"Isn't she nice and jolly?" Roy demanded, when the door closed behind Lucille. "I like her, don't you? She has told me lots of things while you were asleep. Only think, her father and mother were both guillotined. Both of them had their heads cut off. And they hadn't done one single thing to make them deserve it. They were awfully good and kind to everybody, she says. And she was only a little girl then, and when they were dead, somebody took her away to England, and she was there three or four years. And then she came back to France, and she lives with some people at a place called Verdun. She says they give her a home, and she works for them. And she would like to go to England again some day."
But Lucille de St. Roques had not told Roy the most recent sorrow which had come to her. She let it out to Captain Ivor a day or two later. Only one year before this date she had become engaged to young Théodore de Bertrand, son of the old couple downstairs; and three months later he had been drawn for the conscription. No use to plead that he was practically an only son, since the second son Jacques was a ne'er-do-well, who had taken himself off, nobody knew whither. More soldiers were wanted by the First Consul for his schemes of foreign conquest, and young De Bertrand had to go. Scarcely four months after his departure, news came that he had been shot in a sortie in the Low Countries. Large tears filled Lucille's eyes, and dropped slowly.
"Ah, so many more!" she said. "Thousands, thousands, called upon to be slain, for nothing! Not for their country, but for the ambition of one bad man. It makes no difference, Monsieur, that they love not the usurper. My Théodore was of the Royalist party, yet he had to go. And the poor old father and mother—they are left without one son in their old age!"
(To be continued.)
[SOME PRACTICAL HINTS ON COSMETIC MEDICINE.]
By "THE NEW DOCTOR."
PART III.
THE TEETH.
That "The Pearls of the Mouth," according to an Eastern expression, are a great adjunct to the beauty of the face nobody will dispute. But that the irregular, saw-edged series of half-decayed stumps that not uncommonly take their place are disfiguring, every woman who possesses them knows to her cost.