"Every one who has passed a Regent Street photographer's window must do that," answers Wolfgang evasively.

'Those horrible photographers! We talked just now of the education of pain. The number of times I have been forced to sit for my portrait may be set, I should hope, against a few of my sins."

"Have been forced," repeats the master, italicizing the words somewhat pointedly. "I can imagine it coming among a fashionable Beauty's sorrows to be stared at by the mob, copied by the milliners, interviewed by correspondents of provincial newspapers. Surely there can be no law in England compelling her to sit, against her will, to the photographers; and surely," adds Wolfgang, "there must be a law in England to restrain the photographers from making a traffic of her likeness."

you?" he asks, presently-" a game at six-andsixty for your amusement in winter, three weeks of mineral-water drinking for your summer dissipation, and a good marital stocking on the knitting-pins at all times-such a lot, let us say, as would fall to the mistress, did she exist, of Schloss Egmont?

"Schloss Egmont? I should die, I should commit suicide, if I remained another six weeks in that hideous place!" In her desire to appease Wolfgang's prophetic jealousy, Vivian allows herself for once to speak as she feels, without let or hindrance. "Those howling woods! Those poverty-stricken gardens! (The peasants are right, I am sure. Every kind of ghostly demon must inhabit them.) The suites of rooms, each more chill, more comfortless than the other! And the portraits, no doubt of faded Fraus von Egmont, on the walls! And the atrabilious drawing-room

་་

"I am sick of the name of Beauty as I am sick of the whole life it involves," she exclaims, with pretty irrelevance" mob, special correspondents, photographers, St. James's Street, and all. I am sick of being fed on sugar-candy, of being sprinkled with rose-water. I want the solid fireside joys that come to other people naturally." And as she says this there is an unmistakable tremor in her voice. "I want to be as I was in pa's quiet little Devonshire village, only with one heart to care for me, one pair of eyes to look on me as a woman—not a London sight, like the infant hippopotamus at the Zoological, or Madame Tussaud's latest waxwork murderer."

She wants to set her foot upon another neck! Sated though she declares herself to be of rosewater celebrity, the pastime of breaking simple hearts has not for certain lost its zest. She would enjoy the pain even of an obscure German professor ere she dismiss him and his passion from her thoughts for ever. The greed of conquest has, in truth, reached a point in Vivian Vivash at which it becomes a moral disease. She lives only to be admired-honestly, if possible, but admired; and if a victim draw back, would overstep the limits of self-respect rather than see him break, scathless, from her toils.

But Wolfgang's heart is tough. Surrender, no doubt he will-yes, in this very forthcoming "evil quarter of an hour!" But not without a struggle. He knows most of the world's capitals, from the outside, at least, possibly he may have learned a few of the world's ways in his day; have come across women of equal beauty with this one, and of equal worth!

"You talk of a little Devonshire village-how would the quiet of German country life suit

And Ange! And Jeanne!'

"And in another day or two, the society of Count Paul von Egmont himself?" suggests Wolfgang, with emphasis. "Do not omit the part of Hamlet from the play."

Miss Vivash hesitates; she trifles, coyly irresolute, with the bracelet on her wrist. In the hand of an expert coquette, silence is to speech what shadow is to light. She who understands it not is ignorant of the very chiaroscuro of her craft. Can a confession from the loveliest pair of lips extant rival in sweetness the avowal that silence masks, and that the vanity of man's nature can construe as he wills?

"I think," so at last she speaks, in fluttering accents, and not trusting her eyes to meet Wolfgang's, "that for once, for this night only, as the acting people say, it would refresh one to speculate, like Maud Muller, on the pleasant mighthave-beens of life! London and all the people` belonging to it, Schloss Egmont and all the people belonging to it, do not, to my mind, come under the name of pleasant."

"The happiest hours I have known have been spent within the four hideous walls, in the poverty-stricken gardens that surround Schloss Egmont," retorts the master.

His voice reflects loyally the flood of strong feeling at his heart. Poor victim! Surely the end can not be far off, now. A man exchanging warm sentiments with Beauty, at such an hour, in Beauty's present plastic mood, must have advanced tolerably far along the road to execution!

"The happiest hours you have known have been spent at Schloss Egmont?" she repeats, with an air of bewitching consciousness. "Surely you do not reckon any of the hours you have spent there, lately?"

"Quite lately, Miss Vivash. Now, in fact, during this present month of July."

"And alone, of course; alone, with your own thoughts, or with those wild books of German poetry, that must so delightfully take you out of this dull, prosaic world! Schiller and Heine" (one feels unwillingly convinced that Beauty's sculptured lips say Heiner), " and the rest! Oh, Mr. Wolfgang," impulsively, "those are just the higher interests that I need! Pursuits, studies, some one of superior mind to guide me, to save me from myself! I'm sure I don't know how I dare speak in this open way, but you seem so like an old and valued friend that I take courage. Tell me, you don't quite disbelieve in me—you think there may be better capabilities in me than anything my artificial life of frivolity has called forth ?"

And as though swayed irresistibly by some current of strong feeling, she rests a white hand, for a couple of seconds or more, on Wolfgang's

arm.

As a bit of acting, the impulse is excellent. Jeanne has not been overmuch affected by the stock sentiment, the carefully learned glances and attitudes of the love-struck Duchess of Carrara. At this moment, words, gestures, alike struck off at white heat, she feels that her rival is an artist.

Is Wolfgang acting a part too?—a more serious one than Vivian's, but still a part, in which vanity rather than passion holds the masterplace?

Alas! Such details matter not to Jeanne. She is nothing to him. And this picturesque situation, this sample of a reigning Beauty's every-day sensations, is the turning-point in her fate; just that! Standing here, metaphorically and literally, in the cold, a miserable, unwilling listener, Jeanne feels that all the best half of herself-her girlhood, light-heartedness, hope-have died a sudden, violent death; that from this hour forth she will be about on a level, as regards enjoyment of life, with Ange-or lower, perhaps, by reason of the interminable vista of days that stretch out gray and changeless before her!

The principal actors—in this farce, or tragedy —which ?—move, ere long, away; and advancing a pace or two from the wet shrubs, out of the pouring rain, Jeanne resolves stoutly to hold her pain in check, to confront whatever immediate ordeal lies before her. But even this respite is brief. Before five minutes are over, Miss Vivash and her companion return once more to their former position, and once more Jeanne is forced to listen.

That a climax of some kind has been reached during these five minutes, it needs but a glance at the two faces to discern.

'Save us from our answered prayers!' as some one or another wisely said."

"You do not hold to any old-fashioned doctrines about wedded happiness?" he asks.

"In the cooing of turtle-doves, the sweetness of barley-sugar temples? Well, yes. I dare say such things are pleasant enough-while they last!"

"And the love that comes when the cooing of turtle-doves, when barley-sugar temples, are things of the past?"

A gesture of Vivian's white hand expresses as much condensed cynicism as would spread over a dozen pages, printed small, of La Rochefoucauld. “I am not a sentimentalist, Mr. Wolfgang, once and for all. I am seasoned wood; I look at the world without blinkers. Every penniless love-match I ever took the trouble to watch, I have seen end in grief-naturally. How can it be otherwise? When people are married, each year they live brings heavier inevitable expenses on their shoulders. A woman's dress is costly in exact proportion to her age. (I went about in one gown," muses poor Beauty, "straight through the best balls of my first season. And all the fine ladies copied me! I know a great deal too much of human nature to go about in one gown now.) Then, unless the wife is a regular failure, she will look forward constantly to being more invited out, to entertaining more, to having better equipages, richer jewels. Love! unless the husband has an ample balance at his banker's, how can love exist, I should like to know, amid the wear and tear of daily anxieties like these?" "Are you administering a wholesome bitter -speaking in parable—for my good?" says Wolfgang. "Or do you, in earnest, believe that human life contains nothing of higher worth, of keener delight, than equipages, jewels, and invitation-cards?"

"I believe," says Vivian, with an unstifled yawn, "that, unless one wants to be rheumatic for the rest of one's mortal days, it would be well to go back to the ballroom. What a climate!" (peeping forth, with a shudder, at the grand, dark heavens, through whose dome, at one solitary point, a star already shines). "If this is a normal German July, what must December be like -a succession of Decembers, enlivened by sixand-sixty, Frau Pastors, and the eternal stocking? And to think there are thousands-for aught I know, millions-of sentient beings condemned to drone out their days, even by courtesy one can not say to live, in the Fatherland!"

She turns brusquely away, the master in dutiful attendance; and stiff, cramped, drenched to the skin, Jeanne Dempster crawls forth out of her place of concealment, and watches their depar

ture.

That Wolfgang has declared his love, and been rejected, she accepts as a certainty, although the actual words of his declaration were unheard by her. That, in spite of Vivian's cold worldliness, he will continue faithful to his folly, she can not, dare not doubt. "Although to you this may seem a farce, to me it is a matter of life and death. Although I may be a fool, although I may have to pay dearly for my folly-change I shall not." Do not his own confessions shut out the possibility of disbelief?

Well, and let him be true or false, a fool or wise, Jeanne Dempster must live on, must brave a hundred human faces, now, in yonder lighted noisy Kursaal, and make no sign that the heart within her breast is dead!

She will not give herself time for cowardice. She stops not to consider what sensation her wet clothes, her tear-stained cheeks are likely to create among the pink-and-white beauties of the ballroom—nay, it seems to her that she derives a certain forlorn satisfaction from the sense of her own uncomeliness. Approaching nearer the light, she sees that the clock above the entrance of the Kursaal points to three quarters past ten. In another fifteen minutes the ball will be over; let her sick heart in this, at least, find a shade of comfort. The fiddlers, even now, are tightening their strings preparatory to the final dance. What are her chances of a partner? she asks herself, ingeniously self-torturing, after the manner of the miserable. Wolfgang, Sir Christopher, thin-waisted, supercilious Baden officers-which among them all will come forward as the squire of the forlorn and draggled Cinderella, who is about to put in an appearance upon the scene?

She walks boldly past the range of windows, makes her way in (readily enough, when people discover the dripping condition of her raiment), through the crowded vestibule, and enters the ballroom. The first figure her eyes light upon is Miss Vivash. The Beauty is talking with an air of confidence to Lady Pamela at the farther end of the saal. Wolfgang, looking pale and disturbed, stands apart, speaking to no one, near the door.

He sees his pupil in an instant, and crosses over to her side.

"Miss Dempster, my little Jeanne, this is a relief, indeed! But you are cold" (whether the girl repulse him or not, he rests his hand on hers). "You must be drenched to the skin in that light frock of yours. What, in Gottes namen, have you been doing, child?"

Wolfgang looks at her with unsmiling lips, with grave, mistrustful eyes.

"A singular kind of lesson that has kept you out in such weather, at such an hour of the night as this, and alone!"

"And suppose I was not alone?" she answers curtly. "Suppose, until half an hour ago, that Sir Christopher Marlowe was good enough to be my companion?"

"Sir Christopher!" repeats Wolfgang, glancing across the room at the Bond Street perfections of the little London dandy; "why, Sir Christopher Marlowe would melt away bodily in one of our Black Forest thunder-showers."

"When one is in pleasant society, Mr. Wolfgang, the accidents of wind and rain may be forgotten, as you, surely, ought to know."

Jeanne believes herself to speak with a tolerably successful show of flippancy. Something, at any rate, in her tone or in her mention of Sir Christopher, produces an effect on Wolfgang.

"If Sir Christopher is ready to bear the blame, I, of course, may be silent," he remarks, somewhat coldly. 'Otherwise, as I shall have to answer to Mademoiselle Ange to-morrow for your illness-"

"Oh, my illness!" exclaims Jeanne, turning aside from him impatiently. "Do I look, the very least in the world, like a person who is going to be ill ?”

"You do not," is Wolfgang's reply; "you look like a person who is ill already. Your poor little pinched face is white as death, with a crimson spot on either cheek; your eyes are glassy, your lips blue."

"What a seductive picture!" cries Jeanne, this time with a laugh 'twould go to your heart to hear. "Who will offer himself as my partner, I wonder, for the next dance? for I hope I shall dance it! I hope a day of such wild pleasure as this has been will wind up bravely!"

“I believe I am, or was, engaged, after a fashion," Wolfgang remarks, after glancing at a programme that hangs suspended from his buttonhole. But, if you will accept me, Miss Dempster, I am ready to forswear myself. You and I have never danced together, have we?"

"No, we have had the good fortune hitherto to find other partners," Jeanne answers bitterly. "It would be rather late in the day to mend now. Besides, sir, why should my conscience be made to bear the guilt of your perjuries?"

A glow of telltale indignation suffuses her face, her lips tremble. As Wolfgang watches her steadily, the dawning of some new, not unwelcome truth seems to break upon him.

"If I am ready to bear the guilt myself," he whispers, "will you dance with me? It is never too late in the day to return to one's first-"

The sentence, unhappily for Jeanne's peace, remains a fragment. At this instant a suppliant for her hand, a victim to her drenched and mermaid charms, crosses the room, and with figure bent at an acute right angle, with hands stiffly glued down to his sides, stands, after the manner of academy-taught cavaliers, before her.

"Kann ich die Ehre haben "--so in a sepulchral voice he addresses her "Kann ich die Ehre haben, Gnädiges Fräulein ?"

The new-comer is an immensely tall, conspicuously ugly university student, distantly known, by reason of his kinship with the Katzenellenbogen family, to Jeanne and Ange; a Herr Graf possessing Tittel ohne Mittel, like most of the Schwarzwald nobles, and of lineage too high, of prejudices too stiff, to seek partners among the rosy-cheeked bourgeois daughters of Freiburg or Mühlheim. Three or four tolerably recent duelslashes traverse his cadaverous face; his flaxen hair-long and parted down the center of his head, like the hair of Ary Scheffer's heroes—is drawn tightly behind his ears. He affects black gloves, too long in the fingers; shows an untold length of throat; wears Lord Byron collars, a white cravat, a cutaway riding-coat, and spurs !

And Jeanne turns shortly aside from Wolfgang. With her passion-strung heart just prepared to overflow and relent, she smiles upon this saber-slashed apparition as though he were a creature of light, rests her head with a little willing gesture on his arm, and resigns herself for the remainder of the evening to his guidance!

Lenore's Death Galop is the music chosen for the final dance: wildest, eeriest strains that ever entered into the heart of German composer to weave. The student glides an arm around Jeanne's wet waist, he shakes back his lint-white locks, holds his head aloft, extends his left hand horizontally in space, and in another moment they are off. One glimpse the girl catches of her master's grave face as he watches them depart; one glimpse she has of Vivian, looking on at the little scene with chill composure, with half-closed, indifferent eyes; and then until the galop is finished, during the space of a dozen or more mad minutes, she sees no more.

The Bohemian bandsmen play quick, even according to their national ideas of dancing speed. The strides of the specter student outstrip their strains. Once only in Jeanne Dempster's life before has she experienced such velocity—once, at the age of seven, when her nurse allowed her the supreme bliss of a whirl in a merry-go-round at Freiburg Fair. No matter that her limbs feel heavy, that her breath comes thick. Fast, faster, in her wet clothes, with jealous despair, cold and sick at her heart, she is borne: