"Good evening, Mademoiselle Geneviève," said he respectfully. "You are just returned from church, I see. I was going out this way, up the steep path, because I have some one to see on the Place de l'Eglise, and it is much nearer; and he went towards the gate in the wall.

Raoul had the key in his pocket. He had shut it, and locked it on the inside. What was to be done? Vévette's confusion was luckily somewhat concealed by her large, overhanging straw hat, and Monsieur Richard was never supposed to be very sharp. She stammered something about the key being lost, and in fact said at last that she had lost it, and was afraid she should be scolded. "It is no matter at all," replied blandly Monsieur Richard, we can go round. But I thought you always went that way. I thought you came just now from that gate into the Pavilion."

"I had come all the way round, but had some seeds I wanted to look for in the garden-house," she answered, trembling with

fear.

"Oh! I beg your pardon a thousand times," said Monsieur Richard humbly. "I am afraid I have disturbed you."

They went back together towards the Château, and Vévette let Monsieur Richard out by another gate, and then went into the house herself, calm externally, but internally convulsed with dread.

Had Monsieur Richard seen any thing, or heard voices? What did he guess? What did he know?

That evening the sisters went together to the church, and close behind the sacristydoor Vévette perceived Raoul. When they went out, Vévette followed Félicie. "All is safe," whispered a voice in her ear as she passed; and a key was put into her hand under her cloak. Félicie had seen nothing.

CHAPTER VII.

THE VICOMTE'S TROUBLES.

Ir was within two days of All Saints' dav, when Monsieur le Vicomte went up, just after breakfast time, to pay a visit to his new friend and protégé, as he thought him. Madame Jean received him with affabili ty. She had grown gracious in her demeanor towards the "Son of the Crusaders;" for, in the first place, the tragical death of her old master had considerably

She shook her head, with a sigh, in answer to Monsieur de Vérancour's inquiries at the door.. Ah!" said she, "we are none of us the same since then. We shall be a long while before we get over it; and as for poor Monsieur Richard, he really ought to be persuaded to go away for a short time. He never was strong; but he is wasting away now. He ought to change the air. He wants change of scene, change of everything. He's in a bad way." And with another mournful shake of the head, she ushered the Vicomte into Monsieur Richard's presence.

It was not the room that had formerly been old Prévost's, nor even that immediately under it, which his nephew had been used to inhabit. It was the salon de compagnie, as provincials term it, which Monsieur Richard had caused to be arranged as a kind of study, and out of which he rarely

When the Vicomte entered, Richard Prévost came forward eagerly, to meet him, and when they were seated he began the conversation. "Has the shooting been satisfactory?" he asked. "I have done my best, and have told the garde at the Grande Ferme to keep a sharp look-out; but it is hard in these parts not to share one's game with all the ne'er-do-wells of the department."

"Well, yesterday I tried the woods up there," rejoined Monsieur de Vérancour, pointing in the direction of the hill behind the town. "In the way of hares and chevreuils, there's something to be done certainly."

Ah!" remarked Richard; "in the high timber? yes; and if I dared put old Prosper Morel at your orders, you might have excellent sport. Never was there such a traqueur as that man in the world. But then, you see, I daren't trust him with a gun; you know he was complained of in my uncle's time; the instinct is too strong for him. We were obliged even to have his permit taken from him. I daren't give you Prosper."

Well," answered the Vicomte, in a musing manner, "I saw the poor old fellow yesterday up in the woods yonder, and he looks to me terribly altered. I can't help thinking those few days' imprisonment, and the examinations and suspicions, and all together, were too much for him. He

stares at you in such a strange way, and is more absent than ever. He has quite a moon-struck air."

"Poor man, poor man!" exclaimed Monsieur Richard. "I do not know how to compensate to him for all he went through. In my poor uncle's time, he used to be down here every two days, at least; now he scarcely comes at all. Poor old Prosper!"

The conversation dropped, and it was evident that Monsieur le Vicomte had not paid Richard Prévost this matutinal visit merely to converse about the wrongs of the Breton woodcutter. After a pause of a few seconds, he began upon the matter which was occupying all his mind. "You have perhaps not yet had time to look for the acts I hinted at the other day," said he in the most propitiatory tone he could assume.

Richard Prévost looked as though he had dropped from the clouds. The Vicomte grew more insinuating still.

"I mean the deeds of transfer your lamented uncle had been so good as to prepare," added he, with a smile wherein the deepest sympathy was meant to be allied to the most gracious condescension. "Alas! the papers were all to have been signed on the very day on which' And here Monsieur de Vérancour cut his narration short with an appropriate shudder.

"I remember now," replied Richard. "You allude to the papers concerning the sale of Les Grandes Bruyères." The Vicomte nodded assent. "I must beg for forgiveness; but I have only once had the courage to go up there again, - into that dreadful room. I have only once looked into my poor uncle's papers, and I found nothing there."

--

"Yes! in truth it must be dreadful; dreadful!" rejoined Monsieur le Vicomte, whose self-interest was waxing warm, and who hardly knew how to come to his point. “Dreadful! shattering to the nervous system; but we must be men, - my poor Monsieur Richard! we must be men!" Monsieur Richard sighed. "My poor dear uncle had agreed, I think you told me, to purchase Les Grandes Bruyères," he began, with an apparent effort.

66

"For the sum of seventy thousand francs paid down," replied Monsieur de Vérancour. They were to have been paid into my hands on the fourteenth of this month, on the day of the murder."

Monsieur Richard turned pale, and for a moment closed his eyes. Then, languidly, he drawled out the poor excuse which he

had to offer. "It must seem deplorably weak to you," he said, “but to enter that room turns me sick. I have tried, and I am not equal to it. You see I have even left what had been my own room since I was a boy. I instinctively fly from all that recalls the horrible, horrible event!" Another pause. "My poor uncle, then, had almost bought the property," he added, half speaking to himself.

"Almost!" echoed Monsieur de Vérancour. "Quite! He had quite bought it. The formal engagement was taken. It was binding".

"So that if the property is not purchased within a given time," he began, "there might result a positive inconvenience, kind of obstacle, - to the establishment of Mademoiselle Félicie."

"A kind of obstacle!" echoed the Vicomte; "why, it would be ruin, my dear Monsieur, ruin to us all; for such a parti as Monsieur de Champmorin is not to be found readily in the provinces."

Monsieur de Vérancour, like a great many people in his position, became pressing the moment he had ceased to be supercilious and disdainful, and he was on the verge of becoming importunate. Now that he had been forced into confiding in Monsieur Richard, it did seem to him so tremendous a fact that a daughter of the house of Vérancour should be placed in a dilemma out of which this low-born, money-lending bourgeois could extricate her, that he thought by the mere statement of the case to overwhelm that individual and secure his services to an unlimited extent.

When the Vicomte made the hurried and

and in 1832, with our own William IV. and Queen Adelaide.

After introducing a mere skeleton of his history, we shall give what space we can . afford to some of those interviews.

Thomas Shillitoe was born in London in May, 1754. His father was Librarian of Gray's Inn. Both his parents were members of the Church of England, and were careful in the training of their children. It looks, however, as if that carefulness was not strong enough to resist even a moderate amount of temptation; for, when Thomas was twelve years of age, his father, wishing for an easier life, set up as landlord of the Three Tuns at Islington, and Thomas had to help in the business, and to be in fact the pot-boy. Three or four years were enough to enable Mr. Shillitoe to lose the savings of his life, and he returned to Gray's Inn, to hold an inferior situation, but to lead a happier life, in which he could act up to the convictions which had not forsaken him in his life as a publican.

Thomas was now apprenticed to a grocer at Wapping, being sixteen years of age. Within a year, his master and he removed to Portsmouth. He made some useful acquaintances in both places, but in the house of his master all was miserable and vicious; and at his urgent request his father procured his release from his indentures, and obtained employment for him in the same line of business in London. When he was about twenty years of age, an acquaintance which he had formed led him to a Quaker's Meeting House, which he afterwards attended with regularity on Sunday mornings; but the holy day was now less given to religion than it had been before, for instead of going to church in the afternoon or evening, he spent the time in tea gardens, and other places of resort of a similar kind. So passed another year, until his conscience began to reproach him, and led him to a serious consideration of his state before God, and to the commencement of a religious life.

It is not stated that he immediately joined the Society of Friends. His adherence to them is rather described as a gradual process. His parents were averse to it. But eventually he took the decided step, and became one of the first instruments of infusing new life into a community which had long been sinking lower and lower in spiritual religion.

We next read of him as a clerk in a Quaker banking-house; then, as pained by the worldliness of his Quaker comrades, quitting the counter, and becoming a journey

man shoemaker, on wages which sometimes provided him with bread and cheese, and sometimes with bread only. In 1778, when he was 23 years of age, he set up in that business on his own account in Tottenham, at which place, except during two intervals of absence, he resided till he died there in 1836, in a good old age. Not having been trained in childhood under the discipline of Quakerism, he had not the wonderful selfcontrol which so distinguishes that body, but was irritable in his temper. On the other hand, in common with many of those who had given themselves to what is called amongst them the work of the Ministry, he was earnest, self-denying, resolute, persevering, and apparently indifferent to reproach, in pursuit of his objects.

While engaged in business, he had frequently preached in the Friends' meetinghouses; but in 1805 he yielded to an impulse which he speaks of as if he could not resist it, by retiring from business, that he might give himself to what he called his "religious duties from home." At that time he had a wife and five children, and an income derived from his savings in trade of a "bare hundred pounds a year."

In England and Ireland his journeys were chiefly made on foot. He wore the commonest clothing, and was content with the most homely fare. He may therefore have contrived in those journeys to live upon his own scanty resources and the hospitality of the community to which he belonged.

But journeys through Denmark, Norway, Russia, Prussia, Germany, Sweden, France, and the United States, could not, we apprehend, have been accomplished without some addition to his slender resources, and we may suppose that the Friends, when they commend such missionaries to their work, place at their disposal the means of accomplishing it. Putting all the journeys together, they amount to several years out of the last thirty of his life.

It is remarkable, and disappointing, that we meet with no evidence of any success having attended his earnest and devout labours. We read of people being serious, thoughtful, and grateful, but that is about all. Whether this was really all, or wheth er the biographer was reticent, or imper fectly informed, we of course cannot decide.

From the slender store of anecdotes given in this little volume, we relate those which are connected with royalty. The rest might have happened in the experience of any man who seeks to do good. These would