QUITE ALONE.

  BOOK THE SECOND: WOMANHOOD.
    CHAPTER XLVI. LILY'S NEW LIFE.

A BREATH of her old life had blown on
the faded cheek of the horse-riding countess.
The boon companions of bygone times, the
opportunity for being luxurious, and haughty,
and insolent, had returned once more. She
painted and decked herself with a will; for
she knew how select was her audience, and how
sure she was of their plaudits. To think that
she—who had been the leader of that kind of
fashion which fashionable young men are ashamed
to own, yet follow, and bow down before with
servile reverence—should have been but an hour
ago doomed to caper on a circus-horse for the
amusement of an amphitheatre full of plebeians,
admitted for sixpence in addition to the ordinary
price of entrance to the gardens! To think
that not so very long since, her worldly estate
should have been even more debased, and that,
ruddled and tattooed, and with feathers on her
head, she should have been shown, as a mock
savage, for a few liards, on the boards of a French
booth!

So the countess is gone to her supper, and
the horses are safe in their stables. The last
Roman candle has smouldered out, and very
ghastly and gallows-like in the moonlight looks
the iron framework of the fireworks. A faint
odour of burning yet lingers about them, and
the night breeze stirs shreds of cartridge-paper,
half consumed to cinder, which have fallen in
the thickets of Ranelagh. You might fancy
that this was some huge Place de Grève, where
criminals had been broken on the Catherine-
wheel, or hanged upon gibbets, and their bodies
afterwards given up to the flames. But it was
only the corpse of Pleasure that had thus been
burnt to ashes.

The countess is gone to her supper, the peep-
shows and fiddling-tents are shut up, and
Ranelagh is left to darkness, to the night watchman;
and to Lily Floris.

Lily did not live in the gardens, but she and
her—well, her guardian, her protectress, her
mistress, her tyrant, were generally the last to
leave the place. The countess was generally so
much exhausted by her exertions in the high
school of horsemanship as to require a long
period of rest in her dressing-room before she
went home. Stimulants—stimulants stronger
than eau-de-Cologne—had to be administered
before she felt strong enough to retire to her
domicile. The countess was liberal—not to say
lavish—in her use of stimulants. As she had
attained middle age, as her husband was dead,
and she had no particular character to speak of,
it may not be indiscreet to avow, once for all,
that she was in the habit of taking a great deal
too much brandy-and-water. She said it did her
good. The doctor said it did her harm; but,
at any rate, she took it: cold. It did not
improve her temper. Far from angelic at the best
of times, it now bordered very closely on the
fiendish. Her powers of tongue were by no
means diminished; yet she seemed to distrust
them, and her abusive eloquence was, by no
means rarely, backed up by blows. She was
frequently provoked into striking those who
offended her; and who could avoid giving
offence to that terrible countess? I have heard
that the children of the man who makes birch-
brooms have usually a bad time of it; and there
is considerable risk in residing with a lady of
violent temper addicted to drinking, of equestrian
pursuits, and part of whose necessary
equipment is a riding-whip.

Lily often thought of that dreadful night in
Paris, when the Italian met her in the
Elysian Fields. Was it a judgment on her for
running away, she wondered, that her temporary
evasion had been followed by so dire a bondage?
Perhaps. Her terror had been so excessive, her
despair so great, that it was only in a dim and
fragmentary manner that she could recal the
incidents of her capture. She had fainted
somewhere, that she knew. On returning to
consciousness, she had found herself in a filthy little
room, stretched on a filthier mattress laid upon
the floor. The Italian was crouched on a stool
by the fireplace, smoking, and a toothless
ragged old woman was pottering over some
evil-smelling mess in a pipkin on the hearth.
The room was seemingly Signor Ventimillioni's
studio; for, strewn about, were numbers of
unfinished wax torsos, some with wigs and some
without, some horrid in hirsute adornments in
the way of whiskers and moustaches, and
some bare and grinning like corpses. Arms,
legs, hands and feet, appertaining to celebrated
characters in ancient and modern history,
littered a row of shelves and a rough deal table,