Holborough was a small place; and he began to speculate immediately upon the identity of this bachelor friend of Mr. Fairfax's. It was not a garrison town. The young men of the place were for the most part small professional men—half-a-dozen lawyers and doctors, two or three curates, a couple of bankers' sons, an auctioneer or two, ranking vaguely between the trading and professional classes, and the sons of tradesmen. Among them all Mr. Granger could remember no one likely to be a friend of George Fairfax. It might possibly be one of the curates; but it seemed scarcely probable that Mr. Fairfax would come two hundred and fifty miles to abide three days with a curate. Nor was it the season of partridges. There was no shooting to attract Mr. Fairfax to the neighbourhood of Holborough. There was trout, certainly, to be found in abundance in brooks, and a river within a walk of the town; and Mr. Fairfax might be passionately fond of fly-fishing.

"You will come in and have some luncheon, of course," Mr. Granger said, when they came to the gateway, where George Fairfax pulled up, and began to wish them good-bye. Not to ask the man to eat and drink would have seemed to him the most unnatural thing in the world.

"Thanks. I think I had better deny myself that pleasure," Mr. Fairfax said doubtfully. "The day is getting on, and—and I have an engagement for the afternoon." ("Trout, no doubt," thought Mr. Granger.) "I have seen you, that is the grand point. I could not leave Yorkshire without paying my respects to you and Mrs. Granger."

"Do you leave so soon?"

"To-morrow, I think."

"A hurried journey for trout," thought Mr. Granger.

He insisted upon the visitor coming in to luncheon. George Fairfax was not very obdurate. It was so sweet to be near the woman he loved, and he had not the habit of refusing himself the things that were sweet to him. They went into the small dining-room. The luncheon bell had rung a quarter of an hour ago, and Miss Granger was waiting for her parents, with an air of placid self-abnegation, by an open window.

There was a good deal of talk during luncheon, but the chief talker was George Fairfax. Clarissa was grave and somewhat absent. She was thinking of her brother Austin, and the gloomy account of him which she had just heard. It was hardly a surprise to her. His letters had been few and far between, and they had not been hopeful, or, at the best, brightened by only a flash of hopefulness, which was more like bravado, now and then. His necessity for money, too, had seemed without limit. She was planning her campaign. Come what might, she must contrive some means of being in Paris before long. Mr. Fairfax was going on to Carlsruhe, that was an advantage; for something in his manner to-day had told her that he must always be more or less than her friend. She had a vague sense that his eagerness to establish a confidence between her and himself was a menace of danger to her.

"If I can only go to Austin myself," she thought, "there need be no intermediary."

Luncheon was over, and still Mr. Fairfax lingered—strangely indifferent to the waning of an afternoon which seemed peculiarly advantageous for fly-fishing, Mr. Granger thought. They went into the drawing-room, and Mr. Fairfax dawdled an hour away talking of Lyvedon, and giving a serio-comic description of himself in the novel character of a country gentleman. It was not till Mr. Granger had looked at his watch once or twice in a surreptitious manner, thinking of an engagement to meet his architect for the inspection of some dilapidated cottages on the newest part of his estate, that the visitor rose to depart. Daniel Granger had quite warmed to him by this time. His manner was so natural in its pleasant airiness: it was not easy to think there could be any lurking evil beneath such a show of candour.

"Can't you stay and dine with us?" asked Mr. Granger; "or will you go back to Holborough and fetch your friend? We shall be very glad to know him, if we don't know him already."

If a blush had been possible to George Fairfax, this friendly speech would have raised it; but the capacity had departed from him before he left Eton. He did feel ashamed of himself, nevertheless.

"You are more than good," he said, "but my friend seldom goes anywhere. Good-bye."

He made his adieux with an agreeable abruptness, not caring to prolong the dinner question. Such men as he tell lies without stint upon occasion; but the men are few to whom it is actually congenial to lie. He was glad to get away even from the woman he loved, and the sense of shame was strong upon him as he departed.

If his mother, who was anxiously awaiting a letter from Paris or Carlsruhe, could have known of his presence here in this place, to which his father had come years ago to betray her! If she who loved him so fondly, and was so full of prayers and hopes for his future, could have seen him so utterly on the wrong road, what bitter shame and lamenting there would have been in the halls of Lyvedon that day—those deserted halls in which the lady sat alone among the sombre old-world grandeurs of oak and tapestry, and sighed for her absent son!

* * * * *

Instead of going straight back to the Holborough high-road, Mr. Fairfax struck across the woods by that path which led to the mill-stream and the orchard, where he had parted from Clarissa on that cheerless October night nearly three years ago. He knew that Mr. Lovel was away, and the cottage only tenanted by servants, and he had a fancy for looking at the place where he had been so angry and so miserable—the scene of that one rejection which had stung him to the very quick, the single humiliation of his successful career. It was only the morbid fancy of an idle man, who had an afternoon to dispose of somehow.

Half-way between the Court and the cottage, he heard the jingling of bells, and presently, flashing and gleaming among the trees, he saw a gaily-painted carriage drawn by a pair of goats, with plated harness that shone in the sun. Mixed with the joyous jingle of the bells, there came the sound of an infant's laughter. It was the baby taking his after-dinner airing, attended by a couple of nurses. A turn in the path brought George Fairfax and the heir of Arden face to face.

A sudden impulse seized him—a sudden impulse of tenderness for her child. He took the little bundle of rosy babyhood and lace and muslin in his arms, and kissed the soft little face as gently as a woman, and looked into the innocent blue eyes, dilated to an almost impossible extent in a wondering stare, with unspeakable love and melancholy in his own. Great Heaven! if Clarissa had been his wife, this child his son, what a happy man he might have been, what a new charm there would have been in the possession of a fine estate, what a new zest in life, the savour of which seemed to have departed altogether of late!

He put the little one back into his cushioned seat in the goat-chaise with supreme care and gentleness, not ruffling so much as a plume in his dainty white satin hat.

"A fine boy, Mrs. Nurse," he said, feeling in his waistcoat-pocket for bacsheesh; to which proposition the portly head-nurse, who had stared at him, aghast with horror, while had handled the infant, assented with enthusiasm.

"I never nursed a finer, sir; and I was head-nurse to Lady Fitz-Lubin, which my lady had five boys, and not a girl between them; and Mrs. Granger does dote on him so. I never see a ma that rapt up in her child."

Mr. Fairfax gave her half-a-sovereign, stooped down to kiss the baby again—it is doubtful if he had ever kissed a baby before—and then walked on, wondering at the new sensation. Such a little soft thing, that opened its mouth to be kissed, like a petted bird! And yet he could contemplate a future in which he should come between Clarissa and this child; he could dream of a possibility which should make its mother's name a shame to this little one.

* * * * *

Mr. Granger kept his appointment with the architect, and came to the natural conclusion of a rich roan upon the subject of dilapidated buildings. After inspecting the lop-sided old cottages, with their deep roomy chimneys, in which the farm labourer loved to sit of a night, roasting his ponderous boots, and smoking the pipe of meditation, and their impossible staircases, which seemed to have been designed with a deliberate view to the breaking of legs and endangerment of spines, Mr. Granger made a wry face, and ordered that rubbish to be swept away.

"You can build me half-a-dozen upon the new Arden design," he said; "red brick, with stone dressings; and be sure you put a tablet with the date in front of each."

He was thinking of his son, anxious that there should be some notable improvement, some new building every year, to mark the progress of his boy's existence.

The farm-labourers and their wives did not look so delighted as they might have been by this edict. These benighted souls liked the old cottages, lop-sided as they were—liked the crooked staircase squeezed into a corner of the living room below, the stuffy little dens above, with casement windows which only opened on one side, letting in the smallest modicum of air, and were not often opened at all. Cottages on the Now Arden model meant stone floors below and open rafters above, thorough draughts everywhere, and, worst of all, they meant weekly inspection by Miss Granger. The free sons and daughters of Hickly-on-the-Hill—this little cluster of houses which formed a part of Mr. Granger's new estate—had rejoiced that they were not as the Ardenites; that they could revel in warmth and dirt, and eat liver-and-bacon for supper on a Saturday night, without any fear of being lectured for their extravagance by the omniscient Sophia on the following Monday, convicted of their guilt by the evidence of the grease in an unwashed frying-pan; that their children could sport on the hillside in garments that were guiltless of strings; that, in short, they were outside the circle of Miss Granger's sympathies and could live their own lives. But that sweet liberty was all over now: with the red brick and stone dressings would come the Draconian laws of New Arden; no more corners for the comfortable accumulation of dirt, no more delicious little cupboards for the stowing away of rubbish. Everything was to be square and solid and stony. They heard Mr. Granger giving orders that the chimney was to be flush with the wall, and so on; the stove, an "Oxford front," warranted to hold not more than a pound and a half of coal; no recesses in which old age could sit and croon, no cosy nook for the cradle of infancy.

After this interview with the architect, Mr. Granger rode home through Holborough. His way took him past that very hotel where George Fairfax was staying—the chief inn of the town, a fine old red-brick building that filled nearly one side of the market-place.

It happened that just as Mr. Granger rode along the High-street, where there were some half-a-dozen stragglers visible upon a wide expanse of pavement, and one carriage waiting at the draper's, Mr. Fairfax walked up the broad steps of the hotel and entered—entered with the air of a man who lived there, Daniel Granger thought. And he had said that he was staying with a bachelor friend. Mr. Granger rode slowly past the principal part of the hotel to an archway at the end—an archway leading to livery stables, where the ostler was lounging. He stopped opposite this archway, and beckoned the man over to him.

"There was a gentleman went into the hotel just now," he said; "did you see him?"

"Yes, sir, I seed him. Mr. Fairfax; him as was to have married Lady Laura Armstrong's sister."

"Is he staying in the house, do you know?"

"Yes, sir; came last night, down from London. Shall I take him your card, sir?"

"No, thank you, Giles; I won't call upon him this afternoon, I only wanted to be sure. Good-day."

He rode on. What was the meaning of this lie which George Fairfax had told him? Had it any meaning which it behoved him to fathom? It was strange, at the least—strange enough to make Mr. Granger very uncomfortable as he rode slowly back to the Court.

* * * * *



CHAPTER XXXII.

AUSTIN.

Late in the autumn of that year, Mr. Granger and his household took up their abode in Paris. Clarissa had expressed a wish to winter in that brilliant city, and Daniel Granger had no greater desire than to please her. But, in making any concession of this kind, he did it in such a quiet unobtrusive way, that his wife was scarcely aware how entirely her wishes had been studied. He was too proud a man to parade his affection for her; he kept a check upon himself rather, and in a manner regulated his own conduct by the standard of hers. There was never any show of devotion on his part. The world might have taken them for a couple brought together by convenience, and making the best of their loveless union.

So, with regard to the gratification of her wishes, it seemed always that the thing which Clarissa desired, happened to suit his own humour, rather than that he sacrificed all personal feeling for her pleasure. In this Parisian arrangement it had been so, and his wife had no idea that it was entirely on her account that Daniel Granger set up his tent in the Faubourg St. Honore.

The fair Sophia had, however, a very shrewd suspicion of the fact, and for some weeks prior to the departure from Arden, existed in a state of suppressed indignation, which was not good for the model villagers; her powers of observation were, if possible, sharpened in the matter of cobwebs; her sense of smell intensified in relation to cabbage-water. Nor did she refrain from making herself eminently disagreeable to her stepmother.

"I should not have supposed you would so soon be tired of Arden Court," she remarked pleasantly, during that dreary quarter of an hour after dinner which Mr. Granger and his wife and daughter were wont to pass in the contemplation of crystallized apricots and hothouse grapes, and the exchange of the baldest commonplaces in the way of conversation; Perhaps if Clarissa and her husband had been alone on such occasions that air of ceremony might have vanished. The young wife might have drawn her chair a little nearer her husband's, and there might have been some pleasant talk about that inexhaustible source of wonder and delight, the baby. But with Miss Granger always at hand, the dessert was as ceremonious as if there had been a party of eighteen, and infinitely more dreary, lacking the cheery clatter and buzz of company. She ate five hothouse grapes, and sipped half a glass of claret, with as solemn an air as if she had been making a libation to the gods.

Mr. Granger looked up from his plate when his daughter made this remark about Arden, and glanced inquiringly at his wife, with a shadow of displeasure in his face. Yielding and indulgent as he had been to her, there was in his composition something of the stuff that makes a tyrant. His wife must love the things that he loved. It would have been intolerable to him to suppose that Mrs. Granger could grow weary of the house that he had beautified.

"I am not tired of the Court," Clarissa answered with a sad smile. "There are too many recollections to make it dear to me."

Daniel Granger's face flushed ever so slightly at this speech.

It was the past, then, and not the present, that rendered the place dear to her.

"I could never grow tired of Arden," she went on; "but I think it will be very nice to spend a winter in Paris."

"Lady Laura Armstrong has put that notion into your head, no doubt," said Miss Granger, with the faintest suspicion of a sneer. She was not very warmly attached to the lady of Hale Castle nowadays, regarding her as the chief promoter of Mr. Granger's marriage.

"Lady Laura has said that they enjoyed themselves very much in Paris the winter before last," Clarissa answered frankly; "and has promised me plenty of introductions. She even promises that she and Mrs. Armstrong will come over for a week or two, while we are there."

"And poor Lady Geraldine Challoner?"

Miss Granger always exhibited a profound pity for Lady Geraldine, and never lost any opportunity of dwelling upon Mr. Fairfax's bad conduct.

"No; I don't suppose Lady Geraldine would go with them," Clarissa answered, colouring a little. The name of Geraldine Challoner was always painful to her. "She doesn't care about going anywhere."

"Perhaps she would not care to run the risk of meeting Mr. Fairfax," suggested Sophia.

Mr. Granger looked up again, with that shadow of displeasure upon his countenance.

"She would not be more likely to meet him in Paris than at Hale," replied Clarissa. "He has gone to Germany."

"Yes, for the autumn, he said. Depend upon it, he will spend the winter in Paris. I have always observed that those dissipated kind of men prefer Paris to London."

"I don't think you have any right to call Mr. Fairfax dissipated, Sophia," said her father, with an offended air; "and I don't think that his movements can be of the smallest consequence to you, nor those of the Hale Castle people either? Clarissa and I have determined to spend two or three months in Paris, and we are not in the slightest degree dependent upon our English friends for our enjoyment there. If you are disinclined to accompany us, and would rather remain at Arden——"

"O, papa, papa!" cried Sophia, with an injured look, "don't say that; don't allow me to think I have grown quite indifferent to you."

"You have not grown indifferent to me; but I don't want to take you away from home against your wish."

"My wish is to be anywhere with you, papa; anywhere—even though you may feel me an incumbrance. I could endure the humiliation of feeling that, so long as I was allowed to remain with you."

Mr. Granger gave a sigh that was almost a groan, and, for perhaps the first time in his life, it occurred to him that it would be a pleasant thing if his only daughter were to fall in love with some fortunate youth, and desire to marry him. A curate even. There was Tillott. Why shouldn't she marry Tillott? He, Daniel Granger, would give his child a handsome portion, and they could go through life inspecting model cottages, and teaching village children the works and ways of all those wicked kings of Israel, who made groves and set up the idols of their heathen neighbours; a pure and virtuous and useful life, without question, if tempered with come consideration for the feelings of the model cottagers, and some mercy for the brains of the humble scholars.

In the interval between this little after-dinner scene and the departure from Arden, Mr. Granger invited Mr. Tillott to dinner two or three times, and watched him with the eyes of anxiety as he conversed with Sophia. But although the curate was evidently eager to find favour in the sight of the damsel, the damsel herself showed no sign of weakness. Mr. Granger sighed, and told himself that the lamp of hope burned dimly in this quarter.

"She really ought to marry," he said to himself. "A girl of her energetic indefatigable nature would be a treasure to some man, and she is only wasting herself here. Perhaps in Paris we shall meet some one;" and then there arose before Mr. Granger the vision of some foreign adventurer, seeking to entangle the wealthy English "meess" in his meshes. Paris might be a dangerous place; but with such, a girl as Sophia, there could be no fear; she was a young woman who might be trusted to walk with unfaltering steps through the most tortuous pathways of this life, always directing herself aright, and coming in at the finish just at that very point at which a well brought-up young person should arrive.

Mr. Granger made his Parisian arrangements on the large scale which became him as a landed gentleman of unlimited wealth. A first floor of some ten spacious rooms was selected in one of the bran-new stone mansions in a bran-new street in the fashionable Faubourg; a house that seemed to have been built for the habitation of giants; a house made splendid by external decoration in carved stonework, garlands of stone-fruit and flowers, projecting lion-heads, caryatides, and so on: no gloomy porte-cochere, but a street-door, through which a loaded drag might have been driven without damage to the hats of the outside passengers. A house glorified within by egg-and-dart mouldings, white enamelled woodwork and much gilding; but a house in which the winter wind howled as in a primeval forest, and which required to be supplied with supplementary padded crimson-velvet doors before the spacious chambers could be made comfortable. Here Mr. Granger took up his abode, with ten of his Arden Court servants quartered on a floor above. The baby had a nursery loosing into the broad bare street, where some newly-planted sticks of the sycamore species shivered in the north-east wind; and the baby took his matutinal airings in the Tuileries Gardens, and his afternoon drives in the Bois, while every movement of his infant existence was watched or directed by the tenderest of mothers. The chief nurse, who had lived with more fashionable mistresses, for whom the duties of the nursery were subordinate to the business of society, pronounced Mrs. Granger "fidgety"; a very sweet lady, but too fond of interfering about trifles, and not reposing boundless confidence in the experience of her nurse.

There were a good many English people in Paris this year whom the Grangers knew, and Lady Laura had insisted upon giving Clarissa introductions to some of her dearest friends among the old French nobility—people who had known Lord Calderwood in their days of exile—and more than one dearest friend among the newer lights of the Napoleonic firmament. Then there were a Russian princess and a Polish countess or so, whom Lady Laura had brought to Mrs. Granger's receptions in Clarges-street: so that Clarissa and her husband found themselves at once in the centre of a circle, from the elegant dissipations whereof there was no escape. The pretty Mrs. Granger and the rich Mr. Granger were in request everywhere; nor was the stately Sophia neglected, although she took her share in all festivities with the familiar Sunday-school primness, and seemed to vivacious Gaul the very archetype of that representative young English lady who is always exclaiming "Shocking!" Even after her arrival in Paris, when she felt herself so very near him, after so many years of severance, Clarissa did not find it the easiest thing in the world to see her brother. Mr. and Mrs. Granger had only spent a couple of days in Paris during their honeymoon, and Daniel Granger planned a round of sight-seeing, in the way of churches, picture-galleries, and cemeteries, which fully occupied the first four or five days after their arrival. Clarissa was obliged to be deeply interested in all the details of Gothic architecture—to appreciate Ingres, to give her mind to Gerome—when her heart was yearning for that meeting which he had waited so long to compass. Mr. Granger, as an idle man, with no estate to manage—no new barns being built within his morning's ride—no dilapidated cottages to be swept away—was not easily to be got rid of. He devoted his days to showing his wife the glories of the splendid city, which he knew by heart himself, and admired sufficiently in a sober business-like way. The evenings were mortgaged to society. Clarissa had been more than a week in Paris before she had a morning to herself; and even then there was Miss Granger to be disposed of, and Miss Granger's curiosity to be satisfied.

Mr. Granger had gone to breakfast at the Maison Doree with a mercantile magnate from his own country—a solemn commercial breakfast, whereat all the airy trifles and dainty compositions of fish, flesh, and fowl with which the butterfly youth of France are nourished, were to be set before unappreciative Britons. At ten o'clock Clarissa ordered her carriage. It was best to go in her own carriage, she thought, even at the risk of exciting the curiosity of servants. To send for a hired vehicle would have caused greater wonder; to walk alone was impossible; to walk with her nurse and child might have been considered eccentric.

She could not even take an airing, however, without some discussion with Miss Granger. That young lady was established in the drawing-room—the vast foreign chamber, which never looked like a home—illuminating a new set of Gothic texts for the adornment of her school. She sorely missed the occupation and importance afforded her by the model village. In Paris there was no one afraid of her; no humble matrons to quail as her severe eyes surveyed wall and ceiling, floor and surbase. And being of a temperament which required perpetual employment, she was fain to fall back upon illumination, Berlin-wool work, and early morning practice of pianoforte music of the most strictly mathematical character. It was her boast that she had been thoroughly "grounded" in the science of harmony; but although she could have given a reason for every interval in a sonata, her playing never sparkled into brilliancy or melted into tenderness, and never had her prim cold fingers found their way to a human soul.

"Are you going out so early?" this wise damsel asked wonderingly, as Clarissa came into the drawing-room in her bonnet and shawl.

"Yes, it is such a fine morning, and I think baby will enjoy it. I have not had a drive with him since we have been here."

"No," replied Sophia, "you have only had papa. I shouldn't think he would be very much flattered if he heard you preferred baby."

"I did not say that I preferred baby, Sophia. What a habit you have of misrepresenting me!"

The nurse appeared at this moment, carrying the heir of the Grangers, gloriously arrayed in blue velvet, and looking fully conscious of his magnificence.

"But I do like to have a drive with my pet-lamb, don't I, darling?" said the mother, stooping to kiss the plump rosy cheek. And then there followed some low confidential talk, in the fond baby language peculiar to young mothers.

"I should have thought you would have been glad to get a morning alone, for once in a way," remarked Sophia, coming over to the baby, and giving him a stately kiss. She liked him tolerably well in her own way, and was not angry with him for having come into the world to oust her from her proud position as sole heiress to her father's wealth. The position had been very pleasant to her, and she had not seen it slip away from her without many a pang; but, however she might dislike Clarissa, she was not base enough to hate her father's child. If she could have had the sole care and management of him, physicked and dieted him after her own method, and developed the budding powers of his infant mind by her favourite forcing system—made a model villager of him, in short—she might have grown even to love him. But these privileges being forbidden to her—her wisdom being set at naught, and her counsel rejected—she could not help regarding Lovel Granger as more or less an injury.

"I should have thought you would have been glad of a morning at home, Clarissa," she repeated.

"Not such a fine morning as this, Sophy. It would be such a pity for baby to lose the sunshine; and I have really nothing to do."

"If I had known a little sooner that you were going, I would have gone with you," said Miss Granger.

Clarissa's countenance fell. She could not help that little troubled look, which told Miss Granger that her society would not have been welcome.

"You would have had no objection to my coming with you, I suppose?" the fair Sophia said sharply. "Baby is not quite a monopoly."

"Of course not. If you'll put on your things now, Sophia, I'll wait for you."

It was a hard thing for Clarissa to make the offer, when she had been waiting so anxiously for this opportunity of seeing her brother. To be in the same city with him, and not see him, was more painful than to be divided from him by half the earth, as she had been. It was harder still to have to plot and plan and stoop to falsehood in order to compass a meeting. But she remembered the stern cold look in her husband's face when she had spoken of Austin, and she could not bring herself to degrade her brother by entreating Daniel Granger's indulgence for his past misdeeds, or Daniel Granger's interest in his future fortunes.

Happily Sophia had made elaborate preparations for the Gothic texts, and was not inclined to waste so much trouble.

"I have got my colours all ready," she said, "and have put everything out, you see. No, I don't think I'll go to-day. But another time, if you'll be so kind as to let me know beforehand, I shall be pleased to go with my brother. I suppose you know there's an east wind to-day, by-the-bye."

The quarter whence the wind came, was a subject about which Clarissa had never concerned herself. The sun was shining, and the sky was blue.

"We have plenty of wraps," she said, "and we can have the carriage closed if we are cold."

"It is not a day upon which I should take an infant out," Miss Granger murmured, dipping her brush in some Prussian-blue; "but of course you know best."

"O, we shall take care of baby, depend upon it. Good-bye, Sophy."

And Clarissa departed, anxious to avoid farther remonstrance on the part of her step-daughter. She told the coachman to drive to the Luxembourg Gardens, intending to leave the nurse and baby to promenade that favourite resort, while she made her way on foot to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard. She remembered that George Fairfax had described her brother's lodging as near the Luxembourg.

They drove through the gay Parisian streets, past the pillar in the Place Vendome, and along the Rue de la Paix, all shining with jewellers' ware, and the Rue de Rivoli, where the chestnut-trees in the gardens of the Tuileries were shedding their last leaves upon the pavement, past the airy tower of St. Jacques, and across the bridge into that unknown world on the other side of the Seine. The nurse, who had seen very little of that quarter of the town, wondered what obscure region she was traversing, and wondered still more when they alighted at the somewhat shabby-looking gardens.

"These are the Luxembourg Gardens," said Clarissa. "As you have been to the Tuileries every day, I thought it would be a change for you to come here."

"Thank you, ma'am," replied Mrs. Brobson, the chief nurse; "but I don't think as these gardings is anyways equal to the Tooleries—nor to Regent's Park even. When I were in Paris with Lady Fitz-Lubin we took the children to the Tooleries or the Bore de Boulong every day—but, law me! the Bore de Boulong were a poor place in those days to what it is now."

Clarissa took a couple of turns along one of the walks with Mrs. Brobson, and then, as they were going back towards the gate, she said, as carelessly as she could manage to say: "There is a person living somewhere near here whom I want to see, Mrs. Brobson. I'll leave you and baby in the gardens for half an hour or so, while I go and pay my visit."

Mrs. Brobson stared. It was not an hour in the day when any lady she had ever served was wont to pay visits; and that Mrs. Granger of Arden Court should traverse a neighbourhood of narrow streets and tall houses, on foot and alone, to call upon her acquaintance at eleven o'clock in the morning, seemed to her altogether inexplicable.

"You'll take the carriage, won't you, ma'am?" she said, with undisguised astonishment.

"No, I shall not want the carriage; it's very near. Be sure you keep baby warm, Mrs. Brobson."

Clarissa hurried out into the street. The landau, with its pair of Yorkshire-bred horses, was moving slowly up and down, to the admiration of juvenile Paris, which looked upon Mr. Granger's deep-chested, strong-limbed bays almost as a new order in the animal creation. Mrs. Granger felt that the eyes of coachman and footman were upon her as she turned the first corner, thinking of nothing for the moment, but how to escape the watchfulness of her own servants. She walked a little way down the street, and then asked a sleepy-looking waiter, who was sweeping the threshold of a very dingy restaurant, to direct her to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard. It was tous pres, the man said; only a turn to the right, at that corner yonder, and the next turning was the street she wanted. She thanked him, and hurried on, with her heart beating faster at every step. Austin might be out, she thought, and her trouble wasted; and there was no knowing when she might have another opportunity. Even if he were at home, their interview must needs be brief: there was the nurse waiting and wondering; the baby exposed to possible peril from east winds.

The Rue du Chevalier Bayard was a street of tall gaunt houses that had seen better days—houses with porte-cocheres, exaggerated iron knockers, and queer old lamps; dreary balconies on the first floor, with here and there a plaster vase containing some withered member of the palm tribe, or a faded orange-tree; everywhere and in everything an air of dilapidation and decay; faded curtains, that had once been fine, flapping in the open windows; Venetian shutters going to ruin; and the only glimpse of brightness or domestic comfort confined to the humble parlour of the portress, who kept watch and ward over one of the dismal mansions, and who had a birdcage hanging in her window, an Angora cat sunning itself on the stone sill, and a row of scarlet geraniums in the little iron balcony.

But this model portress did not preside over the house inhabited by Austin Lovel. There Clarissa found only a little deaf old man, who grinned and shook his head helplessly when she questioned him, and shrugged his shoulders and pointed to the staircase—a cavernous stone staircase, with an odour as of newly opened graves. She went up to the first-floor, past the entresol, where the earthy odour was subjugated by a powerful smell of cooking, in which garlic was the prevailing feature. One tall door on the first-floor was painted a pale pink, and had still some dingy indications of former gilding upon its mouldings. On this pink door was inscribed the name of Mr. Austin, Painter.

Clarissa rang a bell, and a tawdry-looking French servant, with big earrings and a dirty muslin cap, came to answer her summons. Mr. Austin was at home; would madame please to enter. Madame, having replied in the affirmative, was shown into a small sitting-room, furnished with a heterogeneous collection of cabinets, tables, and sofas, every one of which bore the stamp of the broker's shop—things which had been graceful and pretty in their day, but from which the ormolu-moulding had been knocked off here, and the inlaid-wood chipped away there, and the tortoiseshell cracked in another place, until they seemed the very emblems of decay. It was as if they had been set up as perpetual monitors—monuments of man's fragility. "This is what life comes to," they said in their silent fashion. This faded rubbish in buhl and marqueterie was useful enough to Mr. Lovel, however; and on his canvas the faded furniture glowed and sparkled with all its original brightness, fresh as the still-life of Meissonier. There were a child's toys scattered on the floor; and Clarissa heard a woman's voice talking to a child in an adjoining room, on the other side of a pair of tall pink folding-doors. Then she heard her brother's voice saying something to the servant; and at the sound she felt as if she must have fallen to the ground. Then one of the doors was opened, and a woman came in; a pretty, faded-looking woman, dressed in a light-blue morning wrapper that might very well have been cleaner; a woman with a great deal of dyed hair in an untidy mass at the back of her head; a woman whom Clarissa felt it must be a difficult thing to like.

This was her brother's wife, of course. There was a boy of four or five years old clinging to his mother's gown, and Clarissa's heart yearned to the child. He had Austin's face. It would be easy to love him, she thought.

"Mr. Austin is in his paintin'-room, madame," said the wife, putting on a kind of company manner. "Did you wish to see him about a picture? Je parle tres poo de Francais, mais si——"

"I am English," Clarissa answered, smiling; "if you will kindly tell Mr. Austin a lady from England wishes to see him. What a, dear little boy! May I shake hands with him?"

"Give the lady your hand, Henery," said the mother. "Not that one," as the boy, after the invariable custom of childhood, offered his left—"the right hand."

Clarissa took the sticky little paw tenderly in her pearl-gray glove. To think that her brother Austin Lovel should have married a woman who could call her son "Henery," and who had such an unmistakable air of commonness!

The wife went back to the painting-room; and returned the next minute to beg the visitor to "step this way, if you please, ma'am." She opened one of the folding-doors wide as she spoke, and Clarissa went into a large room, at the other end of which there stood a tall slim young man, in a short velvet coat, before a small easel.

It was her brother Austin; pale and a trifle haggard, too old in looks for his years, but very handsome—a masculine edition of Clarissa herself, in fact: the same delicate clearly-cut features, the same dark hazel eyes, shaded by long brown lashes tinged with gold. This was what Mrs. Granger saw in the broad noonday sunshine; while the painter, looking up from his easel, beheld a radiant creature approaching him, a woman in pale-gray silk, that it would have been rapture to paint; a woman with one of the loveliest faces he had ever seen, crowned with a broad plait of dark-brown hair, and some delicate structure of point-lace and pink roses, called by courtesy a bonnet.

He laid down his mahl-stick, and came to meet her, with a puzzled look on his face. Her beauty seemed familiar to him somehow, and yet he had no recollection of ever having seen her before. He saw the faded counterpart of that bright face every morning in his looking-glass.

She held out both her hands.

"Austin, don't you know me?"

He gave a cry of pleased surprise, and caught her in his arms.

"Clarissa!" he exclaimed; "why, my darling, how lovely you have grown! My dear little Clary! How well I remember the sweet young face, and the tears, and kisses, and the slender little figure in its childish dress, that day your father carried you off to school! My own little Clary, what a happiness to see you! But you never told me you were coming to Paris."

"No, dear, I kept that for a surprise. And are you really glad to see me, Austin?"

"Really glad! Is there any one in the world could make me gladder?"

"I am so happy to hear that. I was almost afraid you had half forgotten me. Your letters were so few, and so short."

"Letters!" cried Austin Lovel, with a laugh; "I never was much of a hand at letter-writing; and then I hadn't anything particularly pleasant to write about. You mustn't gauge my affection by the length of my letters, Clary. And then I have to work deucedly hard when I am at home, and have very little time for scribbling."

Clarissa glanced round the room while he was speaking. Every detail in her brother's surroundings had an interest for her. Here, as in the drawing-room, there was an untidy air about everything—a want of harmony in all the arrangements. There were Flemish carved-oak cabinets, and big Japan vases; a mantelpiece draped with dusty crimson velvet, a broken Venetian glass above it, and a group of rusty-looking arms on each side; long limp amber curtains to the three tall windows, with festooned valances in an advanced state of disarrangement and dilapidation. There were some logs burning on the hearth, a pot of chocolate simmering among the ashes, and breakfast laid for one person upon a little table by the fire—the remnant of a perigord pie, flanked by a stone bottle of curacoa.

She looked at her brother with anxious scrutinising eyes. No, George Fairfax had not deceived her. He had the look of a man who was going the wrong way. There were premature lines across the forehead, and about the dark brilliant eyes; a nervous expression in the contracted lips. It was the face of a man who burns the candle of life at both ends. Late hours, anxiety, dissipation of all kinds, had set their fatal seal upon his countenance.

"Dear Austin, you are as handsome as ever; but I don't think you are looking well," she said tenderly.

"Don't look so alarmed, my dear girl," he answered lightly; "I am well enough; that is to say, I am never ill, never knock under, or strike work. There are men who go through life like that—never ill, and never exactly well. I rarely get up in the morning without a headache; but I generally brighten considerably as the sun goes down. We move with a contrary motion, Helios and I."

"I am afraid you work too hard, and sit up too late."

"As to working hard, my dear, that is a necessity; and going out every night is another necessity. I get my commissions in society."

"But you must have a reputation by this time, Austin; and commissions would come to you, I should think, without your courting them."

"No, child; I have only a reputation de salon, I am only known in a certain set. And a man must live, you see. To a man himself that is the primary necessity. Your generosity set me on my legs last year, and tempted me to take this floor, and make a slight advance movement altogether. I thought better rooms would bring me better work—sitters for a new style of cabinet-portraits, and so on. But so far the rooms have been comparatively a useless extravagance. However, I go out a good deal, and meet a great many influential people; so I can scarcely miss a success in the end."

"But if you sacrifice your health in the meantime, Austin."

"Sacrifice my health! That's just like a woman. If a man looks a trifle pale, and dark under the eyes, she begins to fancy he's dying. My poor little wife takes just the same notions into her head, and would like me to stop at home every evening to watch her darn the children's stockings."

"I think your wife is quite right to be anxious, Austin; and it would be much better for you to stay at home, even to see stockings darned. It must be very dull for her too when you are out, poor soul."

Mr. Lovel shrugged his shoulders with a deprecating air.

"C'est son metier," he said. "I suppose she does find it rather dismal at times; but there are the children, you see—it is a woman's duty to find all-sufficient society in her children. And now, Clary, tell me about yourself. You have made a brilliant match, and are mistress of Arden Court. A strange stroke of fortune that. And you are happy, I hope, my dear?"

"I ought to be very happy," Clarissa answered, with a faint sigh, thinking perhaps that, bright as her life might be, it was not quite the fulfilment of her vague girlish dreams—not quite the life she had fancied lying before her when the future was all unknown; "I ought to be very happy and very grateful to Providence; and, O Austin, my boy is the sweetest darling is the world!"

Austin Lovel looked doubtful for a moment, half inclined to think "my boy" might stand for Daniel Granger.

"You must see him, Austin," continued his sister; "he is nearly ten months old now, and such a beauty!"

"O, the baby!" said Austin, rather coolly. "I daresay he's a nice little chap, and I should like to see him very much, if it were practicable. But how about Granger himself? He is a good sort of fellow, I hope."

"He is all goodness to me," Clarissa answered gravely, casting down her eyes as she spoke; and Austin Lovel knew that the marriage which had given his sister Arden Court had been no love-match.

They talked for some time; talked of the old days when they had been together at Arden; but of the years that made the story of his life, Austin Lovel spoke very little.

"I have always been an unlucky beggar," he said, in his careless way. "There's very little use in going over old ground. Some men never get fairly on the high-road of life. They spend their existence wading across swamps, and scrambling through bushes, and never reach any particular point at the end. My career has been that sort of thing."

"But you are so young, Austin," pleaded Clarissa, "and may do so much yet."

He shook his head with an air of hopelessness that was half indifference.

"My dear child, I am neither a Raffaelle nor a Dore," he said, "and I need be one or the other to redeem my past But so long as I can pick up enough to keep the little woman yonder and the bairns, and get a decent cigar and an honest bottle of Bordeaux, I'm content. Ambition departed from me ten years ago."

"O Austin, I can't bear to hear you say that! With your genius you ought to do so much. I wish you would be friends with my husband, and that he could be of use to you."

"My dear Clarissa, put that idea out of your mind at once and for ever. There can be no such thing as friendship between Mr. Granger and me. Do you remember what Samuel Johnson said about some one's distaste for clean linen—'And I, sir, have no passion for it!' I confess to having no passion for respectable people. I am very glad to hear Mr. Granger is a good husband; but he's much too respectable a citizen for my acquaintance."

Clarissa sighed; there was a prejudice here, even if Daniel Granger could have been induced to think kindly of his brother-in-law.

"Depend upon it, the Prodigal Son had a hard time of it after the fatted calf had been eaten, Clary, and wished himself back among the swine. Do you think, however lenient his father might be, that his brother and the friends of the family spared him? His past was thrown in his face, you may be sure. I daresay he went back to his evil ways after a year or so. Good people maintain their monopoly of virtue by making the repentant sinner's life a burden to him."

Clarissa spoke of his wife presently.

"You must introduce me to her, Austin. She took me for a stranger just now, and I did not undeceive her."

"Yes I'll introduce you. There's not much in common between you; but she'll be very proud of your acquaintance. She looks upon my relations as an exalted race of beings, and myself as a kind of fallen angel. You mustn't be too hard upon her, Clary, if she seems not quite the sort of woman you would have chosen for your sister-in-law. She has been a good wife to me, and she was a good daughter to her drunken old father—one of the greatest scamps in London, who used to get his bread—or rather his gin—by standing for Count Ugolino and Cardinal Wolsey, or anything grim and gray and aquiline-nosed in the way of patriarchs. The girl Bessie was a model too in her time; and it was in Jack Redgrave's painting-room—the pre-Raphaelite fellow who paints fearfully and wonderfully made women with red hair and angular arms—I first met her. Jack and I were great chums at that time—it was just after I sold out—and I used to paint at his rooms. I was going in for painting just then with a great spurt, having nothing but my brush to live upon. You can guess the rest. As Bessie was a very pretty girl, and neither she nor I had a sixpence wherewith to bless ourselves, of course we fell in love with each other. Poor little thing, how pretty she used to look in those days, standing on Jack's movable platform, with her hair falling loose about her face, and a heap of primroses held up in her petticoat!—such a patient plaintive look in the sweet little mouth, as much as to say, 'I'm very tired of standing here; but I'm only a model, to be hired for eighteenpence an hour; go on smoking your cigars, and talking your slangy talk about the turf and the theatres, gentlemen. I count for nothing.' Poor little patient soul! she was so helpless and so friendless, Clary. I think my love for her was something like the compassion one feels for some young feeble bird that has fallen out of its nest. So we were married one morning; and for some time lived in lodgings at Putney, where I used to suffer considerable affliction from Count Ugolino and two bony boys, Bessie's brothers, who looked as if the Count had been acting up to his character with too great a fidelity. Ugolino himself would come prowling out of a Saturday afternoon to borrow the wherewithal to pay his week's lodging, lest he should be cast out into the streets at nightfall; and it was a common thing for one of the bony boys to appear at breakfast-time with a duplicate of his father's coat, pledged over-night for drink, and without the means of redeeming which he could not pursue his honourable vocation. In short, I think it was as much the affliction of the Ugolino family as my own entanglements that drove me to seek my fortunes on the other side of the world."

Austin Lovel opened one of the doors, and called his wife "Come here, Bessie; I've a pleasant surprise for you."

Mrs. Lovel appeared quickly in answer to this summons. She had changed her morning dress for a purple silk, which was smartly trimmed, but by no means fresh, and she had dressed her hair, and refreshed her complexion by a liberal application of violet powder. She had a look which can only be described as "flashy"—a look that struck Clarissa unpleasantly, in spite of herself.

Her expressions of surprise did not sound quite so natural as they might have done—for she had been listening at the folding-doors during a considerable part of the interview; but she seemed really delighted by Mrs. Granger's condescension, and she kissed that lady with much affection.

"I'm sure I do feel proud to know any relation of Austin's," she said, "and you most of all, who have been so kind to him. Heaven knows what would have become of us last winter, if it hadn't been for your generosity."

Clarissa laid her hand upon Bessie Lovel's lips.

"You mustn't talk of generosity between my brother and me," she said; "all I have in the world is at his service. And now let me see my nephews, please; and then I must run away."

The nephews were produced; the boy Clarissa had seen, and another of smaller growth—pale-faced, bright-eyed little fellows; They too had been subjected to the infliction of soap-and-water and hair-brushes, clean pinafores, and so on, since Mrs. Granger's arrival.

She knelt down and kissed them both, with real motherly tenderness, thinking of her own darling, and the difference between his fortunes and theirs; and then, after a warm caress, she slipped a napoleon into each little warm hand, "to buy toys," and rose to depart.

"I must hurry away now, Austin," she said; "but I shall come again very soon, if I may. Good-bye, dear, and God bless you."

The embrace that followed was a very fervent one. It had been sweet to meet again after so many years, and it was hard to leave him so soon—to leave him with the conviction that his life was a wreck. But Clarissa had no time to linger. The thought of the baby in the Luxembourg Gardens had been distracting her for ever so long. These stolen meetings must needs be short.

She looked at her watch when she got back to the street, and found, to her horror, that she had been very nearly an hour away from the nurse and her charge. The carriage was waiting at the gate, and she had to encounter the full fire of her servants' gaze as she crossed the road and went into the gardens. Yes, there was the baby's blue-velvet pelisse resplendent at the end of an avenue, Clarissa walked quickly to meet him.

"My darling!" she cried. "Has he been waiting for his mamma? I hope he has not been tired of the gardens, nurse?"

"Yes, ma'am, he have been tired," replied Mrs. Brobson, with an outraged air. "There ain't much in these gardens to keep a baby of his age amused for an hour at a stretch; and in a east wind too! It's right down cutting at that corner."

"Why didn't you take him home in the carriage, nurse? It would have been better than running any risk of his catching cold."

"What, and leave you without a conveyance, ma'am? I couldn't have done that!"

"I was detained longer than I expected to stay. O, by the bye, you need not mention to Miss Granger that I have been making a call. The people I have been to see are—are in humble circumstances; and I don't want her to know anything about it."

"I hope I know my duty, ma'am," replied Mrs. Brobson stiffly. That hour's parading in the gardens, without any relief from her subordinate, had soured her temper, and inclined her to look with unfavourable eyes upon the conduct of her mistress. Clarissa felt that she had excited the suspicion of her servant, and that all her future meetings with her brother would involve as much plotting and planning as would serve for the ripening of a political conspiracy.

* * * * *



CHAPTER XXXIII.

ONLY A PORTRAIT-PAINTER.

While Clarissa was pondering on that perplexing question, how she was to see her brother frequently without Mr. Granger's knowledge, fortune had favoured her in a manner she had never anticipated. After what Mr. Fairfax had said to her about Austin Lovel's "set," the last thing she expected was to meet her brother in society—that fast Bohemian world in which she supposed him to exist, seemed utterly remote from the faultless circle of Daniel Granger's acquaintance. It happened, however, that one of the dearest friends to whom Lady Laura Armstrong had introduced her sweet Clarissa was a lady of the Leo-Hunter genus—a certain Madame Caballero, nee Bondichori, a little elderly Frenchwoman, with sparkling black eyes and inexhaustible vivacity; the widow of a Portuguese wine-merchant; a lady whose fortune enabled her to occupy a first floor in one of the freestone palaces of the Champs Elysees, to wear black velvet and diamonds in perpetuity, and to receive a herd of small lions and a flock of admiring nobodies twice a-week. The little widow prided herself on her worship of genius. All members of the lion tribe came alike to her: painters, sculptors, singers; actors, and performers upon every variety of known and unknown musical instruments; budding barristers, who had won forensic laurels by the eloquent defence of some notorious criminal; homoeopathic doctors, lady doctresses, or lawyeresses, or deaconesses, from America; and pretty women who had won a kind of renown by something special in the way of eyebrows, or arms, or shoulders.

To these crowded saloons Mr. Granger brought his wife and daughter one evening. They found a great many people assembled in three lofty rooms, hung with amber satin, in the remotest and smallest of which apartments Madame Caballero made tea a l'anglaise, for her intimates; while, in the largest, some fearful and wonderful instrumental music was going on, with the very smallest possible amount of attention from the audience. There was a perpetual buzz of conversation; and there was a considerable sprinkling of curious-looking people; weird men with long unkempt hair, strong-minded women, who counterbalanced these in a manner by wearing their hair preternaturally short. Altogether, the assembly was an usual one; but Madame Caballero's guests seemed to enjoy themselves very much. Their good spirits may have been partly due to the fact that they had the pleasing anticipation of an excellent supper, furnished with all the choicest dainties that Chevet can provide; for Madame Caballero's receptions were of a substantial order, and she owed a good deal of her popularity to the profusion that distinguished the commissariat department.

Mr. and Mrs. Granger made their way to the inner room by and by. It was the prettiest room of the three, with a great semi-circular window overlooking nothing particular in the daytime, but making a handsome amber-hung recess at night. Here there was a sea-coal fire a l'anglaise, and only a subdued glimmering of wax candles, instead of the broad glare in the larger saloons. Here, too were to be found the choicest of Madame Caballero's guests; a cabinet minister, an ambassador, a poet of some standing, and one of the most distinguished soprano's of the season, a fair-haired German girl, with great pathetic blue eyes.

Even in this society Madame Caballero was rejoiced to see her sweet Mrs. Granger and her charming Miss Granger, who was looking unutterably stiff, in mauve silk and white lace. The lady and her friends had been talking of some one as the Grangers entered, talking rapturously.

"J'en raffole!" exclaimed Madame; "such a charming young man, gifted with talents of the most original order."

The ambassador was looking at a portrait—the likeness of Madame Caballero herself—a mere sketch in oils, with a mark of the brush upon it, but remarkable for the chic and daring of the painter's style, and for that idealised resemblance which is always so agreeable to the subject.

Clarissa's heart gave a little throb. The picture was like one she had seen on the easel in the Rue du Chevalier Bayard.

"Mais c'est charmant!" exclaimed the ambassador; and the adjective was echoed in every key by the rest of the little coterie.

"I expect him here this evening," said Madame; "and I shall be very much gratified if you will permit me to present him to your excellency."

The ambassador bowed. "Any protegee of Madame's," he said, and so on.

Mr. Granger, who was really a judge of art, fastened on to the picture immediately.

"There's something fresh in the style, Clary," he said. "I should like this man to paint your portrait. What's the signature? Austin! That's hardly a French name, I should think—eh, Madame Caballero?"

"No," replied Madame; "Mr. Austin is an Englishman. I shall be charmed if you will allow him to paint Mrs. Granger; and I'm sure he will be delighted to have such a subject."

There was a good deal of talk about Mr. Austin's painting, and art in general. There were some half dozen pictures of the modern French school in this inner room, which helped to sustain the conversation. Mr. Granger talked very fair French, of a soundly grammatical order; and Clarissa's tongue ran almost as gaily as in her schoolgirl days at Belforet. She was going to see her brother—to see him shining in good society, and not in the pernicious "set" of which George Fairfax had spoken. The thought was rapture to her. They might have a few minutes' talk to themselves, perhaps, before the evening was over. That interview in the Rue du Chevalier Bayard had been so sadly brief, and her heart too full for many words.

Austin Lovel came in presently, looking his handsomest, in his careful evening-dress, with a brilliant light in his eyes, and that appearance of false brightness which is apt to distinguish the man who is burning the candle of life at both ends. Only by just the faintest elevation of his eyebrows did he betray his surprise as he looked at his sister; and his air, on being presented to her a few moments afterwards, was perfect in its serene unconsciousness.

Mr. Granger talked to him of his picture pleasantly enough, but very much as he would have talked to his architect, or to one of his clerks in the great Bradford establishment. There was a marked difference between the tone of the rich English trader and the German ambassador, when he expressed himself on the subject of Mr. Austin's talent; but then the Englishman intended to give the painter a commission, and the German did not.

"I should like you to paint my wife—and—and—my daughter," said Mr. Granger, throwing in Sophia as an after-thought. It would be only civil to have his daughter's portrait painted, he thought.

Mr. Austin bowed. "I shall be most happy," he said. Clarissa's eyes sparkled with delight. Sophia Granger saw the pleased look, and thought, "O, the vanity of these children of perdition!" But she did not offer any objection to the painting of her own likeness.

"When shall we begin?" asked Mr. Granger.

"My time is entirely at your disposal."

"In that case, the sooner the thing is done the better. My wife cannot come to your studio—she has so many claims upon her time—but that would make no difficulty, I suppose?"

"Not at all. I can paint Mrs. Granger in her own rooms as well as in mine, if the light will serve."

"One of our drawing-rooms faces the north," answered Mr. Granger, "and the windows are large—larger than I like. Any loss of time which you may suffer in accommodating Mrs. Granger must, of course, be considered in the price of your pictures."

"I have only one price for my pictures," replied Mr. Austin, with a loftiness that astonished his patron. "I charge fifty guineas for a portrait of that kind—whether it is painted for a duke or a grocer in the Rue St. Honore."

"I will give you a hundred guineas for each of the pictures, if they are successes," said Mr. Granger. "If they are failures, I will give you your own price, and make you a present of the canvasses."

"I am not a stoic, and have no objection to accept a premium of a hundred guineas from so distinguished a capitalist as Mr. Granger," returned Austin Lovel, smiling. "I don't think Mrs. Granger's portrait will be a failure," he added confidently, with a little look at Clarissa.

Sophia Granger saw the look, and resented it. The painter had said nothing of her portrait. It was of Clarissa's only that he thought. It was a very small thing; but when her father's wife was concerned, small things were great in the eyes of Miss Granger.

There was no opportunity for confidential talk between Austin Lovel and his sister that evening; but Clarissa went home happy in the expectation of seeing her brother very often in the simplest, easiest way. The portraits would take some time to paint, of course; indeed Austin might make the business last almost as long as he liked.

It was rather hard, however, to have to discuss her brother's merits with Mr. and Miss Granger as if he had been a stranger; and Clarissa had to do this going home in the carriage that night, and at breakfast next morning. The young man was handsome, Mr. Granger remarked, but had rather a worn look—a dissipated look, in point of fact. That sort of people generally were dissipated.

Mrs. Granger ventured to say that she did not think Mr. Austin looked dissipated—a little worn, perhaps, but nothing more; and that might be the effect of hard work.

"My dear Clary, what can you know of the physiology of dissipation? I tell you that young man is dissipated. I saw him playing ecarte with a Frenchman just before we left Madame Caballero's; and, unless I am profoundly mistaken, the man is a gambler."

Clarissa shuddered. She could not forget what George Fairfax had said to her about her brother's ways, nor the fact that her remittances had seemed of so little use to him. He seemed in good repute too, and talked of fifty guineas for a picture with the utmost coolness. He must have earned a good deal of money, and the money must have gone somewhere. In all the details of his home there was evidence of extravagance in the past and poverty in the present.

He came at eleven o'clock on the second morning after Madame Caballero's reception; came in a hired carriage, with his easel and all the paraphernalia of his art. Mr. Granger had made a point of being present at this first sitting, much to the discomfiture of Clarissa, who was yearning for a long uninterrupted talk with her brother. Even when Mr. Granger was absent, there would be Miss Granger, most likely, she thought, with vexation; and, after all, these meetings with Austin would be only half meetings. It would be pleasant only to see him, to hear his voice; but she was longing to talk freely of the past, to give him counsel for the future.

The drawing-room looking north was rather a dreary apartment, if any apartment furnished with blue-satin damask and unlimited gilding can be called dreary. There was splendour, of course, but it was a chilling kind of splendour. The room was large and square, with two tall wide windows commanding a view of one of the dullest streets in new Paris—a street at the end of which workmen were still busy cutting away a hill, the removal whereof was necessary for the realisation of the Augustan idea of that archetypal city, which was to be left all marble. Mr. Granger's apartments were in a corner house, and he had the advantage of this side view. There was very little of what Mr. Wemmick called "portable property" in this northern drawing-room. There were blue-satin divans running along the walls, a couple of blue-satin easy-chairs, an ormolu stand with a monster Sevres dish for cards, and that was all—a room in which one might, "receive," but could scarcely live.

The light was capital, Mr. Austin said. He set up his easel, settled the position of his sister, after a little discussion with Mr. Granger, and began work. Clarissa's was to be the first portrait. This being arranged, Mr. Granger departed to write letters, leaving Sophia established, with her Berlin-wool work, at one of the windows. Clarissa would not, of course, like to be left tete-a-tete for two or three hours with a strange painter, Miss Granger opened.

Yes, it was very pleasant to have him there, even though their talk was restrained by the presence of a third person, and they could only speak of indifferent things. Perhaps to Austin Lovel himself it was pleasanter to have Miss Granger there than to be quite alone with his sister. He was very fond of Clarissa, but there was much in his past life—some things in his present life even—that would not bear talking of, and he shrank a little from his sister's tender questioning. Protected by Miss Granger and her Berlin-wool spaniels, he was quite at his ease, and ran gaily on about all manner of things as he sketched his outline and set his palette. He gave the two ladies a lively picture of existing French art, with little satirical touches here and there. Even Sophia was amused, and blushed to find herself comparing the social graces of Mr. Austin the painter with those of Mr. Tillott the curate, very much to the advantage of the former—blushed to find herself so much interested in any conversation that was not strictly utilitarian or evangelical in its drift. Once or twice Austin spoke of his travels, his Australian experiences; and at each mention, Clarissa looked up eagerly, anxious to hear more. The history of her brother's past was a blank to her, and she was keenly interested by the slightest allusion that cast a ray of light upon it. Mr. Austin did not care, however, to dwell much upon his own affairs. It was chiefly of other people that he talked. Throughout that first sitting Miss Granger maintained a dignified formality, tempered by maidenly graciousness. The young man was amusing, certainly, and it was not often Miss Granger permitted herself to be amused. She thought Clarissa was too familiar with him, treated him too much with an air of perfect equality. A man who painted portraits for hire should be received, Miss Granger thought, as one would receive a superior kind of bootmaker.

More than once, in fact, in the course of that agreeable morning, Clarissa had for a moment forgotten that she was talking to Mr. Austin the painter, and not to her brother Austin Lovel. More than once an unconscious warmth or softness in her tone had made Miss Granger look up from her embroidery-frame with the eyes of wonder.

Mr. Granger came back to the drawing-room, having finished his letter-writing just as the sitting concluded, and, luncheon being announced at the same time, asked Mr. Austin to stay for that meal. Austin had no objection to linger in his sister's society. He wanted to know what kind of man this Daniel Granger was; and perhaps wanted to see what probability there was of Daniel Granger's wife being able to supply him with money in the future. Austin Lovel had, from his earliest boyhood, possessed a fatal capacity for getting rid of money, and for getting into debt; not common plain-sailing debt, which would lead at the worst to the Bankruptcy Court, but liability of a more disreputable and perilous character, involving the terror of disgrace, and entanglements that would have to be unravelled by a police-magistrate.

Racing debts, gambling debts, and bill-discounting transactions, had been the agreeable variety of difficulties which had beset Austin Level's military career; and at the end there had been something—something fully known to a few only—which had made the immediate sale of his commission a necessity. He was allowed to sell it; and that was much, his friends said. If his commanding officer had not been an easy-going kind of man, he would scarcely have got off so cheaply.

"I wonder how this fellow Granger would treat me, if he knew who I was?" he thought to himself. "He'd inaugurate our acquaintance by kicking me out of his house most likely, instead of asking me to luncheon." Notwithstanding which opinion Mr. Austin sat down to share the sacred bread and salt with his brother-in-law, and ate a cutlet a la Maintenon, and drank half a bottle of claret, with a perfect enjoyment of the situation. He liked the idea of being patronised by the man who would not have tolerated his society for a moment, had he been aware of his identity.

He talked of Parisian life during luncheon, keeping carefully clear of all subjects which the "young person," as represented by Miss Granger, might blush to hear; and Mr. Granger, who had only an Englishman's knowledge of the city, was amused by the pleasant gossip. The meal lasted longer than usual, and lost all its wonted formality; and the fair Sophia found herself more and more interested in this fascinating painter, with his brilliant dark eyes, and sarcastic mouth, and generally agreeable manner. She sat next him at luncheon, and, when there came a little pause in the conversation, began to question him about the state of the Parisian poor. It was very bad, was it not?

Mr. Austin shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't know," he said, "but I don't think it would be possible for a man to starve to death in Paris under the Imperial regime; and it seems very easy for an Englishman to do it in Spitalfields or Mile-end New Town. You don't hear of men and women found dead in their garrets from sheer hunger. But of course there is a good deal of poverty and squalor to be found in the city."

And then Mr. Austin launched into a graphic description of some interesting phases of life among the lower classes, borrowed from a novel that had been recently delighting the reading public of France, but appropriated with such an air of reality, that Miss Granger fancied this delightful painter must spend some considerable part of his existence as a district visitor or city missionary.

"What a pity that Mr. Tillott has not his persuasive powers!" she thought; Mr. Tillott's eloquence being, in fact, of a very limited order, chiefly exhibiting itself in little jerky questions about the spiritual and temporal welfare of his humble parishioners—questions which, in the vernacular language of agricultural labourers, "put a chap's back up, somehow."

"I should like to show Mr. Austin the baby, Daniel," Clarissa said to her husband shyly, while Miss Granger was keeping Austin hard and fast to the amelioration of the working classes; "he would make such a lovely picture."

Mr. Granger smiled, a quiet well-satisfied smile. He, the strong man, the millowner and millionaire, was as weak as the weakest woman in all things concerning the child of his mature age.

"Yes," he said, with some affectation of indifference; "Lovel would make a nice picture enough. We'll have him painted if you like, Clary, some day. Send for him, my dear."

She had her hand upon the bell directly.

"Yes," she cried, "he would make the sweetest picture in the world, and Austin shall paint him."

The familiar mention of the name Austin, tout court, scared Mr. Granger almost as much as a cannon fired close at his elbow might have done. He stared at his wife with grave displeasure.

"Mr. Austin can paint him some day, if you wish it, Clarissa," he said.

Mrs. Granger blushed crimson; again she remembered that this brother she loved so dearly was only a strange painter of portraits, whom it behoved her to treat with only the most formal courtesy. She hated the deception; and having a strong faith in her husband's generosity, was sorely tempted to put an end to this acted lie on the spot, and to tell him who his guest was; but fear of her brother's anger stopped her. She had no right to betray him; she must wait his permission to tell the secret.

"Even Sophia seems to like him," she thought; "and I don't think Daniel could help being pleased with him, in spite of anything papa may have said to his prejudice."

The baby was brought, and, being in a benignant humour, was graciously pleased to look his brightest and prettiest, and in nurse's phraseology, to "take to" his unknown uncle. The unknown uncle kissed him affectionately, and said some civil things about the colour of his eyes, and the plumpness of his limbs—"quite a Rubens baby," and so on, but did not consider a boy-baby an especially wonderful creature, having had two boy-babies of his own, and not having particularly wanted them. He looked upon them rather as chronic perplexities, like accommodation bills that had matured unawares.

"And this is the heir of Arden," he said to himself, as he looked down at the fat blue-eyed thing struggling in Clarissa's arms, with that desperate desire to get nowhere in particular, common to infancy. "So this little lump of humanity is the future lord of the home that should have been mine. I don't know that I envy him. Country life and Arden would hardly have suited me. I think I'd rather have an entresol in the Champs Elysees, and the run of the boulevards, than the gray old Court and a respectable position. Unless a man's tastes are 'horsey' or agricultural, country life must be a bore."

Mr. Austin patted the plump young cheeks without any feeling of enmity.

"Poor little beggar! What ghosts will haunt him in the old rooms by-and-by, I wonder?" he said to himself, smiling down at the child.

* * * * *



CHAPTER XXXIV.

AUSTIN'S PROSPECTS.

The picture made rapid progress. For his very life—though the finishing of his work had been the signal of his doom, and the executioner waiting to make a sudden end of him when the last touch was laid upon the canvas, Austin Lovel could not have painted slowly. The dashing offhand brush was like a young thoroughbred, that could not be pulled, let the jockey saw at his mouth as he might. And yet the painter would have liked much to prolong this easy intercourse with his sister. But after Clarissa's portrait was finished, there was Miss Granger to be painted; and then they would want a picture of that unapproachable baby, no doubt; and after that, perhaps, Mr. Granger might consent to have his massive features perpetuated. Austin considered that the millionaire should be good for three hundred guineas or so; he had promised two hundred, and the painter was spending the money by anticipation as fast as he could.

He came every other morning to the Rue de Morny, and generally stayed to luncheon; and those mornings spent in his company were very pleasant to Clarissa—as pleasant as anything could be which involved deception; there was always the sting of that fact. Miss Granger was rarely absent for ten minutes together on these occasions; it was only some lucky chance which took her from the room to fetch some Berlin wool, or a forgotten skein of floss silk for the perennial spaniels, and afforded the brother and sister an opportunity for a few hurried words. The model villagers almost faded out of Miss Granger's mind in this agreeable society. She found herself listening to talk about things which were of the earth earthy, and was fain to confess herself interested in the conversation. She dressed as carefully to receive the painter as if he had been, to use her particular phraseology, "a person in her own sphere;" and Mr. Tillott would have thought his chances of success at a very low point, if he could have seen her in Austin Lovel's presence.

That gentleman himself was not slow to perceive the impression he had made.

"It's rather a pity I'm married, isn't it, Clary?" he said to his sister one day, when Sophia, whose habits had not been quite so methodical of late, had gone in search of some white beads for the spaniels, some of which were of a beady nature. "It would have been a great chance for me, wouldn't it?"

What do you mean, Austin?"

"Miss Granger," answered the painter, without looking up from his work, "I think she rather likes me, do you know; and I suppose her father will give her fifty thousand or so when she marries, in spite of young Lovel. He seems to have no end of money. It would have been an uncommonly good thing, wouldn't it?"

"I don't think it's any use talking of it, Austin, however good it might have been; and I don't think Sophia would have suited you as a wife."

"Not suited me—bosh! Any woman with fifty thousand pounds would have suited me. However, you're right—there's no good in talking of that. I'm booked. Poor little woman, she's a good wife to me; but it's rather a pity. You don't know how many chances I might have had but for that entanglement."

"I wish, Austin, for your poor wife's sake, you'd let me tell my husband who you are. This concealment seems so hard upon her, as well as a kind of wrong to Daniel. I can do so little to serve her, and I might do so much, if I could own her as my sister-in-law. I don't think Daniel could help liking you, if he knew everything."

"Drop that, if you please, Clarissa," said Austin, with a darkening countenance. "I have told you that your husband and I can never be friends, and I mean it. I don't want to be degraded by any intercession of yours. That's a little too much even for me. It suits my purpose well enough to accept Mr. Granger's commissions; and of course it's very agreeable to see you; but the matter must end there."

Miss Granger returned at this moment; but had she stayed away for an hour, Clarissa could scarcely have pressed the question farther. In the old days when they had been boy and girl together, Austin seven years her senior, Clarissa had always been just a little afraid of her brother; and she was afraid of him now.

The very fact of his somewhat dependent position made her more fearful of offending him. She was anxious about his future anxious too about his present mode of life; but she dared not question closely upon either subject. Once, when she had ventured to ask him about his plan of life, he answered in his careless off-hand way,—

"My dearest Clary, I have no plans. I like Paris; and if I am not particularly successful here, I don't suppose I should be more successful anywhere else. I mean to stay here as long as I can hold out. I know a good many people, and sometimes get a stroke of luck."

"But you are ruining your health. Austin, I fear, with—late hours, and—and—parties."

"Who told you I keep late hours? The Parisians, as a rule, don't go to bed at curfew. I don't suppose I'm worse than my neighbours. If I didn't go out, Clary, and keep myself in the minds of my patrons, I might rot in a garret. You don't know how soon a man is forgotten—even a man who has made his mark more positively than I have; and then you see, my dear, I like society, and have no taste for the domestic hearth, except for variety, once in a way, like dining on a bouillon after a week's high feeding. Yes, come what may, I shall stay in Paris—as long as I can."

There was something in the tone of the last words that alarmed Clarissa.

"You—you—are not in debt, are you, Austin?" she asked timidly.

"No—no—I'm not in debt; but I owe a good deal of money."

Clarissa looked puzzled.

"That is to say, I have no vulgar debts—butcher and baker, and so on; but there are two or three things, involving some hundreds, which I shall have to settle some of these days or else——"

"Or else what, Austin?"

"Cut Paris, Clary, that's all."

Clarissa turned pale. Austin began to whistle a popular cafe-chantant air, as he bent over his palette, squeezing little dabs of Naples yellow out of a leaden tube. Some hundreds!—that was a vague phrase, which might mean a great deal of money; it was a phrase which alarmed Clarissa; but she was much more alarmed by the recklessness of her brother's tone.

"But if you owe money, you must pay it, Austin," she said; "you can't leave a place owing money."

The painter shrugged his shoulders.

"It's not an agreeable thing to do," he said, "but it has been done. Of the two, it's pleasanter than staying in a place where you owe money."

"Of course I shall do all I can to help you, dear," said his sister. "There will be a hundred and twenty-five pounds due to me at Christmas, and I'll give you the hundred."

"You're a first-rate girl, Clary, but I think that fellow Granger might give you more pin-money. Five hundred a year is a beggarly pittance for a man of his means."

"It is more than I fancied I could ever want; and Daniel allows papa five hundred a year, you know Austin."

"Humph! that makes a thousand—no great things for a millionaire. A pretty girl, married to a man of that stamp, ought to have unlimited command of money," replied her brother. "It's the only compensation," he said to himself afterwards.

"I don't like to hear you say these things, Austin. My husband is very kind to me. I'm afraid I'm not half as grateful as I ought to be."

"Gratitude be——!" He did not finish the ejaculation.

"Gratitude from a Lovel of twenty to a Granger of fifty! My dear Clary, that's too good a joke! The man is well enough—better than I expected to find him: but such a girl as you is a prize for which such a man could not pay too highly."

It was rarely they had the opportunity for so long a conversation as this; and Austin was by no means sorry that it was so. He had very pressing need of all the money his sister could give him; but he did not care to enter into explanations about the state of his affairs.

* * * * *



CHAPTER XXXV.

SISTERS-IN-LAW.

Clarissa did not forget the existence of the poor little wife in the Rue du Chevalier Bayard; and on the very first afternoon which she had to herself, Mr. Granger having gone to see some great cattle-fair a few miles from Paris, and Miss Granger being afflicted with a headache, she took courage to order her coachman to drive straight to the house where her brother lived.

"It is much better than making a mystery of it," she thought.

"The man will think that I have come to see a milliner or some one of that kind."

The footman would fain have escorted Mrs. Granger the way she should go, and held himself in readiness to accompany her into the house; but she waved him aside on the threshold of the darksome porte-cochere, out of which no coach ever came nowadays.

"I shan't want you, Trotter," she said. "Tell Jarvis to walk the horses gently up and down. I shall not be very long."

The man bowed and obeyed, wondering what business his mistress could have in such a dingy street, "on the Surrey side of the water, too," as he said to his comrade.

Austin was out, but Mrs. Lovel was at home, and it was Mrs. Lovel whom Clarissa had come chiefly to see. The same tawdrily-dressed maid admitted her to the same untidy sitting-room, a shade more untidy to-day, where Bessie Lovel was dozing in an easy-chair by the fire, while the two boys played and squabbled in one of the windows.

Mrs. Granger, entering suddenly, radiant in golden-brown moire and sables, seemed almost to dazzle the eyes of Austin's wife, who had not seen much of the brighter side of existence Her life before her marriage had been altogether sordid and shabby, brightness or luxury of any kind for her class being synonymous with vice; and Bessie Stanford the painter's model had never been vicious. Her life since her marriage had been a life of trouble and difficulty, with only occasional glimpses of spurious kind of brilliancy. She lived outside her husband's existence, as it were, and felt somehow that she was only attached to him by external links, as a dog might have been. He had a certain kind of affection for her, was conscious of her fidelity, and grateful for her attachment; and there an end. Sympathy between them there was none; nor had he ever troubled himself to cultivate her tastes, or attempted in the smallest degree to bring her nearer to him. To Bessie Lovel, therefore, this sister of her husband's, in all the glory of her fresh young beauty and sumptuous apparel, seemed a creature of another sphere, something to be gazed upon almost in fear and trembling.

"I beg your parding!" she faltered, rubbing her eyes. She was apt, when agitated, to fall back upon the pronunciation of her girlhood, before Austin Lovel had winced and ejaculated at her various mutilations of the language. "I was just taking forty winks after my bit of dinner."

"I am so sorry I disturbed you," said Clarissa, in her gracious way. "You were tired, I daresay."

"O, pray don't mention it! I'm sure I feel it a great compliment your comin'. It must seem a poor place to you after your beautiful house in the Roo de Morny. Austin told me where you lived; and I took the liberty of walking that way one evening with a lady friend. I'm sure the houses are perfect palaces."

"I wish you could come to my house as my sister-in-law ought," replied Clarissa. "I wanted to confide in my husband, to bring about a friendship between him and my brother, if I could; but Austin tells me that is impossible. I suppose he knows best. So, you see, I am obliged to act in this underhand way, and to come to see you by stealth, as it were."

"It's very good of you to come at all," answered the wife with a sigh. "It isn't many of Austin's friends take any notice of me. I'm sure most of 'em treat me as if I was a cipher. Not that I mind that, provided he could get on; but it's dinners there, and suppers here, and never no orders for pictures, as you may say. He had next to nothing to do all the autumn; Paris being so dull, you know, with all the high people away at the sea. He painted Madame Caballero for nothing, just to get himself talked of among her set; and if it wasn't for Mr. Granger's orders, I don't know where we should be.—Come and speak to your aunt, Henery and Arthur, like good boys."

This to the olive-branches in the window, struggling for the possession of a battered tin railway-engine with a crooked chimney.

"She ain't my aunt," cried the eldest hope. "I haven't got no aunt."

"Yes, this is your aunt Clarissa. You've heard papa talk of her."

"Yes, I remember," said the boy sharply. "I remember one night when he talked of Arden Court and Clarissa, and thumped his forehead on the mantelpiece like that;" and the boy pantomimed the action of despair.

"He has fits of that kind sometimes," said Bessie Lovel, "and goes on about having wasted his life, and thrown away his chances, and all that. He used to go on dreadful when we were in Australia, till he made me that nervous I didn't know what to do, thinking he'd go and destroy himself some day. But he's been better since we've been in Paris. The gaiety suits him. He says he can't live without society."

Clarissa sighed. Little as she knew of her brother's life, she knew enough to be very sure that love of society had been among the chief causes of his ruin. She took one of her nephews on her lap, and talked to him, and let him play with the trinkets on her chain. Both the children were bright and intelligent enough, but had that air of premature sharpness which comes from constant intercourse with grown-up people, and an early initiation in the difficulties of existence.

She could only stay half an hour with her sister-in-law; but she could see that her visit of duty had gratified the poor little neglected wife. She had not come empty-handed, but had brought an offering for Bessie Lovel which made the tired eyes brighten with something of their old light—a large oval locket of massive dead gold, with a maltese cross of small diamonds upon it; one of the simplest ornaments which Daniel Granger had given her, and which she fancied herself justified in parting with. She had taken it to a jeweller in the Palais Royal, who had arranged a lock of her dark-brown hair, with a true-lover's knot of brilliants, inside the locket, and had engraved the words "From Clarissa" on the back.

Mrs. Lovel clasped her hands in rapture as Clarissa opened the morocco case and showed her this jewel.

"For me!" she cried. "I never had anything half as beautiful in my life. And your 'air, too!" She said "'air" in her excitement. "How good of you to give it to me! I don't know how to thank you."

And the poor little woman made a rapid mental review of her wardrobe, wondering if she had any gown good enough to wear with that splendid jewel. Her purple silk—the one silk dress she possessed—was a little shiny and shabby by daylight, but looked very well by candle-light still, she thought. She was really delighted with the locket. In all her life she had had so few presents; and this one gift was worth three times the sum of them. But Clarissa spoke of it in the lightest, most careless way.

"I wanted to bring you some little souvenir," she said, "and I thought you might like this. And now I must say good-bye, Bessie. I may call you Bessie, mayn't I? And remember, you must call me Clarissa. I am sorry I am obliged to hurry away like this; but I expect Mr. Granger back rather early, and I want to be at home when he returns. Good-bye, dear!"

She kissed her brother's wife, who clung to her affectionately, touched by her kindness; kissed the two little nephews also, one of whom caught hold of her dress and said,—

"You gave me that money for toys the other day, didn't you, aunt Clarissa?"

"Yes, darling."

"But I didn't have it to spend, though. Pa said he'd lay it out for me; and he brought me home a cart from the Boulevard; but it didn't cost two napoleons. It was a trumpery cart, that went smash the first time Arthur and I stood in it."

"You shouldn't stand in a toy-cart, dear. I'll bring you some toys the next time I come to see mamma."

They were out on the landing by this time. Clarissa disengaged herself from the little fellow, and went quickly down the darksome staircase.

"Will that be soon?" the boy called over the banisters.

"I do hope I shall be able to keep it," said Bessie Lovel presently, as she stood in the window gloating over her locket; whereby it will be seen that Austin's wife did not feel so secure as she might have done in the possession of her treasure.

* * * * *



CHAPTER XXXVI.

"AND THROUGH THY LIFE HAVE I NOT WRIT MY NAME?"

Mid-Winter had come, and the pleasures and splendours of Paris were at their apogee. The city was at its gayest—that beautiful city, which we can never see again as we have seen it; which we lament, as some fair and radiant creature that has come to an untimely death. Paris the beautiful, Paris the beloved, imperial Paris, with her air of classic splendour, like the mistress of a Caesar, was in these days overshadowed by no threatening thundercloud, forerunner of the tempest and earthquake to come. The winter season had begun; and all those wanderers who had been basking through the autumn under the blue skies that roof the Pyrenees, or dawdling away existence in German gambling-saloons, or climbing Alpine peaks, or paddling down the Danube, flocked back to the central city of civilization in time to assist at Patti's reappearance in the Rue Lepelletier, or to applaud a new play of Sardou's at the Gymnase.

Amongst this flock of returning pilgrims came George Fairfax, very much the worse for two or three months spent in restless meanderings between Baden and Hombourg, with the consciousness of a large income at his disposal, and a certain reckless indifference as to which way his life drifted, that had grown upon him of late years.

He met Mr. and Mrs. Granger within twenty-four hours of his arrival in Paris, at a ball at the British embassy—the inaugural fete of the season, as it were, to which the master of Arden Court, by right of his wealth and weight in the North Riding, had been bidden. The ambassadorial card had ignored Miss Granger, much to the damsel's dissatisfaction.

Clarissa came upon Mr. Fairfax unawares in the glazed colonnade upon which the ball-room opened, where he was standing alone, staring moodily at a tall arum lily shooting up from a bed of ferns, when she approached on her partner's arm, taking the regulation promenade after a waltz. The well-remembered profile, which had grown sharper and sterner since she had seen it for the first time, struck her with a sudden thrill, half pleasure, half terror. Yes; she was pleased to see him; she, the wife of Daniel Granger, felt her heart beating faster, felt a sense of joy strangely mingled with fear. In all the occupations of her life, even amidst the all-absorbing delight of her child's society, she had not been able quite to forget this man. The one voice that had touched her heart, the one face that had haunted her girlish dream, came back to her again and again in spite of herself. In the dead of the night she had started up from her pillow with the sound of George Fairfax's familiar tones in her ears; in too many a dream she had acted over again the meeting in the orchard, and heard his voice upbraiding her, and had seen his face dark and angry in the dim light. She had done her duty to Daniel Granger; but she had not forgotten the man she had loved, and who had loved her after his fashion; and often in her prayers she had entreated that she might never see him again.