irable
for her. Where was she to find this?

She set out on her search, she and the child and its nurse. Not Susanne.
Susanne had a sweetheart in Grenoble, and declined to leave it, so a
girl was engaged for the child in her place. Lady Isabel wound up her
housekeeping, had her things packed and forwarded to Paris, there to
wait her orders and finally quitted Grenoble. It was a fine day when she
left it--all too fine for the dark ending it was to bring.

When a railway accident does take place in France, it _is_ an accident.
None of your milk-and-water affairs, where a few bruises and a great
fright are the extent of the damages but too often a calamity whose
remembrance lasts a lifetime. Lady Isabel had travelled a considerable
distance that first day, and at the dusk of evening, as they were
approaching a place, Cammere, where she purposed to halt for the night,
a dreadful accident occurred. The details need not be given, and will
not be. It is sufficient to say that some of the passengers were killed,
her child and nurse being amongst them, and she herself was dangerously
injured.

The injuries lay chiefly in her left leg and in her face--the lower part
of her face. The surgeons, taking their cursory view of her, as they
did of the rest of the sufferers, were not sparing in their remarks, for
they believed her to be insensible. She had gathered that the leg was to
be amputated, and that she would probably die under the operation--but
her turn to be attended to was not yet. How she contrived to write she
never knew, but she got a pen and ink brought to her, and did succeed in
scrawling a letter to Lord Mount Severn.

She told him that a sad accident had taken place; she could not say how;
all was confusion; and that her child and maid were killed. She herself
was dangerously injured, and was about to undergo an operation, which
the doctors believed she could not survive; only _in case of her death
would the letter be sent to Lord Mount Severn_. She could not die, she
said, without a word of thanks for all his kindness; and she begged him,
when he saw Mr. Carlyle, to say that with her last breath she humbly
implored his forgiveness, and his children's whom she no longer dared to
call hers.

Now this letter, by the officiousness of a servant at the inn to which
the sufferers were carried, was taken at once to the post. And, after
all, things turned out not quite so bad as anticipated; for when the
doctors came to