r front of bristling steel.

--_Milnes_.

When the carriage containing Judge Merlin, Claudia, Beatrice, and Mr.
Brudenell reached the Washington House the party separated in the hall;
the ladies went each to her own chamber to dress for dinner, and Judge
Merlin called a servant to show Mr. Brudenell to a spare room, and then
went to his own apartment.

When Herman Brudenell had dismissed his attendant and found himself
alone he sat down in deep thought.

Since the death of Nora he had been a wanderer over the face of the
earth. The revenues of his estate had been mostly paid over to his
mother for the benefit of herself and her daughters, yet had scarcely
been sufficient for the pride, vanity, and extravagance of those foolish
women, who, living in Paris and introduced into court circles by the
American minister, aped the style of the wealthiest among the French
aristocracy, and indulged in the most expensive establishment, equipage,
retinue, dress, jewelry, balls, etc., in the hope of securing alliances
among the old nobility of France.

They might as well have gambled for thrones. The princes, dukes,
marquises, and counts drank their wines, ate their dinners, danced at
their balls, kissed their hands, and--laughed at them!

The reason was this: the Misses Brudenell, though well-born, pretty,
and accomplished, were not wealthy, and were even suspected of being
heavily in debt, because of all this show.

And I would here inform my ambitious American readers who go abroad in
search of titled husbands whom they cannot find at home, that what is
going on in Paris then is going on in all the Old World capitals now;
and that now, when foreign noblemen marry American girls, it is because
the former want money and the latter have it. If there is any exception
to this rule, I, for one, never heard of it.

And so the Misses Brudenell, failing to marry into the nobility, were
not married at all.

The expenditures of the mother and daughters in this speculation were
enormous, so much so that at length Herman Brudenell, reckless as he
was, became alarmed at finding himself on the very verge of insolvency!

He had signed so many blank checks, which his mother and sisters had
filled up with figures so much higher than he had reckoned upon, that at
last his Paris bankers had written to him informing him that his account
had been so long and so much overdrawn that they had been obliged to
decline cashing his last checks.