"You have won me by a lie-a horrible lie!" I said; "and you seem to glory in it. Henceforth I despise you, and cease to recognise any ties between us."

'He started up, his features working. "Are you mad, woman, that you threaten me? Are you dreaming of leaving me?"

'White and breathless, he awaited my reply. "No," I answered, "I am not dreaming of leaving you. You and I are tied together by a cruel bond. I will not leave you; but I will not even try to love you. My presence shall prove your torture. I may be your slave; but I am no longer your wife!"

'He sat down, his frame trembling. "And in all these months, Ursula, you have never cared for me!"

'His look was pitiful. No wounded dog ever appealed to his master for help with such dumb pathos; but I had no compassion. "No; I have never cared for you -not for one moment; and I shall never care for you," I told him coldly and deliberately. "And it is all on account of this young lover of yours?" "All on account of this young lover of mine, whom I love as deeply and as hopelessly as you love me."

'He sprang again to his feet, clenching and unclenching his hand as though it held a knife. O father, if he had only killed me then I would have died thanking him for releasing me! "Be careful, be careful," he exclaimed fiercely, "or the next report you have of Bernard Keane's death may be a true one!"

'I felt the blood ebb away from my face, my lips, and an icy hand clutch at my heart. John Lock is capable of fulfilling a threat like that, father.'

'I know it.' Pierce was terrified by the scene his daughter described, horror

VOL. XXI.

struck by the feelings she depicted. The galling chains had fallen from his own limbs only to be fastened on his child. He saw how they tortured her, how she wrenched at them in vain. Impotent as the reed shaken by the wild whirling blast, Ursula was held in John Lock's grasp.

'His threat has lain on me like a bar of iron,' murmured the girl; 'a bar of iron that seems to be hot and searing to my brain and heart.' 'No wonder. To John Lock, to will is to work.'

'But he shall not work; I'll prevent it! Only, father, never let Bernard know who I am, and what I am now. Save him from tracking me out and falling into the hands of a ruthless and cruel enemy. I think if this cough grew worse and carried me off that Bernard need only know that his poor young wife was dead. I wish it were so; but people can't die when they please, or I might just lie down on that little couch, and lie down for ever.'

Pierce rose and took her hands.

'Child,' he faltered, 'all this sorrow springs out of one great sin done by your father years ago. Madman that I was to believe that the burden of it would fall on me alone!'

'Don't reproach yourself; I do not complain,' she said wearily. 'Only think what is best to do.'

'I will try; and may Heaven help me to the best!'

'Good-night, father. You will come early to-morrow to see me before I start?'

'Yes. Good-night, my child; and may God, who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, lighten the burden laid upon you!'

'Father, did my mother die of consumption?'

'Yes; but why do you ask that

now ?'

Ursula smiled-a pitiful sickly

II

smile that flickered over her features, lending them a more ghastly look.

'Good-night, my dear old fa

ther.'

And she threw her arms round his neck and kissed him-not once, but twice, with a passionate energy that brought the tears to his haggard eyes.

CHAPTER XL.

A THOUGHT DAWNS.

WHEN Ralph Pierce reached the hotel the following morning, he found Ursula looking even more fragile and wan. She sprang up to meet him from the couch on which she had lain, only partially undressed, all night; and the broad bistre shades underlining her eyes were proof of the awful vigil she had kept.

'Father,' she said, in a low de spondent voice that struck like a dagger to his heart, 'there is something I want you to tell me the meaning of. When I first arrived at Washington it was very quiet, and he did not wish me to go out or make acquaintances. I was glad of it somehow. All my love for glitter and gaiety seemed to have died a sudden death. My brain and my heart as well appeared, as it were, paralysed after that terrible morning when I found myself linked by a hideous chain.

'But time hung heavily; and I took to drawing and etching a little, to rid myself, if I could, of the dull gnawing misery that had settled down upon me like a block of wood. He led me on, suggesting this thing and that, besides supplying me carefully with everything I could need for my work. Only this: he positively insisted that I should keep my talent private, and do my work in a small

out-of-the-way room, of which I was desired to keep the key. He would not for the world, he stated, have any one-especially the servants— know that I had ever learned a trade or worked for my living. Such knowledge would ruin me for ever socially. I did not consider him unreasonable in his notions, and readily agreed to do his bidding. The occupation was a blessing it took my mind in a measure from all I had lost; and for a time I amused myself by forming new designs, that drew me out of the life around me.

'One day he brought a man up to my studio-a man called Abel Wychcote and the two looked over my work together.

""Really," said the man Wychcote, to whom I had taken a strong prejudice from the very first glance, "you have not overlauded your wife's genius; but we have people in the department that she cannot reach, though of course, as an amateur, she is wonderful."

'I felt my cheeks burn. The idea of calling me an amateur ! Why, you know, father, Bernard had most difficult work of the kind, and towards the end he left me to do it all nearly!

""What do you think of that?" John Lock asked, laughing. "I fancy my friend here slightly underrates your ability, Ursula."

""I know he does. Just let him try me," I replied defiantly.

"But ours is peculiar work," Mr. Abel Wychcote remarked pompously. "I belong to the Treasury, Mrs. Lock. I don't know if your husband has told you so."

'I bowed coldly.

""Whatever the work may be, I should not fear to undertake it," I answered, angry at the creature's insolence in doubting my capability.

"And I will bet a thousand

dollars to one that Mrs. Lock will succeed in anything she desires to do." And my husband rubbed his hands and laughed his low, silky, hateful laugh.

'Abel Wychcote brought down his fist with a violence that made my drawing-table shake.

"Done!" he cried ;" and I may consider myself richer by a thousand dollars at once!"

'I threw a look of contempt at him. He was a tall lean man, with a dark evil face, and reminded me of a bird of prey; but though he excited a very unpleasant feeling in my mind, I was pleased at the occurrence; for I was dying to find something to interest me. The old ambition— which had only slumbered-awoke at once at the two men's words. I asked Abel Wychcote for a sight of the fine and peculiar art which he did not believe me capable of reaching. The man took a fiftydollar note out of his purse and flourished it before my eyes. "Mrs. Lock may try at this," he said, with an insidious smile. "I select it at random as an experiment. If she fails, you are only a thousand dollars poorer, and that won't hurt you overmuch, my friend"

'I looked at the note and remarked quietly, "I shall not fail." "Then I shall be a loser of nothing to speak of."

"I won't try if you don't bet a thousand for a thousand," I told him out of defiance.

"Let it be that, then," he answered to my amazement.

'I liked the whole business; it was exciting, and John Lock grew wonderfully earnest about it too. He bought me an easel and paints, and a half-finished picture, which was to deceive the servants, as I remained for hours in the studio.

'I did not care what he did. I found a triumph in winning a bet

against my own ability. I think the period in which I was working on that plate was the happiest that I have known since you and I parted, father.'

an

'Go on,' said Ralph Pierce, speaking hoarsely and with evident effort; 'tell me all about this matter.'

'I finished the plate, and Abel Wychcote declared it a success. John Lock had fairly won his thousand dollars, and the sum was presented to me to buy a diamond ring. I bought one, and it made me happy for a whole day. Then I flung it aside, and have not set eyes on it since. John Lock took the plate away to be "broken up." He said "it had done its work, won me a lovely ring, and must be destroyed at once. It would not do to have such things lying about the house."

'I was indifferent to its fate. It had yielded me the triumph I desired, and so it was taken away.'

'Is that all?' demanded Pierce eagerly, while, in his deep-set haggard eyes, a strange wild light was shining.

'Yes; except this: some time after I found the very plate in the drawer of an old desk that belonged to Mr. Lock. He had sent me there for a paper he wanted in a hurry, and I found the plate, carefully wrapped up in folds of tissuepaper. Father, the plate had been used.'

'A crime! I don't understand.' 'Nor I, altogether. There must be collusion between John Lock and this man who is in the Treasury. This accounts for the lavish wealth he surrounds you with !'

'A crime!' said Ursula slowly, speaking like a person awakening from a heavy dream; but her cheeks were flushed to the deep crimson of a rose. Her black eyes were all aglow with animation, and a smile-a positive smile -played on her scarlet lips. The two men have made me the instrument of a crime! Father, I can brave that man with newborn courage. Let him be cautious and work me no ill, nor Bernard either, or he shall curse the day I ever darkened his doors. A life for a life! And Bernard Keane's life is worth a dozen lives of such men as John Lock !'

She stamped her foot on the floor vehemently as she spoke. All the panther qualities in her nature were aroused. Treachery, revenge, were rife in her breast, throbbing in her pulses, lending a brilliant radiance to her glance, quivering the muscles of her mouth.

'Ursula, I charge you to be careful. Do not again touch a graver. For God's sake, search for that plate, and destroy it-every fatal vestige of it!'

'I will search for it, father!' Her face was white now with

pressed firmly together.

'I will search for it!' she cried, in a loud ringing voice, from which hopelessness and despondency suddenly seemed fled.

'And if those men tempt you again, leave them and come to me. Better to suffer, to die together, in poverty or prison, than to live in sin, to accomplish such devil's work as John Lock would give you!'

'I would come to you at once if I could,' she answered softly, laying her hand on his and resting her head against his breast.

'You must come. I can protect you, and I will, so help me Heaven!'

'But who can protect Bernard as long as that demon goes free?'

She muttered these words under her breath; then she kissed the wrinkled hand that lay in her own.

'Father, a thought dawns on me! I believe you have opened my way to the light. Who knows but that we may be happy yet: you and I—and-Bernard ?"

Pierce looked at her wonderingly; then shook his head sorrowfully.

All this misery was surely driving Ursula mad.

'Child,' he said, 'you have only a woman's feebleness to pit against unscrupulous and hardened men.'

She threw back her head, and the golden hair shimmered in the light like an aureole of glory.

Father, I love Bernard Keane, and I hate John Lock!"

Ir requires an effort of the imagination to picture the Chancellor of the German Empire-the 'man of blood and iron,' as he has often, and not quite unjustly, been called-standing at his mother's knee, listening to the fairy tales and ghost stories with which Teutonic infancy in particular is so frequently amused. Had the biographers sketched the boy Otto as surreptitiously taking down from the shelves of his father's library the Prince of Machiavelli, or some such kindred book, no reader would have doubted the fact for a moment. It would have so delightfully tallied with that trite and nearly always untrue aphorism, 'The child is father to the man.' But no, they represent him as snowballing in the streets with lads of his own age, disporting himself in field and woods, climbing the highest trees on the ancestral domain, and being delighted with the entertainment provided for him by his mother. So true is it, what Helvetius and his set maintain, 'that an infant of genius is quite the same as any other infant, only that certain surprisingly favourable influences accompany him through life, especially through childhood, and expand him.' And the process of expansion, to bear fruit, must, as history has nearly always shown, be accomplished by the mother. father was the heart, the mother the wisdom, of the family,' once said a lady, a near relation of the

The

Bismarcks.

These few words give us not only a picture of both parents, but also of the influence they had upon their offspring. This lady's opinion is further confirmed by several other connections and friends. In Frau Louisa Wilhelmina von Bismarck's character the predominating trait was ambition, and this she allowed to become the principal guide in the education of her youngest son especially. Unlike the fisherman in the Arabian tale, who could not foresee what shape and form the genii from his casket would take, she hesitated not in foretelling the remarkable rôle he was to play in the history of the nineteenth century. But she did not live to see her prophecy fulfilled. She was sleeping in the grave long before her son became a great and worldrenowned man. Frau von Bismarck descended from a family of savants, the Menkens from Leipzig. Already once they had intermarried with the noblesse, one of her great-aunts having become the wife of the Reichsfreiherm von Hohenthal, the founder of the elder branch of the Counts von Hohenthal. But the Menkens themselves had for years been famous in the scientific world, nearly every generation contributing its representatives, who by sheer worth and unaided exertions rose to exalted positions. Frau Bismarck's father proved not an exception, but a modification. He took to diplomacy. He entered his country's