"Because I want to understand, I want to know what I'm doing. You're an artist: you are, you are!" Mrs. Dallow cried, accusing him passionately.

"My poor Julia, it is n't so easy as that, nor a character one can take on from one day to the other. There are all sorts of things; one must be caught young, and put through the mill, and see things as they are. There would be sacrifices I never can make."

"Well, then, there are sacrifices for both of us, and I can't make them, either. I dare say it's all right for you, but for me it would be a terrible mistake. When I think I'm doing something, I must n't do just the opposite," Julia went on, as if she wished to explain and be clear. "There are things I've thought of, the things I like best; and they are not what you mean. It would be a great deception, and it's not the way I see my life, and it would be misery if we don't understand."

Nick looked at her in hard perplexity, for she did not succeed in explaining as well as she wished. "If we don't understand what?"

"That we are awfully different that you are doing it all for me."

"And is that an objection to me what I do for you?" asked Nick.

"You do too much. You're awfully good, you're generous, you're a dear fellow; but I don't believe in it. I did n't, at bottom, from the first - that 's why I made you wait, why I gave you your freedom. Oh, I've suspected you. I had my ideas. It's all right for you, but it won't do for me: I'm different altogether. Why should it always be put upon me, when I hate it? What have I done? I was drenched with it, before." These last words, as they broke forth, were accompanied, even as the speaker uttered them, with a quick blush; so that Nick could as quickly discern in them the uncalculated betrayal of an old irritation,

an old shame almost her late husband's flat, inglorious taste for pretty things, his indifference to every chance to play a public part. This had been the mortification of her youth, and it was indeed a perversity of fate that a new alliance should contain for her even an oblique demand for the same spirit of accommodation, impose on her the secret bitterness of the same concessions. As Nick stood there before her, struggling sincerely with the force that he now felt to be strong in her, the intense resolution to break with him, a force matured in a few hours, he read a riddle that hitherto had baffled him, saw a great mystery, become simple. A personal passion for him had all but thrown her into his arms (the sort of thing that even a vain man -and Nick was not especially vain might hesitate to recognize the strength of); held in check, with a tension of the cord, at moments, of which he could still feel the vibration, by her deep, her rare ambition, and arrested, at the last, only just in time to save her calculations. His present glimpse of the immense extent of these calculations did not make him think her cold or poor; there was in fact a positive strange heat in them, and they struck him rather as grand and high. The fact that she could drop him even while she longed for him - drop him because it was now fixed in her mind that he would not after all serve her determination to be associated, so far as a woman could, with great affairs; that she could postpone, and postpone to an uncertainty, the satisfaction of a gnawing tenderness and judge for the long run this exhibition of will and courage, of the large plan that possessed her, commanded his admiration on the spot. He paid the heavy penalty of being a man of imagination; he was capable of far excursions of the spirit, disloyalties to habit and even to faith, and open to wondrous communications. He ached, for the moment, to convince her that he would

achieve what he would n't, for the vision of his future that she had tried to entertain shone before him as a bribe and a challenge. It seemed to him there was nothing he could n't fancy enough, to be so fancied by her. Presently he said

"You want to be sure the man you marry will be prime minister of England. But how can you be sure, with any one?"

"I can be sure some men won't," Mrs. Dallow replied.

"The only safe thing, perhaps, would be to marry Mr. Macgeorge," Nick suggested.

"Possibly not even him."

"You're a prime minister yourself," Nick answered. "To hold fast to you as I hold, to be determined to be of your party is n't that political enough, since you are the incarnation of politics?

-

"Ah, how you hate them!" Julia moaned. "I saw that when I saw you this morning. The whole place reeked of it."

"My dear child, the greatest statesmen have had their distractions. What do you make of my hereditary talent? That's a tremendous force."

"It would n't carry you far." Then Mrs. Dallow added, "You must be a great artist." Nick gave a laugh at the involuntary contempt of this, but she went on: "It's beautiful of you to want to give up anything, and I like you for it. I shall always like you. We shall be friends, and I shall always take an interest

He stopped her at this, he made a movement which interrupted her phrase, and she suffered him to hold her hand as if she were not afraid of him now. "It is n't only for you," he argued, gently; "you're a great deal, but you 're not everything. Innumerable vows and pledges repose upon my head. I'm inextricably committed and dedicated. I was brought up in the temple; my father was a high priest, and I'm a child of the

“Oh, if it was n't for that!" she rejoined, flushed with the effort to resist his tone. She asked abruptly, "Do you pretend that if I were to die tomorrow you would stay in the House?

"If you were to die? God knows! But you do singularly little justice to my incentives," Nick continued. "My political career is everything to my mother."

Julia hesitated a moment; then she inquired, "Are you afraid of your mother?"

"Yes, particularly; for she represents infinite possibilities of disappointment and distress. She represents all my father's as well as all her own; and in them my father tragically lives again. On the other hand, I see him in bliss, as I see my mother, over our marriage and our life of common aspirations; though of course that's not a consideration that I can expect to have power with you."

Mrs. Dallow shook her head slowly, even smiling a little, with an air of recovered calmness and lucidity. "You'll never hold high office."

"But why not take me as I am?” "Because I'm abominably keen about that sort of thing; I must recognize it. I must face the ugly truth. I've been through the worst; it's all settled."

"I'm sorry to disappoint Mr. Carteret," said Julia. "I'll go and see him. I'll make it all right," she went "Besides, you'll make a fortune

on.

"You're very fortunate to be able to throw away a devotion," Nick replied.

Julia had her pocket handkerchief in her hand, and at this she quickly pressed it to her lips, as if to check an exclamation. Then, for an instant, she appeared to be listening as if for a sound from outside. Nick interpreted her movement as an honorable impulse to repress the words, "Do you mean the devotion that I was witness of this morning?" But immediately afterwards she said. something very different: "I thought I heard a ring. I've telegraphed for Mrs. Gresham."

66

"I'm only joking," Nick returned, with sombre eyes that contradicted this profession. "But what things you deserve I should do!"

"Do you mean striking likenesses?" "You do hate it! Pushed to that point, it's curious," the young man audibly mused.

"Do you mean you are joking about Mr. Carteret's promise?"

"No, the promise is real; but I don't seriously offer it as a reason.'

"I shall go to Beauclere," said Mrs. Dallow. "You're an hour late," she added in a different tone; for at that moment the door of the room was

butler pronouncing her name, was ushered in.

"Ah, don't impugn my punctuality; it's my character!" the useful lady exclaimed, putting a sixpence from the cabman into her purse. Nick went off, at this, with a simplified farewell - went off foreseeing exactly what he found the next day, that Mrs. Gresham would have received orders not to budge from her hostess's side. He called on the morrow, late in the afternoon, and Julia saw him, liberally, in pursuance of her assertion that she would be "beautiful to him, that she had not thrown away his devotion; but Mrs. Gresham remained, immutably, a spectator of her liberality. Julia looked at him kindly, but her companion was more benignant still; so that what Nick did with his own eyes was not to appeal to Mrs. Dallow to see him for a moment alone, but to solicit, in the name of this luxury, the second occupant of the drawing-room. Mrs. Gresham seemed to say, while Julia said very little: "I understand, my poor friend, I know everything (she has told me only

UPON a hill near the shore of the Adriatic stands the little village of Loreto, the resort of half a million of pilgrims every year, who go there to visit the Casa Santa, the house of the Virgin at Nazareth. It is said to have been miraculously transported to Loreto by angels, where a church was built over it, adorned by various Popes, and the "holy house" itself was surrounded by a lofty marble screen, designed by Bramante, and executed by some of the greatest masters of his day. In a niche of the interior is a small representation of the Virgin and Child in cedar, painted black, and attributed to St. Luke. It is richly ornamented with jewels, which sparkle in the light of ever-burning silver lamps. On the 10th of February, 1797, it was carried off to Paris by the French, but was restored to its shrine on the 9th of December in 1802. In the gorgeous Borghese chapel of Sta. Maria Maggiore at Rome, there is a picture of a black Madonna, also said to have been painted by St. Luke, which was carried in many solemn processions through the city as early as the year 590. These are but two of many such pictures to be found all over Europe, and in the Netherlands there is even said to be a church dedicated to la Vierge noire. This peculiar representation of the Madonna occurred so often in ancient art that some of the early writers of the Church felt obliged

to account for it by explaining that the Virgin was of a very dark complexion, as might be proved by the verse of Canticles which says, "I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem." Others maintained that she became black during her sojourn in Egypt. Nevertheless, this blackness, though considered to enhance the sanctity of the ancient pictures, was never imitated by more modern painters, and the priests of to-day will tell you that extreme age and exposure to the smoke of countless altar-candles have caused that change in complexion which the more naive fathers of the Church attributed to the power of the Egyptian sun. This explanation is not a satisfactory one, however, because in nearly all these pictures it is the flesh alone that is entirely black, the crimson of the lips, the white of the eyes, and the draperies having preserved their original brilliancy of tint.

It is to the pagan mythologies that we must look for the true explanation, and even the conservative Mrs. Jameson confesses that "the earliest effigies of the Virgin and Child may be traced to Alexandria, and to Egyptian influences, and it is as easily conceivable that the time-consecrated Egyptian myth of Isis and Horus may have suggested the original type, the outward form, and the arrangement of the maternal group as that the classical Greek types of the Or

pheus and Apollo should have furnished the early symbols of the Redeemer as the Good Shepherd, - a fact which does not rest upon supposition, but of which the proofs remain to us in the antique Christian sculptures and the paintings in the Catacombs." Mrs. Jameson accepts the theory that a pagan symbol was adopted for the expression of Christian thought, but many Romanists would go further than this, and maintain with the Marquis de Mirville in his Archéologie de la Vierge that "as the dogma, the liturgy, and the rites professed by the Roman Apostolical Church in 1862 are found engraved on monuments, inscribed on papyri and cylinders, hardly posterior to the Deluge, it seems impossible to deny the existence of a first, ante-historical (Roman) Catholicism, of which our own is the faithful continuation."

This is a matter of opinion. As a matter of fact, we must remember that the worship of Mary as the mother of God by the Church generally did not begin till the fourth century. In 431, Nestorius and his sect were condemned as heretics by the first Council of Ephesus, for maintaining that in Christ the two natures of God and man remained separate, and that Mary, his human mother, was parent of the man, but not of the God; consequently, that the title which during the previous century had been popularly applied to her (Theotokos, mother of God) was improper and profane. Cyril and his party held that the two natures were made one, and that therefore Mary was truly the mother of God. The decision of the Council, condemning Nestorius, gave the first great impulse to the worship of Mary, and the subsequent multiplication of the pictures of the Madonna and Child.

The first historical mention of a direct worship of the Virgin occurs in a passage in the works of Eusebius, in the fourth century. Having occasion to enumerate the eighty-four heresies which had already sprung up in the Church,

he instances a sect of women who had come from Thrace into Arabia, and who offered cakes of meal and honey to the Virgin, transferring to her the worship that had been paid to Ceres. They were called Collyridians, from collyris, the name of the twisted cake used in their offerings. Here we have the first link between the new faith and the old; for every one knows that the policy of the Church from the beginning has always been to give to the old symbols a new meaning, to the old festivals a new significance, to the old places a new sanctity, and where dates were wanting to supply them from the chronology of the older religions. So that primitive Christianity, while founding its churches upon the ruins of Mithraic temples, filled up the missing dates in the Scriptural narratives from the pagan chronology which was based upon the history of the

sun.

If we take the chronology of the life of the Virgin, for instance, we find the 8th of September set down in the calendar as her birthday. Now the 8th of September in the Roman calendar was the birthday of the virgin Astræa, and signified the disengagement of the celestial Virgo from the solar rays. It is a well-known fact that the 25th of December was appointed by the Western Church to be celebrated as the birthday of Christ no earlier than the fourth century, while a century previous that day had been engrafted into the Roman calendar as the Natalis Solis Invicti, being the feast of the Sun at Tyre, and the feast of Mithra in Persia. Albertus Magnus says that the sign of the celestial Virgo rises above the horizon at the time fixed as the birth of Christ. More than a hundred years before the Christian era, in the territory of Chartres, among the Gauls, honors were paid to the Virgini Parituræ, who was about to give birth to the God of Light.

The 2d of February, the feast of the Purification of the Virgin, is called in