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it then so awful that he should be in Paris?"

"Awful, awful, too awful," murmured Laura, with intense gravity, still looking at her, and looking all the more fixedly that she knew Selina didn't like it.

'My dear, you do indulge in a style of innuendo, for a respectable young woman—!" Mrs. Berrington exclaimed, with an angry laugh. "You have ideas that when I was a girl- She paused, and her sister saw that she hadn't the assurance to finish her sentence on that particular note.

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"Don't talk about my innuendoes and my ideas-you might remember those in which I have heard you indulge! Ideas? what ideas did I ever have before I came here?" Laura Wing asked, with a trembling voice. "Don't pretend to be shocked, Selina; that's too cheap a defence. You have said things to meif you choose to talk of freedom! What is the talk of your house, and what does one hear if one lives with you? I don't care what I hear now (it's all odious, and there's little choice, and my sweet sensibility has gone God knows where !) and I'm very glad if you understand that I don't care what I say. If one talks about your affairs, my dear, one mustn't be too particular!" the girl continued, with a flash of passion.

Mrs. Berrington buried her face in her hands. "Merciful powers, to be insulted, to be covered with outrage, by one's wretched little sister!" she moaned.

"I think you should be thankful there is one human being-however wretched -who cares enough for you to care about the truth in what concerns you," Laura said. "Selina, Selina-are you hideously deceiving us?"

"Us?" Selina repeated, with a singular laugh. "Whom do you mean by us?" Laura Wing hesitated; she had asked herself whether it would be best she should let her sister know the dreadful scene she had had with Lionel; but she had not, in her mind, settled that point. However, it was settled now, in an instant. "I don't mean your friendsthose of them that I have seen. I don't think they care a straw-I have never seen such people. But last week Lionel spoke to me he told me he knew it, as a certainty."

"Lionel spoke to you?" said Mrs. Berrington, holding up her head with a stare. "And what is it that he knows?"

"That Captain Crispin was in Paris and that you were with him. He believes you went there to meet him."

"He said this to you?"

"Yes, and much more-I don't know why I should make a secret of it."

"The disgusting beast!" Selina exclaimed, slowly, solemnly. "He enjoys the right-the legal right-to pour forth his vileness upon me; but when he is so lost to every feeling as to begin to talk to you in such a way- !" And Mrs. Berrington paused, in the extremity of her disapproval.

"Oh, it wasn't his talk that shocked me-it was his believing it," the girl replied. "That, I confess, made an impression on me."

"Did it indeed? I'm infinitely obliged to you! You are a tender, loving little sister."

"Yes, I am, if it's tender to have cried about you-all these days-till I'm blind and sick!" Laura replied. "I hope you are prepared to meet him. His mind is quite made up to apply for a divorce."

Laura's voice almost failed her as she said this-it was the first time that, in talking with Selina, she had uttered that horrible word. She had heard it, however, often enough on the lips of others; it had been bandied, lightly enough, in her presence, under those somewhat austere ceilings of Mellows, of which the admired decorations and mouldings, in the taste of the middle of the last century, all in delicate plaster and reminding her of Wedgewood pottery, consisted of slim festoons, urns and trophies and knotted ribbons, so many symbols, somehow, of domestic affection and irrevocable union. Selina herself had flashed it at her, with light superiority, as if it were some precious jewel, kept in reserve, which she could convert at any moment into specie, so that it would constitute a happy provision for her future. The idea-associated with her own point of view-was apparently too familiar to Mrs. Berrington to be the cause of her changing color; it struck her indeed, as presented by Laura, in a ludicrous light, for her pretty eyes expanded a moment and she smiled pity

ingly. "Well, you are a poor dear innocent, after all. Lionel would be about as able to divorce me-even if I were the most abandoned of my sex-as he would be to write a poem."

"I know nothing about that," said Laura.

"So I perceive as I also perceive that you must have shut your eyes very tight. Should you like to know a few of the reasons-heaven forbid I should attempt to go over them all; there are millions! -why his hands are tied?"

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"No, I don't want you to tell me anything of the sort," Laura interrupted. "Especially as you were just now so pained by the license of my allusions."

"You listen to him, then--but it suits your purpose not to listen to me!"

"Oh, Selina, Selina!" the girl almost shrieked, turning away.

"Where have your eyes been, or your senses, or your powers of observation? You can be clever enough when it suits you!" Mrs. Berrington continued, throwing off another ripple of derision. "And now, perhaps, as the carriage is waiting, you will let me go about my duties."

Laura turned again and stopped her, holding her arm as she passed toward the door. "Will you swear-will you swear by everything that is most sacred?"

"Will I swear what?” And now she thought Selina visibly blanched.

"That you didn't lay eyes on Captain Crispin in Paris.”

Mrs. Berrington hesitated, but only for an instant. "You are really too odious, but as you are pinching me to death I will swear, to get away from you. I never laid eyes on him."

The organs of vision which Mrs. Berrington was ready solemnly to declare that she had not misapplied were, as her sister looked into them, an abyss of

indefinite prettiness. The girl had sounded them before without discovering a conscience at the bottom of them, and they had never helped any one to find out anything about their possessor except that she was one of the beauties of London. Even while Selina spoke Laura had a cold, horrible sense of not believing her, and at the same time a desire, colder still, to extract a reiteration of the pledge. Was it the asseveration of her innocence that she wished her to repeat, or only the attestation of her falsity? One way or the other it seemed to her that she should settle something, and she went on, inexorably-"By our dear mother's memoryby our poor father's?"

"By my mother's, by my father's," said Mrs. Berrington, "and by that of any other member of the family_you like!" Laura let her go; she had not been pinching her, as Selina described the pressure, but had clung to her with insistent hands. As she opened the door Selina said, in a changed voice: "I suppose it's no use to ask you if you care to drive to Plash."

"No, thank you, I don't care-I shall take a walk."

"I suppose, from that, that your friend Lady Davenant has gone." "No, I think she is still there." "That's a bore!" Selina exclaimed, as she went off.

VI.

LAURA WING hastened to her room to prepare herself for her walk; but when she reached it she simply fell on her knees, shuddering, beside her bed. She buried her face in the soft counterpane of wadded silk; she remained there a long time, with a kind of aversion to lifting it again to the day. It burned with horror, and there was coolness in the smooth glaze of the silk. It seemed to her that she had been concerned in a hideous transaction, and her uppermost feeling was, strangely enough, that she was ashamed, not of her sister, but of herself. She didn't believe her-that was at the bottom of everything, and she had made her lie, she had brought out her perjury, she had associated it

with the sacred images of the dead. She took no walk, she remained in her room, and quite late, towards six o'clock, she heard on the gravel, outside of her windows, the wheels of the carriage bringing back Mrs. Berrington. She had evidently been elsewhere as well as to Plash; no doubt she had been to the vicarage—she was capable even of that. She could pay "duty-visits," like that (she called at the vicarage about three times a year), and she could go and be nice to her mother-in-law, with her fresh lips still fresher for the lie she had just told. For it was as definite as an aching nerve to Laura that she didn't believe her, and if she didn't believe her the words she had spoken were a lie. It was the lie, the lie to her, and which she had dragged out of her, that seemed to the girl the ugliest thing. If she had admitted her folly, if she had explained, attenuated, sophisticated, there would have been a difference in her favor; but now she was bad because she was hard. And she could make plans and calculate, she could act and do things for a particular effect. She could go straight to old Mrs. Berrington and to the parson's wife and his five daughters (just as she had kept the children after luncheon, on purpose, so long) because that looked innocent and domestic and denoted a mind without a feather's weight upon it.

A servant came to the young lady's door to tell her that tea was ready; and on her asking who else was below (for she had heard the wheels of a second vehicle, just after Selina's return), she learned that Lionel had come back. At this news she requested that some tea should be brought to her room-she determined not to go to dinner. When the dinner-hour came she sent down word that she had a headache, that she was going to bed. She wondered whether Selina would come to her (she could forget disagreeable scenes amazingly); but her fervent hope that she would stay away was gratified. Indeed she would have another call upon her attention, if her meeting with her husband was half as much of a concussion as was to have been expected. Laura had found herself listening hard, after knowing that her brother-in-law was in the house; she

half expected to hear indications of violence-loud cries or the sound of a scuffle. It was a matter of course to her that some dreadful scene had not been slow to take place, something that discretion should keep her out of, even if she had not been too sick. She didn't go to bed-partly because she didn't know what might happen in the house. But she was restless also for herself; things had reached a point when it seemed to her that she must make up her mind. She left her candles unlighted-she sat up till the small hours, in the glow of the fire. What had been settled by her scene with Selina was that worse things were to come (looking into her fire, as the night went on, she had a rare prevision of the catastrophe that hung over the house), and she considered, or tried to consider, what it would be best for her, in anticipation, to do. The first thing was to take flight.

It may be related, without delay, that Laura Wing did not take flight, and that, though the circumstance detracts from the interest that should be felt in her character, she did not even make up her mind. That was not so easy, when action had to ensue. At the same time, she had not the excuse of a conviction that by not acting-that is, by not withdrawing from her brother-in-law's roof

she should be able to hold Selina up to her duty, to drag her back into the straight path. The hopes connected with that project were now a phase that she had left behind her; she had not, to-day, an illusion about her sister large enough to cover a sixpence. She had passed through the period of superstition, which had lasted the longest-the time when it seemed to her (as at first) a kind of profanity to doubt of Selina and judge her, the elder sister whose beauty and success she had ever been proud of, and who carried herself (though with the most good-natured fraternizings) as one native to an upper air. She had called herself, in moments of early penitence for irrepressible suspicion, a little presumptuous prig; so strange did it seem to her at first, the impulse of criticism in regard to her bright protectress. But the revolution was over, and she had a desolate, lonely freedom which struck her as not the most cynical thing

in the world only because Selina's behavior was more so. She supposed she should learn, though she was afraid of the knowledge, what had passed between that lady and her husband while her vigil ached itself away. But it appeared to her the next day, to her surprise, that nothing was changed in the situation, save that Selina knew at present how much more she was suspected. As this had not a chastening effect upon Mrs. Berrington nothing had been gained by Laura's appeal to her. Whatever Lionel had said to his wife he said nothing to Laura; he left her at perfect liberty to forget the subject he had opened up to her so luminously. This was very characteristic of his good-nature; it had come over him that, after all, she wouldn't like it, and if the free use of the gray ponies could make up to her for the shock, she might order them every day in the week and banish the unpleasant conversation from her mind.

Laura ordered the gray ponies very often; she drove herself all over the country. She visited not only the neighboring but the distant poor, and she never went out without stopping for one of the vicar's five daughters. Mellows was now half the time full of visitors, and when it was not its master and mistress were staying with their friends, either together or singly. Sometimes (almost always when she was asked) Laura Wing accompanied her sister, and on two or three occasions she paid an independent visit. Selina had often told her that she wished her to have her own friends, and the girl now felt a great desire to show her that she had them. She had arrived at no decision whatever; she had embraced, in intention, no particular course of action. She drifted on, shutting her eyes, averting her head and, as it seemed to herself, hardening her heart. This admission will doubtless suggest to the reader that she was a weak, inconsequent, spasmodic young person, with a standard not really, or at any rate not continuously, high; and I have no desire that she shall appear anything but what she was. It must even be related of her that since she could not escape and live in lodgings and paint fans (there were reasons why this combination was impossible) she determined to try and be

happy in the given circumstances-to float in shallow water. She gave up the attempt to understand the queer modus vivendi at which her companions seemed to have arrived; she knew it was not final, but it served them sufficiently for the time, and if it served them why shouldn't it serve her, the dependent, impecunious, tolerated little sister, representative of the class whom it behoved above all to mind their own business? The time was coming round when they would all move up to town, and there, in the crowd, with the added movement, the strain would be less and indifference easier.

Whatever Lionel had said to his wife that evening, she had found something to say to him: that Laura could see, though not so much from any change in the simple expression of his little red face and in the vain bustle of his existence, as from the grand manner in which Selina now carried herself. She was "smarter" than ever, and her waist was smaller, and her back straighter, and the fall of her shoulders finer; her long eyes were more oddly charming, and the extreme detachment of her elbows from her sides conduced still more to the exhibition of her beautiful arms. So she floated, with a serenity not disturbed by a general lateness, through the interminable succession of her engagements. Her photographs were not to be purchased in the Burlington Arcade-she had kept out of that; but she looked more than ever as they would have represented her if they had been obtainable there. There were times when Laura thought her brother-in-law's formless desistence too frivolous for nature; it even gave her a sense of deeper dangers. as if he had been digging away in the dark and they would all tumble into the hole. It happened to her to ask herself whether the things he had said to her the afternoon he came to her in the schoolroom had not all been blind folly, or brandy and soda, which came to the same thing. However this might be, she was obliged to recognize that the impression of brandy and soda had not again been given her. More striking still, however, was Selina's capacity to recover from shocks and condone imputations; she kissed again-kissed Laura

It was

—without tears, and proposed problems connected with the rearrangement of trimmings and of the flowers at dinner, as candidly-as earnestly-as if there had never been a sharper question between them. Captain Crispin was not mentioned; much less, of course, so far as Laura was concerned, was he seen. But Lady Ringrose appeared; she came down, once, for two days, during an absence of Lionel's. Laura, to her surprise, found her no such Jezebel, but a clever little woman with a single eyeglass and short hair, who had read Lecky and could give her useful hints about water-colors; a tolerance that encouraged the girl, for this was the direction in which it now seemed to her best that she herself should grow.

VII.

IN Grosvenor Place, on Sunday afternoon, during the first weeks of the Season, Mrs. Berrington was usually at home; this, indeed, was the only time when a visitor who had not made an appointment could hope to be admitted to her presence. Very few hours in the twenty-four did she spend in her own house. Gentlemen calling on these occasions rarely found her sister: Mrs. Berrington had the field to herself. It was understood between the pair that Laura should take this time for going to see her old women; it was in this manner that Selina qualified the girl's independent social resources. The old women, however, were not a dozen in number; they consisted mainly of Lady Davenant and the elder Mrs. Berrington, who had a house in Portman Street. Lady Davenant lived at Queen's Gate, and also was usually at home of a Sunday afternoon; her visitors were not all men, like Selina Berrington's, and Laura's maidenly bonnet was not a false note in her drawingroom. Selina liked her sister, naturally enough, to make herself useful, but of late, somehow, they had grown rarer, the occasions that depended in any degree upon her aid, and she had never been much appealed to-though it would have seemed natural she should be-on behalf of the weekly circle of gentlemen. It came to be recognized on Selina's part

that nature had dedicated her more to the relief of old women than to that of young men. Laura had a distinct sense of interfering with the free interchange of anecdote that went on at her sister's fireside; the anecdotes were mostly such an immense secret that they couldn't be told fairly if she were there, and she had their privacy on her conscience. There was an exception, however; when Selina expected Americans she naturally asked her to stay at home; not, apparently, so much because their conversation would be good for her as because hers would be good for them.

One Sunday, about the middle of May, Laura Wing prepared herself to go and see Lady Davenant, who had made a long absence from town at Easter, but who would now have returned. The weather was charming, she had from the first established her right to tread the London streets alone (if she was a poor girl she could have the detachment as well as the helplessness of it) and she promised herself the pleasure of a walk along the park, where the new grass was bright. A moment before she quitted the house her sister sent for her to the drawingroom; the servant gave her a note scrawled in pencil: "That man from New York is here-Mr. Wendover, who brought me the introduction the other day from the Schoolings. He's rather a dose-you must positively come down and talk to him. Take him out with you if you can." The description was not alluring, but Selina had never made a request of her to which the girl had not instantly responded: it seemed to her she was there for that. She joined the circle in the drawing-room and found that it consisted of five persons, one of whom was Lady Ringrose. Lady Ringrose was at all times and in all places a fitful apparition; she had described herself to Laura, during her visit at Mellows, as "a bird on the branch." She had no fixed habit of receiving on Sunday, she was in and out as she liked, and she was one of the few specimens of her sex who, in Grosvenor Place, ever turned up, as she said, on the occasions to which I allude. Of the three gentlemen two were known to Laura; she could have told you at

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