Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow: A Novel

by C. Despard

AT WORK WITH A WILL.

---

CHAPTER I.

LAURA'S TASK.

O source of the holiest joys we inherit!
O Sorrow, thou solemn, invisible spirit!
Ill fares it with man when through life's desert sand,
Grown impatient too soon for the long-promised land,
He turns from the worship of thee.

It will long ago have been suspected that Margaret was wrong in her suspicion about her husband. Maurice Grey was not the person who had taken forcible possession of her child. Jane, in her new capacity of friend and protector (for the landlady had never done anything by halves; hers was one of the world's strong natures—great in good as in evil), had opened out, with much shame and contrition, everything that concerned the transactions of that fatal day.

Her story was this: In the course of the afternoon a gentleman had come up the garden-path, and proceeding to the back instead of to the front door, had requested to have a few words with her. He had begun by asking some trivial questions about her mistress, and Jane said that as he asked them he looked at her in a searching kind of way. Apparently it did not take him many minutes to discover a certain amount of animus in her state of mind, and with the more readiness he revealed to her the object of his visit, persuading her that the service she was desired to render was very small. He was careful enough of her conscience not to tell her in so many words what he intended to do. All he asked her was to keep the fact of his having been there at all a secret as long as possible, and if she should be questioned to give a certain description of his personal appearance.

L'Estrange's revenge was perfect in its kind. In his angry bitterness he had determined to punish, and not only to punish but to humiliate, the woman who had kept him at arm's length, who offended him by her dignity, who openly showed her contempt and loathing for his character; and he had succeeded.

It was a bold scheme. Had it been deliberately planned, it might have been said to be diabolical in its clever wickedness; but the fact, though strange, was true: it was not deliberately planned.

When L'Estrange found Margaret's address and followed her to Middlethorpe, he had not the vaguest idea of being in any way inimical to her. He had a passionate admiration for her beauty, and he believed her to be weak. Even the persistent way in which she had hidden herself from him had nurtured this idea in his mind. He thought she was afraid of him, and his aim was to conquer this fear, to persuade her by his specious reasoning that it was foolish and vain.

He was a man who believed he understood women perfectly, and as, unhappily for himself, his experience had been rather with the weak and erring than with the strong and pure, he had a rooted contempt for the female character. The height and purity of such a soul as Margaret's it was impossible for him to understand.

It must not be supposed that L'Estrange was any monster of wickedness—he possessed, on the contrary, many good and noble traits—but his foreign training, the wandering life he had led and the strange notions he had picked up from modern sectaries had sorely impaired his moral sense. Truth was a mere name to him. To cling to it at an inconvenient season he would have considered the supreme of folly. And yet he had a kind of honor of his own. To help the weak and defend the oppressed were articles in his strange creed. If Margaret had given herself up to him and followed him in his wanderings, he would have been faithful to her even unto death.

In fact it was only tenderness for her, an instinctive feeling of unfitness, that had prevented him from marrying the warm-hearted, impulsive English girl who had given him her love so unreservedly.

Fortune had come to L'Estrange late in life, and unexpectedly; with it came the desire for the renewal of old ties. He did not look upon marriage as the insuperable barrier which it is happily considered here. He believed Margaret's marriage to have been one of convenience, not inclination, and that she would be rather thankful to him than the reverse for interfering with its smooth tranquillity. Hence the scene at Ramsgate, which, in reliance on Maurice's impulsive character and his English repugnance to anything approaching a scandal, he had deliberately planned.

It had succeeded beyond his hopes. Margaret was separated from her obnoxious husband, and L'Estrange believed that all he had to do was to go in and win. But for a long time she baffled him, and, as it has been seen, he misinterpreted her motives, attributing to superstitious fear of an unknown evil what really arose from disgust and horror. The success of L'Estrange with women had been so unfailing that he could not but have unbounded confidence in his own power of fascination. That the heart which had once been unreservedly his could have been transferred—and, above all, transferred to a husband—was a thing the Frenchman failed to realize.

When he fell upon the traces he had been so long seeking, his determination was this—to enlighten the fair Englishwoman, to lead her out into what he looked upon as the true land of freedom, to destroy her foolish prejudices, and then when the education was fairly begun—what? The usual fools' paradise.

It was in his surprise and indignation at finding himself utterly baffled, in the light, hateful to him, of her last strong words of contempt and loathing, that he hastily formed the scheme of cruel revenge which he carried out so cleverly. The idea was flashed in upon his brain by the very inspiration of madness.

It will be well, perhaps, to return to that afternoon when, penetrating into Margaret's sanctuary, he carried away her treasure.

The little Laura was unsuspecting. When L'Estrange entered the parlor he found her curled up, with her favorite story-book in her hand, in a corner of the sofa. She recognized him instantly as the stranger whose kindness to her on the sands had made her think he might be her lost father. His appearance confirmed her in the idea. Throwing down her book she ran to him and took his hand with confiding frankness "Then you are my papa after all?" she said.

"Who told you I was your papa, Laura?" he asked gravely.

"I told myself," replied the little one; "but come, poor mamma will be so pleased. I left her sitting on the sands, for she wanted to find you too, and now you've come here instead. Shall we go out and tell her?"

She did not wait for denial or assent, but dashed out of the room for her hat, while L'Estrange, rather astonished at his reception, sat and pondered for a few moments.

"She has taught her child to love him, the man who wronged and doubted her," he thought with a growing wonder. "I must have been mistaken. Does she care for him, after all?"

But the bare idea made him clench his teeth and knit his brows, till the reappearance of the child forced him to dissimulate. L'Estrange was a consummate actor. He could be all things to all men, but I think that never in his life had he set himself a harder task than this. The child was so confiding, so simple in her trust. Not much dissimulation was necessary, however. The strong emotion he felt as he took up the little one and felt her small arms round his neck was very real of its kind. For, she was Margaret's; here lay the spell.

"Laura, my child!" he murmured, and his heart turned with sudden loathing from the deed he was doing. He felt inclined to put her down and to run from the house and from the place.

But as he spoke she smiled. It was her mother's beautiful smile, such as had lit up her face in those bygone days when Margaret and he had been one in heart and mind. He hesitated no longer. "Laura," he said, putting her down and looking at her with a tenderness that was certainly not altogether put on, "I know where your mother is. She is not on the sands; she has walked so far that it would tire her to walk back. We shall have to take a carriage to find her. You are not frightened, little one? See, she has sent her scarf, that you may know I have come from her."

"Is mamma ill?" said Laura with a quivering lip.

"No, only a little tired."

"Well, then, let's go at once! But how funny of mamma to walk so far! I suppose she was talking and forgot."

A carriage which L'Estrange had already hired was waiting for them at some little distance from the house. They got into it and drove away.

For the first half hour Laura was very happy. She did not speak much, for she was a little shy of this new relation of whom she had heard so often, and for whose return she was accustomed to pray at her mother's knees.

She sat by his side, his arm round her, looking up into his face now and then to point out something they were passing or to make a simple remark, mostly about "mamma." He was very silent. But still they went on, up hills and down them, through villages, past trees and fields, till at last all the well-known landmarks had disappeared and Laura grew uneasy.

"Where is mamma?" she asked with a half inclination to tears; "she can't have walked so far."

He drew her on to his knees, so tenderly that she smiled again, and resting her head on his shoulder repeated the question in a quieter tone. Still no answer, and still they drove on, till not even the shelter of those loving arms could do away with the child's uneasiness; she lifted up her dark eyes pleadingly: "Please tell me, shall we soon get to mamma?" Then he took both her small hands and looked at her for a moment. "My poor Laura!" he said, "what will you say to me when I tell you that you are going away from mamma?"

"Away from mamma!" replied the child, and there came a sudden terror into her eyes. But Laura was a peculiar child. The life she had lived with those much older than herself, the shadow of her mother's sorrow and the influence of her mother's life and character, had made her unlike others of her own age.

L'Estrange had been prepared for a passion of tears and cries. It did not come. Only the child drew herself out of his arms, and crouching down in a corner of the carriage looked round as though searching for a means of escape. Her case seemed hopeless, so she clasped her small hands together. "Take me back," she said, earnestly; "oh what will mamma say?—poor mamma!"

And then she cried, but it was like a woman's weeping—a still noiseless grief.

L'Estrange was a disciple of Rousseau's. He could understand the beautiful pathos of a situation, and the child's quiet tears affected him so painfully that he could scarcely refrain from giving vent to his own sentiments in some such way, but they did not persuade him to alter his purpose. He let the child weep for some time, then stooping down he drew the cold little hands from her face, and holding them in his, looked at her earnestly for a few moments.

"Come to me, Laura," he said. She half rose, but, as if bethinking herself, drew back: "It's wrong to take me away from mamma. And why, why did you say we were going to her?"

Yes, there lay the sting. He had deceived her, and the child distrusted him. He drew her to him. "This is a strange child," he thought, "and must be strangely treated."

"Listen to me, Laura," he said gently, "and try to trust me. I know it was wrong, very wrong, but I had a reason. I want to do good to your mamma and to you. Your mother is unhappy."

"Yes," sobbed the child; "but it's only because papa is away; if you—" She looked at him suddenly, then turned away, literally trembling with a new fear. "Are you really my own papa that mamma tells me stories about?" she asked with unchildlike earnestness, fixing her dark, mournful eyes on his face.

There followed a few moments of silence. L'Estrange was thinking. For the first time in all his life he was staggered. Falsehood had hitherto always befriended him, but he had never before been in such a situation as this. Mentally he cursed his own folly, and cast about in his usually ready mind for something to say, for in this pure child's presence he felt as if he dared not lie. An inspiration came. "Laura," he said earnestly, "you are much better and wiser than other children of your age or I should not say this to you. I am not your father. Remember, I never told you I was, but I love you as much as if I were, and I love your mother. I want to make her happy, and you, her little daughter, must help me."

L'Estrange did not mean precisely what he said, but for the moment he persuaded himself that he did. The child held her breath and listened.

"Laura," he continued after a pause, "what would make your mother happy?"

"For papa to come back," she said with a sigh, which he echoed. Only a few hours before he had thought to make her happiness in a very different way. But this should not interfere with his scheme.

"What if you found your father, Laura, and told him this—that your mother was unhappy, I mean, and wanted him back? Do you think he would come?"

The child looked up eagerly: "Oh, I'm certain he would."

"Well, petite, if you consent to come away with me, I will try and take you to your father. Do you understand me?"

Laura understood, certainly. She clasped her hands, but suddenly her face fell. "You said you would take me to mamma, and you didn't," she said; "perhaps this is just the same."

L'Estrange was right. She was a strange child and not easy to manage. As he hesitated for an answer she spoke again: "Take me back to mamma, and we can ask her about it."

"No, Laura," he said as firmly as he could, for he was easily moved and the child had touched him to the heart. And then he took her in his arms again, and smoothing back her hair kissed the tears from her eyes. For the first time he was really in earnest. Instinctively the child felt it and was soothed.

"Trust me, petite, and try to be calm. I do not mean you anything but good, my fair child, for you are dear to me as my own soul."

There was a wonderful power of fascination about this man which had seldom failed him. It had its effects on this girl-child. She looked up into his strong face convulsed with emotion, and she was comforted. Her tears ceased. She lay back silently, and he rocked her to and fro in his arms while they drove on through the gathering darkness. Was the child wrong? Had her heaven-sent gift of instinct failed her in her hour of need? I think not. Rather, in that moment this strange, complex-natured man was what he appeared—good and true. The pure child-presence, the simple words, the dark, searching eyes seemed to have drawn away his evil for the time. It was as though an angel had looked into his soul's darkness and with a ray of living light dispelled it utterly.

It must be remembered that L'Estrange was not an Englishman. There is, I think, a certain oneness of nature about the Anglo-Saxon race that renders it very difficult for its members to understand the emotional, impulsive, two-sided character of the Celt, the Latin or the Greek. An Englishman is eminently straightforward. He does not stop to analyze. Be his object good or bad, he is given to carrying it out perseveringly, leaving to the future thoughts of compunction or self-gratulation. This is doubtless sweeping, as indeed all generalities must be, but possibly a truth underlies it—a truth which may explain the extreme lack of sympathy between ourselves and our southern neighbors. With Englishwomen the case is different. There is always something in the female character that answers to this two-sidedness. Its very weakness challenges a woman's sympathy. Muscular Christianity, strong, manly straightforwardness, is very attractive in its way, but not so dangerous, I am inclined to imagine, to the female heart as this emotional impulsiveness, ready at one moment with tears of sentiment and tender analysis of feeling, and at the next with passionate indignation and deep-breathed curses.

L'Estrange was a son of the South, a pupil of the great philosopher of Nature. From his childhood upward he had indulged in every emotion that ruffled the calm of his strong spirit. From Jean Jacques he had learnt to invert the eternal unity of beauty and goodness, calling that fair which is wanting in truth. Therefore, when involuntarily, as he gazed on the child, who had sobbed herself to sleep on his shoulder, the moisture dimmed his eyes and his heart softened before her fair innocence, he felt a certain glow of self-approbation. "I am certainly becoming a better man," he thought, but he did not make up his mind to restore the child to her mother—the woman he had once loved, the woman he had robbed of every joy.

His heart ached for her sadness as in the soft emotion of that evening her pale face came before his mind; but if he would do her good at all, it should be in his own way.

And so they drove on—Laura, wearied out with her tears and the excitement, fast asleep in the arms of the man who had taken her from her mother; L'Estrange scarcely daring to stir. In his strange way he thanked God for this sleep.

The stopping of the carriage aroused the child. They were at a station some miles distant from the one by which they usually went from Middlethorpe to York.

The night was dark; only a few stars shone through the cloud-rents. Laura started up. "Mamma!" she cried; then looking round her, she remembered and said no more. L'Estrange was watching her narrowly. He had dreaded this awakening, for he feared a passionate outburst of grief, but it did not come.

The child looked out and around her with that far-seeing look that some children have, as if they can see into the invisible, and then, as they entered the dimly-lighted station—for the little lady had insisted upon being put down to the ground—she looked up again into his face. It was the same, mournful, searching gaze that had already touched him so deeply.

Apparently the scrutiny satisfied her, or it may be her woman's instinct showed her the uselessness of resistance, for she gazed away again into the night and said no more till she found herself wrapped up tenderly and laid amongst the cushions of a first-class railway carriage. L'Estrange took his seat beside her and the train began to move.

Then first the child's lip trembled, and there came a look of distress into her small face. L'Estrange stooped over her: "Are you frightened, darling?"

"Not frightened," said the little girl; "but—"

"But what? Tell me."

Then came the trouble with a burst of tears: "I want mamma to tuck me up and hear my prayers. We say them—mamma and I—when the stars come in the sky; and the stars are up there now, and—and I want mamma."

For Laura was only a very little girl, and this want made her first realize what it was to be without her mother.

Her companion did not answer, and the child went on in her simplicity: "God is up there above the stars a very long way away, but I know He hears, for when mamma was in London and Jane was cross, I told Him and He brought her back after a long time. Oh, please, will it be a great many nights before we go back to mamma?"

As she spoke those silent tears so pitiful from a little child began to flow, and her companion once more felt inclined to curse himself for his short-sighted folly. He knelt down beside her in the carriage, and she saw that his face was very pale and that real tears were in his eyes.

"Ma fillette, ma chèrie," he whispered, for in his emotion the English endearments sounded hard and cold, "be patient—trust me."

For a few moments Laura was soothed, but still, as there came the gleam of the stars through the darkness, the childish wail was repeated: "I want mamma! I want mamma!"

L'Estrange was perplexed. Passionate sorrow he had expected, and he had not despaired of curing it by distractions, but this quiet pathos of grief cut him to the very soul. In its presence he was helpless. How could he comfort her?

He pondered, but for a long time in vain. At last his own childish days returned to his mind, and the stories he had learnt at his nurse's knee. "It was in parables," thought this master of human nature, "that the Great Teacher taught the world; and what were the myths of antiquity but parables to prepare the nations in their childhood for the reception of truth? By a parable I may perhaps make this little one believe that her present suffering is for a future good."

By which it will be seen that he still thought, in some vague way, of redressing the great wrong he had committed, and by means of the child, whom he had stolen in an access of bitter revenge, restoring Margaret to happiness by giving her back her husband.

"Laura," he said, lifting her from the cushions and holding her in his arms, "can you listen to a story?"

"Yes," said the child wearily.

"Listen, then, ma fillette, and try to understand me. It is long ago that I heard this story, when I was a little child like you, and perhaps you have heard it many times, for it comes from a book that English people read. There was a man who had a great many sons—twelve, I think—and he loved one of them more than all the others; we do not know why—perhaps he was beautiful and good. This boy was of course very happy at home, because he was always with his father, who gave him everything he wanted. But at last his brothers grew angry—-jealous, I think you call it in English."

Laura drew in her breath with a sigh of contentment. "Why," she interrupted, "you are telling me about Joseph!"

"Yes," he replied gravely, "and ma fillette knows that Joseph was sent to a country a long way off, far from his father who loved him."

"Like me," said Laura sighing.

"And ma fillette knows, too, that Joseph saw his father again."

"After a long, long time," said the child.

"After a long time, it is true; but what did he do then?"

Laura looked away at the stars: "Gave his father bread and a house and sheep, and everything he wanted."

For she knew all about this, her favorite Bible story.

There was a pause then. The child and her companion were thinking.

At last L'Estrange spoke: "And was he sorry afterward, this good Joseph, that he had been taken away from his father?"

"I think he was glad," said Laura in a low tone; "only it was such a very, very long time. But if I thought what you say I wouldn't mind the long time."

"Think it, then, ma fillette," he said, stooping over her with his own peculiar smile, which seemed to shine like light on his dark face. And the child believed him.

It was a strange doctrine to take root in so young a mind, for the subtle parable wrought powerfully. The great fact of self-sacrifice, the suffering of some for the good of others, began to dawn upon the child's mind. It was real suffering to be separated from her mother, to be wandering with this stranger through the night instead of lying in her warm white bed in her mother's room; but Laura neither wept nor complained. Her tears ceased, and her dark eyes grew large with thought. For she had overcome her distrust of her companion; she believed with the simple faith of childhood that what he told her was true. Her strong imagination idealized him into a guide (like Great Heart in the bit of the Pilgrim's Progress she loved the best) come to put an end to her mother's troubles by bringing her father back to them; and for her part in the great work the child, with unchildlike calm and thoughtfulness, was ready.

It was late before they reached York, but rooms were ready at an hotel to which L'Estrange had telegraphed, and the good-natured chambermaid took every care of the little lady. Going to bed so far from mamma was hard work for the poor child, and her sobs and tears and sudden startings from sleep were subject of much speculation to the attendant; but at this time she said nothing, as her services were very liberally remunerated.

L'Estrange passed a very different night. He had been longing for its deep solitude, that he might think out undisturbed the unwonted thoughts to which the experiences of that day had given rise. And the night came—heavy, dark, brooding, suitable to his spirit's mood.

He went to his room, but there he could not rest; under its narrow roof even thought would not come to him; he rose and went out. The town was silent in the darkness, and utterly undisturbed he walked through the quaint, narrow streets, under low-browed gates and arches, till in a few minutes he gained the open country. A wide, grassy expanse it seemed to be, as far as he could see by the faint light that struggled now and then through the clouds—undulating here and there, and bordered in the distance by a fringe of wood, behind which a line of light that told of either twilight or dawn was lying low down on the horizon.

A gate opened on to the smooth turf. He unlatched it, and, after a few more rapid steps, threw himself down on the grass with his face to heaven. A sudden craving for rest of some kind—rest of conscience, rest of heart, rest of soul—had come to him, and in the night's stillness he had set himself the task of thinking out the problem.

In the morning of the long day he had thought to rest in love. That hope had gone by. It did not require so consummate a master of human nature as himself to recognize clearly that this was vain; and strive as he would he could not forget Margaret; her beauty haunted him as the vision of impossible good must follow the lost—a torment, because unattainable for ever. Later, he had imagined that revenge in its bitter satisfaction might rest his spirit. His scheme had succeeded, but this too was vanity, or worse, for the child whom he had looked upon merely as the instrument of his vengeance had opened his eyes, and instead of rest came the stinging pang of remorse to harass his tormented soul.

And thus it had ever been with him. The beautiful "spirit of delight" he had been seeking from his youth up; always with the same result—to find under the beauty, ashes; under the glory, dull despair.

At first, as he lay there under the canopy of cloud, the thoughts of this strange man were nothing higher than self-pity and bitter complaining of wayward fate. His being seemed for the moment a thing apart from himself. He took it in his hand and reasoned on it. Why was it formed to enjoy when enjoyment was a thing unattainable? Why was it tortured with longings which for ever were destined to remain unsatisfied? Why was beauty so fair and good so lovely when always they looked on it from afar? What was this superior fate that fed its slave with mocking visions—removing evermore and ever farther the cup of bliss for which his thirsty soul was panting?

The soft sensualist felt the tears brimming to his eyes as he pondered on his calamities. It was the remembrance of his own parable that first aroused him, for the man was not naturally weak. Brought up in a different school, he might have been different. Education had made him a formalist and from forms he had turned away in his manhood, thinking in the direct opposite to find freedom and truth.

The formalist had cast off every tie of faith, only to fall into the closer bondage of fatalism. And the worst of it all was that there seemed no opening for him into the light. But, though he little suspected it, he had found a teacher, and in the stillness of that night the lessons fallen from the lips of one of God's little ones began to take effect upon his mind.

It was not so much his own parable as its effect upon Laura that struck suddenly to the root of his selfish murmuring. His sensuous soul had been hitherto seeking with all its power for beauty as a resting-place. He had thought to find it in the gratification of his senses, but it had always eluded him. The child's earnest look that night as she took up at his command the burden of suffering for the good that was to come—not so much to herself as to another—made a new idea dawn upon his mind. Was there, then, an unsuspected beauty even in suffering when sanctified by high ends? If so, he had been all his life seeking in vain.

Suddenly as the idea flashed in upon his brain—with the vision of that patient little face, from which something more than a child's spirit seemed to look—he sprang to his feet and walked rapidly forward into the night. Like a dream his former life seemed to map itself out before him in those few moments of intense feeling. The days, the years that had, in spite of his efforts, furrowed his face and sprinkled their gray ashes on his head, how had he spent them? In seeking the good which ever eluded him, in fleeing from the shadow that ever pursued him. The good had been happiness, beauty—the evil had been pain, suffering. Physical suffering, mental suffering, sympathetic suffering, vicarious suffering,—this he had striven to blot out from the story of his life; he would believe that it did not exist, and when in unmistakable evidence it had presented itself to his senses, he would forget its presence or drown its influence in distractions.

And now came this child-messenger to tell him that all this time he had been banishing a holy thing, a soul-purifier. It had ennobled the young face that night till an angel's pure beauty seemed to rest upon it. Even his peerless Margaret had gained in calmness and strength by those years of desolation; and he who had cast it aside as abhorrent, what was he becoming?

He asked himself this with an involuntary shudder. He had always rejoiced in the tenderness of his heart. His very objection to the sight of suffering had been laid to this account in the self-analyses which with him had been so frequent: and now what did he find himself doing? Coolly inflicting torture on a woman and child—two of the weakest of God's creatures—and all for the gratification, not of the best but of the worst feelings of his nature. Once more L'Estrange threw himself to the ground, but this time his face was turned earthward and buried in his hands, while wave after wave of bitterness passed over his troubled soul.

When he looked up the white dawn was beginning to struggle with the darkness. Gray clouds and intermediate patches of pale blue had become visible, and heavy, bead-like drops of dew stood on the blades of grass. His face was wan, like that of one who had passed through a death-agony, but it looked better. He rose to his feet and paced slowly back to the town. At the railway-station he stopped, knocked up a telegraph-clerk, and sent a message apparently to London, then returned to his room at the hotel, arousing the astonishment of two or three sleepy waiters who were up in expectation of an early train.

There he sat down before the table, opened his desk and taking from it a sheet of paper began a letter. It seemed a difficult one to write, for sheet after sheet was destroyed before he could satisfy himself. It was accomplished at last, however, and the words written seemed to be very few, but a smile flitted over his face as he read them. Then he pressed the paper to his lips, enclosed it in an envelope, and wrote the address with a trembling hand.

L'Estrange's method of spelling English words was very eccentric. He could speak the language well enough, as he had lived long in England, but he could never bring himself to write it. Why words should be spelt in such an arbitrary way he could not or would not understand. All he could suppose was that the English would keep in this, as in everything else, to their national characteristic of eccentricity.

English eccentricity had always been a fruitful theme with L'Estrange. On the point of spelling he was obstinate. He persisted in spelling phonetically, and as a natural consequence his letters very often went astray.

It will be as well to say at once that this was the unhappy fate of the letter in which his mental struggles culminated. It was written in French and addressed to Margaret. She never got it. Three weeks later, after vain endeavors had been made to procure it some destination, it was returned to the hotel from which it had been written. There it awaited the return of its writer.

---

[CHAPTER II.]

A WASTED LIFE.

A glorious Devil, large in heart and brain,
That did love Beauty only (Beauty seen
In all varieties of mould and mind),
And Knowledge for its beauty; or if Good,
Good only for its beauty, seeing not
That Beauty, Good and Knowledge are three sisters
That doat upon each other—friends to man,
Living together under the same roof,
And never can be sundered without tears.

The heavy rings round Laura's eyes and her general languor when she appeared in the private sitting-room her protector had taken deeply grieved him.

For a few moments he felt inclined to act upon his natural impulse of kindliness—to take the child back to her mother, and pursue his strange scheme of setting Margaret right with her husband by himself. But a remnant of selfishness withheld him. Laura, in her sweet, childish innocence and in the unchildlike development of her inner life, was a beautiful problem, the like of which had never before, in all his wanderings through the fields of humanity, been presented to him. He longed to study her more closely, and this could only be done by following out his original scheme. He determined, therefore, to leave the decision to her.

He said very little during breakfast-time, only watched her with a certain curiosity. He was grateful to this child who had opened a door of light in his soul, though he was not near enough to her in purity and beauty to know how great was the service she had rendered him.

Breakfast was something of a pretence to both of them. The longing for her mother, and the brave determination to choke it down in her heart till she had done what was required of her—found this unknown father and brought him back—made the child too excited for eating to be any pleasure to her; and L'Estrange at the best of times could not eat so early.

When it was over the child got up. "Please," she said hesitatingly. She was in a great perplexity about what she should call her new protector.

He read her thought: "Come here, Laura."

She went quietly to his side, and he drew her on to his knees. "I knew another Laura once," he said quietly, stroking back her hair; "she was the sister of your mother; but she is dead now, pauvre enfant!" And then he continued, as if talking to himself: "Comme elle était gentille, la chère petite!"

"That must be my aunt Laura," said the child; "mamma has a picture of her, and I kiss it sometimes."

"Yes, she would be your aunt, ma fillette; you are like her. Ah! I remember now—it is of her that your eyes make me think. Turn round to the light."

"But why do you talk about Aunt Laura?" said the child impatiently. "Please, I want a sheet of paper. I can only write big letters, but I think mamma would understand."

"Patience, ma mie. I have written a letter to your mother. See, it is here, all ready to be sent, and if you like some of your big letters can go inside. You shall put it in the postbox yourself, that you may trust your old friend as the other Laura did. I told you about her because of what she used to call me. I should like you to do the same. It was mon père. Can you say that?"

"Mon père," said Laura, in her small childish voice. Then she thought a few moments: "That means my father, doesn't it? But you are not my papa."

"I must be your father till you find your own, Laura," he said gravely. "Shall it be so?"

"Yes, mon père," said the child, smiling up into his face.

And from that moment she never doubted her protector. He on his part became more determined than ever in the pursuit of his new object. Little by little the child was doing childhood's Heaven-given work, drawing away selfishness and bringing pure love in its place. It was this that brought him to try his experiment. He watched the child as she sat down before a large sheet of paper with a pencil, writing painfully her letter to her mother. L'Estrange had all the innate delicacy of a refined mind; he would not attempt to see what the words were that the child was tracing.

She brought the paper to him when the letter was done, and stood beside him as he folded it up; but before it was finally put away he hesitated: "Which would you rather, Laura—for this letter to go to your mother, or to go back yourself?"

For a moment the child's face looked bright and joyous, but only for a moment. The flush faded, she clasped her small hands together: "We must find papa first; but, oh, I hope it will be soon!"

The strong man turned away; he had difficulty in keeping himself from weeping like a child. When he spoke again his voice was calm: "We must lose no time then, Laura." He rang the bell, and the waiter appeared. "Send the chambermaid here."

When after a few moments the soft-hearted Jane came in, he gave her money, ordering, in those imperative tones which always gained a hearing with his inferiors, that the little lady should be supplied without delay with every necessary for a long journey. He did not deign to explain, nor did Jane venture to remonstrate. She went to an outfitter's, procured all that was necessary, and in half an hour from that time they were ready for another start.

There followed a long and wearisome day, for the heat and dust were excessive, and before it was over, L'Estrange for the hundredth time repented as he looked on the patient little flushed face that would yet show no sign of weariness.

Arthur had been right in his conjecture. They were remarkable travellers, and many were the comments of those who journeyed with them—the man, with his dark face and foreign appearance and imperious conduct, and the fair English child, at the very sight of whom his face seemed to melt into tenderness and his manners to take the softness of those of a woman. And no woman could have watched over her child more lovingly or tended it with greater care than he watched over and tended his little charge. Food and drink he brought her with his own hands when it was possible to obtain them; whenever her position grew wearisome she rested in his arms, the imperious voice sinking to lulling murmurs as he told her long nursery-tales which he made out of everything they passed. A house, a stream, the cows in a meadow would be sufficient material for his fertile brain. Once even, when the black grimy dust had literally overpowered the fastidious little lady, and her timidity prevented her from appealing to the attendant in a waiting-room, he took her himself to a kind of pump, and dipping his cambric handkerchief into the cool water washed her hands and face so effectually that she laughed for pleasure. It was her first laugh since the moment when she had discovered that she was going away from her mother, and it caused L'Estrange as sincere a throb of gladness as he had ever known in all his life, for this child was gradually becoming to him something more than a child—something more even than the offspring of the woman who through all his lovings and longings had most entirely held his heart. He began to look upon her, in his strange fatalistic way, as a mysterious thing, sent to him at the very darkest hour of all his dark career to touch his blackness with fingers of light and bring good near to his soul.

And perhaps it was partly the truth. There is, for those who can understand the mystery, something divine in childhood; certainly, if not nearer to God than we, children have the power of drawing out the divine that is in us. L'Estrange felt this in a very peculiar way; he treated the child with a loving reverence, watching jealously her every word and movement as one who looks for an inspiration.

And so the long hours of the day wore away. When they reached London it was already late in the afternoon. Laura was tired, but she would not hear of remaining there for the night, she was too anxious to press on.

They were met at the Great Northern Station by a gentleman who appeared to have been expecting them. This man gave them a boisterous welcome, shook hands warmly with L'Estrange, who did not seem to reciprocate his cordiality, and, chucking Laura under the chin in a familiar way, asked her where she was going. The child's lady-like instincts were offended. She answered quietly that she did not know, and clung to her protector's hand.

The stranger laughed in a peculiar way, and turned to L'Estrange: "I didn't know you had a daughter, mossou."

"Monsieur," replied he, emphasizing the French word, "was mistaken, as he very often is."

"Well! well!" answered the other rapidly—he was our friend Mr. Robinson—"I can't stand here wasting my time. I gather from the telegram, which duly arrived this morning, that you sent for me about a certain subject. I may have information for you—I may not."

"It shall be worth Monsieur Robeenson's while to give me his information," replied L'Estrange quietly, but with a kind of sarcastic courtesy.

The courtesy struck Mr. Robinson's mind, the sarcasm glanced over him harmlessly. "Of course, of course!" he protested volubly. "You foreigners put things strangely, mossou; ignorance of English ways, no doubt. Allow me to explain myself. In expectation of this (you gave me reason a little while ago to believe it might possibly be wanted) I have kept myself acquainted with the movements of the party discussed between us. You will doubtless remember the occasion. Naturally the firm is slightly out of pocket. These investigations, you must understand, are costly, but everything shall be done in due form between us. In the mean time, if I can be of any service—"

"Oblige me," said L'Estrange with the same manner, that might be either courtesy or its semblance, "by taking this as an instalment." He handed him a paper packet. "The firm I can settle with when your lawyer's bill comes in. Your services, monsieur, are for the moment personal."

Mr. Robinson bowed. His fingers itched to get to the inside of the packet, but it would have been unprofessional to show anxiety, so it rested quietly in his palm. L'Estrange looked at Laura to see how much of all this she had understood. The little girl was still holding his hand, but her thoughts seemed to be elsewhere, and he addressed himself again to the lawyer: "Tell me, in as few words as can be, where was he heard of last?"

"The last remittances were sent to Moscow. A few weeks ago he was certainly there—probably is so still."

"Moscow!" L'Estrange repeated the word in a dismayed tone, looking down as he did so at the child whose hand he held.

Mr. Robinson guessed his thought, and broke in volubly: "You surely don't think of going there yourself, and with that child too! Why, it would be preposterous, and not the smallest necessity. Give us time and we can gain further information. If necessary, I could go there myself, though of course it would be an expensive business. In any case, leave your little girl. My wife would be delighted to look for a nice school—conducted, you know, on Christian principles—where every care would be taken, both in the way of physical and mental training."

Mr. Robinson would have his say out. He affected to consider that duty required him to give salutary advice in season and out of season; and as duty, in his sense of the term, was always closely connected with business, he had already in his own mind fixed upon a temporary residence for the child. A lady who owed him a long outstanding bill was anxious to take in pupils. This new client was evidently a liberal payer; through the profits made out of the child a part, at least, of that just debt might be paid off.

But his client did not look at matters in the same light. He tried to stop his voluble utterances, for the little hand he held was trembling. Laura, hearing herself discussed, had taken a sudden interest in the proceedings. She looked up at her protector and saw that his brows were knit angrily. This alarmed her. She burst into tears. "Oh! please don't leave me with him," she sobbed; "take me with you or let me go back to mamma."

How his face changed as he heard the child's cry! It became suddenly soft as that of a woman. He stooped down to her and wiped away her tears, whispering all kinds of gentle assurances. Then he turned again to the lawyer with that ominous frown: "You see what you have done. Be so good, monsieur, as in the future to preserve business relations in our necessary intercourse, nor presume to advise me at all on matters that do not concern you."

Another man would have been struck dumb or else have retired offended, but the lawyer was of the tough sort. This was too valuable a client to be sacrificed to feelings. "No offence meant, I assure you, sir," he hastened to say—"only interest; but" (seeing the frown gather) "to return to business. I have a few more details that may be useful—the address of an agent in Moscow, the—"

"Write them out for me, and send them to the usual address in Paris by to-morrow morning's mail. At the present, monsieur, we have no more time for delay. It is necessary to dine before taking the train again to Southampton."

"You leave, then, this evening? Can I be of any further—"

"No, thank you, Mr. Robeenson." He bowed in his stately manner and turned away to the refreshment-rooms with Laura, leaving the lawyer on the platform, still grinning his contentment.

As they distanced him the child gave a sigh: "I'm so glad he's gone!"

"Why, then, did you not like him, ma mie?"

"No, mon père, not at all; he doesn't look good."

"I think the bébé is right," he said in a low tone; "mais que faut il faire?—Little wise one," he continued aloud, "we must take the people as we find them, some good and some bad, making our own use of them all. Is that too hard a philosophy for the little brain?"

Apparently it was, for the child made no answer.

In the mean time L'Estrange had seated her at one of the marble-topped tables, and before thinking about his own dinner was trying to find out what would best suit her appetite. The well-feed waiter was flying about to supply all her wants; dainty after dainty, which she scarcely touched, was put upon her plate. It was such a new scene to Laura that her appetite fled with the excitement.

Many looked at her curiously in the crowded room, for Laura was a peculiarly beautiful child. Her golden curls and her dark, lustrous eyes, with the transparent delicacy of complexion she had inherited from her mother, and the childish grace which is the gift of God to her age of helplessness, made her very attractive. She was rather embarrassed at the attention she excited, noticing which her protector stood up and folding his arms looked right and left so haughtily that the most compassionate and least curious of the many beholders felt as if their admiration of the fair child had been an indiscretion.

After dinner the wearied little one fell asleep in his arms, and only awoke to find herself in the train, which was far on its way to Southampton. She was getting accustomed to her new friend and to these sudden wakings; so this time, to his great relief, she did not cry out for her mamma, but clung to him still more closely. They stopped at Southampton. It was a lovely night, the sea still as glass and the dark blue sky alight with moonshine and studded with stars.

Laura and her protector stood together on the steamer's deck. "Will ma fillette go to bed?" he asked.

The child shook her head. "Oh! please let me stay out here," she pleaded. "I promise not to be a trouble, and the stars are so nice."

Without another word he wrapped her up in his own fur-lined overcoat and made a bed for her on one of the seats, himself watching beside her.

But this time Laura could not sleep, the position was too strange. "What is that noise?" she asked nervously as the plash of the water against the great paddle-wheels came to her ears.

"The water and the wheels," he answered. "The wheels are rolling along through the waves, taking us over the sea."

The child raised herself on her elbow and looked round: "Where are we going? There's only sky and clouds out there. But, oh!" clasping her hands in delight, "look at the moon on the water. I see it like that at home sometimes. Once, when I could not go to sleep, mamma took me to the window, and a little bit of the sea was all white as it is to-night. She said it was the moon, and now we're going to catch the moon in the water. Oh! why didn't mamma come?"

For this was the ever-recurring trouble of the child. Her love for her mother was stronger and more enduring than it generally is among those of her age. A mother gives; but very often years pass before she receives any return to her devotion. Laura's love was strong, because, in the first place, there was nothing to divide it: her young life had never held another affection. Then her love and childish sympathy had for some time been partially checked, and, it may be, had therefore grown stronger in their secret place. Only during the last weeks had her young affection had its free course in the light of her mother's comprehending love.

Her plaint made her companion wince, but he would not answer it. After a few moments he looked at her again and saw that tears were in her eyes. They were reflecting, in their moistness, the white shimmering moonlight; in its pure unearthly shining the little face seemed almost transfigured.

L'Estrange had been superstitious from his youth up. He was the very creature of those dreams and inspirations to which the glowing South gives birth. Perhaps they had weakened his strong intellect. At any rate they had kept it in the shadowy twilight, giving little chance for living truth to make its entrance into his soul.

The look on the child's face startled him. "Does she belong to this earth?" he asked himself.

"Laura," he whispered, "look away from the stars. Doubtless they are thy sisters and brothers, little one, but look for one moment from them to me, and say what thoughts are in the busy little brain at this moment?"

The child smiled: "I was thinking about the moon and about mamma, mon père. I was wondering if she is looking at the moon now, and if she got my letter, and if she misses me very much."

Her simple reflections did not satisfy her friend. I think at the moment he would scarcely have been surprised if the child had developed budding wings and floated away into the sympathetic moonshine; his superstition, it may be, specially as displayed by one whose sex might have been supposed to lift him above such weakness, will seem strange and improbable to the majority of readers. A man allow himself to think seriously of such follies? Yes—a man, and not the first nor the last, by a great many. The inhabitants of our island are not alone on the face of the earth. In the glow of the sunny South, where generations have lapped their souls in sunshine and indolently lived on the abundant gifts of lavish Nature, where life can be sustained by a little, and the struggle for existence is less painful and bitter, there has been time for dreaming; and perhaps this has enervated the moral sense and loosened the sinews of mind, till pleasure has become a god and the mind receptive of strange things.

In the early days of civilization, before these things had wrought fully on the character, pure reason, law and its cold abstractions, divine art and severe philosophy made the South their centre, for when we think of these first Athens and then Rome come before the mind. And at that age in the gray formless North the legend flourished, with many a wild superstition. But all that has changed. A light dawned upon the mighty tribes; their superstitions fell, and they girded themselves with strength, while evermore in the sunny lands dreams gained ground, and weakness followed in their train, till at last what is it that we see? In the city where Pericles ruled, where Socrates taught, where Plato reasoned, they dream and do not; in imperial Rome a shadow, an old mediæval fiction, has kept the people from freedom as they gloried in the past and dreamed about the future, and in the mean time we of the gray North are rapidly casting from us almost everything but what we can see, taste, hold and understand.

Be practical! is the watchword of the age, and sentiment is repudiated, and imagination cried down or relegated to extreme youth and the weakest of weak womanhood. Are there many, I wonder, who find the medium—whose strong souls are strong enough to allow that there is something which passes their ken—who think it no shame to be at certain moments swayed by sentiment, governed by a dream of ideal loveliness, and yet who work on in their daily calling unsickened and undismayed?

There are some such souls, and to no climate are they peculiar. L'Estrange might have been one of them. There was in his imaginative faculty, in his receptivity to beauty and sentiment, in his sympathetic tenderness, a something that marked him out as one born to a higher life than that of self-gratification. His success among women was chiefly owing to this. For it is the good, not the bad in a character, that draws and enchains the loving worship of womanhood.

Where a man reads weakness a woman's keen eye beholds what underlies that weakness, and if it be lovable she is ready to adore.

What L'Estrange wanted was this: A soul to understand the beauty and glory of truth—truth on the lips and truth in the life. To indulge his love of beauty he had wrapped himself in the rose-colored mists of dreams; to preserve himself and others from pain he had never hesitated to resort to falsehood. He might have been very different. Some of the misery of that "might have been" was in his soul that evening as he turned from the child and paced up and down the steamer's deck, for a dark hour had come and he could not bear to face his good genius. With arms folded and brows knit, his dark face looking forward into the moonlight, he thought until thinking was pain. But the influence of the child had begun to work. He would not, as he usually did, cast aside the painful thinking because of the pain that was in it; rather he looked it in the face, trying to touch its centre, and so, it might be, find a cure.

Oh, it was a hard task! For his was the misery of a wasted life, and a life that had brought desolation. True his innate refinement, the self-respect of a high intellect, had kept him tolerably free from what is gross and degrading, but that midnight retrospect was bitter notwithstanding. Pleasure sought and taken at the expense of truth; blighted lives, to which he had brought the warm beauty of love, leaving them when the mood had changed to find it where they could; good that he might have done and did not; wasted talents, used-up powers,—these came before his conscience in an accusing throng. And there was no help for it. He had one life only, and the best of that life had gone. L'Estrange, though he professed to believe in a futurity to the soul, was that saddest of all beings, a practical infidel. In the misery of self-communion his thoughts turned suddenly to the memory of his boyhood's faith, to the days when heaven had been a reality and the saints robed in white, the pure queen of the skies, the fair infant in her breast, had formed part of his hopes and dreams for the future. They had vanished like myths born of the early vapor. They had been too shadowy to bear the inroad of hot, lurid noon. Tried, they had been found wanting, and what had he left in the hour when his heart and spirit craved for something unearthly as their rest? Nothing. All he found within, as he ventured shudderingly to lift the curtain that hides the unseen from the seen, was a "certain fearful looking-for of judgment and fiery indignation," which no man, if ten times over an infidel, can escape when the hour comes.

His dark face darkened. If all were hopeless, then why should he pause? Why had the good that was in him made him hesitate at last? He would crush it down and gain his own ends, even through suffering itself. He stopped in his rapid walk and looked over the vessel's side. It was a real blackness, for clouds had covered the face of the moon, and had gathered here and there in heavy masses on the horizon.

A moaning wind swept across the sea, ruffling the waters till the vessel rocked to and fro. Then the dark face relaxed. The desolation of the watery waste had been responsive to his mood. "So be it, then," he muttered, looking out into the darkness. He was for the moment like the grand creation of Milton, that ideal Lucifer, when his last struggles after goodness have culminated in the fatal cry, "Evil, be thou my good!"

But L'Estrange was not yet absolutely God-forsaken. As he spoke something touched his knees. He looked down impatiently. But suddenly his impatience changed. He drew himself away with a murmured exclamation and a strange contraction of heart. Was it a miracle? For this was what he saw. The kneeling figure of a child, the hands clasped and the eyes lifted up to his. On the face was a bright shining that made the golden hair like a saint's halo, and brought out the picture in every small detail—the tremulous lips, the fair soft brow, the lustrous eyes under their silken fringe. The face was Laura's. In her companion's mood it seemed transfigured, like that of an angel lamenting over his sins and follies. Involuntarily he bowed his head. The strong man trembled like a child at the evidence of all he had imagined, and yet the phenomenon was very commonplace. This was what had caused it. The faithful child had read his trouble, and as she had already allowed him to find his way to her heart, it made that little heart sad. In her mother's sadness Laura had sometimes proved a comforter, and the thought came into her head that she might comfort her friend. So when he had stopped by the vessel's side the little child had risen noiselessly, and kneeling by his side had clasped her small hands about his knees. Then came the partial darkness, which with her friend's seeming indifference frightened her so much that she loosened her hold and looked up pleadingly. A sailor who was walking about with a lantern looking after the rigging had been watching this little episode. In his curiosity he caused its light to shine full upon the child's face, so that when L'Estrange turned round he saw it irradiated, while, as the sailor stood behind him, the source of the sudden radiance was hidden.

The illumination did not last longer than a few minutes. The man turned away to his business, his heart softer for this glimpse of innocent beauty; Laura and her protector were left in the darkness. But until the day of his death L'Estrange believed that the light which irradiated the child came down from heaven.

He was recalled to his belief in Laura's mortality by a little wailing cry. She put out her hands to feel for her friend, as the darkness and silence alarmed her. Then he stooped down reverently and lifted her up in his arms. The sorrowing angel was his own little Laura, fair and pure in her habitation of flesh and blood, for, clasping her small arms about his neck, she burst into a passion of tears. The darkness, the sense of loneliness, the over-excitement had wrought upon the child's nerves, and L'Estrange forgot all his wild thoughts in the effort to comfort her. Instead of seeking evil as a good, he became tender as the tenderest of fathers while he strove to make her forget her fears.

He succeeded at last. She lay on his knees, quiet, only for a sob or two at intervals, her golden head against his breast, one hand round his neck, the other lost in his large grasp—she was afraid of losing her friend again—and he soothed her by murmuring low, crooning melodies that he thought he had forgotten long ago. Then when the morning came and they were near their destination, he took her to the stewardess for all needful combing and dressing. But from that time L'Estrange treated the mortal child with a strange reverence.

Later in that day, when they were wandering through the quaint streets and corners of old Rouen, and the child had almost forgotten her sorrows in wonder and delight, he brought his trouble to his young oracle. "Have you ever been naughty, Laura?" he asked, looking down upon her with a smile that was almost one of incredulity.

The child smiled: "Oh yes, mon père—a number of times."

"And what did you do, ma fillette?—when you were naughty, I mean."

"I told mamma about it," said the child simply, "and she always said something to make me good again."

"But, Laura, when people are grown up and have no mamma to tell, what must they do then?"

For a moment the child looked troubled and thoughtful; then, as a light seemed to dawn upon her, she smiled. "I should think they might tell God," she said.

The wayworn man bowed his head, and that evening in the solitude he told God. For the child was making him believe in the actual goodness (for only the Good could have made anything so good and pure) and in the possibility of goodness for himself, as he was still able to love and reverence it.

Slowly the light dawned upon his benighted soul, and only after many struggles with the darkness that was in him: this telling God was the beginning.

---

[CHAPTER III.]

A TALE ABOUT THE STARS.

Could we but deem the stars had hearts, and loved,
They would seem happier, holier, to us even than now;
And ah! why not?—they are so beautiful.

The strange travellers continued their wanderings. News reached them at Paris about the object of their journey, but news so indefinite that L'Estrange thought it well to proceed with caution. In any of the places through which they passed it was possible Maurice Grey might be found. He did not seem to be in Moscow, although for the time all communications were to be addressed to an agent there.

He told as much as was possible of his plans and ideas to the child, and her impatience was stayed while they wandered through the English quarter of Paris and appeared in the galleries and public places—her friend, who knew the city well, making every inquiry about the stranger's residence there.

And in the mean time L'Estrange enjoyed his peculiar position and the kind of mystery that the beautiful, fair-haired child excited among the few of his friends whom he could not avoid meeting. Mystery had always been one of his chief tools. He delighted in wrapping himself up in this misty obscurity. It challenged curiosity and excited interest. He was given to appearing and disappearing without rendering to any one an account of his motives, and the rumors current about him were many. Even his nationality was a matter of doubt to some of his nearest associates. The general idea was that he travelled here and there as a secret emissary from one of the societies which work under ground in Europe, or else that he was an agent from some one of its governments. L'Estrange enjoyed this curiosity. It suited his purposes, and he never, or very seldom, lifted the veil. To say the truth, the aims of his journey were as varied and complex as himself. This was not the first that had been undertaken with a good object, though never before, perhaps, had self been so entirely set aside.

Maurice Grey was his enemy. He had taken his treasure. He had possessed himself—for the fact was slowly dawning on his mind through the child's innocent prattle—not only of the person, but of the heart and affections, of the one woman in all the world for whom he had ever cherished a perfect sympathy. For although L'Estrange had felt many times a certain power in womanhood, although his senses had been enchained and his self-love flattered, yet it was true that this time only had his whole being been surrendered, this once only had love become one with his life—entered into him as a thing from which nothing but death could free him.

Sometimes, as with his child beside him he wandered through the gay city, it came over him like a flood what it would be to come upon this man, to look into his face, to behold in it the workings of that soul which for an apparent weakness could have cast off Margaret; and then to do what? To take his revenge by proclaiming in words that could not be denied the purity of his forsaken wife—by giving up into his keeping the child whose young love he had despised. And if, after all, he should be unworthy of this happiness? L'Estrange was walking through the Champs Elysées with Laura late in the afternoon of a sultry day when this thought dawned upon him.

He stopped, and sitting down on one of the chairs drew the child to his knees. There was a fierce determination in his face that half frightened her.

"Mon père!" she said gently.

He turned his face from her and hid it with his hand. L'Estrange was vowing a great vow with himself.

"By Heaven!" he muttered, but so low that she could not hear, "I will watch him, and if I read this weakness in his face he shall never know."

Then he looked forward down the avenue.

A tall, well-shaped and well-dressed man, English evidently, from his carriage and general appearance, was sauntering leisurely in the direction of the Place de la Concorde with a young French girl, who seemed to be chattering volubly and making good use of her eyes, hanging on his arm. There was a carelessness in his manner to her that seemed to mark her out as not precisely of his own position in the social scale, and this, as well as a certain resemblance, tempted L'Estrange to follow the pair.

"Stay where you are till I come back," he whispered to the child. In the gathering twilight he followed till he was close on the heels of the young Englishman.

His companion was at that moment looking up coaxingly into his face.

"But how close you Englishmen are!" she was saying in a wheedling tone. "I am dying of curiosity, mon ami. Tell me, then, about this immaculate, this runaway husband, this milord Anglais, who finds nothing better to do than pine away, perhaps die, for the wife he has left behind. Mon Dieu! what a nation! You are great, vous autres, in love as in war; but why does he hide? One might find a method of consoling him; pas vrai?"

L'Estrange, who had crept under the shadow of the trees, and was now walking parallel with the pair, could see by the light of one of the scattered lamps that the young man's brow darkened.

"He doesn't want such consolation as yours, Laurette. But why do you persist in questioning me? I have told you a dozen times that Maurice Grey will never be game for us—for us," he continued with a strange emphasis. "If I had taken his advice—"

She smiled—a smile that looked rather dangerous: "Your associates would not have been the same. Continue then, mon ami. Are we not friends?"

"Of course, of course," he said hastily. "Ma chère, what a little goose you are, taking up a fellow in this serious kind of style! You see, it's all your own fault—you put me out of temper by talking about that prig. I believe he has buried himself in the wilds. I saw him last in St. Petersburg; then he said he was going to the mountains. But, good gracious! how should this interest you? I shall be jealous presently, Laurette, and think you in love with my saintly cousin."

Laurette laughed—a clear, ringing laugh, but to the watchful listener it sounded hollow.

"There is sadness under that mirth," he said to himself; "she has tried her wiles on the Englishman, and tried them in vain; so much the better for him."

After a few more light words, Laurette and her companion turned into a brilliantly-lit and decorated café. L'Estrange walked slowly back to the seat where he had left Laura. His face was very pale and his fine mouth was quivering. A fear had been partially laid to rest, but it might be that even in the fear a hope, the shadow of self-love, had rested.

As he drew near to the seat where Laura had been left his steps quickened, for the murmur of her sweet voice reached his ears. Some one was speaking to her, and his unquiet conscience filled him with fear. Perhaps they were trying to steal away his treasure.

His fears were realized. A man was leaning over the child's chair and speaking to her earnestly. Laura looked troubled and irresolute, but all her hesitation fled when she saw her friend. She rose suddenly, eluding with the agility of a child the grasping hand that sought to detain her, and took refuge in his arms.

The darkness and his knowledge of Paris favored L'Estrange. He caught her up and disappeared among the shadows with the rapidity of lightning, leaving the man, who was Golding's agent and had been triumphing in his discovery, altogether baffled. He had certainly shown very little judgment, for he had not even mentioned that he had come from her mother. The first thing he had done was to bewilder the child by cross-examination, to test the truth of his discovery. Then he had told her, in the directest way possible, that the man with whom she was travelling was a bad man, and that it was her duty to leave him at once. This, Laura, who had given her faith to her companion, entirely disbelieved. She rather feared the stranger who had come in the darkness to steal her away from her friend.

But all these contradictions puzzled her brain; she felt alarmed, and in her bewilderment the sight of her friend was reassuring. It was rest for the weary child to be gathered up into his strong arms, and his sudden flight through the cool night-air was rather satisfactory than the contrary. The dry manner of this man of business was so different from the tender reverence, the deep emotion, of the man she called her father!—what wonder then that the little girl, woman-like in her instincts, trusted the one and was glad to flee from the other?

With long strides L'Estrange passed on through the darkness, for, though the child was in his arms, he did not grow weary. His love prevented him from feeling her a burden.

"I shall only give thee up to one, my treasure," he whispered; and Laura was quite content.

If she was becoming unspeakably dear to her friend, he was also becoming dear to her. In his tenderness and devotion he seemed to clasp her round like a providence. The little one began to think that he must be her father, whatever he might say to the contrary.

And while she was thinking they went on together more slowly, as the darkness deepened and the danger of pursuit became less, into the very heart of Paris, among its network of streets and lanes. L'Estrange knew every inch of the way as well by night as by day. This was not his first midnight flight.

They stopped at last before a small house in a little side street. L'Estrange rang the bell, and there came a respectable middle-aged woman to the door. She smiled her recognition, then put out her hand and drew them in.

"C'est toi, donc, mon ami? et, mon Dieu! un bébé! Comment! Mais entre toujours."

She took the candle from the concierge, and preceded them up stairs to a little room furnished partly as a bedroom and partly as a sitting-room. Then, when they had seated themselves and she had removed Laura's hat and jacket, she began bustling about, helpful as a Frenchwoman generally is, to prepare everything for their further stay. L'Estrange stopped her:

"A thousand thanks, ma bonne Marie: we go on to-night."

She shrugged her shoulders, a significant gesture. Marie was a very old friend, and L'Estrange had been her benefactor. She knew his weakness. "As you will, mon ami," she answered, "but this bébé wants rest," she continued in English, approaching the child and stroking her fair hair caressingly.

The bébé had been sitting in a large arm-chair, looking curiously about her. She was perfectly happy and comfortable, for her friend was with her, and Marie's benevolent face and pleasant cheerful voice had inspired her with confidence.

"I'm not at all tired, thank you," she said; "mon père carried me a long way."

The woman turned round abruptly: "This is not yours, Adolphe?"

"Pour le moment," he answered; and she did not dare to question him further, for this man, when he liked, could be repellant even to his friends. But the shadow passed. He chatted gayly with Marie upon a variety of subjects, sent a messenger to their hotel to settle their account and bring their portmanteau, and partook with Laura of coffee of Marie's making, and of such few substantials as she could get together in a hurry.

The Frenchwoman was commissioned, sorely to Laura's perplexity, to take her to the station from which they were to start for Vienna according to L'Estrange's plans. But she had full confidence in her friend, and made no demur. He went in a separate conveyance, meeting them in the waiting-room. Before he joined them he looked round searchingly. The train was on the point of starting, and the first-class passengers, penned up in expectation of the signal to take their places, were not many. L'Estrange seemed to breathe more freely as at last he sat down by Laura, and there was a light of triumph and hope in his face, which the keen-eyed Frenchwoman remarked. She kept her own counsels, but her eyes were moist as she bade them heartily farewell. Laura and her companion sped onward for another weary journey. Travelling was life to him, it had become his second nature, and the child was so tenderly cared for, so constantly amused, that she scarcely knew how long the time was.

A night and a day and another night, with only a few hours' interval—for she cared no more for rest than her companion—and at last Vienna was reached. There L'Estrange determined to rest for a few days, because he feared that in spite of all his efforts the child's health might suffer from the constant movement; besides, he had given orders that letters should be addressed to a hotel in that city. Some of these might possibly contain information which would greatly affect their further movements.

L'Estrange was beginning to be cautious, for he saw he was watched—that an effort was being made to follow him. This puzzled him considerably. He could not imagine how the search had arisen. He had thought that his letter would have explained everything to Margaret, and that with the hope before her of the child being instrumental in bringing back the father she would have acquiesced in his certainly rather wild proceedings. She knew him well enough to be aware that, heavy as his sins had been, from this sin he was free. He had never hurt a weak thing. She had known and seen how in the past his tenderness had carried him even too far sometimes, and she could not believe him so utterly changed. He had imagined that when she knew of his sudden repentance she would have been ready even to trust her treasure in his hands, in full faith that he meant well by her and by her child. And so far L'Estrange was right. If Margaret had received that strange letter, penned, as it were, with his heart's life blood, she would have been woman enough to have read its reality—she would have waited patiently, trustfully for the issue. The misfortune was that she did not receive it.

He had written to her again from Paris, but this time he had been still more bewildered about the address. Laura could not assist. Like her friend, she could have found her way to her mother's cottage even in the night, but she had never thought much about the name of the place where she lived, and its spelling was quite beyond her. Fate was inexorable. His second letter went astray like the first, and Laura, who was hoping for an answer to her big letters, and L'Estrange, who was looking passionately for one line to tell him that he was forgiven and understood, were both destined to disappointment. There was a letter, however, an English letter, which partially explained the mystery of the attempt to recapture Laura on the Champs Elysées.

Mr. Robinson, that most respectable of solicitors, had been highly satisfied with the contents of the mysterious little packet which his foreign client had put into his hands at the Great Northern Station. It confirmed him in his opinion that the Frenchman was likely to be valuable. He determined at once to make himself useful. And no one understood better how to make himself useful without needlessly disturbing his conscience or compromising his character for rectitude. He had scented a mystery in the fair-haired English child, and Margaret's story, related to him on the day following his meeting with L'Estrange, made him imagine that he saw through it. Hence his lukewarmness in the pursuit entrusted to him. But the young Arthur's vigorous championship alarmed him for his client. He saw that everything would be done for the recovery of the child, whom it was his firm conviction the Frenchman had stolen, from some motive utterly unguessed at by himself.

After Arthur had left him the lawyer cogitated for a while. It would not do for him, in his capacity of family lawyer to Mrs. Grey, and more especially still in his character for even ultra-scrupulousness, to appear to connive at such a deed as this of his client's, but he might, by warning him of the search which was being set on foot, buy his gratitude, and, what was better still, bind him to himself.

After much planning he resolved to give the little episode of Arthur's visit and the search that was being inaugurated for the lost child as a piece of gossip which might be interesting to his client on account of his supposed connection with Laura's father. The letter was a grand piece of lawyer's art, and Mr. Robinson chuckled over it with delight.

L'Estrange saw through the artifice, and as he read the letter his dark face looked grim. Opposition was like food to his determined soul. He set his teeth together, vowing inwardly that he would carry out his project in spite of them all.

They were detained at Vienna. It was as he had feared: the constant movement, the over-excitement, the strange, new life, had been too much for Laura. She had a slight feverish attack, but her friend, who knew a little of everything, had studied medicine in his early years, not with a view of entering the profession, for as a profession he despised it, but simply to increase and intensify his power over his fellows. He knew how to treat the child, and was not even alarmed at her sudden weakness. Rest and quietness were the best remedies, and these he gave her, with some simple medicine whose efficacy he had often tested. The child was inclined to be sorely fretted at the delay. On the sixth day of their stay in Vienna (she was lying on a sofa in a splendidly-furnished room that looked out upon the broad, grand Danube flowing majestically through the city, and her friend for the first time had left her a few minutes alone) this impatience grew almost too great to be borne. She buried her head in the sofa-pillows, and the wailing plaint for mamma came now and then, with heavy sobs, from her child's heart. This continued for some little time. When she looked up again, trying with the vain endeavor of a troubled child to stay her weeping and think no more of her sorrow, L'Estrange was standing at the head of the sofa looking down on her. His arms were folded, he stood perfectly still, and there was on his face a look of such fixed and hopeless sadness that, child as she was, she recognized it suddenly. Her own tears ceased to flow, and for a moment she looked back into his face as if, with the angelic intuition of her age (I wonder if angels do whisper these secrets to the little ones?), she would find out and understand what was the great woe that oppressed him. Then, as if she had come to a partial understanding, she raised herself on the sofa and tried with all her small strength to draw down his dark, weary-looking face to the level of hers. He yielded to the sweet compulsion; kneeling beside her, he suffered her to lay his head on the sofa-pillow and draw his cheek to hers.

It was a very simple mode of consolation. She only whispered again and again the name he had taught her to call him, and pressed her childish lips to his forehead, and stroked back his hair with her small, hot fingers; but it was very effectual. The dark look left her friend's face. It was as though "a spirit from the face of the Lord" had visited him.

He lifted the little one into his arms and held her there for a few minutes, then, with a softness of tone and manner which none but the pure child could awake in him, he told her a part, at least, of his trouble. It was in the form of a parable. "Laura," he murmured—the darkness was gathering, and two or three stars had begun to shine out in the sky—"look up: what do you see?"

"The sky, mon père; and now, ah, see! the stars are beginning to shine—one, two, three. I can see them in the water too."

"Do you know what it is that makes them so bright, fillette?"

The child shook her head.

"No, ma mie, nor do I very well, except that it is a transparent, beautiful something we in this world call light: what this something is I know not; I can only tell that the light is very good. Now, shall I tell you a story that came into my head a little minute ago, about the stars out there and the light?"

"Yes, yes!" Laura clasped her hands with delight.

In the joy of one of her friend's own stories even the trouble about her mother was for the time forgotten.

He stopped as if to think. How often in the long after-time, when L'Estrange was to the child only the memory of a strange dream, when the knowledge that womanhood brought threw its light on this part of her life, did Laura remember his look that evening. Even then, in her childhood's ignorance, it touched and charmed her, till all unconsciously she clung to him more closely and trusted him more fully. He was looking up. The fitful twilight was playing on his broad, massive brow, and on that brow was rest. But in the deep-set, passionate eyes, in the quivering lips, the struggle could still be read. A longing seemed to look out from his face—a longing that held and enchained him till it could be satisfied.

They sat by the window, L'Estrange in a deep arm-chair, the child in her favorite position on his knee. And after a pause, during which they were both looking up, watching how one star after another lit its small lamp in the sky, he began in a dreamy tone, rather as if he were speaking to himself than to any listener: "They are all alive; yes, must it not be so? for every body has a soul. Those bright ones that walk in light amid the ceaseless music of the spheres are instinct with the mystery that we of this world call Life. And why should this not be? for life consists in the power of movement and volition. Surely they move. Science proves that they revolve evermore in their grand orbits, and surely they will to shine, for it is only when we need their light that the light appears. Yes, it is true—these bright things live. They suffer pain, they know delight as well as we."

Then, as the clasping arms of the little one recalled him to the remembrance of her presence, he smiled: "I promised a story, and ma fillette will scarcely understand such philosophy yet. It was a prelude to the tale. Listen, then, ma mie. Those bright things up there are alive. Each one has its spirit, a being more beautiful than we of earth can conceive. I must describe them, must I? Hélas, bébé! I fear it is beyond me. I must tell, then, of things that have not for me the beauty they once had—the golden dawn, and the silver twilight, and the freshness of early youth, and the mildness of sunset skies. Put all these together and thou hast a part only of the fairness of these beings, who were placed by God thousands of ages since in the bright stars up there. The spirits were given a work to do. They were to shine when the sun, who was made to be king over them all, had gone away to rest behind the sky. The stars were glad when they were told to shine, for they were all good, and this shining, which is for the good of our dark world down here, made them happy. Little children who look, as ma fillette is doing now, at those stars up there, feel glad when they see the light, but they do not know that the stars are glad too—that when they shine out in the night they are singing aloud for joy."

Laura looked delighted, and put out her hand to stop her friend for a moment: "They must be singing now. Oh listen! Perhaps we shall hear them."

But he shook his head and smiled: "No, petite: long ago, when there were very few people, this music was heard. Now there are too many noises; but if any one could hear it would be such as thee."

Then he stopped again, and there came a sad look into his eyes. "There are more stars up there than we can see," he went on, "for some are not allowed to shine. They lie in the night like dead things, but still they are alive, for sadness is in their hearts, and this sadness is greatest now when all the others are shining and singing out for joy."

Laura's eyes looked sorrowful. "Why do they sing so loud?" she asked; "they might be sorry for the poor little dead stars."

"Some of them are so far away that it would take them thousands of years even to know that the light of the poor dead stars had gone out, and so they cannot tell that their singing makes the dead stars sad; but those who are near are sad, and sometimes even try to help. My story is about one of the dead stars. He was meant to be a beautiful star, for his spirit was great and strong, with mighty wings and eyes piercing like those of an eagle. Every day he knelt before God's white throne, which is quite in the middle of those stars, and every night he shone out into the darkness with a fair and glorious shining, and sang more loudly and sweetly than any. But there came a time when the star-spirit grew tired of this happy life: his light shone less brightly than it had done, his voice was sometimes missed from the night-chorus. A change had come over him, and this was what had caused it. There had come to him at a time when he was resting idly on his wings in that dark azure above—it was too early for his light to be shining, and he had left the crystal throne—a being until then unknown to him. It was dark and mournful, with black plumes covering it from head to foot, and nothing of light about it but a last remnant that shone from its eyes. This was the spirit of darkness, whose dominions had been invaded and conquered by light. The spirit of the night let her black plumes fall, and the star saw she was beautiful—with a beauty that did not belong to the light, it is true, but that still possessed a wild charm of its own. It was fascinating to him, perhaps, because unlike anything he had ever seen before."

L'Estrange was getting past Laura, but he had almost forgotten the child, and she listened, not understanding much, but entranced as she might have been by some bewitching melody. Her friend paused for a moment; when he continued his voice was low, and its tones were more sad than they had been:

"The star-spirit and the spirit of the night met many times, and at each time of their meeting the light of the star waned fainter. At last, when the fascination with which she surrounded him had reached its full force, he forgot, or omitted purposely, to light his lamp and shine with his companion-spheres in the midnight heavens. Terrible things happened that night, for our star, which was very bright and large, had been well known upon the earth.

"Sailors had given it a name of their own, and often, when the sea was all round them and they could not tell where they were, looking up they had seen this star, and its light had guided them. On this night the sea was running high, and as usual the sailors had looked up for their star, that they might know no rocks were near. Think of their despair when they found it not! Ah! there was one great ship full of women and little children. The sailors had lost their way. They looked up for the star which had guided them so often: hélas! its bright shining was swallowed up by the darkness. They took a wrong path in the waters, the big ship struck upon a rock, the women and little children were drowned. The star-spirit did not know this. He felt no sadness that night, for the spirit of darkness was with him; yet the next night, when he would have shone out in his place, he found that the power of shining had gone from him—that his star was a dead star in the sky. Ah, mon Dieu! to tell of his sadness! He would have no more to say to the night-spirit who had tempted him; he shut himself up in his dark star; he waited, waited, night after night, thinking that the power and gladness of shining might come back. It did not come; even, it seemed, his star grew blacker as the ages passed, as if the dark spirit were wrapping it round in her heavy plumes. So sad a change! No little children looking up to him, no weary traveller blessing him for his help, no pleasant music sounding from him in the evening; nothing but darkness, sorrow, misery. The stars went singing about him, and he lay there still, all his gladness gone out of him—a dead star in heaven. At last there came a night when the singing was louder and more joyous, and the spirit of the dead star, who had been hiding his head for shame at his darkness, looked out to see what it meant. A baby-star had been born into the sky, and all its sisters and brothers were rejoicing over its birth. The spirit of the dead star saw that its light was very near where his had been. It was feeble, but clear as dawn. The sight of the tiny light recalled to him the time when he too had shone out, a new joy and gladness, into the sky, and folding his wings he wept, as only spirits can weep, for a time that we on earth should call years. Perhaps his weeping made him better. It is impossible to say; but suddenly in the midst of it he heard a sound. It was clear, like the dripping of water from a fountain; it was silvery, like the ringing of bells in the distance. The spirit lifted his head from his folded wings, and there—even in his habitation, in the dead star whose light he had been—stood a beautiful child-spirit, her head drooping, her snowy wings folded over her breast, a small lamp in her hand. When the spirit of the dead star looked at the child she trembled, as if with fear at her own boldness; so the spirit could not be angry, although he knew this was the baby-light that had caused his weeping through those long dark years. Indeed, as he looked up he began to feel love stirring in his heart; the child-spirit was so beautiful and good, and her voice was like music. For she spoke when she saw she needed not to fear. 'I have come to stay with thee,' she whispered, 'for thy darkness and silence made my heart ache, and I have been praying to come for all these years. At last I have been allowed. Must I go away into the darkness?'

"He was moved with the child-spirit's humility and love. He rose, and towering above her in his grandeur gathered her up into his breast. 'Thou shalt stay with me for ever,' he answered. It was the night-time. Even as the spirit spoke he became conscious of a certain gladness unknown to him for the ages of darkness that had passed, and the everlasting song and music grew suddenly louder and more joyous. The child had broken the spell of night's spirit, she had brought him of her light, and he was born again, feebly but truly, into the sky."

L'Estrange stopped and looked down with a half smile, then his brow contracted. Laura had been listening breathlessly. She could not understand his tale, but its strangeness charmed her. "Is that all?" she said with a long-drawn sigh.

"Not quite all," he answered; then, as if to himself, "the end has yet to come. They were very happy together," he continued after a few moments' silence, "the spirit of the star that had been dead, but was gradually being restored to life and gladness, and the child whose presence had wrought the wonder. Once more the spirit of the star bowed down by day before the great white throne, and the child went with him; her angelic purity made her welcome there. But one day when they returned there was sadness at the heart of the spirit of the star, for he had learned that the child who had restored him was not to be left with him for ever; she had another work to do. He looked at her. She could not be sad, for, unlike the other spirit, she had never sinned, and perhaps this made his sadness the greater. Then it had been sweet to shine and sing with his companion-spheres, and he hardly knew how he would be able to shine and sing alone. But he would not keep her back. Another one, sad, it might be, in his darkness, wanted her, and with the life and gladness his child-messenger had brought him love. So"—L'Estrange's voice sank—"he let her go, his beautiful, his God-given—he let her go."

He said no more. For a few moments there was deep silence between them. Something of his sadness and a knowledge of its cause had penetrated the child's soul through his parable. Her eyes filled with tears. She looked up at the starry multitude, shining out now in their full glory above her, with a new love. At last she spoke, laying her head against his breast: "But, mon père, the spirit of the star shone out still?"

He answered sadly: "Mon enfant, I know no more."

---

[CHAPTER IV.]

MOSCOW.

Mind's command o'er mind,
Spirit o'er spirit's, is the close effect
And natural action of an inward gift
Given of God.

Laura was much better the next day; indeed, the improvement was so great that her protector considered himself justified in pressing on for another stage of their journey. She was not so joyful as might have been expected. Perhaps his parable had calmed the little girl, making her impatience less by the hint of possible separation. Laura cared very much for her friend. She had become so united to him in thought and affection that she could scarcely imagine a future without him. We must remember that with little ones, especially when their natures are impressionable like Laura's, it does not take long for these attachments to be formed. With them habit passes quickly into a necessity. It was thus with Laura. She had become so accustomed to her friend's protecting tenderness that she could not bear to think of being separated from him. But Laura was not untrue to her mother. She thought as much as ever of her return to the little cottage by the sea. Only in thus far her dreams and ideas were changed. She could not and would not think of that return, of those pleasant days when mamma would be happy and papa at home, without including in them all this kind guide who was planning their happiness.

Her friend's look at the end of his tale had been so sad that she dared not ask for an explanation, and indeed her own little heart had been almost too full of sympathy with the bereaved star-spirit for her to think of much else at the moment. But to this one thing in her after reflections Laura made up her mind: her friend should go back with her to her mother, he should not look so sad, they would make him as happy as they would be. In fact, the child mapped out the future, as many of her elders will do, in those long days of travelling that succeeded their stay in Vienna.

They were very long and very wearisome, unbroken by incident of any kind; the very passengers became few, and the towns scattered as they advanced. It was not difficult to get a carriage to themselves, but certainly some comforts were necessary to make the long journeys tolerable. Laura, however, had no relapse. At every possible resting-place her companion watched narrowly to see if fatigue were taking any effect upon her. He was reassured. The child slept, ate and made herself happy.

L'Estrange was not so fortunate. Anxiety, suspense, and a certain vague uneasiness of conscience concerning even this late delight—which seemed to have aroused the latent good that was in him—kept him wakeful, and by the time Moscow was nearly reached the faithful child noticed that he looked pale and ill. She told him so with a sweet womanly concern that sat strangely on her child's face. But he only smiled, and said rest would set him right. Evening had fallen on the earth when at last Moscow the long-desired dawned on the sight of the wanderers. It was from the midst of a desolate country, bleak and half cultivated, that it rose suddenly, almost, as it were, by magic, its glittering cupolas and myriad towers visible long before the city itself came in sight.

L'Estrange, who knew all about this strange appearance (he had travelled through Russia before), pointed it out to the child. Very little could have surprised Laura much at this time; she had been living ever since she had left quiet Middlethorpe in an atmosphere of wonders; but amongst them all this arrival had been looked to as something pre-eminent. For Moscow was the city where this wonderful father was hiding. Laura was fully convinced that he would be the first person they should meet in the streets, and it did not seem unnatural that Moscow itself should be strange as any of the wonders in the Arabian tales. Perhaps, Laura reasoned with herself, it was because it was so beautiful and wonderful that her father had remained there. She had heard of people who had gone to heaven, not wishing to come back, and vaguely she blent the two ideas together till the feeling in her mind was something like this: Moscow was like heaven, so beautiful and delightful that those who went there never wanted to go home again.

The first sight of the ancient city was enough to justify her dreams. It was to the child like a glimpse of Fairyland. Once at the window, watching the gradual approach, out of the pale evening light, of those dim, ghostly giants that lifted their stately heads from the surrounding dimness, nothing would persuade her to leave it.

They drew nearer and the darkness gathered, so that Laura, though straining her eyes into it, could see nothing. When they arrived finally, and drove into the enchanted city, its wonders were hidden by the dim, gray night of the North. From the magic and dazzle that through the twilight had shone many-colored on the background of sky, they passed to a hotel exceedingly like the others at which they had put up.

It was a death to the child's first illusion. Her companion watched her curiously. He noted how the dazzle of expectation and wonder died out of her eyes, and how the real, growing weariness began to assert itself after the excitement which had veiled it for the time. They were together in the handsome, stately saloon—alone, for travellers at this season were few; the short, bright summer of the North was nearly over, the evenings were becoming gray, the nights black and dreary. There was a large square black monument in the room they occupied that emitted a close heat, and the process of shutting out carefully all external air had begun.

L'Estrange seated himself on one of the massive couches and drew the child to his side. "What is it, petite?" he asked as he noted her disappointment.

"Where is papa?" she questioned sadly.

"We shall look for him to-morrow."

He threw off his hat as he spoke, and the child saw that his face was very weary-looking and sad. Fatigue, anxiety and want of sleep were gradually taking their effect on his strong frame, while the close air of the room in his weak condition almost overpowered him.

"Mon père," she said, clinging to him, "how pale you look!"

He tried to rouse himself: "I am tired, fillette."

But suddenly the pallor spread till his very lips were blanched. He sank back on the couch with a faint moan, yet even then the soul of the man was strong enough to conquer partially the physical weakness. He thought of her through the pain that was striving to master him; he saw her face of despair, though a film seemed to be gathering over his sight, and with a strenuous effort he half raised himself, his pale lips parted in a reassuring smile: "I shall be better soon—water."

She brought it to him in a moment, all the woman in her risen to meet the emergency, and then she placed a pillow under his head and chafed his cold hands. By the time the waiter arrived to lay the cloth for dinner L'Estrange was better. It was a kind of spasm that had robbed him of his power for the moment. He had experienced something of this kind before, and it alarmed him; understanding a little about the science of medicine himself, he knew the danger of mysterious pains, and he felt that it would not answer for him to be laid up until his work was done.

When dinner was over they went out into the night together, and the cool air revived him; but afterward, when real solitude had fallen over everything, and the child had been committed to the care of one of the women of the house, the fear of what might come quite mastered him.

L'Estrange was no coward, to shrink from physical pain. Whenever it was possible he would escape suffering (though perhaps his real horror was rather of mental than physical pain); when it was impossible he met it like a man. But this time he felt his frame was weakening. The mental rest he had craved so passionately would never come till his work was over, and in the mean time another such paroxysm as the one through which he had passed might lay him prostrate. In this case what would become of Laura? How would he prove to his wronged Margaret that his intentions with regard to her were good and true?

Even as he thought he felt the pain approaching with stealthy creeping, like a thief come to rob him of his power. He rose with difficulty from the couch on which he had been lying, and opening one of his packages drew from it the small medicine-chest he always carried. His hand shook as he turned the key, for he knew what he was doing, and had it not been for his strange position would have dreaded it far more than the physical pain, which he felt it could not cure, only put away for a time. For L'Estrange had once been in the habit of putting into him this enemy to steal away his soul. He had felt then that his intellect was being weakened—that his bodily and mental powers were being destroyed; he had fought with the weakness and had conquered it.

But as he took out the little well-known phial, with its dark liquid, once so precious, he felt that another victory would be still more dearly bought, and he trembled. Necessity, however, is strong and knows no law. While he hesitated the pain gained ground.

Hastily he poured out a strong dose, drank it, and slept a heavy, uneasy sleep, broken by dreams and distorted images of reality, while through them all the keen finger of pain found its way, touching his heart and chilling its warm life. But even this semblance of sleep was better than the dismal wakefulness.

He got up better, and found that the pain whose ravages he had been dreading had left him. He sighed as he rose. An inner consciousness told him it was only for a time. Through that day the effects of the potion of the night followed him. Even Laura, child as she was, remarked the change. There was about her friend a certain languor, an absence of vital energy. He could scarcely rouse himself, even to take the steps needful for the accomplishment of the object that had brought them so far.

Toward the next evening, however, the effects of his dose began to lessen. He regained something of his physical energy, and in the gathering twilight started, without the child, for the address of the agent who held the information they required.

Laura had been restless and uneasy during the whole day, startled with the slightest noise, watching curiously all who came in and went out; for now that the time, as she believed, was very near for her meeting with this unknown father, she began to feel vaguely afraid.

"You are going to find him," she said as her companion came booted and cloaked into the room where she was sitting.

He looked at her earnestly: "And to give up my treasure."

She clung to him: "He won't take me away, mon père. We shall all go home to mamma together."

Her friend smiled, but he shook his head, and Laura's heart sank and the tears filled her eyes. She was too young for all this conflict of feeling. L'Estrange felt it with a sudden sense of compunction. He tried to comfort her as he would have comforted any ordinary child under the circumstances: "No doubt it shall be all as my little girl wishes."

But Laura looked up into his face with those mournful, searching eyes, and then turned away from him. In her simplicity she had read the hollowness of his efforts at consolation, and she was hurt that he should tell her anything but the truth. Her friend stooped down to her and took both her hands in his:

"You are a little witch, Laura. What am I to say to you, then?"

"I don't want you to say what I like," she answered in a low, tearful voice; "I want you to say what is really true." And then she began to cry: "I love you, and I love mamma—oh, so much!—and I think I shall love my papa when I see him. Why can't we all be happy together?"

"Why, little wise one?" He settled his hat upon his brows and turned away, leaving her unconsoled. "Ask the stars," he said from the door, and Laura was left alone to think and wonder, for young as she was the shadow that rests evermore on things human was closing her in its dark embrace. The why, the dark mystery of human fate, had already begun in her young soul its restless questioning.

Her friend felt this, and his heart ached for her, but the mischief was wrought—he could do nothing. Action was the only cure for their common sadness, therefore he would delay no longer. Hiring a droshki, he drove through the modern Moscow, while ever before him rose that mighty circlet of walls and battlements, enclosing, its forest of towers, steeples and cupolas, gorgeous as an Eastern tale, fantastic as the dream of a diseased imagination, that city within a city—the Kremlin.

He was gathering together the forces of his mind, and this helped him in his task, for L'Estrange had ever been specially alive to the influence of externals. Beauty of form and coloring had always been able to sway his moods. This mighty monument, by strength formed and endowed, seemed to brace his spirit as he looked out upon it and thrilled to the memories it enshrined. The great impregnable, before whom Napoleon and his legions melted, the strong abode of the Muscovite giants—Ivan the Terrible and his court—the treasure-house of the Czars, the representative of the history of a nation destined to great things,—as he gazed upon it he felt the softness leave his heart. He was trying to be great, and this monument of human greatness helped him. He could not meet his enemy, although his words were to be, in a certain sense, peace, with the tender voice of a child ringing its sweet sadness into his ears, with the languor of sorrow and pain stealing away his strength.

And gradually as he drove through the shadowy streets, by the walled gardens and stone buildings, with the Kremlin rising ever before him in the distance, his mind took a stronger tone. Not as the wrong-doer, but as the representative of the wronged, he would stand before the man he sought, arraigning his enemy for the crime to which, as he well knew, his own conduct had lent a colorable pretext. L'Estrange could scarcely believe that it was anything but a pretext. Margaret's fault, if fault there had been, was so venial, her manner of life after the separation—and L'Estrange was too much given to intrigue himself to be able to understand how Maurice Grey could know nothing whatever of that—had been so pure, so single in its aims, that the harshness of her husband's judgment became great and vindictive in comparison.

L'Estrange found it by no means difficult to work himself up into a state of suitable indignation, and as he reached the door of the house indicated as that of the agent who held the knowledge of Maurice Grey's hiding-place, he was once more the dark, stern man, strong and self-contained.

His newly-formed resolutions were not yet destined to be fulfilled. Time and distance still separated him from Maurice Grey.

He had gathered from the conversation overheard in the Champs Elysées an approximation to the truth, though some diplomacy was necessary before anything could be wormed out of the crafty Russian.

The golden key opened his lips at last, and L'Estrange applied it liberally, but with a certain amount of caution, for he wished to be sure his information was accurate.

At last, however, the man was conquered, and perhaps gold was not the only or even the most potent agent. After many twistings and turnings and sundry circumlocutions, which their common tongue, the French language, so supple and delicate, could ably render, the wily Russian told his visitor all he wanted to know. The English milord—so he styled Maurice, probably because his pockets were well lined—had been in Moscow, but had only remained there two days. He had put up at his house, for he and the Englishman had met before, and their relations one with the other were of the most friendly character; also, Mr. Grey disliked hotels: for some reason he had seemed to desire the incognito. Monsieur had unfolded to his friend his intention of wandering, and under these circumstances had appeared to be in some perplexity about his letters, which he wished sent to another address than his own. He (M. Petrovski) had come to the help of monsieur (his readiness to help travellers, more especially, perhaps, the English, had always been very great), proposing that all communication with England should be carried on through himself.

He did not say that as he was a kind of property-agent this was altogether in his line of business, and that for everything he did he was amply paid. Probably the Russian thought it well to leave something to the imagination. And in this he was wise. L'Estrange's imagination was all-embracing, in his species more especially. He understood the position at once, and added so largely to the profit on the transaction—demonstrated so clearly how in the whole matter he would be a gainer—that the Russian's tongue, as by a species of intoxication, wagged more freely than ever.

His small black eyes glittering above his hawk-like nose and long, dark beard—he was a Russian Jew—he proceeded to assure his guest that nothing but his full assurance of the fact that only friendliness was intended to his dear friend Monsieur Grey would have persuaded him to open his lips on the subject.

And L'Estrange entering into his motives and approving heartily of his reticence, he showed his sincerity by leading him to a little side-window which commanded the ante-room, and bidding him look out carefully without allowing himself to be seen.

L'Estrange obeyed. He looked out, and treasured up what he saw for further use.

It was a large, bare room, containing only a table and two or three chairs. On one of these, in full relief, for the light from a small oil-lamp shone on his face, sat a young man. He was evidently English, and very young, almost a boy, for his face was clean shaven and his short fair hair curled over a broad, open brow, upon which time had as yet written no wrinkles. But what L'Estrange chiefly remarked in those few moments of intense study was this: the earnestness of his face, the purpose that shone out of his eyes, the manliness of his bearing and attitude.

He turned from the window to find out how it was that this young Englishman had been shown to him so mysteriously, and the Russian, who had been observing him narrowly, took him by the arm: "The young man has come by appointment on the same errand as yourself: apparently he is very anxious—for some time since he has pestered me with letters. Mark my confidence. I ask you how I am to treat him?"

For a moment L'Estrange was perplexed, then suddenly came back to his mind the remembrance of the lawyer's letter. This was Margaret's messenger. He looked out again. Perhaps the manliness of the young face pleased him; perhaps he saw in this strange search an access to his strength—an instrument that he might use to confirm the absolute truthfulness of what he was about to tell the mistaken husband; perhaps he had a certain compunction at the idea of sending on a fruitless search this young, disinterested champion of the woman who seemed to win all hearts. Whatever might be the cause, the effect of his second look was this. He turned from the window with a half smile: "Tell him what you have told me, my good friend, but keep him about here for some days."

The Russian bowed his assent, and after a few more courteous words preceded his visitor to the door. How had L'Estrange obtained this power over a nature so mercenary? Not by money alone, for others could hold out the same inducement—Arthur had been ready to pour out gold at his feet—nor indeed altogether by his superior diplomacy, though that no doubt had contributed to bring about the result.

That there are certain men who have an extraordinary power over their fellows is indisputable. Strength of purpose and character may be an element in the formation of this power, but it is not altogether alone. Such knowledge of the workings of the human mind as L'Estrange had gained by means of keen observation and long study of his fellows is perhaps the strongest element of all. For L'Estrange knew how to take men, what chord to strike in their natures, often strange and complex, to make them answer to his hand—how to render them actually desirous of doing his will.

---

[CHAPTER V.]

A GLIMPSE OF MARGARET'S CHILD.

To look upon the fair face of a child
Feels like a resurrection of the heart.
Children are vast in blessings; kings and queens
According to the dynasties of love.

Arthur, then, had found his way to Moscow. After days of wandering, after vain efforts to entrap the wily Russian into sending him by letter the information he desired, after keen and hungry searching in the English quarter of every city through which he had passed, he had gained the dim metropolis of the North, but only to be forestalled, to have a watch set upon his movements, to play into the hands of the man for whom, in his youthful enthusiasm, he cherished the bitterest contempt, the most undying enmity.

Perhaps under any circumstances it would have been impossible for the impulsive, straightforward young Englishman, headlong in his pursuits, whether good or evil, to understand the complex, two-sided nature of such a man as L'Estrange. Knowing what he did of him, it is scarcely a matter of surprise that he felt his strong young arm tingle at times to fell him to the earth, and if he should never rise again, so much the better—there would be one villain the less in the world. All he desired was to meet him face to face.

But Margaret had laid her commands upon him. His enemy, her enemy, was to be respected. The remembrance of her words made Arthur tremble, for in the holy indignation of his youth he felt that if they should meet it would be difficult to restrain himself from dealing the well-merited blow.

He consoled himself with the reflection that words have power to slay. And words were ready on his lips for the disturber of Margaret's peace, the maker of her misery, which in his inexperience he believed must go to the heart of the worst villain that ever lived.

Arthur did not confine his search to Maurice. Wherever he went strict inquiry had been instituted for the dark foreigner and fair-haired English child. At Paris, as has been already seen, his agent was upon the traces of the pair. There they had been lost altogether, for L'Estrange's ruse had succeeded, and never again had Arthur or the agent he employed been able to recover them.

The only consolation that could be derived from the chance encounter in the Champs Elysées was in the relation that appeared to exist between the child and this man. He was evidently kind to her, for the agent, who reported their conversation accurately, told of her indignation when he so foolishly began to abuse her friend, and also of her little cry of delight when she saw him reappear.

In the long letter which Arthur was writing to Middlethorpe that evening he related this incident, scarcely knowing whether or no it would be a comfort to the bereaved mother—whether she would fear the strange influence which this man seemed to have acquired over her child, or be thankful that at least he was treating her kindly. In any case, of one blessed fact she might rest assured—for the child's companion had been seen, and dark as the night was the agent had recognized the original of Margaret's miniature—her husband was innocent of this last, this bitterest wrong and humiliation. He had not removed his child from her care. The letter was addressed to Adèle, but it was written for Margaret. It told of that evening's interview, of his wanderings up to that moment and of his further hopes.

He had ascertained Maurice Grey's hiding-place—that is to say, the address was promised—but days of travelling would probably be necessary before he could reach it. Arthur, however, was full of courage and hope. He looked upon the success of his enterprise as only delayed, not put from him altogether. And his young, strong spirit of devotion shone out in every line of the letter which was to find the two lonely women watching and hoping—their trust in him. To know this was enough to brace the young man's mind, to drain him of self-love, to make and keep him strong and pure.

He was in the heat of composition that evening (it must be confessed, in spite of Arthur's literary dreams, the pen was not his strong point), laboring to express enough, and not too much, of the hope his partial success had generated in his mind—to give his friends new courage without buoying them up with false hope; striving to give his devotion to Margaret the delicate expression that might mean what it really was, and yet not offend or alarm her; trying to consider duly the feelings of his cousin and future wife—to prevent her from being in any way hurt by his absorption in that which concerned another; and through it all making his travels and adventures appear in the most interesting and favorable light.

The combination was anything but easy, and once or twice Arthur threw down his pen in despair. To frame a letter satisfactory in every way seemed a hopeless task. On one of these occasions, as he was casting his eyes round the room for inspiration, he was startled by the sound of the door being softly opened. He looked round. A little girl, dressed for travelling, was standing on the threshold and looking at him earnestly. When she saw his face a cloud came over hers, and she looked very much inclined to cry.

Arthur got up and went to the door, the kindliness of his nature aroused by the sight of the child's distress. She threw off her hood then, and shaking back her golden curls showed him one of the loveliest child-faces he had ever seen; but it was not its loveliness that made him start back with a sudden exclamation; it was a memory which that face recalled.

In a moment he gathered his ideas together—where had he seen her before?—and then, with the rapidity of thought, that last evening in England, Margaret, the miniature, the child's likeness, came before his mind. Fate had been kind to him. Margaret's treasure was within his grasp.

Unfortunately, the idea agitated him so much that he could scarcely act with the necessary coolness.

Laura had come into his room by mistake. She had lost her way in the great house, and was looking for her friend, whose room, though in another wing of the building, resembled in position that which Arthur occupied.

Already the child was alarmed by his sudden exclamation. She retreated hastily to the door, but Arthur caught her by the arm and tried forcibly to detain her.

Then Laura really cried, and the young man, between his earnest desire to secure her and his distress at her tears, scarcely knew how to act. He tried gentleness, coaxing her by all kinds of bribes to remain with him, only for a few minutes; but the child grew the more frightened; crying bitterly, she tried with all her small strength to loosen his grasp on her arm. It was in vain, and Laura in her despair called aloud for help: "Mon père! mon père!"

Arthur began to think they had all been mistaken, that her father had actually taken her away, but he had scarcely time to come to any conclusion, for as he was still struggling with the child, drawing her into the room with gentle entreaty, there came a dark figure into the gloomy, unlit passage. Arthur was too much absorbed to see him; Laura did, and with a sudden wrench she tore herself free from the young man's grasp. The strong right arm of her friend received her, while before the young man could recover from his surprise (he was at the moment stooping forward to catch the small retreating form) the left hand thrust him back with such violence that he fell, and lay at full length on the floor of his room. Before he could leap to his feet he had the mortification of hearing the key turned in the lock, and of knowing that as his room was in a remote part of the house, Laura and her protector, whoever that protector might be, would have time during his forced inaction to put at least some of the tortuous streets of old Moscow between themselves and his pursuit.

Arthur's position was ignominious in the extreme, and very difficult of explanation. Rubbing his bruised shins, he thought over it woefully. But thinking would not mend matters. He rang the bell violently.

No one came. Probably his violence defeated its own object. A long hour passed, in which, his letter forgotten, he paced the floor of his room, stamping and fuming like an imprisoned lion.

At last a waiter came. He was a Russian, naturally rather timorous, to whom even French was an unknown tongue; and Arthur, from the other side of the locked door, had great difficulty in making him understand in what consisted the obstruction to its opening.

To tell the truth, his stamping and fuming and stormy gestures of impatience had alarmed the poor man considerably. He had always possessed a strong opinion about the violence of the English character, and it was only with many an inward tremor that, seeing the thing was inevitable, he slowly turned the key in the lock and released the young man from his prison.

His alarm was almost justified by Arthur's subsequent behavior. The delay, the ignominious failure, the blow from the hand of the man he so keenly despised, had nearly maddened the unfortunate young Englishman. Thrusting the waiter to one side with such violence that he staggered back against the wall of the passage, Arthur rushed down the wide staircase, three steps at a time, and demanded an interview with the proprietor of the hotel.

The head man waited upon him, respectful in attitude, fluent in speech, but chuckling inwardly at the Englishman's discomfiture.

L'Estrange had given his explanation of the little scene, and it had been by the order of the head-waiter himself that the young man had been detained so long in his prison.

The flood of bad French in which Arthur poured out his indignation was listened to with quiet deprecation, and answered by a multitude of well-turned apologies; but when the young man moderated his tone, and began to think prudence would be advisable if he wished to get anything from the people of the house about the movements of those who had escaped him, he could scarcely be surprised that diplomacy, bribery and a harrowing tale of wrong proved alike unavailing. He was obliged to give up the effort in despair. Through all the polite assurances, the smooth phrases, the courteous attention of the head-waiter he could read incredulity and indifference.

Arthur spent that night in haunting the railway-stations to extract information from the officials, and in knocking up the drivers of droshkies, trying to make them understand that he wished to find out whom they had driven that evening. It was hopeless. They were very civil; Arthur made it worth their while to be communicative. They were ready with highly-colored accounts of their passengers of the evening, but amongst them all he could find none answering to the description of those he sought. He returned to the hotel baffled and worn-out, longing to leave Moscow at once (the hotel and the smooth-faced head-waiter had become so utterly distasteful to him), but detained by an interview for the following day. M. Petrovski had promised him some further details about the residence of his client. He professed to expect letters which would let him know the Englishman's final resting-place.

That letter whose commencement had caused Arthur such pleasant tremors of anxiety was abruptly concluded. He could not make up his mind to relate to his friends in all its ignominious details the incident of that evening, although he longed to let Margaret know that he had actually seen and held her child. Several times he even tried to frame an account of this his first meeting with the little one, but always in vain. He sent off the letter as it was, and curses not loud but deep followed the swiftly-retreating enemy who had foiled him.

L'Estrange did not altogether deserve them. He had purposely treated the young man gently. He might have dealt him a far severer blow, but that glimpse of his face had taught the man of the world something about his character and purposes, had made him respect the boy, and so long as he did not interfere with himself he was ready to spare him. Laura, however, and her share in the task of restoring the wanderer to his home and wife, L'Estrange reserved to himself. He would bring her forward at his own time, and in the mean while he would show this young man, brave with the temerity of youth, that his guardianship, if tenacious, was strong.

Laura had acted instinctively in the occurrence of the evening, but when it was over, when she and her protector were once more in the train, travelling rapidly southward, she was agitated at the remembrance of what had passed.

"Mon père," she said, clinging to him fearfully, "why do they all try to take me away from you?"

He looked down at her earnestly: "Because they know not how much I love thee."

The child clasped her hands: "I hope, oh I hope, papa will know."

"Why, Laura?"

"Because then he won't wish to take me away."

"But you, ma belle enfant—you will wish to go back with your father. Is it not so?"

"Back to mamma?" said the child. "Oh yes, mon père, but you must go too."

He looked down upon her with a sudden pain in his eyes: "Kiss me, fillette, put your arms round my neck. There, so—it is easier now. Little wise one, what shall I do without thee?"

Laura did not answer, only with her gentle womanly ways she soothed her friend, while in her small heart rose a certain determination. It was this. Not even for her father would she leave her friend. He should go back with them to her mother, for her mother could do him good. It was the determination of a woman, for a woman's tenderness and depth of feeling were becoming prematurely developed in the young girl, who would never perhaps in all her life be a thoughtless child again. Had she gained or lost by the exchange? It was for the future to say.

But my readers will be impatient; and truly it seems that in looking back on this strange story, which the past has evolved out of its mists, an undue prominence has been given to this part. It has been altogether unconsciously done, and only because of the enchaining nature of the subject.

There was something so touching in the confidence and affection of this innocent child's heart, that with the instincts of truth itself found beauty where others might have only been able to find its opposite; there was something so beautiful in the surrender of the strong man's soul to the guiding influence of the poor child, in whose tenderness the heavenly side of him had read a possibility of salvation for his whole nature; and in all the sweet mystery there was so evidently present the working of an unseen Power, preparing this man, who had missed his right aim in the world, for the reception of a pure ideal, for the vision of undying truth. Time presses. We must linger no more over the tender scenes that marked the intercourse between Laura and her strange protector, but pass on our way, leaving them together.

On the following day, while Laura and L'Estrange were putting vast tracts of country between themselves and the ancient city of Moscow, Arthur Forrest, jaded and worn-out by a sleepless night, and considerably discouraged at the total failure of this his first effort to restore Margaret to her own, prepared himself for another interview with Petrovski.

He wished to be calm and cool, for what, he said to himself, if he were to be sent on a fool's errand?—what if the man who had dealt him that mysterious blow could have been really Laura's father? He found it difficult on such a supposition to assign a motive for his conduct, unless indeed he could have heard of his search, and have believed he was simply an agent sent by his wife to entice the child back to her. On the other hand, what could have led L'Estrange, if it should be he, to Moscow?

Arthur was very much perplexed. He determined to call the calmest, clearest judgment to his aid in sifting the information which the agent was ready to proffer. Alas! when did an old head sit upon young shoulders? If ever they have been united, the combination has not produced such a pleasing whole as Arthur Forrest, who, in spite of the knowledge of this world on which he prided himself, was above all things young and confiding.

Petrovski might have deceived him, might have sent him to the antipodes, if he had seen fit, but his master in the art of dissimulation had advised him to be truthful. Arthur, therefore, after some days' delay, was told the simple truth—that Maurice Grey, disgusted with his life in St. Petersburg, had made up his mind to turn his back on society altogether. With this view he had sought the mountains, and had established himself, one servant his only companion, in a chalet hastily fitted up with a few necessaries in one of the higher Swiss valleys.

The agent professed to have just received letters from this remote point. In them Mr. Grey had directed that his money and business-letters from England should be sent to the hotel nearest to his temporary home, and this was the address which was given to Arthur, which had previously been given to L'Estrange.

By the following night's mail Arthur left Moscow. As may well be supposed, he lost no time on the way.

Of this strange flight through almost the entire breadth of Europe he never thought afterward save in the light of a feverish dream. It seemed like a vision. Sleeping and waking he was flying still, with all manner of various impressions, multitudes of scenes and strange faces, flitting before him like a kind of phantasmagoria. Glimpses of grand cities, appearing but to vanish, vast solitudes, uncultivated and barren wastes, mountain-country and soft pastoral scenes passed before him in an ever-varying succession. At last the train had to be left behind; he had gained the mountains, and with them a mode of travelling that seemed painfully slow and wearisome to his brain, in a whirl with swift movement and tumultuous thought.

Arthur was haunted through those long days, and, strange to say, it was not Margaret's face that haunted him, nor even that of his gentle cousin who was pining in distant England for his return. The lovely child's face followed him day after day and night after night. It reminded him of failure, brought back in vivid colors the memory of what he looked upon as a species of ignominy, and yet, do what he would, he could not banish it. The bright golden hair, the dark mournful eyes, the fair contour, the childish grace returned again and again.

At times it was like a nightmare. He would see the child, even touch her, and as he touched her she would vanish. Once or twice during those long nights of travelling Arthur seriously interfered with the comfort of his fellow-voyagers by his strange proceedings. Reaching forward at one time, he would seize upon the hand or knee of the person who sat in front of him, laying himself open, if the individual were of the feminine order, to serious misconception—if of the masculine, to a rude rebuff and rough awakening; at another he would passionately grasp the window-blind, giving rise to an irresistible titter among those of his companions who did not find sleeping in a train such easy work as he did. But whenever Laura's face came before his mind, in sleeping or waking moments, Arthur looked at it with a strange reverence. To him it was scarcely a child's face. It seemed almost as if behind the fairness and beauty there was a meaning.

Arthur could not analyze character. He did not sufficiently understand human nature's diversity to be able to explain to himself why this child was so different from other children, but he felt it; and stronger almost than his longing to restore Maurice Grey to faith in his wife's perfections became his desire to rescue that child from him who had taken her, he firmly believed, with some bad motive, and to lead her back to her mother.

The strange thing was that she loved this man (for Petrovski had so impressed Arthur with a belief in his veracity that once more he had settled with himself the identity of Laura's companion). Could it be, then, that there was some good even in him? But Arthur would not follow out this line of reasoning. He was more than ever confirmed in his hatred of L'Estrange.

"There is something in the Bible," he said to himself, "about Satan putting on the form of an angel of light. This man has only followed the example of his forerunner in all evil. He is deceiving the innocent darling, and she thinks him good."

He was driving in an open sledge—for the season was late and snow had begun to fall on the mountains—when these thoughts crowded in upon his brain.

It was tolerably cold in these high latitudes, but the young man was wrapped up in a fur-lined travelling cloak, the thick leather apron of the sledge covered his knees, and a cigar emitting fragrant blue clouds, whose ascent into the pure air he watched curiously, was between his lips.

Arthur Forrest had not been bred in Belgravia altogether in vain. He understood very thoroughly how to make himself comfortable.

In this thing he considered himself fortunate. The crowd of Britons that yearly fill the Swiss solitudes with their all-engrossing presence had fled at the first breath of winter, "like doves to their windows."

Two or three hardy Swiss returning to their mountains, an adventurous German desirous of studying the aspect of Switzerland in winter, a Pole who wished to put the mountains, soon to be an almost impassable barrier, between himself and his enemies, the vigilant and all-powerful Russian police,—these, with a conductor and driver, formed the whole of the small cavalcade that crossed the St. Gothard on this bleak autumnal day.

In spite of the glorious scenes through which they had been passing, the beauty of Italy rising into the grand desolation of the country that belongs to the snow-kingdom, and that again descending into the awful grandeur of rugged precipices, hissing torrents and shaggy pines, the little party was gloomy. The Pole shivered, and folding his fur-cloak around him cursed the ancestral enemies of his race; the Swiss rubbed their hands, stamped their feet and looked defiantly at a threatening storm-cloud that was rising up behind them; the German tried to get up a shadow of enthusiasm. He stared, with what was meant to be earnestness, through his spectacles, emitted a series of "wunderschöns and wunderhübschs," and strove dutifully to think that this was seeing life and entering sympathetically into Nature's most secret joys—the joy of the torrent, the delight of the snow-whirl. Perhaps it was scarcely matter for surprise that his enthusiasm left rather a dreary effect upon the minds of his companions.

Arthur was the only one who really enjoyed, for this was novelty to him, and in his fashionable life he had long been craving for something out of the common. Then, too, there was about this kind of travelling a certain necessity for endurance which braced his nerves. He was doing this for Margaret, and as each keen blast of wind, sweeping with biting force from the ice-fields, touched his young face, he felt the blood tingle in his veins. He was full of satisfaction, strong to endure.

With an Englishman's insight into possibilities he had forgotten nothing that could possibly conduce to an approximation to comfort in such a situation as that in which he found himself. This being so, he was able to enter more thoroughly into Nature's strange caprices, as exhibited in this land of wonders, than the sentimental German, who shivered in a threadbare coat. For—there can be no doubt about it—physical comfort frees the mind: when the body is irritated by discomfort, the mind, sympathetic, is occupied by itself.

In the intervals of meditation on his plans and further attempts for Margaret, and efforts to take in and write upon his brain some at least of the wonderful combinations of form and coloring through which they were passing, Arthur looked with a dreamy philosophy at his fellow-travellers.

The young man was inclined, from the depths of his magnificent cloak, to wonder lazily why Providence had bestowed the world's allowance of common sense upon our nation. The experience of foreigners which he had been gaining during those weeks of travelling had only confirmed Arthur in his preconceived idea. One and all they were absurd. The absurdities might differ in kind and degree—this the young man would not attempt to deny—and no doubt there were clever people among them; still, as a rule, were they to be compared to Englishmen?

He looked at the sturdy, commonplace Swiss, the shivering Pole (only half a man he pronounced him), the sentimental German, trying so conscientiously to enjoy, and with a feeling of self-gratulation that actually helped to send a warm glow through his frame answered the question by a decided negative. No wonder they pronounced the young Englishman supercilious; he had intended to be very condescending. From the heights of his superior nationality it was so easy to look with a calm pity upon those who had been less highly favored by Nature. It need scarcely be considered matter for surprise that they regarded his condescension in another light, and were inclined to repel his spasmodic efforts to be very pleasant and friendly.

All the travellers were glad when the foot of the mountain was reached. Even the indefatigable Arthur, when he found himself so near his destination, thought it well to take a night's rest at Amsteg, where he broke off from the St. Gothard route for Meyringen and Grindelwald. It was somewhere between these two places that the chalet occupied by Maurice Grey was supposed to be situated.

Once in the neighborhood, the young man felt that it would not be difficult to find it. The very fact of a stranger having made for himself a lonely habitation in the mountains would be sufficient to render his home a celebrated place.

Arthur's only difficulty now was what it had been at York before his interview with Margaret—the framing of some reason which might account for his seeming intrusiveness. He formed a thousand plans. He would wander in the direction of the chalet, he would put himself in the position of a benighted traveller thrown on the hospitality of the hermit; finally, he determined to torment himself no longer—Fate would perhaps befriend him as before. That evening Arthur sent another letter to Margaret and his cousin. There was not much in it of the impressions which the grand scenes among which he was sojourning had written on his mind, but it held a courage and hope that might inspire the lonely wife and bereaved mother with a kindred sentiment.

Arthur was an inexperienced traveller, and the plan of his route had been principally traced in obedience to the suggestions of the few English people he had met. It is more than possible, therefore, that the route chosen was not the most direct; for although it had not been possible for L'Estrange in any way to emulate his swiftness in travelling (he was obliged to suit himself to Laura's capabilities), yet on that night when, from the small village in the valleys, Arthur sent his second letter to Margaret, the child and her protector were already at the address given by Petrovski, in the close vicinity of the child's father, of her friend's most bitter and unrelenting enemy. She was utterly unconscious of the strange position, though a change had come over her in those last days of travelling. There was about her even more of the sedateness of the thoughtful woman, still less of the child's merry unconcern. For the shadows that had threatened this young life's joy were gathering thickly around her. She was in the centre of emotions too strong, of a life too earnest, for her tender youth, and her friend saw with concern how the color faded from her face, how her brow grew transparent, how the quiet gestures of a woman became more and more habitant.

But he could do nothing; the mischief had been wrought in that hour when his passion had overpowered his judgment, when he had consummated the rash deed of taking a tender little one from the mother's fostering care. He had done what he could to obviate the evil, and in the interval the child had grown dear to him as his own soul. This it was that added a tenfold poignancy to the pain with which L'Estrange sometimes looked at her.

Once or twice in the course of this later journey L'Estrange had further accesses of the pain he dreaded, and more than once he had been forced to resort to his kindly enemy, entrancing opium, to stay his fierce pangs for a time. It produced its true effect upon him. Moments he had of joys too great for earth—moments when his imagination played freely, when his heart expanded, when all the dark places of his past life's journey were irradiated with a golden light, and when the growing uneasiness of the present strangeness and the certain future pain passed into calm security and pleasant rosy dreams. But the false potion brought other moments in its train—moments when his whole being seemed weak and nerveless, when deep depression possessed his soul, when even the higher life and nobler possibilities of existence which he had been learning in the child's pure presence became to his languid soul unattainable as the dreams of a weak visionary.

At such times he would sit with folded arms and knit brows looking out and away to the far stretches of horizon that were fleeing evermore before them. Only the child had power to arouse him from one of these gloomy fits of abstraction, though sometimes his mood was so dark that even she scarcely ventured to break in upon it. But she never really feared him; there was a strange sympathy between the two that made her understand him in some wonderful way.

As they neared the end of their journey and rest became a possibility, L'Estrange once more tried to refrain from his death-winged potion. He felt that languor and weakness were possessing themselves of his being, and strength of mind would be more needful than strength of body for the work he had to do.

Only those who have known what this refraining means can understand his sufferings. Racked with pain, that reckless gnawing pain which seems to be verily eating into life, he lay for two nights and days on a bed in the hotel at Grindelwald, where he had decided to remain for a few days. And still during the long hours the patient child, his ministering angel in very truth, sat by his bedside helping her friend to bear, and waiting for him to be better.

---

[CHAPTER VI.]

THE LIFE OF A SOLITARY.

And soon we feel the want of one kind heart
To love what's well, and to forgive what's ill
In us.

Maurice Grey had at last been successful in his weary seeking after loneliness. Whether he had gained happiness thereby is scarcely so easy to say; certainly his surroundings could not possibly have been more beautiful or peace-inspiring.

On an Alpine meadow green with a vivid brightness, spangled in the spring and early summer with many-colored fragrant flowers, bounded on one side by a wood, the home of ferns and moss and lovely things of every shape and hue, overtopped on the other by a ridge of mountains that, rising sheer from the soft greenness, towered into white ice-fields and shoulders and pinnacles of virgin snow, he had found in the summer of that year a tumble-down chalet. It was large and tolerably commodious, evidently intended to be something superior to the ordinary dwelling of the Swiss herdsman.

Maurice Grey was tired of hotel-life when he came upon this treasure trove. Life in the mountains, with the constant companionship of ignorant tourists, would-be enthusiasts and blasé fashionables (for Maurice, though touched and charmed by Nature's beauty, had not arrived at the higher point of seeing beauty in humanity), was scarcely the life of solitude he had been seeking.

In the inane vapidity of travellers' talk all the impressions which Nature's loveliness had been writing on his soul seemed to pass into cynicism and irritability. He would get away from the charmed circle—he would break loose once and for ever from the galling fetters with which his kind would chain him. This chalet was the very thing to suit him. He had come upon it in the course of a long, solitary ramble which was taking him into ground untrodden apparently by the ordinary tourist. It led to no point of special interest, there was nothing remarkable to distinguish it from thousands of Alpine meadows in the vicinity, it was intersected by no well-frequented path.

Maurice Grey set inquiries on foot. He found that the neglected chalet had been intended for a small pension; that the proprietor, who was a farmer, had sustained an unexpected loss in cattle, and had thus been unable to complete and furnish it; that he would be only too delighted to let it on very moderate terms to any one who would take the trouble of making it habitable.

On the very next day Maurice found out the farmer, and an arrangement was entered into highly to the satisfaction of both. It took a very short time to fit up the small abode, or two rooms on the ground floor, with the few articles an Englishman would find necessary—a wooden bed and a large bath, a table and chair, one leather-backed arm-chair, rough shelves with a selection of books that he had ordered in one of the German towns through which he had passed, writing-materials and his beloved pipe, sole companion of his solitude.

These were all, save the kitchen utensils, which his new servant, a German who could do everything, had procured for him, and with these Maurice Grey settled down to a hermit's life. It was scarcely the life to suit him. There was too much vigor and manhood in his frame, too many cravings in the heart he had thought dead, for the death-in-life of one cut off from the society of his fellows to be bearable for any length of time. During the long hours of the day, when even his servant was absent seeking at the nearest village for the daily necessaries of their life, Maurice Grey, the sociable, lively Englishman, would sit like a patriarch at the door of his tent and look out—not on his children and children's children playing on the green sward, but on the savage grandeur of the mountains, on shaggy pines rising head above head like a great army on the hillside, on the flash of torrents, their fall scarcely heard in the far distance, scattering their white foam into the sunshine, on radiant ice-rivers sweeping down between dark gray rocks. And the wonder entered into his soul. But the illusion faded, for, all grand and glorious as it was, there was yet in it nothing to lay hold upon the heart or satisfy its wants.

Sometimes the stillness would grow so oppressive that even the tinkling of the cattle-bells, notifying the approach of the sleepy, quiet animal, would be a relief to the man's brain And then he would rush into the wood. There was sound enough there—the rustling of leaves, the chirping of grasshoppers, the movement and ceaseless murmur of life various and multiform.

At times Maurice Grey would enjoy it, but not always, for in the midst of this rich profusion of Nature his was a life apart. More than once he was mortified, even in those first days, when solitude had a certain novelty, to discover how instinctively his step would quicken and his heart grow lighter when in the evening, his hour for dinner drawing near, he could look forward to seeing at the door of his chalet the familiar face of his servant and only companion. He was too proud, however, to betray himself even to Karl, and in spite of everything was determined to persevere. He would give the new life a fair trial. Happily, Maurice had a resource in his pen. In his youth he had cherished ambitious dreams of distinguishing himself in the world of letters. In these hours of solitude the desire returned—not, indeed, with a like force, for the cry of the miserable, the cui bono? of a sick soul, was at the heart of it.

If the grandeur of Nature could inspire him with high thoughts—if as a poet he could breathe out any one of these, sending it forth a living image of beauty into the world—why and for whom should he do it? For men and women? For their enjoyment, their false praise? Maurice Grey, as it will be seen, had not lost his cynicism in his solitude. But he wrote as he had never written before. He transcribed his strange, wild dreams that were formed in the ice-caverns, and clothed the woods and hills with legends, dismal, gloomy, awe-inspiring, that had drunk from the bitter waters of his own dark soul.

As days and weeks passed on that soul grew darker. Even the faithful Karl, who was strongly attached to his English master, began to fear his strange moods and wonder vaguely at his caprices, recalling the weird märchen that had fed his boyhood in his Black Forest home—of men haunted with the spirit of evil, condemned to wander for ever, seeking rest and finding none; of ghosts that had taken to themselves a fleshly home, and living with human beings had been considered human themselves, till the dark fear of betraying their origin in some unwary moment had driven them to the wilds, there to batten on horrors till the startled flesh should forsake, once and for ever, the naked, shivering ghost.

Karl grew afraid of his own shadow. Indeed, only his visits (and he took care they should be of daily recurrence) to inhabited places kept him sane and capable. So absolute is the truth, old as humanity itself, that "it is not well for man to dwell alone."

For Maurice Grey where was the helpmate to be found? Not upon earth, if perfection such as he sought in his lofty idealism was to be its necessary accompaniment. He had broken his idol for a flaw in its fair whiteness, and what wonder that he found it difficult—nay, impossible—to replace it?

Not that Maurice, to do him justice, had ever sought to replace his idol by any creature outside of him in the world of men and women. It may be, however, that his dream was wilder and more vain. For he looked within instead of without—looked to the poor trembling self for that satisfaction and peace which life with one who was (though he had not known it) verily his other self, by reason of her tenderness and warm womanly sympathy, might have brought him.

Maurice and Margaret had been alike wrong in this, that they had sought in the transitory and fleeting what is impalpable and enduring. Happiness springs not from the dust, and happiness abiding is only to be found outside of ourselves, outside of humanity, outside even of the world.

This they were learning, the husband and wife, each in the secret place of a stricken heart—learning it with stormy seas and vast plains and snow-clad mountains between them. Sometimes it would dawn upon Maurice, in the midst of a dream of impossible bliss, that he had been seeking the good in a wrong channel—that perhaps it might be found when and where he least thought to meet it. And the idea would make him tremble as with a sudden inspiration his eyes would seek the blue vault above, so restful in its calm transcendent purity.

And so the long summer months, laden with beauty, passed by him. Days he had of musing, when his soul, entering in upon itself, would strive painfully for the secret of Nature's abiding joy—days of inspiration, when after a restless night dreams and imaginings would shape themselves into burning words which he would trace with a poet's tremulous joy—days of moody abstraction, when even the blue heavens irritated him by their calm beauty, when the white snow-peaks glared and dazzled and robed themselves in dark palls: days too he had when a better spirit seemed to be taking possession of him, when the spirit of good brooded over his soul, when from the everlasting pæan of hill and vale, of rustling leaves, rushing torrents and tuneful birds the shadow of a peace that might yet be his descended on his soul. And still Karl came and went, leaving the hermit in the morning, returning with early evening, ministering to his necessities and preventing him from feeling the hardships that might have been his lot in the strange life he had chosen.

If the truth must be told, the imaginative German half expected at times, as he entered the dark gorges which led to his master's dwelling, to find that in his absence companion-ghosts had spirited him away. But such an occurrence never happened, and the man began to take heart and breathe more freely.

Unhappily, the summer-time could not last for ever. Autumn came, and on this particular occasion an early autumn fell upon the valley. Bleak winds began to moan and sigh among the hills, the mountains robed themselves in gray, impenetrable mist, the leaves shuddered and fell by myriads.

Maurice Grey was an Englishman. He had always prided himself on his independence of externals, but hitherto he had been well occupied, mentally or physically, in such a season. This coming on of autumn was very different from any former experience. To be absolutely alone, or shut up with a servant who only at intervals shows a scared face; a blanket, damp, white, clinging, about the house, and entering in by every nook and cranny; nothing visible but walls of chilly vapor rising in billowy folds about dark, formless giants, that are known to be snow-mountains only because they have been visible before,—is sufficiently depressing; but add to all this a mental life unhealthily alive and sensitive, an absence of present joys, with the memory of past happiness rising at times to mock the heart by its fairness, the sting of a remorseful conscience, physical powers fast decaying under the unspeakable horrors of a lonely, unloved life, and I think it will be allowed that Maurice Grey would have been more than human if even his intellect had not begun to fail him.

It was such a morning as that I have been describing; he sat before his desk; his pipe was on the table before him, books were scattered on every side, a manuscript was open, the pen was in the ink; but he was doing literally nothing, not even attempting to beguile his dreariness with that friend of the forlorn—a pipe. His folded arms rested listlessly on the table; he was looking out into the thick mists with a dreary hopelessness that in a man seemed miserable beyond compare. He was not even thinking. It was as though a gloomy abstraction had seized upon his soul.

The door grated on its hinge—it was not particularly well hung—but Maurice did not hear the sound. He was like a man who was under the influence of some strong narcotic, plunged in visions that shut out the external world. Karl was the intruder. He peeped cautiously into the room, took a back-view of his master's position, then steered noiselessly round to the front (Maurice was painfully irritable in these moods) and gained a side-view of his face. It resulted in an ominous shake of the head and a bold move. Creeping still nearer, Karl touched his master on the arm, then sprang back, for the angry frown gathered on his brow.

Karl had been observing him, and Maurice had a vague fear that in his moody fit he had been ridiculous. An Englishman hates to be absurd, even to a valet, and Maurice Grey, as he glanced at the repentant German brimful of apologies that were only waiting a suitable outlet, felt his choler rising. "How many times have I ordered you," he said angrily, "not to come in here without knocking?"

"Meinherr did not hear," replied the submissive youth.

"Then you should have knocked again or gone away. By Heaven! do you think me incapable of taking care of myself? Speak, idiot! what is the meaning of this intrusion?"

The frightened German extended his arms apologetically: "Meinherr must condescend to hear that, as this weather has lasted some days, we are nearly out of provision."

"Go to Grindelwald to-day."

"Impossible. Meinherr will please to take the trouble of observing how thick are these mists."

"Then why, in the name of all that's sensible, do you annoy me? Can I make provisions?"

"No, but meinherr might wish to know why his table shall be so poorly provided this day, and—" The man hemmed.

"And—what? Go on, can't you?"

"Meinherr should also know that weather like this at present never lasts very long about here."

"So much the better. Is that all you wished to tell me?"

"Meinherr would for the few days be so much better at the hotel. If he should please we might go there to-morrow and rest till the weather shall be a little more clear. There are not a great many people travelling just now. Meinherr would have a good apartment and would be very little annoyed."

The poor man's voice trembled with fear and anxiety. It was one word for his master and several for himself. Karl was beginning to feel that he could scarcely bear another week of such horrors as those to which he had lately been exposed. His master himself, by his dark moodiness and mysterious surroundings, peculiarly awe-inspiring, his only companion; the dark gorges and mountain-caverns yawning round him like so many graves; no creature to whom he could unfold the tale of the fears that beset him,—nothing less than such a combination could have emboldened the submissive Karl to make the proposition which he had advanced in so timorous a manner.

After the murder was out he stood silent, aghast at his own audacity, waiting for the torrent of angry words with which the Englishman would answer him.

To his surprise no such answer came. Maurice rose from his seat and burst into a loud laugh. The diversion had been salutary: "You would make a first-rate special pleader, Karl. A word for me and a dozen for yourself, eh? Well, what are we to do? Some one must be left in charge here. Since you are so anxious about my welfare, I had better go to Grindelwald and leave you behind me."

Karl smiled pleasantly. Matters were taking a favorable turn.

"Meinherr is pleased to joke. He would most certainly require the services of a valet in Grindelwald as well as here, and no one else would understand his ways so well. I spoke—it is perhaps a few days since—to an old woman who is well known in the village. She would be very glad for a small sum to look after the chalet. Meinherr will excuse this liberty. I feared for him the severity of the winter season."

"All right, Karl. Poor fellow!" he added, gently, "I fear you lead a hard kind of life here, and you are a faithful servant. Well, let it be so. You shall have a little change."

By these sudden flashes of kindliness, these glimpses of a better nature, Maurice had endeared himself to his servant. To be harshly treated was too common to the German to be in any way food for complaint, but for a master to consider him, to take a kindly interest in his feelings, was something quite new. His heart warmed to this proud Englishman who was considerate enough to give him his due meed of thanks and praise.

At Maurice's last remark he pressed eagerly forward, his eyes glistening: "Not for worlds if at all inconvenient to meinherr. What is good enough for him should, it is quite certain, be good enough for his servant."

Maurice smiled: "I begin to think you are right, my good Karl; a change will do me good, as well as you. I left a portmanteau at the hotel, so we shall not require to take anything with us. If by to-morrow the mist has at all cleared we shall start for Grindelwald."

The next day rose bright and clear. Maurice and his servant left the chalet early in the morning, locking the door carefully, as Maurice had a deep regard for his books and manuscripts, and taking with them the key, which was to be given to the old Swiss woman, destined heiress to the horrors of the lonely place.

Happily, Marie was endowed neither with an overflow of imagination nor highly-strung nerves. With her small grandchild to wait upon her, and plenty of coffee, sausage and black bread, she could be happy anywhere.

---

[CHAPTER VII.]

THE WORK OF MARGARET'S MESSENGER BEGUN.

Sometimes we feel the wish across the mind
Rush like a rocket tearing up the sky,
That we should join with God and give the world
The slip; but while we wish the world turns round,
And peeps us in the face—the wanton world!
We feel it gently pressing down our arm.

Maurice and his servant reached the hotel in safety. Its situation was fine, though not to be compared with that of the Englishman's chosen dwelling. It was perhaps too much shut in with the great giants that enclosed the valley in their apparently indissoluble embrace, too much under their shadow for their true grandeur to be felt. In the summer and early autumn it was a busy place, for it was a favorite resting-point and suitable centre for many excursions. But at this time, as Karl had wisely predicted, it was nearly empty. The flock of guides who during the summer months had been accustomed to haunt its approach had gone home to their families and their winter-life among the herds of cattle and goats; the dépendances were entirely closed, and many of the windows of the hotel itself showed white blinds and a general appearance of being shut up for the time.

Nevertheless, in the village of Grindelwald a slight commotion seemed to be on foot, of which the hotel was apparently the centre. Curious men in white ties were discussing volubly with the few rough outsiders who, in the vague hope of further spoil, were haunting the outskirts of the hotel with bare-backed mules and alpenstocks; from the little shop where carvings and views were temptingly exhibited the ancient proprietor was looking curiously across at the hotel; and the village people were gathered together in small knots, evidently discussing some object of common interest. Into the midst of this excitement Maurice Grey and his servant walked quietly about noon on this bright autumnal day.

Karl pricked up his ears. "Something has happened, meinherr," he ventured with the familiarity of a favorite attendant; then, perceiving no sign of disapproval, "Travellers lost in yesterday's mist. Ach! wie schrecklich!" he continued, lapsing into German as exciting scraps of one of the many conversations reached his ears. "Meinherr has without doubt heard. 'II ne peut pas se consoler.' An Englishman, it may well be, who has lost his son, perhaps even two. Will meinherr permit that I make inquiry?"

Maurice could not help laughing at the man's overweening curiosity. "Ask about my room and luggage first," he said, "then you may do as you like."

But by this time the landlord had seen the Englishman, and had advanced, hat in hand, to ask his pleasure. The rarity of new arrivals in this season made an extra coating of politeness desirable.

"Is anything wrong?" asked Maurice when the trivial matter of accommodation had been settled.

The landlord answered in French; he had never been able to acquire English: "Ah, monsieur, a sad event indeed; but come within and you shall hear of it. We are idle now, and my people have nothing better to do than to talk about these things. Better not—better not," and he shook his head seriously.

"But why?" asked Maurice, his curiosity aroused. "Is there anything particularly mysterious about this event, which seems to have excited you all so much?"

"Mysterious! Monsieur has truly chosen a right word to describe this occurrence."

And he proceeded to pour into Maurice's ear some account of the sensational event which had that day formed the one topic of conversation in the little village.

It will be as well, perhaps, to take the story out of his hands and to give in a few words a résumé of what, with interruptions and circumlocutions manifold, the landlord made comprehensible at last to his new guest.

It seemed that a few days before the Englishman's arrival several travellers had put up at the hotel, apparently with the intention of staying there some time.

The first party consisted of only two, an elderly gentleman who appeared to be in a bad state of health, and a child strikingly lovely if the impassioned description of the landlord was at all worthy of belief.

They took three rooms en suite, and the little lady was to be constantly attended by one of the chambermaids.

Later in the same day the second party arrived. It consisted of two gentlemen and a lady, all of whom gave Austria as their country. The lady, a peculiarly proud and beautiful woman, seemed to be the wife of one of the gentlemen, but they both treated her with a tolerable amount of carelessness.

For two days these different families had remained in the hotel without meeting or having any intercourse one with the other, for the elderly gentleman had been suffering so acutely that he never left his room, and the child would not leave his side.

On the third or fourth day he appeared at the table d'hôte, accompanied by the little girl, and seats were placed for them exactly opposite to those occupied by the Austrians. The lady and one of the gentlemen were already seated when they entered.

One of the waiters, it appeared, was a particularly observant character, though, indeed, there are always observant characters at hand when such are found convenient, and a waiter's life at some large hotel is specially favorable to the cultivation of this habit of mind. Many a waiter might frame exciting romances, the materials drawn simply from the sphere of his own observations. The waiter in question was German, a man of an inquiring turn of mind, and specially given to the study of character. Some peculiarity of countenance, as he afterward declared, led him to look rather attentively at the dark, handsome face of the Austrian lady. Lost in his favorite study, he forgot to notice, by the necessary bustle, the drawing out of chairs and readjustment of knives and forks, the entry of the elderly Frenchman and his fair-haired child. He could not, therefore, have been mistaken in his assertion that as the lady lifted her eyes from her plate and caught a glimpse of the new arrival, her face became suddenly convulsed. She started violently, first flushed crimson, then turned as pale as death.

This circumstance made the intelligent waiter think. He turned his attention instantly from the strangely-affected lady to the apparent cause of her agitation, but here he was partially baffled. There seemed to have been a kind of flash of recognition in the face of the gentleman with the iron-gray hair as he seated himself opposite to her; even this, however, was so slight that possibly he might only have imagined it, for the Frenchman's conduct during the time allotted to dinner was absolutely natural. Once or twice he even looked across at his companions with that quiet species of scrutiny which is allowable between perfect strangers meeting in this way, and several times he addressed himself in French to one or other of the gentlemen who faced him. The lady made no further sign, only to the far-seeing German she seemed to be making a violent effort to control herself. On the evening of that day something—he did not explain what—led this particular waiter to the part of the house in which the suite of rooms taken by the gentleman (who will have been recognized as M. L'Estrange) was situated. He stated afterward that he had been chained to the spot—the spot being the outside of the door of the Frenchman's apartment—by strange and unusual sounds. He heard a woman's voice, interrupted often with tears and sobs; she was speaking in tones of entreaty or expostulation, raising her voice violently from time to time as her excitement grew with her theme. What that was the waiter could not precisely say. He was an exact man, who never liked to go beyond his authority. In fact, as he was eminently practical and had never cultivated his imaginative faculties, perhaps he chose the easiest course.

Stern, low tones answered from time to time the woman's impassioned appeals, and at last, very suddenly as it seemed, the door was thrown violently open, and cloaked and hooded, her face covered by a thick black veil, there walked out the proud Austrian lady. He recognized her by her exceptional height and her stately carriage.

The door was closed softly from the inside, and the lady walked rapidly through the passage to her own rooms, which were situated in another part of the house.

This happened two days before the arrival of Maurice. In the night the lady had disappeared. A French waiter went at the same time, whether as her attendant or not no one could discover. One thing alone was certain—the deed had been cleverly done. During the whole of those days the lady had been sought, but sought in vain.

"We thought her husband careless," said the landlord in conclusion, "but ever since he has been like a madman. We dare not tell him what monsieur knows about the conversation that has been overheard: the life of the French gentleman, who seems still very ill, would scarcely be safe; and, after all, who can say? He seems to have acted well. A woman's caprice, an old attachment. Monsieur will doubtless be of my advice. It would be useless to arouse ill feeling without just cause."

And so saying, the landlord shrugged his shoulders. Why should he affect himself at all with the miseries of forsaken husbands or runaway wives? It is an ill wind that blows nobody good, and the landlord, to speak truly, was not discontented with the kind of notoriety which this romantic tale, told and retold as it might very probably be—especially if the dénouement should turn out to be tragic—would bring upon his house.

Maurice Grey read something of this in the man's eyes, and in his turn he shrugged his shoulders, a sign with him of bitter contempt.

Not "What fools," but "What knaves these mortals be!" was the constant cry of his sick soul. It was meeting him again as he emerged from his solitude.

When the landlord left him to answer some summons, Maurice Grey looked out upon the mountains, and laughed a laugh that was sad to hear, for under the mirth lay a weary weight of misery and bitterness. Women inconstant, man faithless—everywhere self-interest the great ruling motive of life, and in all the green earth no spot where he could lay his head, feeling "Here I may rest with a perfect confidence." The man's heart contracted painfully; from such a standpoint as his the outlook on humanity is gloomy indeed. He felt for a moment that he would fain be out of it all. The frank, round face of Karl aroused him to a sense of his position, and to the recollection that while such simple souls as his were left all honesty had not passed away from the earth. It was certainly a relief.

"Meinherr's rooms are ready, his fire lit and his clothes airing. Will he please to see if everything is to his liking?" said the German.

"Where is my room?"

"In the best part of the house, eccellenz, close to the apartments occupied by the gentleman of whom he has doubtless heard."

"The inconsolable husband?" Maurice's lips were curled into a kind of sneer as he asked the question.

"No, meinherr; the other person concerned, as they say, in this sad business—a Frenchman, I believe."

"So all these details are the common talk of the place," said Maurice to himself. "Unfortunate man!" And then he set his teeth together. "I acted wisely," he muttered; "such a scandal as this would have killed me."

He said nothing more to Karl, and the honest soul, who had rejoiced in the interest his master was taking in sublunary affairs, who had been congratulating himself, in fact, on the very rapid success of his plan for drawing his master out of his dark moods, was distressed and perplexed to see the old frown gather on his brow, to hear his fierce, impatient sigh, and to find himself banished summarily from his room with the curt abruptness to which Karl had become accustomed.

Left alone, Maurice sat down by the little wood-fire, which had been kindled solely in consideration for his feelings as an Englishman, and returned to his sad pondering. He was playing a dangerous game with himself, for he was in that mood which has often tempted a man to tamper with his humanity—to put out his rash hand and experimentalize on the nature whose fearful beauty and hidden mystery it is impossible for him to understand. It would have been better, a thousand times better, for the Englishman at such a moment as this to have thrown himself into any kind of work, to have sought society, however humble, to have looked for some interest in the outer world; anything would have been better, indeed, than this giving way to the spirit that possessed him—this looking for and searching into what no son or daughter of humanity may fathom. Like a fiend's temptation ran backward and forward through his mind, haunting him with its dull rhythm, the burden of a song that he remembered to have heard in some bygone time:

"A still small voice, it spake to me—
Thou art so full of misery,
Were it not better not to be?"

And again, with an added force—

"Thou art so steeped in misery,
Surely 'twere better not to be—better not to be."

As he repeated these words half aloud, Maurice rose and paced the room excitedly.

"Yes," he said to himself, "a wise counsel. Men, women, what are they?" He knit his brows and his eyes looked fierce. "What are we?—miserable, and our misery makes us bad. God!—if there be a God!"—he lifted his pale, agitated face, but underlying his wretched, wild doubts might have been read there the reverence of a fine soul—"why are we miserable, seeking good for evermore, and finding evil, inconstancy, falsehood? Why is our fair world the abode of fiends incarnate, who burden the ages with their folly? And if we were happy"—again he lifted his pale face, and the dazzling snow-peaks against their azure background met his gaze—"if we were happy," he repeated slowly—"if she had been happy—O God! she would have been good, for the soul of purity was in her; but misery brings madness to the blood and thoughts of evil to the heart; and for misery there is no cure under the sun."

For a few moments he remained perfectly still and silent, his arms folded, his brow contracted, looking out upon the snow-fields; then added, this time half aloud, "But one!"

He turned from the window and cast a rapid, hungry glance round the room. It was comfortably arranged, the small wood-fire crackling merrily, the clothes he was about to wear hanging on a chair beside it carefully brushed, his bed turned down, exhibiting the whitest of white linen; but what specially drew Maurice's attention was his portmanteau, which, after the necessary articles had been taken from it, Karl had left open, that the expediency of further unpacking might be decided by his master. It was a large travelling portmanteau, evidently full of a miscellaneous collection of articles—books, dressing-apparatus, clothes, curiosities picked up in wandering from place to place. On one of these curiosities, which was lying near the top of the open side, Maurice's eyes finally rested.

For a moment he gazed silently, then crossing the room took it up in his hand to examine it more closely. A case containing a pair of small pocket-pistols, the barrels of silvered metal richly chased with gold. One of these Maurice removed from its covering. He handled it with a certain curiosity, took it to pieces to examine its condition, cleaned it with the most delicate care, then, after putting it together again, spent a few moments in listening to its click. It looked more like an elegant toy than a dangerous weapon. Maurice put it down and returned it to the case, which contained, besides the companion pistol, a small flask of gunpowder and some bullets. These he took out, then in a quiet, leisurely manner proceeded to load the pistol. His attitude was rather that of a man who is amusing himself, trying to kill time, than of one who has any serious purpose in view. And perhaps at this moment Maurice was scarcely serious. In any case, when his work was done he did not proceed farther; he put the pistol down again. It almost seemed as if this quiet, ordinary occupation (for Maurice's firearms had always been treated by him with minute personal care—he did not allow a servant to touch them) had quieted the tone of his mind and banished some of his dark thoughts. He put down the pistol then, and turned back to the fireside to resume his unhealthy musing.

For here lay Maurice Grey's error. Instead of mastering his morbid feelings, driving them away by stress of hard work and diversity of thought, he, like many a strong man before and since, suffered them to master him.

Again and again he would return to the old mystery, bringing the energy of his soul to bear upon it. Again and again it would elude him, till, mortified and baffled, tied down to the narrow circle of self-knowledge, a broad outlook on humanity impossible by reason of his self-chosen fate, he had come to loathe his very life as an evil thing.

It is easier to meet a foe in fair fight than a giant formed by a diseased imagination—blurred, indistinct, but awful with the terrors of the unknown.

With his small pistol within reach, Maurice set to work once more thinking over humanity's woes and wrongs, gloomily seeking for the shadow of a reason why life should be thought worth having—why it would not be well to pass out from it once and for ever through the lurid portals of self-destruction. What wonder that his unhealthy pondering should point out to him no ray of light, no gleam of hope?

But happily for Maurice, and for the many who were interesting themselves in his welfare, his mind at the time could bear no further tension. Rather to his own surprise, he found it wandering from the solemn question of life versus death to the common things that surrounded him. How strange it is that at the solemnest moments the trivial and commonplace intrude the most perseveringly! And yet it is a fact that might be proved by numberless instances.

Maurice's window looked out upon the hotel garden; gradually, as the tension on his nerves grew less, he caught himself counting and remarking curiously the very few who from time to time passed up and down the snow-shrouded paths and alleys. A woman-servant, apparently looking for some kind of herb; two waiters, who walked rapidly up and down as if enjoying the keen air and glittering sunshine; the landlady, in morning undress, crossing to the dépendance in the grounds, and returning with some utensil which had been left there accidentally; finally—and this it was that riveted Maurice's attention—a traveller, probably a new arrival, for the landlord had given Maurice a detailed account of all those who were in his house at the time, especially giving him to understand that no English visitors remained. And this young man was certainly from England. What other country could have produced the faultless exterior with regard to form, the fair freshness of face, the well-bred nonchalance of manner?

The young man held a cigar lightly in the tips of his fingers, his lively whistle penetrated to Maurice's retreat, he walked up and down on the crystallized snow with a resolute, energetic step; there was, to the eyes of the jaded man of the world, something peculiarly pleasant and attractive about his general appearance.

"I wonder who he is?" said Maurice to himself. "It would be rather pleasant to meet anything so fresh; he has a good face, too. That young fellow is no scamp."

Inconsistency of human nature, or rather, perhaps, adaptability to circumstances. Maurice a few moments before had been condemning his generation indiscriminately, calling men and women by the harshest names in the vocabulary, longing passionately to escape from them for ever. Appears upon the scene a young man with a fair, fresh face, and he endows him immediately with the qualities in which all his kind had been pronounced deficient! Strange, but true, for such is life, so complex a thing, driven hither and thither by trifles light as air.

Maurice Grey turned away from the window, looked with a half smile, half tremor at the loaded pistol, put it in a safe place lest Karl should see fit to meddle with it, and proceeded to dress himself carefully for the early table-d'hôte dinner.

And thus, though he himself was all unconscious of the fact, the work of Margaret's messenger was begun.

---

[CHAPTER VIII.]

A TÊTE-À-TÊTE DINNER AT THE HOTEL.

For how false is the fairest breast!
How little worth, if true!
And who would wish possessed
What all must scorn or rue?
Then pass by beauty with looks above:
Oh seek never—share never—woman's love.

Maurice Grey's costume was as faultless as that of the young man whom he had admired in the hotel-garden when at the strange hour of two o'clock p. m. he, in obedience to the summoning bell, peered into the long dining-room, at the extremity of which was a small table spread with two or three covers. Karl, his face beaming all over as he recognized his master, was standing behind the chair destined for him, the young Englishman was brushing his feet vigorously on the mat before the door that stood midway in the room, two waiters were hovering about helplessly.

Maurice took his place at one side, Arthur Forrest seated himself at the other side of the table. They were Englishmen and total strangers one to the other, therefore it is scarcely necessary to say that the places they chose were as far apart as the small size of the table would permit. And yet the two men were anxious to know one another—Maurice, because he felt that his companion's freshness would be a relief to his jaded soul; Arthur, because he had recognized in Maurice Grey the husband of Margaret, the man for whom he had been searching through the length and breadth of Europe.

Burning with anxiety to unfold his mission, he could scarcely preserve his composure now the fatal moment had arrived, now he and the man he had been seeking were at last face to face. For he could not be mistaken; he had ascertained from the landlord the name of this only other Englishman besides himself who had not fled from the valleys at the first breath of winter, and Maurice's likeness, confided to him by Margaret, had been too often studied in its every lineament for him not to be able at once to know its original. With the knowledge came an excitement that threatened to overpower him utterly; but he controlled himself. That calm self-possession and a certain amount of diplomacy were absolutely necessary if he would bring his mission to a successful issue, he felt most keenly.

Once Maurice caught the young men's eye scanning his face, and as the eyes met Arthur blushed; he felt, too much for his comfort and composure, that the slightest false move might be fatal. Maurice was utterly unsuspicious; he attributed his young companion's confusion to embarrassment at being caught exhibiting a little too much curiosity, and ne was simply amused, determining in his own mind to find out more about the young fellow, so evidently a gentleman, yet so frank and transparent in his ways.

A few moments of delay passed by; then, as there was no further accession to the company, soup was served. Arthur, too full of tremulous excitement to be able to find a single commonplace, began to eat in total silence; Maurice looked across at him between the spoonfuls.

"Apparently we are to dine alone together," he said at last with a pleasant smile; "rather a different scene from the one I looked in upon a few weeks ago."

"I suppose this place is very full in the season," was Arthur's not very brilliant reply.

"Especially so this year; it is gaining in renown, and certainly the situation is good. But to me hotel-life is so distasteful."

Arthur was beginning to gain confidence. "Do you think so?" he said. "Now, I like it—abroad, that is to say; the people one meets are off their stilts, and generally inclined to be friendly; there is no bother, something approaching to comfort, and plenty of life and gayety."

"I'm afraid present circumstances will scarcely answer to your description," said Maurice.

Arthur laughed: "No, indeed, you and I seem to be the only sane people in the establishment. I gather from the waiters—one of whom, happily for me, speaks English—that the present company consists of an elderly gentleman, ill or out of his mind, certainly peculiar; his daughter, an angel of beauty and goodness; a fuming Austrian, scouring the mountains for his lost wife; attendant brother, similarly occupied; landlord, landlady, staff of servants."

Maurice smiled: "I think you have omitted nobody, only, for fear your expectations should have risen too high, even under circumstances so meagre, I should inform you that the angel of beauty is a child, a mere baby; but my arrival only preceded yours by a few hours, so, like you, I speak from rumor. Now, may I venture to ask how long you will be likely to stand out against such an atrocious state of things? I have an interest in the question, as I believe I am a fixture for some time."

It was by no means an easy question for Arthur to answer. He might have said that the time of his stay depended entirely upon Maurice himself. Not being able to give the true answer, he treated the question as lightly as possible: "Oh I I can scarcely say, exactly. I was recommended to come—mountains in winter, snow, and that kind of thing; they certainly look very well, but, you see, I am not precisely an enthusiast in that line."

"Was it for your health?" asked Maurice with grave interest, looking compassionately at the fresh young face, whose brilliant coloring might possibly hide disease.

This question made Arthur turn as red as fire. The knowledge of what his errand really was rendered him painfully self-conscious. "Why, no—yes—no, I mean," he answered, his confusion growing as he advanced.—"What a fool I must be!" he muttered to himself angrily; then, as he caught a faint smile, polite but perplexed, on the lips of his questioner, he controlled himself suddenly. "The fact is," he said rapidly, "I've been so desperately chaffed about this midwinter journey—But, you see, I rather like cold weather, and the air here is bracing."

Maurice saw his questions had been ill-timed, and with true courtesy proceeded to change the subject: "You would not have said so yesterday. Then, and for some days previously, it was anything but bracing up here. We had a fine blanket of cold mist about us—not a tree to be seen beyond the distance of a handsbreadth."

"I thought you had only arrived yesterday," said Arthur, a tremor in his voice. He knew perfectly well whence Maurice had come, but it was his plan to feign ignorance; he wished to draw him on to speak about himself.

Maurice smiled: "I don't come from very far. You must have heard from the people about here of the peculiar Englishman who shuns civilized places—I believe this is the form the rumors take—and lives by himself in a chalet among the mountains. That strange individual is before you now."

Arthur bowed, as in acknowledgment of this peculiar kind of introduction. "I must confess," he replied, "that Mr. Grey is known to me by fame, and being so far in advance of you I must ask you to be obliging enough to accept my card. If, as I suppose, we are to dine in this way tête-à-tête for some few days to come, it is as well that we should at least know each other by name."

"Thank you," replied Maurice cordially. He was at a loss to account for the timidity, the hesitation, the evident constraint of this young man, who was yet, to all appearance, no novice in the ways of the world; but he liked him and wished to set him at his ease.

"You have just come from England, I presume?" he said after a short pause, looking kindly into Arthur's flushed face. "I have been a wanderer for many years. How do you like this kind of life?"

"It has been pleasant enough," replied the younger man, reassured once more by his companion's friendliness; "but, do you know, I find nothing to compare with the comfort, the convenience—in fact, you know the kind of thing that one finds at home. Here one can't get even decent tobacco; there is nothing to be had in the way of drink but sour wine. As for the cooking, some people praise it very highly; but—" As he spoke there came up a little dish of vegetables swimming in butter. "Bah! they call that an entrée, I suppose."

Maurice laughed, and helped himself to the obnoxious dish: "You see what wandering does. I have become cosmopolitan in my tastes. From the sauerkraut of Germany to the caviare of Russia I am tolerably at home, able at least to pick up a living; but come, you are right about the wine, which I really think grows in sourness with the added degrees of frost; we might have better tipple than this, and it is an occasion. I have not done the social for many a long day. The 'Wein kart,' Karl. Let us order up the best bottle of champagne the landlord has in his cellar, though I greatly fear his stock is low. Karl, inquire for me—any first quality champagne left?"

The landlord's cellar was not absolutely empty. In a few moments a bottle of very excellent champagne stood on the table between the two young men. Maurice drained a brimming glass; Arthur would scarcely do more than wet his lips. He had not forgotten his purpose, and to bring it to a successful issue he knew it would be necessary to have all his wits about him. Laughingly, Maurice reproached his young companion for his abstemiousness, and filled and refilled his own glass with the glittering draught. For after the dull weight of loneliness, after the terrible experiences of the morning, after the gloomy musing that had oppressed him with its horror, this return, even transitory as he felt it to be, to some of life's amenities was a boundless relief to the man's soul. In the old happy days society had been Maurice Grey's life; it had intoxicated him like wine. Among his peers, when, soul meeting soul, the sparkles of wit, the flashes of gay humor had been struck out in the heat of social intercourse, he had reigned as a king: brilliant, vivacious, boundlessly hospitable, his society had been courted by the world, and he had met the world courteously, drawing out from its pleasures the extreme of good that was in them.

But misery had changed Maurice woefully, and it was only when the wine was in his blood, when its liquid fire was coursing through his veins, that he could return in any degree to his former self—that he could become once more the fascinating, brilliant, cordial man of society. On this particular occasion he had determined to forget himself. It was the flying back of the bow that had been bent nigh to breaking. Wine could make him forget, and he poured out glass after glass, draining them rapidly, as a man might do who was consumed with burning thirst. Gradually his eyes began to shine and his words to flow more readily. The haughty, self-contained man spoke freely of himself, and made a friend and companion of the youth whom hazard had thrown into his way.

Arthur listened silently, with a tremulous joy. If Maurice would confide in him his task was half done already. But love had taught the young man prudence. He would hear before he would speak; he would earnestly study the character of him he had come so far to seek before he would determine how and when his object should be revealed. Maurice, in this mood, was a marvellously agreeable companion. The younger man, standing, as it were, on the threshold of life, listened, entranced, to his descriptions of the great world, and Mr. Grey knew the world better than most men. He had plunged into every kind of society; he had feigned to be what he was not, that he might gain access to that which would otherwise have been denied to him; he had played upon the weaknesses of men and women, only to scathe them with his biting ridicule. Then too, he had seen the world from a variety of standpoints. During the first part of his life as a man he had taken a part in the careers which the great world offers to its votaries; afterward he had lived as a spectator: holding himself aloof from the heartburnings, the jealousies, the ambitions, the intrigues, he had been able more calmly to note and criticise. He had made undying enemies, he had knit to himself faithful friends, he had been concerned in strange histories; but all these things had been apart from himself. As far as his own feelings were concerned, they were nothing, feathers light as air, incidents pour passer le temps—nothing more. He was in the midst of a brilliant series of anecdotes drawn from his life in St. Petersburg, which had been fruitful in events, commenting lightly, even with a kind of sarcasm—for these things could not move Maurice Grey—on the enthusiasm he had excited in female breasts, and on the confusion and dismay which his mysterious absence would create, when the light began to wane, and the waiter came in to set a match to the solitary oil-lamp which was the hotel dining-room's winter allowance of light.

Maurice stopped and drew out his watch: "By Jove! young gentleman, your society is so fascinating that I had altogether forgotten the time. Do you know we have been nearly three hours at table? Now tell me candidly, have you any plan for this evening? I need scarcely ask," he continued laughing; "amusements are not in this primitive corner; if you went out to walk you would infallibly lose yourself, and as far as I can make out there are in the hotel at present no fair ladies to conquer; but so much the better for you. If I had my life to live over again, I would flee woman as I would the plague." His brow contracted. "I wonder why I talk about women at all. They are all alike false and fickle."

Arthur looked up. He was but a boy, and in presence of this man of the world, steeped to the lips in cynicism, it was difficult to express the strong faith of his young soul. But Margaret's face in its calm beauty came suddenly like a sweet vision before his eyes, and he answered, trembling slightly, "I am younger than you, Mr. Grey, and have had much less experience of the world; but I know that in this thing you are wrong. There may be some women who are bad and faithless, and all that kind of thing—there are ever so many more who are good and pure. Perhaps you have been unfortunate in your intercourse with women—perhaps—" his voice shook, and there was a sudden light in his blue eyes—"perhaps you have made some terrible mistake."

Maurice was earnestly intent on the business of lighting his cigar from the solitary oil-lamp, so that the look on Arthur's face escaped him, but the earnestness, the apparent meaning in the boy's voice, impressed him strangely. He turned round instantly, a slight appearance of surprise in his manner; then as he caught sight of the flushed face and gleaming eyes of his companion, he shook his head and his lips curled into something like a sneer: "My dear fellow, you are young. Wait a few years, and your vigorous championship will die down, withered by circumstances."

He laughed bitterly, and Arthur turned away, a cold feeling at his heart. He could not understand this cynicism. To him who knew this man's history it seemed cruel and wanton beyond compare.

But Maurice was good-natured, and he liked the boy; his very freshness, whose springs he had been trying to poison, pleased him. He took him by the arm and looked into his averted face. "Have I frightened you altogether?" he said kindly, "or will you listen to what I was about to propose?" Arthur smiled his acquiescence, but it was with an effort; he felt in no smiling mood.

"If you like, then, let us adjourn to my quarters. This great place looks desolate with the one oil-lamp they generously allow us. There I have a jar of excellent whisky, and Karl will soon find us all appliances and means to boot for the concoction of whisky-punch, which, if you had lived so long in these inhospitable regions as I have, you would know to be a real luxury."

Arthur smiled: "I have not tasted a drop since I left England."

"Then you agree to my proposal? Come!"

The two men rose, Maurice linking his arm into that of his companion, and leaving the long dining-room, threaded the ill-lit passages which led to Maurice's apartment. The door of the room adjoining his was ajar, and close to its threshold they paused involuntarily for a second or two. What made them stop was nothing more than a child's voice singing a child's hymn: an untaught, feeble voice, thrilling with melody that made it tremble, there was yet in it that which irresistibly drew and fascinated. Even in its weakness there was something strange. To the imaginative it would have seemed like a woman's heart trying to express itself through the feeble medium of a child's voice. For there was soul and purpose in the quavering treble that trilled against the air. With one accord the men stopped to listen, holding their breath lest any of the sounds should escape them. The voice paused a moment and they passed on, but before they had reached their destination, Maurice, who had been looking back toward the door whence the sound had proceeded, caught an instantaneous glimpse of the owner of the childish voice. A little golden head and fair face, on which light from within the room was shining, peered out and looked up and down the passage. Only for a moment, but in that moment the dark eyes of the golden-haired child and the dark eyes of the world-weary man met. The child, frightened vaguely, retreated to the inside of the room; the man staggered as if he had received a blow, and sank down, to his companion's dismay, pale and speechless on the nearest chair.

Maurice, it must be remembered, had been drinking pretty freely and in such a condition as his men are scarcely so well able to master their sudden emotions as they may be at another time.

The face of his child, the sound of the hymns her mother had sung at her cradle, was to Maurice like the dim memory of a fair dream. He did not for a moment recognize the child as his own; he was far from imagining that the little Laura was near him, and the look in her eyes, the expression of her features, the music of her voice, constituted a haunting mystery that absolutely staggered him.

He met her eyes, and suddenly, as in a vision, his wife's pure face, his child's cradle, all the details in their utmost minuteness of a home that had once been happy, flashed over his mind. He did not know how it had come. He scarcely even connected this sudden revulsion of feeling with the sight of the child's face; he only knew that it was there, a haunting memory of past happiness, and that his present pain was almost too great to be borne. Covering his face with his hands, the strong, cynical man sat for some minutes—minutes that seemed ages to Arthur—plunged in bitter thought.

When he looked up, Arthur thought his face was more haggard than it had been, and there was a certain excitement in his manner. He rang the bell vigorously. "You will say I am a pretty host, Mr. Forrest," he said lightly; "this is scarcely the entertainment I promised you."

Then, as Karl, who had been in the close neighborhood of the room expecting some such summons, appeared in the doorway, "Try and get a small kettle, two tumblers and a lemon."

In a very short time the required articles were in the room, and with his favorite beverage before him the frown passed from Maurice's brow and the gloomy abstraction from his manner.

He returned to the descriptions which his adjournment to his own room had interrupted, and Arthur was by turns convulsed with merriment, thrilling with sympathy, absorbed in interest; but Maurice's tales left a sad impression. There ran through them all the spirit of the preacher's bitter cry, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."

"Yes, Solomon was a wise man," cried Maurice at the end of one of his vivid bits of description. "'One man in a thousand have I found, but a woman have I not found.'"

He flung down his glass with a laugh so bitter that it made his young companion shudder.

"You look incredulous," continued Maurice; "when the gray begins to sprinkle your hair you will come to the same conclusion. Look!" he bowed his head and showed the deep furrows that lined his brow, the white that shone out here and there from his dark hair. "I could have done great things in the world: a woman made me what I am—a wreck in every sense of the word."

The whisky was rapidly mounting to the man's brain. Maurice's cheek was flushed, his eyes glistened, but he recollected himself suddenly: "I am a fool to prate about my own affairs, God knows it were best to hide them; but, young man, you will understand it all some day." He laughed harshly. "Lives there a man who has not suffered?"

Arthur listened to his ravings, and as he did so the memory of Margaret's pure life, the echo of her noble words, shone out to him like light through the darkness of her husband's desperate words.

At first he felt his heart swell with indignation, but he looked at Maurice and the indignation changed to pity. "Yes," said the young man to himself, "to believe such a woman false must be enough to kill a man's faith in humanity."

He rose from his seat, and stood up before the world-sated man strong in the pure faith of his young soul. His companion had said he would understand this some day.

"Never!" said Arthur earnestly; "God grant that day may never come! I know women on whose constancy and purity I would stake my life." He was thinking of Margaret and Adèle.

Maurice looked at him curiously. For the second time he saw that in Arthur's face which made him think there might possibly be a meaning under his vigorous assertions.

"Life is not very much to stake," he said lightly—"more, no doubt, to you than to me—but I confess I am curious." The cynical smile which Arthur disliked was playing round his lips. "I have given you a chapter out of my experience; return it by giving me one out of yours. I should like to know more about those fair ladies—but perhaps they are not fair; that would make all the difference—upon whose integrity you would be ready to stake your life." Then his voice deepened and his brow contracted: "God knows I would have done the same once upon a time, but that is past, with other things."

There was silence between the two men for a few moments; then Maurice looked across at the young face, on which a shade of weariness was resting, with some compunction.

"Poor fellow!" he said gently, "I have done wrong. Faith is such a beautiful thing, and it lasts so short a time, I should have left you yours."

But Arthur looked up almost angrily: "You cannot surely think that my faith is weakened by anything you have said."

Maurice smiled. "Youthful infatuation!" he muttered. "But let me hear your story," he added aloud, "then perhaps I shall discover that unlike mine your faith is founded on a rock."

Arthur looked at his companion searchingly. The last words had been carelessly spoken, for the excitement brought on by wine and whisky was wearing Maurice out; fatigue and exhaustion were fast taking possession of him.

The young man read this, and he rose to his feet.

"I cannot tell you my story to-night," he said; "it is rather long, considering the lateness of the hour."

"As you will, my dear fellow." Maurice's eyes were nearly closed.

Arthur went to his own room, and when Karl appeared a few minutes later to take his master's last commands, he had great difficulty in persuading him of the desirability of undressing and lying down between the sheets like a Christian. He succeeded at last, and Maurice slept such a deep unbroken sleep as he had not known for days; but he woke with a racking headache and a general sense of dissatisfaction.

---

[CHAPTER IX.]

A TORMENTED SPIRIT.

Yes, all the faithless smiles are fled
Whose falsehood left thee broken-hearted;
The glory of the moon is dead,
Night's ghosts and dreams have now departed:
Thine own soul still is true to thee,
But changed to a foul fiend through misery.

In the mean time, L'Estrange, in his enforced retirement, had not forgotten to supply himself with a means of knowing everything that went on in the house. In most places he had an agent of some kind; where he had not his intimate knowledge of human nature made it not difficult for him to find out the creature he needed.

He had heard of the Austrian lady's flight. This small episode, which in days gone by would scarcely have caused him a moment's thought, had wrought upon his mind to such an extent that a serious relapse had been the consequence.

It was pretty much as the landlord had conjectured. The proud lady who had put down her pride so woefully, trampling her own and her husband's honor in the dust, was one of the many to whom this man had vowed undying attachment. She had tired him, and he had abandoned her; and from the day of their parting years before in sunny Italy to this time, when L'Estrange and she found themselves strangely under the same roof, they had never met. The fair Austrian had been forgotten, relegated in his mind to the record of past absurdities, but she had never forgotten him.

Her life had been uneventful, lived out in a small German town, where petty gossip is the sole excitement. She had married a man for whom she cared little, simply because to marry had been rendered almost necessary by the exigencies of her position. She had had no children. What wonder, then, that her mind dwelt, ever more morbidly as the slow years passed by, on this one warm, passionate episode in her otherwise cold career?

In any case, so it was. She believed that the man who had loved her then—the man whose tender speeches rung ever in her ears—loved her still with the same passion, and that only necessity, biting poverty or unacknowledged ties, had forced him to leave her so cruelly. After all, it was only a very commonplace and every-day matter. To the woman this summer-day's love-making had been that one great epoch from which everything past and future should thenceforward be dated—the era of an awakening into life of feelings that had before lain dormant and unsuspected in her being. To the man it was nothing more than one sweet out of many—a sweet which, when it should cloy upon his fastidious taste, could be put away without a sigh to the memory of its sweetness.

With the idea in her mind of his continued faithfulness, the Austrian lady had persuaded her husband to travel, only that she might search for her lost lover through the length and breadth of Europe. But for the greater part of two years they had been wanderers, and still they had come upon no traces of him who had formerly seemed to be ubiquitous. She had begun to mourn for him as the dead, when suddenly, in this out-of-the-way corner, at this strange season, she saw his face once more.

It was seldom that this proud lady betrayed the emotions of her soul. It may be that her inner consciousness of want of rectitude of purpose had been one great agent in the formation of those barriers of steel with which she sought to surround herself. But this time there was no help for her. The pent-up torrent had grown in force and intensity, until no bounds could restrain its impetuous overflow. She was a woman, and the haggardness of the face of the man she loved, the stooping walk, the whitened hair, spoke so powerfully to her imagination that she could scarcely be calm. Was it for her he had been sorrowing? And yet in that flash of recognition at the dinner-table she had read nothing but cold indifference. She knew him to be a consummate actor: was this, then, put on? In her hungry desire to know the whole truth she prepared an interview for that evening; but before it her measures had been taken. There was a person in the house—one she had met before—who, her woman's instinct told her, would willingly lay down his life in her service. She would take him into her counsels; and if the presentiment which lay cold at her heart as she looked upon the well-known face that evening should turn out to be true—if she could never be consoled with this man's love—she would flee from the place, leave her husband, give up her position in society and hide her humiliation in a convent.

And so it had all happened. What could L'Estrange say when she spoke to him passionately of their former love, when she asked him plainly if there remained any vestige of it in his heart?

He thought to do what was best and wisest; he thought to kill the madness in her soul by letting her see at once that all which had passed between them was as though it had never been. For Laura's unconscious influence and those struggles through which he had passed had not been altogether in vain; L'Estrange was a better man than he had been in almost any period of his strange, wild career.

Deeply as he pitied the erring lady, he told her the truth—told her that in his heart all such feelings as she would have striven to awaken were for ever dead. It was painful to listen to her wild reproaches, to hear that it was he who had made her life a desolation—painful, with only the frail panels of a dividing door between them and the pure child, to bow his head beneath the torrent of her well-deserved anger. But it did not last long. In his dark eyes, made brilliant by fever, in the stern lines written by trouble on his strong face, in the determined tones of his voice, she read his resolve, and with the coming on of darkness she fled over the snows to a hamlet in the mountains, there to stay, under the roof of a poor herdsman, until the first hue-and-cry should be over. Those who helped her flight were faithful to her cause; their measures were well taken, and the drifting of the snow obliterated all marks of footsteps. In time she reached the distant convent, and the mystery of her disappearance was never solved.

But into L'Estrange's soul the iron entered. At the threshold of a new life past evil—evil irrevocable—was meeting him, and before the irrevocable the spirit of the strong man sank. That night he would not touch the beguiling potion. He almost hailed the bitter physical and mental pain which this abstaining entailed. It seemed like a kind of expiation for the follies of his life. He could not close his eyes. Throughout the long watches of the night he paced his room, body and soul racked with inconceivable anguish. The pain was beginning to tell on his strong frame.

When, early on the following morning, the little Laura went into her friend's room, she found him stretched on the sofa pale and gaunt, like one who has passed through a death-agony. She noticed the change at once, and ran to his side: "Mon père is worse?"

"Yes, Laura," he replied; then he took her small face in his hands, and holding it there for a few moments gazed on it earnestly: "Petite chèrie, we must lose no time."

"In finding papa?" replied the little one seriously. "Mon père, I think it will be soon. Last night I dreamt I saw him. Is he here, in this house, I wonder?"

But her friend turned away: "Little one, you are too much shut up here, and this makes you imaginative. It is a fine day. We must ask the good girl who waits on you to take you for a run on the crisp snow."

The little girl clapped her hands. "Yes," she said, "it will be nice, but mon père must have breakfast first."

She rang the bell and proceeded to arrange everything, to have the stove lighted, to set out the breakfast-things in their little sitting-room, and to superintend the preparation of chocolate à la Française, for Laura had become quite a little woman in her ways: then, as she saw that her friend was still suffering, she sat by his side and sang to him in her sweet, childish way till his eyes closed. The little child-heart, by the outcome of its tenderness, had brought rest to the weary brain, the pain-racked soul.

It was nearly midday when, all radiant with color and life, Laura returned from her ramble with the good-natured chambermaid. As she entered the room one of the waiters left it. She found L'Estrange dressed, and sitting in an easy-chair close by the stove, which showed a little patch of glowing red.

He called her to his side, and lifting her on to his knees took off her warm cloak and hood with all the tenderness of a woman, then stroking back her fair hair he kissed her on the brow. "Laura, petite chèrie," he said in a low tone, as if speaking to himself rather than addressing her, "the time has nearly come."

She put her arms round his neck, and resting her fair head on his shoulder looked up into his strong, pale face. "What time, mon père?" she asked in an awed whisper.

"When thou and I must part, fillette."

But the child lifted her head and shook her golden curls. The clear, bracing air, the brilliant sunshine, the glittering snow had breathed a spirit of gladness into her heart. She could not see the necessity for such sad forebodings.

"Mon père," she answered eagerly, "you should not say things like that; indeed, indeed, it's very wrong. You are going back with me to mamma, who'll be ever so glad to see us; and my own papa is to be found: he will thank you, mon père, for bringing me, and then we shall all be so happy together."

For this was always the end of the child's plans. She could not imagine anything else. Her friend smiled, and then he sighed. "Soit donc, petite sage," he replied enigmatically, and Laura was perfectly satisfied.

Once or twice during that day the mysterious waiter interviewed L'Estrange, and each time Laura was condemned to be mystified. They spoke in a language which was a jargon to her; but she was accustomed to mystery where this strange friend of hers was concerned.

The waiter was keeping him au courant in the most trivial details that concerned those inhabitants of the house in whom L'Estrange was interested. He heard of the hue-and-cry that followed the Austrian lady, and of her husband's despair; he heard of the several arrivals, first Maurice Grey's, and then Arthur Forrest's; he knew that they had dined together tête-à-tête and sat a long time over their wine, evidently in deep converse; finally, when the two men were closeted in Maurice's room, his confidential emissary was hovering about, ready to report the slightest extraordinary demonstration. For L'Estrange did not credit Arthur Forrest with so much diplomacy as he had hitherto used in his treatment of the delicate mission with which Margaret had entrusted him, and he knew that fire lay hidden under Maurice Grey's cold reserve. The name of his wife blundered out by a stranger, who would appear to know the sad details of her history and his own, might very possibly cause an explosion of some kind; indeed, during that long evening, whose tedious hours not even Laura's gentle ministries could beguile, the Frenchman was on the alert. From moment to moment he expected to hear the door of the neighboring room pushed violently open, and to understand from his well-feed observer that the young peace-maker had been thrust out from the presence of the proud Englishman, who would feel himself doubly injured by this interference.

Laura did not tell her friend about the strange look which had met hers that evening, though the child pondered it in her simple heart, trying to find out what there was in it that had affected and fascinated her. She would have asked L'Estrange if he thought that this man who had looked at her with a kind of yearning in his sad face could be, indeed, the father they were seeking; but one of his dark moods was on him, and for the first time in all their intercourse she feared to break it.

Since their dinner in the afternoon he had not stirred from the one position, except when the mysterious informant had come in to report progress, and then he had looked at him from under his shaggy eyebrows with a glance that would have killed deceit at its very birth. At other times he remained silent, his hands clasped over an ancient staff, on his strong face a look of pain—but pain crushed down by indomitable will—his lips and nostrils faintly quivering as any sound came from outside, his eyes fixed on the small patch of glowing red that was waning and fading out as the day passed away behind the western mountains.

But though Laura feared to break in upon his silence, she did not fear him. She sat at his feet, curled up like a kitten wearied with play, on a crimson cushion that belonged to the heavy-looking couch, trying by the shimmering firelight to look over a book of very gaudy pictures which the landlady, who pitied her apparent isolation, had lent her.

Evening deepened into the early night of the season. Candles were brought by Laura's friend, the good-natured Swiss chambermaid, and before the little girl had succeeded in tracing a history for half of the wonderful pictures in her book, she grew so sleepy that her friend was moved from his abstraction to ring the bell and give her into the care of Gretchen, after a most loving good-night and many tender recommendations to the waiting-maid to take every care of his little treasure.

He did not leave his place by the fireside till his delicate ear told him that there was nothing stirring in the house but himself.

---

[CHAPTER X.]

PEACE, BE STILL.

But what time through the heart and through the brain
God hath transfixed us, we, so moved before,
Attain to a calm. Ay, shouldering weights of pain,
We anchor in deep waters, safe from shore,
And hear, submissive, o'er the stormy main
God's chartered judgments walk for evermore.

Was he to pass another night of racking pain, another night of restless wandering? The little chest which held the only means by which this question, to him so awful, could be answered in the negative, lay at his feet; his very soul was yearning for rest. Outside, the white mountains were sleeping, pure as angels undefiled, beneath the moonbeams; from the next room, the door of which he had opened, came the light sound of the child's regular breathing; in the house was silence absolute.

And his rest might be as absolute as any—nay, not only so, it might be filled with sensuous pleasure, such pleasure as his brilliant youth, that had gone by for ever, had often afforded him; it might be clothed with images of beauty and delight. But, on the other hand, had he not chosen suffering—suffering instead of delight—to be a soul-purifier, to atone, if atonement might be, for some of the self-seeking of his ruined life?

And he could delay no longer; an act of expiation was to be wrought which would demand all the force of his soul to carry to a successful issue; the father of the child he loved was at hand; with all the strong energies of his soul awake he must meet him, and make him own that his enemy's words were the words of truth.

Then—L'Estrange acknowledged it to himself with a sigh—the suffering whose ravages he dreaded did not overcloud his intellect, did not bewilder his brain, as its antidote had done; rather, like the purging fire, it seemed to draw out and develop the greatness of the soul that was in him.

The strong man shivered as he turned from his only hope, and began once again in the unhealthy activity of his heart and brain to think and reason, to live an inner life that was gradually, by its overpowering force, drawing away the life from his body.

He bowed his face in his hands. Where was all this to end? he asked himself. Was he to go down to the grave with the burden of his own ruined life and of the lives he had ruined hanging like a millstone about his neck, dragging him down to the nether hell, without a hope save in the last vague dream of the infidel—an utter death, an eternal sleep?—and this, in his very darkest moments, L'Estrange had never brought himself to believe.

So intense was his mental life during the first part of that night that his physical sufferings were almost forgotten, but at last, as the slow hours went by, pain came, twinge after twinge, that would not be denied, and panting and exhausted, his great strength failing in the struggle, the man threw himself down upon his bed, moaning faintly.

A wild impatience followed. The spasms he experienced were of that gnawing, craving kind more difficult, perhaps, than any other to be borne.

Not the sharp stinging which rends the frame, and then, spent by very force, allows it to rest; but the dull, ceaseless throbbing that nothing can stay, that gives no moment of respite to the overwrought nerves. L'Estrange at the moment felt as if it would madden him. His blood was coursing like liquid fire through his veins; his hands and feet were burning; drops of agony stood on his brow. He crossed his room suddenly, and throwing open the window leaned out into the night; but first—for through everything this strange man did ran the tender thoughtfulness that could only have been prompted by a fine soul—he shut noiselessly the door of communication between his room and Laura's lest the chill night-air should touch his darling. He looked out upon a strange scene—the white earth, in shadow save where the moon had touched it with an unearthly radiance; the mountains looking verily like giants in the uncertain light, yet glistening and transparent where the night-born light was resting; cloud-shadows, whose depth seemed infinite as the outer darkness of despair, blotting out here and there the transparent whiteness; behind one of the distant peaks a pale line, faint and tremulous, that told of coming dawn; over all a weird unreality.

The face that looked out into the dim night was as strange as the scene could be, though it lacked the utter stillness of the shrouded, moonlit earth. The eyes were wild and wandering, with an impatient, hungry look in them, as though they were searching, seeking, striving to draw from the visible the secrets of that which no eye beholds; the mouth quivered with the storms of feeling; the brow was contracted by a mortal agony, and from time to time the pale lips moved as if in pitiful appeal to some hidden power. But after a few moments of earnest gazing some of all this passed by. It would almost have seemed as though the influence of Nature's eternal calm had been breathed in upon his soul through the medium of sense, or rather perhaps it was a thought from within that swept over the tumult of the man's brain, so that suddenly his agony was stayed.

Was it so very strange? Long ago, in the far ages, a Man to whom conflict and storm were known in all their fulness stood up on a dark night and said to the angry billows and raging winds, "Peace, be still." Was it altogether for the sake of that terror-stricken crew, or was it not also a sublime parable? For, evermore, it is the same. The Man, present in the midst of the soul's tumult, bids in His own time—the best time for the stricken—that the storms which overwhelm it shall sink to rest.

Thus it was with L'Estrange. In the silence and solitude he was finding the great Father, who, though we know it not, is never very far from any one of us. "God is here" was the thought that swept over him through the stillness of Nature, through the profound silence of the night. He knelt before the window and stretched out his hands to the midnight heavens. Who shall say what dreams, what possibilities, passed in that moment through his soul? For with his errors and imperfections, his falseness and his folly, this man was one of the mighty few, a son of divine genius. Will they be judged by another code, I sometimes wonder, than the common herd to whom their gigantic struggles, their vast temptations, their agonies, their failures, must for ever be a life unknown, a sealed-up book?—such a man as Shelley, peering in his spirit's misery through the ages, then when nothing but the aching void, the yawning nothing, answered his wild search, giving himself up to the proclamation of a dark infidelity; or Byron, dying for a dream; or Keats, breathing out his young life with the cry of a disappointed soul? Will the misguided, distorted greatness find in the Hereafter a better sphere? Have they, these mighty dead, even with the last breath of a life tortured with earth's blackness, received as by inspiration the fair beauty of undying truth into their souls? Who shall say? In the presence of mysteries like these we can only bow our heads and pray that so it may be.

To L'Estrange a moment of such inspiration had come. He had prayed before. Often during these last days, when gradually the fetters of self-love had been falling off from his soul, he had cried out in the darkness to the Father of spirits. But then He had been a grand abstraction; now, for the first time, He was near and real.

First happiness, then vengeance, then atoning suffering and self-abnegation, had been looked for as the life of his spirit's life. In that hour of awful sweetness they all fell off from him. God looked down into the man's heart; God was what, all unconsciously to itself, that heart had been seeking, and there was a great calm.

Sweetly the daughter of his affections had sung to him that evening about the Crucified; to the man of the world her hymn had been an idle tale; now all was changed. In the great stillness of God's calm upon his heart he was able to listen more truly.

Bowing his head, the stricken man wept as the Gospel-story in its simple beauty surged in upon his heart. He had often reasoned about it. Calmly and coolly he had torn to shreds the arguments which men weaker but better than himself had brought to bear upon its truth. In this transcendent moment reasoning was not—it could not be.

True, in the craving need of his own heart, in the sudden, awful revelation of his spirit's darkness, there he read its truth, and like a little child he wept before its unspeakable beauty and pathos.

L'Estrange could never have told how long the time was that he passed on his knees before the open window looking out upon the snow. It was like a dream, but when he rose the white dawn was beginning to rise over the mountains.

The spasms had left him; he scarcely dreaded them now, for the mental struggles that had rent his very being had merged into a great calm. But as he shut the window and tried to cross the room his knees trembled and he staggered strangely.

Weakness as of a little child seemed to have come upon him, and weariness too—a blessed weariness. He threw himself down upon the bed, and for the time forgot all his woes in sleep.

---

[CHAPTER XI.]

HAUNTING MEMORIES.

I am digging my warm heart
Till I find its coldest part;
I am digging wide and low,
Further than a spade can go,
Till that, when the pit is deep
And large enough, I there may heap
All my present pain and past.

It was late on the following morning when L'Estrange awoke. He felt strangely refreshed, and wondered for the first few moments what was this change which had come upon him. Then the remembrance of that night's conflict and conquest returned. The calm was still in his heart, drowning in its depths all earthly yearnings.

But more urgently than before he felt the necessity for action. He rang the bell, and his special attendant answered it. From him he learnt that the child, fearful of disturbing him, had taken her morning run with Gretchen while he slept, and that the two Englishmen had started from the hotel with alpenstocks and knapsacks, stating that they would probably not return that evening. From scraps of their conversation the man had gathered that the elder of the two was desirous of showing the younger his home among the mountains. It was therefore more than probable that the chalet usually inhabited by Mr. Grey was their destination.

Mr. Grey's servant, somewhat to his own displeasure, had been left behind at the hotel.

To all this intelligence L'Estrange listened silently. He was surprised, for he had not imagined Maurice Grey would have taken so kindly to the young man who was interesting himself in his affairs; he was disappointed, for on this very day he had determined to meet Maurice, and now another necessary delay must intervene. But he did not express any of his feelings to his attendant. He was accustomed to make use of men, but to all whom he made thus useful himself, his motives and his emotions were a sealed book.

He rose, dressed with the help of the complaisant waiter, and went into the hotel-garden to wait for the return of his darling, and to try, by diligent exercise and exposure to the keen bracing air, to regain some of his old strength.

In the mean time, Maurice Grey and Arthur Forrest were finding their way over the mountains to the chalet, which Arthur was curious to see.

They were drawn together by a kind of mutual attraction that neither of them could explain to himself. Arthur was occasionally very indignant with Maurice's cynicism; he was almost afraid of his superior knowledge of the world; he shrank painfully from his ready sneer, and while he was with him lived in a constant state of agitation in his fear of letting out anything before the time, and thus widening the breach between husband and wife; yet he liked Maurice Grey, he admired his fine proportions, endowed him with all kinds of knowledge and wisdom, and was impatient of the hours that divided them. Maurice, on the other hand, was inclined to despise this boy's rawness and simplicity, and to despise himself for in any sense making a confidant of him, and yet he liked him; he enjoyed his society; the bright expressive eyes of the young man had the power of drawing him out, of making him talk about himself and the troubles of his life.

Perhaps the secret of this strange attraction on his side might have been found in the young Arthur's sympathy and frank admiration, for few men are above the pardonable weakness of liking to be admired and sought out.

The paths that led to Maurice's dwelling-place were tolerably steep, and in some places the snow was soft, in others the frost made the paths slippery; therefore during their walk Maurice and Arthur were too much engrossed with the one necessity of keeping their footing to find much breath for conversation. But they were both good walkers and strong, stalwart men; therefore, although they had started comparatively late in the morning, the sun had not dropped behind the mountains that shut in the valley before they were seated in Maurice's little room, a jug of whisky punch between them, and on the table the white bread and the meat with which Maurice had taken care to provide himself before leaving the hotel that morning.

They found everything in first-rate order. On the previous day Marie and her little grandchild had arrived. The stove had been kept alight all night, according to Karl's strict orders, lest the books and manuscripts should suffer from the damp, and the old woman had just finished a general cleaning up when her master and his visitor arrived.

The dinner was certainly plain, but the two Englishmen did justice to it—Arthur perhaps appreciating it all the more for the absence of any suspicious-looking entrées.

"What do you think?" said Maurice when they both paused at last from sheer exhaustion. "This is a very rough place; can you manage to put up with it for a night or two? If so, I will undertake to show you some of the finest points of view in the Alps, seeing which at this season, you know, will render you for all the future a respectable traveller."

Arthur laughed: "Put up with it! I should just think so. I never saw anything so delightfully primitive. I quite envy you your little snuggery."

A sad smile played round Maurice's lips, it softened his face marvellously: "I am scarcely a person to envy, and yet this had been my dream for many a long day. I thought it would make me happy."

There was a bitter ring, a kind of irony of self, in the last words. He looked out meditatively over the snow. "Men are strangely constituted," he continued sadly; "the dream and hope of to-day are the weariness and disgust of to-morrow." He turned to his young companion: "People will always insist upon buying their own experience at any cost, or else I should prove to you, as a lesson that I have painfully gained, how foolish it is to set one's heart too much on anything under the sun. 'Light come, light go;' if we hold to our possessions lightly, the loss of them grieves us little. I see in your eyes that my philosophy is repugnant."

For Arthur read all Maurice's cynicism in the light of his history. His face flushed. "Depth of feeling is never wasted," he said earnestly; "I ought to know that."

Maurice had cleared away the remnants of their simple meal. They were sitting, one on each side of the small stove, discussing some famous cigars, a stock of which Arthur always had on hand.

His remark made Maurice turn round to him suddenly: "That's rather a deep doctrine for one of your age; but it reminds me you were to tell me something to prove that Solomon, who professed, by the bye, to understand human nature, was altogether wrong in that impolite statement of his about women. Stop, let me see! I drank rather too much last night; still, I don't think I am wrong."

But Arthur turned away. His heart and courage had fallen suddenly. It had been easy enough to think and plan, to imagine how with heart-eloquence he would describe the woman he loved—how he could tell of her quiet, self-denying life, of her constancy, of her undying memory of the past—how, when his story had been triumphantly told, he would give her name, and so dispel for ever the mist of falsehood which had risen in dark clouds about her husband's idea of her. The moment for all this had come, and he found that the heart-thrilling words would not answer to his summons, that his feelings were too intense, that the fear of failure paralyzed him.

"Not now, not here," he said to himself, and then he rose and looked out of the window.

The sun was setting over the mountains, and on their summits a dark cloud was resting, but above it and beyond in a vast circle of rays the golden glory shone. It irradiated the pure snows till they blushed into beauty, it lit up the heavens, it glistened from the torrents. The whole landscape was transfigured—changed from the still fixity of the snow-bound North into the voluptuous warmth of an Oriental dream; the dark fir trees showed crimson stems; the reaches of billowy snow looked warm and inviting under the golden radiance; the distant peaks glowed and shone till to the excited fancy of the gazer they might have seemed hewn out of fire. Arthur looked, and the narrow roof seemed to press him down, the four walls of his friend's chalet were a prison.

"I cannot tell it here," he said to himself; "out there under the witness of the sky, in the presence of the pure snow-peaks, it may perhaps be easier."

Maurice was looking at him curiously. "I fear I have been showing impertinent curiosity," he said lightly, "but you drew it on yourself. Why did you interest me so strangely?"

"I spoke impulsively," replied Arthur in the same light manner, "and, I think, rather underrated the difficulties of what I was attempting. For this once you must excuse me. I have a certain disinclination, for which I really am at a loss to account, to telling my story (a very simple one, after all) in this place. If you can preserve your interest till to-morrow, I will promise not to disappoint you. Take me to the point you mentioned just now, and there I will tell you as well as I can."

As he spoke the last words the young man's voice deepened, and there was a certain solemnity in his manner which aroused Maurice's curiosity; but he said nothing more on the subject, and the two men smoked on in silence till the golden glory had passed from the earth, and the snow lay pale once more under the gray mystery of a northern night. Then Maurice looked at his young companion across the interval of shadow, and saw, by the light which gleamed fitfully from the open stove, that there was a deep thoughtfulness on his brow.

Perhaps it was this that drew him on to speak as he did. "You have only begun life," he said, "I have lived out mine, at least all the good that is in it, and yet, I scarcely know how it is, I have been drawn on to speak to you as I seldom speak to either men or women. I don't say I have no friends. I have made many, and good ones too, in the course of my wanderings, and I have appreciated their friendship, but to the best of them all my life has been a sealed-up book." He paused a little, puffing away silently, and Arthur did not speak, only the earnestness on his face deepened as he literally trembled with hope.

For Arthur's heart was as true as steel. He had thrown himself with a self-denying ardor that nothing could curb into Margaret's cause. She was still the queen of his heart, but since those first days, when her regal beauty and apparent friendlessness had driven him nearly mad with longing and desire, his queen had risen to a far loftier place in his thoughts and dreams. There was something very beautiful and rare in this unselfish devotion. Margaret for himself, even if he had found that her husband was dead, Arthur never imagined for a moment; in so far he had gained full victory over his own heart. Margaret happy, Margaret raised to her true position, restored to her undoubted rights, and by his instrumentality,—this was the proud desire of his soul. Therefore it was that he hung upon Maurice's words that evening, rejoicing with trembling that so far he had been successful.

Young and inexperienced as he was, he saw the world-weary man trusted him. This was something gained, a step in the right direction.

Arthur scanned his companion's face curiously during the silence that followed his last words. It was a mobile face, though for years it had been trained to express nothing but cynic indifference to life and its concerns. On this special evening Maurice had given way, and emotions for which few of his friends would have given him credit were writing their impress on his brow.

He got up suddenly, and crossing to the window shut out the pale snow. "It is desolate," he said in a low tone; "it makes one shiver." Then he lighted a small reading-lamp, that cast a warm yellow light over the room, and sat down again. "I saw a picture once," he continued in the same low voice, "and the snow out there makes me think of it. It was an English scene, a bit out of a village, the church lit up from inside, a house near it, the pleasant firelight shining from within crimson curtains; outside, snow and desolation. There was a solitary figure amongst it all—a woman with thin tattered clothes and haggard face in which could be seen the remnants of beauty. She was shivering alone in the cold and darkness, looking piteously in at the light. Some moral was tacked on to it, for, if I remember rightly, I came across this long ago in a book or magazine. The whole runs strangely in my mind to-night."

"And what was the moral?" asked Arthur.

"An unloved life or some such sentimental rubbish."

He tried to laugh off the impression, but Arthur, who was deeply interested, said nothing to change the subject, and almost in spite of himself, as it were, Maurice returned to it.

"Strange how this haunts me!" he muttered. "'An unloved life!'—poets' trash. Women can always console themselves, and the misery of the fair is given rather to reclining on velvet and down than shivering out in the snow."

He laughed aloud, and raising his glass drained it at a draught; but there came a sudden change over his face, his brows knit, his hands worked convulsively. "If I had been mistaken—" he murmured, and his head sank upon his breast. Then, as the futility of his vague thoughts flashed over him, he raised it again. "There is no peace but in forgetfulness," he cried, and pouring out a glass of raw spirit he tossed it down his throat.

There followed a few moments of silence which Arthur feared to break, then Maurice looked across at him with a sad smile. "Young man," he said, "it is a good thing to be happy. Misery and remorse change a man woefully. Ah, it is wonderful," he continued, and there was a plaintive ring in his voice—"wonderful to think how entirely they can change us—how we become morose, dark, fretful—how we look for the old landmarks and find them gone, vanished like a dream—how we become absolutely others than ourselves!"

Arthur's voice was husky as he questioned: "Remorse! what have you to do with that?"

"I once thought nothing. Great God!"—he lifted his gleaming eyes; in the agony of the moment he seemed to have forgotten his companion—"we cannot all have patience like to Thine; and I thought I acted for the best. I took away my obnoxious presence, I left her to her chosen pleasures, I fled from my own disgrace."

His head sank. Emotion, fatigue, strong drink had combined to unnerve him utterly. "The face in the picture is hers," he continued in a low, broken voice; "last night I saw her so—pale, wasted by misery, an outcast—and I opened my arms to take her to a shelter, but she fled from me with horror."

Arthur was listening with an interest so deep and earnest that for a moment he forgot his self-imposed caution. He started forward impulsively, and gazing into the bloodshot eyes of the man who faced him, "It was a lying dream," he cried. "She—"

But he broke off suddenly, for Maurice looked at him in a strange, questioning manner. He could have bitten off his tongue for its betrayal. "I mean—I mean—" he explained falteringly, "it was a strange dream."

His explanation could not mend matters; the mischief was done. Maurice was sufficiently himself to be able to detect a certain reality in those first hasty words. He looked at Arthur with suspicion. Could it be possible that the young man knew something of his history? The bare idea made him hastily resume his cloak of proud reserve.

He drew himself up, composed his face, and threw out his hands with a yawn: "I really should crave your indulgence. Something has come over me to-night. I feel as if I had been talking a considerable amount of nonsense." He shook his fist at the whisky-bottle. "There's the traitor. Then," bending his head courteously, "it is long since I have enjoyed anything so pleasant as an evening gossip with a friend. Really, the worst of this kind of life is the difficulty of passing one's evening. Come! a recipe for killing the time: what do you advise?"

"I know no means but endurance," replied Arthur, trying to speak lightly, though his heart was full, for the earnestness had left Maurice's face, the smile of the cynic was playing round his lips.

Indignant and disappointed, Arthur turned away, in case his less manageable features should betray him. The sphere of his experience was narrow, and therefore it was that in this relapse to his indifferent mood he failed to sympathize with Maurice.

It is only when the world has given thrust upon thrust to the heart, it is only when the dreary cry, "Vanity of vanities!" has written itself in all its desolation on the spirit, that these rapid changes from grave to gay, from deep earnestness to bitter cynicism, can be understood; for they are the product of the world's harsh lessons, the carrying out into practice of a creed taught by repeated disappointments. They speak of the soul's fear of revealing itself. Its best and its highest it would cover over with the frost-work of frivolity and cynicism, lest the pearls of its spiritual being should be trampled under the feet of swine.

Too often, unhappily, the result is that the pearls are buried irrecoverably and for ever, that the soul gains the indifference it assumes—an undying heritage of bitterness.

Ah! it is sad, infinitely sad, to think of a soul torn, ruined, in its struggles with wayward fate—too sad, if there were no beyond. But if man be weak, God is merciful. It may be that for the disappointed there is a haven, after all, in the great Hereafter to which all humanity is hastening.

---

[CHAPTER XII.]

TOLD AMONG THE SNOWS.

Oh, she was fair: her nature once all spring
And deadly beauty, like a maiden sword—
Startlingly beautiful. I see her now!

That was the end of anything like confidential intercourse between Maurice Grey and the young Arthur, so far as the evening passed in the chalet was concerned. They were both tired, and Maurice had once more allowed himself to take rather more strong drink than was good for him.

It was a new fault. Hitherto, in all his dark moods, through his dreary solitude, and, to him, almost as dreary times of gayety, he had always respected himself so far as to refrain from drowning his sorrows in so contemptible a way. Now, it seemed as though a crisis in his fate had come, as though he were destined to be swept away utterly in the numbing torrent of misery and loneliness.

Arthur had to assist him to bed that evening, for he was almost incapable of doing anything for himself. The young man recovered very soon from the indignant displeasure into which Maurice's cynicism had thrown him. He saw the weary man, overcome as much perhaps by emotion and fatigue as by what he had taken, sink into a deep sleep, and a dim idea of the truth dawned in upon his mind. It softened him so much that he could scarcely keep from tears as he looked on the face of his new friend, so fine in all its outlines, yet so evidently wasted by care. And this was the long-sought, the earnestly-desired—Margaret's husband, the arbiter of her destinies, the object of her changeless love.

Arthur felt a new love stirring in his heart; he treated his companion with a tender reverence.

He had some difficulty and met a few harsh words before he could rouse Maurice so far as to half lead, half drag him, into his small bedroom. When at last his efforts had been successful, when he saw him resting in the death-like immobility of sleep upon the pillow, he half trembled about the effect upon Maurice's morning mood of this little night-episode. Would he be humiliated at the remembrance of the weakness into which he had been betrayed, and shut up his heart still more from his companion?

Arthur might have spared himself the trouble of forming any conjecture on the subject. Maurice the next morning remembered very little of his strange revelations, and nothing whatever of the torpor that succeeded.

"I must have been tolerably done up last night," he said lightly when they met at the breakfast-table. "I don't really know how I got to bed. I think I must have undressed in my sleep."

"You seemed half asleep," said Arthur cautiously. "When we separated I was pretty far gone myself. I dare say this strong air has something to do with it."

"It has the effect of champagne upon one's spirits—at least, so they say. I feel anything but lively this morning. However, if you are still in the same mind, we had better try what high latitudes can do for us. Do you feel up to a good climb?"

"Thoroughly—in the very mood for exertion."

"Well, then, old fellow! set to work with a will, for if we intend to sup on anything more inviting than black bread and sausages, we must get back to the hotel this evening. That rascal Karl only half supplied us with bread and meat."

"I could sup on anything after a walk like yesterday's to give me an appetite. However, Master Karl evidently intended that we should return to-day. What a joke he is! If eyes could kill, I should certainly have been slain yesterday when I suggested that we could dispense with attendance."

Maurice smiled: "Poor old Karl! Well, I believe he is one of the few a man can trust. It is my chief reason for keeping him, for really, in some ways, he's an immense bore. That big fellow is as frightened of bogies as a baby. The dark weather we had sent him nearly out of his wits. It was chiefly in consideration for his feelings that I put up at the hotel the other day."

"Then I ought, certainly, to be very thankful to him," said Arthur warmly; "he will think I have made him a poor return. I suppose we may leave our knapsacks under the care of your old woman here?" he continued. "It's all very well to talk of their convenience and that kind of thing; I can only say that my shoulders ached considerably yesterday; they've not recovered yet."

Maurice laughed: "You are a young traveller, my dear fellow; however, I'll be merciful. Leave them here, by all means, and start this time untrammelled. But come! Are you ready? Now, if you take my advice—and I know something of the mountains—you should begin quietly. We can quicken the pace when we get into the swing and get up the wind—two very serious matters, I can assure you."

There had been sufficient thaw to make the roads practicable, at least to men with strong boots and leathern gaiters. Many of the steeper paths were nothing better than watercourses. But this was a matter of minor import to the two men. It took Arthur some time, as his friend had predicted, to get into the swing, and they plodded on for some miles in silence, Arthur turning over and over in his head that tale, so oft told in the silence of his heart, of his first love, which had come upon him like a kind of magic, awakening him to a truer comprehension of life, a fuller appreciation of beauty—the tale which he must tell, before many minutes should pass over, to another—to a man unsympathetic perhaps, and hard. Once or twice he ventured to steal a glance at Maurice. His face was inscrutable. For the moment he was really nothing more than the quiet English gentleman, patient and enduring, as becomes one of his race—manly in his way of meeting difficulties, determined when it is necessary to overcome them. In walking, more especially in climbing, there is abundant room for the display of character, and in Switzerland a young Englishman of breeding and degree may be known at once by his bearing.

Their route was very lonely. It would have shocked an American traveller, who does not care to pass over any but well-frequented roads, where pedestrians, chaises-à-porteur and heavily-laden mules are to be met with in numbers. But with the early break-up of the season these things had gone. Even the small sheds where light refreshments are temptingly displayed in the summer months were empty and deserted; the places of the men who for the small sum of fifty centimes had been wont to awaken the echoes of the everlasting hills, "knew them no more." Maurice and Arthur had the mountains to themselves. They reached about midday the point of which Maurice had spoken. He had not overpraised it. After a last little bit of climbing, so steep that it had taken all their attention to keep a footing on the slippery rock, they reached a kind of rocky plateau partly covered with snow, partly patched with the emerald green which belongs peculiarly to the Alps. Standing near a ragged pine tree, they looked up. The sky was of a deep unruffled blue, and against it, clear as crystal, shone out the dazzle of the snow-peaks; lower down, a glacier, rendered pure by the late snow-falls, swept a radiant ice-river between gray, cloud-like rocks, in whose crevices the rich soft moss had made a home; lower still, tier above tier, rose the straight stems and green crowns of the hardy pine; while far below, at an almost inconceivable depth, that which could not be seen made itself felt—a torrent had been making for its waters a way throughout the ages, and its roar and hiss rose evermore into the daylight.

Arthur gazed silently for a few minutes, then turned to his friend a pale and earnest face. "Beautiful!" he said in a low, impassioned voice. He bent his young head. "It make me think of her."

Maurice smiled. He was pleased with the frank expression of enjoyment, and in his answer there was an elder man's indulgence to the amiable weakness of a younger: "Come! here's a forsaken shed looks as if it had been left on purpose—faces the sunshine and sheltered from the wind. We can sit down and rest if you like, take our brandy and water, and eat the crusts we were provident enough to bring, for, by Jove! in these regions, at least, a man can't live on air; then you must tell me about this mysterious 'her,' in whom I really begin to take an alarming interest. Why, old fellow, what's come over you? Here, take some brandy. You've been doing too much. One oughtn't to overdo this kind of thing at first."

But Arthur put away the brandy-flask with an attempt at a smile. Not fatigue, but a sudden emotion had overcome him. Margaret's fate seemed in his hands. It was trembling in the balance, and he felt, for the moment, powerless by excess of feeling.

"I will drink nothing, thank you," he said; and he sat down on a stone bench in full view of the radiant snow-peaks. They were sheltered from the bleak wind by one of the walls; the opening of the shed let in a flood of sunlight. It might have been a summer's day.

Maurice spread his overcoat on the ground and stretched himself out luxuriously, with his face toward Arthur. "After labor, rest," he said lightly; "but come, I am impatient; let the mystic lady appear."

He laughed as he spoke, but there was no answering merriment in Arthur's face. He looked away from Maurice toward the mountains. "I wish to God she might!" he said earnestly. "If her sweet face were here my poor words would be useless. It would tell its own tale of long-suffering, of angelic patience, of truth, of purity. But—" he felt, though he did not dare to look round, that the face of his companion expressed calm philosophic wonder, that his lips were curled into the faintest possible sneer—"I did not intend to rhapsodize. My tale should speak for itself plain, unvarnished facts, which I defy the falsest being that ever lived to gainsay."

He paused, and Maurice sighed. "The young man is evidently cracked on this point," was the burden of his thought. "I am in for a good half hour of ecstasies. Well, I brought it on myself. Patience is the only remedy.—Permit me," he said aloud; "this promises to be rather exciting—I must hear it through the medium of my usual sedative." He lit a cigar, and the blue wreaths of smoke curled up into the sunshine, while Arthur, his task rendered all the more difficult by his companion's nonchalance, struggled to find the truant words in which he had thought to clothe his subject. "It is not very long since I first met her," he said quietly, "but it seems a lifetime, for the meeting changed me. In the light of her history I read that life has a certain reality; in the depths of her sad eyes I saw that endurance and self-denial are beautiful and good. It must have been early in the month of May—yes, I remember, the Exhibition of the Royal Academy had not long been open—I strolled in one day to amuse myself and pass an hour or two of the afternoon. My cousin and fiancée was to have met me there. She did not appear, and I was considerably indignant, for at that time I believed that all womankind owed me a debt of gratitude, simply for being and giving them the light of my countenance. You see, women had spoiled me from my babyhood upward. But enough about myself.

"As I was wandering about, discontented and cross, a picture took my fancy. I sat down on the seat that faced it to examine it in detail. There was only one other on the same bench (for it was tolerably late and the rooms were thinning), a lady, but I paid little attention to her, as her dress was shabby and she wore a close bonnet and thick crape veil. It had been my habit to ogle only the well-dressed ladies—others offended my fastidious taste; but when this stranger fell back suddenly in a deep faint I did my duty as a gentleman (there was no one else in the room at the moment)—I rose hastily to offer her assistance.

"Then for the first time I saw her face, as the bonnet and veil had fallen back. Such a face! I wish I could describe it—-its purity of outline, its exquisite marble-like coloring, its deep sadness. She had a quantity of golden hair: as I tried to raise her it fell down in a perfect shower over my arm. I was paralyzed—a sudden fever possessed me. I could have carried off the mysterious lady there and then, and hidden her away from every eye. But do what I would I could not restore her to consciousness, and I began to tremble. I had a kind of objection to calling in the assistance of any passing stranger. At the critical moment, however, like the good genius in a fairy-tale, my kind little cousin appeared, and in a very few moments took the matter out of my hands altogether. She was as enthusiastic as I had been, and far more successful. In a few moments we had the pleasure of seeing our fair lady restored, and of taking her back to her home, which turned out to be only a miserable lodging in the gloomiest part of London.

"If I had been in love with her in her fainting condition, I tell you honestly that when I saw her eyes open, when I heard her voice—above all, when I read that deep sadness in her face—I was ten times more in love than before. But such was the influence of her gentle womanly dignity I dared express nothing either by word or sign. She thanked us with all the cordiality of a lady, but utterly and absolutely denied herself to us for the future, and I could not think of disobeying. In accepting our services she was like a queen dispensing her favors. All I could hope was that kindly chance would favor me. For the next few days I could think of nothing else: her face followed me like a dream of beauty that haunts the soul. My one hope was in the picture-galleries. As you may believe, I attended them daily, and some days later I saw her again in the same place. This time she did not see me. I watched her, myself unseen. Unhappily, a false counsellor was at hand. He had traced the direction of my glance before I knew he was near. I took his odious advice; I was weak enough to believe him. In disobedience to her express commands I visited her at the address to which we had taken her."

Maurice's cigar had died down; he was listening with apparent interest. "And you received a rebuff for your pains," he said lightly.

Arthur flushed: "A rebuff! say rather a rebuke; and such a gentle, womanly one that it cut me to the very soul. I felt that, coûte que coûte, I must know more of her; but I could not do it in that way, you know. I was puzzled and baffled, doubtful how to act. Then came in the gentle self-denial, the noble trustfulness of another woman to my assistance. My cousin Adèle read my sadness, and was not long in putting her finger on the cause. She helped me; she made herself Margaret's friend—"

Arthur stopped suddenly. He had let out the name, which he had intended to bring in at the end of his tale—a grand finale.

His sudden and evidently conscious pause gave the error significance. In a moment Arthur saw what he had done. A tremor passed through Maurice's frame. He turned round sharply and fixed the young man with his stern eyes. "Why do you stop?" he said. "Go on, if your tale be worth the telling."

And Arthur continued falteringly: "We were able to give her some assistance—that is, my cousin did. In her lonely and unprotected condition she had been tortured by the persecutions of the man who, as I afterward found out, had wrought the wrong from the effects of which she had been suffering during those long years. To live out her solitary life in peace, she had hidden herself in an out-of-the-way seaside village. Her visit to London had been made for the purpose of gaining some employment, her income proving insufficient for the education of her only child, a daughter, whom she had brought up in strict seclusion."

Maurice's face was turned from Arthur, but as, almost insensibly to himself, the young man's voice grew stern and deep, he saw that his companion winced and cowered. It was almost as though he had received some unlooked-for blow.

"In London," continued Arthur, "the ruffian came upon her traces. Mrs. Grey feared and hated him—the very sight of him was odious to her. It was only to save her name—her husband's name, as I afterward learnt—from public notice that she refrained at this time from calling in the strong arm of the law.

"To baffle him and preserve her privacy she took refuge in flight; my cousin helped her, and from that day dated their warm friendship. She returned then to her own home—the little village by the seaside. Adèle knew her address. I was not taken into their confidence; I was suffered to be useful, but I knew nothing, and yet even in that usefulness I reckoned myself happy.

"After this weeks passed by of which I can scarcely give an account—weeks during which my life might have been summed up in one short sentence—I was in love. I felt it was hopeless. My cousin, who knew more of Mrs. Grey's history than I did, let me feel this whenever—and it was very often—she was the topic of conversation between us. She herself had not given me the faintest encouragement, yet I hoped against hope. I thought, I studied, I planned, I put off my idleness. My dream was to gain fame and distinction by my own efforts. It was all for her. Ah!"—once more the young man was warming to his subject—"words fail when I try to express what her influence was. I became a different man; the memory of her goodness and beauty, of her life of self-denial, changed me utterly. But at last the craving to see her face again, to know more certainly that my hope was vain, became almost too great to be borne. You see, I was young, and had not been accustomed to this kind of thing. It preyed upon my health and spirits. Besides all this, certain disagreeable and—as I must always maintain—utterly unfounded rumors with regard to Mrs. Grey were flying about."

Again Maurice winced and shrank, but this time Arthur did not pause.

He went on rapidly: "These things maddened me: if she had been an angel from heaven I could not have believed more steadfastly in her truth. I longed to make myself her champion, to gain from herself the right to protect her. Then once more my cousin helped me. She gave me the address I wanted, she sent me to find our friend, she told me to offer her my services.

"As you may imagine, it was not necessary to urge the matter. I found my way to the seaside village. I entered the little cottage where her quiet, lonely life had been lived out, and there I learned the secret of her sadness. It had wrought upon her fearfully since we parted in London. When first I saw her she was sitting in her garden; I was at the window of her drawing-room. I thought that death was written on her face, it was so worn and wasted, so utterly forlorn, but beautiful still. Another trouble had come to overwhelm her: her little child, a girl, in whom all the affection of her heart was centred, had been stolen from her in some mysterious way."

In his earnestness Arthur's voice grew husky: "I forgot my own desires; all I had come to say passed away from my mind; only I threw myself heart and soul at her feet, imploring her to use me for her service, and"—the boy's voice sank—"she trusted me; she told me something of her history; she let me know that she had one craving, one longing desire."

He paused. Maurice had risen to a sitting position; his face was buried in his hands, his great frame was convulsed. "It was—?" he asked, fixing his eyes suddenly on his companion's face. "Speak, and at once."

Arthur rose and stood before him. "Maurice Grey," he said, "your wife is pure as an angel, white as the snow up there. Her one thought through these long years has been of you. The name she teaches her child to lisp is yours. She loves you only; her heart is single. All she asks is this—to speak to you face to face, to see you again before she dies. This is the quest that brought me here, for I have hunted for you through the length and breadth of Europe—sought you as a man seeks his enemy. It was to tell you this, to bring you a message from your wife."

He bowed his head: "God knows it has been done in singleness of heart. All I wish or seek is her restoration to happiness. I have not said half I intended. I greatly fear I am a poor pleader, but, Maurice Grey, I call upon you to listen to me. Return to England, see your wife, judge for yourself; you will find then that you have both been the victims of some terrible mistake."

He ceased, but Maurice did not answer, and once more his face was averted.

Arthur's heart sank. "It has been all in vain," he said to himself. "Oh, how shall I tell Margaret?"

Mechanically the two rose, and Maurice preceded Arthur, without a single word passing between them, until they stood where two roads met. There Maurice stopped and turned to his companion. "You must pardon me," he said, "if I say very little just now; I must be alone." He put his hand to his head. "I must think. The hotel is over there; you cannot possibly miss the road. I must return to the chalet." He seemed to be passing through some severe mental struggle, for he paused, then added, "In the mean time, for your kind intention to her and to me I thank you."

He turned away, and in a few moments was lost to Arthur's following gaze in the intricacies of the mountain-paths. Sadly, yet with a certain rising of hope in his spirit, the young man went on to the hotel.

---

[PART V.]