newly returned and writing a book—Six Months
with the Queen of Bushra—Bushra was not far,
that is to say, less than six hundred miles, from
Sir Hopkins's government. O, yes, he had
made an excursion as he came home—governor
civil enough—wanted him (the traveller) to dine
with him, but didn't. Saw nothing—saw
nobody—heard nothing, and heard of nobody.
Nothing to the Queen of Bushra, who gave him
a bracelet of teeth, which she had gathered with
her own hands. The water grew icy cold with
startling suddenness.

So with the tourist, the author of the lively
journal From Spa to Spa. "You meet all sorts
of people at those wicked places, Mr. Duncan
Davis," she would say, with a smile, "and touch
them off so cleverly. I sat up till one last night
reading the book you sent me. I have friends
that go every year, and can tell me nothing. By
the way, did you ever fall in with a Mr. Carter
and his family?"

"Carter, Carter!" said Mr. Duncan Davis,
searching the old closet he called his memory.
"Yes, to be sure, at Nauheim. There was a
Carter there."

Pauline's face grew very eager. "You did?"
she said. "Tell me about him—you quite
interest me."

"To be sure," said Duncan Davis. "I knew
him intimately. He was the chaplain, and had
the English chapel, and—"

But some one had turned the cruel cock, and
the water again grew icy cold. Duncan Davis
never told more of the Nauheim chaplain.

This had been Pauline's life, and Pauline's
curious purpose of general inquiry had been
noted by a few gentlemen as a phase of
fascinating oddity. The wives of the gentlemen—
strongly intellectual in their way, and whose
voices rang out at dinner sharp and clear as their
lords'—were pleasant on this fancy, and hinted
at the supposed matrimonial end of all society.

"With so large a net, my dear," said Mrs.
Winslow Jones, "she will have a salmon one of
these mornings." This drawing in of her net
was delightful to all assistants, for the
fisherwoman's voice was so gay and so fascinating. Her
talk was a sort of moderated burlesque—a
softened comic exaggeration— a dressing up of
light flying topics in quaint, sober, solemn
language. Then her deep limpid eye flashed, the
bells began to ring, and the music to play, and the
voices of gay laughing revellers were heard in her
throat, as though a door had been opened quickly.
But when the lights were down, and the social
theatre closed for the night, the deep limpid
eyes grew dull, the clouds began to gather, and
an old look of weary restlessness, which seemed
the reflection, as in a glass, of a heavier and a
yet wearier restlessness, now more than two years
old, came and settled on her face. These two
looks were familiar and habitual with Pauline,
during this year or two. The first the world
saw: the second, only that gloomy brother, now
grown yet more gloomy.

In a mean street—that hung like a torn bit of
ribbon from the skirt of Belgrave-square—and
in a rather mean house (but which was let, as
birds'-nests are sold in China, for its weight in
silver), Lady Laura Fermor and her band had
thrown up fresh works. Flushed with recent
success, she had seen the truth that all things
naturally tend to the centre and to the metropolis;
and she was now operating from a sort of
"pah" in town.

At pleasant chambers in St. James's-square,
the special morning paper whose function it is to
calculate the right ascension of the fashionable
heavenly bodies, had announced that Sir Hopkins
Pocock had recently arrived. The Eastern
dependency had not been so skilfully manipulated
as the Waipiti. With those intractable
savages he had won glory; more civilised beings
he had found less impressionable. He was
recalled. His staff and dependents fell with him:
and Sir Hopkins Pocock, C.B., returned to
England, his health having broken down sadly,
as we all well knew.

In Clarges-street, idlers, and neighbours who
were idlers, had noticed men, like shipwrights
on a ship's side, busy burnishing and scouring a
model house from top to bottom; and at whose
door a little later, great wains were seen disgorging
furniture from their dark jaws, like whales
on wheels. The more curious still, four days
later, that there was a tall, grim, stiff gentleman,
whose name was Carlay, in possession, and who
was expecting home his married daughter and
her husband, who were to live with him.

These are the little strands which are to make
the piece. The weaving may now begin.

CHAPTER V. A VISIT.

DURING these days there was often sitting in
Pauline's drawing-room, and almost at Pauline's
feet, the chair was so very low, the gauntly
handsome Mr. Romaine who was of her party at
the French play. He was one of the travellers
whom she had sent for, and who had been
contemptuously turned away with the rest, when it
was found that there was no profit in him; but he
had declined to accept that furlough. It suited
him to stay. His cheeks were well scorched,
even to a hard red; his cheek-bones were high
and glossy; there was much of his neck seen;
he had shiny eyes in deep ambuscade, and a
glossy overhanging moustache. Yet he was
tall, manly, gaunt, alive, and, when he chose,
soft as a woman. He was one of those men
who put up a dozen guns for luggage, and go
and range among the poor wild beasts, who no
doubt wonder what manner of wild beasts these
are that come to their forests to scatter fire and
smoke, and the sharp report, and the smashing
stroke, and the cruel agony. He had gone among
odd tribes—blacks and greys, and red-coloured—
and received the freedom of their wigwams, and
had been offered wives in profusion, and had
written very agreeable narratives of his