cruel Juggernaut, but Kitty's successors were infinitely more kind.

Mrs Cornford's friends loved this sweet, blue-eyed thing, who was always looking and listening her heart away, and took pains to interpret their theories to her. Laura became a Fouriérist, a Pre-Raphaelite, a Garibaldian, everything by turns, and was sometimes so many things at once that her brain grew cloudy. The sense of her own nothingness troubled her terribly sometimes. She was fain to become an hospital nurse in Italy; to turn photographer like Vittoria ; or to join the first Phalanastery she could hear of; to do something, no matter what, so long as it employed her faculties. She was comforted by the assurance that humanity is naturally divided into two portions--one consisting of those who cultivate Beauty as their especial province, and the other those who gather and enjoy the fruits of it. Her kind patrons, moreover, found a little employment for her, which is the best sort of consolation; Laura was quite happy to sit for hours mending Vittoria's sacred gloves, or M. Puig's no less sacred stockings. It was impossible for any circumstance connected with genius to be common, she thought; and to remain as a working bee amongst so sublime a community seemed the greatest good fortune that could overtake her.

But would it be allowed to overtake her? Laura and her father had never been wholly unreserved to each other, and of late they had not grown less so. If Prissy willed a thing she spoke out, and whatever obstacle might be thrown in the way, was almost sure to gain the victory. She had more demonstrativeness than Laura, and could discuss her inmost thoughts and feelings with subtle though candid metaphysical introspection. Had she been circumstanced as Laura was, she would have made out such a case for herself that Dr Norman must have given way. There was no difficulty that Prissy could not solve as she best liked, no Gordian knot that she could not untie without assistance-Prissy being always fully impressed with the magnitude and worthiness of her own motives, than which there is nothing more necessary to success. Poor Laura

never considered her own motives of much importance, and, though she brooded over a perplexity as persistently as a bird over its eggs, nothing resulted from it.

Kitty's defection was to Laura what the lightning is to the mother whose child it has killed. Her supreme concern was for Perry. Whose sorrow was anything in comparison to his sorrow? Who deserved Kitty but he?—for Laura, like the little simple soul she was, had no idea of moral justice, and thought that Perry had no right to suffer just because he was young and gifted and beautiful.

She saw something of the reckless despondency into which Kitty's conduct threw him, and her father's unaltered bearing struck her as being very cold in comparison. Perry did not mind weeping, or tearing his hair, or saying mad things before this sweet thing, who would put her little hands entreatingly on his arm, and beg him to be consoled, with big tears in her blue eyes.

If Perry said to her half fiercely

"How can you bear to be with a madman? Do go away." Or, in a humble, tender tone

"O, Miss Norman, it is not good for you to be here, however much we may like it!"-Laura would go home half crazed with a new sense of delight.

If Perry played, as only Perry could play, mysterious snatches of the music he loved best, the child sat listening in a trance. Kitty and Perry seemed god and goddess to her; the two beings alone worthy of all worship and all good things. Who else could do what they could do, or were so beautiful and winning?

Kitty having dropped like a star below the horizon, there arose this new, large, luminous orb in its place; and she could not choose but adore doubly. Day by day, hour by hour, she was ever trying to brace herself up for a great effort; she must hint to her father how her heart would break if he forced her from Paris. The thought of speaking seemed hardly less terrible to her than that of silence. If some one, if something would only help her. But she knew she should have no help,

and she put her momentous request into every available shape, trying to find a happy one. To go straight to her father, as Prissy would have done, and say, "Papa, I like being in Paris best, don't make me go away," was simply impossible; and to throw herself in tears upon his breast, and declare that he was making her unhappy, no less so. Timidity begets something very like cunning in the purest minds, and Laura at length came to the decision that she must invent a sufficient excuse. So one day she went up to Dr Norman, and said, very pleadingly

"Papa, don't you think it would be a good thing for me to draw so well that I might earn my own living if I wanted?" "Good heavens, Laura! who has put that notion into your head?"

Dr Norman was an ultra-Liberal in theory, advocating every kind of moral and intellectual improvement for both men and women, but often in practice as arrant a Conservative as any going.

"I have thought of it myself, papa. I have, indeed."

"Then the sooner you get rid of the notion the better. It is all very well for some women to strike out independent careers for themselves; in a few cases it is admirable; but you are the last person fitted to do so."

"Why, dear papa?" asked Laura, already on the verge of crying.

You

"There are a dozen Whys and Wherefores, my dear. will make a dear little housekeeper, and that can be said of very few girls. Take my advice, and be contented for a time in your proper sphere."

"And is that Prissy's sphere?" said Laura, the corners of her mouth going down.

"Prissy is a mere baby at present; it is impossible to say the sort of woman she will develop into; but as far as I can judge, she has much more of the peculiar sort of character requisite for battling with the world than you have."

Laura, by a great effort, contested the point a little longer. She might have to battle with the world, she said, and it could

not do any harm to be fitted for whatever might happen. Mrs Cornford said she had a decided talent for drawing, and Mrs Cornford was a judge. Dr Norman heard her to the end, and, when she had done, looked up with a shrewd smile, saying

"And I think I know whither all this high-flown utilitarianism is tending, Laura. You wish to stay in Paris, and go on taking lessons of Mrs Cornford.”

Laura turned crimson, and had not a word to say.

Dr Norman continued

“If Mrs Cornford were a different person altogether, I should not mind; but you are old enough to know the sort of objection we must have to her, I think."

"She is not quite a lady, you mean, papa ?"

Exactly; with all her good qualities, she is quite without the habits of respectable society. I should not like you to catch her tone."

A sort of despair took possession of the child, and she turned away to hide the tears that she knew she could restrain no longer. Dr Norman thought it high time to end the discussion.

66

"Of course you must please yourself, my dear," he said. "I should never dream of interfering with any decision you might deliberately make concerning your own career.

that."

And then he left her to reflect upon the words.

Remember

CHAPTER XXVII.

PITFALLS.

DR NORMAN finally fixed the day for leaving Paris, and Laura counted the hours as they passed with a terrible feeling of reluctance. Could she go? She said to herself a dozen times a day that she could not, and yet she was possessed of so little resisting power that she made no legitimate effort to stay. She took everybody in her confidence by turns-Mrs Cornford,

Vittoria, Tommie, even Monsieur Puig, and each gave her counsel, though not of available sort. Of Perry she could not, for some inexplicable reason, make a confidant; and the consciousness of having a secret from him made their conversations less sympathetic and less delightful to look back upon. Once or twice he had said to her

"You look ill; you sit among Mrs Cornford's oils too much. You should not come to her in the hottest part of the day," accompanying the words with an underlying concern which set the child's heart beating almost wildly. It was quite a new thing to Laura to find her small individuality recognised to the full by another person. Kitty had done it, but Kitty was not a man, and Kitty was too much in the habit of recognising individualities in general to render her recognition inestimable. Perry was so delightfully frank in his approval of persons and things, and at the same time so full of reverence for everybody excepting himself, that one felt attracted to him as to a child. Even whilst he was praising her, Laura seemed to be protecting him; and the need to go on protecting him grew stronger within her day by day.

If he said, "Who will make me leave off work when my head aches?" or, "I shall have no one to talk over my troubles to, and no one to look after me and keep me out of scrapes, when you are gone, Miss Norman," she repeated the words to herself again and again, smiling and crying. There had been all along so much frankness in their intimacy, that regrets on both sides at the prospect of parting occasioned very little comment. Laura could freely tell Mrs Cornford that she liked Perry very much, and that she should never forgive Kitty for her conduct to him. Perry could as freely talk of Laura's charming ways and blind admiration of every one and everything connected with art.

"I wish I had never seen Kitty," he happened to say to Mrs Cornford, "and then perhaps "but there he halted.

"I wish you had never seen my little Laura," Mrs Cornford answered. "I ought to have known better than to let her come to the house so often; and as I didn't, you ought."