There was still a minute, however, before
Clemens could be found by the secretary—a
minute in which the high-hearted man's
heroism forsook him, so wondrously had his love
of his young wife entwined itself with every
fibre of his frame. Their marriage had been
an ill-suited one; Stiegel had told him so; his
dreams had told him so. And here it chanced
that in his struggling to rise from the bed, his
steel-clasped book was displaced from under
his pillow, fell out into the chamber, its clasp
broke, and its white leaves fluttered free.

"Where is Clemens?" cried the Baron, loudly.
"What can matter anything that befals me, so
that I can do any good to her? I would die to
fulfil her wishes and to make her happy. O
Heaven if she were only safe!" . . . .

There was a bustle in the passage, outside the
door. There were voices, not of Conrad calling
for Clemens. There were feet—and not of grooms
bustling to bring out carriages. But at the
sound the Baron fell back into the bed. His
moment of strength had passed, and . . . .

She was safe. Helen was safe! Because she
was there beside him, more beautiful and radiant
than ever; with that look of girlish wondering
admiration on her face which had won the man
when he had brought her diamond heart home
to her; but with it something beyond—the look
of a woman who had dared adventure and
endured fatigue, and had been raised by her
devoted truth to an equality with his higher
nature.—She was hanging over him; she was
clinging round him. She was telling him how,
after that terrible silence had begun, and after
. . . . " But why think of them, George? Both
were bad; Reginald the worse, because he is the
cleverer of the two.—But, love, when I saw that
I had no chance of being left at peace among
them, why, what could I do? You know I am
not an Oranienberg woman. So I set up the
story of a fever, as the only means I had of
keeping them out and getting away to you.
And we did on the twenty-seventh. Yes,
dear, and I rode for a day in boy's clothes, you
see, when no letters came. . . .  And they are
watching our house still, at this very moment,
for aught I know. . . . Don't scold me, darling!
Put your head there!" (" There" meant a
pleasing corner, where many favoured heads
would have been only too glad to lie.) " O! it
was no joke, I assure you,.all those people in
all that wretched town sending hour by hour,
day by day, to inquire after the poor Baroness. . . .
And yet it was a joke! Fancy, among the rest
to turn up, an old Schlettersheim creature—your
constant lover, Miss Sauerwein, who has somehow
scraped up money enough to follow you to court
. . . . and was glad—she quite smiled, they tell
me—to hear my fever was so much worse. That
was the day I was delirious." (And here the old
girlish laugh rung out more merrily than ever.)
"But I made dear old Stiegel bring me. He is
beginning to endure me now, perhaps, though it
was so mad my running after you. I would not,
indeed, if I could have helped it! Well, there,
then " (and the head of the wounded man
changed its place from west to east). "No wonder
you have been in pain, and look so very wild.
Why, I declare, they have let you read, ill as you
have been—and read in one of those abominable
old books of yours, which always made you
gloomy when you were well. You shall read in
that thing no more, at all events!"—And the
grey and the white leaves were in the twinkling
of an eye torn out of the steel-clasped book and
burning on the stone floor.

"There! How could they permit it? . . .
O! my poor dear, you do look as if you wanted
sleep—and I do too. Stiegel, sit in the ante-
chamber, and keep everything quiet. Forgive
me, my love, I did so long to be with you!"
. . . . In ten minutes more, the Baron's head
and his heart were at rest on her shoulder: a
rest without dreams of Grand-Dukes, or cousins,
or rivals great or small, or misgivings that he
was too old, and she too young—a rest (and may
all my readers know the blessing of such rest)
without any dreams at all!

I have never discovered where Helen's English
cousin came to light again: if he ever did
reappear.

I have always believed that if poison was put
into the Grand-Duke's wound, the Grand-
Duchess knew who put it there.

I know that the Oranienbergs never went
back to court.

SCALE INSECTS.

THE rinds of many oranges are speckled with
brownish scales. When examined closely, these
scales are discovered to be the covers over
the eggs, or rather the awnings over the
nests, of the scale insect of the oranges.
Under a low power of microscope, on turning
over one of these scales an extraordinary scene
presents itself; for some hundreds of eggs are
beheld imbedded in a woolly or cottony
substance. The body of the insect is white, oval,
and very flat. From underneath the body issue
two hairy feelers with eight or nine joints, and
about a fourth of the body in length. At the
very edge of the oval body may be discerned
two very small pink eyes; and from the end
of it trail two minute and long hairs. The
legs are six, and each leg is armed with a
hook. There is a proboscis below the feelers,
by inserting which in the rind of the orange
the insect, whilst still a caterpillar, fixes itself
for life.

These scale insects are something more
important than marvels and revelations of the
microscope, for they play an important part
in the business of man. They attack many
stove plants, and, besides, make their presence
for evil felt upon plums, peaches, grapes, pears,
aloes, nectarines, pine-apples, oleanders, and
acacias, as well as oranges. Scale insects have
been known to destroy an orange harvest. Their
ravages destroyed, in 1843, the chief dependence
of the inhabitants of a whole group of volcanic
islands in the Mediterranean.