the voice, in terrible excitement.

"They--Mr. De Jussac, they are loveliness itself. Plancine, I will not
touch them. You must be the first."

He strode to the kneeling girl; lifted, almost roughly dragged her to her
feet.

"Come!" he said; and, supporting her across the room, whispered madly in
her ear: "Pretend! For God's sake, pretend!"

Plancine's swimming eyes looked down, looked upon a litter of perished
rags of paper, and, lying in the midst of the rubbish, an ancient stained
and cockled miniature of a powdered Louis _Seize_ coquette.

This was all. This was the treasure the old crazed vanity had thought
sufficient to build her nephew his fortune.

The diamonds! Probably these had long before been sacrificed to the
armies ineffectively manoeuvring for the destruction of Monsieur "Veto's"
enemies.

Plancine lifted her head. Thereafter George never ceased to recall with a
glad pride the nobility that had shone in her eyes.

"My papa!" she cried softly, going swiftly to the bed; "they are
beautiful as the stars that glittered over the old untroubled France!"

De Jussac sprang up on his pillow.

"The guillotine!" he cried. "The beams break into flowers! The axe is a
shaft of light!"

And so the glowing blade descended.

AN EDDY ON THE FLOOR

PART I

OF POLYHISTOR'S NARRATIVE

WRITTEN FOR, BUT NEVER INSERTED IN, THE ----- FAMILY MAGAZINE

The eyes of Polyhistor--as he sat before the fire at night--took in the
tawdry surroundings of his lodging-house room with nothing of that apathy
of resignation to his personal [Greek: ananke] which of all moods is to
Fortune, the goddess of spontaneity, the most antipathetic. Indeed,
he felt his wit, like Romeo's, to be of cheveril; and his conviction that
it needed only the pull of circumstance to stretch it "from an inch
narrow to an ell broad" expressed but the very wooing quality of a
constitutional optimism.

Now this inherent optimism is at least a serviceable weapon when it takes
the form of self-reliance. It is always at hand in an emergency--a guard
of honour to the soul. The loneliness of individual life must learn
self-respect from within, not without; and were all creeds to be mixed,
that truism should be found their precipitate.

Therefore Polyhistor was content to draw grass-green rep curtains
across window-panes sloughed with wintry sleet; to place his feet upon a
rug flayed of colour to it dusty sinews; to admit to his close
fellows