slightest anxiety on that score. I hear only of her brilliant successes, flatteries, presents, the high terms she can demand, the fabulous sums she has made on her last tour.'

His tone displeased Cherubina seriously; she was up in arms at

once.

'She has made eighty thousand francs,' she said, and has given it all to pay papa's debts.'

'Debts-eh, what? Val rubbed his forehead, and stood beholding her with a blank look.

'Don't tell her I told you,' continued Cherubina hurriedly. 'Tell nobody. Papa had got himself into trouble at Milandreadful trouble-with gambling. We never knew how bad it had been till long after. Renza thought it would distress us less if we heard of it when it was all past and gone, and papa was well again. He sent for her to Milan, to tell her about it. She had just been offered this engagement, and took it, got the money advanced; and she saved him, he says. For he was not himself, he was ill for long afterwards, and he declares he might have done something mad or wicked, but for her. She is generous; it was not only the money: she risked her health. The doctors had warned her not to undertake what she did; but papa's danger would not wait, and she bound herself to work and earn all that was wanted.'

Cherubina stopped for breath. But she saw Val was listening with keen interest, and resumed confidently,

'Next July her engagement ends; but I am afraid for her she has had no rest—and—'

Madame came rushing into the room, and cut short Cherubina's speech.

'Here, Mr. Romer, here is the letter,' she said, presenting it.

'Just in time for post,' said Val, snatching his hat and escaping, scarcely vouchsafing an answering look or nod to Cherubina, who, though alarmed at her own indiscretion, could not bring herself to repent it.

Connaught Gate was not half a mile off, yet Val took half an hour to walk that distance. His mind meanwhile was proceeding apace. It was like turning a sharp corner in the road, disclosing a new bit of country.

'Blockhead!' he uttered presently aloud, surprised by a tardy perception of how readily he had been the disciple-perhaps the dupe-of Diana's idle but noxious cynicism. How unresistingly he had allowed her to thrust Laurence from the pedestal she had occupied in his imagination! His blind trust in his present fair monitor had received a shake. The idea that his mind had been poisoned, his judgment vitiated, enslaved, had for the first time been forced upon him; and at the same moment he woke to a distant uncomfortable sense of the little dignified part he had been playing lately.

Then he bethought him these reflections were unfair to Diana. Before he let mistrust go further, he would put her to the test.

Lady Brereton was not alone. His reception was of the cool order, for which, in the presence of strangers, Val was prepared, and accustomed to put on it a desired interpretation of his own. To-day first he questioned whether this distance and indifference were not a sincerer expression of her feeling towards him than the exquisite cordiality she tendered him in private.

He kept apart. Diana had instantly detected the change in his manner, the shade of cold severity and reserve, and, when all her

other guests were gone, taxed him with it in a playful way.

'Are you aware you are looking as grave and absent as a professor of mathematics?' she said lightly.

Is it a new statue you are meditating? Surely you are not troubling yourself any more about the memorial to poor dear old Lady Ravenstock?'

Val hesitated; and Diana went on, laughing,

'If her tiresome husband isn't satisfied, you must remind him she only died last year, and cannot be expected to have altered so much for the better in so short a time.'

'I suppose I have lived the life of a savage and a recluse too long,' he remarked, 'and cannot shake off my old bad habits. I shall always be giving offence in society. I am no courtier.'

'Do you tell me that for news?' she said, smiling. I thought we had known each other long enough and well enough to have no startling discoveries left to make.'

Certainly you know me well enough,' he said bluntly, but whether I-' and he paused significantly.

She turned her eyes to his with astonishment. In he plunged, headlong,

'Lady Brereton!'

The wonder in her eyes was infinite. What was coming next? 'It is a year ago, in the garden of my villa at Rome. We were speaking of Mdlle. Therval.'

'Well she uttered haughtily, with some impatience; but Val was not disconcerted.

A girl who, as you knew, had always answered to my dreams of the ideal human being. But for her, I should perhaps now be a muddle-headed attorney, instead of a -a-pretty fair sculptor. In her I saw genius go together with

beauty and goodness-just what an artist needs to show him his faith is no chimera.'

"Anything more?' she murmured. The man must be out of his senses to speak to her thus.

'You broke my faith in her, you destroyed my trust. To this moment, I don't know how. A word, a suggestion from you was enough. I believed you, without question, or hesitation, or proof.'

'Scarcely,' she interposed. 'I think you are forgetting that time, and misrepresent what occurred.'

'I forget nothing,' said Val, 'nor how, viewing all by the false light of suspicion, I just turned away, silently acknowledging that what I had been worshipping all my life was probably but the creation of a boy's, a fool's fancy. Yet boys and fools turn out to be right sometimes, and wise men make mistakes.'

Diana bent down her head, to hide a slight perplexity. She had told him no downright lies in the past that she recollected; still she felt herself on precarious ground.

'One question,' he resumed, after a pause. 'When Mr. Gervase Damian left Rome, did you know his reasons? Did you know more?'

Diana shrugged her shoulders. She was too proud to equivocate, and felt it might not be safe. Certainly I did not know then,' she said indifferently.

really, Mr. Romer, you must allow me to ask you the reason of this cross-examination. I presume you have one. Otherwise I am

at a loss to comprehend it.'

'Certainly I have one,' he retorted, slightly provoked. 'You, as well as myself, have shown in society a reserve on the subject of Mdlle. Therval-a marked coolness, to say the least, which I can tell you has proved enough to set certain people speculating and romancing. What I have to say is this-that, to stop people's mouths before fables go flying about, it would be well, and it would be a graceful action on your part, that when Mdlle. Therval arrives you should ask her to your house to play.'

"Mr. Romer!'

Her accent let him know he had given mortal offence. Val was dismayed. What had he said What had he said that was so dreadful?

'But what objection could there be he stammered.

'O, pardon me. I was not even thinking of that,' pointedly.

'I see. You think it unwarrantable of me to presume to say what you should or should not do. But it seems to me this is not a matter for formality and conventional reserve. I thought it was permitted to lay them aside on occasion, since, as you said yourself, we were old friends,' he concluded appealingly.

But Diana's face had taken an expression of obstinacy and ostentatious forbearance not unlike Sir Adolphus's when Val talked politics, and at least equally provoking.

'Will you ask Mdlle. Therval

to your house?' he repeated, after waiting in vain for some response. 'Why do you lay such stress upon that?'

'Because it is your best-your sole way of proving to me that you admit the injustice of your former depreciating insinuations.' 'I neither admit nor deny. I suspend judgment.'

'You refuse what I ask, then?' he said brusquely. It is not much.' Diana was piqued by this insistance, and replied distantly,

Really, Mr. Romer, if you are so anxious to meet her, you can surely find other opportunities. I cannot ask you to depend upon this one.'

Val was incensed to the depths of his honest nature. His serious earnest mocked by persistent levity and scepticism! And he had thought that woman had a heart, and he some power over it!

The power she unquestionably held over his own was in jeopardy now. She saw that, and it embittered her against Laurence, who stood between her and this man's homage, that she had stooped to manœuvre to win.

She kept silence, looked patience, as much as to say, 'You have lost your head and your temper; but I am indulgent, and will give you time to recover.'

When she thought she had given him time enough, she spoke deprecatingly,

You see, the lives of these people, and their ideas and customs, are so different from one's own.'

Thank you for reminding me,' put in the sculptor irascibly.

"Their notions of feminine principle and propriety so much laxer,' she continued unregardingly. Among themselves they countenance much we regard as inadmissible. Some persons, I know, make contrary laws for different classes. For my part, I do

not see, if that is allowed, where we are to stop. I decline to adopt a different code of honour and morals by which to judge women of different castes. A woman who consents to receive and return addresses never meant in earnest forfeits respect.'

Val's pent-up feeling burst forth now unrestrainedly,

'What shall we say of women who accept in play what is offered in earnest who win love and friendship under false pretences --who play with men's lives, devotion, and happiness, not from weakness or passion-there is pardon for that-but from cold self-love Playing with fire, who know themselves uninflammable ! A poor pastime, Lady Brereton.' Diana was stupefied.

Mr. Romer,' she murmured, 'you forget yourself.'

You are right,' Val returned incisively. 'I do sometimes; and you, never. That is what I meant, I think. The chances are uneven. You must allow me to be glad of our conversation, since it was time I should begin to understand better my own position and yours.'

He was going. This was no parting, but a lasting rupture. Diana made a movement towards him, trying once more the power of a beseeching look. Val repelled the subtle advance with an imperceptible gesture. Theirs had been no common friendship. She recognised that now, failing to be all to him, she would henceforward be nothing.

When the door closed upon him, Diana, for all her ingrained habit of self-command, found herself more thoroughly and painfully agitated than ever she had been in her life. She had a bare moment to recover. Val was scarcely out of the house, when the servant announced,

'Mrs. Damian.'

Before Diana, distracted, could frame an excuse for not receiving this inopportune visitor, the lady was in the room. She was in a state of excitement at least equal to Diana's, and much less controlled.

'Di, are you alone? Say you can see no one. I must speak to you.'

'What is the matter?" asked Diana, aghast. Never had she seen Gervase's mother so upset. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright. She looked ready to go off into a fit.

Mrs. Damian spoke quickly, 'Something very serious-something that would be a calamity for us all. Di, it must be stopped, cost what it may.' 'Gervase?'

She nodded, and resumed, in a voice choked with agitation,

'My poor mad boy! He was always so dangerously impulsive.' Then suddenly changing her tone: 'Di, it is all your doing! Why didn't you marry him?'

'He never asked me,' retorted Diana, coming out with the truth at last for sheer impatience.

'Well, you will have your revenge,' said his mother. He is going to ruin himself—to ruin us all-by marrying-'

'Laurence Therval.'

'Di Mrs. Damian stared, as if at something unearthly. He has told you, then?' she asked, with instant jealousy of her son's confidence.

'Not he. But I often saw them together in Rome. I suspected something-a wild affair; but she went off suddenly, and I thought Gervase had got tired of it, and given it up, when he came to you at Genoa.'

'That was why we could do nothing with him there,' cried the mother pathetically, throwing up

her hands; and I could hardly get him to look at the little widow, whom I had coaxed into coming on purpose. A clear ten thousand a year, Di, lost to the family, all for a caprice.'

'A caprice that lasts a year, and results in an offer of marriage, deserves another name,' remarked Diana unmercifully.

'A craze, an infatuation,' struck in Mrs. Damian distressedly. 'And this recovery of poor Otho's property, which is a little fortune for us, and that we have all been rejoicing over as a godsend, has merely smoothed the way for his folly. He writes to me that he has made up his mind to retire from the service. Di, we shall hear next of his consorting with actors and gipsies, and married -married to a notorious adventuress.'

'An adventuress? repeated Diana, surprised in spite of herself.

Mrs. Damian rambled on disconsolately,

'He is coming to England next month for Amy's marriage. Mdlle. Therval is expected every day. I hear she is going to be well received in society. I myself have been urging people to take her up! It will confirm him in his madness. I know women and mothers who will tell him he is quite right. (It is not their son.) Then he will confess all to me, he will have to choose between her and me; and he will choose-her!'

Mrs. Damian looked up. The paroxysm had passed. She replied,

'Some friend of Gervase's-a foreigner. Do you know anything of a Countess Janowski?' Diana reflected.

'I have heard of a Count Janowski. I did not know he was married.'

Mrs. Damian took out a letter. 'She writes in Gervase's interest,' she said, 'to warn me.'

Diana read attentively. Her countenance betokened intense surprise, amounting to discomfiture. But her clear sight led her instantaneously to put her finger on the truth. She looked up.

'That's the wild revenge of some jealous woman,' was the spontaneous comment that rose to her lips. But she checked it, and perused the letter once again.

Why should this disclosure startle her so? Did it not merely substantiate her own theories? She remained thoughtfully scrutinising the date of the letter, the hand, the signature-Marie Filomena, Comtesse Janowski.'

'Well?' asked the mother anxiously.

The girl has duped us all,' said Diana, rising, pacing the room, and speaking half to herself, imperiously, as if to force conviction on her own mind. 'It all comes out now. At last I understand.'

'You heard something of this elopement, then; you confirm the story?' asked Mrs. Damian breath