A short three-quarters of an hour brought them to a park gate, which somebody, running out from the lodge. hard by, flung open to admit them. Presently came another gate, a gravel sweep, flanked by evergreens, and then Jeanne made out, as well as the darkness would allow her, a low, irregularly built, white house.

66 Welcome to Holmhurst!" cried Mr. Ashley, who had assumed a certain bluff, British heartiness of manner since he had been once more upon his native soil. "Here, catch hold of the reins, Simpson. Why the dickens don't somebody come to open the door? here's Mrs. Ashley."

Oh!

The front door had been thrown open, letting out a stream of ruddy light into the clinging mist outside, and through it hurried a tall, gray-haired lady, who was talking volubly to nobody in particular as she walked, and who clutched hastily at her cap, which had somehow fallen on to the extreme back of her head. Just as she reached the threshold she dropped her shawl, which she kicked impatiently away into an adjacent puddle, whence it was rescued by Simpson, who shook it and delivered it up to an imperturbable butler.

"Well, John," began this impetuous lady, bestowing a hasty embrace upon her husband, and speaking in a hurried monotone, as though it were absolutely essential that she should crowd as many words into one sentence as most people do into five; "so here you are back again, safe and sound. No return of gout?-no cold? That's right! And this is Jeanne. How do you do, my dear?-so delighted to see you-not that I do see you. Come in and get warm, you must be frozen. Did you have a rough passage? Have you had any tea Will you have anything now, or wait till dinner? We dine in half an hour-that is, we ought, only this new cook is so dreadfully unpunctual. Have you much trouble with your servants in Algiers?

Here they are beyond everything-no satisfying them, and no getting them to do their work! Not you, Jarvis" (this to the butler)," you know I don't mean you. Come into the library, my dear, and be introduced to your cousins. Je devrais parler français, mais ça m'est devenu tant difficile-faute d'habitude. Vous m'excuserez-je veux dire, tu m'excuseras-"

Jeanne stemmed this torrent of words by remarking:

"I am quite accustomed to speak English, madame."

66

Yes, to be sure-of course-you speak it much better than I do French, I have no doubt. What has become of my shawl?-never mind! This is Helen, and this is Blanche.'

Mrs. Ashley, while continuing her remarks, had led the way into a large, comfortable-looking room, lined with bookcases, and furnished with an abundance of chintz-covered sofas and armchairs. Two fair-haired, blue-eyed girls rose to greet the new-comer. Jeanne, who had all a French woman's admiration for pink and white coloring, thought them excessively pretty, and noted, with a certain sense of relief, that they lacked their mother's conversational powers; for when one of them had observed, "You must be dreadfully cold!" and the other had added, "How tired you must be !" they seemed to think that they had said all that the occasion required, and relapsed into a smiling silence.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Ashley, who had not allowed her tongue to rest from the trifling consideration that nobody was listening to her, was concluding a long sentence by a name, the sound of which brought a sudden flush into Jeanne's pale cheeks.

"Miss Barrington-Jeanne, let me introduce you to Miss Barrington, who is anxious to make your acquaintance."

Miss Barrington had been a beauty once upon a time. She was now a somewhat remarkable-looking old woman. Her abundant white hair, her sharp black eyes, her overhanging eyebrows, and her shrewd, thin face, made up a whole which formed a striking contrast to the Ashley family, whose comely countenances could not boast of one clearly drawn feature amongst them.

"How do you do?" said she, holding out her hand, and laying down the tatting upon which she had been engaged. "I have heard all about you from my nephew. There is a letter for you somewhere. I thought 1 would just mention the fact, because Mrs. Ashley has, of course, forgotten all about it, and she is just as likely as not to throw it into the fire, if you don't claim it."

"Oh, no!" protested Mrs. Ashley, "I should never have done that-I shouldn't, indeed. I know my memory is treacherous, but I am always so very particular about letters, and really I can't remember to have burnt an unopened one more than once in my life, and that turned out to be only an invitation to dinner, so that it really did not signify much, though the people did make a ridiculous fuss about it. Jeanne's letter is on her dressing-table, where I put it with my own hands. Will you come upstairs now, my dear, and see your room?”

Jeanne followed her aunt, willingly enough, upstairs to the prettily furnished bedroom which had been prepared for her. A bright fire was burning cheerfully in the grate, and a maid was busy unpacking her clothes. On the pincushion, transfixed by a huge, blackheaded pin, was the wished-for letter, with its familiar French stamps and its many postmarks.

"There!" cried Mrs. Ashley, pointing triumphantly to this evidence of her care, "I pinned it down myself, so that there should be no risk of its being swept away. I know you will be anxious to read it, for I can guess from whom it comes," she added meaningly, patting Jeanne on the shoulder, and turning round to nod and smile before she bustled out of the room.

So Jeanne, left to herself at last, sank into an arm-chair before the pleasant warmth and blaze of the coal fire (the first she had ever seen, by the way), and settled herself to enjoy her letter, which was not from M. de Saint-Luc at all, as worthy Mrs. Ashley had assumed it to be, but from Léon.

The lad wrote in high spirits. He had joined his regiment, and had received a lieutenant's commission forthwith. He might have had his troop but for native modesty; for in those days

commissions fluttered about in the air, right and left, and were often caught by less competent hands than his. He was full of enthusiasm for the army, for his comrades; above all, for his old friend and colonel. An action was said to be imminent, and he was about to be sent to the front-Coulmiers and victory before him, if he had known it. That-or another fate-thought his sister, with a long sigh, as she dropped the letter. "You are not to be anxious if you get no news of me for some time," Léon had added in a postscript. Just so we can all remember, when we had the toothache in our childish days, being recommended "not to think about it."

Jeanne thought about it till she found that she had barely left herself time to perform her evening toilet; and then, changing her dress with what expedition she could, swept down the shallow oak stairs to the library, where Mr. Ashley, erect upon the hearthrug, with his nose in the air and his coat-tails gathered up under his arms, was holding forth to a respectful feminine audience, much as you may see a Cochin-China cock in the farm-yard crowing mellifluously, to the admiration of his surrounding brood.

"Much of a muchness, the whole lot of 'em," Jeanne heard him saying; "but if you talk of lying, I must say that fellow Gombetter can give Gortschakoff pounds!"'

After which, becoming aware of the presence of his niece, he fell to poking the fire with a good deal of needless noise, and remarked that the weather was really remarkably cold for the time of year.

Miss Barrington, with more tact, continued the subject.

"If I had to govern a nation," said she, "I think I should go in for a course of unscrupulous veracity, just to see how it would act. Bismarck is the only public man I know of who habitually tells the truth, and the consequence is that nobody can make him out. I remember once, some years ago, making a resolution to steer clear of fibs in my own small sphere; but it didn't do. As far as I can remember, I only kept it up for about a fortnight."

Miss Barrington's remarks were listened to with that respectful deference which, in this country, can be com

manded by wealth alone. When she had done one of the young ladies exclaimed:

"Oh! but, Miss Barrington, 'you never do tell fibs."

The old lady's eyes twinkled. "Don't I, my dear?" returned she. "How do you know? Do you suppose such hardened old sinners as I are easily detected? Helen Ashley is my goddaughter," she continued explanatorily, addressing herself to Jeanne; that is why she takes such a favorable view of my character."

And Jeanne noticed, with some surprise, that at this apparently innocent speech her uncle bit his nails and frowned, and Mrs. Ashley wriggled uneasily upon her chair, while a fine rich pink overspread the cheeks, forehead, and ears of the fair Helen.

The announcement of dinner put an end to a rather uncomfortable period of silence. Mr. Ashley gave his arm to Miss Barrington, and the rest of the party trooped out of the room after him. Jeanne, scanning the spacious diningroom with the eager eyes of an explorer in unknown lands, received a favorable impression of English luxury. She had read, in I know not what book of "Notes upon Great Britain,' that the saturnine nature of the inhabitants of these islands is nowhere more vividly exemplified than in the aspect of that particular room in which their happiest moments are supposed to be passed. The writer, whose ideas may possibly have been formed in that gloomy part of London to which, for some inscrutable reason, foreigners chiefly resort, had drawn a graphic picture of a funereal apartment, furnished with a long table, a dozen or more horse-hair chairs, a mahogany sideboard, a sarcophagus to keep the decanters in, a portrait in oil of the master of the house, and a print representing the coronation of Queen Victoria. "There," he had concluded, "you have the scene of those social banquets so dear to Englishmen. Admit

that a man must drink a great deal of port wine before he can feel gay amidst such surroundings." The dining-room at Holmhurst by no means answered to this description. It was such a room as may be seen in scores of country houses of the less pretentious order-a room

neither venerable in the way of old oak panelling, antlers, family portraits, and high-backed chairs, nor pseudo-venerable in one of the abominable theatrical styles affected by modern upholsterers, and dubbed "Early English," "Elizabethan," "Jacobean, or what notyet with a certain attractiveness of its own. The Turkey carpet, a little worn and faded in places; the plain, solid furniture, dating apparently from the commencement of the present century, and likely to see the end of it; the fire that blazed in the ample grate, the fine damask table-cloth, the glittering silver, and the mellow, shaded light of the tall lamps-all these details of the picture which met Jeanne's eye made up a sufficiently pleasant whole; and each and all of them seemed to wear a smile of quiet, conscious self-respect and prosperity, not unlike that which commonly illumined the features of their master about the dinner-hour.

The repast itself, to be sure, did not prove quite up to the Campagne de Mersac standard-being, indeed, of the kind usually set before her employers, in this favored land, by a good plain cook with a kitchen-maid under her; but such as the food was, there was plenty of it; and the wine-if that had been a point within Jeanne's powers of criticism was excellent. A portly butler, assisted by a hobbledehoy in livery, handed the plates, and doled out half glasses of sherry from time to time. Miss Barrington had a special claret-jug at her elbow, and helped herself.

Mr. Ashley swallowed his soup, making a good deal of noise over it, and related the chief incidents of his journey, dwelling with some bitterness upon the senseless suspicion with which he had been met at the frontier.

"As if any fool couldn't see that I was an Englishman!" cried the worthy gentleman, reasonably enough. "I believe, upon my conscience, they'd have clapped me into jail if Jane, there, hadn't come to the rescue and made it all right," he added, nodding in a friendly manner at his niece.

"If people would only take the trouble to learn modern languages when they were young, " remarked Mrs. Ashley, addressing herself, as usual, to space; "but, of course, in our time one's edu

cation was neglected as far as that sort of thing went. Nowadays it is different. We girls did learn French, German, and Italian; and the same master, I remember, taught us all three; but boys, of course-modern languages being an extra, and in play-hours and all-you couldn't expect it, could you? unless they had a special turn that way, as some have. Our eldest boy, Jack, took up German for his examination at the Staff College at Sandhurst the other day, and got I don't know how many marks -such a good thing! Not that it is likely to be of much use to him, as far as I can see; and being such a long time away from his regiment and his brother officers, has been very tiresome for him; and then there was all the hard work, and a good deal of expense in one way and another-stili, of course, one is glad to think he has passed."

No one ever dreamt of paying any attention to Mrs. Ashley's interminable semi-soliloquies. Her daughters talked through them without scruple, neither meaning offence nor giving any. By way of entertaining their guest, they confined their remarks entirely to the subject of Algeria, about which country they asked one well-meant, silly question after another, while Jeanne, bored but patient, answered to the best of her ability; and Mr. Ashley and Miss Barrington talked politics; and the dinner progressed through its prescribed courses.

When it was all over, the ladies betook themselves to the drawing-room, where the younger of the two sisters seated herself at the piano, while the elder warbled English ballads in a thin, faint voice, starting a trifle flat, and consistently remaining so up to the last note of her performance. Mrs. Ashley took up the Queen, and read occasional inaudible extracts from that voluminous journal, and Miss Barrington returned to her tatting. After what Jeanne had heard before dinner, it would perhaps have evinced something more than mortal powers of self-control if she had abstained from seating herself beside the latter lady.

"You said Mr. Barrington was your nephew, did you not ?" she asked, proceeding straight to the point, with her usual directness.

"Yes. What did you think of him ?" Miss Barrington had a gruff voice, like a man's, and had cultivated a natural abruptness of manner, having found that the quickest and surest means of coming to an understanding with her fellow-creatures.

Jeanne thought the question rather in bad taste, and did not much like the tone in which it was delivered. She replied, however, without embarrassment, that she had found Mr. Barrington very amiable.

"Amiable!" echoed the old lady. "What a very odd description of him! But 1 suppose you use the word in its French sense, amiable-lovable—eh ? A good many people have found him that, by all accounts. Indeed, I am very fond of him myself, though he is a selfish rascal at heart, as most men are. He showed me a picture he had done of you; it was not flattered."

66

Jeanne laughed. Is he at home now?" she asked, after a short pause.

"No," answered the old lady, looking up from her tatting, "he is not; he is away paying visits in different parts of the country."

Miss Barrington's keen black eyes had found out many a secret in their time by mere force of tacit interrogation; but they failed to extract any information from the beautiful, pale face upon which they were now fastened.

"I am sorry for that," observed Jeanne, calmly. "Mr. Barrington was a great deal at our house while he was in Algiers, and I should have liked to have met him again.'

Was she sorry? She was saying to herself that she was glad that she was intensely relieved. And yet there was a dull sort of pain about her heart, suspiciously like disappointment.

He will return home before Christmas, I have no doubt, and then you will be able to renew your acquaintance with him," said Miss Barrington dryly, and with that she changed the subject.

After a time Mr. Ashley came in from the dining-room, rubbing his eyes and yawning. The clock on the mantelpiece struck ten, and one of the girls rang the bell. Suddenly Mrs. Ashley scrambled up from her low chair, made a futile grab at her cap, which had fallen on to

the back of her head again, and hurried across the room to Jeanne.

Nous allons faire la prière," said she. Si vous avez des scrupules—”

The servants came in, in a long line, while she was speaking. Mr. Ashley was turning over the leaves of a large, gilt-edged Bible, and adjusting his spectacles. For a moment Jeanne was seized with that queer, bewildering sensation-to which no one is a strangerof having been in the same place, and under precisely similar circumstances, before. Then she remembered the description Léon had given of life at Holmhurst upon his return to Algiers, and how he had claimed to have earned the good opinion of his relations by his repudiation of bigotry. With that reminiscence before her, she hastened to reassure her aunt, and the ceremony proceeded.

It is to be feared, however, that Jeanne's heart was not in her devotions that evening, and that she might just as well have retired for any good she got from them; for while Mr. Ashley was offering up a somewhat hasty, but comprehensive supplication for the welfare of all mankind, one, at least, of those who should have been supporting him in his modest demands was many miles away, in the cool dining-room of the Campagne de Mersac. The sun was streaming through the open windows; the wind was scattering the almond blossoms outside; the shrill voices of Madame de Breuil's visitors rose and fell in the adjoining salon; a handsome, bright-eyed lad was sitting on a corner of the table swinging his long legs, chattering about England and Paris, and waxing enthusiastic in his praise of a certain Englishman named Barrington whom he had brought to Africa with him. All this took place long, long ago -eight months or so, in point of factand many people and many things had had time to die since then, hope and joy among the rest. "If only I were dead too!" sighed poor Jeanne, upon her knees.

"Amen," says Mr. Ashley briskly, shutting up his book. And so one more day is at an end, and everybody may go to bed; and those who can't sleep must bear their own burden, and hope to be a little more tired to-morrow night.

CHAPTER XXIX.

IN WHICH JEANNE TAKES A WALK.

MR. ASHLEY, who was a thoroughgoing Conservative in practice as well as in principle, clung to the observance of many old customs in his household from no other motive than an inherent dislike of change. It was by his orders that the great bell at the top of the house was rung, for some two or three minutes, every morning as the clock struck eight, rousing the slumbering echoes, setting the dogs in the stable-yard barking, and causing visitors to begin the day with bad words. In Mr. Ashley's father's time, or in his grandfather's, this untimely clamor had probably had its justification as a summons to the first meal of the day; it survived now without any justification at all, much as the curfew still continues to toll the knell of parting day in certain remote villages.

The dull, gray light was just stealing through Jeanne's window-curtains, on the morning after her arrival at Holmhurst, when she was startled by this prolonged din ; but as it was clearly out of the question that she could now be in time to present herself at any rite or meeting which it might herald, she wisely turned round and fell asleep again, having, indeed, had but a small part of her fair share of rest during the night. About an hour later she was again aroused by that peculiarly irritating rata-tat-tat at her door of which the knuckles of English servants possess the secret, and a maid came in with a bath and cans of water, and Mrs. Hashley's love, and would she please 'ave her breakfuss in her room or downstairs?

Having received this young person's assurances that there was no 'urry, Jeanne answered that she would go downstairs as soon as she was dressed, and succeeded eventually in reaching the dining-room just as Miss Barrington was leaving it.

"Good-morning," said that lady. "You ain't very early people in your part of the world, I see.'

"I am very sorry. Have I kept them waiting?" asked Jeanne, apprehensively.

"Dear me, no! Punctuality is the soul of business; but if you haven't any business to do, what's the use of being punctual? The only reason why I stay