The picture of neatness and prettiness which
I had drawn as existing behind those dainty
muslin curtains was not realised. It was
indeed reversed. The room was in the greatest
confusion, and untenanted. "Why you see,
Sir," said the woman of the house who
had ushered the carter up behind us,
"Madam'selle went away the first thing
yesterday morning. She sold her bits of things to
the broker (you'll have to get the sofa bed out
o'window, Mr. Bracket), and never give us no
notice in a regular way (now mind the walls
with them saucepans), leastways not a week's;
but my husband never went for to charge her,
poor thing, for she paid as punctual as the
Monday morning cum—allays."

"Has she left her present address?" I
asked.

"O dear no, quite contra-ry. Says she to
me, says she—leastways as well as I could
understand her French brogue, and she had
her han'kercher a kivering of her face—Mrs.
Blinkinson," says she, "don't," says she,
"answer no questions as may be asked about
me. I am a going," says she, "to where I
hope nobody may find me out." And then
she pulled the street door to, and I never see
her more—and never shall."

I looked at Bevil. He was shivering as if
an icy chill had struck to his heart. He
looked round the room slowly, vacantly. The
bird was lying at the bottom of its cage—
dead. The flowers, no longer tended, were
drooping. He stretched forth his trembling
hand, and, plucking a geranium, put it into
his bosom. He then turned, and, without
speaking, descended the stairs. With
unsteady gait he entered his own house.

For more than a week I missed the sounds
from below. Bevil had gone straight to his
bedroom, and had not left it since. His
mother now, instead of tending him with glue-
pots, was constantly on the stairs with broths,
and coffee, and tea, and a variety of other
sloppy sustentation; but her son would
partake of them but very sparingly. I determined
to rouse him, and advised that, as he
would not or could not work, an active search
after the lost damsel was better than stolid,
inactive grief. This roused him, and he
followed my advice.

Weary days and weary weeks were spent
in the search. The cunning Silhouette eluded
him as if she had been an Ombre Chinois.
Bevil first addressed himself to the shop for
which Manette had worked. The master
of it said that he never saw Manette but
once, and then she came with specimens of her
embroidery, to get more. It was so good that
he had employed her ever since, and was both
surprised and chagrined at her sudden desertion.
He had, through her landlord, offered
her a good salary to work at his house, and
had hoped she would accept. Her strange
disappearance was therefore the more
unaccountable.

The clergyman of the French church, when
Bevil sought him, was as surprised as
her lover at Manette's absence from service and
communion. In the latter he said she was a
regular and deeply-impressed partaker. He
could give no information. Neither could the
officers of the hospital, where the girl's father
had died in the winter (of whom Bevil also
inquired), give him comfort.

"There is nothing for it," I told him one
day, "but time and work."

He did after a time resume his work, but
the sounds given out from his bench made me
melancholy. His tools were taken up, used
and laid down with a slow, intermittent
apathy, which showed that the heart and the
hands did not go together.

Work, on the contrary, grew so fast on my
hands, that I hardly had time for sleep. My
successor to the curacy I had left in Southwark
was taken ill, and besides my own duty,
I had volunteered to do a part of his. This
occasionally consisted in administering
consolation and prayer to the inmates of one of the
Borough hospitals.

During one of my visits to the female ward,
I was attracted by a few words which fell
from the clinical lecturer who was addressing
a knot of pupils standing at the bed on a case
of tumour of the face. He had, in fact,
(warming with his subject), glided from an
explanation of the operation which had been
performed and of the after-treatment, to an
involuntary eulogium on the beauty of the
patient, which the consequences of the disease
and its remedy tended to impair. I got a peep
at the damsel between the shoulders of a
couple of the shortest of the listeners, and
saw just above the bedclothes (which were
held up with extreme rigidity and care to
conceal the lower part of the face) a pair of
familiar black eyes. They quite thrilled through
me. The students were dismissed; and I
overheard a sweet voice ask "if zat scar —"

" Don't let it trouble you for one instant,"
said Dr. Fleam, as he left the bed-side; "it
will hardly be visible, and in a week you will
be as well—and as pretty—as ever."

I looked again. Those piercing black eyes
met mine point-blank. There was a scream,
smothered by the bedclothes—under which
the head was instantly  popped.

But that was enough. I felt convinced that
Manette was found.

About a month from that date there was
joy at No. 1, Peppermint Place. It is
November: on one side of my fireplace sit
Bevil and Manette. Old Mrs. Bevil has gradually
pushed her chair back to the window; and
bit by bit has nibbled folds of the curtain,
until she is completely hidden behind it in
that comfortable obscurity in which she alone
delights. They had assembled to hear a
lecture from me.

"Personal Vanity," I began with all the
solemnity to be invoked in the presence of a
pair of eyes, which sparkled so with joy, that