with her as soon as possible," his friend said, at which suggestion the civil engineer only shrugged his shoulders and answered:

"She was very much blown upon then-under a most awful cloud, in fact; she may not care to be recognised, now she's married, by any one who knew her then." When he had said that, the young man walked away to confide the same particulars to another friend he had in the regiment, and then to another, and so the thing grew.

Grew-until it attained such proportions that it forced itself upon Frank Lee's ears and understanding before the evening was half over. He heard half allusions to it, caught murmurs respecting it, knew that it was suddenly dropped as he approached on all sides, for Mrs. Lee was a popular favourite and a prominent beauty. In his dread that his uncle should hear it then, with the eyes of the world upon him, the young man was imprudent enough to confide it to his own betrothed, who indignantly repudiated the bare idea of so much as a breath ever having been raised about Mrs. Lee. "I will go to her at once, Frank, and ask her if she recognises this man who says he knew her, and tell her what he says." It was in vain Frank entreated Ethel not to do so; all he could wrest from Ethel was a promise that she would not tell Mrs. Lee what the stranger had uttered respecting her until they reached home.

He was pointed out to Mrs. Lee, not as a man who claimed to have known her of old, but as a man who had been engaged in superintending mining operations in Prussia, and who spoke German fluently. And Mrs. Lee put up her glass and looked at him with the blank gaze of unrecognition. In a cowardly way the man seized upon this as "a proof that he had been right in assuming that she did not wish any back numbers from her life to be read," and then laughed about "little Kate Chester" in a way that made some other men long to wring his neck.

However, the story grew, gained monstrous proportions, finally reached Mr. Lee's ears, and broke his heart. And then, when all the world seemed ready to turn against her, when her husband's relations said "little Fritz ought to be taken from her and put under proper guardianship," then she stood at bay and defied all the inhabitants of Dusseldorf combined to say that she had been more than maligned. She had been the object of jealousy, the object of the basest falsehoods, the object of fierce female rancour, envy, and evilspeaking, but she had never been the object of a bad man's guilty love, or a good woman's scorn. And the man who blighted her life when it was promising to be so fair, who crushed her husband's heart with shame, who made her an alien to her child's father's kin, and robbed her of a home and peace, knew all these truths, and still spoke in foul-mouthed idleness.

A SPRIG OF HOLLY,

DON'T think a jollier party can ever have assembled itself together than the one that was staying at the Firs last Christmas. The

cause of this extraordinary joy and good feeling was to be found, perhaps, in none of us being of kin. There was not so much as a brace of cousins among the guests to mar the harmony, either by their love or hate. Added to this, our hostess had no sons to protect against insidious advances, and no daughters to get off. She could venture to be open-hearted and nobly reliant on the friends she had gathered together without doing violence to the maternal instinct.

We

The party included every element of success. had handsome men and intellectual men, men of money and men of mark; and we had flirts, fascinating women, and one heiress.

The Apollo of the party was Lionel Poole, a treasury clerk. His good looks were a perpetual source of discomfort to somebody or other, for they were rather of the plaintive order. His eyes had a habit of saying more than they meant-unconsciously, let us hope, for the sake of his soul, for more than half of his young-lady acquaintances had been bidden adieu by him at night

in a manner that left no doubt whatever on their minds that they were to be the recipients of an offer from him in the morning.

He was so pre-eminently handsome a man that I fear in describing him I may rather slur the indisputable claims he had to be considered something else. Lionel Poole was a clever man also, with a utility talent that turned everything to his own advantage.

To tell the truth, I was more than slightly astonished when I came down into the drawing-room the day of my arrival to find him installed at the Firs.

He was palpably a pampered guest, too, for he had the key of Mrs. Fitzgerald's private photograph album in his hand; and after that lady (our hostess) made her appearance, he went and sat by her side, and made comments that were inaudible to the rest of us, but that, to judge from the expression of his face, were not flattering to the portrayed ones.

Now Mrs. Fitzgerald had, the previous season, come out of the retirement of her widowhood for the first time, for the purpose of chaperoning her young cousin Alice Riley and myself through the shoals and quicksands of London society; and at the end of the season-only such a short time since-poor Alice went into a low state of mind, and on to the Continent, in consequence, it was whispered, of the sudden cessation of the attack Mr. Lionel Poole had made upon a heart that the world had not hardened yet.

I was sorry to see him at the Firs, therefore-sorry, that is, just for a few minutes, in fact, until he left Mrs. Fitzgerald's side and came to mine, where he remained. Ill-natured people had said that the beautiful Mrs. Fitzgerald had not resented his sudden defection from the side of her blonde charge, as it would have been becoming for a chaperon and cousin to do. And they added that the light which came into her eyes when his perfidy was discussed was not kindled by wrath.

She was the most beautiful brunette I ever saw, this young widowed hostess of ours. A graceful, charming

woman, too, with a way that was winning alike to women and men. Why she had never married again—she had been five years a widow-we none of us knew for certain; but report had told me that her last husband, in a rabid fit of jealousy, had bound her by a solemn oath to be faithful for ever to his unpleasant memory.

Only one of the other men have I time or space to describe. He was a Captain Villars, R.A., and neither mad, methodist, nor married, as officers of that gallant corps are popularly supposed to be. He was not such a handsome man as Lionel Poole, nor could he converse in so subtly pleasing a way; but he was a man on whom a woman would rely instinctively, for one glance at his broad open brow, and frank, fearless, honest eyes showed clearly, even to the worst read in such matters, that he was the soul of honour.

The other ladies, too, are deserving of something better than the scant courtesy of a curt mention; so, as a curt mention is all I could make of them here, I will refrain from one at all, and simply say that I was the heiress.

During the earlier part of my sojourn at the Firs I did not observe Captain Villars or anybody else, but Lionel Poole and Mrs. Fitzgerald very much. I had known the soldier in London before, and then (it was before I had been left the fortune which altered my point of view of life entirely) he had seemed to like me well. But now he stood gravely aloof from me, and I scarcely noticed the fact, for I was absorbed in the contemplation of Lionel Poole.

We had a variety of ways of passing the time. No one thing at the Firs palled upon us by reason of our doing it often through lack of something else to do. When it was fine, and the ground not slippery, there were riding horses and carriages; when it was bitter and brightly frosty, there was the artificial lake to skate on; and when we couldn't get out at all, there was the billiard and music room; and in the evenings we always had charades and tableaux.