"Stay!" said his highness, clasping the hands of Albert and Genevieve, and joining them together; "if ever you are tempted to stray from the paths of rectitude, may the warning voice of Genevieve, Countess Stralenheim, call you back to duty and honor."

A month later and Albert Rhonge led his bride to the altar. There was another marriage, too, on that bright autumnal morning— that of Count Steinberg and Ernestine, and, with their recorded vows, a prayer went up that heaven would accept the expiation of the father's crime in the father's penitence.

A

WOMAN'S CONFLICT.

A long row of buildings, lifting their fair architectural proportions toward the sky, amid the din and discord of the metropolis center. The broad pavement and broader street, separating the lofty columns, sounded to the tread of impatient footsteps, and thundered and rattled as carriages and equestrians pressed onward.

The flash of bright coloring, the glitter of gold and precious stones, the sheen of silken drapery, and the last shimmer of the setting sun, quivering through the domes and cornices, throwing a glorified light over the throng and aisle.

Within a building, with walls of cold gray stone, the loftiest on that marbled and stoneloomed street, up three flights of stairs, a little wearisome jerk at each succeeding step, two tired feet had mounted that very morning. Through the rich autumn day two pale hands kept nervously turning at heavy, unfinished garments, or plying the needle with swift nervous motion. A white, troubled face bowed over her tedious labor; a proud soul battled

with itself, and fiercely denunciated its unsanctified destiny, struggled to crush its vain rebelings, and patiently, aye, contentedly, work out her destiny-her woman's lot.

The day was done; the ill-requited labor folded carefully away, still the contest waged on in that soul's arcana, a fierce, hard battle, for the opposite forces were each fully equipped, and each struggling to the death for victory, and Fate, or is it Providence, must decide the final issue.

Poverty and genius! of all enemies on earth the most unrelenting; no truce; no armistice between them, only to conquer or be conquered -only to live triumphant, or else to die.

Only a woman! Yet in her soul concentrated conceptions of beauty and eloquence, such as if wrought into statues of marble, would make a man immortal; but she, a woman, must crush them or starve. Three years of unremitted, almost unrequited labor, had served to exhaust much of physical strength; but the fire of her genius burned with unconsumed force, her love for art raising her into a realm so fair, that her soul lived apart from the annoyances of her common life.

There had been days and months when she dreamed of a future, when her hand should be free to wield the chisel or the brush, when she had deemed the fulfilment of her earnest purpose possible, had even thought that her desire to create, brought her into closer, holier sympathy with the infinite God, who gave to her soul its godlike power, and to her hand its

graceful skill. But the years of her life fleeted by, she wielding the one weapon that the world bequeaths to delicate womanhood, with which to battle against the necessities which existence demands, and still the cry surged up from her outer life, 66 'Bread, bread!" Was this, and nothing more, the design of her being? the Alpha and Omega of life? If so, what waste of power-what lavish expenditure of talent!

Yet who shall say that the germs crushed and hidden beneath the rubbish and refuse of the garden, may not at last burst forth into quicker and larger growth, and expand into finer and richer bloom than that which is nurtured with tender care. Shall we not wait for the harvest, the sickle and the scythe?

So, while the day dimmed into twilight, in the third year of her servitude and twentythird of her life, the combat ceased in the soul of Madeline Mozier, and genius acknowledged the defeat. It might have been from some advantage in the battle, but poverty gained the victory, and silenced for a time the weapons of its foe, Genius. Genius! that fatal gift, sighed as she submitted to her fate. She must go on weaving the same dreary pattern into the warp and woof of her destiny, ceasing to hope, drawing her meager existence from endless buttonholes and seams. Perhaps her fate centered in her own organization, perhaps in her surrounding circumstances-in her struggling womanhood, and perhaps, after all, it is but another name for Providence; better, perhaps, to have written, Providence; but she mused in a dreary sort of way, not of Providence, but of Fate!

She looked out upon the throng of human beings, shifting like the waves of the restless sea, and listened to the perpetual roar, flashing up through the dim ether.

She knew that beyond the tall spires the horison lay, purple and amber-hued; she knew that the hills in the back-ground lay well-defined, as once were the purposes of her own life; she thought how the shades would gather down and fold them in obscurity like that in which she wrested out her years; she longed for one hour of perfect solitude for thought. She remembered the river's shore, as seen once in the long ago, glowing, as if beneath the foam there heaved a sheet of molten gold. Through the meager space that bound her wearied vision, she heard the strange, mysterious language of the wind and waves, telling of the limitless realm of repose in the far beyond. She listened to the voices, seething and surging through her soul, and the river loomed before her, a golden causeway, bridging the narrow space separating her weary life from the infinite world of souls, in which all impossibilities become possibilities, and, in thinking thus, forgot all that she was, and, for a moment, all that she might be. From thence she must know that the conceptions of beauty, confined to her own fettered soul, must become, in the great thereafter, ennobling realities.

If hands of clay could fashion from the soulless marble such shapes of beauty perpetual, when the soul should step forth from its mechanism would it not still retain its creative faculties, and, instead of marble, sculptured for the