she should love me," he said. "I have never dared to ask her that; but I never can forget my love for her. I will try to do the best with what remains of my life that I can; but the best-that is for ever lost to me."

Lesbia felt depressed. All the world seemed sad, and everything to go wrong. She began to tremble lest Countess Stadion's theory should be true.'

They passed the spot where Stephen Dalrymple had first told her of his love. She looked around. Surely he would remember her now? But no answering look met hers; he was listening attentively to something his companion was saying to him. Countess Stadion, however, saw the mute appeal. All Lesbia's soul shone for that one moment in her eyes.

"I think your wife wants you," she said to Dalrymple.

"I think not."

"At any rate you had better see, and we are getting so near the town now, that it would be as well if you joined her. People talk of Prince Philip being with her so much alone."

Lesbia, did you want me?"

No," she said quietly.

The pain

made her quiet. They rode on, and no word, or look, or allusion to the past, indicated that they had been this path once before together.

Good-bye," said Countess Stadion to Stephen Dalrymple, as he stopped for a moment whilst her husband dismounted and rang the bell. Then she added in a lower voice, "I have seen enough of your wife to-day to tell you she has grown from a child into a woman.

"

CHAPTER VII

"NOT A CARE IN THE WORLD.”

It was far on into the spring now; and Lesbia still sat looking at life from the outside. She saw very little of her husband. The Duke wanted him about his stud, twenty miles off; the Duke wanted him about his corps de ballet; the Duke wanted him about the fountains in the Schloss Garten; the Duke wanted him about the new prima donna. He was the purveyor-in-general to the grand ducal pleasures, and the master of the horse began to tremble for his own permanent appointment, and the mistress of the horse to look askance at poor, harmless, little Lesbia.

"Those innocent, modest little minxes

VOL. II.

K

"She

are always the most. artful," said the indignant lady to her husband. actually blushes when the Grand Duke talks to her! Arch flattery! as if any one could believe it to be necessary to blush for the Grand Duke !"

The theatre-intendant already saw himself superseded. He was a man of good family and poor means, and was further blessed with three of the very ugliest daughters that ever fell to the lot of any afflicted parent. His post was no sinecure. The Grand Duke expected him to be always on the alert; to pick out the prettiest ballet girls, the most accomplished singers, the most espiègle of soubrettes, the loveliest "first ladies." It gratified him, when strangers came to Groschenheim, to hear them extol the show of beauty on the grand ducal stage; and more than one than one Impalpability and

Transparency had had to sue their "good cousin of Groschenheim" long and loud before he would be persuaded to part with the reigning star of the stage.

"It is your own fault if you are superseded," said the angry Frau-Intendantin to her long-suffering lord; "you are not sufficiently on the alert."

But it is rather difficult for an elderly man who suffers from podagra and a plethora of debt and small domestic miseries, to be "on the alert" in the FrauIntendantin's sense. When a man is thinking of his coals and candles, of his sauerkraut and sausages, of his daughters' ball dresses and his servants' wages, it is not easy for him to be on the qui vive as to neat ankles and bright eyes; and when, added to this, a helpmate, who if she has ceased to love, has not ceased to be jealous of him, reproaches him with