and she gave one of the strange laughs. "That
was the secret, was it? But we should have
had a stronger and less delicate subject to
practise on. O, Violet! Violet!"

Her face dropped upon the little marble table,
and Fermor heard her hysterical sobs as she
stayed in this position for many minutes. He
was greatly distressed, almost shocked at the
violence of this grief, and tried to soothe her. In
a few moments she raised her face and wiped
her eyes. "This is very foolish," she said. "We
women should train ourselves. But it does me
good to think and talk of all this; it brings
relief. It has quite comforted me meeting
you. We must have many a talk on this matter
in London and here. But you go to-morrow.
Of course, you have your duties, and cannot
waste time on a poor lonely sister like me."

She looked at him with a sort of shy fascination,
and her voice was very musical and melancholy.
"Twelve o'clock!" she said, rising
suddenly; "how time has flown!"

"Good gracious!" he said, for the first time
thinking of Mrs. Fermor. "So late! Yes, I shall
see you again. We are not bound to a day. But I
am so glad you have taken a calm, sensible view of
this affair, as, indeed, I anticipated you would."

"Ah, yes! Let us go in, now," she said. They
went into the great court. It was almost
deserted. But the sleepless Bureaux were still
at work. At the bottom of the great stair she
said "Good night."

She followed him with her eyes as he ascended
slowly: when he reached the top, he looked
down and saw her figure standing in wonderful
attitude of grace. He thought again of the
curious changes that had taken place in her.
"What a crisis," he said, as he looked down,
"to pass through! How would a less skilful
man have done?"

At that distance he could not see her face, nor
the features in her face. But the eyes were
flashing. And he could not hear the hard voice
that came from the lips:

"It was, then, his own work; and he is satisfied!
Before God, then, I shall not spare him!"

Once more, at the door of the lobby, he looked
down, and saw her hand raised towards him.
Complacently, he thought it was a sort of
salutation, and he waved his own to her. Then
went his way along the galleries. There was a
smile on his face as he passed along; it was
softened to a gentle feeling of romance very
pleasurable. "My life," he thought," has been
a strange one. It might be written in a book.
Who can tell what is coming, either?"

He found the young wife up, waiting. She
had been writing—writing home to her father.
He required one letter every day, without fail.

"I was having some coffee out on the Boulevards,"
said Fermor. "So sorry to have kept
you; met a friend."

There was a curious look on the young wife's
face, a colder one than he had ever seen.

"Tell me about it," she said, calmly. "An
old friend, or a new one? Had he anything to
tell?"

Fermor walked to the window impatiently.
"Nothing that you would care to hear," he said.
"By the way, we need not be hurrying away in
the morning. There is no necessity for such a
precipitate departure. It would look absurd.
We should be having the police after us!" He
said this as though she had been proposing it.

"Just as you please," she said.

Her passiveness mystified him. But no more
was said on the matter.

On the next day, about two o'clock, Captain
Fermor fixed a flower in his button-hole, chose
out a new pair of gloves, put some perfume on his
handkerchief, and sent up to Numero 110, to
know if Mademoiselle Manuel was at home. "I
have not talked to a clever woman I don't know
when," he said; "I must tell her the whole
story about poor Violet from the very beginning."
He had, in fact, prepared a dramatic little
narrative, in which he himself was painted as an
object of great interest.

The boy-waiter came with word that Mr. and
Miss Manuel had left for London by the early
train that morning.

ITALIAN IRON.

THERE are many points of view, besides the
merely politico-religious, from which the Italian
Convention, and the approaching union of the
whole peninsula under one government, deserve
to be regarded. Unless there comes some
unlucky hitch in European politics, we shall see
in Italy an immense development of manufactures
and industry within the next few years.

We seldom reflect enough how much we in
England owe, not only to our insular position
which has kept us free from invasion, but to our
freedom from close personal concern in
continental wars. We have had far too much to do
with them; we feel that, to our sorrow, every
time the tax-gatherer comes round, and Mr.
Gladstone feels it every time he performs one of
his grand financial feats: but we have scarcely
ever been interested in them at first hand. War
with us has never been engrossing enough to
hinder us from cultivating the arts of peace.
The best soil in Europe (for, on the whole, we
have the smallest proportion of utterly
unimprovable land of any European country), the
richest stores of mineral wealth, and time and
opportunity to use them—these have been our
advantages. Look, on the other hand, at the
Continent during the half century ending with
Waterloo—towns taken, trade paralysed or
killed outright, countries ravaged, above all,
men drawn off in far too large a per-centage
from peaceful occupations. We too had armies,
but only large enough to win renown, and keep
ourselves in practice, and support our position
among the nations. We have always managed
to do a good deal of our fighting by deputy.
Subsidising Austrians or Russians, even though
it does make the taxes heavier, is far less destructive