trouble than that to brood over you are a very fortunate young lady."

So saying, the old man trotted away into the house, thinking to himself, 66 I suppose there is some other young man then, whom we have not heard of." But although the Doctor's chance shot had proved a miss, so far as he was concerned, it had an undesigned success of which he was ignorant. After she was left alone, Chris thought over what he had said, and of course she understood what he had been driving at; and so it came to pass that all of a sudden she knew for certain what she had more than once vaguely suspected, but had never put into plain words. Such discoveries have different effects upon different people. To Chris it could not, in the circumstances, be anything but painful to acknowledge that she loved Gerald Severne; yet her predominating sensation was not so much one of pain as of extreme astonishment.

The pos

sibility of Gerald's falling in love with her had been placed before her plainly enough more than once. Lady Barnstaple had spoken of it as an undesirable event, and Mr. Compton had mentioned it in the contrary sense; but neither of them had made her doubt for a moment of her personal safety. And now, after all, it turned out that she was the one who ought to have been cautioned; for it was very evident that, knowing what he knew about her, Gerald would think of her no more, even as a friend. Warnings however would have done little good. She recognised the fact that she had loved him from the first, and would have loved him whether he had cared for her or not. It was her fate, she supposed.

Not until the following morning did she begin to feel wretched and humiliated. It is, no doubt, a humiliating thing for a woman to become enamoured of a man without having received due encouragement. ought to wait until she is asked, just as children are expected to keep silence until they are spoken to. It seems a

She

little hard upon the women and children but in their own interest, as well as in that of the community at large, these regulations must be observed. Chris, who had plenty of common sense, was quite ready to admit that, and consequently had to admit that she had more or less disgraced herself. Whether she could possibly have helped disgracing herself to that extent was another question: the main thing was that she should henceforth conceal her guilty secret; and as a first step towards doing so, she assumed an air of cheerfulness and jollity at the breakfast hour which deceived neither the Doctor nor his less observant wife.

"That poor child has something on her mind," said the latter to the former after Chris had left the room.

"I am much indebted to you for the information, my dear," replied the Doctor, who was apt to be a little irritable during the early hours of the day. "Allow me to inform you in return that you have a nose upon your face and that I have a pair of eyes in my head. What would increase my already high opinion of your sagacity would be to hear from you exactly what it is that the child has upon her mind."

Madame Lavergne at once confessed her inability to earn the reward named upon those terms, whereupon the Doctor rejoined tartly,

"Then if I were you, I should feel ashamed of myself. A woman who

can't find out what is the matter with another woman!—although I dare say it would not make much difference if you could."

Chris meanwhile had sauntered down to the end of the garden, where she met the postman, who handed her a letter which had been forwarded from London. This proved to be an invitation from Lady Barnstaple, who had returned to Brentstow and who begged her to "run down to us for a week or two before we go abroad for the winter." Her ladyship wrote very affectionately.

Come and sit down beside me and tell me all your news."

"I don't think I have any to tell, Lady Barnstaple," answered Chris. "I came here soon after Aunt Rebecca died, and nothing has happened to me since."

"Oh!" said Lady Barnstaple, to whom this announcement seemed to come as somewhat of a relief; "then I'll tell you mine, of which I have quite a budget. First of all, have you seen anything of that Mr. Richardson lately?"

Chris shook her head.

"So much the better! He is somewhere abroad, I hear, and no doubt he will try to pick up old acquaintances if he can. I don't know whether you

have heard that he levanted in the autumn, leaving his accounts unsettled. Lord Barnstaple saw him once or twice at Newmarket and heard of his goings

on.

A most disreputable young man by all accounts; and if you should come across him again you had better look the other way. Well, then there is poor Mr. Ellacombe-what do you think has happened to poor Mr. Ellacombe. He has actually gone and married; and the unfortunate thing is that his wife is a person whom one can't know. I shall always think that you are a little bit to blame for this catastrophe, Chris; though of course one wouldn't have wished you to prevent it in the only way in which it could have been prevented. After all perhaps he may find Mrs. Ellacombe a congenial companion; for rumour says that she is not precisely a total abstainer, and I am afraid there can be no question about his own tendencies."

"I thought you had a better opinion of him," Chris could not help saying.

"Oh, well, one tries to hope for the best; but at all events he is married now, and there's an end of him. When will you come and spend a day with us, Chris Gracie is longing to see you and tell you all about her engagement to Lord Forfar, whom I think you saw at Brentstow. He is a very nice fellow in every way, and we are

very much pleased with the match, and you may congratulate us all round if you like."

Chris availed herself heartily of this gracious permission. She was fond of Lady Grace, and though she could not remember much about Lord Forfar, she remembered that he was young and good-looking, and said so.

"Yes;" Lady Barnstaple answered, "and what is even more to the purpose is, that he is sure to succeed his father before long, which will make him immensely rich. When we left England the old man was only being kept alive by brandy and beaten-up eggs; so that one may reasonably hope to get the funeral and a decent period of mourning over before the spring, when, according to present arrangements, Gracie is to be married."

Dr. Lavergne, who had come in from the garden and had been duly presented to Lady Barnstaple, was SO tickled by these last words that he could not repress an abrupt chuckle; whereupon his visitor stared at him for a moment and then joined in his merriment quite good-humouredly.

"I thought," she remarked, "that you didn't understand English.'

The Doctor explained that, although he did not speak our language, he understood it a little. "And," added he, with a bow, "I am beginning to understand the English character, for which I entertain the warmest admiration. You have, if I may be permitted to say so, a frankness of speech which no other nation can attempt to rival."

"Well," said Lady Barnstaple, getting up, some of us have; but I don't know that it is exactly a national characteristic. In our class one meets with quite a large number of people who say what they think, because there really is no reason why they shouldn't; but the English bourgeois is a sad impostor, like the bourgeois of other countries, and he is always inclined to shy at his own shadow, as they all are."

Possibly these sentiments may have

nettled the Doctor, whose republicanism was that of the year 1848, or it may be that he was a little bit jealous of Lady Barnstaple, who unceremoniously arranged that Chris should spend the whole of the next day with her, and seemed to take it for granted that the girl would be only too glad of an outing. Anyhow, his visitor had no sooner departed than he observed, "She is droll, miladi, and she has an air of being very outspoken; but I am not convinced that she says quite all that she thinks, or that she is not just as capable of hatching transparent little plots as any bourgeoise in France or England. Have you a 'Journal des Étrangers,' my dear?"

Madame Lavergne was sorry that she had not. "What do you want it for, mon ami?" she inquired innocently.

"Oh, I was only curious to see whether Mr. Severne had arrived from Paris yet; but perhaps it will not be until the next list is issued that we shall find his name," replied the Doctor, trotting out rapidly into the garden, as his habit was when he wished to avoid being called upon to explain himself.

CHAPTER XVII.

IN justice to Dr. Lavergne, it must be remembered that he had tested Chris with a view to discovering whether she cherished any tender sentiment for Mr. Severne and that he had come to the conclusion that she was free from any such weakness. His sarcastic allusions to the designs of Lady Barnstaple were not, therefore, intended to wound her feelings, and no one would have been more sorry than he, had he known that he had been the means of inflicting an almost sleepless night upon her. Chris did not believe that Gerald would come to Cannes or even that he would be sent for; yet what the Doctor had said made her realize for the first time the pinch of wealth. It is no such unhappy fate to be rich-all things con

sidered, it is a great deal worse to be poor-but the defects of what one possesses are, of course, always more conspicuous than its advantages, and the drawback to being an heiress is that melancholy doubt which must be present to all heiresses as to whether they are loved for themselves or for their dowry.

One discovery leads to another. After Chris had wept a little over the cynicism of Dr. Lavergne and the worldliness of Lady Barnstaple, she found out that she would hardly have been moved to the point of tears by either of these distressing traits if she had not been harbouring a secret hope that, some day or other, Gerald would seek her and find her and allow her a chance of explaining how it was that she had been seen walking in the streets of Paris with no other companion than Val Richardson. It would have been generous of him to give her such an opportunity in the days of her poverty; but the generosity would be less evident now; and it is a remarkable proof of the unhealthy condition of mind into which young women with plenty of money and no occupation are apt to fall that before daybreak Chris had firmly resolved to live and die an old maid. She was displeased with Dr. Lavergne, which was pardonable enough; she was displeased with Lady Barnstaple, and that also was not very unnatural; but she certainly had no business to be displeased with poor Gerald, whose behaviour since his encounter with her had been quite unexceptionable. He had held his tongue and he had left her alone: what more could any man with the feelings of a gentleman do? Chris however was unreasonable enough to quarrel with him for his discretion and to say to herself that if he had cared in the least for her, he would not have remained silent and quiescent so long. His coming forward now-should he be persuaded by his mother to do sowould only show that he thought ninety thousand pounds worth a small sacrifice of pride.

Towards morning she fell asleep, but did not get nearly as many hours of rest as persons of her age require; so that, in spite of all her efforts to summon up a cheerful expression, it was a somewhat weary and drawn face that she took to Lady Barnstaple's villa, in the garden of which she was met by Lady Grace.

"I saw you from my bedroom window, and I thought I would come down and intercept you," Lady Grace said. "There are some people in the drawingroom who are going to stay to luncheon; but we needn't go in yet. And how have you been all this long time, Chris? And why have you never written to me?"

seated for half an hour on the shady side of a mimosa that she found herself compelled to take her turn of submitting to cross-examination.

Have you no news to give me?" Lady Grace inquired. "Nothing about Mr. Richardson, for instance?"

"I suppose, from your asking that question," answered Chris, "that you know I was once engaged to him. I did not exactly wish it; but circumstances brought it about. The engagement is broken off now."

"I have rather a headache this morning," said Chris; "otherwise there's nothing the matter with me." Then she expressed her congratulations and begged to be told all about Lord Forfar; though her friend assured her that there was really nothing to tell.

Forfar," Lady Grace declared, "is a commonplace young man, as you must have noticed, and I am a commonplace young woman, as you know; so that we shall get on very well together and live happily to the end of our days, I hope. Our relations are pleased with us; but they are not very much interested in us, and indeed one couldn't expect it of them. We are not interesting. Now you are very interesting, Chris, and that's why I want to talk to you about yourself."

But Chris, who was by no means anxious to talk about herself, insisted upon categorical answers to a number of questions relating to Lord Forfar and the approaching wedding; and it was not until the two girls had been

"I am sure she hasn't told anybody but me. And so it is really at an end! I am delighted to hear it; for I never thought him at all nice, and lately I have been told some very unpleasant things about him."

Chris not feeling called upon to make any rejoinder, a pause followed, after which Lady Grace resumed "There is somebody else who will be even more glad than I am to hear that you are not going to marry Mr. Richardson."