentant, tear-blotted letter from Poppy Mason.

“You understand!" Sir Harry cried, as Lady Gwendolen’s eyes readied the cramped signature at the bottom of the page. "It was a plot. She confesses—die owns up. And, oh, Gwen—”

"I don’t see,” said Lady Gwendolen, looking very pale and very tall, "that it makes any difference.”

"No?”

"I wore the hat,” she said; *that is a fact that can never be got over. I wore the hat. I think I behaved rather badly to you in doing so. But, on the other hand, I know you have behaved very badly to this poor girl. Oh! I know what you are going to say—she says herself as much for you. But there are moral wrongs. And now I will bid you good-night. If you consider me heartless, it will be easy to confirm yourself in the opinion. Remember—I wore that hat! That knock is Mr. Pertz’s. Goodbye!” And so they parted.

XVI

A MAKER OF COMEDIES

IT was glorious weather; depth upon depth of blue over* canopying the gay head of Paris, as she reclined with her lap full of May blossoms, in the embraces of hoary Father Seine. A brisk breeze besomed before it the not over-delicate odours of narrow streets and filthy kennels, and the over-night’s or early morning’s rainfall had washed the roof-tiles ruddy, and the pavement-cobbles white.

The tennis-court near the Estrapade was crowded, and as every spectator paid what he could afford, and according to his station, velvet cosaques shouldered with greasy leathern doublets, and slashed breeches rubbed with ragged hose, just as silver crowns and white farthings jostled in the gate-keeper’s pewter pipkin. Close to the elbow of the musqueteer the scullion sniggered, and great ladies and files publiques tittered in concert at the conceits of the players, three ex-bakers of the Rue St. Antoine, who acted farces enlivened with songs whose tenour was not always of the most rigidly improving kind, spiced with rather bold allusions to political and social topics of the day, and served up with pleasantries somewhat of the boldest.

In accordance with the regulations of the Parlement the performance had begun at one o’clock. It was now upon the stroke of five, and the epilogue had yet to be delivered. The light had barely waned, though the sky had deepened from turquoise into sapphire with the passage of the hours, and a young moon floated like a blown feather over the pointing spires, clustered chimneys, and crowded roof-gables of the capital.

Thus the insatiate public waited, with an appetite for mirth yet unappeased, although its side-ribs were aching with repletion; sweating and shouldering, swaying and pushing, hip to hip and jowl to jowl, between the purple pansy-bloom of coming twilight, and the yellow flare of tallow-soaked wicks in earthen lampions.

The prologue had been given by Gualtier Garguille, a wizened, lean-shanked zany, famous for his gift of delineating the absurdities of senility. Gros Guillaume, a coarse buffoon of extraordinary stature, had swayed the humours of the crowd, and wrung the tears of laughter from its eyes, by mimicking an unpopular and overbearing magistrate, much favoured of the powerful Cardinal who held the reins of France. The higher the rope is set, and the greater the certainty of destruction for the mountebank, should he slip in the middle of one of his airy capers, the greater the zest of the upward-gazing populace. It was known that from elevated quarters a warning had been conveyed to the buffoon; and that wider than any of the grinning human mouths that hailed the mirth-provoking feat with shouts of laughter, gaped a dungeon door.

The prologue had been delivered, according to custom, by Gualtier Garguille. The epilogue was to be spoken by the principal person of the ribald trio, Henri le Grand sumamed ‘Turlupin.’

He came now to the front of the stage—a sordid platform of rickety planks, uphdd on groaning trestles—and taking off his swart and bearded mask, looked upon the people with a dog-like smile that showed one tooth in the lifting of the upper lip. He wore a kind of Moorish garb with a short and silken tunic, shawled at the waist, and loose trousers of alt striped tissue thrust into ankled pantoufles of yellow leather. Bizarre and outrageous as was the man's attire, there showed something of dignity in his bearing, his movements were eloquent and full of supple grace, and mobile lip and glancing eye were fit accompaniments to tones of a melodious persuasiveness.

“Ho, Turlupin!” cried a lusty butcher, so wedged in the mass of humanity that his round, red face looked like a rosy apple in a heap of yellow ones, “Let us taste the best your oven can bake to-night before we part.”

"I have no spice-cakes to offer, good fellow,” answered the mummer, “for you and your neighbours have eaten the whole stock. There is but a crust left, and that something stale. Many sound grinders have crashed upon it, and many healthy stomachs rejected it. Truth is always an unpalatable morsel, and will continue to remain so until the world’s end.”

His auditors, puzzled at the gravity of the opening period of the oration, waited with staring eyes and steaming gullets for what was to come.

"What! Because you are accustomed to get finger-pokes between the ribs from me,” continued Turlupin, “you will not believe that I could thrust a dagger there land fetch groans instead of laughter! Because I mouth through a horse-collar you think it impossible that I should ever weep over a coffin. How singularly destitute of imagination are you all. From what a heavy day soil the earth of which your bodies are made must have been taken. If if were hot for the testimony of Holy Writ I would hot believe that I and you are equally descendants of grandfather Adam. Yet so it is. I pity myself the more for it.”

At this astounding insolence, not a forehead wrinkled. The people were confident that the joke would come. Meanwhile the actor beckoned to his companions. They advanced together, wizened dwarf and burly giant, and ranged themselves with him in line.

“There is a story which I may or may not have told you twenty times. I care not if I have, since it fits my humour, and it serves my purpose to tell it again,” continued Turlupin. “It is of a highly respected citizen, I will not say a magistrate out of pity for my comrade, Gros Guillaume, who is afflicted with a constitutional awe and terror of the very word.”

Laughter bubbled over here, but the player looked upon the sea of twinkling eyes and creasing cheeks before him with such gravity, that the ebullition was soon quelled.

“So heavily does this affliction sit upon him, friends,” Turlupin continued, laying a hand upon the shoulder of the sufferer, “that he will enter as a patient the famous hospital of the Condergerie, in a few hours from now. I understand that handsome preparations are being made. A dungeon, particularly elegant and choice, which has, moreover, not been occupied for thirty years or so, is even now being prepared to receive him. It measures about twenty-three feet in length, by eleven and a half in height, and the rats speak highly of its commodiousness and comfort. If I have a prejudice, it is in favour of exactitude. The authorities whom I see here present will favour me by correcting an error if I have been unfortunate enough to make one.”

A ripple like a shudder passed through the mass of humanity, as the spectators became conscious that an increase of pressure of which they had lately become sensible was due to the incursion of a body of musqueteers, accompanied by an officer of the Condergerie, into the already over-filled tennis-court. Escape for the timorous was impossible, they were compelled to await, with the courageous, the unknown event Meanwhile, the speaker proceeded to his peroration, and wandering eyes and ears were recalled to him erelong by some subtle magnetism of his personality.

“Oh! now I take it you snuff something on the wind," cried Turlupin, “and you will scarcely need my story, which is, after all, little better than a parable. The citizen I speak of owned everything that man can own, except a stomach to digest with, and for that he would, I verily believe, have given the contents of all his coffers. For when his table groaned with savoury dishes, his poor portion must be one meagre platter of pulse, unless he would undergo in advance the pains of purgatory. Thus his life was but misery, and so, when Death tapped at his door one day, he was not unwilling to go, though he begged hard for one hour’s respite before the scythe should fall. This given, how do you think he spent those sixty minutes? In bidding farewell to his wife? In counselling his children? In arranging his affairs? No, and no, again! What did he then? Why, ordered a meal, a banquet of luscious and savoury dishes crowned with rich wine. And he ate till he was full to the throat, and drank until the tips of his flabby ears were stained with red Burgundy. ‘For,’ says he, ‘in an hour I shall die, and dead men cannot have the stomach-ache.’ As he, so I, so we who stand before you. Gros Guillaume, hand me the bag.”

The huge buffoon handed him a bag he carried, and Turlupin untied the neck of it and peeped in gravely.

"In a few moments, friends, the Theatre of the Estra-pade, where I and my comrades have entertained you these three years past, will have ceased to exist. The lamps will have flickered and snuffed themselves out, the costumes and decorations will be trodden in the dirt, the stage we have trodden will furnish fire to cook a beggar’s meal. Do you take my meaning? The confreres of the Hotel de Bourgogne, jealous—God pity us!—of our popularity, have lodged a complaint—”

A storm of hisses burst. The musqueteers looked towards their officer, waiting for the signal to quell the manifestations of disapproval. But Turlupin raised his hand, and silence fell upon the angry people like a velvet pall.

"So, like the citizen of whom I told you, I can make a hearty meal," said he, "with little fear of an indigestion to follow. Forbidden fruit is my taste, so please you. I have no liquorish hankerings for spiced ragouts. Jokes I have cracked you for three years past; you have learned to call my farces Turiupinades, after their godfather. Well, my last turlupinade shall be a serious drama, a tragic episode, enacted without one spoken word, by seven head-coverings. Nothing of sedition here, you will think. Hats are incapable of speech. And yet . . . But dead men, you remember, cannot have the stomach-ache."

He opened the bag with a certain gusto, and drew from it a blade velvet headdress of the kind made popular by the Queen Dowager, Marie de Medias, bending to a peak towards the centre of the forehead, and bordered with pearls. An electric shock, slight, but prophetic of others to come, passed through the block of humanity beneath him as he placed the pearl-bordered coif upon his own head, and his fellow players, whose palates had not been prepared for the surprise, drew back confounded.

But Turiupin was searching in the bag with a quaint expression of puzzled pre-occupation, and now withdrew his hand with a second treasure-trove. This was a masculine hat, looped and feathered in the Italian style, made popular by Condni, the murdered favourite of Marie de Medids: and when the actor placed it above the coif the obvious inference drew a murmur from the audience. A kingly crown came next, and when the emblem of Gallic sovereignty flattened down the Italian hat and feather the silence in the crowded theatre was so profound that the bubbling of the heated tallow in a lamp was heard quite plainly. The allusion was quite perfect to the crushing of the Queen-mother’s creature by the young King, her son.

Turlupin dipped again into the fateful bag, and brought thence, and topped the crown with, a ducal coronet. Not even a sibilant whisper, or a guttural grunt of comprehension, escaped the spectators. One and all were absorbed in the scandalous chronicle which was in process of unfolding without the aid of spoken or written words. But when the crimson hat of a cardinal eclipsed the coronet of the Duke who had ruled the King, and the pointed hood of a Capuchin monk surmounted the cardinal’s hat, all present drew, as through a single pair of lungs, a rattling breath, which caught upon the edge of a wild shout of laughter as the piquant head-dress of a lady’s waiting-maid fluttered its ribbons at the summit of the edifice.

“Hugues Gueru, known as Gualtier Garguille; Robert Guerin, sumamed Gros Guillaume; Henri le Grand, called Turlupin, you are arrested, by order of His Eminence the Cardinal Duke de Richelieu!”

Thus a harsh voice cried upon the borders of the crowd, and the laughter was stricken dead in one cold moment.

There was a confusion. Men swore and women shrieked as the musqueteers forced their way to the stage, and secured the players.

“Ah, the mischief!” said Turlupin to his companions. “Why did you not show your dean heels when I twigged the buff coats at the beginning. Was it not settled between us?”

Gros Guillaume, whose arms were in process of being pinioned by one musqueteer while three others held him, grinned a gigantic grin.

“You forget,” he returned, “you had not told us what was in the bag. I for one was obliged to stay and see the end, or rather the bottom of it.”

“And I also,” piped the lean pantaloon, who was tied with an odd piece of string to a brawny soldier’s belt-buckle.

“Nor do I regret it,” responded Gros Guillaume. “A more delicate piece of devilry I never had the good fortune to meet with.”

“You flatter me,” returned Turiupin modestly. “But, tonnerre 'de Dieut surely we are going together?”

“It appears not,” blubbered Gros Guillaume, while Gualtier Garguille struggled like a wounded rabbit in the grasp of his huge musqueteer.

"Come, come, Monsieur le Baflli,” expostulated Turiupin, “this is not as it ought to be. If all three are arrested, all three ought, in common decency, to share a common prison.”

"The orders are special and stringent, Monsieur Turiupin,” rejoined the personage addressed, “otherwise it would have been my privilege to extend to you the hospitality of the Gondergerie. Believe me, I regret my guest.” He bowed ceremoniously to the player, without, however, removing his hat, and its broad feathered edges shaded a sinister smile. The captain in command of the musqueteers shouted an order, the company drew up in double line, wheeled and separated, one moiety marching off with two prisoners in the direction of the Palais de Justice, the other towards the Rue Neuve Saint-Augustin, with the late leader of the dramatic troupe of three, bound and pinioned in their midst.

"Venire Saint Gris!” reflected Turiupin, as the towering facade and twisted chimneys of a well-known hold loomed into vision above its high garden walls; “we are to be introduced into high company, it seems.” From long habit he spoke in the plural, and the stab with which remembrance advised him of the solitariness of his condition brought moisture to his eydids.

An obese porter, dad in crimson Every, opened the heavy gate in answer to the summons of a hoarse-throated bell, and the musqueteers tramped in measured order along a flagged path bordered with tubbed orange trees, and, a lofty flight of marble steps surmounted, entered the great vestibule of the hotel. Richly-carpeted staircases and passages ensued, and in an ante-room lined with laced and Evened lackeys, and studded with suitors holding petitions in hand, the captain parleyed with a venerable major-domo for admittance to the curtained chamber of audience beyond. Another moment, and the heavy draperies parted. The captain, followed by two of his men leading between them the prisoner, entered, and Turlupin found himself in the presence of the princely prelate who ordered the destinies of France.

Wax candles burning in silver-gilt candelabra made islands of light upon the purplish dusk. Upon the dais the Cardinal sat in a great carved chair, cushioned with violet velvet, blazoned with coat of arms and hats of office. His scarlet robes enhanced the ivory pallor of his dearly-modelled countenance, and deepened the caverns underneath the arching brows, where two pale yellow flames flickered over the furnace-ashes of the past. The red biretta covered his head, whose dose-cropped hairs glistened like silver wires above the sunken temples, and the amethyst ring of his sacred office gleamed upon the emaciated hand that propped his chin.

dose by his shoulder and bending to his ear in familiar colloquy stood a bearded monk, wearing the long pointed hood of the Capuchin order. This was the notorious Father Joseph, ruler of the ruler of rulers, at whom had been levelled the last sly sally of the famous Turlupinade.

Upon the entrance of the musqueteers the Cardinal raised his head. The captain and his soldiers dropped each a knee as the prelate made the benedictory sign, but the prisoner remained upright and unbending. A broad* leaved hat covered his Moorish turban, and an ample cloak of a dark hue concealed his gaudy costume, and the ropes that bound his arms.

"Behold a typification of the ’defiant spirit of this deplorable age,” cried Father Joseph, lamentably, wagging his beard. "Bonds and humiliation alone have no power to subdue their stubborn nature. Where others reverently kneel this mummer remains erect, as though his miserable soul had no need of your Eminence’s blessing. ‘Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall,’ as Scripture hath it.”

“I stand,” was the player’s answer as he shook the cloak from his shoulders and let it fall upon the gorgeous carpet, "in regard of that very precaution. For these most zealous captors of mine have trussed me like a chicken for roasting, and I must keep bolt upright, in order that I may not tumble on my nose.”

A smile flickered across the Cardinal’s white face, like the reflection of a torch seen in ice over which it passes He gazed long and keenly at the actor, feeling between his thumb and forefinger the narrow tuft of beard that graced his long and pointed chin. Then be spoke in slow, mellifluous tones:

“Who is this man, and why has he been arrested?’'

“Because of his scurrilous and ribald attacks upon Holy Church and State,” interposed Father Joseph somewhat hurriedly; “your Eminence gave the order. By calling he is a buffoon, nicknamed Turljipin’ by the degraded class for whose amusement he caters. Who and what he really is, the Evil One may know, for I do not.”

"You overrate the personage's intelligence, holy father,” said the player, ingenuously.

"Does your Eminence hear?” cried the Capuchin, wrathfully. “Insolence and hardihood combine in the bearing of this wretched man. He defies your laws t Even your presence has no awe for the ribald fellow! He is as ready with his tongue as though your very audience-chamber were a bagnio, and the state and ceremony which surrounds you as unreal as the gilded pasteboard of yonder trumpery crown.”

For the fastenings of the fateful bag, somewhat carelessly carried by one of the musqueteers, had come undone, and the tawdry emblem of royalty, escaping thence, rolled on the Turkey carpet to the very edge of the Cardinal’s footstool.

“The crown is weightier than it looks,” responded Turlupin, “for the burden of my offences partly rests upon it.”

“Explain, De Marillac,” said the Cardinal authoritatively.

The captain of musqueteers obeyed. The recital of the story brought the still jetty arches of the Cardinal’s brows together in a frown, and stained his ivory cheek with faded crimson, as it sent the eyes and hands of the Capuchin in the direction of the ceiling.

"O infamy!” cried Father Joseph. "Such scurri’ous rogues should be swept from the face of the earth, besomed out of their stinking corners, and crushed without mercy, like less noxious vermin.”

“It is odd,” responded Turlupin, “that the besom your Reverence speaks of should have the knack of picking the nap off the carpet, and leaving the dirt behind. But this is a strange world, and the human being that live upon it are stranger still. I puzzle myself even more than my fellow creatures puzzle me, and see no hope for a solution of the riddle. Though Death is the solving of all problems, or so folks say; and it may be that the time approaches when my ignorance is to be enlightened.”

“This fellow has tasted prison-fare before?” inquired the Cardinal of the captain of musqueteers.

“Three times, so please your Eminence,” responded Turlupin. “The first gaol fees I ever paid were at The Chatelet, and as the ordinance regulates the amount only in the case of noble persons, Lombards, and Jews, ignoring players altogether, the prevot simplified the matter by taking all I had. . . . Then, having stripped me of my very breeches, his guards let me down—for the sake of modesty, they said—into the dungeon named the Fosse, after the fashion of a bucket descending into a well. This dungeon is a pleasant invention, as your Eminence knows, shaped something after the fashion of an hypocras-bag, save that the liquid at the bottom of it is not so agreeable to the palate or the nostrils as spiced wine.”

“How long did you remain there?” queried the Cardinal. ‘

“Three weeks,” returned the player.

“It is said,” the Cardinal returned, “that no prisoned can exist there for a period exceeding eight days.”

“So the authorities informed me upon finding me alive,” answered the player.

"It is extraordinary that you should have survived," remarked the Cardinal.

"Your Eminence will have already observed,” said the player with a bow, “that I am an extraordinary, person."

"For what crime," asked the Cardinal, "were you imprisoned?”

“For making people laugh, your Eminence," said Turlupin. "My next experience of incarceration was at the hands of the Prior of St. Martin des Champs. You will judge that the treatment of the reverend Prior was generous in the extreme, for while there I neatly died of drinking.”

"Of drinking!” cried the Capuchin, contemptuously.

“Explain,” said the Cardinal, tapping his chin.

"His reverence had me chained up to a post,” said Turlupin, "and filled me up, every hour or so, with cold spring water. In order that I should not reject his hospitality, he had my teeth broken.” He grinned to show a row of jagged stumps and continued: 'They fitted a funnel in my throat also, to save me the trouble of swallowing. The Church’s severity is tempered with mercy, as of course your Eminence knows.”

The Cardinal shuddered slightly, and said:

"For what offence did you suffer thus?”

“For making people cry,” answered Turlupin; “and when, three years later, your Eminence dapped me up again—this time in the Condergerie—it was for making people laugh and cry together. Upon the present occasion my offence is against the edict which prohibits the low born of your Eminence's (I should say His Majesty’s) subjects from over-indulgence in the luxury of dress. For wearing too many hats, it may be tint I am to be deprived of the power of wearing one at all.”

Said the Cardinal, glancing authoritatively at one of the musqueteers:

“Loosen the knot. Do yon not see how those cords • gall him?”

Turlapin cried to the soldier:

“Pull them more tightly. What I do you think I am a stranger to the mercy of justice? I go, Monseigneur,” he said, addressing the Cardinal, “to the dungeon you destine for me. But not alone—for my Art is with me. For her I have suffered, for her I have groaned—for her I have borne chains, for her I have tasted the anguish of the rack—but Art is faithful to those who serve her, and one day she will reward me. The Church may refuse me absolution, my body may be buried at night by torchlight at the corner of the street like a parricide’s, like a suicide’s! I shall lie still under the stones, while over my dull breast the feet of Paris pass to and fro—and thus lying, I shall know the players’ footsteps; they tread so lightly underneath their load of shame. A shame,” he cried, “that shall one day be wiped away, when the Church opens wide her arms to her player-children, and Kings and Emperors shall call him Friend whom God hath crowned with Genius and with Art!"

The Cardinal scrutinised the speaker, and said:

“I judge it that yours is a more than ordinary genius.”

"Ventre Saint Grist"returned the player, tapping his forehead, “it may be so as not I have had my doubts. This thinking-apparatus of mine has given me unconscionable trouble, the tongue beneath it is weary of wagging; once freed of my head I shall be infinitely more comfortable. Your Eminence must realise that in France at this present era a man of brains is singularly out of place, unless he have the good fortune to be a Cardinal, and a Duke into the bargain.”

“You have a certain gift of sarcastic utterance, Master Turlupin,” said the Cardinal, “and a happy knack of phrase-stringing. It is said that the comedies performed by you and your two companions are the work of your own pen; is this so?”

“I cannot deny, Monseigneur,” replied the playwright, “that I have followed the example of your Eminence on more than one occasion."

"You recall to me," said the Cardinal, "the short-lived follies of my youth. I do not care that their memory should be revived.”

"Let your Eminence be at rest upon the point,” cried Turlupin, "for the tragedies, I have heard upon good authority, were most execrable, and it is certain that no manager, who had the interests of his treasury at heart, would ever place them on the stage again.”

The Cardinal winced, and sharply bit his lip.

"For my own poor efforts,” resumed Turlupin, "they will certainly not outlive their author, being impromptus thrown off on the spur of necessity, or as the whim seized tot.

The Cardinal lifted his arched brows upon a moment’s meditation, and stretched one transparent finger towards the player.

“The price of your freedom,” he said, “or of any other advantage you may desire, within the bounds of reason, and not involving the release of your companions, shall be one of these impromptus.”

Turlupin thought a moment. “It is a bargain with your Eminence,” he responded. “But are my gestures to be hampered with these hempen formalities? I ask in the interests of my art.”

The Cardinal nodded, and the actor was unbound. He stretched his stiffened limbs, and stamped to restore the chamber with a professional eye.

“Mori de mo viel" he cried, “the stage is excellent, but too vast for a mere monologue. Surely your Eminence will permit the introduction of a lay figure, a human puppet, male or female, which I may embrace or scold, weep over or denounce, according to the humour of my inspiration? Your Eminence signifies assent? Thanks, thanks!" He flew to the window and threw it open.

“He will leap out!” groaned the Capuchin.

“I am upon parole,” replied the comedian, “and the distance from the ground is sixty feet. Either of these considerations would restrain me from yielding to the impulse of departure. But see there—there! That young girl would suit me admirably!”

The high windows of the second floor of the hotel gave dear view of the square beyond its courtyard gates, and here upon the uneven pavement a female in the tawdry dress of a meretricious calling strolled up and down, waiting probably for the opportunity to accost some stranger whose bearing and attire gave evidence of position and of means. She was still young, it was plainly seen even at that distance, and the masculine hat and feathers with which she aped the dashing mode at that rime in favour with ladies of quality, lent to her features an air of hardy boldness in keeping with her profession.

“Holy Saints!” cried the Capuchin, following with starting eyeballs the direction of the actor's pointing hand. “A fille de joie. To be seen entering His Eminence’s palace in broad daylight? It is scandalously impossible.” “Oh, if we must wait until dark!” cried Turlupin, with a gesture of impatience.

The Cardinal interposed.

“Let the woman be brought up,” he said.

“Pardon, Eminence,” interposed the actor, eagerly. “It is necessary that she should not be alarmed. Let a- message be conveyed her by one of your lackeys, who must be profoundly irresponsive to questioning by the by, that a person within the hotel wishes to speak to her.”

The Cardinal touched a bell, to the silver tinkle of which a liveried servant instantly responded. To him Turlupin conveyed some directions in a whispered tone, and the Cardinal ratified them by a mute gesture of the hand. The man quitted the apartment, and a moment later was seen to cross the courtyard, issue from the entrance-gates, and enter the square. He spoke to the woman, pointing to the hotel. To her interrogations he replied with a shake of the head. The feminine love of intrigue conquered. She followed the lackey, after an instant’s hesitation.

“And now,” said Turlupin, “I must clear the stage. Will your Eminence favour me by concealing yourself behind yonder screen! You, father,” he addressed the Capuchin, “will avail yourself of any niche behind the tapestry which your experience recommends for spying purposes, while these gentlemen”—he pointed to the musqueteers and their commander—-“will be good enough to get into yonder closet. The upper part is latticed, I observe, in favour of convenient respiration.”

The Cardinal, with a smile of scarce-repressed amusement at the scandalised countenance of Father Joseph, complied with the request. The others followed his example, and the room, though in reality alive with eyes, appeared to contain but one human being; a ««« apparently bent double with age and infirmity, and wrapped in a heavy cloak; who sat leaning upon his staff in the Cardinal’s vacated chair, and seemed enwrapped in meditation.

The measured tread of the liveried lackey was soon heard crossing the uncarpeted parquet of the ante-room.

The quick, light pattering of the velvet-covered, cork-soled walking-dogs worn by women of this era ensued upon it, then the doors flew open. The woman entered, and they closed behind her sharply, with an ominous clicking of the lode.

She started slightly at the sound, and glanced backwards irresolutely, then gaining or mustering courage, she advanced to the middle of the room. The old man who was seated in the Cardinal's chair lifted his head at the rustling of her tawdry draperies, and regarded her with a lacklustre eye.

"Who are you?” he asked, in cracked and quavering tones. “From whence do you come?”

The girl, for she was little more, pointed to the window.

“I was out there. . . . They sent for me.. . . One here wished to speak with me, and I came. . . . That is all!”

She spoke with something of a country accent. Her manner was, despite the coarse polish of her miserable trade, instinct with a rustic clumsiness; nor could the rouge and pearl-powder upon her face conceal its unfaded sun-tan.

“They sent for you,” muttered the old man. “Fools! You are not she. And yet your voice strikes a note upon rite keyboard of memory, and something in your face. . . . Come here.”

She advanced irresolutely, and then with greater confidence. For as the old man rose painfully to his feet, supporting himself upon his staff, it was plain that he was a cripple.

“Oh no, you are not she,” said he, with a sigh of disappointment, removing his glance, unusually bright and piercing for his age, from the girl’s features. Then a thrill of hope came into his weak and broken voice. “Not she, but you may help me find her,” he cried. “Who knows? I came to this great house to-day seeking her, but they know nothing here, they say, and cannot help me. Perhaps you may!”

“I do not understand you,” said the girl, “nor why I have been brought here, nor who the woman is of whom you speak. Have you lost her long, and in what manner did she leave you?”

“She left us just three years ago,” the old man cried, “and suddenly, without a leave-taking in words. But we found a scrap of paper afterwards, pinned to the pillow of her little bed. She slept in the high garret, you must know, because she loved the view that was to be had from the window. The garden ran down to the river beneath, where the great trout lie under the mill-wheel all the hot summer days long, and the steeple of Gretry peeps over the cap of the hill, out of a clump of elms. The swallows hawk airily after flies, and the mill-wheel splashes and drones, and the sunbeams are dusted with meal as they come pouring through the trap-door. The sights and sounds are fresh and dean, and the smells are delicate. ... I wonder she could prefer this great, gay, seething, noisome city. But, as I have said, she went away, and there was the little letter, under the image of Our Lady: —‘Farewell, I go to Paris.' Nothing more. But Madame Vaudret, of the inn, said she had always had a hankering to be a great lady. Perhaps she has become one, -and that is why she has forgotten her mother and father! Do you not think that this may be so?”

The girl’s features contracted painfully, and her bosom rocked with a deep breath of pain.

“No,” she muttered, “I do not think it.”

“Why?” asked the old man, quaveringly.

He seemed even older and more feeble than at first, and leaned upon his crutched staff more heavily.

"Look at me,” the girl said, “look at me well!” There was a dang of self-contempt in her voice, and a haggard smile of scorn upon her painted lips. “Am I a great lady?”

“No,” the old man returned. His chin quivered piteously, and he plucked at his puckered lips with a shaking hand.

"No," the girl echoed. She spread out her tawdry darts and struck an attitude, still with that withering look of self-contempt, and laughed, and struck a blow upon her painted lips to silence them. "Then no more is your daughter. As she left you and your wife, so I left my home and my people. I also was to be a lady, great, and rich, and delicately clothed and housed. Oh, look at me once more!” she cried. “Even as I am, so is die, and the shame of me within and without is hers, and the bread she eats is the bread of infamy like mine, and the cold, liquid, muddy death that shall suck me down and hide and keep me, shall unite me, amongst other bloated corpses, amongst other desolate souls in torment with hers. Oh! go home!” she cried, “go home and forget her. Pray for her if you can, when things are well with you, and your bosom’s mood is gentle, but never seek to find her any more!”

She laughed still, with open mouth and gleaming teeth, but the laughter was an hysterical grimace, and tears made channels down her painted cheeks. Through them she looked at the old man, and was dazzled by the glory of the smile that irradiated his face. He seemed no longer old and withered, but young and comely in the change that had come upon him.

“If the bread my daughter eats is bitter with sin,” he said, "and her life bears the plague-spot of infamy, and her head hangs heavily underneath its load of shame, as you say, all the greater is her need of me, and all that I can give her. She has drunk of Paris now, and will thirst no more for it, and most like, after the roaring of its streets the clatter of our mill-wheel will come soothingly. She has lain upon worse beds, I doubt not, than her little pallet in our garret, and .the swallows in our eaves will chirp the cheerfuller that she nests near them, as of old. For her there is a welcome waiting, all the tenderer tint she has doubted it, and for you too. Oh, take my word for it, they will be glad when you return!”

The girl’s dull eyes caught fire at his. Hope struggled behind her mask of dull despair.

“If I thought that! oh, if I thought that!” she faltered, "I would go back to-morrow.”

"Not to-morrow,” said the old man. “Now. At once, without delay.”

“But without my clothes and ornaments! They have never seen the like. Must I leave them?” the girl murmured.

The old man answered briefly: “Remember how they were bought.”

She hung her head.

“Money, though? I have saved a little—and travelling is dear.”

"Remember how that saved money was gained,” said he.

She dropped again. Then the old man fumbled underneath his cloak and drew near to her and thrust in her hand six silver crowns, and bade her go while God should speed her. She snatched the hand and kissed it almost with a bite, and fled to the door, and as the lode yielded to the turning of the handle, looked bade upon her good angel, smiling wildly, and was gone.

"Excellent!” the Cardinal cried. “If these are your impromptus your finished pieces must be well worth praise. And the jade is actually gone? Home, let us hope, for the credit of your representation. And now, your fee. You may ask anything you choose except the freedom of your companions. I will hazard a guess that the boon you demand will be your own delivery from durance."

"Your Eminence," said Turlupin, "is for once not happy in a conclusion. All I seek is your permission to experience with my confreres the hospitality of the Condergerie. A dungeon when boon companions share it is not so dull a place, and mouldy bread acquires a savoury relish with good wit to season it. Consider, too, that we shall have ample time and leisure for the invention and rehearsal of fresh comedies. I should not wonder if when we come out again—if we do come out—there happened to be another surprise in the lucky-bag for your Eminence.”

“He is incorrigible!" said the Ordinal. “Let him be taken to the Condergerie and confined with his comrades."

“I thank your Eminence very heartily,” said the actor, once more pinioned, “and upon the step of departure must crave pardon for a crime against good manners, of which I have been guilty."

“What is that?” asked the Cardinal.

“I took leave without permission to borrow your Eminence’s cane in order to sustain my character of a moment since to greater perfection," returned Turlupin, “and the liberty sits upon my conscience heavily.”

“You are forgiven," said the Cardinal.

“A lost soul!” groaned the Capuchin.

“A very extraordinary character!” mused the Cardinal, as the door dosed behind the soldiers and their prisoner.