Slander and Sillery

I

The Lion of the Chaussée D’Antin

Ma mère est à Paris,
Mon père est à Versailles.
Et moi je suis ici.
Pour chanter sur la paille,
L’amour! L’amour!
La nuit comme le jour.

Humming this popular if not over-recherché ditty, a man sat sketching in pastels, one morning, in his rooms at Numéro 10, Rue des Mauvais Sujets, Chaussée d’ Antin, Paris.

The band of the national guard, the marchands crying “Coco!” the charlatans puffing everything from elixirs to lead-pencils, the Empress and Mme. d’Alve passing in their carriage, the tramp of some Zouaves just returned from Algeria—nothing in the street below disturbed him; he went sketching on as if his life depended on the completion of the picture. He was a man about thirty-three, middle height, and eminently graceful. He was half Bohemian, half English, and the animation of the one nation and the hauteur of the other were by turns expressed on his chiselled features as his thoughts moved with his pencil. The stamp of his good blood was on him; his face would have attracted and interested in ever so large a crowd. He was very pale, and there was a tired look on his wide, powerful forehead and in his long dark eyes, and a weary line or two about his handsome mouth, as if he had exhausted his youth very quickly; and, indeed, to see life as he had seen it is somewhat a fatiguing process, and apt to make one blasé before one’s time.

The rooms in which he sat were intensely comfortable, and very provocative to a quiet pipe and idleness. To be sure, if one judged his tastes by them, they were not probably, to use the popular jargon, “healthy,” for they had nothing very domestic or John Halifaxish about them, and were certainly not calculated to gratify the eyes of maiden aunts and spinster sisters.

There were fencing-foils, pistols, tobacco-boxes of every style and order, from ballet-girls to terriers’ heads. There were three or four cockatoos and parrots on stands chattering bits of Quartier Latin songs, or imitating the cries in the street below. There were cards, dice-boxes, albums à rire, meerschaums, lorgnons, pink notes, no end of De Kock’s and Lebrun’s books, and all the etcæteras of chambres de garçon strewed about: and there were things, too—pictures, statuettes, fauteuils, and a breakfast-service of Sèvres and silver—that Du Barry need not have scrupled to put in her “petite bon-bonnière” at Luciennes.

So busy was he sketching and singing

“Messieurs les étudiens
Montez á la Chaumière!”

that he never heard a knock at his door, and he looked up with an impatient frown on his white, broad forehead as a man entered sans cérémonie.

“Mon Dieu! Ernest,” cried his friend, “what the devil are you doing here with your pipe and your pastels, when I’ve been waiting at Tortoni’s a good half-hour, and at last, out of patience, drove here to see what on earth had become of you?”

“My dear fellow, I beg you a thousand pardons,” said Vaughan, lazily. “I was sketching this, and you and your horses went clean out of my head, I honestly confess.”

“And your breakfast too, it seems,” said De Concressault, glancing at the table. “Is it Madame de Mélusine or the little Bluette whose portrait absorbs you so much? No, by Jove! it’s a prettier woman than either of ’em. If she’s like that, take me to see her this instant. What glorious gold hair! I adore your countrywomen when they’ve hair that color. Where did you get that face? Is she a duchess, or a danseuse, a little actress you’re going to patronise, or a millionnaire you’re going to marry?”

“I can’t tell you,” laughed Vaughan. “I’ve not an idea who she may be. I saw her last evening coming out of the Français, and picked up her bouquet for her as she was getting into her carriage. The face was young, the smile very pretty and bright, and, as they daguerreotyped themselves in my mind, I thought I might as well transfer them to paper before newer beauties chased them out of it.”

“Diable! and you don’t know who she is? However, we’ll soon find out. That gold hair mustn’t be lost. But get your breakfast, pray, Ernest, and let us be off to poor Armand’s sale.”

“That’s the way we mourn our dead friends,” said Vaughan, with a sneer, pouring out his coffee. “Armand is jesting, laughing, and smoking with us one day, the next he’s pitched out of his carriage going down to Asnières, and all we think of is—that his horses are for sale. If I were found in the Morgue to-morrow, your first emotion, Emile, would be, ‘Vaughan’s De l’Orme will be sold. I must go and bid for it directly.”

De Concressault laughed as he looked up at a miniature of Marion de l’Orme, once taken for the Marquis of Gordon. “I fancy, mon garçon, there’ll be too many sharks after all your possessions for me to stand any chance.”

“True enough,” said Vaughan; “and I question if they’ll wait till my death before they come down on ’em. But I don’t look forward. I take life as it comes. Vogue la galère! At least, I’ve lived, not vegetated.” And humming his refrain,

“L’amour! l’amour!
La nuit comme le jour!”

he lounged down the stairs and drove to a sale in the Faubourg St. Germain, where one of his Paris chums, a virtuoso and connoisseur, had left endless meubles to be sold by his duns and knocked down to his friends.

Vaughan was quite right; he had lived, and at a pretty good pace, too. When he came of age a tolerably good fortune awaited him, but it had not been long in his hands before he contrived to let it slip through them. He’d been brought up at Sainte Barbe, after being expelled from Rugby, knew all the best of the “jeunesse dorée,” and could not endure any place after Paris, where his life was as sparkling and brilliant as the foam off a glass of champagne. Wild and careless, high spirited, and lavish in his Opera suppers, his cabaret dinners, his Trois Frères banquets, his lansquenet parties, his bouquets for baronnes, and his bracelets for ballerinas, Ernest gained his reputation as a Lion, and—ruined himself, too, poor old fellow!

His place down in Surrey had mortgages thick on every inch of its lands, and the money that kept him going was borrowed from those modern Satans, money lenders, at the usually ruinous interest. “But still,” Ernest was wont to say, with great philosophy, “I’ve had ten years’ swing of pleasure. Does every man get as much as that? And should I have been any happier if I’d been a good boy, and a country squire, sat on the bench, amused my mind with turnips, and married some bishop’s daughter, who’d have marched me to church, forbidden cigars, and buried me in family boots?”

Certainly that would not have been his line, and so, in natural horror at it, he dashed into a diametrically opposite one, and after the favor he had shown him from every handsome woman that drove through Longchamp, wore diamonds at the Tuileries, and supped with dominos noirs at bals d’Opéra, and the favor he showed to cards, the courses, and the coulisses, few bishops would have imperilled their daughters’ souls by setting them to hunt down this wicked Lion, especially as the poor Lion now wasn’t worth the trapping. If he had been, there would have been hue and cry enough after him I don’t doubt; but the Gordon Cummings of the beau sexe rarely hunt unless it’s worth their while, and they can bring home splendid spoils to make their bosom friends mad with envy; and Ernest, despite his handsome face, his fashionable reputation, and the aroma of conquest that hung about him (they used to say he never wooed ever so negligently but he won), was assuredly neither an “eligible speculation” nor a “marrying man,” and was an object rather of terror to English mammas steering budding young ladies through the dangerous vortex of French society with a fierce chevaux de frise of British prejudices and a keen British eye to business. If Ernest was of no other use, however, he was invaluable to his uncles, aunts, and male cousins, as a sort of scapegoat and épouvantail, to be held up on high to show the unwary what they would come to if they followed his steps. It was so pleasant to them to exult over his backslidings, and, cutting him mercilessly up into little bits, hold condemnatory sermons over every one of the pieces. “Dans l’adversité de nos meilleurs amis, nous trouvons toujours quelque chose qui ne nous déplait pas;” and Vaughan’s friends, like the rest of us pharisees, dearly loved to glance at the publican (especially if he was handsomer, cleverer, or any way better than themselves), and thank God loudly that they were not such men as he. Ernest was a hardened sinner, however; he laughed, put the Channel between him and them, and went on his ways without thinking or caring for their animadversions.

“By Jove! Emile,” said he as they sat dining together at Leiter’s, “I should like to find out my golden-haired sylphide. She was English, by her fair skin, and though I’m not very fond of my compatriotes, especially when they’re abroad (I think touring John Bull detestable wrapped up in his treble plaid of reserve), still I should like to find her out just for simple curiosity. I assure you she’d the prettiest foot and ankle I ever saw, not excepting even Bluette’s.”

“Ma foi! that’s a good deal from you. She must be found, then. Voyons! shall we advertise in the Moniteur, employ the secret police, or call at all the hotels in person to say that you’re quite ready to act out Soulié’s ‘Lion Amoureux,’ if you can only discover the petite bourgeoise to play it with you?”

Vaughan laughed as he drank his demi-tasse.

“Lion amoureux! that’s an anomaly; we’re only in love just enough pour nous amuser; and of us Albin says, very rightly,

Si vous connaissiez quelques meilleurs,
Vous porteriez bientôt cette âme ailleurs.”

“Very well, then: if you don’t know of anything better, let’s hunt up this incognita. If she went to the Français, she’s most likely at the Odéon to-night,” said De Concressault. “Shall we try?”

“Allons!” said Vaughan, rising indolently, as he did most things. “But it’s rather silly, I think; there are bright smiles and pretty feet enough in Paris without one’s setting off on a wild-goose chase after them.”

They were playing the last act of “La Calomnie,” as Vaughan and De Concressault took their places, put up their lorgnons, and looked round the house. He swore a few mental “Diables!” and “Sacrés!” as his gaze fell on faces old or ugly, or too brunes or too blondes, or anything but what he wanted. At last, without moving his glass, he touched De Concressault’s arm.

“There she is, Emile, in the fourth from the centre, in a white opera cloak, with pink flowers in her hair.”

“I see her, mon ami,” said Emile. “I found her out two seconds ago (see how well you sketch!) but I wouldn’t spoil your pleasure in discovering her. Mon Dieu! Ernest, she’s looking at you, and smiles as if she recognised you. Was there ever so lucky a Lauzun?”

Vaughan could have laughed outright to see by the brightness of the girl’s expression that she knew the saviour of her bouquet again, for though he was accustomed to easy conquests, such naive interest in him at such short notice was something new to him.

He didn’t take his lorgnon off her again, and she was certainly worth the honor, with her soft, lustrous gold hair, the eyes that defy definition—black in some lights, violet in others—a wide-arched forehead, promising plenty of brains, and a rayonnante, animated, joyous expression, quite refreshing to anybody as bored and blasé as Vaughan and De Concressault. As soon as the last piece was over Vaughan slipped out of his loge, and took up his station at the entrance.

He didn’t wait in vain: the golden hair soon came, on the arm of a gentleman—middle aged, as Vaughan noticed with a sensation of satisfaction. She glanced up at him as she passed: he looked very handsome in the gas glare. Vaughan perhaps was too sensible a fellow to think of his pose, but even we have our weaknesses under certain circumstances, as well as the crinolines. Luckily for him, he chanced to have in his pocket a gold serpent bracelet he had bought that morning for some fair dame or demoiselle. He stopped her, and held it out to her.

“I beg your pardon, mademoiselle,” he said in French, “but I think you dropped this?”

She looked up at him with the sunniest of smiles as she answered, in a pure accent, “No monsieur, thank you, it does not belong to me.”

The middle-aged man glanced sideways at him with true British suspicion—I dare say a pickpocket, a Rouge, and Fieschi, were all mixed up in his mind as embodied in the graceful figure and bold glance of the Lion. He drew the girl on, looking much like a heavy cloud with a bright sun ray after it; but she half turned her head over her shoulder to give him a farewell smile, which Ernest returned with ten per cent. interest.

“Anglais,” said Emile, concisely.

“Malheureusement,” said Ernest as briefly, as he pushed his way into the air, and saw the gold hair vanish into her carriage. He went quickly up to the cocher.

“Où demeurent-ils, mon ami?” he whispered, slipping a five-franc piece into his hand.

The man smiled. “A l’Hôtel de Londres, monsieur; No. 6, au premier.”

“The devil! pourquoir ne allez pas?” said an unmistakably English voice from the interior of the voiture. The man set off at a trot; Ernest sprang into his own trap.

“Au Chateau Rouge! May as well go there, eh, Emile? What a deuced pity la chevelure dorée is English!”

“I wish she were a danseuse, an actress, a fleuriste—anything one could make his own introduction to. Confound it there’s the ‘heavy father,’ I’m afraid, in the case, and some rigorous mamma, or vigilant béguine of a governess: but, to judge by the young lady’s smiles, she’ll be easy game unless she’s tremendously fenced in.”

With which consolatory reflection Vaughan leaned back and lighted a cheroot, en route to spend the night as he had spent most of them for the last ten years, till the fan had begun to be more bore than pleasure.

II

Nina Gordon

“Have you been to the Hôtel de Londres, Ernest?” said De Concressault, as Vaughan lounged into Tortoni’s next day, where Emile and three or four other men were drinking Seltzer and talking of how Cerisette had beaten Vivandière by a neck at Chantilly, or (the sport to which a Frenchman takes much more naturally) of how well Rivière played in the “Prix d’un Bouquet;” what a belle taille la De Servans had; and what a fool Senecterre had made of himself in the duel about Madame Viardot.

“Of course I have,” said Vaughan. “The name is Gordon—general name enough in England. They were gone to the Expiatoire, the portière told me. There is the heavy father, as I feared, and a quasi-governess acting duenna; they’re travelling with another family, whose name I could not hear: the woman said ‘C’était beaucoup trop dur pour les lèvres.’ I dare say they’re some Brummagem people—some Fudge family or other—on their travels. Confound it!”

“Poor Ernest,” laughed De Concressault. “Some gold hair has bewitched him, and instead of finding it belongs to a danseuse, or a married woman, or a fleuriste of the Palais Royal, or something attainable, he finds it turn into an unapproachable English girl, with no end of outlying sentries round her, who’ll fire at the first familiar approach.”

“It is a hard case,” said De Kerroualle, a dashing fellow in one of the “Régiments de famille.” “Never mind, mon ami; ‘contre fortune bon cœur,’ you know: it’ll be more fun to devastate one of our countrymen’s inviolate strongholds than to conquer where the white flag’s already held out. Halloa! here’s a compatriot of yours, I’d bet; look at his sanctified visage and stiff choker—a Church of England man, eh?”

“The devil!” muttered Vaughan, turning round; “deuce take him, it’s my cousin Ruskinstone! What in the world does he do in Paris?”

The man he spoke of was the Rev. Eusebius Ruskinstone, the Dean’s Warden of the cathedral of Faithandgrace, a tall, thin young clerical of eight or nine-and-twenty, with goodness enough (it was generally supposed) in his little finger to make up for all Ernest’s sins, scarlet though they were. He had just sat down and taken up the carte to blunder through “Potage au Duc de Malakoff,” “Fricassée de volaille à la Princesse Mathilde,” and all the rest of it, when his eye lit on his graceless cousin, and a vinegar asperity spread over his bland visage. Vaughan rose with a lazy grace, immensely bored within him: “My dear Ruskinstone, what an unanticipated pleasure. I never hoped Vanity Fair would have had power to lure you into its naughty peep-shows and roundabouts.”

The Rev. Eusebius reddened slightly; he had once stated strongly his opinion that poor Paris was Pandemonium. “How do you do?” he said, giving his cousin two fingers; “it is a long time since we saw you in England.”

“England doesn’t want me,” said Ernest, dryly. “I don’t fancy I should be very welcome at Faithandgrace, should I? The dear Chapter would probably consign me to starvation for my skeptical notions, as Calvin did Castellio. But what has brought you to Paris? Are you come to fight the Jesuits in a conference, or to abjure the Wardenship and turn over to them?”

Eusebius was shocked at the irreverent tone, but there was a satirical smile on his cousin’s lips that he didn’t care to provoke. “I am come,” he said, stiffly, “partly for health, partly to collect materials for a work on the ‘Gurgoyles and Rose Mouldings of Mediæval Architecture,’ and partly to oblige some friends of mine. Pardon me, here they come.”

Vaughan lifted his eyes, expecting nothing very delectable in Ruskinstone’s friends; to his astonishment they fell on his beauty of the Français! with the outlying sentries of father, governess, and two other women, the Warden’s maiden sisters, stiff, maniérées, and prudish, like too many Englishwomen. The young lady of the Français was a curious contrast to them: she started a little as she saw Vaughan, and smiled brilliantly. On the spur of that smile Ernest greeted his cousins with a degree of empressement that they certainly wouldn’t have been honored by without it. They were rather frightened at coming in actual contact with such a monster of iniquity as a Paris Lion, who, they’d heard, had out-Juan’d Don Juan, and gave him but a frigid welcome. Mr. Gordon had doubtless heard, too, of Vaughan’s misdemeanors, for he looked stoical and acidulated as he bowed. But the young girl’s eyes reconciled Ernest to all the rest, as she frankly returned a look with which he was wont to win his way through women’s hearts, ’midst the hum of ball rooms, in the soft tête-à-tête in boudoirs, and over the sparkling Sillery of petits soupers. So, for the sake of his new quarry, he disregarded the cold looks of the others, and made himself so charming, that nobody could withstand the fascination of his manner till their dinner was served, and then, telling his cousins he would do himself the pleasure of calling on them the next day, he left the café to drive over to Gentilly, to inspect a grey colt of De Kerroualle’s.

“La chevelure dorée is quite as pretty by daylight, Ernest,” said De Concressault. “Bon dieu! it is such a relief to see eyes that are not tinted, and a skin whose pink and white is not born from the mysterious rites of the toilet.”

Vaughan nodded, with his Manilla between his teeth.

“That cousin of yours is queer style, mon garçon,” said Kerroualle. “How some of those islanders contrive to iron themselves into the stiffness and flatness they do, is to me the profoundest enigma. But what Church of England meaning lies hid in his coat-tails? They are, for all the world, like our révérends pères! What is it for?”

“High Church. Next door shop to yours, you know. Our ecclesiastics are given to balancing themselves on a tight rope between their ‘mother’ and their ‘sister,’ till they tumble over into their sister’s open arms—the Catholics say into salvation, the Protestants into damnation; into neither, I myself opine, poor simpletons. Ruskinstone is fearfully architectural. The sole things he’ll see here will be façades, gurgoyles, and clerestories, and his soul knows no warmer loves than ‘stone dolls,’ as Newton calls them. I say, Gaston, what do you think of my love of the Français; isn’t she chic, isn’t she mignonne, isn’t she spirituelle?”

“Yes,” assented De Kerroualle, “prettier than either Bluette or Madame de Mélusine would allow, or—relish.”

Ernest frowned. “I’ve done with Bluette; she’s a pretty face, but—ah, bah! one can’t amuse oneself always with a little paysanne, for she’s nothing better, after all; and I’m half afraid the Mélusine begins to bore me.”

“Better not tell her so, mon ami,” said De Kerroualle; “she’d be a nasty enemy.”

“Pooh! a woman like that loves and forgets.”

“Sans doute; but they also sometimes revenge. Poor little Bluette you may safely turn over; but Madame la Baronne won’t so easily be jilted.”

Vaughan laughed. “Oh, I’m not going to break her heart. Don’t you know, Gaston, ’on a bien de la peine à rompre, même quand on ne s’aime plus.”

“I shouldn’t have said you found it so,” smiled De Concressault, “for you change your loves as you change your gloves. La chevelure dorée will be the next, eh?”

“Poor little thing!” said Ernest, bitterly. “I wish her a better fate.”

He went to call on la chevelure dorée, nevertheless, the morning after, and found her in the salon alone, greatly to his surprise and pleasure. Nina Gordon was pretty even in the morning—as Byron says—and she was much more, she was fascinating, and as perfectly demonstrative and natural as any peasant girl out of the meadows of Arles, ignorant of the magic words toilette, cosmétique, and crinoline.

She received him with evident pleasure and perfect unreserve, which even this daring and skeptical Lion could not twist or contort into boldness, and began to talk fast and gaily.

“Do I like Paris?” she said, in answer to his question. “Oh yes; or at least I should, if I could see it differently. I detest sight-seeing, crowding one’s brains with pictures, statues, palaces, Holy Families jostling Polinchinelle, races, mixing up with grand masses, Versailles, clouding St. Cloud—the Trianon rattled through in five minutes—all in inextricable muddle. I should like to see Paris at leisure, with some one with whom I had a ‘rapport,’ my thoughts undisturbed, and my historical associations fresh and fervent.”

“I wish I were honored with the office of your guide,” said Ernest, smiling. “Do you think you would have a ’rapport’ with me?”

She smiled in return. “Yes, I think I should. I cannot tell why. But as it is, my warmest souvenir of Condé is chilled by the offer of an ice, and my tenderest thought of Louise de la Vallière is shivered with the suggestion of dinner.”

Vaughan laughed. “Bravo!” thought he. “Thank God this is no tame English icicle. I would give much,” he said, “to be able to take my cousin’s place, and show you Paris. We would have no such vulgar gastronomical interruptions; we would go through it all perfectly. I would make you hear the very whispers with which La Vallière, under the old oaks of St. Germain, unknowingly, told her love to Louis. In the forest glades of St. Cloud you should see Cinq-Mars and the Royal Hunt riding out in the chasse de nuit; in the gloomy walls of the prisons you should hear André Chénier reciting his last verses, and see Egalité completing his last toilet. The glittering ‘Cotillons’ on the terraces of Versailles, the fierce canaille surging through the salons of the Tuileries, the Templars dying in the green meadows at the back of St. Antoine—they should all rise up for you under my incantations.”

Positively Ernest, bored and blasé, accustomed to look at Paris through the gas-lights of his Lion’s life, warmed into romance to please the eyes that now beamed upon him.

“Ah! that would be delightful,” said the girl, her eyes sparkling. “Mr. Ruskinstone, you know, is terrible to me, for he goes about with ‘Ruskin’ in one hand, ‘Murray’ in the other, and a Phrase-book or two in his pocket (of course he wants it, as he’s a ’classical scholar’), and no matter whatever associations cling around a place, only looks at it in regard to its architectural points. I beg your pardon,” she said, interrupting herself with a blush, “I forgot he was your cousin; but really that constant cold stone does tease me so.”

At that moment the heavy father, as Ernest irreverently styled the tall, pompous head of one of the first banks in London, who was worth a million if he was worth a sou, entered, and the Rev. Eusebius after him, who had been spending a lively morning taking notes among the catacombs. He was prepared to be as cold as a refrigerator, and the banker to follow his example, at finding this bête noire of the Chaussée d’Antin tête-à-tête with Nina. But Ernest had a sort of haughty high breeding and careless dignity which warned people off from any liberties with him; and Gordon remembered that he knew Paris and its haute volée so well that he might be a useful acquaintance if kept at arm’s length from Nina, and afterwards dropped. Unlucky man! he actually thought his weak muscles were strong enough to cope with a Lion’s!

Vaughan took his leave, after offering his box at the Opéra-Comique to Mr. Gordon, and drove to the Jockey Club, pondering much on this new species of the beau sexe. He was too used to women not to know at a glance that she had nothing bold about her, and yet he was too skeptical to credit that a girl could possibly exist who was neither a coquette nor a prude. As soon as the door closed on him his friends began to open their batteries of scandal.

“How sad it is to see life wasted as my cousin wastes his,” said the Warden, balancing a paper-knife thoughtfully, with a depressed air; “frittered away on mere trifles, as valuless and empty as soap-bubbles, but not, alas! so innocent.”

“What do you mean?” Nina asked, quickly.

“What do I mean, Miss Gordon?” repeated Eusebius, reproachfully; “what can I mean but the idle whirl of gaiety, the vitiating pleasures, the debts and the vices which are to be laid at poor Ernest’s door. Ever since we were boys together, and he was expelled from Rugby for going to Coventry fair and staying there all night, he has been going rapidly down the road to ruin.”

“He looks very comfortable in his descent,” smiled the young lady. “Pray why, after all, shouldn’t horses, operas, and Manillas, be as legitimate objects to set one’s affections upon as Norman arches and Gregorian chants? He has his dissipations, you have yours. Chacun à son goût!”

The Warden had his reasons for conciliating the young heiress, so he made a feeble effort to smile. “You know as well as I that you do not think what you say, Miss Gordon. Were it merely Vaughan’s tastes that were in fault it would not be of such fearful consequence, but unfortunately it is his principles.”

“He is utterly without any,” said Miss Selina Ruskinstone, who, ten years before, had been deeply and hopelessly in love with Ernest, and never forgave him for not reciprocating the passion.

“He is a skeptic, a gambler, a spendthrift; and a more heartlessless flirt never lived,” averred Miss Augusta, who hated the whole of Ernest’s sex—even the Chapter—pour cause.

“Gentlemen can’t help seeming flirts sometimes, some women pay such attention to them,” said Nina, with a mischievous laugh. “Poor Mr. Vaughn! I hope he’s not as black as he is painted. His physiognomy tells a different tale; he is just my ideal of ‘Ernest Maltravers.’ How kind his eyes are; have you ever looked into them, Selina?”

Miss Ruskinstone gave an angry sneer, vouchsafing no other response.

“My dear Nina, how foolishly you talk, about looking into a young man’s eyes,” frowned her father. “I am surprised to hear you.”

Her own eyes opened in astonishment. “Why mayn’t I look at them? It is by the eyes that, like a dog, I know whom to like and whom to avoid.”

“And pray does your prescience guide you to see a saint in a ruined Lion of the Chaussée d’Antin?” sneered Selina, with another contemptuous sniff.

“Not a saint. I’m not good enough to appreciate the race,” laughed Nina. “But I do not believe your cousin to be all you paint him; or, at least, if circumstances have led him into extravagance, I have a conviction that he has a warm heart and a noble character au fond.”

“We will hope so,” said the Warden, meekly, with an expression which plainly said how vain a hope it was.

“I think we have wasted a great deal too much conversation on a thankless subject,” said Selina, with asperity. “Don’t you think it time, Mr. Gordon, for us to go to the Louvre?”

That day, as they were driving along the Boulevards, they passed Ernest with Bluette in his carriage going to the Pré Catalan: they all knew her, from having seen her play at the Odéon. Selina and Augusta turned down their mouths, and turned up their eyes. Gordon pulled up his collar, and looked a Brutus in spectacles. Nina colored, and looked vexed. Triumph glittered in Eusebius’s meek eyes, but he sighed a pastor’s sigh over a lost soul.

III

“le Lion Amoureux.”

The morning after, as they were going into the Exposition des Beaux Arts, they met Vaughan; and no ghost would have been more unwelcome to the Warden than the distingué figure of his fashionable cousin. Nina was the only one who looked pleased to recognise him, and she, as she returned his smile, forgot that the evening before it had been given to Bluette.

“Are you coming in too?” she asked.

“I was not, but I will with pleasure,” said Ernest. And into the Exhibition with them he went, to Ruskinstone’s wrath and Gordon’s annoyance.

Vaughan was a connoisseur in art. The Warden knew no more than what he took verbatim from the god of his idolatry, Mr. John Ruskin. It was very natural that Nina should listen to the friend of Ingres and Vernet instead of to the second-hand worshipper of Turner. Vaughan, by instinct, dropped his customary tone of compliment—compliment he never used to women he delighted to honor—and talked so charmingly, that Nina utterly forgot the luckless Eusebius, and started when a low, sweet voice said, close beside her, “What, Ernest, you here?”

She turned, and saw a woman about eight-and-twenty, dressed in perfection of taste, with an exquisite figure, and a face of brunette beauty; the rouge most undiscoverable, and the eyes artistically tinted to make them look larger, which, Heaven knows, was needless. She darted a quick look at Vaughan’s companion, which Nina gave back with a dash of hauteur. A shade came over his face as he answered her greeting.

“Will you not introduce me to your friend?” said the new comer. “She is of your nation, I fancy, and you know I am entêtée of everything English.”

Ernest looked rather gloomy at the compliment, but turning to Nina, begged to introduce her to Madame de Mélusine. The gay, handsome baronne, taking in all the English girl’s points as rapidly as a groom at Tattersall’s does a two-year-old’s, was chatting volubly to Nina, when the others came up. Gordon, though wont to boast that he belonged to the aristocracy of money, was always ready to fall in the dust before the noblesse of blood, and was gratified at the introduction, remembering to have read in the Moniteur the name of De Mélusine at the ball at the Tuileries. And the widow was very charming even to the professedly stoical eyes of a Brutus of sixty-two. She soon floated off, however, with her party, giving Vaughan a gay “A ce soir!” and requesting to be allowed the honor of calling on the Gordons.

“Is she a great friend of yours?” asked Nina, when she and he were a little in advance of the others.

“I have known her some time.”

“And you are very intimate, I suppose, as she called you by your Christian name?”

He smiled a smile that puzzled Nina. “Oh! we soon get familiar here!”

“Where are you going to see her again this evening?” she persevered, playing with her parasol fringe.

“At her own house—a house that will charm you. By the way, it once belonged to Bussy Rabutin, and it has all Louis Quatorze furniture.”

“Is it a dinner?—a ball?”

“No, an Opera supper—she is famed for her Sillery and her mots. Ten to one I shall not go; what amuses one once palls with repetition.”

“I don’t understand that,” said Nina, quickly; “what I like, I like pour toujours.”

“Pauvre enfant! you little know life,” muttered Ernest. “Ah! Miss Gordon, you are at the happy age when one can believe in the feelings and friendships, and all the charming little romances of existence. But I have passed it, and so that I am amused for a moment, so that something takes time off my hands, I look no further, and expect no more. I know well enough the champagne will cease to sparkle, but I drink it while it foams, and don’t trouble myself to lament over it. Qu’importe? when one bottle’s empty, there is another!”

“Ah! it is such women as Madame de Mélusine who have taught you that doctrine,” cried Nina, with an energy that rather startled Ernest, though his nerves were as strong as any man’s in Paris. “My romances, as you term them, still I believe sleep in your heart, but the world you live in has stifled them. Do you think amusement will always be enough for you?—do you think you will never want something better than your empty champagne foam?”

“I hope I shall not, mademoiselle,” said Vaughan, bitterly, “for I am certain I do not believe in it, and am quite sure I should never get it. Leave me to the roses of my Tritericæ; they are all I shall ever enjoy, and they, at the best, are withered.”

“Nina, love,” interrupted Selina, coming up with much amiability, “I was obliged to come and tell you not to be quite so energetic. All the people in the room are looking at you.”

“I dare say they are,” said Vaughan, calmly. “It is not often the Parisians have the pleasure of seeing beauty unaffected, and fascinations careless of their own charms. Nature, Selina, is unhappily as rare one side the Channel as the other, and we men appreciate it when we do see it.”

When Vaughan parted from them soon after, he swore at himself for three things. First, for having driven Bluette, en plein jour, through the Boulevards, though he had driven Bluette, and such as Bluette, a thousand times before; secondly, for having been so weak as to introduce Madame de Mélusine to the Gordons; and, thirdly, for having—he the thorough-paced Lion, whose manual was Rochefoucauld, and tutor in love, De Kock—actually talked romance as if he were Werter or Paul Flemming, or some other sentimental simpleton.

Vaughan, to his great disgust, felt a fit of blue devils stealing on him, hurled one or two rose notes waiting for him into the fire with an oath, smoked half a dozen Manillas fiercely, and then, to get excitement, went to a dinner at the Rocher de Cancale, played écarté with a beau joueur, went to an Opera supper—not to the De Mélusine’s—then to Mabille and came home at seven in the morning after a night such as would have raised every hair off Brutus’s head, given a triumphant glitter to the Warden’s small blue eyes, and possibly even staggered the hot faith of his young champion. Pauline de Mélusine was as good as her word—she did call on the Gordons—and Brutus, stoic though he was, was well pleased; for the baronne, though her nobility only dated from the Restoration, and was not received by the exclusive Legitimists of the old Faubourg St. Germain, had a very pleasant set of her own, and figured among the nouvelle noblesse and bourgeois décorés who fill the vacant places of the De Rochefoucauld, the De Rohan, and the Montmorency, in the “imperial” salons of the Tuileries, where once the noblest blood in Europe was gathered.

“It is painful to me to frequent Ernest’s society,” the Warden was wont to say, “for every word he utters impresses me but more sadly with the conviction of his lost state. But we are commanded to be in the world though not of it, and, if I shun him, how can I hope to benefit him?”

“True; and, as your cousin, it would scarcely be charitable to avoid him entirely, terrible as we know his habits to be. But there is no necessity to be too intimate, and I do not wish Nina to be too much with him,” the banker was accustomed to answer.

“Anglice, Vaughan gets us good introductions, and makes Paris pleasant to us; we’ll use him while we want him: when we don’t, we will give him his congé.”

That’s the reading of most of our dear friends’ compliments and caresses, isn’t it?

Vaughan knew perfectly well that they would like to make a cat’s-paw of him, and was the last man likely to play that simple and certainly not agreeable rôle unless it suited him. But he had reasons of his own for forcing Gordon to be civil and obliged to him, despite the prejudices of that English, and therefore, of course, opinionated gentleman. It amused him to mortify Eusebius, whom he saw at a glance was bewitched with the prospect of Nina’s dot, and it amused him very much to see Nina’s joyous laughter as he leaned over her chair at the Opéra Comique, to hear her animated satire on Madame de Mélusine, for whom, knowing nothing of her, the young lady had conceived hot aversion, and to listen to her enthusiasm when she poured out to him her vivid imaginings.

Gradually the cafés, and the Boulevards, and the boudoirs missed Ernest while he accompanied Nina through the glades of St. Cloud, or down the Seine to Asnières, or up the slopes of Père la Chaise, in his new pursuit; and often at night he would leave the coulisses, or a lansquenet, or the gas-lights of the Maison Dorée, and the Closerie des Lilas, to watch her thorough enjoyment of a vaudeville, her fervent feeling in an opera, or to waltz with her at a ball, and note her glad recognition of him.

To this girl, Ernest opened his heart and mind as he—being a reserved, proud, and skeptical man—had never done to any one; there was a sympathy and confidence between them, and she learned much of his inner nature as she talked to him soft and low under the forest trees of Fontainebleau, such talk as could not be heard in Bluette’s boudoir, under the wax-lights of the Quartier Bréda, or in the flow of the Sillery at la Mélusine’s soupers. All this was new to the tired Lion, and amused him immensely. La chevelure dorée was twisting the golden meshes of its net round him, as De Concressault told him one day.

“Nonsense,” said Ernest; “have I not two loves already on my hands more than I want?”

“Dethrone them, and promote la petite.”

Vaughan turned on his friend with his eyes flashing.

“Bon Dieu! do you take her for a ballet-girl or a grisette?”

“Well, if you don’t like that, marry her then, mon cher. You will satisfy your fancy, and get cinquante mille francs de rente—at a sacrifice, of course; but, que veux-tu? There is no medal without its reverse, though a ’lion marié’ is certainly an anomaly, an absurdity, and an intense pity.”

“Tais-toi,” said Ernest, impatiently; “tu es fou! Caught in the toils of a wretched intrigante, in the power of any tailor in the Rue Vivienne, any jeweller in the Palais Royal, my money spent on follies, my life wasted in play, the turf, and worthless women, I have much indeed to offer to a young girl who has wealth, beauty, genius, and heart!”

“All the more reason why you should make a good coup,” said Emile, calmly, after listening with pitying surprise to his friend in his new mood. “You have a handsome face, a fashionable reputation, and a good name. Bah! you can do anything. As for your life, all women like a mauvais sujet, and unless the De Mélusine turn out a Brinvilliers, I don’t see what you have to fear.”

“When I want your counsel, Emile, I will ask it,” said Vaughan, shortly; “but, as I have no intention of going in for the prize, there is no need for you to bet on the chance of the throw.”

“Comme tu veux!” said the Parisian, shrugging his shoulders. “That homme de paille, your priestly cousin, will take her back to the English fogs, and make her a much better husband than you’d ever be, mon garçon.”

Vaughan moved restlessly.

“The idiot! if I thought so—— The devil take you, Emile! why do you talk of such things?”

At that minute Nina was sitting by one of the windows of their hotel, watching for Ernest, with a bouquet he had sent her on a table by her side; and the Rev. Eusebius was talking in a very low tone to her father. She caught a few words. “Last night—Vaughan at the Frères Provençaux—a souper au cabinet—Mademoiselle Céline, première danseuse—quite terrible,” &c., &c.

Nina flushed scarlet, and turned round. “If you blame your cousin, Mr. Ruskinstone, why were you there yourself?”

The Warden colored too. With him, as with a good many, foreign air relaxed the severity of the Decalogue, and what was sin at home, where everybody knew it, was none at all abroad—under the rose. Some dear pharisees will not endanger their souls by a carpet-dance in England, but if a little bird followed them in their holiday across the Channel, it might chance to see them disporting under a domino noir.

“I had been,” he stammered, “to see, as you know, a beautiful specimen of the arcboutant in a ruined chapel of the Carmélites, some miles down the Seine. It was very late, and I was very tired, so turned into the Frères Provençaux to take some little refreshment, and I there saw my unhappy cousin in society which ought, Miss Gordon, to disqualify him for yours. It is very painful to me to mention such things to you. I never thought you overheard——”

“Then, if it is very painful to you,” Nina burst in, impetuously, her bouche de rose, as De Kerroualle called it, curving haughtily, “why are you ceaselessly raking up every possible bit of scandal that you can against your cousin? His life does not clash with yours, his acts do not matter to you, his extravagance does not rob you. I used to fancy charity should cover a multitude of sins, but it seems to me that, now-a-days, clergymen, like Dr. Watt’s naughty dogs, only delight to bark and bite.”

“You are cruelly unjust,” answered the Warden, in those smooth tones that irritate one much more than “hard swearing.” “I have no other wish than Christian kindness to poor Ernest. If, in my place as pastor, I justly condemn his errors and vices, it is only through a loving desire to wean him from his downward course.”

“Your love is singularly vindictive,” said his vehement young opponent, her cheeks hot and her eyes bright. “No good was ever yet done to a man by proclaiming his faults right and left. I should like you much better, Mr. Ruskinstone, if you said, candidly, I don’t like my cousin, and I have never forgiven him for thrashing me at Rugby, and playing football better than I did.”

Eusebius winced at this little touch up of his bygone years, but he smiled a benign, superior, pitying smile. “Such petitesses, I thank Heaven, are utterly beneath me, and I should have fancied Miss Gordon was too generous to suppose them. God forbid that I should envy poor Vaughan his dazzling qualities. I sorrow over him as a relative and a precious human soul, but as a minister of our holy Church I neither can, nor will, countenance his gross violations of all her divinest laws.” With which peroration the Warden, with a sigh, took up a work on “The Early English Piscini and Aspersoria,” and became immersed therein.

“Poor Mr. Vaughan!” cried Nina, impatiently. “Probably he is too wise to concern himself about what people buzz in his absence, or else he need be cased in mail to avoid being stung to death with the musquito bites of scandal.”

Gordon came down on her with his heavy artillery. “Silence, Nina! you do not know what you are defending. I fear that no slander can darken Mr. Vaughan’s character more than he merits.”

“A gambler—a roué—a lover of married woman, of dancing-girls,” murmured Eusebius, in an aside, meant, like those on the stage, to tell killingly with the audience.

Nina flushed as scarlet as the camellias in her bouquet, and put up her head with a haughty gesture. “Here comes the subject of your vituperation, Mr. Ruskinstone, so you can repeat your denunciations, and favor him with a sermon in person—unless, indeed, the secular recollections of Rugby intimidate the religious arm.”

I fear something as irreverent as “Little devil!” rose to the Warden’s pious lips as he flashed a fierce glance at her from his pale-blue eyes, for he loved not her, but the splendid dot which the banker was sure to pay down if his son-in-law were to his taste. He caught his cousin’s glance as he came into the salons, and in the superb scorn gleaming in Ernest’s dark eyes, Eusebius saw that they were not merely enemies, but—rivals: a Warden with Church principles, all the cardinal virtues, strict morality, and money; and a Lion with Paris principles (if any), great fascinations, debts, entanglements, and an empty purse. Which will win, with Nina for the cup and Gordon for the umpire?

IV

Mischief

“Qui cherchez-vous, petite?”

The speaker was la Mélusine, and the hearer was Nina who considerably resented the half-patronising, half mocking, yet intensely amiable manner the widow chose to assume towards her. Gordon was stricken with warm admiration of madame, and never inquired into her morality, only too pleased when she condescended to talk to or invite him. They had met at a soirée at some intimate friends of Vaughan’s in the Champs Elysées. (Ernest was a favorite wherever he went, and the good-natured French people at once took up his relatives to please him.) He was not there himself, but the baronne’s quick eyes soon caught and construed her restless glances through the crowded rooms.

“Je ne cherche personne, madame,” said Nina, haughtily. Dressed simply in white tulle, with the most exquisite flowers to be had out of the Palais Royal in the famous golden hair, which gleamed in the gaslight like sunshine, she aroused the serpent which lay hid in the roses of madame’s smiles.

Pauline laughed softly, and flirted her fan. “Nay, nay, mignonne, those soft eyes are seeking some one. Who is it? Ah! it is that méchant Monsieur Vaughan n’est-ce pas? He is very handsome, certainly, but

On dit an village
Qu’Argire est volage.”

“Madame’s own thoughts possibly suggest the supposition of mine,” said Nina, coldly.

“Comme ces Anglaises sont impolies,” thought the baronne. “No, indeed,” she said, laughing carelessly, “I know Ernest too well to let my thoughts dwell on him. He is charming to talk to, to waltz with, to flirt with, but from anything further Dieu nous garde! Lauzun himself were not more dangerous or more unstable.”

“You speak as bitterly, madame, as if you had suffered from the fickleness,” said Nina, with a contemptuous curl of her soft lips. Sweet temper as she was, she could thrust a spear in her enemy’s side when she liked.

Madame’s eyes glittered like a rattlesnake’s. Nina’s chance ball shot home. But madame was a woman of the world, and could mask her batteries with a skill of which Nina, with her impetuous abandon, was incapable. She smiled very sweetly, as she answered, “No, petite I have unhappily seen too much of the world not to know that we must never put our trust in those charming mauvais sujets. At your age, I dare say I should not have been proof against your countryman’s fascinations, but now, I know just how much his fondest vows are worth, and I have been deaf to them all, for I would not let my heart mislead me against my reason and my conscience. Ah, petite! you little guess what the traitor word ‘love’ means here, in Paris. We women grow accustomed to our fate, but the lesson is hard sometimes.”

“You have been reading ‘Mes Confidences,’ lately?” asked Nina, with a sarcastic flash of her brilliant eyes.

“How cruel! Do you suppose I can have no émotions except I learn them second-hand through Lamartine or Delphine Gay? You are very satirical, Miss Gordon——How strange!” said the baronne, interrupting herself; “your bouquet is the fac-simile of mine! Look! De Kerroualle sent you that I fancy? You know he raffoles of you. I was very silly to use mine, but Mr. Vaughan sent me such a pretty note with it, that I had not the resolution to disappoint him. Poor Ernest!” And Madame sighed softly, as if bewailing in her tender heart the woes her obduracy caused. The blood flamed up in Nina’s cheeks, and her hand clenched hard on Ernest’s flowers: they were the fac-similes of the widow’s; delicate pink blossoms, mixed with white azalias. “Is he here to-night, do you know?” madame continued. “I dare say not; he is behind the coulisses, most likely. Céline, the new danseuse from the Fenice, makes her début to-night. Here comes poor Gaston to petition for a valse. Be kind to him, pray.”

She herself went off to the ball-room, and the effect of her exordium was to make Nina very disagreeable to poor De Kerroualle, whom she really liked, and who was entêté about her. Not long afterwards, Nina saw in the distance Vaughan’s haughty head and powerful brow, and her silly little heart beat as quick as a pigeon’s just caught in the trap: he was talking to the widow.

“Look at our young English friend,” Pauline was saying, “how she is flirting with Gaston, and De Lafitolle, and De Concressault. Certainly, when your Englishwomen do coquet, they go further than any of us.”

“Est-ce possible?” said Ernest, raising his eyebrows.

“Méchant!” cried madame, with a chastising blow of her fan. “But, do you know, I admire the petite very much. I believe all really beautiful women had that rare golden hair of hers—Lucrezia Borgia (I could never bear Grisi as Lucrezia, for that very reason). La Cenci, the Duchess of Portsmouth, Ænone—and Helen, I am sure, netted Paris with those gold threads. Don’t you think it is very lovely?”

“I do, indeed,” said Vaughan, with unconscious warmth.

Madame laughed gaily, but there was a disagreeable glitter in her eye. “What, fickle already? Ah well, I give you full leave.”

“And example, madame,” said Ernest, as he bowed and left her side, glad to have struck the first blow of his freedom from this handsome tyrant, who was as capricious and exacting as she was clever and captivating. But fetters made of fairer roses were over Ernest now, and he never bethought himself of the probable vengeance of that bitterest foe, a woman who is piqued.

“Tout beau!” thought Pauline, as she saw him waltzing with Nina. “Mais je vous donnerai encore l’échec et mat, mon brave joueur.”

“Did you give Madame de Mélusine the bouquet she carries this evening?” asked Nina, as he whirled her round.

“No,” said Ernest, astonished. “Why do you ask?”

“Because she said you did,” answered Nina, never accustomed to conceal anything; “and, besides, it is exactly like mine.”

“Infernal woman!” muttered Ernest. “How could you for a moment believe that I would have so insulted you?”

“I didn’t believe it,” said Nina, lifting her frank eyes to his. “But how very late you are; have you been at the ballet?”

His face grew stern. “Did she tell you that?”

“Yes. But why did you go there, instead of coming to dance with me? Do you like those danseuses better than you do me? What was Céline’s or anybody’s début, to you?”

Ernest smiled at the native indignation of the question. “Never think that I do not wish to be with you; but—I wanted oblivion, and one cannot shake off old habits. Did you miss me among all those other men that you have always round you?”

“How unkind that is!” whispered Nina, indignantly. “You know I always do.”

He held her closer to him in the waltz, and she felt his heart beat quicker, but she got no other answer.

That night Nina stood before her toilette-table, putting her flowers in water, and some hot tears fell on the azalias.

“I will have faith in him,” she cried, passionately; “though all the world be witness against him, I will believe in him. Whatever his life may have been, his heart is warm and true; they shall never make me doubt it.”

Her last thoughts were of him, and when she slept his face was in her dreams, while Ernest, with some of the wildest men of his set, smoked hard and drank deep in his chambers to drive away, if he could, the fiends of Regret and Passion and the memory of a young, radiant, impassioned face, which lured him to an unattainable future.

“Nina dearest,” said Selina Ruskinstone, affectionately, the morning after, “I hope you will not think me unkind—you know I have no wish but for your good—but don’t you think it would be better to be a little more—more reserved, a little less free, with Mr. Vaughan?”

“Explain yourself more clearly,” said Nina, tranquilly. “Do you wish me to send to Turkey for a veil and a guard of Bashi-Bazouks, or do you mean that Mr. Vaughan is so attractive that he is better avoided, like a mantrap or a Maëlstrom?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” retorted Augusta; “you know well enough what we mean, and certainly you do run after him a great deal too much.”

“You are so very demonstrative,” sighed Selina, “and it is so easily misconstrued. It is not feminine to court any man so unblushingly.”

Nina’s eyes flashed, and the blood colored her brow. “I am not afraid of being misconstrued by Mr. Vaughan,” she said, haughtily; “gentlemen are kinder and wiser judges in those things than our sex.”

“I wouldn’t advise you to trust to Ernest’s tender mercies,” sneered Augusta.

“My dear child, remember his principles,” sighed Selina; “his life—his reputation——”

“Leave both him and me alone,” retorted Nina, passionately. “I will not stand calmly by to hear him slandered with your vague calumnies. You preach religion often enough; practice it now, and show more common kindness to your cousin: I do not say charity, for I am sick of the cant word, and he is above your pity. You think me utterly lost because I dance, and laugh, and enjoy my life, but, bad as my principles are, I should be shocked—yes, Selina, and I should think I merited little mercy myself, were I as harsh and bitter upon any one as you are upon him. How can you judge him?—how can you say what nobility, and truth, and affection—that will shame your own cold pharisaism—may lie in his heart unrevealed?—how can you dare to censure him?”

In the door of the salon, listening to the lecture his young champion was giving these two blue, opinionated, and strongly pious ladies, stood Ernest, his face even paler than usual, and his eyes with a strange mixture of joy and pain in them. Nina colored scarlet, but went forward to meet him with undisguised pleasure, utterly regardless of the sneering lips and averted eyes of the Miss Ruskinstones. He had come to go with them to St. Germain, and, with a dexterous manœuvre, took the very seat in the carriage opposite Nina that Eusebius had planned for himself. But the Warden was no match for the Lion in such affairs, and, being exiled to the barouche with Gordon and Augusta, took from under the seat a folio of the “Stones of Venice,” and read sulkily all the way.

“My dear fellow,” said Vaughan, when they reached St. Germain, “don’t you think you would prefer to sit in the carriage, and finish that delightful work, to coming to see some simple woods and terraces? If you would, pray don’t hesitate to say so; I am sure Miss Gordon will excuse your absence.”

The solicitous courtesy of Ernest’s manner was boiling oil to the fire raging in the Warden’s gentle breast, and Eusebius, besides, was not quick at retorts. “I am not guilty of any such bad taste,” he said, stiffly, “though I do discover a charm in severe studies, which I believe you never did.”

“No, never,” said Ernest, laughing; “my genius does not lie that way; and I’ve no vacant bishopric in my mind’s eye to make such studies profitable. Even you, you know, light of the Church as you are, want recreation sometimes. Confess now, the chansons à boire last night sounded pleasant after long months of Faithandgrace services!”

Eusebius looked much as I have seen a sleek tom-cat, who bears a respectable character generally, surprised in surreptitiously licking out of the cream-jug. He had the night before (when he was popularly supposed to be sitting under Adolphe Monod) tasted rather too many petits verres up at the Pré Catalan, utterly unconscious of his cousin’s proximity. The pure-minded soul thus cruelly caught looked prayers of piteous entreaty to Vaughan not to damage his milk-white reputation by further revelation of this unlucky detour into the Broad Road; and Ernest, who, always kind-hearted, never hit a man when he was down, contented himself with saying:

“Ah! well, we are none of us pure alabaster, though some of the sepulchres do contrive to whiten themselves up astonishingly. My father, poor man, once wished to put me in the Church. Do you think I should have graced it, Selina?”

“I can’t say I do,” sneered Selina.

“You think I should disgrace it? Very probably. I am not good at ‘canting.’” And giving Nina his arm, the Warden being much too confused to forestall him, he whispered: “when is that atrocious saint going to take himself over the water? Couldn’t we bribe his diocesan to call him before the Arches Court? Surely those long coats, so like the little wooden men in Noah’s Ark, and that straightened hair, so mathematically parted down the centre, look ’perverted’ enough to warrant it.”

Nina shook her head. “Unhappily, he is here for six months for ill health!—the sick-leave of clergymen who wish for a holiday, and are too holy to leave their flock without an excuse to society.”

Vaughan laughed, then sighed. “Six months—and you have been here four already! Eusebius hates me cordially—all my English relatives do, I believe; we do not get on together. They are too cold and conventional for me. I have some of the warm Bohemian blood, though God knows I’ve seen enough to chill it to ice by this time; but it is not chilled—so much the worse for me,” muttered Ernest “Tell me,” he said, abruptly—“tell me why you took the trouble to defend me so generously this morning?”

She looked up at him with her frank, beaming regard. “Because they dare to misjudge you, and they know nothing, and are not worthy to know anything of your real self.”

He pressed his lips together as if in bodily pain. “And what do you know?”

“Have you not yourself said that you talk to me as you talk to no one else?” answered Nina, impetuously; “besides—I cannot tell why, but the first day I met you I seemed to find some friend that I had lost before. I was certain that you would never misconstrue anything I said, and I felt that I saw further into your heart and mind than any one else could do. Was it not very strange?” She stopped, and looked up at him. Ernest bent his eyes on the ground, and breathed fast.

“No, no,” he said at last; “yours is only an ideal of me. If you knew me as I really am, you would cease to feel the—the interest that you say——”

He stopped abruptly; facile as he was at pretty compliments, and versed in tender scenes as he had been from his school-days, the longing to make this girl love him, and his struggle not to breathe love to her, deprived him of his customary strength and nonchalance.

“I do not fear to know you as you are,” said Nina, gently. “I do not think you yourself allow all the better things that there are in you. People have not judged you rightly, and you have been too proud to prove their error to them. You have found pleasure in running counter to the prudish and illiberal bigots who presumed to judge you; and to a world you have found heartless and false you have not cared to lift the domino and mask you wore.”

Vaughan sighed from the bottom of his heart, and walked on in silence for a good five minutes. “Promise me, Nina,” he said at length with an effort, “that no matter what you hear against me, you will not condemn me unheard.”

“I promise,” she answered, raising her eyes to his, brighter still for the color in her checks. It was the first time he had called her Nina.

“Miss Gordon,” said Eusebius, hurriedly overtaking them, “pray come with me a moment: there is the most exquisite specimen of the Flamboyant style in an archway——”

“Thank you for your good intentions,” said Nina, pettishly, “but really, as you might know by this time, I never can see any attractions in your prosaic and matter-of-fact-fact study.”

“It might be more profitable than——”

“Than thinking of La Vallière and poor Bragelonne, and all the gay glories of the exiled Bourbons?” laughed Nina. “Very likely; but romance is more to my taste than granite. You would never have killed yourself, like Bragelonne, for the beaux yeux of Louise de la Beaume-sur-Blanc, would you?”

“I trust,” said Eusebius, stiffly, “that I should have had a deeper sense of the important responsibilities of the gift of life than to throw it away because a silly girl preferred another.”

“You are very impolitic,” said Ernest, with a satirical smile. “No lady could feel remorse at forsaking you, if you could get over it so easily.”

“He would get over it easily,” laughed Nina. “You would call her Delilah, and all the Scripture bad names, order Mr. Ruskin’s new work, turn your desires to a deanship, marry some bishop’s daughter with high ecclesiastical interest, and console yourself in the bosom of your Mother Church—eh, Mr. Ruskinstone?”

“You are cruelly unjust,” sighed Eusebius. “You little know——”

“The charms of architecture? No; and I never shall,” answered his tormentor, humming the “Queen of the Roses,” and waltzing down the forest glade, where they were walking. “How severe you look!” she said as she waltzed back. “Is that wrong, too? Miriam danced before the ark and Jephtha’s daughter.”

The Warden appeared not to hear. Certainly his mode of courtship was singular.

“Ernest,” he said, turning to his cousin as the rest of the party came up, “I had no idea your sister was in Paris. I have not seen her since she was fourteen. I should not have known her in the least.”

“Margaret is in India with her husband,” answered Vaughan. “What are you dreaming of? Where have you seen her?”

“I saw her in your chambers,” answered the Warden, slowly. “I passed three times yesterday, and she was sitting in the centre window each time.”

“Pshaw! You dreamt it in your sleep last night. Margaret’s in Vellore, I assure you.”

“I saw her,” said the Warden, softly; “or, at least, I saw some lady, whom I naturally presumed to be your sister.”

Ernest, who had not colored for fifteen years, and would have defied man or woman to confuse him, flushed to his very temples.

“You are mistaken,” he said, decidedly. “There is no woman in my rooms.”

Eusebius raised his eyebrows, bent his head, smiled and sighed. More polite disbelief was never expressed. The Miss Ruskinstones would have blushed if they could; as they could not, they drew themselves bolt upright, and put their parasols between them and the reprobate. Nina, whose hand was still in Vaughan’s arm, turned white, and flashed a quick, upward look at him; then, with a glance at Eusebius, as fiery as the eternal wrath that that dear divine was accustomed to deal out so largely to other people, she led Ernest up to her father, who being providentially somewhat deaf, had not heard this by-play, and said, to her cousin’s horror, “Papa, dear, Mr. Vaughan wants you to dine with him at Tortoni’s to-night, to meet M. de Vendanges. You will be very happy, won’t you?”

Ernest pressed her little hand against his side, and thanked her with his eyes.

Gordon was propitiated for that day; he was not likely to quarrel with a man who could introduce him to “Son Altesse Monseigneur le Duc de Vendanges.”

V

More Mischief — And an End

In a little cabinet de peinture, in a house in the Place Vendôme, apart from all the other people, who having come to a déjeûner were now dispersed in the music rooms, boudoirs, and conservatories, sat Madame de Mélusine, talking to Gordon, flatteringly, beguilingly, bewitchingly, as that accomplished widow could. The banker found her charming, and really, under her blandishments, began to believe, poor old fellow, that she was in love with him!

“Ah! by-the-by, cher monsieur,” began madame, when she had soft-soaped him into a proper frame of mind, “I want to speak to you about that mignonne Nina. You cannot tell, you cannot imagine, what interest I take in her.”

“You do her much honor, madame,” replied her bourgeois gentilhomme, always stiff, however enraptured he might feel internally.

“The honor is mine,” smiled Pauline. “Yes, I do feel much interest in her; there is a sympathy in our natures, I am certain, and—and, Monsieur Gordon, I cannot see that darling girl on the brink of a precipice without stretching out a hand to snatch her from the abyss.”

“Precipice—abyss—Nina! Good Heavens! my dear madame, what do you mean?” cried Gordon—a fire, an elopement, and the small-pox, all presenting themselves to his mind.

“No, no,” repeated madame, with increasing vehemence, “I will not permit any private feelings, I will not allow my own weakness to prevent me from saving her. It would be a crime, a cruelty, to let your innocent child be deceived, and rendered miserable for all time, because I lack the moral courage to preserve her. Monsieur, I speak to you, as I am sure I may, as one friend to another, and I am perfectly certain that you will not misjudge me. Answer me one thing; no impertinent curiosity dictates the question. Do you wish your daughter married to Mr. Vaughan?”

“Married to Vaughan!” exclaimed the startled banker; “I’d sooner see her married to a crossing sweeper. She never thought of such a thing. Impossible! absurd! she’ll marry my friend Ruskinstone as soon as she comes of age. Marry Vaughan! a fellow without a penny——”

Pauline laid her soft, jewelled hand on his arm:

“My dear friend, he thinks of it if you do not, and I am much mistaken if dear Nina is not already dazzled by his brilliant qualities. Your countryman is a charming companion, no one can gainsay that; but, alas! he is a roué, a gambler, an adventurer, who, while winning her young girl’s affections, has only in view the wealth which he hopes he will gain with her. It is painful to me to say this” (and tears stood in madame’s long, velvet eyes). “We were good friends before he wanted more than friendship, while poor De Mélusine was still living, and his true character was revealed to me. It would be false delicacy to allow your darling Nina to become his victim for want of a few words from me, though I know, if he were aware of my interference, the inference he would basely insinuate from it. But you,” whispered madame, brushing the tears from her eyes, and giving him an angelic smile, “I need not fear that you would ever misjudge me?”

“Never, I swear, most generous of women!” said the banker, kissing the snow-white hand, very clumsily, too. “I’ll tell the fellow my mind directly—an unprincipled, gambling——”

“Non, non, je vous en prie, monsieur!” cried the widow, really frightened, for this would not have suited her plans at all. “You would put me in the power of that unscrupulous man. He would destroy my reputation at once in his revenge.”

“But what am I to do?” said the poor gulled banker. “Nina’s a will of her own, and if she take a fancy to this confounded——”

“Leave that to me,” said la baronne, softly. “I have proofs which will stagger her most obstinate faith in her lover. Meanwhile give him no suspicion, go to his supper on Tuesday, and—you are asked to Vauvenay, accept the invitation—and conclude the fiançailles with Monsieur le Ministre as soon as you can.”

“But—but, madame,” stammered this new Jourdain to his enchanting Dorimène, “Vauvenay is an exile. I shall not see you there?”

“Ah, silly man,” laughed the widow, “I shall be only two miles off. I am going to stay with the Salvador; they leave Paris in three weeks. Listen—your daughter is singing ‘The Swallows.’ Her voice is quite as good as Ristori’s.”

Three hours after, madame held another tête-à-tête in that boudoir. This time the favored mortal was Vaughan. They had had a pathetic interview, of which the pathos hardly moved Ernest as much as the widow desired.

“You love me no longer, Ernest,” she murmured, the tears falling down her cheeks—her rouge was the product of high art, and never washed off—“I see it, I feel it; your heart is given to that English girl. I have tried to jest about it; I have tried to affect indifference, but I cannot. The love you once won will be yours to the grave.”

Ernest listened, a satirical smile on his lips.

“I should feel more grateful,” he said, calmly, “if the gift had not been given to so many; it will be a great deal of trouble to you to love us all to our graves. And your new friend Gordon, do you intend cherishing his grey hairs, too, till the gout puts them under the sod?”

She fell back sobbing with exquisite abandon. No deserted Calypso’s pose was ever more effective.

“Ernest, Ernest! that I should live to be so insulted, and by you!”

“Nay, madame, end this vaudeville,” said he bitterly. “I know well enough that you hate me, or why have you troubled yourself to coin the untruths about me that you whispered to Miss Gordon?”

“Ah! have you no pity for the first mad vengeance dictated by jealousy and despair?” murmured Pauline. “Once there was attraction in this face for you, Ernest; have some compassion, some sympathy——”

Well as he knew the worth of madame’s tears, Ernest, chivalric and generous at heart, was touched.

“Forgive me,” he said, gently, “and let us part. You know now, Pauline, that she has my deepest, my latest love. It were disloyalty to both did we meet again save in society.”

“Farewell, then,” murmured Pauline. “Think gently of me, Ernest, for I have loved you more than you will ever know now.”

She rose, and, as he bent towards her, kissed his forehead. Then, floating from the room, passed the Reverend Eusebius, standing in the doorway, looking in on this parting scene. The widow looked at herself in her mirror that night with a smile of satisfaction.

“C’est bien en train,” she said, half aloud. “Le fou! de penser qu’il puisse me braver. Je ne l’aime plus, c’est vrai, mais je ne veux pas qu’elle réussisse.”

Nina went to bed very happy. Ernest had sat next her at the déjeûner; and afterwards at a ball had waltzed often with her and with nobody else; and his eyes had talked love in the waltzes though his tongue never had.

Ernest went to his chambers, smoked hard, half mad with the battle within him, and took three grains of opium, which gave him forgetfulness and sleep. He woke, tired and depressed, to hear the gay hum of life in the street below, and to remember he had promised Nina to meet them at Versailles.

It was Sunday morning. In England, of course, Gordon would have gone up to the sanctuary, listened to Mr. Bellew, frowned severely on the cheap trains, and, after his claret, read edifying sermons to his household; but in Paris there would be nobody to admire the piety, and the “grandes eaux” only play once a week, you know—on Sundays. So his Sabbath severity was relaxed, and down to Versailles he journied. There must be something peculiar in continental air, for it certainly stretches our countrymen’s morality and religion uncommonly: it is only up at Jerusalem that our pharisees worship. Eusebius dare not go—he’d be sure to meet a brother-clerical, who might have reported the dereliction at home—so that Vaughan, despite Gordon’s cold looks, kept by Nina’s side though he wasn’t alone with her, and when they came back in the wagon the banker slept and the duenna dozed, and he talked softly and low to her—not quite love, but something very like it—and as they neared Paris he took the little hand with its delicate Jouvin glove in his, and whispered,

“Remember your promise: I can brave, and have braved most things, but I could not bear your scorn. That would make me a worse man than I have been, if, as some folks would tell you, such a thing be possible.”

It was dark, but I dare say the moonbeams shining on the chevelure dorée showed him a pair of truthful, trusting eyes that promised never to desert him.

The day after he had, by dint of tact and strategy, planned to spend entirely with Nina. He was going with them to the races at Chantilly, then to the Gaité to see the first representation of a vaudeville of a friend of his, and afterwards he had persuaded Gordon to enter the Lion’s den, and let Nina grace a petit souper at No. 10, Rue des Mauvais Sujets, Chaussée d’Antin.

The weather was delicious, the race-ground full, if not quite so crowded as the Downs on Derby Day. Ernest cast away his depression, he gave himself up to the joy of being loved, his wit had never rung finer nor his laugh clearer than as he drove back to Paris opposite Nina. He had never felt in higher spirits than, after having given carte blanche to a cordon bleu for the entertainment, he looked round his salons, luxurious as Eugène Sue’s, and perfumed with exotics from the Palais Royal, and thought of one rather different in style to the women that had been wont to drink his Sillery and grace his symposia.

He knew well enough she loved him, and his heart beat high as he put a bouquet of white flowers into a gold bouquetière to take to her.

On his lover-like thoughts the voice of one of his parrots—Ernest had almost as many pets as there are in the Jardin des Plantes—broke in, screaming “Bluette! Bluette! Sacre bleu, elle est jolie! Bluette! Bluette!”

The recollection was unwelcome. Vaughan swore a “sacre bleu!” too. “Diable! she mustn’t hear that François, put that bird out of the way. He makes a such a confounded row.”

The parrot, fond of him, as all things were that knew him, sidled up, arching its neck, and repeating what De Concressault had taught it: “Fi donc, Ernest! Tu es volage! Tu ne m’aimes plus! Tu aimes Pauline!”

“Devil take the bird!” thought its master; “even he’ll be witness against me.” And as he went down stairs to his cab, a chorus of birds shouting “Tu aimes Pauline!” followed him, and while he laughed, he sighed to think that even these unconscious things could tell her how little his love was worth. He forgot all but his love, however, when he leaned over her chair in the Gaités and saw that, strenuously as De Concressault and De Kerroualle sought to distract her attention, and many as were the lorgnons levelled at the chevelure dorée, all her thoughts and smiles were given to him.

Ernest had never, even in his careless boyhood, felt so happy as he did that night as he handed her into Gordon’s carriage, and drove to the Chaussée d’Antin; and though Gordon sat there heavy and solemn, looming like an iceberg on Ernest’s golden future, Vaughan forgot him utterly, and only looked at the sunshine beaming on him from radiant eyes that, skeptic in her sex as he was from experience, he felt would always be true to him. The carriage stopped at No. 10, Rue des Mauvais Sujets. He had given her one or two dinners with the Senecterre, the De Salvador, and other fine ladies—grand affairs at the Frères Provençaux that would have satisfied Brillat-Savarin—but she had never been to his rooms before, and she smiled joyously in his face as he lifted her out—the smile that had first charmed him at the Français. He gave her his arm, and led her across the salle, bending his head down to whisper a welcome. Gordon and Selina and several men followed. Selina felt that it was perdition to enter the Lion’s den, but a fat old vicomte, on whom she’d fixed her eye, was going, and the “femmes de trente ans” that Balzac champions risk their souls rather than risk their chances when the day is far spent, and good offers grow rare.

Ernest’s Abyssinian, mute, subordinate to that grand gentleman, M. François, ushered them up the stairs, making furtive signs to his master, which Vaughan was too much absorbed to notice. François, in all his glory, flung open the door of the salon. In the salon a sight met Ernest’s eyes which froze his blood more than if all the dead had arisen out of their graves on the slopes of Père la Chaise.

The myriad of wax-lights shone on the rooms, fragrant with the perfume of exotics, gleamed on the supper-table, gorgeous with its gold plate and its flowers, lighted up the aviary with its brilliant hues of plumage, and showed to full perfection the snowy shoulders, raven hair, and rose-hued dress of a woman lying back in a fauteuil, laughing, as De Cheffontaine, a man but slightly known to Ernest, leaned over her, fanning her. On a sofa in an alcove reclined another girl, young, fair, and pretty, the amber mouthpiece of a hookah between her lips, and a couple of young fellows at her feet.

The brunette was Bluette, who played the soubrette rôles at the Odéon; the blonde was Céline Gamelle, the new première danseuse. Bluette rose from the depths of her amber satin fauteuil, with her little pétillant eyes laughing, and her small plump hands stretched out in gesticulation. “Méchant! Comme tu es tard, Ernest. Nous avons été ici si longtemps—dix minutes au moins! And dis is you leetler new Ingleesh friend. How do you do, my dear?”

Nina, white as death, shrank from her, clinging with both hands to Ernest’s arms. As pale as she, Vaughan stood staring at the actress, his lips pressed convulsively together, the veins standing out on his broad, high forehead. The bold Lion hunted into his lair, for once lost all power, all strength.

Gordon looked over Nina’s shoulder into the room. He recognized the women at a glance, and, with his heavy brow dark as night, he glared on Ernest in a silence more ominous than words or oaths, and snatching Nina’s arm from his, he drew her hand within his own, and dragged her from the room.

Ernest sprang after him. “Good God! you do not suppose me capable of this. Stay one instant. Hear me——”

“Let us pass, sir,” thundered Gordon, “or by Heaven this insult shall not go unavenged.”

“Nina, Nina!” cried Ernest, passionately, “do you at least listen!—you at least will not condemn——”

Nina wrenched her hands from her father, and turned to him, a passion of tears falling down her face. “No, no! have I not promised you?”

With a violent oath Gordon carried her to her carriage. It drove away, and Ernest, his lips set, his face white, and a fierce glare in his dark eyes that made Bluette and Céline tremble, entered his salons a second time, so bitter an anguish, so deadly a wrath marked in his expressive countenance, that even the Frenchmen hushed their jests, and the women shrunk away, awed at a depth of feeling they could not fathom or brave.

The fierce anathemas of Gordon, the “Christian” lamentations of Eusebius, the sneers of Selina, the triumphs of Augusta, all these vials of wrath were poured forth on Ernest, in poor little Nina’s ears, the whole of the next day. She had but one voice among many to raise in his defence, and she had no armor but her faith in him. Gordon vowed with the same breath that she should never see Vaughan again, and that she should engage herself to Ruskinstone forthwith. Eusebius poured in at one ear his mild milk-and-water attachment, and, in the other, details of Ernest’s scene in the boudoir with Madame de Mélusine, or, at least, what he had seen of it, i. e. her parting caress. Selina rang the changes on her immodesty in loving a man who had never proposed to her; and Augusta drew lively pictures of the eternal fires which were already being kept up below, ready for the Lion’s reception. Against all these furious batteries Nina stood firm. All their sneers and arguments could not shake her belief, all her father’s commands—and, when he was roused, the old banker was very fierce—could not move her to promise not to see Ernest again, or alter her firm repudiation of the warden’s proposals. The thunder rolled, the lightning flamed, the winds screamed all to no purpose, the little reed that one might have fancied would break, stood steady.

The day passed, and the next passed, and there were no tidings of Ernest. Nina’s little loyal heart, despite its unhesitating faith, began to tremble lest it should have wrecked itself: but then, she thought of his eyes, and she felt that all the world would never make her mistrust him.

On the surlendemain the De Mélusine called. Gordon and Eusebius were out, and Nina wished her to be shown up. Ill as the girl felt, she rose haughtily and self-possessed to greet madame, as, announced by her tall chasseur, with his green plume, the widow glided into the room.

Pauline kissed her lightly (there are no end of Judases among the dear sex), and, though something in Nina’s eye startled her, she sat down beside her, and began to talk most kindly, most sympathisingly. She was chagrinée, désolée that her chère Nina should have been so insulted; every one knew M. Vaughan was quite entêté with that little, horrid, coarse thing, Bluette; but it was certainly very shocking; men were such démons. The affair was already répandue in Paris; everybody was talking of it. Ernest was unfortunately so well known; he could not be in his senses; she almost wished he was mad, it would be the only excuse for him; wild as he was, she should scarcely have thought, &c., &c., &c. “Ah! chère enfant,” madame went on at the finish, “you do not know these men—I do. I fear you have been dazzled by this naughty fellow; he is very attractive, certainly: if so, though it will be a sharp pang, it will be better to know his real character at once. Voyez donc! he has been persuading you that you were all the world to him, while at the same time, he has been trying to make me believe the same. See, only two days ago he sent me this.”

She held out a miniature. Nina, who hitherto had listened in haughty silence, gave a sharp cry of pain as she saw Vaughan’s graceful figure, stately head, and statue-like features. But, before the widow could pursue her advantage, Nina rallied, threw back her head, and said, her soft lips set sternly:

“If you repulsed his love, why was he obliged to repulse yours? Why did you tell him on Saturday night that ‘you had loved him more than he would ever know now?’”

The shot Eusebius had unconsciously provided, struck home. Madame was baffled. Her eyes sank under Nina’s, and she colored through her rouge.

“You have played two rôles, madame,” said Nina, rising, “and not played them with you usual skill. Excuse my English ill-breeding, if I ask you to do me the favor of ending this comedy.”

“Certainly, mademoiselle, if it is your wish,” answered the widow, now smiling blandly. “If it please you to be blind, I have no desire to remove the bandage from your eyes. Seulement, je vous prie de me pardonner mon indiscrétion, et j’ai l’honneur, mademoiselle, de vous dire adieu!”

With the lowest of révérences madame glided from the room, and, as the door closed, Nina bowed her head on the miniature left behind in the déroute, and burst into tears.

Scarcely had la Mélusine’s barouche rolled away, when another visitor was shown in, and Nina, brushing the tears from her cheeks, looked up hurriedly, and saw a small woman, finely dressed, with a Shetland veil on, through which her small black eyes roved listlessly.

“Mademoiselle,” she said, in very quick but very bad English, “I is come to warn you against dat ver wrong man, Mr. Vaughan. I have like him, helas! I have like him too vell, but I do not vish you to suffer too.”

Nina knew the voice in a moment, and rose like a little empress, though she was flushed and trembling. “I wish to hear nothing of Mr. Vaughan. If this is the sole purport of your visit, I shall be obliged by your leaving me.”

“But mademoiselle——”

“I have told you I wish to hear nothing,” interposed Nina, quietly.

“Ver vell, ma’amselle; den read dat. It is a copy, and I got de original.”

She laid a letter on the sofa beside Nina. Two minutes after, Bluette joined her friend Céline Gamelle in a fiacre, and laughed heartily, clapping her little plump hands. “Ah, mon Dieu! Céline, comme elle est fière, la petite! Je ne lui ai pas dit un seul mot—elle m’a arrêtée si vite, si vite! Mais la lettre fera notre affaire n’est pas? Oui, oui!”

The letter unfolded in Nina’s hand. It was a promise of marriage from Ernest Vaughan to Bluette Lemaire. Voiceless and tearless, Nina sat gazing on the paper: first she rose, gasping for breath; then she threw herself down, sobbing convulsively, till she heard a step, caught up the miniature and letter, dreading to see her father, and, instead, saw Ernest, pale, worn, deep lines round his mouth and eyes, standing in the doorway. Involuntarily she sprang towards him. Ernest pressed her to heart, and his hot tears fell on the chevelure dorée, as he bent over her, murmuring, “You have not deserted me. God bless you for your noble faith.” At last he put her gently from him, and, leaning against the mantelpiece, said, with an effort, between his teeth, “Nina, I came to bid you farewell, and to ask your forgiveness for the wrong I have done you.”

Nina caught hold of him, much as Malibran seized hold of Elvino: “Leave me! leave me! No, no; you cannot mean it!”

“I have no strength for it now I see you,” said Ernest, looking down into her eyes; and the bold, reckless Lion shivered under the clinging clasp of her little hands. “I need not say I was not the cause of the insult you received the other night. Pauline de Mélusine was the agent, women willing to injure me the actors in it. But there is still much for you to forgive. Tell me, at once, what have you heard of me?”

She silently put the miniature and letter in his hand. The blood rushed to his very temples, and, sinking his head on his arms, his chest rose and fell with uncontrollable sobs. All the pent-up feelings of his vehement and affectionate nature poured out at last.

“And you have not condemned me even on these?” he said at length, in a hoarse whisper.

“Did I not promise?” she murmured.

“But if I told you they were true?”

She looked at him through her tears, and put her hand in his. “Tell me nothing of your past; it can make no difference to my love. Let the world judge you as it may, it cannot alter me.”

Ernest strained her to him, kissing her wildly. “God bless you for your trust! would to God I were more worthy of it! I have nothing to give you but a love such as I have never before known; but most would tell you all my love is worthless, and my life has been one of reckless dissipation and of darker errors still, until you awoke me to a deeper love—to thoughts and aspirations that I thought had died out for ever. Painful as it is to confess——”

“Hush!” interrupted Nina, gently. “Confess nothing; with your past life I can have nothing to do, and I wish never to hear anything that it gives you pain to tell. You say that you love me now, and will never love another—that is enough for me.”

Ernest kissed the flushed cheeks and eloquent lips, and thanked her with all the fiery passion that was in him; and his heart throbbed fiercely as he put her promise to the test.

“No, my darling! Priceless as your love is to me I will not buy it by concealment. I will not sully your ears with the details of my life. God forbid I should! but it is only due to you to know that I did give both these women the love-tokens they brought you. Love! It is desecration of the name, but I knew none better then! Three years ago, Bluette Lemaire first appeared at the Odéon. She is illiterate, coarse, heartless, but she was handsome, and she drew me to the coulisses. I was infatuated with her, though her ignorance and vulgarity constantly grated against all my tastes. One night at her petit souper I drank more Sillery than was wise. I have a stronger head than most men: perhaps there was some other stimulant in it; at any rate, she who was then poor, and is always avaricious, got from me a promise to marry her, or to pay twenty thousand francs. Three months after I gave it I cared no more for her than for my old glove. France is too wise to have Breach of Promise cases, and give money to coarse and vengeful women for their pretended broken hearts; but I had no incentive to create a scene by breaking with her, and so she kept the promise in her hands. What Pauline de Mélusine is, you can judge. Twelve months ago I met her at Vichy; the love she gave me, and the love I vowed her, were of equal value—the love of Paris boudoirs. That I sent her that picture only two days ago, is, of course, false. On my word, as a man of honor, since the moment I felt your influence upon me I have shunned her. Now, my own love, you know the truth. Will you send me from you, or will you still love and still forgive?”

In an agony of suspense he bent his head to listen for her answer. Tears rained down her cheeks as she put her arms round his neck, and whispered:

“Why ask? Are you not all the world to me? I should love you little if I condemned you for any errors of your past. I know your warm and noble heart, and I trust to it without a fear. There is no doubt between us now!”

Oh, my prudent and conventional young ladies, standing ready to accuse my poor little Nina, are you any wiser in your generation? You who have had all nature taken out of you by “finishing,” whose heads are crammed with “society’s” laws, and whose affections are measured out by rule, who would have been cold, and dignified, and read Ernest a severe lesson, and sent him back hopeless and hardened to go ten times worse than he had gone before—believe me, that impulse points truer than “the world,” and that the dictates of the heart are better than the regulations of society. Take my word for it, that love will do more for a man than lectures; and faith in him be more likely to keep him straight than all your moralising; and before you judge him severely for having drunk a little too deep of the Sillery of life, remember that his temptations are not your temptations, nor his ways your ways, and be gentle to dangers which society and custom keep out of your own path. The stern thorn crows you offer to us when we are inclined to ask your absolution, are not the right means to win us from the rose wreaths of our bacchanalia.

Nina, as you see, loved her Lion too well to remember dignity, or take her stand on principle; and gallantly did the young lady stand the bombardment from all sides that sought to break her resolutions and crush her “misplaced affections.” Gordon chanced to come in that day and light upon Ernest, and the fury into which he worked himself ill beseemed so respectable a pharisee. Vaughan kept tranquilly haughty, and told the banker, calmly, that he “thanked God he had his daughter’s love, and his money he would never have stooped to accept.” Gordon forbade him the house, and carried Nina back to England; but before she went they had a parting interview, in which Ernest offered to leave her free. But such freedom would have been worse than death to Nina, and, before they separated, she told him that in three months more she should be of age, and then, come what might, she would be his if he would take her without wealth. Take her he would have done from the arms of Satanus himself, but to disentangle himself from all his difficulties was a task that beat the Augean stables hollow. The three months of his probation he worked hard; he sold off all his pictures, his stud, and his meubles; he sold, what cost him a more bitter pang, his encumbered estates in Surrey; he paid off all his debts, Bluette’s twenty thousand francs included; and shaking himself free of the accumulated embarrassments of fifteen years, he crossed the water to claim his last love. No poor little Huguenot was ever persecuted for her faith more than poor little Nina for her engagement. Every relative she had thought it his duty to write admonitory letters, plentifully interspersed with texts. Eusebius and his 4000l. a year, and his perspective bishopric, were held up before her from morning to night; the banker, whose deception in the Mélusine had turned him into sharper vinegar than before, told her with chill stoicism that she must of course choose her own path in life, but that if that path led her into the Chaussée d’Antin, she need never expect a sou from him, for all his property would be divided between her two brothers. But Nina was neither to be frightened nor bribed. She kept true to her lover, and disinherited herself.

They were married a week or two after Nina’s majority; and Gordon knew it, though he could not prevent it. They did not miss the absence of bridesmaids, bishop, déjeûner, and the usual fashionable crowd. It was a marriage of the heart, you see, and did not want the trappings with which they gild that bitter pill so often swallowed now-a-days—a “mariage de convenance.” Nina, as she saw further still into the wealth of deep feeling and strong affection which, at her touch, she had awoke in his heart, felt that money, and friends, and the world’s smile were well lost since she had won him. And Ernest—Ernest’s sacrifice was greater; for it is not a little thing, young ladies, for a man to give up his accustomed freedom, and luxuries, and careless vie de garçon, and to have to think and work for another, even though dearer than himself. But he had long since seen so much of life, had exhausted all its pleasures so rapidly, that they palled upon him, and for some time he had vaguely wanted something of deeper interest, of warmer sympathy. Unknown to himself, he had felt the “besoin d’être aimé”—a want the trash offered him by the women of his acquaintance could never satisfy—and his warm, passionate nature found rest in a love which, though the strongest of his life, was still returned to him fourfold.

After some months of delicious far niente in the south of France, they came back to Paris. Though anything but rich, he was not absolutely poor, after he had paid his debts, and the necessity to exertion rousing his dormant talents, the Lion turned littérateur. He was too popular with men to be dropped because he had sold his stud or given up his petits soupers. The romance of their story charmed the Parisians, and, though (behind his back) they sometimes jested about the “Lion amoureux,” there were not a few who envied him his young love, and the sunshine that shone round them in his inexpensive appartement garni.

Ernest was singularly happy—and suddenly he became the star of the literary, as he had been of the fashionable world. His mots were repeated, his vaudevilles applauded, his feuilletons adored. The world smiled on Nina and her Lion; it made little difference to them—they had been as contented when it frowned.

But it made a good deal of difference across the Channel. Gordon began to repent. Ernest’s family was high, his Austrian connexions very aristocratic: there would be something after all in belonging to a man so well known. (Be successful, ami lecteur, and all your relatives will love you.) Besides, he had found out that it is no use to put your faith in princes, or clergymen. Eusebius had treated him very badly when he found he could not get Nina and her money, and spoke against the poor banker everywhere, calling him, with tender pastoral regret, a “worldly Egyptian,” a “Dives,” a “whitened sepulchre,” and all the rest of it.

Probably, too, stoic though he was, he missed the chevelure dorée; at any rate, he wrote to her stiffly, but kindly, and settled two thousand a year upon her. Vaughan was very willing she should be friends with her father, but nothing would make him draw a sou of the money. So Nina—the only sly thing she ever did in her life—after a while contrived to buy back the Surrey estate, and gave it to him, with no end of prayers and caresses, on the Jour de l’An.

“And you do not regret, my darling,” smiled Ernest, after wishing her the new year’s wishes, “having forgiven me for once drinking too much Sillery, and all the other naughty things of my vie de garçon?”

“Regret!” interrupted Nina, vehemently—“regret that I have won your love, live your life, share your cares and joys, regret that my existence is one long day of sunshine? Oh, why ask! you know I can never repay you for the happiness of my life.”

“Rather can I never repay you,” said Vaughan, looking down into her eyes, “for the faith that made you brave calumny and opposition, and cling to my side despite all. I was heart-sick of the world, and you called me back to life. I was weary of the fools who misjudged me, and I let them think me what they might.”

“Ah, how happy you make me!” cried Nina. “I should have been little worthy of your love if I had suffered slander to warp me against you, or if any revelations you cared enough for me to make of your past life, had parted us:

Love is not love
That alters where it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.

There, monsieur!” she said, throwing her arms round him with a laugh, while happy tears stood in her eyes—“there is a grand quotation for you. Mind and take care, Ernest, that you never realise the Ruskinstone predictions, and make me repent having caught and caged such a terrible thing as a hunted Paris Lion!”

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