old clothes, and thinks he has done his duty! And there was poor Cornford, bless him! I don't wish to say a word against the dead, but what a time of it I had with him! My dear Perry, don't say I know nothing about men."

"Oh! of course, you know just what experience teaches you," Perry rejoined, sulkily; "a woman can't go beyond that. I don't expect you to have any sympathy with what I suffer."

"Twiddle-dum-dee," Mrs Cornford said, with something like a tear in her eye. "If I didn't care for you, you might go downhill as fast as you like. But I want to rouse you to your duty."

་་

"Good Heavens! where did you learn to talk like that?"

"It's everybody's duty to be respectable," Mrs Cornford said, with vigour, "and it's nobody's duty to be an ass. Crying after Kitty is about as wise as crying for the moon, and crying because you can't get the moon of a piece with it," -she added, fiercely, "the life you pride yourself in leading now is a disgrace to the poor woman who bore you."

Perry turned exceedingly red.

"Yes, sir, a disgrace. You spend your time in smoking, and drinking, and bad company. You neglect your work; you leave a good subject in such a mess that no one can tell which is the top and which is the bottom; you disgust your best friends by debasing as delightful a genius as painter-I mean vagabond-was ever born with. A few months more of this sort of thing, and Perugino Neeve's name won't be worth a farthing dip among connoisseurs and picture buyers."

Perry, at this, dashed about the room like one mad.

"How can I work?" he cried, "when my mind is full of her? She may be false-as you say-or true. What has that to do with the matter? If a man loves a woman, he goes on loving her, and there is no help for it; and I shall go on loving Kitty, and there is no help for that either-except absinthe."

"You-don't-take-absinthe?" faltered Mrs Cornford, with sudden pallor, adding: "if so, God save you, my poor Perry, for neither man nor woman can!"

"How you jump at conclusions!" Perry went on, still acting the lunatic to perfection. "Did I say that I drank absinthe, or that I was about to drink absinthe, or that I was about to be about drinking absinthe-pray did I or did I not, my good Polly? But women haven't so much as a grain of logic in their compositions, and it is of little use talking."

Mrs Cornford was not to be so put off.

"Dear Perry, good Perry," she said, laying her hands lovingly about his arms; "for the love of God, speak the truth. It is poison, you know, my dear, and I don't want to see you go down to your grave besotted with the worst dram-drinking that ever was; you haven't-you won't, Perry, on your word; you haven't-you won't," and then she broke down, and began

to cry.

Perry, being unused to see women in tears, and Mrs Cornford's tears being wholly unprecedented, set to work to restore her after the most extravagant fashion. First and foremost, he darted to the door and called out, wildly

"Tommie, Binnie, Mimi, make haste, my good girls! Your aunt is in a fit."

Then he rushed to and fro, overturning chairs, easels, and portfolios, in search of restoratives; and finally seized hold of a tin can, full of paint-water, and soused poor Mrs Cornford with it, ere she could defend herself. His act certainly attained its end, for Mrs Cornford's tears ceased to flow, but she was roused to such a pitch of indignation, that she could find no vent in words.

What followed can be better imagined than described. Perry, seeing himself worsted in the encounter, made an ignominious retreat from the studio, and absinthe was not again mentioned for some time.

But Mrs Cornford's anger was the thing of an hour, and when it had passed she was as keenly alive to the import of Perry's speech as ever.

She had known Perry since he was a curly-haired, marbleloving, apple-adoring little man of four years, and loved him with her whole heart. He had ever been what he now was,

beautiful enough for a god, impulsive as a woman, naïve as a child, gifted exceedingly, passionate, sensitive, versatile, weak. And she knew that nothing would ever change him—except absinthe. How could she save him, her adopted boy, her fellow-student, her critic, her friend, her darling? How could she save him from this great perdition?

Poor Polly Cornford was a bad hater, or she would have begun hating Kitty, though such a course were but to imitate the savages who buffet their unpropitious and faithless gods. From Kitty, she felt it was vain to hope anything. If Perry were saved, it must be by herself, unaided and alone.

In the weeks following, she watched Perry much as a cat watches a mouse; asking the why and the wherefore of any prolonged absence, searching his face with an eagerness at once fierce and pathetic, flying at him savagely when he made lame excuses for having come home in the small hours, coaxing him to his work as tenderly as a mother coaxes her sick baby to eat; exhausting all sisterly, womanly, motherly wiles on his behalf. "Let me go

"Oh! of what use is it?" Perry would say. my ways."

"That I never will, while my name is Polly Cornford, and I love chrome-yellow."

“But it's positively unchristian-like, and against the laws of society, to hunt a fellow down in the way you do.”

"May I have no worse sins to repent of on my dying bed!" And the two would squabble over the contested right-like two dogs over a bone.

Mrs Cornford resorted to other means, slily persuading— the artful, loving, unselfish soul-one of her patrons to give Perry an order instead of herself. What were her own interests in comparison with those of her darling?

"Of what use is it?" Perry said again, with what would have appeared brutal ingratitude in anybody else. "Don't be so benevolent, Polly. You only get hated for it. I shall paint this picture in my worst manner, of course, and whose fault will it be? You have been warned."

What with Perry's dogged persistence in his vagabondish self-immolation, and irritable deprecation against interference, it was a wonder that Mrs Cornford's patience held out. But her patience seemed to possess the quality of miraculous replenishment, like the widow's cruise of oil.

CHAPTER XXI.

KITTY FOLLOWS THE EXAMPLE OF THE PRODIGAL.

ALL this time Kitty was saying to herself that if there were no passionate Perrys, and no patient Dr Normans in the world wanting to marry her, she could go her ways and be happy. She had passed the stages of early womanhood without being touched by the tenderness of a man-unless, perhaps, Perry's tenderness had touched her once or twice-and without desiring marriage for marriage sake.

But having in some inconsequent moment listened to the stories of two lovers, and never since having found courage to turn a deaf ear to either, she found herself now somewhat awkwardly entangled. In this, the Fates had been unkind to her, poor Kitty thought, for what would have comforted her so much as coldness or forgetfulness on the part of these men? One sword of Damocles hanging over one's head is a trial of fortitude, but two are unbearable; and Kitty fretted herself almost into a fever with the desire of getting away, not from her enemies, but from her friends. Meantime, how was she to temporise with them during the two or three weeks that remained of her stay in Paris? To ignore the fact that the Normans and Perry's set were in Paris was impossible, but any safe mode of recognition seemed hard to hit upon. Should she write?

Should she go?

Should she ask them to visit her?

She decided upon the first expedient, and one or two sweet little notes of excuse found their way to the quiet old-fashioned

apartments in the Faubourg St Germain, and the dingy little hole in the Rue de Trévise.

These sweet little notes were works of art in their way, and cost Kitty as much thought and time as would have sufficed for results much more important. But they answered her purpose, and without affronting either, kept Dr Norman and Perry away. It chanced, curiously enough, that she never once encountered her lovers face to face during this probationary period. It is true that she religiously abstained from the picture-galleries, from the theatres, drove in the Bois less than usual, and sacrificed herself a dozen times a day. Dr Norman had called formally in the first instance, but she was not at home, not at home in the fact, and he had never repeated the visit.

Did Perry avoid her? and, if so, was it for the sake of his peace or her own? She felt inquisitive on this point, though she would not have confessed as much for worlds; and the more so as no answers had come to her sweet little notes to him, and Polly Cornford, and the Bianchis.

Myra, woman-like, tried to get at her dearest friend's real feelings on the subject of Perry, especially after having once caught a glimpse of him in the park of Vincennes. It had happened in this wise,

Myra and Kitty were sweeping their long silk skirts across the dewy ways one summer morning, one or two friends bearing them company, when they came upon Perry, stretched at full length under a tree. He was bareheaded, and, as the weather was warm, had divested himself of paletot-like the careless vagabond he was-and with a little sunlight playing about his gold-brown locks and beard, and his ineffably winning face turned upwards, he looked beautiful enough to have Undines and Dryads for companions, in such a scene and such a time.

They would have passed him, but Myra felt her arm clutched as in a vice. "Come this way," Kitty said, calmly, though turning pale and red by turns. And they went the indicated, leaving Perry behind.

way

she