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"And unless I and my things are to be left behind, I must go and pack them at once," says Rawdon, devoutly wishing such a consummation may arrive. He runs off to his room, rapidly turning over the possibilities of escape as he runs, and finds that fate, and Mrs. Crosbie's maid, have been too much for him. His dressing-case is packed; the evening suit he wore last night neatly folded in his portmanteau waiting only for him to turn the key. All that remains now is to submit, bid å hurried good-bye to Mrs. Theobald, and be carried off at once to his lawful happiness, and the village wedding, and the shining rector and curates in Lidlington church! He descends the stairs swiftly (may not his mother be again in wait for him?) gets safely past the second floor, and knocks at the Theobalds' door. A step is heard crossing the room-how Rawdon's heart beats-the lock turns, and instead of Jane's slim figure he sees the yard-wide waist of the Belgian nurse.

Her French is pretty much on a par with Rawdon's, who has enjoyed the usual linguistic teaching of a thorough English education during ten years or so of his youth. But when does bad news fail to convey itself intelligibly? Mr. and Mrs. Theobald have gone away to breakfast in the woods. They may be back at two, three-who knows? The French gentleman, their friend, is with them, and will Monsieur like to leave any message?

Monsieur feels his heart is in his mouth, so ridiculously poignant is his disappointment. Gone away to breakfast in the woods! And with de Lansac! He detests Mrs. Theobald and everything belonging to her, he despises himself for having wished to see her again. The door stands wide open, and he looks drearily round the pretty sunlit room. He sees the corner where Jane showed him her book of martyrs, the window where they ate madeira cake, and were happy in the moonlight. A work-box, and some scraps of lace and ribbon, are on a table near at hand. Her presence is everywhere.

"Will Monsieur leave a message, a card?" repeats the Belgian, looking up with stolid scrutiny at the young Englishman's face.

"Je laisse mon carte," says Rawdon. Then, taking out his cardcase, he discovers he has no pencil wherewith to write his P. P. C. The Belgian, however, divining what he wants, signs to him to come in, and pointing to her mistress's open work-box says the word, "crayon." Just then a vigorous shout makes itself heard from the interior of the bedroom; Mees Bébé awakening from her noontide sleep. The nurse runs away, prompt to whip or comfort, as the case may demand, and Rawdon is left alone.

After some search he finds a pencil, duly writes the conventional absurdity upon a couple of cards for Mr. and Mrs. Theobald; then, instead of wisely escaping from the room and its recollections at once, falls to examining all the different little trinkets and bits of feminine

rubbish Jane's box contains. Here is a morsel of blue ribbon, the same ribbon, he could swear, that she wore when he first saw her yesterday; and here is an old-fashioned silver amulet, heart-shaped, and scented by a vanilla bean inside; and here, carefully stored in a corner by themselves, are a dozen or so dead rose-leaves. Rawdon thinks it would be no great crime to possess himself of these, keep them, wear them—yes, in the pocket of that very embroidered waistcoat that shall face the rector and both curates in Lidlington church; then, with sudden chill, he remembers that they may, nay, that they must be, a memento of some hour in which he had no part. Does not their colour tell they died longer ago than yesterday? Well, but that desire of stealing something that once belonged to Jane has entered his heart, and he has not the moral courage necessary to put it away. A patter of bare feet, a loud "I sall! I sall!" is heard from the inner room. If he means to commit the deed at all, it behoves him to lose no time about it. He hesitates, and the temptation grows stronger. . . another instant, and the little silver heart (Jane's dearest possession: if he only knew how dear a one!) is feloniously transferred to Rawdon Crosbie's waistcoat-pocket. Open flies the bedroom-door, and in rushes Blossy, in the lightest of baby déshabille, her feet, her neck bare, her yellow curls disordered, a nightcap, of the ridiculous shape that children wear abroad, on one side of her head; the most delicious little figure for a baby Greuze imaginable. She flies to Rawdon; the nurse, who follows, vainly striving to throw a frock, lasso-fashion, over her head, and takes refuge in his

He knows nothing whatever about children of her age; indeed, connecting them always in his mind with schoolrooms and villagetreats, dislikes them, on principle. But who could feel Blossy Theobald's lips upon his cheek and not fall in love with her? Rawdon does, on the spot-he has, it must be confessed, pretty wide capabilities of this kind! And when, two minutes later, he goes back dutifully to his betrothed, such improvement in spirits and temper is visible in him as at once gives the poor little heiress's heart food for suspicion.

"You have been saying good-bye to Mrs. Theobald, Rawdon ?”

"I have been leaving my P. P. C. on Mr. and Mrs. Theobald, Emmy. They were out, unfortunately, and the only person I saw was your friend, the small child.”

He puts his arm round her, guiltily conscious of his latest infidelity, and the heiress reposes her face affectionately on his waistcoat. Mr. and Mrs. Crosbie have gone to dispute the bill, and it is the lovers' last moment together before starting.

"Oh Rawdon, what a dandy you are getting!" Her nose is within an inch and a half of Jane's amulet. "What is this new

scent you wear? and what put it into your head to buy it?"

"I never bought a bottle of scent in my life, Emmy. It must be these foreign fusees. I believe I have a box of them about me, somewhere."

"Oh, indeed. Fusees! I never knew any fusees smell so sweet before. I remember the time when you used to say you despised men who wore scents."

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'My dear Emmy," replies Rawdon, sagely, "I've quite left off despising people for being fools. It's a bad habit, a habit that leads one into being personal."

Well, the moment for departure arrives, and the Crosbie family take their places in the Pepinster char à banc. Cric-crac goes the driver's whip; another moment, 'and Spa, and the new keen taste of life he has experienced there, will be things of the past to Rawdon Crosbie. He glances up at certain windows of the first-floor, to wish a mental good-bye to some one who stood there last night, and sees a small figure kissing its hand to him vehemently.

"Dood-bye, dood-bye," shouts Blossy, whom the Belgian nurse holds aloft in her arms upon the balcony.

Emma on this looks up, and then Mrs. Crosbie. She is a little near-sighted-not blind, like Francis Theobald, but sufficiently so, on occasion, to warrant that aid and maintenance to dignity, a double eyeglass. She draws forth and adjusts her double eyeglass now. "A nice-looking child, positively a nice-looking child, Emma, is she not ?" This little Christian concession to human weakness Mrs. Crosbie thinks it right, under the happily-altered circumstances, to make. "Dood-bye, my dear," elevating her voice, playfully, “doodbye." And, carried away by the charitable impulses of the moment, Mrs. Crosbie actually so far forgets herself as to waft a kiss, from the extreme tips of her gloved fingers, to Jane Theobald's child.

And now occurs a really remarkable phenomenon, considering Blossy Theobald's age and circumstances. At the unexpected sight of these two ladies, Emma smiling, Mrs. Crosbie hand-kissing, the child in a second becomes scarlet. " Mein Fiss!" she screams, "Mein Fiss!" Then doubles up her dimpled fists in the most belligerent of attitudes, and shakes them with rage, straight in the direction of Mrs. Crosbie's face. The Belgian nurse, shocked at such a display of temper towards ladies dressed in fine green and blue silks, attempts blandishment, and receives instant punishment on her face and ears in return. "Mein Fiss, mein Fiss!" shrieks Blossy, as though she would invoke heaven and earth to come to the rescue.

Put yourself in her place, mature Reader. She went to sleep last night, the ravished possessor of a real gold fish, with emerald eyes, with movable tail. She awoke this morning with a paper of sweets, paltry substitute, miserable bribe, beneath her pillow; her fish gone, her mother telling her that he had swum away in the night,

because the ladies wanted him back again. And now she sees them -these brigands, these destroyers of her happiness-smiling and kissing their hands, as though to give a fish one day and lure him away the next, were quite a trivial thing. Why, if Blossy's strength but matched her childish rage, her maddened sense of injustice, she would willingly tear both of them to pieces with those small hands of hers on the spot.

"What deplorable passions, or rather what a deplorable bringing up," says Mrs. Crosbie, with her slow soft smile, as she doubles up her eyeglass. "Rawdon used to fly into just those sorts of senseless rages till I cured him of them."

"I doubt if Miss Theobald could be cured easily," remarks Emma, giving a last look at the little blue-eyed fury overhead.

"My dear Emma, education can cure anything. In six months I would undertake to eradicate the evil even of that child's natural heart. Education, system, strictness

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The char à banc moves on with a jerk, and Blossy continues to bestow gestures of bitterest anathema upon its occupants till they are out of sight.

"And so, adieu to Spa!" whispers Miss Marsland, sentimentally, to her lover, as they turn from the last street of the village.into the open country road. "Dear little Spa! I shall always look back to our stay here as an oasis in life, shan't you, Rawdon ?"

Rawdon is silent. He is in one of those impressionable moods when we are apt to regard the lightest accident as a portent, a "delicate omen traced in air" either for good or evil; and the child's parting maledictions seem to him-child that he is himselfto be fraught with untoward augury of all kinds for the future.

CHAPTER X.

FADED DAFFODILS.

THE FUTURE!

Yes," says Miss Charlotte Theobald, with spiteful prescience, "there's the rub. The present will all go smooth enough, as long as they have poor James's money to make ducks and drakes of-but the future! What future, what hope, either for his child or himself, can a man have who has made such a marriage as our brother Francis?"

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'Especially if he doesn't keep his health," rejoins the elder sister mournfully. "Francis always had a poor digestion.

feeble action of the liver as

The same

"Feeble action of the fiddle-strings, Anne! Francis has got his share of the Theobald laziness, or he would never have been cajoled

into marrying the woman he did. But don't talk to me of bad health. A man leading the life of dissipation his has been and living still!"

"Ah, it takes a great deal to kill people, however delicate they are," remarks the eldest Miss Theobald, thinking perhaps of herself and of all the years she has survived her sister Charlotte's bitter tongue. "Look at our cousin James. He never really digested a meal for twenty years—”

"And then died in a minute, with his old will torn up, the new one not signed, and leaving his property to the man he most wished in the world to disinherit-our brother Francis. So much for your invalids!" Miss Charlotte's tone of disgust expresses more, even, than her words. "Catch a man in honest health, a man with a digestion, making such a muddle at the last as that!"

"But ought we to call it a muddle, Charlotte? It might be more comfortable, certainly, if we didn't live in the immediate neighbourhood, still, as it has pleased Providence to remove poor James to a better sphere, is it not better our brother should come into the property than a stranger? There's more chance of their settling down respectably now that Francis has a house and position of his own than there was before."

"Ah! You think so." I represent by full stops certain curious interjectional sniffs on the part of Miss Charlotte Theobald. "Then let me tell you, Anne, your remark only betrays your usual gross ignorance of human nature. Position, to a woman like Mrs. Francis Theobald, will be . . . a thing to laugh at and degrade- an opportunity of dragging us deeper into the mire than she has dragged us already. As long as they were too poor to live in England we might pretend to forget, might flatter ourselves that our friends forget the connection. For the future we shall have it in daily, hourly evidence before our eyes. You should have heard Mrs. Pippin's voice to-day as she congratulated me on my brother's return. So very agreeable, would it not be, for us to have him as a neighbour?' And now it appears the Crosbies met them-met them, and of course wouldn't know her-abroad."

"Dear, dear, you don't mean to say that, Charlotte! Well, now, I call it very unkind of the Crosbies. I'm sure, for our sainted mother's sake, the hospitality they have met with from our family, they might

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"Anne!" interrupts the younger sister sternly. "Once and for all, let me tell you that that sort of sentimental talk is bosh!" It is Charlotte Theobald's habit to flavour her discourse with somewhat masculine and nervous turns of expression. "As long as our mother lived and gave dinners the world was civil to her. And when she died, and could give dinners no longer, the world forgot her-the

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