little accommodation; a tiny little bit of something at three months at, oh! so moderate a price. I'll renew, mum, I'll always renew for you. Don't you want some pretty article of jewellery to set off that charming little figure with? Say the word. Old Ephy's always ready to do business with you, and bears no malice for any mistakes made."

She laughed scornfully,-was it at the compliment or at the offer?— but she bit her lips and turned her head away. She had just then plenty of money at the banker's.

"Not to-day," she said; "don't tempt me, you wicked old man. and fetch me the paper, and let me go."

Go

"A little bracelet now, just a fifty-pun'-note to buy sweet scents with," the Rasper persuasively continued, and leering at her like a wornout satyr in whom avarice had extinguished desire. "Say the word, pretty Mrs. Armytage. Say the word. Look here, and here, mum."

He had been pottering about since the conversation commenced, and, piece by piece, had brought out from his iron safe a quantity of flat, oval morocco cases. He opened them with seeming carelessness, keeping her in conversation meanwhile. She cast her eyes-she could not help it-on the glittering gems as they lay in their nests of white satin. There were massive bracelets and tiny trinkets of gold filagree; there were big drop ear-rings of pearl; there were necklaces of emerald and sapphire; there were rivières of diamonds, serpents of diamonds, lockets studded with diamonds, Lilliputian watches bristling with brilliants; there were pencil-cases with amethyst tops, and even snuff-boxes and bonbonnières of gold and mosaic and enamel; there were brooches, and chatelaines of dull, heavy-looking, red gold, all chased and bossed and graven; and there were legions of rings of every shape, of every size, that gleamed and glistened with a fascinating shimmer from among the dingy old papers on the kitchen-table, like the eyes of so many wild-beasts crouching in their lair and waiting for their prey.

"Look at them," cried Ephraim Tigg, his own old eyes sparkling as he greedily contemplated all this treasure; "look at the pooty things! Ain't they better than all the meat and drink and fine clothes in the world? They don't wear out, bless them. Think of the pretty things they'll purchase. These real pearls will buy coronets with sham ones round them. These diamonds will bring the brightest eyes in England down to the poor old beggarman's kitchen. They'll buy houses and lands, and honours and friends. When I die," quoth Ephraim Tigg, "I should like to be buried in di'monds."

Mrs. Armytage gazed but for a minute or so. She resolutely closed her eyes and clenched her hands, and once more entreated Mr. Tigg to do her bidding. With many leers and whinings, and much expatiating on the beauty and costliness of his wares-in truth, they were superbthe Rasper at length consented to totter out of the room. With her eyes still closed, the woman heard him clumping up-stairs with his

crutch-sticks; then, a lambent flame in her face, and presaging evil, she started up.

She, and the jewels, and her Impulse were together. She hung over the table; she touched and fondled the gems; she tried now one bracelet and now another on her arm. Her fingers fluttered among the rings, and had a pretty palsy. She cursed because there was no looking-glass. She clutched at necklaces. She wounded her hands with the pins of brooches. Oh, but to have one of them! "Take one," said Impulse. "Take one, Mrs. Armytage," cried twenty thousand little fiends nestling in her golden curls. She felt sick and dizzy. Her breath came short and hot. Her heart leapt up to the bars of its cage, and her busy fingers still went wandering, and wandering, and wandering among the perilous stuff.

"What can a poor little woman do with a parasol ?" she muttered bitterly. "I can't strangle him with a cambric pocket-handkerchief. Upon my word, if I were a man, I'd brain him with one of his own crutches, and force my way out of the house with all these things."

Just at this moment her Impulse whispered, "Look there-look at that book, Mrs. Armytage; that's safe enough." In her agitation, rearranging a necklace in its case, she had disturbed and well-nigh thrown to the ground a portly folio volume. She knew it well. It was Ephraim Tigg's cheque-book. How many times had she seen and gloated over it! No longitudinal pamphlet of single cheques sufficed for the extended banking transactions of the Rasper. There were at least twenty on each page of the folio volume. Mrs. Armytage looked upon them, and, in her mind's eye, filled up the blanks between the graven forms with sums and with signatures. But the writing she pictured to herself all seemed to be in red ink. Some two or three cheques had already been cut from the page that lay open before her. The cheques were on white paper; the cuttings on the page looked by no means conspicuous. Would the abstraction of one, one little cheque only, be missed? No longer twenty thousand minor fiends among her curls, but the very Devil himself cried, "Take it, woman! be bold, and take it!"

A sharp penknife lay invitingly near, when just the tiniest creak in the world of the kitchen-door alarmed her. It had been left half open. She looked up, and saw Ephraim Tigg of Stockwell, the Rasper, through the aperture, leaning on his two crutch-sticks and watching her.

She caught his eye at once, and he hobbled in. "Aha!" he said cunningly, "we have been travelling on Tom Tiddler's ground I see. Pretty travelling, pretty travelling, isn't it?"

She was confused, and dropped her veil, and yet in her inmost heart was as thankful as one so fallen as she was could be, that for once she had not obeyed the promptings of that Impulse of hers. Ephraim Tigg swept in a moment the table with his hungry eye. He saw that nothing was missing-nor gem nor cheque.

There was one loose draft, however, and that he had brought with

him. It was similar in form to those in his book. It was much crumpled, as though it had passed through many hands. Was there not a big black word branded or stamped across its face-a word that began with F? The draft was for four hundred pounds, and bore in the usual place of signature his own name, Ephraim Tigg, with his own name, or something very like it, appended thereto. With never a word he handed it to Mrs. Armytage, who, in equal silence, tore the document into minute fragments, and thrust them into her porte-monnaie. She made the usurer a low curtsey, laughed her little silver laugh, and was her own old charming self again.

Quitte pour cette fois," she murmured between her shining teeth; "but it has cost me a hundred pounds."

The Rasper let her go, and when her skirts had ceased to rustle in his hearing, sate down, and nursed one of his bandaged legs.

"Not this time, but the next," he said, with a cunning smile. "Not this time, but the next she surely will. The bird must be caught; the pretty little song-bird must be caged and fed on Old Bailey grunsel."

Mrs. Armytage was unusually grave and meditative until the brougham had brought her to the Middlesex side of Westminster Bridge. She leant her cheek on her hand, and through her clustering curls looked wistfully at the passing crowds who sped about their several concernments, pure and honest ones mainly, it is to be hoped, not errands of sin and death. She passed a girls' charity-school, and wondered to see how white the children's caps and pinners and sleeves were; how smooth and rosy their faces. "I could do without diamonds if I were a charitygirl," she thought. At the corner of the New Cut there was, as usual, the great flaunting ragged crowd reeking of fried fish and vitriol. "Is there any one among those wretches wickeder or more miserable than I am?" Mrs. Armytage asked herself. It was late in the bright May afternoon, the sun danced on the river, which the cloudless sky made blue against its will, hiding all the mud and the corruption beneath. She saw the myriad panes in the Parliament House all twinkling in golden sparkles; the sharp crocketed pinnacles piercing the clear azure; the long purple shadow that the great tower cast upon the flood. She brightened up herself now, perhaps in compliment to the Houses of Lords and Commons, and by the time her brougham had entered Birdcage Walk was quite radiant, and had bowed, smiled, shaken her ringlets, and waved her finger-tips to at least a score of fashionable acquaintances.

She was still a bird of passage, and had no house in London; but for the present was staying, not in an hotel, but in grand furnished lodgings close to Albert Gate, Knightsbridge. She dismissed the brougham at the door, and bade the driver go to the stables and tell them to send round the horses. In a quarter of an hour or so came a mounted groom, with a cockade in his hat,-had not her late husband

military rank?-leading her own saddle-horse, an exquisitely formed and satin-skinned chesnut. And forth came Mrs. Armytage, in the most graceful of riding-habits and the tightest-fitting of riding-trousers, and a little Spanish hat with a white feather swaling in it. The Spanish hat was a novelty in 1851. The great Sombrero and pork-pie revolution had not yet taken place. Reine, her faithful chambermaid, had dressed her. "She is perfect," Reine exclaimed, as she stood at the door, and in unfeigned admiration saw her mistress assisted into her saddle :-she scarcely seemed to touch the outstretched palm of the groom-and giving her horse a light touch of the whip on the flank, caused him to curvet and paw his way up the street.

"Yes," soliloquised Mademoiselle Reine, "she is perfect. She can do the haute école to a marvel. She would be a treasure at Franconi's. Elle y ira un jour, peut-être. She is not a bad mistress, and never looks to see what there is between the pear and the cheese. Mais, quelle drôlesse !” And Mademoiselle Reine, shrugging her shoulders, shut the door.

Mrs. Armytage passed some hundreds of acquaintances in the park. Amazons and cavaliers in the ride; guardsmen and dandies lounging at the rails. She patronised them all. She puzzled the men; she was the femme libre, but allowed no liberties. No one could say any thing against her, and yet every body had an innate conviction that she did not belong to the category of the immaculate. The Southbank, who was in great force in the Park that afternoon, hated Mrs. Armytage even worse than she did Miss Salusbury. "She's neither flesh nor fowl, nor good red-herring," was the disparaging remark of the plain-spoken Southbank. The more cynical among the dandies said, that when she had a fixed residence in town, her house was one where you played at being well-behaved, and made believe to be proper. But every body liked Mrs. Armytage's little dinners and card-parties, her dry Sillery, her sparkling Burgundy, and her conversation.

As she cantered homewards, she caught sight of Captain William Goldthorpe, leaning over the rails. He was as splendid as the sartor, sutor, shirt-maker, and jeweller's art could make him; but his moustache hung down, his eyelids drooped, and he looked on the whole a very dejected dragoon indeed. She reined in her horse, and looked at him long and earnestly.

"Poor Willy Goldthope," she said, "to be so young and good-looking, and to have so rich a papa, and yet to be in such dreadful difficulties."

The dragoon recognised her, and raised his hat.

"Just like his own fair curls," thought the widow; "yes, Willy is very like Hugh. Poor Hugh!"

And so she rode through Albert Gate.

CHAPTER XV.

QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES?

THEY had brought him away from Hoogendracht, and made a gardechiourme-a keeper of gaol-birds-of him. He was not master of his own actions. He was in the hands of Fate; and Fate, through the intermediary of the Maritime Prefect of the department of the Bouches-duScampre, had brought him to Belleriport-upon-the-Sea, and made a gaoler of him.

The place was not one that was much coveted, although it entailed the wearing of a military uniform, even by people ordinarily so hungry for office, and so fond of wearing uniform, as are the French. An old soldier is glad enough to get a place as a gamekeeper or a garde-champêtre, or to slumber and snarl in the porter's lodge in some public establishment. He will not object to a place in the custom-house, or at the Octroi barriers in Paris. He will accept even at a pinch the appointment of porte clefs or guardian in a Parisian prison, or in a maison centrale. But he shuns the chiourme. An ineffaceable infamy attaches to all that is connected with the galleys. The gardes-chiourme are looked upon as cousinsgerman to the hangman. Although the convicts have been transferred to dry land, and (ten years since) were lodged in the Belleriport barracks, instead of being chained to the oar in monstrous bi-remes and tri-remes; the duties of their task-masters were still analogous to those which they fulfilled in the days when the galley-master walked backwards and forwards, from stem to stern, along the plank between the lines of rowers, and, with threats and execrations, let fall his lash on the shoulders of the slaves who faltered at the oar.

The gendarmes are accustomed to handle malefactors; but they shrink from the chiourme. They conduct the convicts to its gates, and give them over to their keepers, but there their office ends. Were they to accept the detestable functions attached to the place itself, their yellow belts would be tarnished, their moustaches would wax limp, and their jack-boots dull; and the glory of their cocked-hats would be diminished. For there is no greater error than to suppose that a gendarme occupies a humiliatingly inferior position in the military hierarchy of France. The gendarmerie is a service d'élite. No rude boys dare deride him as they do the humble "Bobby" in England. They fear and respect him, nay, even admire his imposing dress and resplendent accoutrements. He is favoured by the municipal authorities, and frequently deferred to,--not ordered hither and thither like a dog or an English policeman. I have heard a private in this force called "Monsieur le gendarme" by a shopkeeper.

So he had been brought from the peaceful Flemish convent,-from innocent labours, from the calm abode where, if the evil passions of men