by half the earth, as she had been. It was harder still to have to plot and plan and stoop to falsehood in order to compass a meeting. But she remembered the stern, cold look in her husband's face when she had spoken of Austin, and she could not bring herself to degrade her brother by entreating Daniel Granger's indulgence for his past misdeeds, or Daniel Granger's interest in his future fortunes. Happily Sophia had made elaborate preparations for the Gothic texts, and was not inclined to waste so much trouble. "I have got my colors all ready," she said, "and have put every thing out, you see. No, I don't think I'll go to-day. But another time, if you'll be so kind as to let me know beforehand, I shall be pleased to go with my brother. I suppose you know there's an east wind to-day, by-the-bye." The quarter whence the wind came was a subject about which Clarissa had never concerned herself. The sun was shining, and the sky was blue. "We have plenty of wraps," she said; "and we can have the carriage closed if we are cold." "It is not a day upon which I should take an infant out," Miss Granger murmured, dipping her brush in some Prussian blue; "but of course you know best. "Oh, we shall take care of baby, depend upon it. Good-by, Sophy." ter. And Clarissa departed, anxious to avoid farther remonstrance on the part of her step-daughShe told the coachman to drive to the Luxembourg Gardens, intending to leave the nurse and baby to promenade that favorite resort, while she made her way on foot to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard. She remembered that George Fairfax had described her brother's lodging as near the Luxembourg. Mrs. Brobson stared. It was not an hour in the day when any lady she had ever served was wont to pay visits; and that Mrs. Granger of Arden Court should traverse a neighborhood of narrow streets and tall houses, on foot and alone, to call upon her acquaintance at eleven o'clock in the morning, seemed to her altogether inexplicable. "You'll take the carriage, won't you, ma'am?" she said, with undisguised astonishment. "No, I shall not want the carriage; it's very near. Be sure you keep baby warm, Mrs. Brobson. Clarissa hurried out into the street. The landau, with its pair of Yorkshire-bred horses, was moving slowly up and down, to the admiration of juvenile Paris, which looked upon Mr. Granger's deep-chested, strong-limbed bays almost as a new order in the animal creation. Mrs. Granger felt that the eyes of coachman and footman were upon her as she turned the first corner, thinking of nothing, for the moment, but how to escape the watchfulness of her own servants. She walked a little way down the street, and then asked a sleepy-looking waiter, who was sweeping the threshold of a very dingy restaurant, to direct her to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard. It was tout près, the man said; only a turn to the right, at that corner yonder, and the next turning was the street she wanted. She thanked him, and hurried on, with her heart beating faster at every step. Austin might be out, she thought, and her trouble wasted; and there was no knowing when she might have another opportunity. Even if he were at home, their interview must needs be brief: there was the nurse waiting and wondering; the baby exposed to possible peril from east winds. The Rue du Chevalier Bayard was a street of They drove through the gay Parisian streets, tall, gaunt houses that had seen better dayspast the pillar in the Place Vendôme, and along houses with porte-cochères, exaggerated iron the Rue de la Paix, all shining with jewelers' knockers, and queer old lamps; dreary balcoware, and the Rue de Rivoli, where the chest-nies on the first floor, with here and there a nut-trees in the Gardens of the Tuileries were shedding their last leaves upon the pavement, past the airy tower of St. Jacques, and across the bridge into that unknown world on the other side of the Seine. The nurse, who had seen very little of that quarter of the town, wondered what obscure region she was traversing, and wondered still more when they alighted at the somewhat shabby-looking gardens. "These are the Luxembourg Gardens," said Clarissa. "As you have been to the Tuileries every day, I thought it would be a change for you to come here. plaster vase containing some withered member of the palm tribe, or a faded orange-tree; every where and in every thing an air of dilapidation and decay; faded curtains, that had once been fine, flapping in the open windows; Venetian shutters going to ruin; and the only glimpse of brightness or domestic comfort confined to the humble parlor of the portress who kept watch and ward over one of the dismal mansions, and who had a bird-cage hanging in her window, an Angora cat sunning itself on the stone sill, and a row of scarlet geraniums in the little iron bal cony. But this model portress did not preside over the house inhabited by Austin Lovel. There Clarissa found only a little deaf old man, who grinned and shook his head helplessly when she questioned him, and shrugged his shoulders and pointed to the staircase-a cavernous stone staircase, with an odor as of newly opened graves. She went up to the first floor, past the entresol, where the earthy odor was subjugated by a powerful smell of cooking, in which garlic was the prevailing feature. One tall door on the first floor was painted a pale pink, and had still some dingy indications of former gilding upon its mouldings. On this pink door was inscribed the name of Mr. Austin, Painter. Clarissa rang a bell, and a tawdry-looking French servant, with big ear-rings and a dirty muslin cap, came to answer her summons. Mr. Austin was at home; would madame please to enter? Madame, having replied in the affirmative, was shown into a small sitting-room, furnished with a heterogeneous collection of cabinets, tables, and sofas, every one of which bore the stamp of the broker's shop-things which had been graceful and pretty in their day, but from which the ormolu moulding had been knocked off here, and the inlaid wood chipped away there, and the tortoise-shell cracked in another place, until they seemed the very emblems of decay. It was as if they had been set up as perpetual monitors-monuments of man's fragility. "This is what life comes to," they said, in their silent fashion. This faded rubbish in buhl and marqueterie was useful enough to Mr. Lovel, however; and on his canvas the faded furniture glowed and sparkled with all its original brightness, fresh as the still-life of Meissonnier. There were a child's toys scattered on the floor; and Clarissa heard a woman's voice talking to a child in an adjoining room, on the other side of a pair of tall pink folding-doors. Then she heard her brother's voice saying something to the servant; and at the sound she felt as if she must have fallen to the ground. Then one of the doors was opened, and a woman came in; a pretty, faded-looking woman, dressed in a light blue morning wrapper that might very well have been cleaner; a woman with a great deal of dyed hair in an untidy mass at the back of her head; a woman whom Clarissa felt it must be a difficult thing to like. This was her brother's wife, of course. There was a boy of four or five years old clinging to his mother's gown, and Clarissa's heart yearned to the child. He had Austin's face. It would be easy to love him, she thought. "Mr. Austin is in his paintin'-room, madame," said the wife, putting on a kind of company man"Did you wish to see him about a picture? Je parle très poo de Français, mais si-" ner. 66 "I am English," Clarissa answered, smiling: "if you will kindly tell Mr. Austin a lady from England wishes to see him. What a dear little boy! May I shake hands with him?" shine; while the painter, looking up from his easel, beheld a radiant creature approaching him, a woman in pale gray silk, that it would have been rapture to paint; a woman with one of the loveliest faces he had ever seen, crowned with a broad plait of dark brown hair, and some delicate structure of point lace and pink roses, called by courtesy a bonnet. He laid down his mahl-stick and came to meet her, with a puzzled look in his face. Her beauty seemed familiar to him somehow, and yet he had no recollection of ever having seen her before. He saw the faded counterpart of that bright face every morning in his looking-glass. She held out both her hands. 66 Austin, don't you know me?" He gave a cry of pleased surprise, and caught her in his arms. "Clarissa!" he exclaimed; "why, my darling, how lovely you have grown! My dear little Clary! How well I remember the sweet young face, and the tears and kisses, and the slender little figure in its childish dress, that day your father carried you off to school! My own little Clary, what a happiness to see you! But you never told me that you were coming to Paris." And "No, dear, I kept that for a surprise. are you really glad to see me, Austin ?" Really glad! Is there any one in the world could make me gladder?" 66 "I am so happy to hear that. I was almost afraid you had half forgotten me. Your letters were so few and so short." "Letters!" cried Austin Lovel, with a laugh. "I never was much of a hand at letter-writing; and then I hadn't any thing particularly pleasant to write about. You mustn't gauge my affection by the length of my letters, Clary. And then I have to work deucedly hard when I am at home, and have very little time for scribbling.' Clarissa glanced round the room while he was speaking. Every detail in her brother's surroundings had an interest for her. Here, as in the drawing-room, there was an untidy air about every thing—a want of harmony in all the arrangements. There were Flemish carved oak cabinets and big Japan vases; a mantel-piece draped with dusty crimson velvet, a broken Venetian glass above it, and a group of rusty "Give the lady your hand, Henery," said the mother. "Not that one," as the boy, after the invariable custom of childhood, offered his left-looking arms on each side; long limp amber "the right hand." Clarissa took the sticky little paw tenderly in her pearl gray glove. To think that her brother, Austin Lovel, should have married a woman who could call her son "Henery," and who had such an unmistakable air of commonness! 66 The wife went back to the painting-room, and returned the next minute to beg the visitor to step this way, if you please, ma'am." She opened one of the folding-doors wide as she spoke, and Clarissa went into a large room, at the other end of which there stood a tall, slim young man, in a short velvet coat, before a small easel. It was her brother Austin; pale and a trifle haggard, too old in looks for his years, but very handsome-a masculine edition of Clarissa herself, in fact; the same delicate, clearly cut features; the same dark hazel eyes, shaded by long brown lashes tinged with gold. This was what Mrs. Granger saw in the broad noonday sun curtains to the three tall windows, with festooned valances in an advanced stage of disarrangement and dilapidation. There were some logs burning on the hearth, a pot of chocolate simmering among the ashes, and breakfast laid for one person upon a little table by the fire-the remnant of a perigord-pie, flanked by a stone bottle of Curaçoa. She looked at her brother with anxious, scrutinizing eyes. No, George Fairfax had not deceived her. He had the look of a man who was going the wrong way. There were premature lines across the forehead and about the dark, brilliant eyes; a nervous expression in the contracted lips. It was the face of a man who burns the candle of life at both ends. Late hours, anxiety, dissipation of all kinds, had set their fatal seal upon his countenance. "Dear Austin, you are as handsome as ever; but I don't think you are looking well," she said, tenderly. ache; but I generally brighten considerably as the sun goes down. We move with a contrary motion, Helos and I." "I am afraid you work too hard, and sit up too late. "As to working hard, my dear, that is a necessity; and going out every night is another necessity. I get my commissions in society." "But you must have a reputation by this time, Austin; and commissions would come to you, I should think, without your courting them." 66 given his sister Arden Court had been no lovematch. They talked for some time-talked of the old days when they had been together at Arden; but of the years that made the story of his life Austin Lovel spoke very little. "I have always been an unlucky beggar," he said, in his careless way. "There's very little use in going over old ground. Some men never get fairly on the high-road of life. They spend their existence wading across swamps, and scrambling through bushes, and never reach any particular point at the end. My career has been that sort of thing." "But you are so young, Austin," pleaded Clarissa, and may do so much yet." He shook his head with an air of hopelessness that was half indifference. 66 'No, child; I have only a reputation de salon; I am only known in a certain set. And a man must live, you see. To a man himself that is the primary necessity. Your generosity set me on my legs last year, and tempted me to take this floor, and make a slight advance movement altogether. I thought better rooms would bring My dear child, I am neither a Raffaelle nor me better work-sitters for a new style of cab-a Doré," he said, "and I'd need be one or the inet portraits, and so on. But so far the rooms other to redeem my past. But so long as I can have been comparatively a useless extravagance. pick up enough to keep the little woman yonder However, I go out a good deal, and meet a and the bairns, and get a decent cigar and an great many influential people; so I can scarcely honest bottle of Bordeaux, I'm content. miss a success in the end." bition departed from me ten years ago." "But if you sacrifice your health in the mean time, Austin." "Sacrifice my health! That's just like a woman. If a man looks a trifle pale, and dark under the eyes, she begins to fancy he's dying. My poor little wife takes just the same notions into her head, and would like me to stop at home every evening to watch her darn the children's stockings." "I think your wife is quite right to be anxious, Austin; and it would be much better for you to stay at home, even to see stockings darned. It must be very dull for her, too, when you are out, poor soul." Mr. Lovel shrugged his shoulders with a deprecating air. "C'est son métier," he said. "I suppose she does find it rather dismal at times; but there are the children, you see-it is a woman's duty to find all-sufficient society in her children. And now, Clary, tell me about yourself. You have made a brilliant match, and are mistress of Arden Court. A strange stroke of fortune that. And you are happy, I hope, my dear?" "I ought to be very happy," Clarissa answered, with a faint sigh, thinking perhaps that, bright as her life might be, it was not quite the fulfillment of her vague girlish dreams—not quite the life she had fancied lying before her when the future was all unknown: "I ought to be very happy, and very grateful to Providence; and oh, Austin, my boy is the sweetest darling in the world!" Austin Lovel looked doubtful for a moment, half inclined to think "my boy" might stand for Daniel Granger. "You must see him, Austin," continued his sister; "he is nearly ten months old now, and such a beauty!" Am "Oh, Austin, I can't bear to hear you say that! With your genius you ought to do so much. I wish you would be friends with my husband, and that he could be of use to you." 66 My dear Clarissa, put that idea out of your mind at once and forever. There can be no such thing as friendship between Mr. Granger and me. Do you remember what Samuel John son said about some one's distaste for clean linen -'And I, Sir, have no passion for it!' I confess to having no passion for respectable people. I am very glad to hear Mr. Granger is a good husband; but he's much too respectable a citizen for my acquaintance.' Clarissa sighed: there was a prejudice here, even if Daniel Granger could have been induced to think kindly of his brother-in-law. "Depend upon it, the Prodigal Son had a hard time of it after the fatted calf had been eaten, Clary, and wished himself back among the swine. Do you think, however lenient his father might be, that his brother and the friends of the family spared him? His past was thrown in his face, you may be sure. I dare say he went back to his evil ways after a year or so. Good people maintain their monopoly of virtue by making the repentant sinner's life a burden to him." Clarissa spoke of his wife presently. "You must introduce me to her, Austin. She took me for a stranger just now, and I did not undeceive her." "Yes, I'll introduce you. There's not much in common between you; but she'll be very proud of your acquaintance. She looks upon my relations as an exalted race of beings, and myself as a kind of fallen angel. You mustn't be too hard upon her, Clary, if she seems not quite the sort of woman you would have chosen for your sister-in-law. She has been a good wife to me, and she was a good daughter to her drunk. en old father, one of the greatest scamps in London, who used to get his bread-or rather his gin "Oh, the baby!" said Austin, rather coolly. "I dare say he's a nice little chap, and I should like to see him very much, if it were practicable. But how about Granger himself? He is a good-by standing for Count Ugolino and Cardinal sort of fellow, I hope.' "He is all goodness to me," Clarissa answered, gravely, casting down her eyes as she spoke; and Austin Lovel knew that the marriage which had Wolsey, or any thing grim and gray and aquiline-nosed in the way of patriarchs. The girl Bessie was a model too in her time; and it was in Jack Redgrave's painting-room-the pre-Raph She knelt down and kissed them both with real motherly tenderness, thinking of her own darling, and the difference between his fortunes and theirs; and then, after a warm caress, she slipped a napoleon into each little warm hand, "to buy toys," and rose to depart. "I must hurry away now, Austin," she said; "but I shall come again very soon, if I may. Good-by, dear, and God bless you.' The embrace that followed was a very fervent one. It had been sweet to meet again after so many years, and it was hard to leave him so soon -to leave him with the conviction that his life was a wreck. But Clarissa had no time to linger. The thought of the baby in the Luxembourg Gardens had been distracting her for ever so long. These stolen meetings must needs be short. aelite fellow who paints fearfully-and-wonderful- | had seen, and another of smaller growth-palely-made women with red hair and angular arms faced, bright-eyed little fellows. They too had -I first met her. Jack and I were great chums been subjected to the infliction of soap and water at that time-it was just after I sold out-and I and hair-brushes, clean pinafores, and so on, since used to paint at his rooms. I was going in for Mrs. Granger's arrival. painting just then with a great spurt, having nothing but my brush to live upon. You can guess the rest. As Bessie was a very pretty girl, and neither she nor I had a sixpence wherewith to bless ourselves, of course we fell in love with each other. Poor little thing, how pretty she used to look in those days, standing on Jack's movable platform, with her hair falling loose about her face, and a heap of primroses held up in her petticoat!-such a patient, plaintive look in the sweet little mouth, as much as to say, 'I'm very tired of standing here; but I'm only a model, to be hired for eighteen pence an hour; go on smoking your cigars, and talking your slangy talk about the turf and the theatres, gentlemen. I count for nothing.' Poor little patient soul! she was so helpless and so friendless, Clary. I think my love for her was something like the compassion one feels for some young feeble bird that has fallen out of its nest. So we were married one morning; and for some time lived in lodgings at Putney, where I used to suffer considerable affliction from Count Ugolino and two bony boys, Bessie's brothers, who looked as if the count had been acting up to his character with too great a fidelity. Ugolino himself would come prowling out of a Saturday afternoon to borrow the wherewithal to pay his week's lodging, lest he should be cast out into the streets at nightfall; and it was a common thing for one of the bony boys to appear at breakfast-time with a duplicate of his father's coat, pledged overnight for drink, and without the means of redeeming which he could not pursue his honorable vocation. In short, I think it was as much the affliction of the Ugolino family as my own entanglements that drove me to seek my fortunes on the other side of the world. Austin Lovel opened one of the doors, and I called his wife. "Come here, Bessie; I've a pleasant surprise for you." Mrs. Lovel appeared quickly in answer to this summons. She had changed her morning dress for a purple silk, which was smartly trimmed, but by no means fresh; and she had dressed her hair, and refreshed her complexion by a liberal application of violet powder. She had a look which can only be described as "flashy"- -a look that struck Clarissa unpleasantly in spite of herself. Her expressions of surprise did not sound quite so natural as they might have done, for she had been listening at the folding-doors during a considerable part of the interview; but she seemed really delighted by Mrs. Granger's condescension, and she kissed that lady with much affection. "I'm sure I do feel proud to know any relation of Austin's," she said, "and you most of all, who have been so kind to him. Heaven knows what would have become of us last winter if it hadn't been for your generosity.' Clarissa laid her hand upon Bessie Lovel's lips. "You mustn't talk of generosity between my brother and me," she said: "all I have in the world is at his service. And now let me see my nephews, please; and then I must run away. 29 The nephews were produced; the boy Clarissa She looked at her watch when she got back to the street, and found, to her horror, that she had been very nearly an hour away from the nurse and her charge. The carriage was waiting at the gate, and she had to encounter the full fire of her servants' gaze as she crossed the road and went into the gardens. Yes, there was the baby's blue velvet pelisse resplendent at the end of an avenue. Clarissa walked quickly to meet him. 66 "My darling!" she cried. "Has he been waiting for his mamma? I hope he has not been tired of the gardens, nurse?" "Yes, ma'am, he have been tired," replied Mrs. Brobson, with an outraged air. "There ain't much in these gardens to keep a baby of his age amused for an hour at a stretch; and in a east wind, too! It's right down cutting at that corner. "Why didn't you take him home in the carriage, nurse? It would have been better than running any risk of his catching cold." "What, and leave you without a conveyance, ma'am? I couldn't have done that!" "I was detained longer than I expected to stay. Oh, by-the-bye, you need not mention to Miss Granger that I have been making a call. The people I have been to see are-are in humble circumstances; and I don't want her to know any thing about it. "I hope I know my duty, ma'am," replied Mrs. Brobson, stiffly. That hour's parading in the gardens, without any relief from her subordinate, had soured her temper, and inclined her to look with unfavorable eyes upon the conduct of her mistress. Clarissa felt that she had excited the suspicion of her servant, and that all her future meetings with her brother would inOvolve as much plotting and planning as would serve for the ripening of a political conspiracy. CHAPTER XXXII. ONLY A PORTRAIT-PAINTER. WHILE Clarissa was pondering on that perplexing question, how she was to see her brother frequently without Mr. Granger's knowledge, fortune had favored her in a manner she had |