that she knows people who live in the same Avenue; so she is quite happy, as she can now write and 'get at the whole history,' she says." Dreadful busybody," added my sister.

Madame's Austrian officer, too, would come to my wheeledchair on the Promenade, and exercise his English. He had undoubtedly grown a much graver man in these short weeks. I think that it was Madame's unconscious influence that had put to flight a certain conceit and frivolity, his most notable characteristics when he came to Meran.

"I had not thought it possible for such a life to be," he ruminated, somewhat incoherently, one day. "I explain myself? No? Well, it is this way: The gracious lady, your friend, lives a life that I had not imagined. So beautiful; and not coquette. Is it possible? Full of brightness; can you say, brightness? Thank you. Brightness, and yet none of the feminine interests. How do you call? No toilet-arts, I mean; and no entourage; no emulations-rivalities. These are the things that are like the air that beautiful ladies of society breathe, while they are young. Is it not so? Yet, they exist not for your friend. Wonderful! Ah, yes, of course. Duty! Austrian ladies, also, feel the claims of duty. But we don't ask them to combine the rôles of wife and daughter. 'And private secretary,' you add? Merciful heavens! And sick nurse'? Du lieber Gott! More and more unthinkable. It is admirable; and I should have believed it beyond the strength of human nature, had I not Her life is full, with all the essentials left out."

seen.

"What are the essentials,' besides 'rivalities' and 'toilet'?" I ventured to ask.

"Gnädiges Fraülein! That I should have to instruct you!" he almost moaned. "You are of the North, all of you-cold. Love! love should be the very spirit and fount of a lovely young life like hers."

He was speaking in a low, concentrated tone. I suppose he talked because he felt he must. He was, evidently, perfectly candid. When a soul lays itself bare in your grasp, you naturally touch it gently. I told him-contradicting him, but doing it as kindly as I was able-that her life was full of love.

"Love such as one may give to one's great-grandfather," he put in, almost angrily.

"No, Herr Lieutenant; not at all! The tender love one may give to one's baby-child that wholly depends on one; and the warm affection one gives to one's best friend-and there is nothing, nothing, so close and strong as that love; and a host of loves, besides, that lie between these two distant poles of tenderness. And, remember, a human being does not live by the heart only. We have, or we ought to have, a life of the brain. If that be a full life, so much the better and happier for all of us. I am glad you talked to me. Let me ask you, very gently, did you ever before think of women as humanbroadly human ?”

After a long, long, pause, he said: "It may not be absolutely dull to live for nothing but the serious. Our sober German neighbors feel so!" His bright blue eyes had a cloud in them-no tear, only a reflection of mental fog. It was a peculiarity of his liquified-turquoise eyes that, when he was puzzled, their pupils vanished in a kind of misty grayness.

Again we sat silent. The noisy Passer stream hurried by us to join the Etsch, which becomes the Adige farther on, in soft-tongued Italy. There is not much need of conversation for those who rest by a brawling little river. Lower down on the Promenade the band was playing Strauss music; oxen were dragging creaking wains across the bridge from Untermaïs; and peasants, here and there, made even a braver show in their bright costumes, than the fashionable strangers, clustered about the band-stand. My chair-man smoked a furtive pipe, half hidden by a neighboring tree; and probably marveled at the long and silent visit paid me.

1

At last something, possibly the magnetism of my chairman's eye, awoke a recollection in the Herr Lieutenant's mind, and he sprang to his feet, made his rectangular bow, and apologized for being "distracted, distraught, how do you say?" He thought I "was certainly going somewhere" when we met; and he "impeached, prevented. Pardon; pardon." In the courtly fashion of his nation he stooped to kiss my glove, and was gone in a trice; gone, to join my friendly Danish child, to whom the young officer was always so good, actually playing with him by the half-hour together; gone, just at the wrong moment; for Mrs. Woods came hurrying up to me, with all the importance of one bearing great news. Her gossip, for once, was deeply interesting.

"I

"I've just heard from Paris, my dear," she cried. have friends actually living next door to the de Belforts. Alice Cunningham writes she has known the Vansiddarts for years, and they have a flat under the same roof with your friends. Have I mislaid Alice's letter? Ah, no; it's all right. 'I hope the old gentleman was not selfish. But I dare say he did not know how to get out of a difficulty.' Well, the long and short of it is, when the ward came home from school 'for good,' Monsieur de Belfort had been a year or two a widower; and I can see, by the way Alice tells her story, she doesn't love the Vansiddart sisters too well. She says they hoped, first of all, that he would marry the eldest; or perhaps it was rather that the eldest, and each of the others, hoped to marry him. And then they rather quarreled among themselves about him; and finally they all united in a determined effort to secure him for the youngest and best-looking. Alice says: "They were passées, every one of them.' By way of a supreme stroke of diplomacy, Miss Vansiddart first said to Monsieur de Belfort that his ward would soon need some one to take her to parties and to matronize her generally-I'm quoting Alice almost word for word-but he wouldn't see it,' as people say. The next thing was that Miss Rose threw herself at the head of the ward of sixteen, cultivating the girl's friendship assiduously, till the elder sister judged the time ripe, and she went, 'as an old friend,' to suggest that Monsieur de Belfort should give the girl a companion of her own age. (The' own age' delights Alice-Rose must have been about forty!) Well, Alice says, 'the chaperon idea did not catch on' (like most people in the very best society, Alice is fond of slang, my dear); 'neither did the youthful companion "catch on," (there it is again). 'Before Miss Vansiddart saw him again, Monsieur de Belfort and his ward were off to Switzerland. Pending his return, Rose had the sweetest toilets planned and put together; and her elders were rather less well-dressed than in other years. In fact they were combining their forces, you see, for an ordered attack on the old gentleman. But a great surprise awaited them. Monsieur met them immediately on his return and introduced his wife!' Alice here takes a backward glance: 'The girl and her guardian had always been the best of good comrades. In her holidays, since she had been a mite of a thing, her main delights had been pony-riding beside his cob,

and natural history-' very unnatural for a girl, I call it, don't you? 'They were so engrossed by their pursuits that they had no time for society, except the society of some people of like tastes. It would appear,' she says, 'that he told his ward, as soon as he got her away to Switzerland, that the gossips would either separate them, or saddle them with a duenna, or marry them; and she was to take a whole fortnight to think which would be the least unpleasant solution. "Nous séparer ?" cried the girl, in grief and fear. "Ah, bonpapa, won't you marry me?" and she kissed him. You see, she was the merest child. She had her fortnight to consider; but her mind was made up in that first moment. Bonpapa should not be afflicted with a duenna. That matter settled, she devoted her thoughts to the best way of disguising the regrettable fact of her youth. It was certainly wonderful what dress and deportment did in the way of aging her. She was simply the schoolgirl, with a suspicion even of the tomboy about her, when she left Paris three years ago; but she returned staid and demure, and looking three, to five-and-twenty, a month after her wedding. What do you think of that?"

"I find it pathetic, Mrs. Woods," I said.

“Oh, well, I don't know about 'pathetic'; but isn't it interesting? So, it was all news to you? With your opportunities, dear, I should have found out a good deal more than you appear to have done. Bye-bye."

A fortnight afterwards there was a sad procession to the railway station, to see our Paris friends start on their homeward journey.

It is a great mistake saying good-by; a mistake, too, seeing people off; but Jane, and the Herr Lieutenant, and the hotel proprietor, and the Viennese professor, and everybody who had more than a bowing acquaintance with Monsieur and Madame, came upon the platform.

It was absolutely true to Madame's character that she should be as watchful of her husband, as helpful towards him, as if he were her sole thought at the moment; and, at the same time, as graciously observant of her obsequious courtiers on the platform, as if her rôle were simply that of a queen on some great ceremonial occasion. For each she had some farewell word, grave, or sweet, or thankful, that the hearer received

as a thing specially, personally applicable, and therefore most precious. A manner like her's, and the power to coin her happy phrases, are royal gifts.

And do you know that we never more saw our sovereign lady?

The papers, three days later, had a telegraphic announcement of a terrible railway accident in France. The Herr Lieutenant brought it me, saying hoarsely, with his finger on the paragraph: "Is there any danger-any chance-?"

I answered with a question: "Could they have got so far? They were to stop at Innsbruck; and at some Swiss town-?"

And then it became clear to us, if they carried out their plan, they would have been in the ill-fated train! But they would only travel on, if Monsieur were not very tired. we prayed that they might have been delayed!

How

There was suspense, till Gaglinani's Messenger, or some London paper, brought us horrible news; telling us that an old valet, himself almost unhurt, had identified Madame among the killed. She was shot out of the train, as was the servant, in the collision. He saw, and spoke one moment with her. She must, then, have gone back to try to extricate her husband, before part of the wreck of the train, which had been tottering on the edge, went rolling down with the crumbling embankment; for the rescue party found Madame's dear hand fast held in that of her insensible husband.

A month later we heard from old Victor, the valet, that Monsieur still lived, might live long, now, Dr. Berthelet said, but had wholly lost his memory, and was, in fact, childish.

The life that was taken!

And the worn, ailing remnant of life that was left!

One other thing we know; the Herr Lieutenant offered his services for the winter to Monsieur, as German and English reader or secretary. His health obliged him to seek an extension of leave. He could as well spend the winter in Nice, he said, as in Meran. Would Monsieur de Belfort make any use he could of an idle man, whose time would hang very heavily on his hands?

But Monsieur-ailing and childish-would never again need a secretary. That was the sorrowful answer Victor sent.