that was lying on the table, and turning the title on the back carelessly towards her. WYou forget yourself how dare you!" said Ursula, and she rose up opposite to him in a frenzy of indignation.

"When a woman does not respect herself, Miss Hamilton," he quietly replied, "she can hardly expect that other people will respect her."

She looked steadily at him for a few seconds while she struggled to say something; but no sound would come, and her lips quivered, and her eyes closed: she then grew deadly white and left the room. "Oh, you hit too hard!" I exclaimed in despair. "You have hurt her!"

"Hurt her!" he echoed. "I think she must be gone mad! Hurt her? I hope I have-it is quite the kindest thing left for one to do by her."

I gathered up my work hastily and was going to follow her, when Monsieur de Saldes continued: "You are so young, so pure, s0 good, you do not know the face of evil, as a poor battered wretch like myself does. I implore you break off your intimacy with Ursula; she is no fit companion for you indeed she is not. Depend upon it, that when a woman of her years already finds virtue wearisome, the chances are that before long she will find it impossible!"

"Monsieur René," said I, "for shame! Your dislike is making you do her far less than justice" and I got up from the sofa. "I who have known her less long, know her better than you do!" don't

"Don't go, I beseech you," he said, "or shall never forgive myself. I believe the truth is that I absolutely loathe that woman!" and he ground his teeth.

next her skin-grasped tightly in one of her hands.

When I came down on Saturday morning, I found Madame Olympe busily reading a despatch which had just arrived from the Sœur Marie.

"Just look at it," she said, putting it into my hands. "And tell me if you ever read anything more grotesque and grim than this cake-and-death joke?" The letter was as follows:

"Madame la Comtesse will be glad, no doubt, to learn that Madame Simon is still in the same state. The difficulty of swallowing remains very great. She only took one small teacupful of broth, by spoonfuls, at intervals all through the for the worse. Yesterday, after we had made whole of yesterdav; still there is no change her comfortable for the night, Madame Chevet, the nurse, said to me,' She will be in the other world before to-morrow.' But I was certain that her hour was not yet come, and so I laid a wager with her about it. The stake was a galette, and I have won it, since here is tomorrow and Madame Simon is still alive. We did it, Madame la Comtesse, to amuse ourselves a little while we were watching. Madame la Comtesse need send no money at present. I looked into Madame Simon's purse while she was asleep, and saw in it two bank-notes, one for two hundred francs and another for one hundred. Madame la Comtesse's devoted and obedient servant, "SŒUR MARIE."

"Would one not believe from this," said Madame Olympe, when I gave her back her letter, "that the poor old sister was a regular Mrs. Gamp? Yet no one ever was tenderer or more devoted than she is to all those who suffer. It is a strange childish element that I have observed in many of the sisters of charity and in many of the country priests too."

"Has Monsieur Kiowski arrived?" asked Monsieur Charles, as we sat down to breakfast.

"Not yet. But he will be here directly," answered Madame Olympe.

"If he comes at all," said Monsieur de Saldes.

I made no answer and was passing on, meaning to leave the room quietly, when Madame Olympe who was standing up behind Monsieur Jacques' chair and beating time while he accompanied Jeanne's duet - suddenly caught me round the waist and held me fast, while she went on counting her "Un, deux, trois; " and so I stayed and grew calm as I listened. "Ave sanctissima, mater amabilis, ora, ora pro nobis ! " "Do you think he will not come?" asked sang the two thin childish voices. It was Monsieur Charles. "Well, I am a little of wonderfully pure and passionless, and I your opinion. To come all the way across wished my poor Ursula could have heard it. the sea (and there was such a high wind in When I went upstairs she was in bed. I the night too!) to sing a trio, seems a strong went close up, but she did not stir. Her measure." thick fringes of eyelashes were all matted together in little wet points, and the marks of tears still lay in wet lines, all down her face. She had gone to sleep crying, with a small iron cross which had belonged to her mother

"He will come," said Jeanne.

"He will come," said Madame Olympe. "He will come," said Ursula.

"What faith!" said Monsieur de Saldes. "Happy man to be so believed in! But you and which she always wore have said nothing." And he turned to me.

"What is your opinion? that he will come?"

Do you believe Just then there was a great bustle outside, and we heard a high voice asking breathlessly if we were all well and if we were in the breakfast-room. The door was thrown open, and Monsieur Kiowski appeared. He looked pale and tired. He had been travelling all night and had had a rough passage; but he had sold his friend's Egeria, and, true to his word, there he was to sing the Tantum ergo. He was received with acclamations.

Our whole day was passed in rehearsing. We went to the church after breakfast, and returned there again in the afternoon. The piano, which was sent down from the chateau, was too large to go up the small staircase of the tribune opposite the high altar, where the singing was to take place, and the noise and bustle of the workmen who hauled it up by ropes from the body of the church rather jarred upon my nerves. So I stayed below as far from it all as I could, and amused myself with reading a catechism which had been left upon one of the chairs. Monsieur de Saldes declined going into the tribune, where Madame Olympe had called him, and came and sat near the high altar with me. This I was convinced he did to avoid Ursula. He and she had kept carefully apart from each other all day; to me she never once mentioned him, nor made the slightest allusion to his behaviour of the night before. Her manner was grave, quiet, and unexceptionable; but her whole aspect was one of concentrated pride, and I saw that she had been deeply offended.

The singers kept themselves warm with singing I suppose, but I was frozen when the afternoon rehearsal was over and we all came out; and having got my clogs on, I made up my mind to walk across the fields home. Monsieur Rene, who was cold too, offered to escort me.

Monsieur Jacques came into the hall and began speaking to me, as I was trying to undo one of my clogs. I could not unclasp it, and Monsieur de Saldes knelt down to help me. As he stooped, a bunch of dead violets fell out of his breast. He hastily picked them up and thrust them back again and I believe thought that Monsieur Jacques and I- who were talking together-had not perceived them; but we both had certainly the same idea, for as soon as he had left us Monsieur Jacques called to me as I was going upstairs, and said again, in an agonized whisper, "Do not let Ursula marry him!"

"Why don't you marry her yourself?" said I, laughing. "That would settle it all comfortably."

He looked up at me with a sharp gaze of far-seeing misery.

"She would wash me - and I should die!" he said.

In the evening the village-girls came up again to the house, and the music was worked at indefatigably. When we went to bed, I sat down in an arm-chair by the fire, aud began building up the bits of wood and making a blaze. Ursula presently came and knelt down by me, and after a few minutes' silence said to me, "Bessie, though I have not known you long, I love you so much that I want to take an immense liberty with you."

"Take it, my dear," I answered, kissing her upturned forehead. "I hardly know what you can have to say to me that de mands so solemn a preface."

She coloured slightly, and after a minute's hesitation said, quickly and nervously, "Don't let René de Saldes persuade you that he is fond of you."

"My dear child! "I exclaimed, much surprised.

"It is his way," she continued, "and he is not trustworthy. Don't let him do it!" "Do you mean," said I, "that it is his way to persuade people that he is fond of them, when he really does not care at all about them?"

He seemed very sad, and I was obliged to recollect his really prosperous circumstances not to feel myself full of sympathy for unexisting misfortune. He spoke of a life hopeless and aimless, a failure from be- "I don't know that," she answered. ginning to end, and was so gentle, so de- "I have seen him very successfully make pressed, and so loveable, that I felt myself people think so about whom he did not care overflowing with pity for him, until I re- at all; and I have seen him like people too, membered what Madame Olympe had told as he does you; but, on the whole, those he me of his determined rejection of all em- liked, I think, came even worse off than ployment and of every sort of career. I was glad when we got home, for he was altogether so touching about himself that, in a few minutes more, I am sure he would have made me cry-although I knew perfectly well that it was all humbug.

those he didn't. You see he can only love just a very little himself; and he is always loved a great deal, and you mustn't love him, dear Bessie - indeed you mustn't. You cannot think how the notion of your

21

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being made unhappy by him has afflicted | that at present he had only a hundred and and tormented me." fifty pounds a year, and that of course he could not support a wife upon that income. "Good gracious! she began again. "Then after losing the eleven best years of your life, you are actually going to wait for perhaps another eleven? Good gracious, what a dismal state of things!" and she sat down on the ground, with her hands clasped round her knees, looking into the red embers.

"Don't be anxious about it any more, dear," said I. 66 Why, at all events, you know I am going away on Monday." "Yes," she replied; "but to whom? to what? to a narrow circle of exhausting and ungrateful duties, and perhaps with a heart made heavy by the remembrance of what you have left behind. Ah! I cannot bear to think of it!" and she flung her arms round me.

She was so full of affectionate solicitude, als that I determined to put her mind altogeth

er at ease about me.

My dear," said I, "I have not lost these eleven years, since I have passed them in loving the best and noblest human creature that I ever knew." Nevertheless, Ursula's discouraging view of the case af fected me more than I was willing to own. It did seem rather hopeless and she rang the changes on it in a way that was painful to me in spite of all her real kindness and my affection for her.

"Dear Ursula," I said, "I am going home to some one who is not like Monsieur de Saldes; some one who is able, thank heaven, to love a great deal, and who loves me as much as he is able." I then told her of my engagement to Mr. L'Estrange. "No, really, dear Bessie!" she exclaim"Are you really engaged? How very, very glad I am that it is all right!" and is he very charming, dear? and should I like him? and would he like me? and do you love him very, very much, dear?"

Ted.

"He is very learned and very clever, and quite the most charming person I ever Binet," I answered. "And he is so strong and gentle and good, that it is impossible not to love him."

Good gracious!" she ejaculated, thoughtfully to herself, still looking into the fire. And isn't he likely to get some preferment soon?"

"Indeed I cannot tell," said I. "They know how distinguished and how hardworking he is, perhaps something may turn up before very long." Good gra

"But eleven whole years! cious, my dear, I don't see my way at all! What will you do if he doesn't get any preferment?" she continued after a pause.

"Wait on, I suppose," I said, rather drearily, and I began not to see my way either- so I got into bed as quickly as I could, and pretended to be asleep, that she might leave off saying "Good gracious!" at my unprosperous little love-affair any

more.

The

Our Sunday function went off very bril liantly and was eminently successful. church was crammed from one end to the other with the relations and friends of the young people who were the principal objects of interest in the ceremony. I found that it was not a confirmation service, but the taking of their first communion by the young village children who had just been confirmed. And what with the part they took and the part that we took in the performance, I must say that I think it was altogether as unedifying a spectacle as I ever assisted at. Our programme was singular but effective.

First came the glorious Tantum ergo, for which Monsieur Kiowski had sacrificed himself with such a good grace, and which went beautifully-Monsieur Jacques, with a roll of music for a bâton, directing for all the world as though we had been in a theatre.

Then there were long orations made by two poor little girls in their white communion-frocks, who took it by turns to stand up in the crowded church, accusing themselves of the most frightful iniquities, and addressing long pompous harangues to the priest, to their parents, to the assistant spectators, to their companions, to the Virgin, to God; which were declaimed with the most la boured gestures-evidently perfectly unspontaneous, and bearing no reference whatever to the words they were uttering.

"Vous me voyez prosternée," was asserted by one child, standing bolt upright, who, poor little soul, proceeded to inform us, "qu'elle avait perdu la robe de son innocence," and invited us with continual placid wavings of her arms, a shrill voice and cheerful countenance, to "écouter ses sanglots" and "contempler ses larmes." These recitations were relieved by a most remarkable set of evolutions. -a sort of military entertainment without fire-arms precipitately performed at intervals by all the little boys to the sound of a wooden clapper played by the priest; but the drilling had been incomplete, and the execution was rather agitated and leaving something to be desired. It was inexpressibly comical-but, at the same time on that very account, extremely painful and disagreeable. It went to my heart to see children, in themselves sacred, and doing so sacred a thing, going through a series of antics which made them look like so many absurd little parrots and apes. Ursula received many compliments as she went out, and people told her how much impressed they had been with the devotional feeling of what she had sung: her part of the business seemed the most solemn after all.

Then Ursula sang her Marcello psalm, and
the grave tones went surging over the
church in great waves of sound and send-
ing shivers down one's spine. Then follow-
ed a trio - also by Marcello sung by Ur-
sula, Monsieur Kiowski, and Monsieur
Charles: this too was beautiful and perfectly
devout. After it came Jeannes and Mad-
ame Martin's sweet hymn to the Virgin;
then a cantique by the village-girls, as triv-
ial and profane as the romances one bears
upon the street organs, and very like them;
then Ursula got up again and sang her
Stradella love-song, transmogrified for the
first three or four bars into an O Salutaris,
and then suddenly flaming out into very
earthly ecstasies in good right Italian. Fortu-
nately it was a song with a Da capo to it,
so that she was able to relapse into devo-
tion and Latin again at the conclusion. It
was a splendid piece of audacity, and a
splendid piece of art; but although I could
not help being transported with it, my con-
science kept putting up a regretful protest
all the time, and I could not bear her doing
it. However, she had never been taught
anything but singing, and religion has to be
learnt as well as everything else. The per
formance wound up with a quartet (the
most serious they could find,) out of Ros-
sini's Tancredi, sung without any attempt
at disguise, in its native Italian. Mixed up
with all this came bits of the regular mass
music, executed in our tribune (but not by
us) upon a little braying, fiendish old or
gan with about as much regard to time and
tune as distinguishes the infant German
band in London streets. Alternating with
it came doleful gusts of nasal chanting from
the officiating priests below. No one ap-
peared to have the slightest idea what was
the right moment for anything to take
place, and we made three or four false "Come, get in, get in !" cried Madame
starts, cropping out into O Salutarses and Olympe, who had gone on before us, and
Amabilises upon improper occasions, and who was already seated in the carriage.
being rebuked for it and speedily reduced" We must make haste if we mean to go
to silence by Monsieur le Curé, who kept up on the river before it gets dark."
a series of mysterious telegraphic communi-
cations with us, by means of his arms, from
the other end of the church, where he was
(I suppose) praying at the high altar. Some-
times he graciously waved and beckoned; at
other times he protested, and, as it were,
thrust us back again into our seats; and
once or twice he did something that looked
uncommonly like shaking his fist at us,
when we persisted in opening our mouths
in the wrong place. His energetic and ex-
pressive movements were all we had to
guide us, and I think it was wonderful that
the music did not go worse astray.

"I jumped in, Ursula jumped in, Monsieur Charles climbed up to the box; Jeanne, Monsieur Dessaix, and Monsieur Kiowski had already started walkingtaking the short cut across the fields.

"Is there room for me?" asked Monsieur de Saldes. He had before said that he meant to walk, which was what I saw had determined Ursula upon driving.

Yes, yes, there is plenty of room; get in!" said Madame Olympe. He got in, and as he did so on one side, Ursula got out on the other. "But what are you doing?"

the

asked Madame Olympe, rather impatient-[rowed. We were all very quiet; some of lymuose us were a little exhausted by the exertions "Only going to run after Jeanne and of the morning, and all were depressed by Jacques," said Ursula, setting off. My the feeling that it was the last of our many feet got quite frozen in that cold tribune, happy excursions. What an evening it and I want to warm them."

"There's room inside," shouted Madame Olympe, through the front window, to Monsieur Charles; he had no great-coat, and she thought he would be cold. "Get into the carriage and let the servant go upon the box."

"But, Olympe, I am quite comfortable up here," he answered.

"Get into the carriage."

was! One whole side of the heavens was of a deep solemn rose-colour, with a wondrous diaper of red brown leaves embroidered upon it by the branches of a screen of trees which stood out in strong relief against it: the other side was a blaze of golden fire. This effect lasted the longest: it only seemed to grow into an ever-deepening amber, haunting that half of heaven like some brooding passionate regret, while the rose

"I have got a shawl over my knees," said hue passed first into violet, then into dark he, appealingly.

"Get into the carriage."

"I was just going to smoke a little cigarette," be observed, mildly.

"But when I tell you to get into the carriage!" she answered, her voice working up ominously towards the treble key.

He did as he was bid, and we started.

After we had gone steadily along for about ten minutes, one of the horses shied at a piece of paper that was lying in the road. Madame Olympe gave a scream: "It's the

white horse!" cried she.

"It's the bay one," said Monsieur René, looking out.

The coachman whipped and whipped in vain; the animal jumped and fidgeted, but would not go by the place.

Madame Olympe was beginning to good deal frightened. "It's the white horse!" she exclaimed again.

Monsieur Charles now looked out in his turn. "No, Olympe," said he, "it is the bay horse."

"It's the white horse!" she vociferated, eyeing him despotically, between two screams. The beast now began to kick and plunge, and Madame Olympe got into a state of the most imperious terror. "There is no white horse at all in the carriage," said Monsieur Charles.

"But when I tell you that I choose that it should be a white horse!" cried she in her highest key, and with her eyebrows running straight up her forehead into her hair. It was too funny, and we all went into fits of laughter, in which she could not help joining very heartily herself, in spite of her alarm. The gentlemen then got down, the restive creature was led past the obstacle, and presently we arrived safely at - the water's edge, where we found the Bothers waiting for us.

We jumped into the boat, and pushed off from shore: Monsieur de Saldes and Jeanne

purple, and then faded away into still silver grey. Soft opal tints came down from the skies and lay upon the face of the waters, as we rowed away from all the glory into a world of delicate twilight shadow. Suddenly, from the grey bank, burned out a single orange-coloured leaf. Oh! who shall explain the strange mystery by which one feels stabbed to the heart with a sharp pang of delight at some unexpected apparition of this kind? We all called aloud in one unanimous voice of salutation, as we floated past the little lonely flame. Presently the surface of the river became black as liquid ebony, the moon got up, and a pleasant rhythm of plashing oars, always accompanied by a bright flash of light, was all that marked our gentle progress through the water.

"Ah! Will no one sing and make this quite, quite perfect?" said Madame Olympe.

Monsieur Kiowski began the well-known air of the Sorrento boatmen, the Fata d' Amalfi, and Ursula joined in second. While they sang, Jeanne and René pulled in their oars, and we went drifting-drifting drifting along in soft darkness, listening to the passionate southern sounds. I could not help thinking that, perhaps when I am dying, that solitary leaf will burn into my heart once more, as I drift silently with closed eyes into the waters of the other life.

Every one felt grieved when Madame Olympe unwillingly gave the signal for pulling to shore. The place where we landed was very shallow, and one had to step over large stepping-stones in the water in order to reach the bank. There was neither difficulty nor danger, and we accomplished it with perfect ease. Suddenly a plaintive voice was heard calling upon us all to stop. It was Monsieur Jacques, who had remained behind unperceived, and who now nounced that it was simply impossible for

an