Pale with disappointment and indignation, Kate flies at full speed down the staircase, leaving Mr. Spry emotionless and smiling on the sofa in a state of amused trepidation. 'It is very cruel!' she murmurs, with a half sob.

'A fine girl-a stunner,' the photographer says aloud. Heavens, what an eye she's got! That remark about want was really quite touching; it almost made me offer her an extra five shillings, only I know what hypocrites women are. Now that's what I call a grand creature; but she hasn't half the spirit she had a month ago. Something's tamed her, by Jove!'

The 'grand creature' gains the streets, which seem all topsy-turvy to her distorted vision; and perhaps Kate has never looked so handsome in all her life-commingled rage and vexation transforming her into a type at once furious and feminine. And it is at this identical moment, as she prepares to cross the road, muddy enough to disgust a saint, that Ernest and the Vansetti, seated in an elegant brougham, drawn by horses of indisputable value, catch sight of her on the kerbstone. Kate's eyes, for the first time since leaving Surbiton, rest upon her husband; and she thinks of her little child, who, like herself, may die of hunger.

'Good God, Nadia!' screams Ernest, bobbing behind the Vansetti's magnificent fur tippet, 'that's Kate-that's my wife!'

The Vansetti is of course gorgeous, piquante, unrivalled. She is robed in matchless sable from top to toe; a pale blue-velvet Parisian bonnet, enlivened by a small humming-bird, adorns her lovely head; and her yellow gloves fit à merveille. The sable alone, according to a London paper, cost five hundred pounds. Her dress is an ethereal pale-blue Watteau silk,

to match her bonnet. Pearl-powder, uncomfortably thick, attempts to hide the ravages of forty-seven years; her eyebrows alone are problems for the Arcade; her lips suggest an epic poem. Messalina does not admire the intensity in the strong face watching her with that mocking restless smile. Ernest is utterly frightened, and is the colour of a blanched almond; he is vaguely reminded of the terrors of the law, and thinks Kate looks as if she meant deadly mischief, standing there, in the full daylight, biting her under-lip till it bled; he sees her wipe away the blood with her handkerchief.

Ernest is clothed à ravir. An army tailor does justice to his superb form. The dandy rivals the coquette in perfumes, jewelry, fashion, and vileness. He is considerably stouter; he also is slightly rouged. His peaked beard has vanished, and a small dainty imperial moustache, well waxed and curling towards his nose, has taken its place.

Kate wonders for a moment what any man could see in such a painted old hag; but then, how can one woman judge another from the aesthetic, lofty, masculine point of view?

'Your vife!' repeats Nadia; 'dat tall shabby girl vid de greate furie on her brow? Ernest, she is dangerous; she vill vant to kill us.'

'Why don't the brute drive on?' growls Ernest, insanely seizing the check-string, shaking his fist at the back of the innocent coachman.

There is Kate, like a pale and wrathful Nemesis, staring at him on the pathway. He is so excited, he smashes a three-guinea pineapple and some bath-buns to pieces with his patent boots. A great restlessness leaps into Kate's soul; she will pursue these traitors, confront them, terrify them, perhaps who knows?-strike. She feels

possessed by those mysterious forces that assail us like whispers from the immortal gods. She is armed-she has her weapon. Why not pierce that evil breast which has never yet been wrung with pain? She longs to wreak her vengeance with savagery and scorn, even should she herself pay the penalty with her own life. It would be sweet to die, if she dragged these traitors to their doom. Feverish, weak, excited, heart-wrung, Kate feels her hour has come; she will follow that carriage, and one or the other of its occupants shall find that she, the outcast, holds life or death in her hands.

It might be madness that possessed her-she knew not. She hailed a hansom, bidding the man keep the brougham in sight, and impetuously offered him a sovereign to follow it like grim death. Every nerve is strung to the highest tension; her firm tightened lips ache with the fierce grip of her teeth; every pulse leaps with disdainful wrath; and yet Kate has the haziest notion in the world of what she ultimately means to attain. No thought arrests that insatiate desire for vengeance; she only remembers that this man, who lives in riot, luxury, and pleasure, has cast her into pitiless abject want; that he has made her life hard, mean, and bitter; that he has squandered her fortune, and cares not whether she and her child sink into the lowest abyss of degradation and despair. And Ernest, reading her thoughts, trembles; in fact, he is so completely cowed and miserable, he descends warily from the brougham and enters an hotel for some refreshment. Never, he reflects, did a crisis more keenly demand the safe adjunct of brandy to balance his nervous system.

But Kate, with that ceaseless tremor about her heart, does not perceive he has alighted, leaving

the danseuse alone in the carriage. The Vansetti shivers, tosses her head, and picks up the mangled pine-apple and the fragments of the bath-buns, and is thankful that a half-guinea lobster and some seakale have been saved from indiscriminate slaughter under the back

seat.

She is annoyed with Ernest for being so childish and timid; but it is astonishing how continuous hard drinking will tell on the finest constitution, and weaken the grandest muscle in the world.

For the first time since making his acquaintance the Vansetti sneers frostily, with that coarse venom about the curves of her beautiful mouth that is so singularly disagreeable in an ignorant mindless woman. There was no grief in this disappointment in her lover; but there was unmistakable contempt. It was with this sneer she would regard the efforts of the wretched Pylades, when Orestes triumphed, and the postprandial fight over the mutton-cutlet bones had left him with a bleeding nose and fractured shoulder; the same expression that might have gleamed in the eyes of the Roman courtesans, when the vanquished sank on the blood-stained arena, and the old sickening tale of human anguish and defeat was whispered to deaf ears and stony hearts. Ernest trembled! Her Anthony, her idol, nearly fainting at the tragic aspect of a badly-dressed young woman on a kerbstone! This was too absurd. Kate was superbly handsome, that she tacitly admitted. What she would give to have her youth again, to dance with her old barbaric fire to the dark-eyed people of her native village! It was very annoying to be constantly reminded of the manufacture of enamel. But even a Vansetti cannot escape the advances and encroachments of time; all the petulance of

a woman "unused to denial could not defeat the effects of that silent testimony to her age, when, divested of paint and powder, the cut-in lines about the mouth and brow revealed the painfully significant fact of maturity. But she laughed, notwithstanding; the yellow wig was eminently successful, her limbs were yet lithe, and she could dance like a sylph; the delicate ankles had a magic charm that affected people with rapturous admiration; her fine muscular development and visible charms surely surpassed any attractions of intellect or feeling. In any case they paid, and she was charming, and Vansetti was not likely to despise the folly of admirers who nobly swelled her coffers. If she swore like a trooper, she postured exquisitely as a 'Star of Eve;' and if she drank more than was exactly good for her, no vulgar pimples or blemishes lingered on the cuticle's fair surface; and when we add she was intensely happy, and that the great glistening eyes only lighted up at the prospect of greed and desires fulfilled as soon as imagined, it must be admitted many excellent 'failures' afflicted with sensibility and chronic worthiness must have recognised the satisfactoriness of heartless materialism.

Her house was in every respect worthy of its owner, and in many ways indescribable; statues graced a marble hall, exotics of priceless value adorned the staircases; and as she swept into her drawingroom to-day, unconscious of the tall figure gliding stealthily to her side, she heaved that sigh of placid contentment and satisfaction at her surroundings, as if sensualism overpowered her with its delightful completed perfection. Only there was Ernest, who had offended her; Ernest sneaking quietly out of the carriage as if a detective were at his heels. Well, she wearied somewhat of this magnificent youth;

there was even a sarcastic German, with ten thousand a year, she found more interesting, preferring cynicism to dipsomania, and valuable presents to the arrival of the army tailor's bills; yes, she will speak her mind very plainly to Mr. Ernest Hamilton, and turn a deaf ear to his despairing entreaties.

Thus musing, she tells the coachman to drive home. She at once rings for her maid, who removes her superb sable tippet. Vansetti then brandishes a lace handkerchief in the air, admires her fine diamond rings, and drinks off a glass of Vermouth. Princes will hurl matchless bouquets at her to-night, in her sensational character-dance. Her new shoes are also exquisitely original, having been designed by a French poet.

Vansetti has no idea she is pursued, and this time by a woman. Kate has gained admission, and is now passing quickly across the marble hall and up the first row of stairs.

'Let me look at my shoes, Adrienne,' cries Vansetti, in her pretty childish treble; and then, as her maid retires to obey her mistress, she sees Kate at her elbow.

Kate speaks very calmly-has she not learnt patience ?-but the malice of her scorn deepens to cruelty: disdain is ever strong.

'Yes, you know me. I am Mrs. Hamilton.'

'And vat for you come to me, vy you intrude in my house, by vat right you push yourself in here? Do you vish to borrow money of me? I vish you may get it. You vill go out, madame—and straight too— a leetle quicker than you did come.'

She rises to ring the bell, but Kate's strong hand is outstretched, and Kate's eyes, watchful if wild, rivet her to the spot; she takes out her dagger, she will force cries of fear from these false and venal lips. Wounds of terror at least can be

lent saint and thrice-blessed wig! Through their instrumentality alone was she not lying a bleeding corpse on the amber-coloured satin couch! She had escaped a coroner's inquest! And as the Vansetti fanned herself and swallowed her Vermouth, trying to find out the meaning of Kate's last sentence, a brutelike satisfaction that, after all, she had had the best of it all along, dawned on her mind. It was Kate who wore old garments and shabby boots; Kate, whose young life was blighted and submerged in dull gloom; Kate's money they had revelled in; and the starving destitute woman could only talk of killing. Age! Bah! She must endow a church and leave thousands to be spent in masses for her soul; and in the mean time enjoy. The only strange part of the affair was why Kate should be so poor-young, brilliant, and beautiful. But, then, who could understand these English? They clung to phantoms, and loved the solemn and believed in honour; while the facile infidelities and the unscrupulousness of deception, allied with the profits of an elevating and enrobling profession, the poetry of motion, and unquenchable mirth and insolence, were what alone paid. Vansetti felt a sincere contempt and pity for Mrs. Hamilton's misguided views of life.

But now death was to change all. As Vansetti walked to the window, trying, for the first time, to battle with a mental difficulty, her eyes alighted on her victim's helpless body, covered with a sheet, borne silently along the road by four men on a stretcher. Ernest had been knocked down by a waggon and killed during a state of semi-intoxication. So, ruined and despised, he met his doom; and the Vansetti was more angry and annoyed at the trouble and worry in

which his death might involve her than she was grieved at his loss. It seemed a fit ending to such a life that they should bring him under the roof of this woman, who had helped to slay him, and beggar him of the last remnant of sentiment, honour, or respectability.

CHAPTER XII.

AN ACCEPTED PICTURE. 'But am I not the nobler through thy love?'

LONG before Kate reached her lodgings she had repented of her impetuous encounter with oneheartless and defiled-whose subjugation of a selfish reprobate struck her as astonishing, even bewildering, in its completeness. Kate's impulses escaped her control, partly through the increasing weakness that of late had undermined her health; while the ivory paleness of her complexion, the languor of her movements, indicated symptoms of enfeebled strength that must have startled any one watching her with careful affectionate eyes; but no one appeared just now particularly interested in Mrs. Hamilton's welfare. Mary called her eccentric,' Tabitha thankless; and her father, hearing indistinct rumours of her poverty, began to think it was time to return from that prolonged honeymoon, and see what this tiresome Kate was doing, and if Ernest were still mythical and absent. But why should he be worried when life was really beginning to be pleasant, his dear departed quietly reposing in the family vault, and his second wife all that could be desired, in that she was refined, decorous, and mild? whereas the former Mrs. Grafton's culinary propensities and tastes, her indifference to her per