that all he knew of the babe's mother
was that she was a beautiful lady from London. Kranich carried the
story dutifully to his aunt, adding his own ingenious surmise: "Can
Francine have become sufficiently Anglicised to contract secret
marriages with roving revolutionists, and scamper about the country
with ardent young Frenchmen in the style of Gretna Green?" In fact, it
was really from London that Mrs. Ashburleigh was proceeding, for the
purpose of taking care, in the Rhenish city where he was dying, of
her handsome, dissipated, worthless husband. Taken suddenly ill at
Brussels, she left her infant to the unequaled chill of a strange,
unknown cemetery, hastening thence with tears and despair to the
bedside where duty called her.

Has my reader forgotten the dim, tear-swollen story which I heard--not
at all improved in the telling--from my generous young friend
Grandstone--how an impulsive Frenchman had laid to rest, in flowers
and evergreens, the unnamed baby of a woman he had never seen? Jealous
as I was of Fortnoye, I never could think without tenderness of this
singular action. To make the tomb of this helpless Innocence the young
man braved the curiosity of his comrades--despised the rumor, the
obloquy, and, hardest of all, the jests. Well has the wise dramatist
decided that Ophelia must needs be laid in Yorick's bed!

Poor Francine, gay, frivolous, innocently vain of her little travesty
of English behavior, found her accomplishments and graces received
by her guardian's circle with incomprehensible coldness. Hurt and
humiliated, she asked to pay a visit to her father. The honest rustic
received her with a miserable confusion of doubt and severity, for
her escapade to England had never pleased him, and her return from her
godmother's home wore to him the air of a repudiation. At her father's
house, however, she was discovered by Fortnoye, who had never heard
the ingenious Kranich's theory of his own private wedding with
Francine, and who thought to find in her the veiled unknown of the
cemetery. He saw for the first time, in the flowery home at Noisy,
that fresh ingenuous beauty, a little over-cast with disappointment.
His generous nature was touched; and, with his talent for
administration and planning, he conceived the idea of establishing
Francine in the pretty bird's nest at Carlsruhe, distant alike from
the strongholds of her calumniators, Belgium and France.

Fortnoye now had an object in life. "There is