life before her marriage had been altogether sordid and shabby, brightness or luxury of any kind for her class being synonymous with vice; and Bessie Stanford, the painter's model, had never been vicious. Her life since her marriage had been a life of trouble and difficulty, with only occasional glimpses of a spurious kind of brilliancy. She lived outside her husband's existence, as it were, and felt somehow that she was only attached to him by external links, as a dog might have been. He had a certain kind of affection for her, was conscious of her fidelity, and grateful for her attachment; and there an end. Sympathy between them there was none; nor had he ever troubled himself to cultivate her tastes, or attempted in the smallest degree to bring her nearer to him. To Bessie Lovel, therefore, this sister of her husband's, in all the glory of her fresh young beauty and sumptuous apparel, seemed a creature of another sphere, something to be gazed upon almost in fear and trembling. "I beg your parding!" she faltered, rubbing her eyes. She was apt, when agitated, to fall back upon the pronunciation of her girlhood, before Austin Lovel had winced and ejaculated at her various mutilations of the language. "I was just taking forty winks after my bit of dinner." "I am so sorry I disturbed you," said Clarissa, in her gracious way. "You were tired, I dare say." "Oh, pray don't mention it! I'm sure I feel it a great compliment your comin'. It must seem a poor place to you after your beautiful house in the Roo de Morny. Austin told me where you lived; and I took the liberty of walking that way one evening with a lady friend. I'm sure the houses are perfect palaces. " "I wish you could come to my house as my sister-in-law ought," replied Clarissa. "I wanted to confide in my husband, to bring about a friendship between him and my brother if I could, but Austin tells me that is impossible. I suppose he knows best. So, you see, I am obliged to act in this underhand way, and to come to see you by stealth, as it were. "It is very good of you to come at all," answered the wife, with a sigh. "It isn't many of Austin's friends take any notice of me. I'm sure most of 'em treat me as if I was a cipher. Not that I mind that, provided he could get on; but it's dinners there, and suppers here, and never no orders for pictures, as you may say. He had next to nothing to do all the autumn, Paris being so dull, you know, with all the high people away at the sea. He painted Madame Caballero for nothing, just to get himself talked of among her set; and if it wasn't for Mr. Granger's orders I don't know where we should be. Come and speak to your aunt, Henery and Arthur, like good boys." -- This to the olive-branches in the window, struggling for the possession of a battered tin railway engine with a crooked chimney. "She ain't my aunt," cried the eldest hope. "I haven't got no aunt." "Yes, this is your aunt Clarissa. heard papa talk of her. You've "Yes, I remember," said the boy, sharply. "I remember one night when he talked of Arden Court and Clarissa, and thumped his forehead on the mantel-piece like that ;" and the boy pantomimed the action of despair. "He has fits of that kind sometimes,' said Bessie Lovel, "and goes on about having wasted his life and thrown away his chances, and all that. He used to go on dreadful when we were in Australia, till he made me that nervous I didn't know what to do, thinking he'd go and destroy himself some day. But he's been better since we've been in Paris. The gayety suits him. He says he can't live without society." Clarissa sighed. Little as she knew of her brother's life, she knew enough to be very sure that love of society had been among the chief causes of his ruin. She took one of her nephews on her lap, and talked to him, and let him play with the trinkets on her chain. Both the children were bright and intelligent enough, but had that air of premature sharpness which comes from constant intercourse with grown-up people, and an early initiation in the difficulties of existence. She could only stay half an hour with her sister-in-law; but she could see that her visit of duty had gratified the poor little neglected wife. She had not come empty-handed, but had brought an offering for Bessie Lovel which made the tired eyes brighten with something of their old light— a large oval locket of massive dead gold, with a Maltese cross of small diamonds upon it; one of the simplest ornaments which Daniel Granger had given her, and which she fancied herself justified in parting with. She had taken it to a jeweler in the Palais-Royal, who had arranged a lock of her dark brown hair, with a true-lover's knot of brilliants, inside the locket, and had en graved the words "From Clarissa" on the back. Mrs. Lovel clasped her hands in rapture as Clarissa opened the morocco case and showed her this jewel. "For me!" she cried. "I never had any thing half as beautiful in my life. And your 'air, too!" She said "air" in her excitement. "How good of you to give it to me! I don't know how to thank you. And the poor little woman made a rapid mental review of her wardrobe, wondering if she had any gown good enough to wear with that splendid jewel. Her purple silk-the one silk dress she possessed-was a little shiny and shabby by daylight, but looked very well by candle-light still, she thought. She was really delighted with the locket. In all her life she had had so few presents, and this one gift was worth three times the sum of them. But Clarissa spoke of it in the lightest, most careless way. "I wanted to bring you some little souvenir," she said, "and I thought you might like this. And now I must say good-by, Bessie. I may call you Bessie, mayn't I? And remember, you must call me Clarissa. I am sorry I am obliged to hurry away like this; but I expect Mr. Granger back rather early, and I want to be at home when he returns. Good-by, dear!" She kissed her brother's wife, who clung to her affectionately, touched by her kindness; kissed the two little nephews also, one of whom caught hold of her dress and said, "You gave me that money for toys the other day, didn't you, Aunt Clarissa ?" "Yes, darling." Pa "But I didn't have it to spend, though. said he'd lay it out for me, and he brought me home a cart from the Boulevard, but it didn't cost two napoleons. It was a trumpery cart, | her life, even amidst the all-absorbing delight of that went smash the first time that Arthur and I stood in it." "You shouldn't stand in a toy cart, dear. I'll bring you some toys the next time I come to see mamma. her child's society, she had not been able quite to forget this man. The one voice that had touched her heart, the one face that had haunted her girlish dream, came back to her again and again in spite of herself. In the dead of the night she had started up from her pillow with the sound of George Fairfax's familiar tones in her ears; in too many a dream she had acted over again the meeting in the orchard, and heard his voice upbraiding her, and had seen his face dark and angry in the dim light. She had done her duty to Daniel Granger; but she had not forgotten the man she had loved, and who had loved her after his fashion; and often in her prayers she had entreated that she might never see him again. Her prayers had not been granted-perhaps they did not come so entirely from the heart as prayers should that would fain bring a blessing. He was here; here to remind her how much she had loved him in the days gone by-to bewilder her brain with conflicting thoughts. He turned suddenly from that gloomy contemplation of the arum lily, and met her face to face. That evening dress of ours, which has been so MIDWINTER had come, and the pleasures and splendors of Paris were at their apogee. The city was at its gayest-that beautiful city, which we can never see again as we have seen it-liberally abused for its ugliness, is not without a which we lament as some fair and radiant creatnre that has come to an untimely death. Paris the beautiful, Paris the beloved, imperial Paris, with her air of classic splendor, like the mistress of a Cæsar, was in these days overshadowed by no threatening thunder-cloud, forerunner of the tempest and earthquake that was to come. The winter season had begun; and all those wanderers who had been basking through the autumn under the blue skies that roof the Pyrenees, or dawdling away existence in German gambling saloons, or climbing Alpine peaks, or paddling down the Danube, flocked back to the central city of civilization in time to assist at Patti's reappearance in the Rue Lepelletier, or to applaud a new play of Sardou's at the Gymnase. Among this flock of returning pilgrims came George Fairfax, very much the worse for two or three months spent in restless meanderings between Baden and Homburg, with the consciousness of a large income at his disposal, and a cer tain reckless indifference as to which way his life drifted, that had grown upon him of late years. He met Mr. and Mrs. Granger, within twentyfour hours of his arrival in Paris, at a ball at the British embassy-the inaugural fête of the season, as it were, to which the master of Arden Court, by right of his wealth and weight in the North Riding, had been bidden. The embassadorial card had ignored Miss Granger, much to the damsel's dissatisfaction. Clarissa came upon Mr. Fairfax unawares in the glazed colonnade upon which the ball-room opened, where he was standing alone, staring moodily at a tall arum lily shooting up from a bed of ferns, when she approached on her partner's arm, taking the regulation promenade after a waltz. The well-remembered profile, which had grown sharper and sterner since she had seen it for the first time, struck her with a sudden thrill, half pleasure, half terror. Yes; she was pleased to see him; she, the wife of Daniel Granger, felt her heart beating faster, felt a sense of joy strangely mingled with fear. In all the occupations of certain charm when worn by a handsome man. A tall man looks taller in the perfect black. The broad expanse of shirt front, with its delicate embroidery, not obtrusively splendid, but minutely elaborate rather, involving the largest expenditure of needle-work to produce the smallest and vaguest effect-a suspicion of richness, as it were, nothing more; the snowy cambric contrasts with the bronzed visage of the soldier, or blends harmoniously with the fair complexion of the fopling who has never exposed his countenance to the rough winds of heaven; the expanse of linen proclaims the breadth of chest, and gives a factitious slimness to the waist. Such a costume, relieved, perhaps, by the flash of some single jewel, not large, but priceless, is scarcely unbecoming, and possibly more æsthetic in its simplicity than the gem-besprinkled brocades and velvets of a Buckingham in the days when men wore jeweled cloaks on their shoulders, and point d'Alençon flounces round their knees. George Fairfax, in his evening dress, looked supremely handsome. It is a poor thing, of course, in man or woman, this beauty, but it has its charm, nevertheless, and in the being who is loved for other and far higher qualities the charm is tenfold. Few women, perhaps, have ever fallen in love with a man on account of his good looks; they leave such weak worship for the stronger sex; but, having loved him for some other indefinable reason, are not indifferent to the attraction of splendid eyes or a faultless profile. Clarissa trembled a little as she held out her hand to be clasped in George Fairfax's strong fingers, the quiet pressure whereof seemed to say, "You know that you and I are something more to each other than the world supposes." She could not meet him without betraying, by some faint sign, that there was neither forgetfulness nor indifference in her mind as to the things that concerned him. Her late partner-a youthful secretary of legation, with straw-colored hair and an incipient mustache-murmured something civil, and slid away, leaving those two alone beside the arum lily, or as much alone as they could be in a place where the guests were circulating freely, and about half a dozen flirtations ripening amidst the shining foliage of orange-trees and camellias. "I thought I should meet you here to-night," he said. "I came here in the hope of meeting you. She was not an experienced woman of the world, skilled in the art of warding off such a speech as this. She had never flirted in her life, and sorely felt the want of that facility which comes from long practice. "Have you seen my husband ?" she asked, awkwardly enough, in her distress. "I did not come to see Mr. Granger. It was the hope of seeing you that brought me here. I am as great a fool as I was at Hale Castle, you see, Clarissa. There are some follies of which a man can not cure himself." "Mr. Fairfax!" She looked up at him gravely, reproachfully, with as much anger as she could bring herself to feel against him; but as their eyes met, something in his-a look that told too plainly of passion and daring-made her eyelids fall, and she stood before him trembling like a frightened child. And this moment was perhaps the turning point in Clarissa's life-the moment in which she took the first step on the wrong road that was to lead her so far away from the sacred paths of innocence and peace. George Fairfax drew her hand through his arm-she had neither strength nor resolution to oppose him and led her away to the quietest corner of the colonnade, a recess sheltered by orange-trees, and provided with a rustic bench. There is no need to record every word that was spoken there; it was the old story of a man's selfish, guilty love and a woman's sinful weakness. He spoke, and Clarissa heard him, not willingly, but with faint efforts of resistance that ended in nothing. She heard him. Never again could she meet Daniel Granger's honest gaze as she had done-never, it seemed to her, could she lose the sense of her sin. He told her how she had ruined his life. That was his chief reproach, and a reproach that a woman can rarely hear unmoved. He painted in the briefest words the picture of what he might have been, and what he was. If his life were wrecked utterly-and from his own account of himself it must needs be so-the wreck was her fault. He had been ready to sacrifice every thing for her. She had basely cheated him. His upbraiding stung her too keenly; she could keep her secret no longer. "I had promised Laura Armstrong," she said -"I had promised her that no power on earth should tempt me to marry you-if you should ask me." "You had promised!" he cried, contemptuously. "Promised that shallow trickster ! I might have known she had a hand in my misery. And you thought a promise to her more sacred than good faith to me? That was hard, Clarissa." "With all my heart," she faltered, and then hid her face in her hands. It seemed as if the confession had been wrung from her somehow. In the next moment she hated herself for having said the words, and calming herself with a great effort, said to him, quietly, "And now that you know how weak I was when I seemed indifferent to you, have pity upon me, Mr. Fairfax." 66 Pity!" he exclaimed. "It is not a question of pity: it is a question of two lives that have been blighted through your foolish submission to that plotting woman. But there must be some recompense to be found in the future for all the tortures of the past. I have broken every tie for your sake, Clarissa; you must make some sacrifice for me." Clarissa looked at him wonderingly. Was he so mad as to suppose that she was of the stuff that makes runaway wives? "Your father tempted my mother, Mr. Fairfax," she said, "but I thank Heaven she escaped him. The rôle of seducer seems hereditary in your family. You could not make me break my word when I was free to marry you; do you believe that you can make me false to my husband?" Yes, Clarissa. I swore as much that night in the orchard-swore that I would win you in spite of the world." 66 "And my son," she said, with the tone she might have used if he had been one-and-twenty 'is he to blush for his mother by-and-by ?" "I have never found that sons have a faculty for blushing on account of that kind of thing," Mr. Fairfax answered, lightly." Egad, there'd be a great deal of blushing going on at some of the crack clubs if they had!" he said to himself afterward. Clarissa rose from the seat among the orangetrees, and George Fairfax did not attempt to detain her. He offered her his arm to conduct her back to the ball-room; they had been quite long enough away. He did not want to attract attention, and he had said as much as he cared to say. He felt very sure of his ground now. She loved him-that was the all-important point. His wounded self-esteem was solaced by this knowledge. His old sense of power came back to him. He had felt himself all at sea, as it were, when he believed it possible that any woman he cared to win could be indifferent to him. From the other side of the ball-room Mr. Granger saw his wife re-enter arm in arm with George Fairfax. The sight gave him a little shock. He had hoped that young man was far enough away, ruining himself in a fashionable manner somehow; and here he was in attendance upon Clarissa. He remembered how his daughter had said that George Fairfax was sure to meet them in Paris, and his own anger at the suggestion. He would be obliged to be civil to the young man, of course. There was no reason, indeed, that he should be otherwise than civil-only that lurking terror in his mind that this was the man his wife had loved. Had "It was hard," she answered, in a heart-loved? is there any past tense to that verb? broken voice. "My God!" he cried, looking at her with those passionate eyes; "and yet you loved me all the time?" Mrs. Granger dropped Mr. Fairfax's arm directly they came to a vacant seat. "I am rather tired," she said, in her coldest voice. "I think I'll rest a little, if you please. I needn't detain you. I dare say you are engaged for the next dance. 66 'No. I seldom dance." He stood by her side. One rapid glance across the room had shown him Daniel Granger making his way toward them looking unspeakably ponderous and British amidst that butterfly crowd. He did not mean to leave her just yet, in spite of her proprietor's approach. She belonged to him, he told himself, by right of that confession just now in the conservatory. It was only a question when he should take her to himself. He felt like some bold rover of the seas, who has just captured a gallant craft, and carries her proudly over the ocean chained to his gloomy hull. She was his, he told himself; but before he could carry her away from her present surroundings he must play the base part which he had once thought he never could play. He must be civil to Daniel Granger, mask his batteries, win his footing in the household, so that he might have easy access to the woman he loved, until one day the thunder-bolt would descend, and an honest man be left desolate, "with his household gods shattered." It was just one of those sins that will not bear contemplation. George Fairfax was fain to shut his eyes upon the horror and vileness of it, and only to say to himself, doggedly, "I have sworn to win her." Mr. Granger greeted him civilly enough presently, and with the stereotyped cordiality which may mean any thing or nothing. Was Mr. Fairfax going to remain long in Paris? Yes, he meant to winter there, if nothing better turned up. "After all, you see," he said, "there is no place like Paris. One gets tired of it, of course, in time; but I find that in other places one is always tired." 66 'A very pleasant ball," remarked Mr. Granger, with the air of saying something original. You have been dancing, I suppose ?" "No," replied Mr. Fairfax, smiling; "I have come into my property. I don't dance. 'I range myself,' as our friends here say." He thought, as he spoke, of sundry break-neck galops and maelstrom waltzes danced in gardens and saloons the very existence whereof was ignored by or unknown to respectability; and then thought, "If I were safely planted on the other side of the world, with her for my wife, it would cost me no more to cut all that kind of thing than it would to throw away a handful of withered flowers." CHAPTER XXXVI. STOLEN HOURS. MISS GRANGER's portrait was finished, and the baby-picture-a chubby blue-eyed cherub at play on a bank of primroses, with a yellow-hammer perched on a blossoming blackthorn above his head, and just a glimpse of blue April sky beyond; a dainty little study of color, in which the painter had surpassed himself-was making rapid progress, to the young mother's intense delight. Very soon Mr. Austin would have no longer the privilege of coming every other day to the Rue de Morny. Daniel Granger had declined sitting for his portrait. "I did it once," he said. "The Bradford people insisted upon making me a present of my own likeness, life-size, with my brown cob, Peter Pindar, standing beside me. I was obliged to hang the picture in the hall at Arden-those good fellows would have been wounded if I hadn't given it a prominent position; but that great shining brown cob plays the mischief with my finest Velasquez, a portrait of Don Carlos Baltazar, in white satin slashed with crimson. No; I like your easy, dashing style very much, Mr. Austin; but one portrait in a lifetime is quite enough for me.' As the Granger family became more acclimatized, as it were, Clarissa found herself with more time at her disposal. Sophia had attached herself to a little clique of English ladies, and had her own engagements and her separate interests. Clarissa's friends were, for the most part, Frenchwomen, whom she had known in London, or to whom she had been introduced by Lady Laura. Mr. Granger had his own set, and spent his afternoons agreeably enough, drinking soda-water, reading Galignani, and talking commerce or politics with his compeers at the most respectable café on the boulevards. Being free, therefore, to dispose of her afternoons, Clarissa, when Lovel's picture was finished, went naturally to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard. Having once taken her servants there, she had no farther scruples. "They will think I come to see a dress-maker," she said to herself. But in this she did not give those domestic officers credit for the sharpness of their class. Before she had been three times to her brother's lodgings John Thomas, the footman, had contrived-despite his utter ignorance of the French tongue-to discover who were the occupants of No. 7, and had ascertained that Mr. Austin, the painter, was one of them. "Who'd have thought of her coming to see that chap Hostin ?" said John Thomas to the coachman. "That's a rum start, ain't it ?" "Life is made up of rum starts, John Thomas," replied the coachman, sententiously. "Is there a Mrs. Hostin, do you know?" "Yes, he's got a wife. I found that out from the porter, though the blessed old buffer can't speak any thing but his French gibberish. Madame ?' I said, bawling into his stupid old ear. "Mossoo and Madame Hostin? comprenny?' and he says, 'Ya-ase,' and then bursts out laughing, and looks as proud as a hen that's just laid a hegg-ya-ase, mossoo et madame.'" George Fairfax and Clarissa met very frequently after that ball at the embassy. It happened that they knew the same people; Mr. Fairfax, indeed, knew every one worth knowing in Paris; and he seemed to have grown suddenly fond of respectable society, going every where in the hope of meeting Mrs. Granger, and rarely staying long any where if he did not meet her. There were those who observed this peculiarity in his movements, and shrugged their shoulders significantly. It was to be expected, of course, said this butterfly section of humanity: a beautiful young woman, married to a man old enough to be her father, would naturally have some one interested in her. Sometimes Clarissa met George Fairfax in her brother's painting-room; so often, indeed, that she scarcely cared to keep an account of these "CLARISSA SAT IN A LOW CHAIR BY THE FIRE, WHILE GEORGE FAIRFAX AND HER BROTHER TALKED." meetings. Austin knew a good many clever, agreeable Americans and Frenchmen, and his room was a pleasant lounge for idle young men, with some interest in art, and plenty to say upon every subject in the universe. If there were strangers in the painting-room when Mrs. Granger came to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard, she remained in the little salon, talking to her sister-in-law and the two precocious nephews; but it happened generally that George Fairfax, by some mysterious means, became aware of her presence, and one of the folding-doors would open presently, and the tall figure appear. "Those fellows have fairly smoked me out, |