Jeanne d'Arc of the eighteenth century, pining for the weapons and uniform of the martial sex, but yielding her secret, and forsaking her arms, in the interest of her king. On the other side the blushless captain of dragoons listened, with downcast eyes, to the sentimental compliments of Beaumarchais, and suffered himself, without a smile, to be compared to the Maid of Orleans,' says the Duc de Broglie. Our manners are obviously softened,' wrote Voltaire. 'D'Eon is a Pucelle d'Orléans who has not been burned.' To de Broglie, d'Eon described himself as the most unfortunate of unfortunate females'! D'Eon returned to France, where he found himself but a nine days' wonder. It was observed that this pucelle too obviously shaved; that in the matter of muscular development she was a little Hercules; that she ran upstairs taking four steps at a stride; that her hair, like that of Jeanne d'Arc, was coupé en rond, of a military shortness; and that she wore the shoes of men, with low heels, while she spoke like a grenadier! At first d'Eon had all the social advertisement which was now his one desire, but he became a nuisance, and, by his quarrels with Beaumarchais, a scandal. In drawing-room plays he acted his English adventures with the great play-writer, whose part was highly ridiculous. Now d'Éon pretended to desire to take the veil' as a nun, now to join the troops being sent to America. He was consigned to retreat in the Castle of Dijon (1779); he had become a weariness to official mankind. He withdrew (1781-85) to privacy at Tonnerre, and then returned to London in the semblance of a bediamonded old dame, who, after dinner, did not depart with the ladies. He took part in fencing matches with great success, and in 1791 his library was sold at Christie's, with his swords and jewels. The catalogue bears the motto, from Juvenal,

Quale decus rerum, si virginis auctio fiat,

no doubt selected by the learned little man. The snuff-box of the Empress Elizabeth, a gift to the diplomatist of 1756, fetched £2 13s. 6d.! The poor old boy was badly hurt at a fencing match in his sixty-eighth year, and henceforth lived retired from arms in the house of a Mrs. Cole, an object of charity. He might have risen to the highest places if discretion had been among his gifts, and his career proves the quantula sapientia of the French Government before the Revolution. In no other time or country could the King's Secret' have run a course far more incredible than even the story of the Chevalier d'Eon.

359

MY COUSIN CYNTHIA.1

BY MRS. PHILIP CHAMPION DE CRESPIGNY.

'HONOR,' Cynthia said suddenly, over the edge of the hammock in which she had been swaying herself gently to and fro in the shadow of a big ilex, 'I'm in the dickens of a fix, and I don't know how to get out.'

'You shouldn't use bad language,' I replied, from the luxurious depths of a garden chair. If you throw one foot over the side the other will follow it naturally, and you will get out quite easily.'

'I don't mean that I can't get out of the hammock. It's the fix I'm talking about; a very serious one, the worst I've had yet.' She knitted her brow and turned her pretty blue eyes to me appealingly.

'The usual sort, I suppose,' was my indifferent reply. Cynthia was always getting into trouble of some kind, and it was impossible to become wildly excited upon each fresh occasion.

this time?'

She hesitated, and lay back in the hammock.

What is it

'It's rather a long story, and I must begin at the beginning.' I suppose you want me to help you,' I remarked. It was not the first time that I had helped her out of what she called a fix. 'It was last year it happened-before I left school.'

'Did you say "Yes" when you meant "No," or "No" when you meant "Yes" this time?

Cynthia raised her eyebrows in deprecating surprise.

'You know I only did that once, Honor; and I am sure anyone is liable to in the fluster of the moment. The wonder is how people ever say what they mean on those occasions.'

'You haven't told me the trouble yet,' I said; and lying back in the low straw chair I awaited my cousin's revelations with languid curiosity.

'I can't quite remember now how it began,' Cynthia said thoughtfully, but I wrote some letters to somebody.'

'Who was he?'

'I don't know; I never saw him,' was the surprising answer.

1 Copyright, 1904, by Mrs. Philip Champion de Crespigny, in the United States of America.

I sat up in my chair.

'Cynthia !' I exclaimed in horror, 'what do you mean? What kind of letters ? '

'The very silliest kind of letters,' she replied, nodding her head solemnly. That is just where the trouble is.'

6

'Do you mean to say you wrote silly letters to a man you had never seen?' I asked, speaking very slowly, hardly able to believe my own ears. 'Really silly letters?"

'Perfectly idiotic letters,' Cynthia replied placidly.

I stared at her for a moment in speechless wonder.

'What in the world made you do it?' I asked at length.

She turned her face sideways on the red cushion under her head, and drew the edge of the hammock down so that her view of me might be uninterrupted.

It happened like this,' she said; and I confess my curiosity was now thoroughly aroused. The situation appeared so very unusual, even for Cynthia to have brought about. You remember the high brick wall that surrounded the garden at Wintersbury?' I nodded.

'One day I was walking along the path through the lilacs when a stone came flying over the top of the wall and fell at my feet. Something was tied to it, and naturally enough I picked it up. It was a note, and there was no address on the outside.'

'It would hardly have been on the inside,' I remarked, as she waited for me to speak.

'So I opened it,' she went on, ignoring my observation, and there was no beginning to it either, and it was just signed M. P.' 'Do you mean that he was a member of Parliament,' I asked, astonished.

Cynthia laughed.

'Of course not; they were just his initials. One of his names began with M., and the other with P., and that's all I know about him to this day.'

6

'Answered it,' Cynthia replied serenely.

'But how did you know it was meant for you?'

'It probably wasn't.'

Cynthia, you are hopeless!' I cried, flinging myself back in the chair again. I never knew whether to laugh or to cry at her inconsequence.

'It had no address on it, Honor, and it fell at my feet, so it

was mine as much as anyone else's. I couldn't give it to the owner, so why not take the good the gods had sent me? It was a very nice letter,' she added thoughtfully.

There was a pause, for I could really think of nothing to say.

'So I wrote a very nice answer,' she went on, and signed it with my initials, and put no address on it, and threw it over the wall and hoped for luck.'

"What happened then?'

'He must have got it, because he sent another letter with my initials on it this time. It was a very nice one, too, and I wrote an answer to match; and then they got nicer and nicer. In fact, it gives me the cold creeps to think of how nice they got in the end.' She wrinkled her brows and looked really perturbed. I sincerely hoped she was.

'I can't think how you can do such silly things, Cynthia. You will get into serious trouble some day.'

'There is every prospect of serious trouble now, it seems to me,' she replied, with that exasperating serenity.

'Besides being foolish, it's so-so horrid,' I said again, at a loss for a word. 'How you can do it is beyond me altogether.' I looked at her as severely as I could, but it was almost impossible to be really angry with that vision of dimpled loveliness.

'It's no use to think about that now,' she answered, shaking her head sagely. M. P. has the letters. That's the only thing really worth thinking about.'

'Did

you never meet at all?

'Never. We had arranged to meet when, if you remember, scarlet fever broke out in the school, and we were all bundled home. It annoyed me then, but now I'm inclined to think it was a direct interference of Providence.'

'One could almost have wished that Providence had sent the scarlet fever a little sooner,' I remarked drily.

'He wrote once more, asking me to address his letters to “M. P., Wilworthy Post Office."

'That is not far from here.'

Cynthia nodded and went on:

'He also asked how he was to address mine. Then I got ill with scarlet fever directly I arrived home, and didn't answer. After that I didn't want to write any more, so I stopped.'

I watched the mottled sunshine playing over Cynthia's golden locks, and remained silent. Lying there in the hammock, with a

brilliant gleam of light on the water of the lake beyond her, she would have made a charming subject for an artist.

'Then about a week ago I remembered the letters,' Cynthia continued dreamily, and it struck me what a pity it would be if they should prove the means of blasting an otherwise successful career.'

'You mean you got a sudden panic that Mr. Horndean, or Ned Bromley, or one of the others would find out about them,' I said cynically.

So I wrote and asked M. P. to send them back,' she finished. 'Has he done so ? '

'No he says he will give them back if I will meet him for the purpose; that after all that has passed between us he thinks he has a right to claim an interview. And so the matter stands.'

'It's certainly a very pretty fix.'

'It's the deuce,' Cynthia said, calmly.

I raised my eyebrows.

'It's no use to look at me like that, Honor,' she went on. 'What is the use of saying it's a great pity, or very unfortunate? It isn't; it's the deuce. There's no doubt about it.'

She flung herself back in the hammock, and contemplated the flickering shadows in silence, making lazy and ineffectual feints at a drone buzzing noisily above her head.

'I see nothing for it but to go and fetch them,' I said, after a long pause.

'Wild horses wouldn't get me there,' Cynthia answered with decision.

'Why? What are you afraid of?'

She made no answer.

'You had better make an effort to get the letters back,' I added.

'You haven't a notion what kind of a man he is, and you may find yourself really in trouble over it.'

'Of course, that's the horror of it; he holds my fate in his hands,' she said dismally. Suppose I were to get engaged, he could produce one of the letters and blight all my prospects of happiness, as they do in books.'

'How many did you write?'

'Six. He could break off six engagements that way. Think