she thought, would only cloud the air
more. Very soon his grievances came to the
surface. He had observed, he said, "your
friend, Mr. Hanbury, hanging about." This
was more of the elixir. What did that mean,
pray? Violet, a little flurried, called up her
presence of mind. She did not know, she said.
She supposed he had business, or some such
reason. With a voice that trembled a little,
she added, that he was "very good," and that
people seemed to like him.

"O, that is it," said Fermor, getting up, and
walking over to the window. "I see." Though
a little terrified, Violet was pleased, for here
were signs of the elixir. Fermor turned round,
smiling with grim scorn. "I see!" he repeated.
He was thinking how this poor child was
inconsistently showing "the little game" of the
family.

The faint lines in her face, and her secret
suspense, struck him with a little pity.

"O, by the way," she said, with a sort of
nervous coquetry, "I want you to do something
for me. I have a plan—a great little scheme.
It is all my own plan entirely. I am going to
give a little party."

Fermor started. "A party! Give a party!"

"It's to be a little party," said Violet,
coming up to him, and now filled with
misgivings as to the policy of her proposal. "Only
a few, I assure you."

"That of course you can arrange as you like,"
he said; "I only give my opinion. If you take
my advice, you would not think of such a thing.
It is at least laughable. Everybody is gone
away. It will only end in failure."

"But you will come? If you were to know
how I have set my heart on it."

"On my coming?" said Fermor, smiling in
spite of himself. "Well, I suppose the great
little scheme must go on."

A week more, and more fashionable Israelites
had gone out of the place. There were no
traces even of the place where the Laura Fermor
tents had been pitched a few days back. The
fashionable London Fremdenblatt had announced
them at their hotel in Dover-street. Sir Hopkins,
said the same register, was staying at
Wycherly's, St. James's-square, genteel and
costly chambers, well known to colonists.

Every one was arriving somewhere in Town;
and Eastport, abandoned and forsworn, began
to have very much the look of the field where a
gay circus has flourished temporarily, where the
horses had galloped round, and scarlet and
tinsel fluttered, but where now there was only
the mark of a worn sawdust ring.

Fermor fumed against this abandonment.
Things, as regards his personal affairs, had
settled into a dead level. There was a lull.
But he would have preferred something that he
might work against. He went to see the
Manuels fitfully, and bestowed some gloom and
mystery on them. The brother seldom
appeared to him, and when he did, he seemed to be
held as it were in a leash. But Violet, still
anxious and still fluttering, said to all their
gentle remonstrances, "Leave it to me. Do,
do now. We shall settle it all the night of
the little party." It was to bring forth a new
and perfect understanding, a resolution of all
difficulties, even the naming of a near and
certain day for the nuptials, and universal
happiness and delight. "Leave it all to me! /
know," said Violet, with a little air of mystery.
And she had now come to brood anxiously over
this eventful night, as though it were finally to
determine her fate.

Fermor, too, was waiting another event. Sir
Hopkins had said he would write to him from
London as soon as everything was settled, and
"he saw his way finally." Someway Fermor
had begun to have a restless feeling; for this
letter did not come. His family had not written
either.

But there was yet another letter expected
which did not come. Major Carter had said to
him, "I have written, as you wished it, to old
Gainsborough. He is the most wonderful
gatherer-up of old stories in nature. Quartered
in Spain, as I told you. He knows everything
about everybody, and, depend upon it, we shall
have a very full and curious letter touching a
certain family. I have no right to say a word of
my own suspicions. I feel it was going beyond
what I ought, to have done. The only thing I
can do is to support what I say, or own that I
have been wrong. You have no part in it
whatever. I have forced it on you."

Thus it came to a certain Monday, for which
evening Miss Manuel had asked a few friends to
tea, and music.

IN THE POLISH CAUSE.

LAST summer, three young students, Wilhelm
Unman from Stockholm, Gabriel Jacobsson,
and John Eriksson from Strömsholm,*
proceeded to Poland to share in the struggle
for liberty. The Stockholm paper, the Aftonblad,
gives a detailed report of their adventures
and their fate, of which an outline might
perhaps not be uninteresting to English readers.

They left Stockholm on the 3rd of July, 1863,
and went by steamer to Stettin, and from thence
by railway to Rokietnice, a small station near
the town of Posen, not daring to enter the latter
for fear of being arrested. Through less
frequented roads they now proceeded, sometimes
walking, sometimes riding with peasants, to the
frontier. After having been hiding here for
some time with some Polish men of property,
they found an opportunity of crossing the frontier,
and learnt that a corps of insurgents were
in the town of Zayorowo, not many miles
distant. They went thither and presented
themselves to the chief of the corps as volunteers;
but, before they had yet entered on duty, a
Russian force, greatly superior in numbers,

* The same three young men mentioned in the
article entitled From the Pen of a Pole, All the
Year Round, vol. xi., page 448.