energy of the centre which is evidenced in the case of the sun by its tail-producing action on comets, it is easy to imagine that when that radiant energy is reduced, the carbon compounds will gradually ap proach the central body, until at length the flickering energy is no longer able to keep these permanent gases away, and then the surroundings of the central body are invaded by these gases in such tremendous quantity that an absorption is produced which first turns the cooler star blood-red, and finally blots it out.

There are several very interesting questions connected with this. Suppose, for instance, that we attempt to discuss the future of that magnificent nebula in Andromeda, the true structure of which Mr. Roberts has recently revealed to us. It is already suspected that the two subsidiary swarms partake of the motion and form a part of the system. Those smaller swarms will naturally condense before the larger

ones.

Let us imagine ourselves no longer dealing with anything so far away, but with the solar system when it was in that stage. The central sun having this cordon round it can only be formed of those substances which are not repelled by its radiant energy; it will therefore be chiefly a mass of metallic vapor. The masses near it for the same reason will be also chiefly of metallic vapors, and their density will be high; those farther away will be less metallic. Bit by bit, in the case of the interior bodies, we shall have these permanent gases coming back again, and more carbon will be added to their superficial layers; those bodies also must condense before the central one.

If we consider the conditions of the outer condensations, they must be particularly rich in permanent gases. We shall, therefore, get in the case of the outer bodies excessively small density, and probably associated with that only the very sparse presence of these metals which have been alone allowed to penetrate toward the centre, because their vapors can condense.

Our sun must ultimately go through the stage in which its absorption will be due no longer to hydrogen, or to iron, but to carbon, chiefly by virtue of the process which has been referred to; and eventually, as its radiant energy gets less and less, as it gets cooler and dimmer, the last speck of blood-red sunlight will be put out by an excess of carbon vapors in its atmosphere.

That is what must have happened to our own earth. It is a very interesting question indeed to attempt to determine at what period of the sun's history a solid crust was formed on the planet on which we dwell. It looks very much as if the consolidation of the earth may have preceded the highest point of temperature of the sun--that is to say, that the earth may have reached a condition closely resembling its present one at the time the sun occupied the apex of the temperature curve to which reference has been made.

In any case the high density of the earth, compared with the density of its crust (the enormous quantity of silicon and oxygen and carbon near the crust having an entirely different specific gravity from the specific gravity of the earth taken as a whole), seems to follow as a matter of course from these considerations.

I trust it will be seen that the hypothesis we have been considering supplies us with an orderly progression of meteoritic dust through heat conditions produced by collisions till finally a cool mass is produced; that this orderly progression brings about all the known phenomena of the heavens on its way, and simply and sufficiently explains them. But though much of the mystery is gone, all the majesty is leftindeed to my mind it is vastly increased. It seems as if the working out of the meteoritic idea will entirely justify Kant's conviction that the physical side of the science of the universe would in the future reach the same degree of perfection to which Newton had in his time brought the mathematical side.-Nineteenth Century.

CHAPTER I.

SHE was not altogether French, notwithstanding her name; indeed, her nationality was the most dubious thing in the world unless any assault was made upon either of the countries to which she owed her parentage. She had a way of thus becoming intensely English at a moment's notice, and intensely French the next, the latter, perhaps, with still greater warmth than the former, as became the constitutional difference between French and English. She was a woman in the full flower and prime of life, that is, approaching thirty-five-a period, however, at which few people will acknowledge a woman's prime to be. According to the vulgar notion, indeed, beauty has begun to fade at this period, when it ought to be in fullest, gorgeous flower. There are some liberal minds which will confess that a woman who is married is in all her magnificence at this age; but for those who are unmarried it is always, in England at least, considered a time of decadence. Thirty-five means fading-the state of the délaissée the condition of the old maid. Mademoiselle had come to this age. She had been a governess for a great part of her life, since she was twenty; fifteen long years, but it seemed a hundred as she looked back upon it. She had developed in that time from a raw girl-weeping passionate tears over a great many things which she scarcely noticed now, feeling herself abandoned, miserable, left in the background, left out of everything, humiliated in her unaccustomed position, injured by life and all that happened to her-into a rational, calm woman, who had made up her mind to the path she was compelled by necessity to tread, and had acquired a dignity of her own which no little slights or scorn could touch. The number of people who are absolutely unkind to their governesses and dependents is small, and yet it can scarcely be, except in very exceptional cases, a comfortable position. To be as

good, or perhaps better, than your employers and superiors-as good and yet so very inuch worse; to live in a house, and yet not to belong to it; to sit alone and hear the echoes of life going on all round

sounds of voices, of doors opening and shutting, of people coming and going, which you cannot help hearing, and yet have nothing to do with; to be contented and independent alone, not showing too much sympathy nor too much zeal, interfering with nothing, making no remarkcan anything be more difficult? A woman can scarcely do this without deteriorating in some way; and there is a state of mind which is born of the condition-its most common development a state in which the faculties are on the alert to interpret all the echoes, to catch at every whisper, to make out everything that is concealed or under the surface. The back stairs at Court do not afford an edifying sphere of study, but still there are notable persons coming and going, and a faint reflection of history in their chance words and looks. But the back stairs in an ordinary house, in Belgravia, in Bloomsbury, in the suburban villas, are so much less elevating that there is nothing notable or historical in them. And yet how can a woman, all alone in a schoolroom, keep from hearing what floats upward, keep from that curiosity which all human creatures share, in respect to the people whom she is meeting every day? The pitiful little records that form the chief interest of so many starved and impoverished lives afford often one of the saddest spectacles in existence. And the woman who is able to resist this tendency runs the risk of growing stoical, cynical, harsh and contemptuous. A girl may go through a few years of it without suffering. If she is happy at the end, and is able to live her own life, she forgets the difficulties of the probation, and probably the strongest feeling in her mind is the sense of being neglected, justly or unjustly, which is very bitter yet evanescent. But a woman

who goes on with it for life has a hard lot.

Mademoiselle had carried on this profession for fifteen years, and she had no prospect but to continue it all her life. It had developed in her a sort of self-denied and reserved quietude, which was strangely out of accord with the natural vivacity which she had inherited from her French father, and which all the subduing influence of an English mother had not brought under. A foreign governess is so much

worse than a native that she has not even possession of an independent and distinctive name. Miss Smith or Miss Jones is better off than the impersonal Mademoiselle or Fräulein, whose title is genetic and official, to be transferred to her successor with an indifference to any individuality in it which, were it not the mere growth of unthinking custom, would be brutal. Perhaps the ladies thus officially addressed do not, among their many grievances, count this; but the special personage of whom we speak, who was in her soul a very proud woman, and possessed, as it happened, a beau nom, a fine, and ancient, and high-sounding name, did feel it, though she was one who never owned to any grievances, nor showed her dislike of any of the peculiar methods of English politeness in dealing with governesses. Her name was De Castel-Sombre, an old name of Béarn, from whence her family came; but her father had been the last of his branch of the house, and had fallen off from its spirit by becoming an artist, which, as he had no money to begin with, had cut him off entirely from the favor. of the noble cousins who might have helped him on had he been without tastes of his own. Mademoiselle's pride, therefore, was purely visionary, and had nothing vulgar embodied in it It was the refuge of a high mind, longing for everything that was excellent, yet attached by straitest bonds of necessity to the common soil. When Monsieur de Castel-Sombre died he left his wife with scarcely any money, two girls, and a number of unsold pictures, for which nobody cared. Naturally, at that moment these women believed that he was one of the greatest of unappreciated painters, and that it was the cruelty and envy of the world which had deprived him of the fame which was due to him. At least Madame de CastelSombre clung to this belief, which her

daughters held hotly until experience taught them better. Mademoiselle (she had really a Christian-name also of her very own, and was called in her family Claire) knew now as well as any one that these cherished pictures, with which her mother's little rooms were darkly hung, were of small merit, and that there was nothing at all remarkable in the fact that they had not found anybody to buy them; but that, too, was a discovery which it took time and experience to make.

Thus she had come through a great many illusions, and discovered the falsehood of them before the time at which our story begins. She no longer felt that she was left out of life when the family in which she lived received company, or re turned their visits. She no longer believed that it was intended as a slight to her, or neglect of her, when she was left behind, but perceived that it was the commonest necessary arrangement, a thing which she herself approved. Instead of being always offended, always conscious of injury, she perceived now all the difficulty of circumstances, and that the presence of a stranger in the house was often as great an inconvenience to the people of the house as it was a humiliation to the governess. She learned to look upon the circumstances in general with those "larger, other eyes" which the poet has attributed to the dead. In one sense Mademoiselle felt that she was dead. She had died to, or rather had outlived, many things in which the chief charm of life seemed once to lie. She no longer expected, as young people do, that life would change sooner or later, and that one time or another she should have what she wanted. This is an illusion that some people pursue as long as they live, and which even age does not cure. "Hope springs eternal in the human breast. They think, however unlikely, that it is not possible but things must improve, and the good they desire come to them before they die. Mademoiselle had got over that. She expected nothing but to go on as she was doing for the rest of her life. It was not, perhaps, an exhilarating prospect. She had thought it over in every way, but she could not make anything better of it. She had thought of taking up a school, which was the highest possibility in the future of a governess, and getting her mother under the same roof, and her sister to help. But to set up a school re

quired capital, and Mademoiselle had none. She had a little, a very little, laid by in case of illness, or to bury her if she died, which is a forlorn provision often made by lonely proud women, who even in death would be indebted to no one; but to furnish a house and live till pupils came would require what would have appeared a fortune to Mademoiselle a thousand pounds, or something of that sort. As well say a million at once. She had learned, among her many experiences, that to rise to the height of independence like that it was necessary to begin on a large scale-to have a good house, and gardens, and servants, and pretensions. The little bit of a house in a little street, with half a dozen little daily pupils drawn from the neighborhood, meant beggary and misery and endless struggles. When the time should come that the mother wanted her children's care and tendance, and could not be left alone, then it might come to that; but a mother who was only sixty, and full of activity, required no such sacrifice. Therefore Mademoiselle had come to the conviction that there was no change to be expected in the tenor of existenceno change for the better, nothing but decadence and downfall. When the present pupils grew up she would go on to another family. She would have little difficulty in finding another situation. It gets very speedily known in any profession what people are worth, and she would find another place easily enough; but she would be older, and when another change came older still. By the time she was fifty she would have finished her present pupils, and probably another set, and then she would be old, and the young mothers of growing girls would not care to have her. They would fear that she would not be strong enough, that she would be unable to take the walks that were necessary, and to be up sufficiently early in the morning. They would be alarmed lest she should fall ill on their hands. She looked forward, seeing this prospect very clearly before her, not deceiving herself, thinking it all over with a sort of cheerful despair. She kept cheerful, for what good would it do her to be gloomy and it was altogether foreign to her temper, in which there was a natural horror of dulness and monotony, and an elasticity which astonished even herself; but yet, no doubt, the outlook was one of despair: to labor on,

always with a kind of personal luxury, living and lodging more or less as people who are very well off lodge and live, yet with so little money-money which, when she sent a share to her mother, and looked to her modest, serious wardrobe, her dark gowns, which were so thrifty, and lasted forever-left so little over, sometimes a few pounds, sometimes only shillings! Great is the power of saving, as we have all heard, and many littles make a mickle, the proverb says; but you may think how slow a process saving is when all that it permits to be laid by is, perhaps, ten pounds a year. In ten years a hundred pounds! which was a great comfort, and made her feel that she might have a long illness and die of it, and be laid in the bosom of the mother earth without being indebted to anybody-a consolation unspeakable; but yet, when you come to think of it, one which means despair, though always a cheerful despair. no chance of ever getting a Rosebank, a Sunnyside, a dignified mansion that would pay, for such a sum as that; it would, however, be enough for the expenses of a last illness (if not too long), and of her burial after, which was a great relief to think of, and gave her the power of looking without fear in the face of fate.

Alas!

Mademoiselle was at present in the family of Mr. Leicester Wargrave, who was in the City, but who lived in an old-fashioned house in the Bayswater district-a house with beautiful rooms and a delightful garden, though not within the lines of fashion. He was the junior partner in the business to which he belonged, a rising man making a great deal of money, but also with many demands upon him in the shape of a large family and a hospitable, cheerful disposition, which his wife shared fully. They both liked to see their friends, to have their house full, to enjoy their life. Though Mrs. Leicester Wargrave was in the habit of declaring with some ostentation that she and her husband were quite outside the fashionable world, yet they loved to entertain people from Belgravia, to show their fine rooms, their beautiful old-fashioned decorations, their large shady garden-a thing so unusual in London. "We don't pretend to be fashionable, but we have something to show for ourselves," said the lady, who was fond of asserting that she was nothing but

a City lady;"City people, pur et simple" -people with no pretensions to be anything better. There are many ways in which pride shows itself, and this mock humility was one of these ways. Mrs. Wargrave had a number of vanities, though she was, on the whole, a nice woman. She liked to speak French with the governess in the presence of people not, perhaps, quite conversant with any language but their own, which is so often the case in the best society; and she liked to say that her governess was a great swell-far finer, you know, than anything we can pretend to-a fille de Croisé, and that sort of thing.' But if there was one thing more than another of which she was proud, it was the influence which she allowed she had over her cousin-in-law, the head of the firm, who was a bachelor, a man about town, a fashionable person. "I don't know, I'm sure, what he sees to make such a fuss about in us, ," Mrs. Leicester Wargrave said; "I suppose ours is the only house, poor fellow, in which he finds real family life. There is nothing he wouldn't do for me. Leicester and he have always been like brothers, but my husband I can do more with Charlie than he can. I don't think myself that he will ever marry. I know as a fact that many and many a set has been made at him, but he only comes and tells me and laughs over it. He had a disappointment, you know, in early life, before he settled to the business. Oh, he has not settled much to it now. He came in in his father's place, which makes him nominally the head, but my husband is really the first working partner. He is not too fine for City life. It is a little absurd, isn't it, that a man who never does anything should get the lion's share and the real workers come off second best ?"

says

"It is a question of capital, I suppose, said the friend to whom she was telling this story of the family fortunes.

Oh, to be sure he has the capital which the old gentleman worked for, so now he doesn't require to do much, and everybody toils for him. But I don't think he will ever marry-all his habits are against it. And he says why should he, when we have been so kind as to provide an heir for him as well as a home? He refers to little Charles, of course. You may imagine I don't build much on what a young man like that says: but I really

don't, myself, believe he will ever marry. He is too happy with us here "

"He is very young to come to such a decision," was the remark of the listener, whose private opinion was that Mrs. Leicester Wargrave was far too self-important and ought to be taken down.

Of

"Oh, yes, not much over thirty. course it's ridiculous: but I have my own ways of knowing, and you'll see it'll come true."

Whether Mrs. Leicester Wargrave believed that a hopeless Platonic attachment for herself lay at the bottom of Mr. Charles Wargrave's determined celibacy it would be difficult to say. She was certainly very proud of his devotion to her, of the dutiful way he appeared at all her parties, and the familiar manner in which he haunted her house. It was a very pleasant house, unlike other London houses, in the depths of the quaint little square of which it formed one side-with its great wide staircase showing a sublime disregard of space, its stuccoed roofs and walls, fine garlands of delicate white against a pale green not quite so faded as the last novelty of asceticism, though a hundred and fifty years old, and its windows opening upon a genuine garden-a garden in which you could lose yourself, in which there were shady walks and great trees, in which it was impossible to believe that at the other side of the house omnibuses were standing and that a hansom could be called to the door by a whistle almost at any hour of the night or day. This gave it a quaint and paradoxical character, adding a charm to the large pleasant rooms, which were not shrouded in curtains and blinds as London houses usually are, but saw clear sky out of every window-clear sky and waving trees. And Mrs. Leicester Wargrave had a choice of very good society, mixed and more original than is usual. She had a number of law people, a few who were simply society people, an occasional literary person, and a certain contingent from the City. The City makes a good mixture when it is carefully done. It brings in the practical, it brings a kind of intelligence always entertaining to the other classes, and a kind of prejudice and narrowness all its own, which is, as people say, "full of character" and amusing to the enlightened. This sort of thing is, perhaps, more practicable in Bayswater than it is Belgravia. Needless to say that