“And it is on his own merits you praise him?

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Yes, that, and because he gave me a lift when I was starting in the management of the paper. I don't mind telling you that he took stock in my name, so I could control the leading interest. Oh, yes, the Index stands by David Lane, every time."

The editor discoursed further of his patron, touched lightly on the business matters with which he occupied himself now that he was out of public life, and finally of Mrs. Varemberg. Barclay had felt, with inward agitation, that this topic was approaching.

"Here is a man," he had reflected, "who, with the least encouragement in the world, will speak freely of her. It is his business to be a repository of information, and he will know all that has been said and all that can be known about her."

Up to this time he had learned no more of her affairs than he knew on the first day of his arrival; he had asked no one about her, sought no information, but, on the contrary, scrupulously refrained from it. He shrank from discussing her sorrows with an outsider almost as a species of desecration, and how much more so when it promised but to make a certainty of the vague, disagreeable imputations she had cast upon herself! His way of thinking had not changed, but now, as in a sort of spell, he sat and listened to the comments of this indifferent person, who nonchalantly volunteered them without a word of invitation from himself, and even against an effort he made to turn the conversation aside.

"His daughter, Mrs. Varemberg, is a mighty fine woman, a lovely woman; she is one that was born to shine," said Ives Wilson. "It's a pity all this trouble of hers seems to keep her from taking the place that rightfully belongs to her."

It

reluctance of the listener was turned to an eager thirst for enlightenment. proved to be no tale of cynical heartlessness he was called upon to hear, but one that had imposed a tone of sympathy and respect even upon the careless tongue of public gossip.

"Her husband was one of the greatest villains unhung," said Ives Wilson. "Lane told me a little about it, at the time, but it was naturally a subject on which he would n't want to talk much." "And Varemberg treated her badly?" "He did pretty much everything but kill her outright."

"That polished, entertaining Varemberg?" muttered Barclay, in wonderment; but the other went on, not heeding him.

"He had such a devilish disposition as you would n't find in a million times. He had made a very plausible show in the beginning, it seems, but he soon dropped that, and went from bad to worse, till there was no living with him." “I had a vague impression, from some source, that - that the difficulty was of a financial sort."

'Varemberg never had any money to speak of; he was tangled up in every direction, and relied upon what he got with her to straighten him out a little. When he had made away with that, he took to reckless courses that got him into trouble, - put other people's signatures to paper, and that sort of thing, and finally had to leave his country for his country's good. He dropped out of sight entirely, and at one time they thought he was dead; but he turns up again every once in a while, for their sins, and whenever they hear of him it is in some new deviltry."

"He does not dare come here?" And the questioner's eye flashed fire.

66

Oh, no, that would be a little too brazen; he would hardly try that, I think, where she is so well protected. Added to which, he has nothing to gain

"It was not she who left him, then? "Very far from it. As I have said, he ran away; he left her behind him, the prey of his angry creditors, in a gloomy old rookery of a château. She She was moping herself to death, when her father came and took her away. She was ashamed of her situation, and tried to conceal it, and it was more by accident than her own disclosure that it got out. I happened to see her when she first got home; you would hardly have expected her to live a month."

"I suppose there are divorce proceedings pending?" threw out Paul Barclay in a nonchalant way.

In the course of this talk, Ives Wilson asked Barclay questions, in a casual way, on a variety of subjects, to which replies were as easily returned. All was grist that came to the journalistic mill, and most of this appeared in next day's Index, in the form of the conventional "interview." It was meant to be, and no doubt was, a considerable tribute to Barclay's importance. It was written in the form of question and answer. He was represented as a world-wide travel er and Eastern capitalist, temporarily sojourning at the Telson House. His views of Keewaydin and the State were given. He was made to speak in a very eulogistic way of Keewaydin, and to foresee a grand future for it. And finally this thrown in quite gratuitously he was said to favor the Index's candidate for governor.

Barclay next brought up the name of

Mrs. Varemberg before his relatives the Thornbrooks, and led them, as discreetly as possible, to speak of her. With beating heart he listened to what they could recall of her history. They spoke in a sedate and measured way, with the cool pulses of their age, and their feeling, as far as they understood the case, was wholly in her favor.

It happened that there came in, the same evening, still another person, who added emphatic testimony of the same kind. This was Mrs. Miltimore, the principal of the seat of learning locally esteemed of quite an august character, the Keewaydin Female Institute. Old Mr. Thornbrook, it appeared, was the .president of its board of trustees.

"Florence Varemberg, or Florence Lane," said this lady, turning to Barclay, when she learned the object of his interest, with a certain stiff manner of her calling," was our favorite pupil and a great credit to us, in her time. She was a lovely character, as lovely in mind as in person; and no matter what may happen, I never have believed, and never shall believe, anything ill of her."

"The separation, then, is not to be regarded as her own fault?"

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Her own fault?

If there ever was a cruelly wronged woman in the world, it is Florence Varemberg."

With how different a feeling did Barclay now hasten back to the object of these inquiries! How callow and besotted must he be, how prone to bad motives himself, since he was so ready to credit them in others! He had been all but persuaded of the truth of her assumed venality and heartlessness. He looked at her with new eyes, but carefully refrained from any change in his manner that should betray to her the new light of which he was in possession.

They made two or three brief excursions together, about the town and environs. Mrs. Varemberg drove him in

her own handsome, quiet conveyance, assuming a duty of hospitality.

"You are the stranger within our gates," said she, "and, in my father's absence, I must see that you are not neglected. You must be shown the points of view on which Keewaydin rests her lofty preeminence."

She had a pair of large, well-broken horses, christened Castor and Pollux, in whom she took a friendly interest, as she incidentally seemed to do in pets. of almost any kind. Castor and Pollux were fortunate enough to have a personal visit from her sometimes in their stable, and she had them brought to her nearly every day, and daintily fed them on lumps of sugar, from the porch, with her own hand.

She drove Barclay first to a little park, or grassy esplanade, on the margin of the more fashionable residence part of the town, with steep, neatly turfed bank extending down to the water's edge. It afforded a most charming prospect, with a great sense of openness and light, over the wide expanse of Lake Michigan. Keewaydin was seen, hence, to spread out thickly along the central shore of a great bay, curved like a not too tautly bent bow. There were the two long breakwater piers, with their small light-houses on the ends. High on the bluff, far to the northward, was a larger light-house, and behind it the great green slope of a reservoir, which resembled the glacis of some fortification. Southward, the most prominent feature, amid thick-clustering roofs, was the shining tin spires of the Polish church of St. Stanislaus. Then, details fading into indefiniteness, and long lines of black smoke drifting seaward from the blast-furnaces of the suburb of Bay View.

"It is magnificent, magnificent!" pronounced the young man, drawing a deep breath of satisfaction at the sight. "Here is a place to exclaim, like the Greeks of old Xenophon, when they

came to the sea again, Thalatta! tha latta!' It is very like the sea, your lake."

"But more cruel and treacherous, somehow; we live by it, but never seem to get very well acquainted with it. A man could be chilled to death, in its cold waters, even in midsummer."

"Are you not going to astonish me with some statements about the place where we now stand having lately been a howling wilderness? I have been led to suppose that was the Western custom, and I miss it."

"The place where we now stand was all simple bluff, and forest, and tamarack swamp, say thirty or forty years ago. A hardy French trapper, of the voyageur kind, came along and built a block-house here, to trade peltries with the Indians, and behold Keewaydin as it stands!"

And he married the Indian princess, of course, the last of her race. Where do I get a vague impression of that

kind?"

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Why, no, the engagement must have been broken off. Princess Pearl Feath er made a very unromantic figure about the streets of Keewaydin, in her last days; she took to drink, in fact, and, it seems to me, died in the county poorhouse."

"Alas, our fond illusions! But I don't quite believe this is real, you know,” he went on; "it may give us the slip. To one accustomed to the Eastern way, a city like this, solidly built as it appears, is suspiciously like Jonah's gourd. At the East it takes the procession a couple of hundred years to pass a given point, as it were, and then, as you might say, it does n't reach it."

"Will you believe there were once such fierce jealousies between the different divisions of the town that the West Side cut down the only bridge uniting it with the East Side, and planted a cannon to prevent its being rebuilt?" "I will try and do so, for this once,

But now the thriving city stretched for long miles on either side of its petty dividing stream, which seemed a mere canal. The once envious West Side climbed, in long lines of compact streets, to a considerable rising ground. Our friends mounted thither, and looked back from those heights at the spires of the section they had left, the dome of the city hall, with its figure, most prominent among them, cut out in a strongly serrated edge against the lake, which gleamed behind them like a strip of silOn their return, they came to the city hall, set in its quiet, grassy square. "Here is our Plaza, - Place d'Armes, Piazza, the focus of the civic life of a people with a mighty past of thirtyfive years," said Mrs. Varemberg, in lively travesty of this kind of description as applied to the picturesque foreign market-places.

ver.

store-keepers bustle across it to and from their dinners in the middle of the day. What would you have worthier, more thoroughly American, than that?"

"Are we to decide that an interest in tradition is a form of entertainment entirely gone out, and to look for something else to take the place of it? Perhaps something in the way of ornamental effects, buildings, and so on, finer than any that have yet been seen, will ultimately be substituted. The worst of it is that we not only have no traditions, but are not even in process of forming them. Day after day passes over this grassy square, and what does it add, in that respect? Not an iota, not a hair's breadth, of romance. If there were only some weird, remarkable story, even of modern date, hanging about, that would be something to be thankful for."

"A weird, remarkable story hanging about an American city hall? That would be rather too much to expect."

"Come, there might be a worse scene for something romantic even than this," maintained Barclay. Their conveyance was now proceeding very slowly. "That Mexican-looking cathedral, over there, is n't so bad, as an accessory, and trees and shrubbery are always good; and then the city hall itself has its good points, first among which I am inclined to put the Golden Justice, up there on her dome. Do you know, I have taken quite a fancy to the Golden Justice."

around Pearl Feather. It was chiefly a committee of ladies, with Mrs. Rantoul, our leading strong-minded agitator, at their head. They thought it would be an additional step towards vindicating the true position of woman, to have a feminine statue. Bear in mind, also, that there was a South Side party, that wanted no statue at all, because it could not be well seen from that part of the town; and lastly, a party of economy, that begrudged the expense." "I begin to see," said Barclay.

"Oh, no; you may think so, but you don't half begin to see yet. The question of nationality came up in connection with the choice of the sculptor, or designer, of the figure, and then of those who were to have the contracts for cast

They had come to a stand-still for a few moments, and now drove on again.

"The Golden Justice," she began, "was a prolific source of discord in its early stages. It was like the wooden horse of Troy. Dissensions commenced over her that have scarcely died out even yet."

"And how could that have been?" "The contest in the first place was as to what the subject of the statue should be. The early pioneer, the French trapper, was proposed. With his rifle and hatchet and his costume of fringed deer-skin, you see, he would have done very well."

residence of these persons and the relative advantage to be gained by the different sections were next considered. The South Side would have had the casting sent abroad, to be done at Munich, because it had no proper foundry for the work, itself; but the West Side had one, and secured it. You must get my father to tell you about the effect in the elections, and the like."

"It is more like the history of a Bellona, goddess of strife, than of a peaceful Justice."

"The Justice was a compromise. There are law-courts in the building, so it is appropriate. And it is conventional and safe. Just then a young sculptor

visit.

"But other pioneers had claims also. The question of race came up, and it was held, by zealous partisans of each, that the first German, Irish, and purely American pioneers had as good a right to the place as he. Still another party supported Pearl Feather."

"Why, I was divination itself!" protested Barclay.

The narrator smiled, indulgently. "This party threw a romantic light

"Schwartzmann? I remember him very well. I have been at his studio in the Rue d'Enfer. He has done some first-rate work."

"Well, he did this. He was looked upon as a product of home manufacture, and got the order. My father had helped him to go abroad and prosecute his studies, and out of gratitude he want