"How would you like to live"-an involuntary sigh escapes him"to live always in Lidlington? I mean, when we are elderly people like my father and mother?"

"Why, Rawdon-what a question! You know I should like it. You know I always mean to remain with mamma."

"Dear Emma!" This last remark he feels has smoothed matters beautifully. "Remaining with mamma seems, after all, to involve so very slight a change in their present position towards each other. "My dear Emma",

And then Rawdon's eloquence comes to an abrupt full stop, and rather spasmodically he puts his arm round Emmy's waist, and kisses her.

He has been in the habit of doing so, fraternally, every morning and night since the day when they first lived together as little children. There is therefore no reason why this particular kiss should form any new standing-point in their existence. Yet each feels that it has done so.

"It is over," thinks Rawdon.

"Thank God! It is over."

What Emma thinks could not be put into words so easily. She is as common-place a woman as ever lived; but she is a woman, and she loves Rawdon from the depth of her heart, and these first moments, doubtless, to her are as ecstatic as though she were a beauty and a genius. Dandelions and potato-flowers are probably as glad of the spring as are violets and primroses if we knew the truth.

The lowering sun warms all the woodland vistas with richer yellow the gnats pursue each other, amatively circling overhead; the small birds sing in the boughs. Love is abroad, quickening the pulse of all creation, this June afternoon.

Rawdon Crosbie, a lover of a minute old, wonders what the mischief he shall say next.

Love-making, in the common acceptation of the word, would be simply ridiculous between him and Emmy. He has too much delicate sympathy with the earnestness of her feelings to begin talking on indifferent subjects. Fortunately she solves the difficulty for him.

"I wonder what mamma will say when-when we tell her all about our walk!"

The remark is so comprehensive and at the same time so vague that Rawdon "blesses her unaware." He has spoken, has spoken definitely, as it was always intended he should speak, on Emmy's twenty-first birthday, and she understands him and is happy. Surely things may remain in this comfortable but unacknowledged position for the present.

"Is it necessary always to tell mamma, verbatim, where you have been and what you have said, Emma? Couldn't you and I keep a secret for one month, well, for one week, then, to ourselves ?"

She hesitates, not quite knowing whether a clandestine engagement would be wrong, but very certain indeed that it would be pleasant. "Do just as you like," says Rawdon, watching her face.

"I like what you like," is Emma's answer, as she glances back at him affectionately. "You must decide everything for me now." "My dear little Emmy! You have always been the best, the kindest"

But just as things have reached this tender point, just as Rawdon Crosbie, carried away by feeling-that he feels nothing, is on the brink of becoming loverlike in earnest, a cavalcade of donkeys, ridden by foreign ladies and gentlemen in picturesque equestrian dress and with a great flourishing of whips, breaks in abruptly upon the scene. The cavalcade passes on in due time, but not until Emma has sustained a dreadful fright from the whole herd of donkeys "trying to run over her," as she calls it, while Rawdon, hot and indignant, has had to shoulder a parasol and stand between his beloved and danger.

"You do make yourself so confoundedly ridiculous,. Emma," he remarks, the amenities of sentiment rapidly merging back into fraternal straightforwardness when they are again alone.

"Yes; but, Rawdon, why should they all begin-I know it was down-hill-but why should the nasty things all begin running just when they came near me? Oh, only donkeys.' It's very fine for you to say 'only donkeys,'" and Emma is very near crying, "but I say I don't want to be killed by a runaway, horrid donkey any more than by a horse."

What man after such an episode could revert to love-making? Not Rawdon Crosbie. He recovers his temper, of course, and begins. to "chaff" Emma, just as he used in the old schoolboy days, about her cowardice; and, as long as they are in the woods, she hangs betrothed-fashion upon his arm, in one steepest part of the descent, even transfers her hand for a single, thrilling, delightful instant to his shoulder. But love-making! Rawdon feels that all the love-making his fate can possibly entail upon him is finished and done with. He has proposed - well, has made himself understood — and Emmy is contented, and nothing more remains to be said on the subject. As far as he is concerned, love-making is a thing over and done with for ever in this life.

A pretty numerous crowd has gathered round the military band by the time they get back to the village: seeing which Rawdon proposes that Miss Marsland should stroll slowly on in the direction of the promenade while he runs back to the Hotel Bellevue for his mother.

"Don't be long, Rawdon," cries Emma, before he has got a couple of paces away. And be sure you return too." Experience has taught her what risk there is of losing Rawdon altogether when once

she trusts him out of her sight. return too ?"

66

Now, promise that you will

"Don't make me promise too much, Emmy," says Rawdon, looking back. "If I meet the Princess, and she gives me another bow, I won't undertake to answer for what will become of me."

"Take care what you say, Sir! If you think so much about the Princess Czartoriska, I shall be jea

But Rawdon is out of hearing; and Emma, with a sensation of treading on air rather than on solid ground, pursues her way alone down the pleasant shaded road towards the avenue.

CHAPTER IV.

THE PRINCESS CZARTORISKA.

SCARCELY has she reached the outskirts of the crowd, when a succession of infantine shrieks disturb the decorum of the promenade: another minute, and Miss Marsland finds herself "assisting" at a combat of the most determined, albeit unequal, nature. On one side a stalwart Belgian nurse, her hair and cap disordered, her face inflamed with passion; on the other a bright-cheeked, furious little morsel of an English baby some two or three years of age.

The original cause of dispute, as in the case of most wars, seems to be forgotten by both belligerents in the present heat and fervour of the fray. Brandishing her charge aloft, and conscious at least of superior physical force, the nurse is bodily bearing the enemy back in the direction of the village, while a shower of blows, neither weak nor ill-directed, fall upon her broad, red face, and a volley of such abuse as the infant tongue is capable of-half German, half English, half Belgian patois-is brought to bear upon her moral sense.

Emma Marsland pauses, half-amused, half-sorry for this poor little plucky British rebel held in durance by the foreigner, and the child, instinctively scenting an ally, stretches forth its arms in her direction.

"Mamsey-me want mein Mamsey !" is its piteous entreaty. And upon this Emma stops outright, and going up to the nurse asks, in as good French as she can command, what ails the little one?

The reply, to English ears at least, is unintelligible; but a rent that the nurse points out in the child's elaborately-embroidered frock, and recent gravel-marks on the palms of its little rosy hands, tell their own story of the nature of its crime. While the "brave Belge" amused herself by gazing at some good-looking bandsman, the child had fallen down, and was now being carried home in grief and disgrace for punishment.

"Poor little thing! I don't suppose she could help it," says Emma, good-naturedly.

"No, no," the child repeats, in its broken accents. "Me touldn't help it. Bossy touldn't help it."

And then with one swift rush she frees herself from the nurse's arms, and seeks the side of her new ally, from which position, clutching Emma's skirts tight, she looks back, with all the flush of victory upon her small face, at the foe.

A rose-bud bit of mischief of three is Blossy Theobald—a bit of mischief delightfully redolent of soap-and-water, fresh air, and health; long eye-lashed, with teeth like tiny pearls, dimpled hands that she has a pretty trick of clasping, the fingers outspread, like one of Vandyck's portrait children, upon her chest; heaven-blue eyes, that look you through and through with the conscious superiority of her age, and assurance-ah! Blossy's assurance, like other of her moral qualities, is a thing to be experienced, not written about.

Mistress in a moment of the situation, she briefly remarks, "Bossy go back," and forthwith, still holding Miss Marsland's dress, turns her small steps again in the direction of the music, the nurse following. Here, then, is Emma Marsland, Mrs. Crosbie's daughter of adoption, trepanned into an intimate acquaintance with Jane Theobald's child! Before three minutes are over Blossy has unfolded all the domestic joys and sorrows of her life. She loves Mamsey, and Dada, and her doll Nancy. And which best? All best. Well, if that cannot be, Nancy. Only Nancy has a broken nose, and her paint is off.

"Then I suppose Nancy is about as pretty as I am?" asks Emma, who, like most very plain people, is sensitive, overmuch, on the subject of her own personal appearance.

Blossy looks up, showing her white teeth and wrinkling her nose as she scrutinises Emma's features, but makes no direct answer. "Madame got pitty zings," she remarks at last, pointing to a little bunch of charms-golden, substantial charms-that hangs from Emma's watch-chain. "And me like pitty zings-me do.”

If the compliment savours of mercenariness, it also displays a ready tact, a fertility of resource, which many an older person might not, on the moment, have found to their hand. Miss Marsland stoops and kisses the small speaker on the lips. Just then-Boum, boum, begins the drum-beat which is to herald in a lively set of military quadrilles. Blossy listens to the first three bars, then, finding the music of a quality that pleases her, lifts her embroidered frock between her two pink thumbs and forefingers, poises her right toe aloft, in true professional fashion, and begins to dance.

A prettier picture it would be hard to imagine than Blossy, dancing improvised ballets of her own beneath green trees, her gipsy-hat falling upon her shoulders, her yellow curls bare in the sun. She smiles, coquettes, raises one dimpled arm above her head; she pirouettes, she fantasias. Emma, already enamoured of the whole world that Rawdon's

declaration has dyed rose-coloured, grows more and more fascinated by the little creature as she stands and watches her. When, but not until, the band has ceased playing, does Blossy cease to dance. Then, after kissing the tips of her fingers to some imaginary audience, she returns gravely to the examination of Miss Marsland's trinkets.

"And who taught you to dance so well?" asks Emma, leading the child apart and sitting down with her upon a bench.

"No one taughted me," says Miss Theobald, in her dialect. "Mamsey dance, and Auntie Min, and Bossy dance too."

"And what is your name? Bossy Teaball?-oh, but that's nonsense. I mean your real name.

"Bossy Teaball, and Auntie Min, and Mamsey, and Dada," repeats the child, evidently determined to go through the family nomenclature exhaustively. "And Bossy like pitty zings!" This with great pathos and sincerity, and clasping the whole bunch of Miss Marsland's trinkets between her two small hands.

To pleading like this there can be but one result. When is the combination of a sweet tongue, a fair face, and a mercenary heart aught but successful? Among Emma's toys is a silver fish, with emerald eyes, ruby gills and flexible tail, that Blossy singles out, by unmistakable signs of admiration, from among its fellows; and before another minute has passed, the fish is detached from Emma's chain and in Blossy's possession. The child jumps, dances, sings with delight, kisses her new treasure, hugs it, as little children do, with rapture to her breast.

"Mamsey, mamsey !" she cries out at last, "mamsey see!" and away flies Blossy, the nurse in pursuit, towards a lady who at this moment approaches by a side-walk, immediately in face of the bench where Miss Marsland is sitting.

It is the Princess Czartoriska! Emma Marsland recognises the blue and white dress, the affable smile, the aristocratic tread, at a glance; and her heart beats pleasurably. Her Highness draws near -ought she to sit still or stand up? Emma feels it must be best to err on the side of over-deference, so stands up. And thus standing, and colouring almost as red as her own hair, waits, while Blossy, volubly explaining her adventure, drags her mother along by the skirts to introduce her to the owner of the "pitty zings."

"I'm afraid my little girl has been giving you a great deal of trouble." What singularly good English the Princess speaks! But then, remembers Emma, the Russians are notably the best linguists extant. And how entirely without state are her manners! But simplicity, Emma has always heard, is a special attribute of real greatness. "Bloss, what do you say to this lady for being so kind to you ?"

"She got pitty zings," answers Bloss, looking up wickedly from beneath her eyelashes.