inquiry before the magistrates, and much raking
up of old memories, which ended in the silent
burial of the bones in the churchyard, and in
the addition of a mysterious tragedy to the local
annals. I will tell the story briefly, as they tell
it; not in shreds and patches, as it was painfully
evolved under the investigation by authority.

In the autumn of 1789, during the earliest
rush of French emigrants to England away from
the Paris mob which had just drawn the first
blood of revolution at the storming of the Bastille,
there came over two ladies of rank, sisters,
middle-aged and single. Two servants
accompanied them, a man and a woman. The
four were received by a Catholic family in
Staffordshire, and entertained for several months,
in thehope and expectation that they would soon
be able to return safely to France. But as things
there went from bad to worse, and the hospitality
of their host wearied, the ladies sought
a house for themselves. Travelling towards
Wales as a district where they might live cheaply
and obscurely until the return of better days,
they lighted on Ash Grange, which the owner
and occupier had vacated but a few weeks before
for a narrow lodging in the chancel of the
church. The heir was Mr. March, a young
gentleman of aristocratic sympathies and
considerable wealth, who resided at Gellert's
Gap, a beautiful estate about three miles distant.
He offered the French strangers the use of the
Grange furnished just as it stood, and they
accepted it as generously as it was offered.

The ladies presently became known to the
neighbourhood as Madame Stéphanie and
Madame Rose le Perier, the last supposed to
be a name assumed in lieu of one of higher
distinction. The man-servant was Monsieur
Rigault, the woman, Madame Bette. Superior
servants they evidently were; but, in casting in
their lot with the mistresses whom they had
followed into their triste exile, they had left
behind them all selfish remembrances of past
estate, and shared with cheerfulness the
privations of their poverty. And they were very
poor. The secrets of their household could not
be kept in that little idle place, though they
took no service from without to carry gossip
abroad; for the small shopkeepers knew every
penny of their expenditure, and Monsieur
Rigault, who catered for them, Frenchman,
and ingenious Frenchman as he was, often
betrayed to their shrewd inquisitiveness the
difficulty he had in making up the materials of
the dinners he cooked.

The ladies were rarely seen beyond the
precincts of their home, and the only persons
they admitted within their doors was Mr. March,
who was a Catholic like themselves, and a priest
who came over from Shrewsbury to visit them
at stated intervals. To Shrewsbury also they
went to attend the services of their church on
great festival days; and once, when they
remained absent more than a week, they were
said to have gone to meet some fellow-emigrants
of royal rank at Alton Towers, the seat of the
great papist Earl of Shrewsbury. Madame
Stéphanie was a person of grandiose air—not
beautiful at all, but of a most magnificent
stateliness, like a woman bred in courts, and
used to think of nobility as the highest grace of
God. Madame Rose was less imposing than
her sister, but more pleasing, and several years
younger. Madame Stéphanie was growing grey
and wrinkled; Madame Rose had still so much
of the bloom of youth as may remain with a
handsome brunette of five-and-thirty.

During the second autumn of their residence
at Ash Grange, Monsieur Rigault made a
journey to France. News that the Tuileries
had been sacked, the Swiss Guard slaughtered,
and the king and his family imprisoned in the
Temple, had reached England before he started,
and the terrible massacres of September were
reported immediately after. Next came a
rumour that the king was to be put upon his
trial before the National Convention, then
intelligence that his head had fallen on the
scaffold, then of the beginning of the Terror.

While Monsieur Rigault was away, Madame
Stéphanie made his little household purchases in
the town. People thus grew familiar with her
grandeur, and very haggard and wan her grandeur
was—infinitely more piteous than humility. Yet
it was impossible to feel sympathy with her.
Monsieur Rigault had won real liking and respect
amongst the shopkeepers, but Madame Stéphanie
treated the simple folks with that haughty rigour
which French writers tell us was the habit of the
great in France in the generations before the
terrible blood-letting of the Revolution. La
Bruyère, the court philosopher and moralist of
Louis Fourteenth's reign, says it was to him a
thing always new the ferocity with which men
treated other men. He saw certain wild
animals, male and female, scattered over the
fields, black, livid, all burnt with the sun, bound
to the soil which they ploughed and harrowed
with invincible obstinacy; they had an articulate
voice, and when they rose upon their feet they
showed a human face, and, indeed, they were
men. At night they retired into their lairs,
where they lived on black bread, water,
and roots; they saved other men the toil of
sowing and reaping, but themselves lacked, even
to hunger, the bread they produced. Madame
Stéphanie le Perier, in the cold inhuman pride
of her character, showed the latest development
of the noble races that had lived for ages by the
bitter labour of such degraded serfs; and now
the scum of their long perdition had seethed to
the surface of society, and society was dying by
wholesale of the poisonous miasma.

In the early spring, Monsieur Rigault was
back at the Grange, but for a few days only;
and then he disappeared again. It was winter,
settled and cold, before he once more presented
himself in the accustomed shops with his thrifty
basket. He was then full of sorrow. His
lean resolute face ran down with tears when
the shopkeepers asked him the truth of those
awful scenes in Paris which their newspaper
feebly depicted, but of which he had been