her own sex. "Her mouth is too wide, her eyes are commonplace. She has two distinct marks of smallpox on her forehead, and you have only to look at her in a mirror to see that her nose is not set straight on her face."

Poor Jane! And she continues charming still.

On this particular afternoon-an afternoon destined, in more ways than one, to prove a landmark in her life-she is dressed in a little striped blue-and-white muslin of twenty-five francs, with a black lace cape round her shoulders. A pair of cream-coloured gloves, a white parasol, a fresh-gathered rose for her waistbelt, lie in readiness on her worktable.

"You are coming with me, Theobald ?" For a long minute Mr. Theobald's eyes and pipe have been liberally sending forth incense at the shrine of Jane's vanity. "Do now, like a good old soul! It isn't much trouble to walk as far as the avenue, and then, if these Chalkshire people are about"

"Oh! you are afraid of the Chalkshire Mrs. Grundy, already, are you, Jenny? Well, I'll come and do a little respectability, for her edification, by-and-by, if I can remember not to fall asleep meanwhile. As a precautionary measure, hadn't you better take Blossy for your chaperon now?"

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Blossy went out with Elize after her dinner. Young monkey, see what she has been doing here!" Jane picks up a hideously battered doll, into whose dropsical body shreds of blue crape, ribbon, and other odds and ends of finery are thickly pinned. "Isn't that taste? What, not for a baby only three years old! And see, she's actually cut Nancy's hair short on the forehead, to be in the fashion, bless her heart!"

"Bless her-bless her!" says Theobald, stretching out his hand theatrically over Nancy's battered head.

The colour deepens on Jane's fresh cheeks. "Oh, you always turn things into ridicule; you never see any cleverness in what the child does-but I do. Very likely she won't be accomplished, book-clever, as your fine county ladies are, but she'll be able to work at her needle, to use her hands, to be useful, Mr. Theobald! and, as far as I can see, those are the first accomplishments men require from their wives."

Mrs. Theobald puts Nancy tenderly aside, takes up her gloves and parasol, and moves towards the door.

"If Blossy can use her hands (and her tongue) as her dear mother does, Jenny, she'll be a treasure, an inestimable treasure, to the man who is fortunate enough to win her."

"Yes-you mean so much of that! I know so well what your compliments are worth!"

But she turns, half mollified. A word can thaw, as a word can chill the girl, so long as the word be spoken by Theobald's lips.

Mr. Theobald raises himself slightly from his reclining position, and takes his pipe from between his lips. "I mean it always when I say flattering things of you, my love. If Blossy only inherits half of her mother's admirable qualities, she will be"

"Make haste, please. I don't want to lose more than I can help of the band. If poor little Blossy inherits my gifts?

"She will be an exceedingly charming woman, Jane. A good milliner; on occasion, a good cook; a perfect dancer; a thorough adept in the art of making any young fool who is taken by her pretty face miserable; and to her husband at all times the most excellent company in the world."

The blood is not in Jane's cheeks alone now. It stains her forehead, her throat; an angry tremble comes round her lips.

"A cook-a milliner-a dancer. Oh, I understand you, Theobald a dancer! And this, after four years, is the highest praise you can find to give me?"

Theobald by now is thoroughly amused. No sarcasm, however bitter, can scathe his well-oiled spirit. How shall he guess that a jest, lightly spoken, lightly meant, may have power to wound Jane's jealous heart to the quick!

"I dare say I could find much more if you would give me time to think. You have faults, Jenny, of course; who has not? But experience will cure these-experience and the salutary advice of judicious female friends, to which our altered position in life will now enable you to have access. There are my sisters-a little crooked-tempered, a little straight-laced, certainly, but an epitome of all female wisdom and propriety in themselves, Charlotte especially. Then, if you behave very well, you may get to know our neighbour, Mrs. Crosbie; perhaps, in time, the archdeacon's wife, and

"And you think sermons preached to me by any of these women would do me, Jane Theobald, good? Where is their right to preach? They are better born; they have never worked for their bread; have never toiled at a rehearsal, or grilled up among the gas battens in a transformation scene! Does this entitle them to mount the pulpit?" "Morally, no; socially, yes?"

"Then I hate such socialism," Theobald successfully represses a smile; "and I despise such morality. And if any of them were to preach to me, and I was to listen-which I shouldn't-it would deinoralise-yes, demoralise me!"

"Don't use strong language, my dear. It is a question exclusively of finance. If we had come into six thousand a year, instead of six hundred, we should be the nicest people in Chalkshire, Jenny, and want sermons from no man."

"I've read in the papers," goes on Jane, her tone waxing hotter and hotter; "I've read in the papers lately about the grand model

markets set up in Bethnal Green, and such places, for the poor. Bishops and lords at the opening ceremony, no selling on Sundays, cleanliness, ventilation, marble slabs-every advantage! And the poor won't go to them, and will sooner get worse things, and pay dearer to their old friends, the costermongers in the gutter."

"The poor are proverbially an ungrateful set of devils,” is Mr. Theobald's cheerful generalisation.

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They are human beings, and I feel as they do," says Jane. "Perhaps because I belong to the vagrant classes myself-I don't know about that-but I feel as they do. I hate advantages that have a do-me-good flavour in them

"Certainly, my dear, but

“I was born among people, among ideas that no man or woman in your class of life can understand. You raised me from them, Theobald, and if I've become, as you say sometimes, 'an imitation better than the reality of a lady,' it has been by living with you, and getting hold of your outward manners simply, but at heart

"Jenny !"

"At heart I've never given up my old associates, or my love for them, or my belief that their life is as good as other lives, and I never will. No, not if all the ladies from all the counties in England were to preach to me at once. I'd be like the ungrateful heathen poor. I'd keep to the costermongers still."

After this there is silence for a minute. Mr. Theobald is the first to speak. "Come here, Jenny, child," holding out his hand to her kindly.

"No, thank you. I can hear you quite as well where I am." "Do you know the meaning of the word 'logic?':

"Of course, I do. I wasn't pretending to talk logic. I was talking common sense; yes, and I was speaking from my heart, straight out, as you as you, Theobald, never do!"

"Do you know, in the very least, how all this animated discussion began ?"

"I know how it will end." She has moved across the room, and looks back at him, her fingers on the handle of the door. "You said something just now about my having to do battle with fine ladies like this Mrs. Crosbie, the fine ladies of your class, sir, in Chalkshire. A minute afterwards you tell me of the good I may get if I choose to listen, humbly and gratefully, to their advice. Very well. Now, I'll tell you the truth plainly. If our going to England, and our living at Theobalds is to make me a hypocrite I mean if I am to choose between becoming a hypocrite, or declaring war to the knife with every fine lady in Chalkshire, I have made my choice already. War to the knife!"

Having uttered which trenchant declaration, Jane, like a whirlwind

(in blue and white muslin), sweeps away from the room and down the staircase of the hotel, and Mr. Theobald is left alone to enjoy his pipe and cull the honey of his own reflections.

CHAPTER II.

A QUESTION OF DUTY.

ALL is bright, sunshiny, cheerful, in the out-of-door world. The season is crude as yet, for it is scarcely past the middle of June; but there are visitors enough to give an air of quasi-occupation to the streets and avenues of the little mountain town. And to those whose tastes affect sweet sunshine and verdant country, rather than princesses and archdukes, early summer is assuredly the time when Spa has most charms.

It is now the gayest hour of the afternoon, and down in the avenue of the Four Hours a band is playing. How pleasant it is to catch the disdant notes, prolonged, hushed, heightened at intervals by the arena of wooded hills which form the walls of the al fresco concertroom! How gloriously the sun streams through the linden boughs, turning the courtyard pavement of the Hotel Bellevue into a mosaic work of ever-shifting gold! What an altogether palatable thing mere existence is! What an excellent place is this best of all possible worlds to live in!

"Each one of us," said Goethe, "must be drunk once." Emma Marsland, yonder plain-looking English girl, who is eating cakes and drinking afternoon coffee under the shadow of the lindens, is drunk to-day! She shows, I must admit, few outward signs by which you could guess at her condition. Emma has been brought up in a school that holds betrayal of feeling as a forfeiture of the sex's dignity. Hers, too, is a face not destined by nature to be the index of the soul. But still, for all her calm exterior, the wine of life runs warm and tingling through her veins; the joyfullest cup we any of us taste, from our birth to our burying, is at her lips. Emma Marsland loves, and believes herself to be loved in return. For one day-as likely as not, one only, out of a perfectly sober common-place life-every beat of the little heiress's heart, every breath she draws, is intoxication.

"How good the coffee always is abroad, mamma." Not very poetic; but this is what she says, not what she thinks. "And the kuchen" (Emma has learnt German for seven years in Chalkshire, and pronounces the word coo-ken.) "so crisp and short, better even than we got on the Rhine. I wonder whether they put much butter in them?" "I should hope not, for your sake, Emmy," remarks a masculine voice at her side. "The dish was brought out, full, a minute ago, and you and mother have pretty nearly emptied it already."

"Oh, Rawdon, what a shame! Mamma, do you hear what Rawdon accuses us of?" And poor Emma laughs and laughs again, a rather tittering little school-girl laugh, at Rawdon's exquisite stroke of humour. "You are glad enough to get your own sherry-and-bitters of an afternoon,-you know you are, Rawdon, and you ought to be content, and not envy mamma and me our coffee and coo-ken. Don't you know they take the place of five o'clock tea to us now we are abroad?"

“Do they !" returns Rawdon, in the absent tone of a man who does not know a word he is saying. "La, la, la, la, lira. . . ." He follows, half aloud, the opening bars of the distant waltz music, then is seized with a mighty yawn, which he strives, gallantly but in vain, to stifle in its birth; and then he crosses his arms, pulls his hat a little over his eyes, gazes up at as much blue sky as the lindens leave visible, and begins to whistle.

He is bored, poor young fellow, but unconsciously; takes no livelier interest in Emmy and the dead level of Emmy's small talk than he has done any time during his twenty-two years of life, but is unaware of his lack of interest. If his mother would allow him to smoke he would be happier than he is, doubtless; and if his mother and Emma would retire to their own apartments in the hotel and leave him and his father to their newspapers and their pipes, he would be happier still. Other anarchy is there none in Rawdon Crosbie's spirit. And yet all the combustible materials wanted for rebellion are ready stored there, waiting only the chance spark that shall kindle them into a flame. Does not every day's experience show us that this slumbering, negative, acquiescent kind of discontent is the very symptom of all others that tells surest when men's hearts are ripe for revolt?

I have spoken at length of Jane Theobald: let me give a few words to the group of English people who are drinking their coffee beneath her window; the Chalkshire neighbours, who are to be Jane's enemies or friends, her monitors or her executioners, as fate may elect.

Mrs. Crosbie was a noted beauty in her youth. She is fifty years old now, but has not forgotten the trick of smile, the turn of head, the downcast bend of the eyelids, which were her strong points when she was the "beautiful Juliana Hervey." The beautiful Juliana Hervey who, after a dozen seasons' fruitless title-hunting, bestowed herself at eight-and-twenty upon Mr. Crosbie, a country gentleman of small means, smaller pretensions, and without a connection in the world worth mentioning. She is dressed always by the first milliner of her part of Chalkshire, adopts with unflinching courage whatever she believes to be the latest fashion of the day, and at the present moment wears a dress, bonnet, and shawl, each undeniable of its kind, but the sum total of whose effect absolutely sets your teeth on edge with its cruel discordancy. Were you to talk to Mrs. Crosbie of dress as of a thing relative rather than final, hint to her of subtle combinations of colour,