A desperate attempt was made by the imperialists to set up a premier gentilhomme of their own in the person of Count Morny, who sought to revive the traditions of De Grammont and of De Montrond. He was brave, he was witty, his physique might be said to realize the ideal of the role, but his morale was founded on the theories of the Bonaparte school. De Grammont tells us how he cheated the greasy cattle-dealer; De Montrond makes us laugh when he relates how in his tour of mediation with Prince Talleyrand he was wont to take bribes from two rival princes, each willing to pay a heavy sum that the other might be baffled; but neither De Grammont nor De Montrond would ever have consented to soil his hands with such vile commercial speculations as the Houilleres d'Anzin or the Vieille Montagne, or condescend to such disgraceful financial mystification as the "Affaire Jecker" of Mexico.

It would be impossible to explain the difference which exists between the "gentilhomme" and the "gentleman." It is felt and understood, but cannot be described. The term "gentleman" itself is conventional. Neither birth nor accomplishments, nor even gentle manners, are necessary for undisputed assumption of the title. The man who acts as a lawyer's clerk cannot be called a gentleman, according to Judge Keating's decision, because, the title having no place in the language of the law, if he chanced to be indicted for a criminal offence he would be denominated a "laborer." Serjeant Talfourd's sweeping theory, of the term "gentleman" being legally applicable to every man who has nothing to do and is out of the workhouse, cannot be accepted, as it would of necessity include thieves, mendicants and out-door paupers. The American police have been compelled, to defend the border-line of gentility against the encroachments of their vagabond gold-seekers, card-sharpers and ruffians, and confine the term to those of respectable calling. In California the term may be applied to every individual of the male gender and the Caucasian race, the line being drawn at Chinamen. An American writer contests the acceptance of the term, in England as being too vague and uncertain for comprehension by foreigners, and suggests that some less conventional designation than those now in use should be found to indicate the idea. To the moral sense it would be natural to suppose that character rather than calling would be the most important point in the consideration of the question; but it is not so. In the four-oared race of gentlemen amateurs held last year at Agecroft in Lancashire the prize of silver plate was won by a crew taken from a club composed entirely of colliers, who had been allowed to row under protest, they not being acknowledged as "gentlemen amateurs." The race over and the prize won by the colliers, an investigation took place by the committee. The result was unanimity of the vote against acceptance of the qualification of the winners. Here, then, occurred the best illustration of the comprehension of the term by the moderns, for the "gentlemen," deeming that money must be a salvo to pride in the bosom of all whose quality of gentleman remains unacknowledged, subscribed a handsome sum to be distributed amongst the disappointed crew. But here, again, the proof was given of the vague uncertainty of the term, for the crew of colliers were gentlemen enough to refuse the proffered gift with scorn.

G. COLMACHE.



SPECIAL PLEADING.

Time, bring back my lord to me: Haste, haste! Lov'st not good company? Here's but a heart-break sandy waste 'Twixt this and thee. Why, killing haste Were best, dear Time, for thee, for thee!

Oh, would that I might divine Thy name beyond the zodiac sign Wherefrom our times-to-come descend. He called thee Sometime. Change it, friend: Now-time soundeth far more fine.

Sweet Sometime, fly fast to me: Poor Now-time sits in the Lonesome-tree And broods as gray as any dove, And calls, When wilt thou come, O Love? And pleads across the waste to thee.

Good Moment, that giv'st him me, Wast ever in love? Maybe, maybe Thou'lt be this heavenly velvet time When Day and Night as rhyme and rhyme Set lip to lip dusk-modestly;

Or haply some noon afar, —O life's top bud, mixt rose and star! How ever can thine utmost sweet Be star-consummate, rose-complete, Till thy rich reds full opened are?

Well, be it dusk-time or noon-time, I ask but one small, small boon, Time: Come thou in night, come thou in day, I care not, I care not: have thine own way, But only, but only, come soon, Time.

SIDNEY LANIER.



THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS.

BY MRS. E. LYNN LINTON, AUTHOR OF "PATRICIA KEMBALL."

CHAPTER XVII.

WHAT MUST COME.

If Madame de Montfort could not teach Leam some of the things generally considered essential to the education of a gentlewoman, if her orthography was disorderly, her grammar shaky, her knowledge of geography, history and language best expressed by x, and her moral perceptions never clear and seldom straight, she was yet far in advance of a girl whose training in all things was so infinitely below even her own dwarfed standard. Madame could read with native grace and commendable fluency, making nimble leapfrogs over the heads of the exceptionally hard passages, but Leam had to spell every third word, and then she made a mess of it, Madame did know that eight and seven are fifteen, but Leam could not get beyond five and five are ten and one over makes eleven. If madame thought deception the indispensable condition of pleasant companionship, and lies the current coin of good society—in which she certainly sided with the majority of believing Christians—Leam would be none the worse for a little softening of that crude out-speaking of hers, which was less sincerity than the hardness of youthful ignorance and the insolence of false pride. If madame was only lacquer, and not clear gold all through, Leam had not the grace of even the thinnest layer of varnish, and might well take lessons in the religion of appearances and that thing which we call "manner." Madame did know at least how to bear herself with the seeming of a lady, and could say her shibboleth as it ought to be said. Thus, she ate with delicacy and held her knife nicely poised and balanced, but Leam grasped hers like a whanger, and cut off pieces of meat anyhow, which as often as not she took from the point. Mamma had eaten with her knife grasped also like a whanger, and why might not she? she said when madame remonstrated and gave her a lecture on the aesthetics of the table. And why should she not make her bread her plate, and hold both bread and meat in her hand if she liked? Why was she to wipe her lips when she drank? and why, traveling farther afield, was she to speak when she was spoken to if she would rather be silent? Why get up from her chair when ladies like Mrs, Harrowby and Mrs. Birkett came into the room? They did not get up from their chairs when she went into their rooms, and mamma never did. And why might she not say what she thought and show what she disliked? Mamma said what she thought and showed what she disliked, and mamma's rule was her law.

All these objections madame had to combat, and all these things to teach, and many more besides. And as Leam was young, and as even the hardest youth is unconsciously plastic because unconsciously imitative, the suave instructress did really make some impression; so that when she assured the incredulous neighborhood of Leam's improvement she had more solid data than always underlaid her words, and was partly justified in her assertion.

Religion, too, was another point on which the forces of new and old met in collision. Madame was of course what is meant by the word "religious." Like all persons trading on falsehood and living in deception, her orthodoxy was undoubted, and the most rigid investigation could not have discovered an unsound spot anywhere. She would as soon have thought of questioning her own existence as of doubting the literal exactness of the first chapter of Genesis, and she thought science an awfully wicked thing because it went to disprove the story of the six days. She firmly believed in the personality of Satan and material fires for wicked souls; and the sweet way in which she lamented the probable paucity of the saved was extremely edifying, not to say touching. This childlike acceptance, this faithful orthodoxy, was one of the things for which the rector liked her so well. He had a profound contempt for science and skepticism together; and an unbeliever, even if learned in the stars and old bones, ranked with him as a knave or a fool, and sometimes both. His pet joke, which was not original, was that there was only one letter of difference between septic and skeptic, and of the two the skeptic was the more unsavory.

Being then pious, madame had hung about her walls short texts in fancy lettering, with a great deal of scroll-work in gold and carmine to make them look pretty. When she came into possession of Leam's mind, she was shocked at her ignorance of all the sayings that were so familiar to herself and other persons of respectability. Leam knew nothing but a few barbarous prayers to saints, used more after the fashion of charms than anything else, the ave and the paternoster said incorrectly and not understood when said. Wherefore madame caused to be illuminated some texts for her room too, as lessons always before her eyes, and counter-charms to those heathenish invocations in which the child put her sole faith and trust of salvation. And among other things she gave her the Ten Commandments, very charmingly done. Round each commandment were pictures, emblems, symbolic flowers, all enclosed in fancy scroll-work of an elaborate kind. Really, it was a very creditable piece of bastard art, and Mr. Dundas was moved almost to tears by it. Madame did it herself—so she said with a tender little smile—as her pleasant surprise for poor dear Leam on her fifteenth birthday. And Leam was so far tamed in that she suffered the Tables to be hung up in her bedroom, and even found pleasure in looking at them. The pictures of Ruth and Naomi; of the thief running away with the money-bags; of a woman lying prostrate with long hair, and a broken lily at her side; of a murdered man prone in the snow, and a frightened-looking bravo, half covering his face in his cloak, fleeing away in the darkness, with a bowl marked "poison" and a dagger dripping with blood in the margin,—all these pictures, which stood against the commandments they illustrated, fascinated her greatly. The colors and the gilding, the flowers and the emblems, pleased her, and she took the texts sandwiched between as the jalap in the jam. At first she thought it impious to have them there at all, because they were in the Bible, and mamma used to say that good Christians never read the Bible. It was a holy book which only priests might use, and when those pigs of Protestants looked into it and read it, just as they would read the newspaper, they profaned it. But by force of habit she reconciled herself to the profanity, and by frequent looking at the art got the literature into her head. And when it was there she did not find anything in it to be afraid of or to condemn as too mysteriously holy for her knowledge. All of which was so much to the good; and Mr. Dundas had no words strong enough whereby to express his gratitude to the fair woman who had saved his child from destruction by giving her the Ten Commandments made pretty by adjuncts of bastard art.

But had it not been for Alick Corfield, Madame la Marquise de Montfort would not have made quite so much way. Alick and Leam used to meet in Steel's Wood; and when Leam carried her perplexities to Alick, and Alick told her that she ought to yield and gave her the reasons why, after first fiercely combating him, telling him he was stupid, wicked, unkind, she always ended by promising to obey; and when Leam promised the things agreed to might be considered done. In point of fact, then, it was Alick who was really moulding her, in excess of that unconscious plasticity and imitation already spoken of. But this was one of the things which the world did not know, and where judgment went awry in consequence.

Of course the neighborhood saw what was coming—what must come, indeed, by the very force of circumstances. The friendship which had sprung up from the first between Mr. Dundas and madame could not stop at friendship now, when both were free and evidently so necessary to each other. For madame, with that noble frankness backed by wise reticence characteristic of her, had told every one of her loss by which she had been necessitated to become Leam's governess; always adding, "So that I am glad to be able to work, seeing that I am obliged to do so, as I could not borrow, even for a short time: I am too proud for that, and I hope too honest."

Wherefore, as she was evidently Leam's salvation, according to her own account, and Sebastian was confessedly her income, and a very good one too, there was no reason why their several lines should not coalesce in an indissoluble union, and one home be made to serve them instead of two. As indeed it came about.

When the year of conventional mourning had been perfected, on the anniversary of the very day when poor Pepita died, the final words were said, the last frail barrier of madame's conjugal memories and widowed regrets was removed, and Sebastian Dundas went home the gladdest man in England. All that long bad past was now to be redeemed, and he had made a good bargain with life to have passed through even so much misery to come at the end into such reward.

Nothing startled him, nothing chilled him. When madame, laying her hand on his arm, said in a kind of playful candor infinitely bewitching, "Remember, dear friend, I told you beforehand that I have lost all my fortune; in marrying me you marry only myself with my past, my child and my liabilities," his mind repudiated the idea of the flimsiest shadow on that past, the faintest blur on its spotless record. As for her child, it was his: he would give it his name, it should be dearer to him than his own; which, all things considered, was not an overwhelming provision of love; and her liabilities, whatever they were, he would be glad to discharge them as a proof of his love for her and the forging of another golden link between them.

He doubted nothing, believed all, and loved as much as he believed. He was happy, radiant, content: the woman whom he loved loved him, and had consented to become his wife. In giving her dear self to him she was also accepting security and devotion at his hands; and what more can a true man want than to be of good service to the woman he loves? If women like to minister, it is the pride of men to protect; and if the vow to endow with all his worldly goods is a fable in fact, it is true as an instinctive feeling.

When Mrs. Harrowby heard that the marriage was positively arranged, she sat with her daughters at a kind of inquest on their dead friendship with Sebastian Dundas, and came to the conclusion that they must know something more definite now about this person calling herself Madame la Marquise de Montfort. As a stranger it was all very well to overlook the vagueness of her biography—they were not committed to anything really dangerous by simply visiting a householder among them—but it was another matter if she was to be married to one of themselves. Then they must learn who she really was, and Mr. Dundas must satisfy them scrupulously, else they should decline to know her.

"It will make a great gap in our society," said kindly Josephine, who, having the most to suffer, had forgiven the most readily.

"Gap or no gap, it is what we owe to ourselves," said Mrs. Harrowby.

"And to Edgar," added Maria.

"I shall call on Sebastian to-morrow," said Mrs. Harrowby, laying aside her knitting with the air of a minister who has dictated his protocol and has now only to sign the clean copy.

"Sleep on it, mamma," pleaded Josephine.

"It will make no difference," returned the mother; and her elder two echoed in concert, "I hope not."

The next day Mrs. Harrowby did call on Mr. Dundas, and, finding that gentleman at home, succeeded in speaking her mind. She conveyed her ultimatum as a corporate not individual resolution, speaking in the name of the "ladies of the place," which she was scarcely entitled to do.

Mr. Dundas declined to satisfy her. Indeed, it would have been difficult for him to have done so, seeing that he knew no more of Madame de Montfort, his intended wife, than what they all knew; which was substantially nothing, unless her fancy autobiography could be called something. He spoke, however, as if he had her private memoirs and all the branches, roots and hole of the family tree in his pocket; and he spoke loftily, with the intimation that she was superior; to all at North Aston, Mrs. Harrowby herself included.

This interview, with its demand unsatisfied and its assertions unproved, sent the coolness already existing between the Hill and Andalusia Cottage down to freezing-point; and the worst of it was that Mrs. Harrowby did not find backers. The neighborhood did not take up the cause as she expected it would. It halted midway and faced both sides, in the manner so dear to English respectability—less cordial to Mr. Dundas and madame than it would have been had Mrs. Harrowby been friendly, but unwilling to follow her to the bitter end. As they said to each other, it was all very well for Mrs. Harrowby to be so severe on the marriage, because she was angry and disappointed—and an angry and disappointed mother is ever unreasonable—but they who had no daughters to marry, really they did not see why they should persecute that poor madame who was such pleasant company, and had behaved herself with so much propriety since she came. And if Sebastian Dundas was going to make a second mistake, that was his lookout, and would be his punishment.

On the whole, the neighborhood when polled was decidedly more friendly than hostile. The Corfields and Fairbairns were, as they had always been, neutrals of a genial tint, more for than against; Mr. and Mrs. Birkett were warm partisans; and only Adelaide joined hands with the Hill and said that Mrs. Harrowby was justified in her renunciation and that madame was a wretch. And for the first time in her life the rector's daughter spoke compassionately of Leam and humanely of Pepita, saying of the one how much she pitied her, having such a woman for a stepmother; of the other, that, horrible as she was, at least they knew the worst of her, which was more than they could say of madame.

She made her father very angry when she said these things, but she repeated them, nevertheless; and she knew that he dared not scold her too severely before the world for fear of that little something called conscience, and knowledge of the reason why he believed in Madame de Montfort so implicitly.



CHAPTER XVIII.

RECKONING WITH LEAM.

The announcement of her father's intended marriage with madame came on Leam with a crushing sense of terror and despair. Unobservant youth sees little, and even what it does see it does not comprehend. Though the girl had accustomed herself by slow degrees to many works and ways which mamma had never known; though the faculties which had been, as it were, imprisoned by that close-set, hide-bound love of hers were now a little loosened and set free; though the activities of youth were stirring in her, and her inner life, if still isolated, was a shade more expanded than of old,—yet she had no desire for greater change, and she had no keener vision for the world outside herself than before. She saw nothing of that diabolical thing which her father and madame had been so long plotting as the outcome of their friendship, the parable of which her education had been the text. If her intelligence was warping out from the narrow limits in which her mother had confined it, it was still below the average—as much as her feverish love and tenacious loyalty were above. All that she knew was, mamma dead was the same as mamma living, only to be more tenderly dealt with, as she could not defend herself; and that she wondered how papa could be so wicked as to affront her now that she was not able to punish him and let him know what she thought of him.

When he told her that he was going to give her a new mother, one whom she must love as she had loved her own poor dear mamma—- he was so happy he could afford to be tender even to that terrible past and poor Pepita—Leam's first sensation was one of terror, her first movement one of repulsion. She flung off the hand which he had laid on her shoulder and drew back a few steps, facing him, her breath held, her tragic eyes flashing, her face struck to stone by what she had heard.

"Well, my dear, you need not look so surprised," said Mr. Dundas jauntily. "And you need not look so terrified. Your new mother will not hurt you,"

"She shall not be my mother, papa," said Learn: "I will not own her."

"You will do what I tell you to do," her father returned with admirable self-command.

"Not when you tell me to do a crime," flashed Leam.

Mr. Dundas smiled. "Your words are a trifle strong," he said.

"It is a crime," she reiterated. "But if you have forgotten mamma, and want to affront her now that she cannot defend herself, I have not, and never will."

Mr. Dundas smiled again. If he was so happy that he could afford to be tender to the past, so also could he afford to be patient with the present. "Foolish child!" he said compassionately: "you do not understand things yet."

"I understand that I love mamma, and will not have this wicked woman in her place," said Leam hotly.

"I think you will," he answered, playing with his watch-guard. "And in the future, my little daughter, you will thank me."

"Thank you? For what?" asked Leam. "You made mamma miserable when she lived: you and your madame helped to kill her, and now you put this woman in her place! Papa, I wonder Saint Jago lets you live."

"As Saint Jago is kind enough to leave me in peace, perhaps you will follow his example. What a saint allows my little daughter may accept," said Mr. Dundas mockingly.

"No," said Leam with pathetic solemnity, "if the saints forget mamma, I will not."

"My dear, you are a fool," said Mr. Dundas.

"You may call me what you like, but madame shall not be my mother," returned Leam.

"Madame will be your mother because she will be my wife," said Mr. Dundas slowly. "Unfortunately for you—perhaps for myself also—neither you nor I can alter the law of the land. The child must accept the consequences of the father's act."

"Then I will kill her," cried Leam.

Her father laughed gayly. "I think we will brave this desperate danger," he said. "It is a fearful threat, I grant—an awful peril—but we must brave it, for all that."

"Papa," said Leam, "I will pray to the saints that when you die you may not go to heaven with mamma and me."

It was her last bolt, her supreme effort at threat and entreaty, and it meant everything. If her words of themselves would have amused Mr. Dundas as a child's ignorant impertinence, the superstition of an untaught, untutored mind, her looks and manner affected him painfully. True, he did not love her—on the contrary, he disliked her—but, all the same, she was his child; and, dissected, realized, it was rather an awful thing that she had said. It showed an amount of hatred and contempt which went far beyond his dislike for her, and made him shudder at the strength of feeling, the tenacity of hate, in one so young.

If more absurdity than good sense is talked about natural affection, still there is a residuum of fact underneath the folly; and Leam's words had struck down to that small residuum in her father's heart. It was not that he was wounded sentimentally so much as in his sense of proprietorship, his paternal superiority, and he was angry rather than sorrowful. It made him feel that he had borne with her waywardness long enough now: it was time to put a stop to it. "Now, Leam, no more insolence and no more nonsense," he said sternly. "You have tried my patience long enough. This day month I marry Madame de Montfort, with or without your pleasure, my little girl. In a month after that I bring her home here as my wife, consequently your mother, the mistress of the house and of you. I give you the best guide, the best friend, you have ever had or could have: you will live to value her as she deserves. Your own mother was not fit to guide you: your new one will make you all that my dearest hopes would have you. Now go. Think over what I have said. If you do not like our arrangements, so much the worse for you."

"The saints will never let her come here as my mother. I will pray to them night and day to kill her." said Leam in a deep voice, clenching her hands and setting her small square teeth, as her mother used to set hers, like a trap.

Naturally, the second Mrs. Dundas could not be brought home without a certain upsetting of the old order and a rearrangement of things to suit the new. And the upsetting was not stinted, nor were the exertions of Mr. Dundas. He superintended everything himself, to the choice of a tea-cup, the looping of a curtain, and racked his brains to make his beloved's bower the fit expression of his love, though never to his mind could it be worthy of her deserving. There was not an ornament in the place but was dedicated to her, placed where she could see it on such and such an occasion, and shifted twenty times a day for a more advantageous position. Everything which the house had of most beautiful was pressed into her service, and even Leam's natural rights of inheritance were ignored for madame's better endowing. Lace, jewelry, trinkets, all that had been Pepita's, was now hers, and the man's restless desire to make her rich and her home beautiful seemed insatiable.

But there was always Leam in the background with whom he had to reckon—Leam, who wandered through the house in her straight-cut, plain black gown, made in the deepest fashion of mourning devisable, pale, silent, feverish, like an avenging spirit on his track; undoing what he had done if he had profaned an embodied memory of her mother, and as impervious to his anger as he was to her despair.

One day he carried from the drawing-room to the boudoir which was to be madame's, and had been Pepita's, a certain Spanish vase which had been a favorite ornament with her because it reminded her of home. He firmly fixed it on the bracket destined for it, opposite the couch where he longed so ardently to see his fair and queenly loved one sitting—he by her side in the lovers' paradise of secure content; but the next time he went into the room he found it lying in fragments on the floor. None of the servants knew how the mischance had happened: the window was not open, and none of them had been in the room. How, then, came it there, broken on the floor? When he asked Leam, wandering by in that pale, feverish, avenging way of hers, he knew the truth.

"Yes," she said defiantly, "I broke it. It was mamma's, and your madame shall not have it."

"If you intend to go on like this I shall have you sent to school or shut up in a lunatic asylum," cried Mr. Dundas in extreme wrath.

"Then I shall be alone with mamma, and shall not see you or your madame," answered Leam, unconquered.

"You are a hardened, shameful, wicked girl," said her father angrily. "Madame is an angel of goodness to undertake the care of such a wretched creature as you are. I could not do too much for her if I gave her all I had, and you can never be grateful enough for such a mother."

"She is not my mother, and she shall not pollute mamma's things," Leam answered with passionate solemnity. "If you give them to her I will break or burn them. Mamma's things are her own, and she shall not be made unhappy in heaven."

Provoked beyond himself, Sebastian Dundas said scornfully, "Heaven! You talk of heaven as if you knew all about it, Leam, like the next parish. How do you know she is there, and not in the place of torment instead? Your mother was scarcely of the stuff of which angels are made."

"Then if she is in the place of torment, she is unhappy enough as it is, and need not be made more so," said faithful Leam, suddenly breaking into piteous weeping; adding through her sobs, "and madame shall not have her things."

Her tenacity carried the day so far that Mr. Dundas left off rearranging the old, and sent up to London for things new and without embarrassing memories attached to them. On which Leam swept off all that had been her mother's, and locked up her treasures in her own private cupboard, carrying the key in the hiding-place which that mother had taught her to use, the thick coils of her hair. And her father, warned by that episode of the vase, and a little dominated, not to say appalled, by her resolute fidelity, shut his eyes to her domestic larceny and let her carry off her relics in safety.

So the time passed, miserably enough to the one, if full of hope and the promise of joy to the other; and the wedding morning came whereon Sebastian Dundas was to be made, as he phrased it, happy for life.

It had been madame's desire that Leam should be her bridesmaid. She had laid great stress on this, and her lover would have gratified her if he could. He had no wish that way—rather the contrary—but her will was his law, and he did his best to carry it into effect. But when he told Leam what he wanted—and he told her quite carelessly, and so much as a matter of course that he hoped she too would accept her position as a matter of course—the girl, enlightened by love if not by knowledge, broke into a torrent of disdain that soon showed him how sleeveless his errand was likely to be.

He did his best, and tried all methods from pleading to threatening, but Leam was immovable. No power on earth should bend her, she said, or make her take part in that wicked day. She go to church? She would expect to be struck dead if she did. She expected, indeed, that all of them would be struck dead. She had prayed the saints so hard, so hard, to prevent this marriage, she was sure they would at the last; and if they did not, she would never believe in them nor pray to them again. But she did believe in them, and she was sure they would punish this dreadful crime. No, she would take no part in it. Why should she put herself in the way of being punished when she was not to blame?

So Mr. Dundas had the mortification of carrying to his bride-elect the intelligence that he had been worsted in his conflict with his daughter, and that her hatred and reluctance were to be neither concealed nor overcome.

Madame was sorry, she said with her sweetest air of patience and liberal comprehension. She would have liked the dear girl to have been her bridesmaid: it would have been appropriate and touching. But as she declined—and her feelings were easy to be understood and honorable, if a little extreme—she, madame, elected to be married as a widow should, with only Mrs. Birkett and Mr. Fairbairn as the witnesses, Mr. Fairbairn to give her away for form's sake. The dear rector of course would marry them in this simple manner. They must hope that time and her own unvarying affection—Mr. Dundas called it sweetness, angelic patience, greatness of soul—would soften poor Leam into loving acceptance of what would be so much to her good when she could be got to understand it. Meanwhile they must be patient—content to go gradually and gain her bit by bit. She, madame, would be quite content with her presence in the room, when they returned to breakfast, in the pretty white muslin frock ordered from town as the sign of her participation in the event.

But when the morning came, where was Leam? The most diligent search failed to discover her, and the only person who could have betrayed her whereabouts was the last whom they would have thought of asking.

Of course, Mr. Dundas was properly distressed at this strange disappearance, and madame was unduly afflicted. She proposed that the marriage should be delayed till the girl was found, but the lover was stronger than the father, and she was overruled—yielding because it is the duty of the wife to yield, but only because of that duty—for her own part desirous of delay until they were assured of the safety of Leam.

The ceremony, however, was performed within the canonical hours, the rector a little tremulous and apparently suffering from sore throat; and as the happy pair drove away, madame, remembering her advent and her objects more than a year ago now, could not but confess that she had done better than she expected, and, her conscience whispered, better than she deserved.

All this time Leam was sitting on the lower branches of the yew tree beneath which that godless ruffian had murdered his poor sweetheart two generations ago in Steel's Wood. It was a lonely corner, where no one would have gone by choice at the best of times, but now, with its bad name and evil association, it was entirely deserted. Leam had made it her hiding-place ever since madame had taken her in hand to teach her the correct pronunciation of Shibboleth, and she had escaped from her teaching and run away into the wood, armed banditti and wild beasts notwithstanding. And one day, hunting in it for fungi, Alick Corfield had found her sitting there, and thenceforth they had shared the retreat between them.

No one knew that they met there, and no one suspected it—not even Mrs. Corfield, who believed, after the manner of mothers who bring up their boys at home, that she knew the whole of her son's life from end to end, and that he had not a thought kept back from her, nor had ever committed an action of which she was not cognizant.

Alick had installed Leam as the girl-queen of his imagination, and paid her the homage which she seemed to him to deserve more than many a real queen crowned and sceptered or princess born in the purple. It pleased him to write bad poems to her as his Infanta, his royal rose, his pomegranate flower, his nestling eagle waiting for strength to fly upward to the sun—all with halting feet and strained metaphor. He drew pictures of her by the dozen, mostly symbolic and all out of drawing, but expressive of his admiration, his hope, his respect; while to Leam he was little better than a two-legged talking dog whose knowledge interested and whose goodness swayed her, but on whose neck she set her little foot and kept it there. She always treated him with profound disdain, even when he told her curious things that were like fairy-tales, some of which she did not believe if they were too far removed from the narrow area of her personal experience. Thus, when he assured her that certain plants fed on flies as men feed on meat, she told him with her sublime Spanish calm, "I do not believe it." And she said the same when he one day informed her that the planets could be weighed and their distance from the earth and the sun measured. In the beginning she knew nothing—neither whether the earth was round or flat, nor what was the meaning of the stars, nor the name of one wild flower excepting daisies, nor of one great man. That fallow waste called her mind was virgin ground in truth, but Alick was patient, and labored hard at the stubborn soil; and when madame had given the credit to her own tact and those ugly little books from which she taught, it was to him really that Leam's microscopic amount of plasticity and reception was due.

These secret meetings amused Leam, and kept her from that ceaseless inward contemplation of her mother which else was her only voluntary occupation. They gave her a sense of power, as well as of successful rebellion to her father, that gratified her pride. To be sure, they were not what mamma would have liked. Alick Corfield was an Englishman, and mamma hated the English. But then, Leam reflected, she had not known Alick: if she had, she would have seen there was no harm in him, and that he was not teaching her things which a child of Spain ought not to know, and which Saint Jago would be angry with her for learning. And perhaps now that mamma was up in heaven, and knew all that went on here at home, she would not mind her little Leama seeing Alick Corfield so often. In her prayers she told her very faithfully all that she had done and felt and thought; she never deceived her a hair's breadth; and as she had asked her permission so often and so humbly, she made sure now that it was granted. Mamma could not refuse her when she asked her so earnestly; and she was not angry, but on the contrary glad, that her little heart had such a good dog to care for her, and that she was defying el senor papa, that false image of the false saint.

For the rest, it was only natural that she should like the air of quasi adventure and independence which this unknown, intercourse with Alick gave her. And as she was still in that conscienceless phase of youth when liking means everything, and honor without love is a grass having neither root nor flower, she continued to meet her faithful dog, and to learn from him—not all that he could tell her, but what she chose to accept.

So here it was, perched among the lower branches of the yew tree in Steel's Wood, that Leam spent her father's wedding-day with Madame la Marquise de Montfort; and when she became hungry Alick went home and brought her some dry bread and grapes from Steel's Corner, Dry bread and grapes—this was all that she would have, she said. She was not greedy like the English, who thought of nothing but eating, she added in her disdainful way; and if Alick brought her anything but bread and grapes, she would fling it into the wood. On his life he was not to touch anything on papa's table. She would rather die of hunger than eat their wicked food. She wondered it did not choke them both.

"Now go," she said superbly, "and come back soon: I am hungry," as if her sense of inconvenience was a catastrophe which heaven and earth should be moved to avert.

But young and so beautiful as she was, her little tricks of pride and arbitrariness were just so many additional charms to Alick; and if she had not flouted and commanded him, he would have thought that something terrible was about to happen: had she become docile, grateful, familiar, he would have expected her to die before the day was out. He liked her superb assumption of superiority. She was his girl-queen, and he was her slave; she was his mistress, and he was her dog; and, dog-like, he fawned at her feet even when she rated him and placed her little foot on his neck.



CHAPTER XIX.

AT STEEL'S CORNER.

"I hope you will not be bored, my boy, but I am thinking of bringing that wretched Leam Dundas here for a few days. I don't like a girl of her age and character to be left for a full month alone. It is not right, for who knows what she may not do? If she ran away on the wedding-day, she may run away again, and then where would we all be? I cannot think what her father was about to leave her unprotected like this. So I shall just take and bring her here; and if you are bored with her, you must make the best of it."

Mrs. Corfield and Alick were sitting in the "work-room" on the morning of the fifth day after the marriage, when the thought struck the little woman of the propriety of Leam's visit to them for the month of her father's absence. She did not see her son's face when she spoke, being busy with her wood-carving. If she had, she would not have thought that the presence of Leam Dundas would bore or annoy him. The clumsy features gladdened into smiles, the dull eye brightened, the dim complexion flushed: if ever a face expressed supreme delight, Alick's did then; and it expressed what he felt, for, as we know, the one love of his boyish life was this girl-queen of his fancy. Not that he was in love with her in the ordinary sense of being in love. He was too reverent and she too young for vulgar passion or commonplace sentiment. She was something precious to his imagination, not his senses, like a child-queen to her courtier, a high-born lady to her page. He bore with her girlish temper, her girlish insolence of pride, her ignorant opposition, with the humility of strength bending its neck to weakness—the devotion and unselfish sweetness characteristic of him in other of his relations than those with Leam. Judge, then, if he was likely to be bored, as his mother feared, or if this project of a closer domestication with her was not rather a "bit of blue" in his sky which made these early autumn days gladder than the gladdest summer-time.

To will and to do were synonymous with Mrs. Corfield: her motto was velle est agere; and a resolve once taken was like iron at white heat, struck into the shape of deed on the instant. Darting up from her chair, birdlike and angular, she put away her work. "Order the trap," she said briskly, "and come with me. We will go at once, before that poor creature has had time to do anything, wild, or silly."

"I do not think she would do anything wild or silly, mother," said Alick in a deprecating voice. It galled him to hear his darling spoken of so slightingly.

"No? What has she ever done that was rational?" cried his mother sharply. "From the beginning, when she was a baby of three months old, and howled at me because I kissed her, and that dreadful mother of hers flew at me like a wildcat and said I had the evil eye, Leam Dundas has been more like some changeling than an ordinary English girl. I declare it sometimes makes my heart ache to, see her with those awful eyes of hers, looking as if she had seen one does not know what—as if she was being literally burnt up alive with sorrow. However, don't let us discuss her: let us fetch her and save her from herself. That is more to the purpose at this moment."

And Alick said "Yes," and went out to order the trap with alacrity.

When they reached Andalusia Cottage, the first thing they saw was a strange workman from Sherrington painting out the name which in his early love-days for his Spanish bride Sebastian Dundas had put up in bold letters across the gate-posts. The original name of the place had been Ford House, but the old had had to give place to the new in those days as in these, and Ford House had been rechristened Andalusia Cottage as a testimony and an homage. Mrs. Corfield questioned the man in her keen inquisitorial way as to what he was about; and when he told her that the posts were to show "Virginia" now instead of "Andalusia," her great disgust, to judge by the sharp things which she said to him, seemed as if it took in the innocent hand as well as the peccant head. "I do think Sebastian Dundas is bewitched," she said disdainfully to her son as they drove up to the house. "Did any one ever hear of such a lunatic? Changing the name of his house with his wives in this manner, and expecting us to remember all his absurdities! Such a man as that to be a father! Lord of the creation, indeed! He is no better than a court fool." Which last scornful ejaculation brought the trap to the front door and into the presence of Leam.

Standing on the lawn bareheaded in the morning sunshine, doing nothing and apparently seeing nothing, dressed in the deepest mourning she could make for herself, and with her high comb and mantilla as in olden days, her eyes fixed on the ground and her hands clasped in each other, her wan face set and rigid, her whole attitude one of mute, unfathomable despair,—for the instant even Mrs. Corfield, with all her constitutional contempt for youth, felt hushed, as in the presence of some deep human tragedy, at the sight of this poor sorrowful child, this miserable mourner of fifteen. Instead of speaking in her usual quick manner, the sharp-faced little woman, poor Pepita's "crooked stick," went up to the girl quietly and softly touched her arm.

Leam slowly raised her eyes. She did not start or cry out as a creature naturally would if startled, but she seemed as if she gradually and with difficulty awakened from sleep, or from something even more profound than sleep. "Yes?" she said in answer to the touch. "What do you want?"

It was an odd question, and Leam's grave intensity made it all the more odd. But Mrs, Corfield was not easily disconcerted, and it was "only Leam" at the worst.

"I want you," she answered briskly, "Tell the maid to pack up your box, take off that lace thing on your head, and come home with me for a day or two. You need not stay longer than you like, but it will be better for you than moping here, thinking of all sorts of things you had better not think of."

"Why do my thoughts vex you?" asked Learn gravely. "I was not thinking of you."

Mrs. Corfield laughed a little confusedly. "I don't suppose you were," she said, "but you see I did think of you. But whether you were thinking of me or not, you certainly look as if you would be the better for a little rousing. You were standing there like a statue when we came up."

"I was listening to mamma," said Leam with an air of grave rebuke.

Mrs. Corfield rubbed her nose vigorously. "You would do better to come and talk to me instead," she said.

Learn transfixed her with her eyes. "I like mamma's company best," she said in the stony way which she had when stiffening herself against outside influence.

"But if you come to us, you can listen to her as much as you like," said Alick soothingly. "We will not hinder you; and, as my mother says, it is not good for you to be here alone."

"I like it," said Leam.

"Nonsense! then you should not like it. It is not natural for a girl of your age to like it. Come with us," cried Mrs. Corfield: "why not?"

"I have something to do," Leam answered solemnly.

"What can a chit of a thing like you have to do? Come with us, I tell you." Mrs. Corfield said this heartily rather than roughly, though really she could not be bothered, as she said to herself, to stand there wasting her time in arguing with a girl like Leam. It was too ridiculous.

Leam looked at her with mingled tragedy and contempt, and disdained to answer.

"What have you got to do?" again asked Mrs. Corfield.

"I shall not tell you," answered Leam, holding her head very high.

How, indeed, should she tell this little sharp-faced woman that she was thinking how she could prevent madame from coming here as her home? The saints had deserted her; she had prayed to them, threatened them, coaxed, entreated, but they had not heard her; and now she had nothing but herself, only her poor little frail hands and bewildered brain, to protect her mother's memory from insult and revenge her wrongs. The fever in her veins had given her mamma's face sorrowful and weeping, meeting her wherever she turned—mamma's voice, faint as the softest summer breeze in the trees, whispering to her, "Little Leama, I am unhappy. Sweet heart, do not let me be unhappy." For five days this fancy had haunted her, but it had not become distinct enough for guidance. She was listening now, as she was listening always, for mamma to tell her what to do. She was sure she would show her in time how to prevent that wicked woman from living here, bearing her name, taking her place: mamma could trust her to take care of her, now that she could not take care of herself. As she had said to papa, if all the world, the saints, and God himself deserted hers she, her child, would not.

She would not tell these thoughts, even to Alick. They were a secret, sacred between her and mamma, and no one must share them. If, then, she went with this bird-like, insistent woman, she would talk to her and not let her think: she and Alick would stand between herself and mamma's spirit, and then mamma would perhaps leave her again, and go back to heaven angry with her. No, she would not go, and she lifted up her eyes to say so.

As she looked up Alick whispered softly, "Come."

Feverish, excited, her brain clouded by her false fancies, Leam did not recognize his voice. To her it was her mother sighing through the sunny stillness, bidding her go with them, perhaps to find some method of hinderance or revenge which she could not devise for herself. They were clever and knew more than she did; perhaps her mother and the saints had sent them as her helpers.

It seemed almost an eternity during which these thoughts passed through her brain, while she stood looking at Mrs. Corfield so intently that the little woman was obliged to lower her eyes. Not that Leam saw her. She was thinking, listening, but not seeing, though her tragic eyes seemed searching Mrs. Corfield's very soul. Then, glancing upward to the sky, she said with an air of self-surrender, which Alick understood if his mother did not, "Yes, I will go with you: mamma says I may."

"It is my belief, Alick," said Mrs. Corfield, when she had left them to prepare for her visit, "that poor child is going crazy, if she is not so already. She always was queer, but she is certainly not in her right mind now. What a shame of Sebastian Dundas to bring her up as he has done, and now to leave her like this! How glad I am I thought of having her at Steel's Corner!"

"Yes, mother, it was a good thing. Just like you, though," said Alick affectionately.

"You must help me with her, Alick," answered his mother. "I have done what I know I ought to do, but she will be an awful nuisance all the same. She is so odd and cold and impertinent, one does not know how to take her."

Alick flushed and turned away his head. "I will take her off your hands as much as I can," he said in a constrained voice.

"That's my dear boy—do," was his mother's unsuspecting rejoinder as Leam came down stairs ready to go.

Steel's Corner was a place of unresting intellectual energies. Dr. Corfield, a man shut up in his laboratory with piles of extracts, notes, arguments, never used, but always to be used, an experimentalist deep in many of the toughest problems of chemical analysis, but neither ambitious nor communicative, was the one peaceable element in the house. To be sure, Alick would have been both broader in his aims and more concentrated in his objects had he been left to himself. As it was, the incessant demands made on him by his mother kept him too in a state of intellectual nomadism; and no one could weary of monotony where Mrs. Corfield set the pattern, unless it was of the monotony of unrest. This perpetual taking up of new subjects, new occupations, made thoroughness the one thing unattainable. Mrs. Corfield was a woman who went in for everything. She was by turns scientific and artistic, a student and a teacher, but she was too discursive to be accurate, and she was satisfied with a proficiency far below perfection. In philosophy she was what might be called a woman of antepenultimates, referring all the more intricate moral and intellectual phenomena to mind and spirit; but she was intolerant of any attempt to determine the causation of her favorite causes, and she derided the modern doctrines of evolution and inherent force as atheistic because materialistic. The two words meant the same thing with her; and the more shadowy and unintelligible people made the causa causarum the more she believed in their knowledge and their piety. The bitterest quarrel she had ever had was with an old friend, an unimaginative anatomist, who one day gravely proved to her that spirits must be mere filmy bags, pear-shaped, if indeed they had any visual existence at all. Bit by bit he eliminated all the characteristics and circumstances of the human form on the principle of the non-survival of the useless and unadaptable. For of what use are shapes and appliances if you have nothing for them to do?—if you have no need to walk, to grasp, nor yet to sit? Of what use organs of sense when you have no brain to which they lead?—when you are substantially all brain and the result independent of the method? Hence he abolished by logical and anatomical necessity, as well as the human form, the human face with eyes, ears, nose and mouth, and by the inexorable necessities of the case came down to a transparent bag, pear-shaped, for the better passage of his angels through the air.

"A fulfillment of the old proverb that extremes meet," he said by way of conclusion. "The beginning of man an ascidian—his ultimate development as an angel, a pear-shaped, transparent bag."

Mrs. Corfield never forgave her old friend, and even now if any one began a conversation on the theory of development and evolution she invariably lost her temper and permitted herself to say rude things. Her idea of angels and souls in bliss was the good orthodox notion of men and women with exactly the same features and identity as they had when in the flesh, but infinitely more beautiful; retaining the Ego, but the Ego refined and purified out of all trace of human weakness, all characteristic passions, tempers and proclivities; and the pear-shaped bag was as far removed from the truth, as she held it, on the one side as Leam's materialistic conception was on the other. The character and condition of departed souls was one of the subjects on which she was very positive and very aggressive, and Leam had a hard fight of it when her hostess came to discuss her mother's present personality and whereabouts, and wanted to convince her of her transformation.

All the same, the little woman was kind-hearted and conscientious, but she was not always pleasant. She wanted the grace and sweetness known genetically as womanliness, as do most women who hold the doctrine of feminine moral supremacy, with base man, tyrant, enemy and inferior, holding down the superior being by force of brute strength and responsible for all her faults. And she wanted the smoothness of manner known as good breeding. Though a gentlewoman by birth, she gave one the impression of a pert chambermaid matured into a tyrannical landlady.

But she meant kindly by Leam when she took her from the loneliness of her father's house, and her very sharpness and prickly spiritualism were for the child's enduring good. Her attempts, however, to make Leam regard mamma in heaven as in any wise different from mamma on earth were utterly abortive. Leam's imagination could not compass the thaumaturgy tried to be inculcated. Mamma, if mamma at all, was mamma as she had known her; and if as she had known her, then she was unhappy and desolate, seeing what a wicked thing this was that papa had done. She clung to this point as tenaciously as she clung to her love; and nothing that Mrs. Corfield, or even Alick, could say weakened by one line her belief in mamma's angry sorrow and the saints' potent and sometimes peccant humanity.

Among other scientific appliances at Steel's Corner was a small off-kind of laboratory for Alick and his mother, to prevent their troubling the doctor and to enable them to help him when necessary: it was an auxiliary fitted up in what was rightfully the stick-house. The sticks had had to make way for retorts and crucibles, and as yet no harm had come of it, though the servants said they lived in terror of their lives, and the neighbors expected daily to hear that the inmates of Steel's Corner had been blown into the air. Into this evil-smelling and unbeautiful place Leam was introduced with infinite reluctance on her own part. The bad smell made her sick, she said, turning round disdainfully on Alick, and she did not wonder now at anything he might say or do if he could bear to live in such a horrid place as this.

When he showed off a few simple experiments to amuse her—made crystal trees, a shower of snow, a heavy stone out of two empty-looking bottles, spilt mercury and set her to gather it up again, showed her prisms, and made her look through a bit of tourmaline, and in every way conceivable to him strewed the path of learning with flowers—then she began to feel a little interest in the place and left off making wry faces at the dirt and the smells.

One day when she was there her eye caught a very small phial with a few letters like a snake running spirally round it.

"What is that funny little bottle?" she asked, pointing it out. "What does it say?"

"Poison," said Alick.

"What is poison?" she asked.

"Do you mean what it is? or what it does?" he returned.

"Both. You are stupid," said Leam.

"What it does is to kill people, but I cannot tell you all in a breath what it is, for it is so many things."

"How does it kill people?" At her question Leam turned suddenly round on him, her eyes full of a strange light.

"Some poisons kill in one way and some in another," answered Alick.

Leam pondered for a few moments; then she asked, "How much poison is there in the world?"

"An immense deal," said Alick: "I cannot possibly tell you how much."

"And it all kills?"

"Yes, it all kills, else it is not poison."

"And every one?"

"Yes, every one if enough is taken."

"What is enough?" she asked, still so serious, so intent.

Alick laughed. "That depends on the material," he said. "One grain of some and twenty of others."

"Don't laugh," said Leam with her Spanish dignity: "I am serious. You should not laugh when I am serious."

"I did not mean to offend you," faltered Alick humbly. "Will you forgive me?"

"Yes," said Leam superbly, "if you will not laugh again. Tell me about poison."

"What can I tell you? I scarcely know what it is you want to hear."

"What is poison?"

"Strychnine, opium, prussic acid, belladonna, aconite—oh, thousands of things."

"How do they kill?"

"Well, strychnine gives awful pain and convulsions—makes the back into an arch; opium sends you to sleep; prussic acid stops the action of the heart; and so on."

"What is that?" asked Leam, pointing to the small phial with its snake-like spiral label.

"Prussic acid—awfully strong. Two drops of that would kill the strongest man in a moment."

"In a moment?" asked Learn.

"Yes: he would fall dead directly."

"Would it be painful?"

"No, not at all, I believe."

"Show it me," said Learn.

He took the bottle from the shelf. It was a sixty-minim bottle, quite full, stoppered and secured.

She held out her hand for it, and he gave it to her. "Two drops!" mused Leam.

"Yes, two drops," returned Alick.

"How many drops are here?"

"Sixty."

"Is it nasty?"

"No—like very strong bitter almonds or cherry-water; only in excess," he said. "Here is some cherry-water. Will you have a little in some water? It is not nasty, and it will not hurt you."

"No," said Leam with an offended air: "I do not want your horrid stuff."

"It would not hurt you, and it is really rather nice," returned Alick apologetically.

"It is horrid," said Learn.

"Well, perhaps you are better without it," Alick answered, quietly taking the bottle of prussic acid from her hands and replacing it on the shelf, well barricaded by phials and pots.

"You should not have taken it till I gave it you," said Leam proudly. "You are rude."

From this time the laboratory had the strangest fascination for Leam. She was never tired of going there, never tired of asking questions, all bearing on the subject of poisons, which seemed to have possessed her. Alick, unsuspecting, glad to teach, glad to see her interest awakened in anything he did or knew, in his own honest simplicity utterly unable to imagine that things could turn wrong on such a matter, told her all she asked and a great deal more; and still Leam's eyes wandered ever to the shelf where the little phial of thirty deaths was enclosed within its barricades.

One day while they were there Mrs. Corfield called Alick.

"Wait for me, I shall not be long," he said to Leam, and went out to his mother.

As he turned Learnm's eyes went again to that small phial of death on the shelf.

"Take it, Leama! take it, my heart!" she heard her mother whisper.

"Yes, mamma," she said aloud; and leaping like a young panther on the bench, reached to the shelf and thrust the little bottle in her hair. She did not know why she took it: she had no motive, no object. It was mamma who told her—so her unconscious desire translated itself—but she had no clear understanding why. It was instinct, vague but powerful, lying at the back of her mind, unknown to herself that it was there; and all of which she was conscious was a desire to possess that bottle of poison, and not to let them know here that she had taken it.

This was on the afternoon of her last day at the Corfields. She was to go home to-night in preparation for the arrival of her father and madame to-morrow, and in a few hours she would be away. She did not want Alick to come back to the laboratory. She was afraid that he would miss the bottle which she had secured so almost automatically if so superstitiously: Alick must not come back. She must keep that bottle. She hurried across the old-time stick-house, locked the door and took the key with her, then met Alick coming back to finish his lesson on the crystallization of alum, and said, "I am tired of your colored doll's jewelry. Come and tell me about flowers," leading the way to the garden.

Doubt and suspicion were qualities unknown to Alick Corfield. It never occurred to him that his young queen was playing a part to hide the truth, befooling him for the better concealment of her misdeeds. He was only too happy that she condescended to suggest how he should amuse her; so he went with her into the garden, where she sat on the rustic chair, and he brought her flowers and told her the names and the properties as if he had been a professor.

At last Leam sighed. "It is very tiresome," she said wearily. "I should like to know as much as you do, but half of it is nonsense, and it makes my head ache to learn. I wish I had my dolls here, and that you could make them talk as mamma used. Mamma made them talk and go to sleep, but you are stupid: you can speak only of flowers that don't feel, and about your silly crystals that go to water if they are touched. I like my zambomba and my dolls best. They do not go to water; my zambomba makes a noise, and my dolls can be beaten when they are naughty."

"But you see I am not a girl," said Alick blushing.

"No," said Leam, "you are only a boy. What a pity!"

"I am sorry if you would like me better as a girl," said Alick.

She looked at him superbly. Then her face changed to something that was almost affection as she answered in a softer tone, "You would be better as a girl, of course, but you are good for a boy, and I like you the best of every one in England now. If only you had been an Andalusian woman!" she sighed, as, in obedience to Mrs. Corfield's signal, she got up to prepare for dinner, and then home for her father and madame to-morrow.

CHAPTER XX.

IN HER MOTHER'S PLACE.

Whatever madame's past life had been—and it had been such as a handsome woman without money or social status, fond of luxury and to whom work was abhorrent, with a clear will and very distinct knowledge of her own desires, clever and destitute of moral principle, finds made to her hand—whatever ugly bits were hidden behind the veil of decent pretence which she had worn with such grace during her sojourn at North Aston, she did honestly mean to do righteously now.

She had deceived the man who had married her in such adoring good faith—granted; but when he had reconciled himself to as much of the cheat as he must know, she meant to make him happy—so happy that he should not regret what he had done. Though she was no marquise, only plain Madame de Montfort—so far she must confess for policy's sake, and to forestall discovery by ruder means, but what remained beyond she must keep secret as the grave, trusting to favorable fortune and man's honor for her safety—though the story of the fraudulent trustee was untrue, and she never had more money than the three hundred pounds brought in her box wherewith to plant her roots in the North Aston soil—though all the Lionnet bills were yet to be paid, and her husband must pay them, with awkward friends in London occasionally turning up to demand substantial sops, else they would show their teeth unpleasantly,—still, she would get his forgiveness, and she would make him happy.

And she would be good to Leam. She would be so patient, forbearing, tender, she would at last force the child to love her. It was a new luxury to this woman, who had knocked about the world so long and so disreputably, to feel safe and able to be good. She wondered what it would be like as time went on—if the rest which she felt now at the cessation of the struggle and the consciousness of her security would become monotonous or be always restful. At all events, she knew that she was happy for the day, and she trusted to her own tact and management to make the future as fair as the present.

The home-coming was triumphant. Because the rector was inwardly grieved at the loss of his ewe-lamb—for he had lost her in that special sense of spiritual proprietorship which had been his—he was determined to make a demonstration of his joy. He and Mrs. Birkett meant to stand by Mrs. Dundas as they had stood by Madame la Marquise de Montfort, and to publish their partisanship broadly. When, therefore, the travelers returned to North Aston, they found the rector and his wife waiting to receive them at their own door. Over the gate was an archway of evergreens with "Welcome!" in white chrysanthemums, and the posts were wreathed with boughs and ribbons, but leaving "Virginia Cottage" in its glossy evidence of the new regime. The drive was bordered all through with flowers from the rectory garden, and Lionnet too had been ransacked, and the hall was festooned from end to end with garlands, like a transformation-scene in a pantomime. One might have thought it the home-coming of a young earl with his girl-bride, rather than that of a middle-aged widower of but moderate means with his second wife, one of whose past homes had been in St. John's Wood, and one of her many names Mrs. Harrington.

But it pleased the good souls who thus displayed their sympathy, and it gratified those for whom it had all been done; and both husband and wife expressed their gratitude warmly, and lived up to the occasion in the emotion of the moment.

When their effusiveness had a little calmed, down, when Mrs. Dundas had caressed her child—which poor Mrs. Birkett gave up to her with tears—and Mr. Dundas had also taken it in his arms and called it "Little Miss Dundas" and "My own little Fina" tenderly—when, the servants had been spoken to prettily and the bustle had somewhat subsided, Mrs. Dundas looked round for something missing. "And where is dear Leam?" she asked with her gracious air and sweet smile.

It was very nice of her to be the first to miss the girl. The father had forgotten her, friends had overlooked her, but the stepmother, the traditional oppressor, was thoughtful of her, and wanted to include her in the love afloat. This little circumstance made a deep impression on the three witnesses. It was a good omen for Leam, and promised what indeed her new mother did honestly design to perform.

"Even that little savage must be tamed by such persistent sweetness," said Mr. Birkett to his wife, while she, with a kindly half-checked sigh, true to her central quality of maternity and love of peace all round, breathed "Poor little Leam!" compassionately.

Leam, however, was no more to the fore at the home-coming than she had been at the marriage, and much searching went on before she was found. She was unearthed at last. The gardener had seen her shrink away into the shrubbery when the carriage-wheels were heard coming up the road, and he gave information to the cook, by whom the truant was tracked and brought to her ordeal.

Mrs. Birkett went out by the French window to meet her as she came slowly up the lawn draped in the deep mourning which for the very contrariety of love she had made deeper since the marriage, her young head bent to the earth, her pale face rigid with despair, her heart full of but one feeling, her brain racked with but one thought, "Mamma is crying in heaven: mamma must not cry, and this stranger must be swept from her place."

She did not know how this was to be done; she only knew that it must be done. She had all along expected the saints to work some miracle of deliverance for her, and she looked hourly for its coming. She had prayed to them so passionately that she could not understand why they had not answered. Still, she trusted them. She had told them she was angry, and that she thought them cruel for their delay; and in her heart she believed that they knew they had done wrong, and that the miracle would be wrought before too late. It was for mamma, not for herself. Madame must be swept like a snake out of the house, that mamma might no longer be pained in heaven. Personally, it made no difference whether she had to see madame at Lionnet or here at home, but it made all the difference to mamma, and that was all for which she cared.

Thinking these things, she met Mrs. Birkett midway on the lawn, the kind soul having come out to speak a soothing word before the poor child went in, to let her feel that she was sympathized with, not abandoned by them all. Fond as she was of madame, the new Mrs, Dundas, and little as she knew of Leam, the facts of the case were enough for her, and she saw Adelaide and herself in the child's sorrow and poor Pepita's successor. "My dear," she said affectionately as she met the girl walking so slowly up the lawn, "I dare say this is a trial to you, but you must accept it for your good. I know what you must feel, but it is better for you to have a good kind stepmother, who will be your friend and instructress, than to be left with no one to guide you."

Leam's sad face lifted itself up to the speaker. "It cannot be good for me if it is against mamma," she said.

"But, Leam, dear child, be reasonable. Your mamma, poor dear! is dead, and, let us trust, in heaven." The good soul's conscience pricked her when she said this glib formula, of which in this present instance she believed nothing. "Your father has the most perfect right to marry again. Neither the Church nor the Bible forbids it; and you cannot expect him to remain single all his life—when he needs a wife so much, too, on your account—because he was married to your dear mamma when she was alive. Besides, she has done with this life and all the things of the earth by now; and even if she has not, she will be happy to see you, her dear child, well cared for and kindly mothered."

Leam raised her eyes with sorrowful skepticism, melancholy contempt. It was the old note of war, and she responded to it. "I know mamma," she said; "I know what she is feeling."

She would have none of their spiritual thaumaturgy—none of that unreal kind of transformation with which they had tried to modify their first teaching. There was no satisfaction in imagining mamma something different from her former self—no more the real, fervid, passionate, jealous Pepita than those pear-shaped transparent bags, so logically constructed by Mrs. Corfield's philosopher, are like the ideal angels of loving fancy. If mamma saw and knew what was going on here at this present moment—and Mrs. Birkett was not the bold questioner to doubt this continuance of interest—she felt as she would have felt when alive, and she would be angry, jealous, weeping, unhappy.

Mrs. Birkett was puzzled what to say for the best to this uncomfortable fanatic, this unreasonable literalist. When believers have to formularize in set words their hazy notions of the feelings and conditions of souls in bliss, they make but a lame business of it; and nothing that the dear woman could propound, keeping on the side of orthodox spirituality, carried comfort or conviction to Leam. Her one unalterable answer was always simply, "I know mamma: I know what she is feeling," and no argument could shake her from her point.

At last Mrs. Birkett gave up the contest. "Well, my child," she said, sighing, "I can only hope that the constant presence of your stepmother, her kindness and sweetness, will in time soften your feeling toward her."

Leam looked at her earnestly. "It is not for myself," she said: "it is for mamma."

And she said it with such pathetic sincerity, such an accent of deep love and self-abandonment to her cause, that the rector's wife felt her eyes filling up involuntarily with tears. Wrong-headed, dense, perverse as Leam was, her filial piety was at the least both touching and sincere, she said to herself, a pang passing through her heart. Adelaide would not speak of her if she were dead as this poor ignorant child spoke of her mother. Yet she had been to Adelaide all that the best and most affectionate kind of English mother can be, while Pepita had been a savage, now cruel and now fond; one day making her teeth meet in her child's arm, another day stifling her with caresses; treating her by times as a woman, by times as a toy, and never conscientious or judicious.

All the same, Leam's fidelity, if touching, was embarrassing as things were; so was her belief in the continued existence of her mother. But what can be done with those uncompromising reasoners who will carry their creeds straight to their ultimates, and will not be put off with eclectic compromises of this part known and that hidden—so much sure and so much vague? Mrs. Birkett determined that her husband should talk to the child and try to get a little common sense into her head, but she doubted the success of the process, perhaps because in her heart she doubted the skill of the operator.

By this time they reached the window, and the woman and the girl passed through into the room.

Mrs. Dundas came forward to meet her stepdaughter kindly—not warmly, not tumultuously—with her quiet, easy, waxen grace that never saw when things were wrong, and that always assumed the halcyon seas even in the teeth of a gale. For her greeting she bent forward to kiss the girl's face, saying, "My dear child, I am glad to see you," but Leam turned away her head.

"I am not glad to see you, and I will not kiss you," she said.

Her father frowned, his wife smiled. "You are right, my dear: it is a foolish habit," she said tranquilly, "but we are such slaves to silly habits," she added, looking at the rector and his wife in her pretty philosophizing way, while they smiled approvingly at her ready wit and serene good-temper.

"Will you say the same to me, Leam?" asked her father with an attempt at jocularity, advancing toward her.

"Yes," said Leam gravely, drawing back a step.

"Tell me, Mrs, Birkett, what can be done with such an impracticable creature?" cried Mr. Dundas.

"She will come right: in time, dear husband," said the late marquise sweetly; and Mrs. Birkett echoed, looking at the girl kindly, "Oh yes, she will come right in time."

"If you mean by coming right, letting you be my mamma, I never will," cried Leam, fronting her stepmother.

"Silence, Leam!" cried Mr. Dundas angrily.

His wife laid her taper fingers tenderly on his. "No, no, dear husband: let her speak," she pleaded, her voice and manner admirably effective. "It is far better for her to say what she feels than to brood over it in silence. I can wait till she comes to me of her own accord and says, 'Mamma, I love you: forgive me the past'"

"You are an angel," said Mr. Dundas, pressing her hand to his lips, his eyes moist and tender.

"I always said it," the rector added huskily—"the most noble-natured woman of my acquaintance."

"I never will come to you and say, 'Mamma, I love you,' and ask you to forgive me for being true to my own mamma," said Learn. "I am mamma's daughter, no other person's."

Mrs. Dundas smiled. "You will be; mine, sweet child," she said.

How ugly Leam's persistent hate looked by the side of so much unwearied goodness! Even Mrs. Birkett, who pitied the poor child, thought her tenacity too morbid, too dreadful; and the rector honestly held her as one possessed, and regretted in his own mind that the Church had no formula for efficient exorcism. Believing, as he did, in the actuality of Satan, the theory of demoniacal possession came easy as the explanation of abnormal qualities.

Her father raged against himself in that he had given life to so much moral deformity. And yet it was not from him that she inherited "that cursed Spanish blood," he said, turning away with a groan, including Pepita, Leam, all his past with its ruined love and futile dreams, its hope and its despair, in that one bitter word.

"Don't say that, papa: mamma and I are true. It is you English that are bad and false," said Leam at bay.

Mrs. Dundas raised her hand, "Hush, hush, my child!" she said in a tone of gentle authority. "Say of me and to me what you like, but respect your father."

"Oh, Leam has never done that," cried Mr. Dundas with intense bitterness.

"No," said Leam, "I never have. You made mamma unhappy when she was alive: you are making her unhappy now. I love mamma: how can I love you?"

And then, her words realizing her thoughts in that she seemed to see her mother visibly before her, sorrowful and weeping while all this gladness was about in the place which had once been hers, and whence she was now thrust aside—these flowers of welcome, these smiling faces, this general content, she alone unhappy, she who had once been queen and mistress of all—the poor child's heart broke down, and she rushed from the room, too proud to let them see her cry, but too penetrated with anguish to restrain the tears.

"I am sure I don't know what on earth we can do with that girl," said Mr. Dundas with a dash of his old weak petulance, angry with circumstance and unable to dominate it—the weak petulance which had made Pepita despise him so heartily, and had winged so many of her shafts.

"Time and patience," said madame with her grand air of noble cheerfulness. But she had just a moment's paroxysm of dismay as she looked through the coming years, and thought of life shared between Leam's untamable hate and her husband's unmanly peevishness. For that instant it seemed to her that she had bought her personal ease and security at a high price.

As Leam went up stairs the door of her stepmother's room was standing open. The maid had unpacked the boxes most in request, and was now at tea in the servants' hall, telling of her adventures in Paris, where master and mistress had spent the honeymoon, and in her own way the heroine of the hour, like her betters in the parlor. The world seemed all wrong everywhere, life a cheat and love a torture, to Leam, as she stood within the open door, looking at the room which had been hers and her mother's, now transformed and appropriated to this stranger, She did not understand how papa could have done it. The room in which mamma had lived, the room in which she had died, the window from which she used to look, the very mirror that used to reflect back her beautiful and beloved face—ah, if it could only have kept what it reflected!—and papa to have given all this away to another woman! Poor mamma! no wonder she was unhappy. What could she, Leam, do to prevent all this wickedness if the blessed ones were idle and would not help her?

Her eyes fell on a bottle placed on the console where madame's night appliances were ranged—her night-light and the box of matches, her Bible and a hymn-book, a tablespoon, a carafe full of water and a tumbler, and this bottle marked "Cherry-water—one tablespoonful for a dose." In madame's handwriting underneath stood, "For my troublesome heart." Only about two tablespoonsful were left.

Leam took the bottle in one hand, the other thrust itself mechanically into her hair. No one was about, and the house was profoundly still, save for the voices coming up from the room below in a subdued and not unpleasant murmur, with now and then the child's shrill babble breaking in through the deeper tones like occasional notes in a sonata. Out of doors were all the pleasant sights and sounds of the peaceful evening coming on after the labors of the busy day. The birds were calling to each other in the woods before nesting for the night; the homing rooks flew round and round their trees, cawing loudly; the village dogs barked their welcome to their masters as they came off the fields and the day's work; and the setting sun dyed the autumn leaves a brighter gold, a deeper crimson, a richer russet. It was all so peaceful, all so happy, in this soft mild evening of the late September—all seemed so full of promise, so eloquent of future joy, to those who had just begun their new career.

But Leam knew nothing of the poetry of the moment—felt nothing of its pathetic irony in view of the deed she was half-unconsciously designing. She saw only, at first dimly, then distinctly, that here were the means by which mamma's enemy might be punished and swept from mamma's place, and that if she failed her opportunity now she would be a traitor and a coward, and would fail in her love and duty to mamma. No, she would not fail. Why should she? It was the way which the saints themselves had opened, the thing she had to do; and the sooner it was done the better for mamma.

She uncorked the bottle of cherry-water, good for that troublesome heart of poor madame's. All that Alick had told her of the action of poisons came back upon her as clearly as her mother's words, her mother's voice. This cherry-water, too, had the smell of bitter almonds, and was own sister to that in the little phial in her other hand. Now she understood it all—why she had been taken to Steel's Corner, why Alick had taught her about poisons, and why her mamma had told her to steal that bottle. She looked at it with its eloquent paper marked "Poison" wound about it spirally like a snake, uncorked it and emptied half into the cherry-water.

"Two drops are enough, and there are more than two there," she said to herself. "Mamma must be safe now." And with this she left the room and went into her own to watch and wait.

It was early to-night when Mrs. Dundas retired. There were certain things which she wanted to do on this her first night in her new home; and among them she wanted to put that green velvet pocket-book, gold embroidered, in some absolutely safe place, where it would not be seen by prying eyes or fall into dangerous hands. She did not intend to destroy its contents. She knew enough of the uncertainty of life to hold by all sorts of anchorages; and though things looked safe and sweet enough now, they might drift into the shallows again, and she wished her little Fina's future to be assured by one or other of those charged with it—if the stepfather failed, then to fall back on the father. Wherefore she elected to keep these papers in a safe place rather than destroy them, and the safest place she could think of was Pepita's jewel-case, now her own. It had a curious lock, which no other key than its own would fit—a lock that would have baffled even a "cracksman" and his whole bunch of skeleton keys.

In putting them away, obliged for the need of space to take off the paper wrappings, she was foolish enough to look at the photographs within—just one last look before banishing them for ever from her sight, as an honest wife should—and the sight of the handsome young face which she had loved sincerely in its day, and which was the face of her child's father, shook her nerves more than she liked them to be shaken. That troublesome heart of hers had begun to play her strange tricks of late with palpitation and irregularity. She could not afford that her nerve should fail her. That gone, nothing would remain to her but a wreck. But her cherry-water was a pleasant and safe calmant, and she knew exactly how much to take.

Her maid saw nothing more to-night than she had seen on any other night of her service. Her mistress, if not quite so sweet to her as to Mrs. Birkett, say, or the rector, was yet fairly amiable as mistresses go, and to-night was neither better nor worse than ordinary. Her attendance went on in the usual routine, with nothing to remark, bad or good; and then madame laid her fair head on the pillow, and took a tablespoonful of her calmant to check the palpitation that had come on, and to still her nerves, which that last look backward had somewhat disturbed.

How beautiful she looked! Fair and lovely as she had always been to the eyes of Sebastian Dundas, never had she looked so grand as now. Her yellow hair was lying spread out on the pillow like a glory: one white arm was flung above her head, the other hung down from the bed. Her pale face, with her mouth half open as if in a smile at the happy things she dreamt, peaceful and pure as a saint's, seemed to him the very embodiment of all womanly truth and sweetness. He leaned over her with a yearning rapture that was almost ecstasy. This noble, loving woman was his own, his life, his future. No more dark moods of despair, no more angry passions, disappointment and remorse; all was to be cloudless sunshine, infinite delight, unending peace and love.

"My darling, oh my love!" he said tenderly, laying his hand on her glossy golden hair and kissing her. "Virginie, give me one word of love on your first night at home."

She was silent. Was her sleep so deep that even love could not awake her? He kissed her again and raised her head on his arm. It fell back without power, and then he saw that the half-opened mouth had a little froth clinging about the lips.

A cry rang through the house—cry on cry. The startled servants ran up trembling at they knew not what, to find their master clasping in his arms the fair dead body of his newly-married wife.