sisters, the two Duchesses and dear
know how charming they all can be.
I know, and I dare say that on the
hear from the Duchesses.'

little Donna Claudia, you They only want to be nice, smallest opportunity you'll

The plural had a sound of splendour, but Lily quite kept her head. 'What do you call an opportunity? Am I not giving them, by accepting their son and brother, the best-and in fact the only opportunity they could desire ?'

'I like the way, darling,' Lady Champer smiled, 'you talk about "accepting"!"

Lily thought of this-she thought of everything.

Well,

say it would have been a better one still for them if I had refused him.'

Her friend caught her up. But you haven't.'

'Then they must make the most of the occasion as it is.' Lily was very sweet, but very lucid. The Duchesses may write or not, as they like; but I'm afraid the Princess simply must' She hesitated, but after a moment went on: 'He oughtn't to be willing, moreover, that I shouldn't expect to be welcomed.' 'He isn't!' Lady Champer blurted out.

Lily jumped at it. Then he has told you? It's her attitude?'

She had spoken without passion, but her friend was scarce the less frightened. My poor child, what can he do?'

Lily saw perfectly. He can make her.'

Lady Champer turned it over, but her fears were what was clearest. And if he doesn't?'

"If he "doesn't "?" The girl ambiguously echoed it.

'I mean if he can't.'

Well, Lily, more cheerfully declined, for the hour, to consider this. He would certainly do for her what was right; so that, after all, though she had herself put the question, she disclaimed the idea that an answer was urgent. There was time, she conveyed-which Lady Champer only desired to believe; a faith, moreover, somewhat shaken in the latter when the Prince entered her room the next day with the information that there was none-none, at least, to leave everything in the air. Lady Champer had not yet made up her mind as to which of these young persons she liked most to draw into confidence, nor as to whether the most inclined to take the Roman side with the American or the American side with the Roman. But now,

at

least, she was settled; she gave proof of it in the increased lucidity with which she spoke for Lily.

'Wouldn't the Princess depart-a-from her usual attitude for such a great occasion?'

The difficulty was, a little, that the young man so well understood his mother. The devil of it is, you see, that it's for Lily herself, so much more, she thinks the occasion great.'

Lady Champer mused. 'If you hadn't her consent, I could understand it. But from the moment she thinks the girl good enough for you to marry'

'How

'Ah, she doesn't!' the Prince gloomily interposed. ever,' he explained, 'she accepts her because there are reasonsmy own feeling, now so my very life, don't you see? But it isn't quite open arms. All the same, as I tell Lily, the arms would open.'

'If she'd make the first step? Hum!' said Lady Champer, not without the note of grimness. She'll be obstinate.'

The young man, with a melancholy eye, quite coincided: She'll be obstinate.'

'So that I strongly recommend you to manage it,' his friend went on after a pause. 'It strikes me that if the Princess can't do it for Lily, she might at least do it for you. Any girl you marry becomes thereby somebody.'

'Of course doesn't she? She certainly ought to do it for me. I'm, after all, the head of the house.'

'Well then, make her!' said Lady Champer a little impatiently.

'I will. Mamma adores me, and I adore her.'

And you adore Lily, and Lily adores you therefore everybody adores everybody, especially as I adore you both. With so much adoration all round, therefore, things ought to march.'

'They shall!' the young man declared with spirit. 'I adore you too-you don't mention that; for you help me immensely. But what do you suppose she'll do if she doesn't?'

The agitation already visible in him ministered a little to vagueness; but his friend after an instant disembroiled it. 'What do I suppose Lily will do if your mother remains stiff?' Lady Champer faltered, but she let him have it: She'll break.' His wondering eyes became strange. Just for that?' 'You may certainly say it isn't much-when people love as you do.'

'Ah, I'm afraid, then, Lily doesn't!'-and he turned away in his trouble.

She watched him while he moved, not speaking for a minute. 'My dear young man, are you afraid of your mamma?'

He faced short about again. I'm afraid of this-that if she does do it she won't forgive her. She will do it-yes. But Lily will be for her, in consequence, ever after, the person who has made her submit herself. She'll hate her for that-and then she'll hate me for being concerned in it.' The Prince presented it all with clearness-almost with charm. What do you say to that?'

His friend had to think. Well, only, I fear, that we belong, Lily and I, to a race unaccustomed to counting with such passions. Let her hate!' she, however, a trifle inconsistently wound up. 'But I love her so!'

"Which?' Lady Champer asked it almost ungraciously; in such a tone, at any rate, that, seated on the sofa with his elbows on his knees, his much-ringed hands nervously locked together and his eyes of distress wide open, he met her with visible surprise. What she met him with is perhaps best noted by the fact that after a minute of it his hands covered his bent face and she became aware she had drawn tears. This produced such regret in her that, before they parted, she did what she could to attenuate and explain-making a great point, at all events, of her rule, with Lily, of putting only his own side of the case. ‘I insist awfully, you know, on your greatness!'

He jumped up, wincing. 'Oh, that's horrid.'

'I don't know. Whose fault is it then, at any rate, if trying to help you may have that side?' This was a question that, with the tangle he had already to unwind, only added a twist; yet she went on as if positively to add another. 'Why on earth don't you, all of you, leave them alone?'

'Don't you like them, then-the women?'

6

She hesitated. No. Yes. They're an interest. But they're a nuisance. It's a question, at any rate, if they're worth the trouble they give.'

This, at least, it seemed he could take in. You mean that one should be quite sure first what they are worth?'

He made her laugh now. 'It would appear that you never

can be. off.'

But also, really, that you can't keep your hands

He fixed the social scene an instant with his heavy eye. 'Yes. Doesn't it?'

'However,' she pursued, as if he again a little irritated her, 'Lily's position is quite simple.'

'Quite. She just loves me.'

'I mean, for herself. She really makes no differences. It's only we--you and I-who make them all.'

The Prince wondered. But she tells me she delights in us; has, I mean, such a sense of what we are supposed to "represent."

'Oh, she thinks she has. Americans think they have all sorts of things; but they haven't. That's just it'-Lady Champer was philosophic. Nothing but their Americanism. If you marry anything, you marry that; and if your mother accepts anything, that's what she accepts.' Then, though the young man followed the demonstration with an apprehension almost pathetic, she gave him, without mercy, the whole of it. 'Lily's rigidly logical. girl as she knows girls-is "welcomed," on her engagement, before anything else can happen, by the family of her young man; and the motherless girl, alone in the world, more punctually than any other. His mother-if she's a "lady "-takes it upon herself. Then the girl goes and stays with them. But she does nothing before. Tirez-vous de là.

A

The young man sought on the spot to obey this last injunction, and his effort presently produced a flash. 'Oh, if she'll come and stay with us-all would, easily, be well! The flash went out, however, when Lady Champer returned: "Then let the Princess invite her.'

Lily a fortnight later simply said to her, from one hour to the other, 'I'm going home,' and took her breath away by sailing on the morrow with the Bransbys. The tense cord had somehow snapped; the proof was in the fact that the Prince, dashing off to his good friend at this crisis an obscure, an ambiguous note, started the same night for Rome. Lady Champer, for the time, sat in darkness, but during the summer many things occurred; and one day in the autumn, quite unheralded and with the signs of some of them in his face, the Prince appeared again before her. He was not long in telling her his story, which was simply that he had come to her, all the way from Rome, for news of Lily and

to talk of Lily. She was prepared, as it happened, to meet his impatience; yet her preparation was but little older than his arrival, and was deficient, moreover, in an important particular. She was not prepared to knock him down, and she made him talk to gain time. She had however, to understand, put a primary question: 'She never wrote, then?'

'Mamma? Oh yes-when she at last got frightened at Miss Gunton's having become so silent. She wrote in August; but Lily's own decisive letter-letter to me, I mean-crossed with it. It was too late-that put an end.'

A real end?'

Everything in the young man showed how real. On the ground of her being willing no longer to keep up, by the stand she had taken, such a relation between mamma and me. But her rupture,' he wailed, 'keeps it up more than anything else.'

And is it very bad?'

'Awful, I assure you. I've become for my mother a person who has made her make, all for nothing, an unprecedented advance, a humble submission; and she's so disgusted, all round, that it's no longer the same old charming thing for us to be together. It makes it worse for her that I'm still madly in love.' 'Well,' said Lady Champer after a moment, if you're still madly in love I can only be sorry for you.'

'You can do nothing for me?-don't advise me to go over?'

She had to take a longer pause. 'You don't at all know, then, what has happened?-that old Mr. Ganton has died and left her everything?'

All his vacancy and curiosity came out in a wild echo. ""Everything"?'

She writes me that it's a great deal of money.'

'You've just heard from her, then?'

'This morning. I seem to make out,' said Lady Champer, ‘an extraordinary number of dollars.'

'Oh, I was sure it was!' the young man murmured.

'And she's engaged,' his friend went on, ' to Mr. Bransby.'

He bounded, rising before her. 'Mr. Bransby?'

"Adam P."-the gentleman with whose mother and sisters she went home. They, she writes, have beautifully welcomed

her.'

'Dio mio!' The Prince stared; he had flushed with the