on his face or figure, of farewell salutation.

CHAPTER XX.

THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

"SLIGHTLY ad rem, our friend the duke," observed the Directeur Gérant, packing his legs into the brougham," ad rem indeed, in each sense of the word. I apprehend that he does not divide time astronomically, but lucratively. Instead of days, and hours, and minutes, he reckons by speculations, and interviews, and francs."

"He is hardly a specimen of ducal courtesy," said Guy.

"Rather is, I should say," replied the other. "It is only in the very highest and the very lowest ranks that you find people who consider themselves absolved from all obligations of courtesy. I should not say consider, for they do not. It does not occur to them. The boor is a boor because he knows no better. The duke is a boor, because he is thinking of something else."

"The usages of society must be a check to this absence of mind."

"So they are in society. But then you see that Forçada was not in society-but in his office. In fact, he rarely wastes the time demanded by society. It bores him. If you met him anywhere-at court, for instance, you would see him not out of place as a courtier. But then he would not be at court, unless he wanted something of the Sovereign."

"What could he want of any sovereign?" said Guy. "He wants to be a sovereign himself, I think, a king of finance."

"Quite true," said the other; "but still he has his human weaknesses, like the rest of us. He has a very strong desire to be made a Prince of the Empire. To forward that little intrigue he would be very

assiduous at any court-Imperial, grand-ducal, or anything else. I do not think he would hesitate to throw away a large sum of money on that errand. But then, after all, he probably thinks that Monsieur le Prince would have a more commanding financial position than Monsieur le Duc-Prince of the Empire,

you understand. Italian princes are only the second titles of dukes."

"How is that?"

"I think because dukes were originally territorial, and princes personal, dignities. The little independent principalities in France, Orange for instance, or Joinville, were nothing in comparison to the old dukedoms Bretagne, Burgundy, Normandy."

"We are apt to forget that in England," said Guy, "and yet all the English dukes are styled high and mighty princes."

"Yes, that is so," was the answer: "and now to return to ourselves. You dine with me today, of course, and I have a box at the opera for to-night."

"You are very kind," said Guy; "but my time is very short."

"A mere matter of business, you know; I should never be pardoned by my board if I allowed Meester Plomville, as they will call you, to go away without showing our hospitality. Such attentions form a regular part of modern business; and there is a special attribution of funds for the purpose, in our case. So that if you do not come you will condemn me to lose a little banquet. Don't be so hard on me. A little dinner, an hour at the opera, a cup of such tea-I don't boast, butas no one else can give you, and then you may sleep the sleep of the virtuous, or any other sleep you like."

"Well," said Guy, "I feel hardly up to a third night's travelling."

"It would be simply an act of

criminality. Now, can you look in at the bank say at a quarter to six? Leave the rest to me, and I will set you down at the Louvre, which, no doubt, will be your first lion. Don't forget the Palais Royal, though its glory is departed. Look in at the Madeleine. But you will be more pleased with poking and pottering about as fancy guides, than with being drilled according to Murray. Here we are. Across that court. Inside that door. The great staircase is to the right. Au revoir"-and off whisked the little brougham.

It is not the purpose of these pages to invade the province of the handbooks, or to describe the Paris of 1851-a Paris now no longer existing. The Gallery of Apollo struck Guy with the conviction that, after all, there must have been a certain element of grandeur in the mind of Louis le Grand. In the collection of priceless works of art the only drawback to his enjoyment was the sense of hurry or bewilderment produced by the feeling that there were so many pictures to look at, an impression which is the natural result of the display of pictures in a long, unbroken gallery, or, still more, in a large and thickly-hung room. How long he stood before the Saint Catherine he did not distinctly know, for he found himself waking up as from a dream, after his eyes had almost lost their power of vision from fixity of gaze. Then he remembered that the picture was by Raphael, and that it could not therefore be a portrait of Philippa.

He strolled round the Palais Royal with a feeling of disappointment. Endless watch-sellers' or jewellers' shops, attire outré in its height of fashion, even print shops, crowded with the invariable simper of French nudity (for Gerome was not then, nor Doré), failed to detain

him long. Then he turned into the Madeleine.

"I suppose," said he to his new acquaintance "on rejoining him at the appointed hour, "that my taste is unformed. Of course the Madeleine is superb-but I was disappointed."

"I am delighted to hear it. Between ourselves it is eminently roturier. No one who can understand Nôtre Dame, or St. Denis, or finer still, St. Ouen, can feel at home in the Madeleine."

"What is thought of the painting on the apse?

It is according. You see that what was intended for an historic painting was finished as a political demonstration, a sort of Domine Salvum fac Ludovicum Philippum in very large letters."

"And not letters of gold."

Decidedly not."

"Do you know," said Guy, "I hardly like to use the expression,

but it seemed to me the most snobbish thing I ever saw in a fine building. The long line of kings, the shadowy background, the towering form of the old Bretagne saint, Hoel, I suppose, looming through the mist, and then in the centre, overpowering in size, glaring in colour, that smirking, cunning, vulgar face."

"It is true; but what will you? Besides, is there not justice in the gibbeting of the heir of Egalité (I don't say his son, for I think there was no actual relationship) with a vulgar face?"

"Do you think the story of Maria Stella is true?"

66

'Every one you ask will know for certain, one way or the other," said the Directeur Gérant. “I do not; but I have read Lavater, and I have read the history of France. If Louis Philippe, by the grace of the mob and the result of longmeditated treason, King of the French, was the son of Philippe,

called Egalité, Duke of Orleans, we may burn those authorities." "Certainly the Bourbon type is entirely obscured," said Guy.

"Obscured!" said the other. "You don't obscure that which does not exist. But the moral evidence is yet clearer. The citizen king had not the vices of the Bourbons. He had his own, of course, such as they were, but not theirs. And, do you know, I think there is nothing so certainly ineradicable as a good, old, long-established, well-known family vice."

The Directeur proposed a drive to the Bois while the dinner was preparing. With light hand and caustic touch he indicated many of the notabilities of the hour, as they returned along the Boulevard.

"Is not that very pretty woman beckoning to you?" said Guy.

"Pardon," said his companion with his hand on the check-string, "thank you. You think her pretty?" and he alighted.

He exchanged a few words with a very well-dressed little woman of very lively manner, who spoke to him with much earnestness. Then he raised his hat and re-entered the carriage.

"You think her pretty?" repeated he.

"Indeed I do. So bright and sparkling, and such a toilette.'

"It is a matter of taste," said the other; "of course it is not for me to gainsay your opinion. I am glad of the opportunity of reminding her of the necessity of sacrificing every scruple to the one vital point of having the water poured on the tea while in a state of actual ebullition. What turns coffee into poison is essential for tea. A spirit lamp poisons the room; if you scent the spirit it is worse.

The case involves a great difficulty in the summer. Now, I hope you have an appetite for the Bisque à l'ecrivisse."

No

The wonderful little dinner in one of those boxes-for they are literally no more-looking out on the Boulevard, was enlivened by the Attic salt of the Directeur. man could be more charming when he chose, and now he did choose. He seemed to have been acquainted with everybody, to have gone everywhere, to know everything. If there was a defect in his conversation it lay in a certain tentative and undecided turn-a feeling the pulse of his companion before expressing any decided views on any subject, and then generally a full adhesion to the line of thought indicated as that taken by the mind of Guy. Sometimes he would appear to oppose diametrically what his companion advanced, but, if so, it was only to twine and glide round, like a river in a wide plain, and to conclude with some keenly touched sympathy. After a long conversation on Paris, and things and people Parisian, some reference was made to Plumville.

"You have been long there? I need hardly ask."

"No," said Guy, "why not?" "Because you have not yet assumed that most respectable and slightly annoying uniform of thought which the excellent Mr. MacAndrew contrives to impose on most of those who come under his very unselfish influence," said the Directeur.

"You have been in Blackshire? at Plumville Works?"

"I have passed through, some time ago," was the reply. "I daresay things are much altered since then. Is that immortal chimney still defying God and man?"

"There is a chimney three hundred and fifty feet high," said Guy. "It throws a train of vapour nine miles long."

"It is a wonder," said the other, "that such chimneys are not introduced into cities. One would ven

I have

tilate a whole street. thought of starting a company for the abolition of smoke nuisance, only the chimney doctors would conspire to poison me. But there are no residences near your chimney-I think.”

"There is the Hall," said Guy, "but the train of smoke always goes far beyond and above the park."

"Ah," said the other, "fancy building a Hall where there is not a decent habitation within five miles."

"Rather less than that," said Guy. "There is Silkotes, and there is the Lodge."

"The porter's lodge?'

seems to have no more dominion over them. I believe, as a practice, they don't die. In fact, the vulgar error as to a cat having nine lives arises exclusively from the misapprehension of the kind of cat referred to. Of course it is that which is denominated as old cat. I am afraid you don't like the Sillery."

Is it the heat, or the variety of viands, or the choice of wines, or how is it, that in those little dinners, to which you so often go with the resolve to eat little and drink less, you imperceptibly arrive at a flushed face, an excited temperament, and finally a sudden conviction that you must rush to some place of amusement? So it was, however, with Guy.

The opera was more noticeable from the fulness and splendour of the house than from any special excellence of the performance. At least so it seemed to the young Englishman. But after a time there was a sort of movement in the pit-not a shudder, not a glow of applause-a sort of half careless, Did you see?' "There is the Prince President," said Guy's companion.

In a box close to the stage satsomething. It was to be taken to be a man, of course; it had human proportion and size. But what was the countenance? There was only one historic, or pre-historic character that occurred to the mind of Guy, as that of one to whom that countenance might have belonged. But the iron Palus was known to heat himself red hot occasionally. The iron mask on which Guy gazed-with full black moustache, drawn out by means of gum arabic into two little mouse's tails that stood out from the sallow cheeks like the whiskers of a cat, with small, dead, introverted eyes, not squinting, but seeming to look inwards, instead of outwards

looked as if not all the fires of Etna could raise its temperature. Two or three gentlemen around the mask gave signs of life; the figure was immovable, a sort of Fatebut the fate that presides over the gaming table. The ballet, full of the moving life that so rivets the gaze of a man of artistic taste, absorbed the attention of Guy for a pas; when he next glanced at the box the mask was gone.

"Now for the Russian tea," said the entertainer. Without very much trouble the little brougham was re-discovered. The course was short-an appartement was reached on the second landing of a large staircase, an apartment that seemed to have been cut up into an unnecessary number of little rooms, merely for the purpose of hanging an otherwise impossible number of portières and window curtains. There, near a very English-looking tea equipage, sat the little lady seen by Guy on the Boulevard, her raven hair twisted and bound into a species of crown on her graceful little head.

"Oh, Lennel, but you are late," said she.

"I have a friend to present to you," said the Directeur Gérant"Monsieur Guy Carrington."

"Ah, Monsieur Guy, for what did you keep Lennel so late ?" said she.

CHAPTER XXI.

GOOD COUNSEL AT CAVENDISH

SQUARE.

A STRONG sense of duty, or an equally strong motive of some kind, is requisite to cause a man of taste, especially if a young man, and most of all if he be on his first visit to Paris, to hasten from the fascinations of that metropolis of pleasure. It must, therefore, be recorded as

not a little to the credit of Guy Carrington that, while it would not have been impossible, or even very difficult, for him to frame excuses for delay (excuses to his own conscience, that is to say), he contented himself by drawing on his constitution for the price of a second day's sight seeing, and returned to London by the mail two nights after he had left that city, on his first continental excursion.

To arrive in London, at least at an hotel, between seven and eight in the morning, is one of the extremest incidents of English discomfort. There is but one expedient by which to render existence tolerable, and that is to take a hot bath. If you can then enjoy a couple of hours' nap, you may go forth to the labours of the day with a brain not altogether unfitted for exertion.

Guy drove to Cavendish-square. By some rare mischance Lady Ullswater was not at home. Sir Henry was, and cheerily welcomed him.

"From Paris, Guidone? And what news do you bring of the change that is now preparing in the workshops of political plotting?"

Guy had been too busy looking about him to make political inquiries. Besides it is only the persons who know nothing who are ready to tell you all they know-and much more-into the bargain.

"That rule is general," said Sir Henry. "As an illustration of its working let me congratulate you on the position you are making for yourself in Blackshire."

"Is it only the kind inference of a partial friend?" said Guy, "or do you really speak as having heard anything about me?"

"The manner in which intelligence travels in this little island of ours is quite incredible," said the baronet. "The change in this respect which I have myself wit