also enters the tower, which is a place of
favourite resort with her. This is felt to be
an awkward meeting; yet neither of the
lovers—for such in reality they both are—
has the heart to break it off. A constrained
conversation on the subject of the ruin takes
place; and, in order to see it more
completely, they both go out upon the kind of
platform which has been described, and
which overlooks the abrupt descent of the
precipice. While they are there, the shepherd,
who keeps the keys of the place, comes
in, looks hastily round, and, seeing no one,
retires—locking the door behind him. So
it happens that when Mademoiselle
Laroque and Maxime descend from the
platform at the back, and attempt to open the
door, it is found to resist all their efforts, and
it becomes apparent that they are prisoners
for the night.

It is then that all the worst suspicions of
Mademoiselle Laroque are once again
confirmed. A dread conviction comes upon her
that this apparent accident is in reality part
of a deep-laid plan, by which her honour is
to be compromised, so that her marriage
with Maxime—that marriage which she has
been taught to believe he desires from such
base and unworthy motives—shall be from
that moment inevitable. As this suspicion
forces itself upon her, the indignant girl
recedes in horror from the man who could
devise a plot so dastardly. There is a long
and painful pause; and when she next
speaks, it is in a voice whose unnatural calmness
sounds strange and almost terrible, in the
dark and noiseless theatre.

"Monsieur le Marquis de Champcey," she
says, addressing him for the first time by
that name and title, which he believed to be
concealed from her, "Monsieur le Marquis
de Champcey, y a t'il eu, avant vous,
beaucoup de lâches—dans votre famille."

Bitter and unmerited taunt. Last drops
that fill to the brim that cup of insult and of
suffering which poverty has held so long to
the lips of this high-souled gentleman.
Cruel words, that drive from her the man
who holds his life more cheaply than the fair
name of her who has thus basely injured
him.

Yes; it is his life that he is about to
risk. The long-restrained and pent-up feeling
bursts out at last; and, in impassioned
words that carry conviction with them,
Maxime owns his love, but swears that until
his means are equal to those of the proud
girl who has so wrongly judged him, no word
of that love shall cross his lips again. Then
calling her to witness, that there is but one
way by which he can disprove the imputation
which has been cast upon him—but one
way to save her reputation and his honour,
he springs upon the platform that overhangs
the precipice, and, before she can interpose
to save him, has leapt into the gulf beneath.

It is a risk—but not, as the audience
knows, a certainty—of destruction. The
trees, whose tops appear behind the ruin,
break his fall, and, though bruised and
wounded, he reaches the ground in
comparative safety.

A striking breathless scene. It is almost
the last with which we need to be occupied.
The corporal of Dragoons agrees with me,
when I hazard an opinion that after this
point the piece deteriorates sadly, and that
when it turns out, at Monsieur Laroque's
death, that his money has been fraudulently
obtained, and that it is all by a strange
coincidence the legitimate property of the
Marquis de Champcey—when I point out, I
say, that this is a termination clumsily and
hastily wrought out, the corporal of Dragoons
agrees with me at once.

I might have added—if they had not begun
to turn the gas out in the theatre and so
brought our conversation to an abrupt close
—I might have added that this slightness,
this hurry of termination, is too often a
characteristic of modern work. I might have
added that the consideration of probability
in a denouement, is a thing too often
undreamt of, and that the turning up of
convenient discoveries, just at the right moment,
is a thing contemptible in art, and hideously
untrue. When do things happen so in life?
Alas, if the legacy is to come, the lovers who
have been waiting for it, grow old before it
does—if there is a person in the way and
his removal would set all things straight—is
he the man to die? I might have added
that, according to my poor judgment all
this rises from a condition of things in which
men are thrown off their balance by a little
success, and presuming on it, cease to take
pains. They do not, in a dignified but humble
retirement, perfectionate their work for
the work's sake. They are the fashion.
They are surrounded by parasites, who,
hovering about them, with servile, buzzing
flatteries, generate in them a blinding
self-esteem, fatal, more than words can tell, to
the production of aught that is great or solid.
Their work must be done to a time that
they may strike while the iron is hot. They
sacrifice their art to a temporary splendour
of liveries and equipage—they fail to look on
money as an accident of art—a necessary
thing indeed, and one that should follow all
success, yet still but an accident attendant
on their work, and not that work's great
object.

But, leaving all that I might have said, but
did not, I have now to record for the benefit
of my friend, Mr. Bull, a truth which, though
it fills me with alarm, must yet not be
concealed from that gentleman. It is this, that
unable again to see the gross vice and
immorality of another French play, I begin to fear
that there must be something defective in my
moral and intellectual eyesight which has
hindered me from perceiving the hidden
villainy of the piece, whose sadder portions