in a querulous way, all the time she was
there. But she lost all personal fear of him.
It was a duller life even than formerly, but
not so violent; more wearisome, but not so
destructive. Norah wore her fetters as
patiently as she used in old times when they
cut deeper and made scars, but were less
heavy. She changed in nothing; she glided
through life always the same pallid, timid,
silent, retiring creature; more like a slave
purchased by money than the heiress of the
great Lyndon estates.

In a dirty garret in Paris lived Mrs.
Gregory Lyndon and her husband. How
they lived, indeed, no one could have told;
not even themselves. He was a furious
gambler, and as furious a drunkard; passing
days, and nights, and weeks from home; not
jealous, or solicitous for his wife, because
profoundly indifferent to her. He would have
been thankful for any act of hers which
should have allowed him to get legal, if
shameful deliverance from her. But poor
Lucy's day of thoughtlessness had gone. A
slatternly, neglected woman, she was a
virtuous, if a wretched one; and, though she
had long ceased to love her husband, she had
both pride and early principle remaining.
None of her family knew where she was.
They had tried to trace her, but Lucy having
thrown every possible obstacle in the way,
after months of weary search, they were
forced to leave her to her self-appointed fate.
And what a fate! Drunken orgies, squalid
misery, vice, crime, starvation, brutality—
these were the matins and the vespers
of Lucy's marriage altar. She never knew
how her husband gained his money—for
all did not come from the gaming-table—
but she dared not question him. Gregory
had learnt his uncle's habit with women, and
Lucy had more than once had reason to
know that her husband's hand was hard, and
her husband's arm strong. At last, a more
than ordinarily daring outrage on the public
code of private possession, threw Gregory
into the hands of the police. False coinage
will not always ring, and false notes will
sometimes betray unskilful writing. He was
arrested as a forger, and condemned to the
galleys for life. But, before he had been
twenty-four hours in prison, the latent
malady, always near, broke out; and so
Gregory was sent to Charenton instead of to
the Bagnes,—to the hospital for the mad, not
to the stronghold of the criminal.

When Lucy heard of this, and knew that
in any case she was practically divorced from
her husband, she wrote home to her mother;
besought forgiveness and aid, and—would
not Launce go to see her? They were too
glad to be able to forgive her, and Launcelot
set off for Paris ten minutes after the
letter reached the house. In a few days,
Lucy was once more under her father's roof;
and, by the time she was thirty, not a trace
of her terrible experience was left on her.
She was handsomer than ever, as worldly, as
self-possessed, as luxurious. No one who
saw the beautiful young widow as she lived and
moved in the calm state of home, would have
imagined that she had once lived in a Parisian
garret, cooking her own food—when she
had any—but more often going without;
bruised and trampled on by a forger and
coiner; with sometimes only a ragged gown
as her sole covering; sometimes indebted
for the bare necessaries of life to the poor
charbonnier and the poorer portress—to
the chiffonnier in the room next to hers,
to the little grisette a stage lower—obliged
for dear life, to people whom she would have
passed by, now, as loftily as if her misery and
theirs had never come together. But, she
used to talk grandly of her Parisian life, and
often quoted the time "when I lived in that
bewitching Paris." Which sounded well.

A short time after Lucy's return, Colonel
Lyndon died, and Norah was left sole heiress
and proprietor. Launcelot, at her request,
went over to the Hall to advise and assist her.
She had no friends and no relatives, and she
remembered that Launcelot had once put his
arms about her and shielded her from her
father.

DOWN AMONG THE DUTCHMEN.

III.

It is Sunday among the Dutchmen—Sunday
morning fresh and clear. So fresh, that
to stand upon a bridge and look down along
the rows of houses brings floating Canaletti
reminiscences. It must be some day of
extra festivity, for from an early hour
bellmen—or whatever title professors
of those instruments rejoice in—have been
hard at work, discoursing all manner of tunes,
high up in the steeple. That excellent
barcarole in Masaniello—or the Fish'oman of
Naples, according to the latest reading—
where the fishing men make mysterious
gestures and entreat of the pescator for his life
to be silent, has been rendered innumerable
times with excellent effect. But for another
manipulator, engrossed with Life let us
Cherish in a contiguous steeple, the enjoyment
would be unmixed. Still, for them, it
must ever be a spasmodic and uneasy task;
for they must be always haunted painfully
by the idea of being tripped up by the
quarter or half-hour chime, and, like special
and parliamentary trains, have to be
unceasingly drawing up to one side to let the
regular traffic go by. The Fish'oman of
Naples was many a time and oft thus cut
short prematurely, and more than once run
into and cruelly damaged.

The streets are crowded with population,
all worship-bound, looking the very reverse
of the famous Johnsonian leg of mutton.
Unlike that joint, they are well-fed, well-
kept, well-dressed, and, for aught I know,