her again till he met her at the Casa di Fiori. The next day I went to Conran while he was breakfasting, and unburdened my mind to him. He looked horribly ill, stern, and haggard, but he listened to me very kindly, though he spoke of the people at the Casa di Fiori in a hard, brief, curious manner.

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Plenty have been taken in like you, Gus," he said. "I was, years ago in my green youth, when I joined at fifteen. There are scores of such women, as I told you, down the line of the Pacific, and about here; anywhere, in fact, where the army and navy give them fresh pigeons to be gulled. They take titles that sound grand in boys' ears, and fascinate them till they've won all their money, and then-send them to the dogs. Your Marchioness St. Julian's real name is Sarah Briggs."

I gave an involuntary shriek. Sarah Briggs finished me. death-stroke, that could never be got over.

It was the "She was a ballet-girl in London," continued Conran ; " then, when she was sixteen, married that Fitzhervey, alias Briggs, alias Smith, alias what you please, and set up in her present more lucrative employment with her three or four confrères. Saint Jeu was expelled from Paris for keeping a hell in the Chaussée d'Antin, Fitzhervey was a leg at Newmarket, Guatamara a lawyer's clerk, who was had up for forgery. There is the history of your Maltese Peerage, Gussy. Well, you'll be wider awake next time. Wait, there is somebody knocking at my door. Stay here a moment, I'll come back to you."

Accordingly, I stayed in his bedroom, where I had found him writing, and he went into his sitting-room, of which, from the diminutiveness of his domicile, I commanded a full view, sit where I would. What was my astonishment to see Lucrezia da Guari! I went to his bedroom door; it was locked from the outside, so I perforce remained where I was, to, nolens volens, witness the finish of last night's interview.

Iron to the last extent and deadly pale, Conran stood, too surprised to speak, and most probably at a loss for words.

Lucrezia came up to him nevertheless with the abandon of her youth and her Southern blood.

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Cecil, Cecil! let me speak to you. You shall listen; you shall not judge me unheard."

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Signorina, I have judged you by only too ample evidence." He had recovered himself now, and was as cool as needs be.

"I deny it. But you love me still ?"

"Love you?" he repeated, fiercely; "yes, you have cursed me with my fatal love for you, and it is one that I can never shake off though I strive for ever. More shame on me! A laugh, a compliment, a caress, a cashmere, is as much as such women as you are worth. Love becomes ridiculous named in the same breath with you."

She caught hold of his hand and crushed it in both her own. "Cecil, kill me if you will. Death would have no sting from your hand, but never speak such words to me."

His voice trembled; the granite rock was swaying at its roots.

"How can I choose but speak them? You know what I believed you in Italy, and how on that belief I offered you my name-a name never

yet stained, never yet held unworthy. I lost you, to find you in society which stamped you for ever. A lovely fiend, holding raw boys enchained, that your associates might rifle their purses with marked cards and cogged dice. I hoped to have found a little diamond, without spot or flaw. I discovered my error too late; it was only glass, which all men were free to pick up and trample on at their pleasure."

He tried to wrench his hand away, but she would not let it go.

"Hush! hush! listen to me first. If you once thought me worthy of your love, you may, surely, now accord me pity. I shall not trouble you long. After this, you need see me no more. I am going back to my old convent. You and the world will soon forget me, but I shall remember you, and pray for you, as dearer than my own soul."

Conran's head was bent down now, and his voice was thick, as he answered briefly,

"Go on."

This scene half consoled me for Eudoxia Adelaida-(I mean, O Heavens, Sarah Briggs!)-it was so exquisitely romantic, and Conran and Lucrezia wouldn't have done at all badly for Monte Cristo and that dear little Haidee. I was fearfully poetic in those days.

"When I met you in Rome," Lucrezia went on, in obedience to his injunction, "two years ago, you remember I had only left my convent and lived with my father but a month or two. I told you he was an officer. I only said what I had been told, and I knew no more than you that he was the keeper of a gambling-house."

very even

She shuddered as she paused, and leaned her forehead on Conran's He did not repulse her, and she continued, in her broken, simple English: "The evening you promised me what I should have needed to have been an angel to be worthy of-your love and your name—that ing, when I reached home, my father bade me dress for a soirée he was going to give. I obeyed him, of course. I knew nothing but what he told me, and I went down, to find a dozen young nobles and a few Englishmen drinking and playing on a table covered with green cloth. Some few of them came up to me, but I felt frightened; their looks, their tones, their florid compliments, were so different to yours. But my father kept his eye on me, and would not let me leave. While they were leaning over my chair, and whispering in my ear, you came to the door of the salon, and I went towards you, and you looked cold, and harsh, as I had never seen you before, and put me aside, and turned away without a word. Oh, Cecil! why did you not kill me then? Death would have been kindness. Your Othello was kinder to Desdemona; he slew her -he did not leave her. To women love is life, and without it the grave is sweeter than the world. From that hour I never saw you, and from that hour my father persecuted me because I would never join in his schemes, nor enter his vile gaming-rooms. Yet I have lived with him, because I could not get away. I have been too carefully watched. We Italians are not free, like your happy English girls. A few weeks ago we were compelled to leave Rome, the young Contino di Firenze had been stilettoed leaving my father's rooms, and he could stay in Italy no longer. We came here, and joined that hateful woman, who calls herself Marchioness St.

Julian; and, because she could not bend me to her will, gives out that I am her niece, and mad! I wonder I am not mad, Cecil. I wish hearts would break, as the romancers make them; but how long one suffers, and lives on! Oh, my love, my soul, my life, only say that you believe me, and look kindly at me once again, then I will never trouble you again, I will only pray for you. But believe me, Cecil. Oh, for the love of Heaven, believe me! Believe me, or I shall die!"

It was not in the nature of man to resist her; there was truth in the girl's voice and face, if ever truth walked abroad on earth. I vow I was such a donkey, sir (but please remember I was very green then, and inconceivably poetic)—I vow I felt a lump in my throat as I listened to her, just such as I felt when I was walked off in tunics and lace collars to Miss Birch's Laburnum Lodge Academy. And Conran, the granite melted out of him like gold at the touch of aqua regis. You may call him a fool for it, gentlemen, if you like. I don't. But he did believe her, and told her so in a few unconnected words, lifting her up in his arms, calling her, as he held her there, his love, his child, his darling, his poor little Lucrezia! and vowing, with most unrighteous oaths, while he soothed away her vehement tears, that her cursed father should never have power to persecute her again as long as he himself lived to shelter and take care of her.

I was so interested in my Monte Cristo and Haidee (it was so like a chapter out of a book), that I entirely forgot my durance vile, and my novel and excessively dirty, though enforced, occupation of spy; and there I stayed, alternating between my interest in them and my agonies at the revelations concerning my Eudoxia Adelaida-oh, hang it! I mean Sarah Briggs-till, after a most confounded long time, Conran saw fit to take Lucrezia off, to get asylum for her with the Colonel's wife for a day or two, that "those fools might not misconstrue her." By which comprehensive epithet Conran, I suppose, politely designated “Ours.”

Then I went my ways to my own room, and there I found-what do you think?-a scented, mauve-hued, creamy billet-doux, in uncommon bad handwriting, though, from my miserable Eudoxia Adelaida to the "friend and lover of her soul." Confound the woman! By Jove! how I swore at that daintily-perfumed and most vilely-scrawled letter. To think that where that beautiful signature stretched from one side to the other"Eudoxia Adelaida St. Julian"-there ought to have been that short, vile, low-bred, hideous, Billingsgate cognomen of "Sarah Briggs!"

In the note she reproached me-the wretched hypocrite!-for my departure the previous night, "without one farewell to your Eudoxia, O cruel Augustus !" and asked me to give her a rendezvous at some vineyards lying a little way off the Casa di Fiori, on the road to Melita. Now, being a foolish boy, and regarding myself as having been loved and wronged, whereas I had only been playing the very common rôle of pigeon, I could not resist the temptation of going, just to take one last look of that fair, cruel face, and upbraid her with being the first to sow the fatal seeds of lifelong mistrust and misery in my only too fond and faithful, &c. &c. &c.

So, at the appointed hour, just when the sun was setting over the faraway Sicilian shore, and the hush of night was sinking over the little,

rocky, peppery, military-thick, Mediterranean isle, I found myself en route to the vineyards; which, till I came to Malta, had been one of my delusions, idea picturing them in wreaths and avenues, reality proving them hop-sticks and parched earth. I drew near; it was quite dark now, the sun had gone to sleep under the blue waves, and the moon was not yet up. Though I knew she was Sarah Briggs, and an adventuress who had made game of me, two facts that one would fancy might chill the passion out of anybody, so mad was I about that woman, that if I had met her then and there, I should have let her wheedle me over, and gone back to the Casa di Fiori with her and been fleeced again: I am sure I should, sir, and so would you, if, at eighteen, new to life, you had fallen in with Eudox-pshaw!-with Sarah Briggs, my Marchioness St. Julian.

I drew near the vineyards: my heart beat thick. I could not see, but I was certain I heard the rustle of her dress, caught the perfume of her hair. All her sins vanished: how could I upbraid her, though she were three times over Sarah Briggs? Yes, she was coming; I felt her near; an electric thrill rushed through me as soul met soul. I heard & murmured "Dearest, sweetest!" I felt the warm clasp of two arms, but —a cold row of undress waistcoat-buttons came against my face, and a voice I knew too well cried out, as I rebounded from him, impelled thereto by a not gentle kick,

Who the deuce are you ?"

"The devil! get out! We both stopped for breath. At that minute up rose the silver moon, and in its tell-tale rays we glared on one another, I and Little Grand.

That silence was sublime the pause between Beethoven's andante and allegro-the second before the Spanish bull rushes upon the torreador.

"You little devil!" burst out Grand, slowly and terribly; "you little, mean, sneaking, spying, contemptible milksop! I should like to know what you mean by bringing out your ugly phiz at this hour, when you need to be afraid of stirring out for fear of nurse's bogies? And to dare to come lurking after me!"

"After you, Mr. Grandison!" I repeated, with grandiloquence. "Really you put too much importance on your own movements. I came by appointment to meet the Marchioness St. Julian, whom, I presume, as you are well acquainted with her, you know in her real name of Sarah Briggs, and to

"Sarah Briggs!-you come by appointment?" stammered Little Grand.

"Yes, sir; if you disbelieve my word of honour, I will condescend to you my invitation."

show

"You little devil!" swore Grand, coming back to his previous wrath; "it is a lie, a most abominable, unwarrantable lie! I came by appointment, sir; you did no such thing. Look there!"

And he flaunted before my eyes in the moonlight the facsimile of my letter, verbatim copy, save that in his Cosmo was put in the stead of Augustus.

"Look there!" said I, giving him mine.

Little Grand snatched it, read it over once, twice, thrice, then drooped his head, with a burning colour in his face, and was silent.

The "knowing hand" was done!

We were both of us uncommonly quiet for ten minutes; neither of us liked to be the first to give in.

At last Little Grand looked up and held out his hand, no more nonsense about him now.

"Simon, you and I've been two great fools; we can't chaff one another. She's a cursed actress, and-let's make it up, old boy."

We made it up accordingly-when Little Grand was not conceited he was a very jolly fellow-and then I gave him my whole key to the mysteries, intricacies, and charms of our Casa di Fiori. We could not chaff one another, but poor Little Grand was pitiably sore then, and for long afterwards. He, the "old bird," the cool hand, the sharp one of Ours, to have been done brown, to be the joke of the mess, the laugh of all the men, down to the weest drummer-boy! Poor Little Grand! He was too done up to swagger, too thoroughly angry with himself to swear at anybody else. He only whispered to me, "Why the dickens could she want you and me to meet ourselves?"

"To give us a finishing hoax, I suppose," I suggested.

Little Grand drew his cap over his eyes, and hung his head down in abject humiliation.

"I suppose so. What cursed fools we have been, Simon! And, I say, I've borrowed three hundred of old Miraflores, and it's all gone up at that devilish Casa; and how I shall get it from the governor, Heaven knows, for I don't."

"I'm in the same pickle, Grand," I groaned. "I've given that old rascal notes of hand for two hundred pounds, and, if it don't drop from the clouds, I shall never pay it. Oh, I say, Grand, love comes deucedly expensive."

"Ah!" said he, with a sympathetic shiver, "think what a pair of hunters we might have had for the money!" With which dismal and remorseful remembrance the old bird, who had been trapped like a young pigeon, swore mightily, and withdrew into humbled and disgusted silence.

Next morning we heard, to our comfort-what lots of people there always are to tell us how to lock our stable door when our solitary mare has been stolen-that, with a gentle hint from the police, the Marchioness St. Julian, with her confrères, had taken wing to the Ionian Isles, where, at Corfu or Cephalonia, they will re-erect the Casa di Fiori, and glide gently on again from vingt-et-un to loo, and from loo to lansquenet, under eyes as young and blinded as our own. They went without Lucrezia, though; she was with the Colonel's wife, who, being a cousin of Conran's, on his statement immediately patronised and petted her. Conran, however, took her out of her hands into his own in a very days. Any other man in the regiment would have been pretty well chaffed at marrying a girl out of the Casa di Fiori, but Conran had such a way of holding his own, of keeping off liberties from himself and anything belonging to him, and was, moreover, known to be a fellow of such fastidious honour, that his young Italian wife was received as if she had been a princess in her own right. With her respected parent Conran had a brief interview previous to his flight from Malta, in which, with a

few