s heights. Yet the streets are in a turmoil. Beaming girls and
bedizened harridans flaunt in the Row, carriages roll, and polite and
impolite jostle each other for gain or gaiety. There are great singers
at the Opera, great pictures on the Line, great festivities everywhere.
There is a _frou-frou_ of silken skirts, with the scent and the laughter
of happy women round and about me, from dawn till nightfall. Yet my soul
shivers somewhere outside. Shivers"--he repeated, shrinking into his
coat as though midsummer were March--"Why is it? I have lived and loved
and--as you know--recovered, but now--oh, Louis, is there anything so
mutely desolate as fresh spade prints on a grassless grave?"

A Quaint Elopement

"Ah! little sweetheart, the romance
Of life, with all its change and chance,
Is but a sealed book to thee."

It took Ralph Hilyard over twelve hours to journey from Southampton to
St Malo on that momentous June night. The sea tossed and bounded and
roared, but he kept his footing on deck, well satisfied with Nature's
frenzied accompaniment to his own tempestuous thoughts. He was being
borne to the historic town where She, from infancy to womanhood, had
dwelt; he would meet those frank blue Breton eyes adjured for a
year--eyes, whose innocence in one less well descended might have spelt
ignorance--he would adore the graceful form, that, while clamouring of
beauty, hinted all unconsciously of the _haute noblesse_, the ghost of
which abides in St Malo to this moment, though the substance has long
since passed away. He would risk all for the encounter, he told himself.
Round the subject his mind had revolved for three hundred and sixty-four
days; on the three hundred and sixty-fifth his thoughts had sprung to
action--he had set sail.

Her people, an austere mother--who loathed the name of the Republic and
rigidly clamped her door against both the bourgeoisie and our British
nation of shopkeepers--and her brother, Le Sieur de Quesne, a foolish
and thoroughly useless fine gentleman, occupied "La Chaumais," their
ancestral domain, near St Servan, on the river Rance. This domain was
almost as hermetically sealed as a convent, and far more gloomy. It
served to perfection as a prison for the peccant Leonie, when it was
discovered that, during a fortnight's stay with an aunt in Paris, she
had ventured to eye as a lover a portionless upstart, an artist who
worked for mere bread in the Quartier Latin. Here, for tw