the telegraph system might be dangerous. There are things you want to keep dark, as you call it, are there not?'

Of course there are. But we've got our code, my trainer and I, and our own private names for every brute in my stable. Got a message this morning: "Bryant and May taken to the bassoon." By which I know that Vesuvian, a two-year-old I was backing for next year, has been run out of her wind in some confounded trial, and is musical.'

'Musical!'

'Yes, ma'am; a roarer, if you want it in plain English.'

Dear me, how provoking!' said Mrs. Chevenix, with a sympathetic countenance, but with not the faintest idea what the Viscount meant.

Elizabeth consented to the Rancho business languidly.

'I'd rather stay at home and finish my novel,' she said, looking at an open volume lying on one of the pouffs. You can't imagine what an exciting chapter you interrupted, Lord Paulyn; but of course I shall go if auntie likes. Auntie has such an insatiable appetite for society.'

Mrs. Chevenix raised her eyebrows, and regarded her niece with admiring wonder. Who would ever imagine the child had been reared in a Devonshire vicarage!' she exclaimed, as Elizabeth sat fanning herself, an image of listless grace.

'Who would have supposed Venus came out of the sea!' replied the Viscount. She didn't look weedy, or sandy, or shell-fishy, that ever I heard of; but came up smiling, with her hair combed out as neatly as the tails and manes of my fillies. And as to rustic bringing-up, there was that young woman in the play-Lady Teazle, you know. See how she carried on.'

The Viscount departed after this, happy in the prospect of meeting Elizabeth an hour later in the happy hunting - grounds of the Rancho, perhaps the best field for flirtation within four miles of Hyde-park-corner.

Elizabeth,' exclaimed Mrs. Chevenix, when they were alone, with an air of almost awful solemnity, there is a coronet lying at your feet, if you have only the wisdom to pick it up. I am not going to make any complaint, or to express my opinions, or to say anything in disparagement of that person. I have kept my feelings upon that subject locked within my breast, at any cost of pain to myself. But if, when you have looked around you, and seen what the world is made of, you can be so infatuated as to persist in your mad course, I can only pity you.'

'Don't take the trouble to do that, auntie. I can imagine no higher happiness than that which I have chosen. A coronet is a grand thing, of course, with all the other things that go along with I am not going to pretend that I don't care for the world and

it.

its pleasures. I do care for them. I have enjoyed my life in the last three weeks more than I thought it possible that life could be enjoyed. I fear that I have an infinite capacity for frivolity. And yet I shall be proud to surrender all these things for the love of the man I have chosen.'

The man you have chosen!' repeated Mrs. Chevenix, with a shiver. My dearest Lizzie, is there not a shade of indelicacy in the very phrase?'

'I can't help that,' answered Elizabeth coolly; I know that I did choose him. I chose him out from all creation for the lord of my life, worshipped him in secret when I thought he was indifferent to me; should have died of a broken heart, I believe, or at any rate of mortification and disappointment, if he had never returned my love.' This was a bold declaration intended to extinguish aunt Chevenix at once and for ever.

'My poor child,' said the matron, shaking her head with a deploring air, I am inexpressibly grieved to hear you speak in that wild manner of such a person as your father's curate. A man in that position cannot afford to be loved in that exaggerated way. A grande passion is out of keeping among people with limited incomes and their career to make in the world. With people of established position it is different, of course; and though I might smile at such an infatuation, were you to entertain it for Lord Paulyn I could hardly disapprove. You and he would be as far removed from the vulgar herd of engaged persons as a prince and princess in a fairy tale, and might safely indulge in some little extravagance.'

'You need fear very little extravagance on my part if Lord Paulyn were my accepted lover,' answered Elizabeth, with a cynical laugh. Imagine any one mated to that prosaic being, with his slang and his stable talk!'

In spite of those small drawbacks-which, after all, are natural to his youth and open-hearted disposition-I believe him to be capable of a most devoted attachment. I have seen him gaze at you, Elizabeth, in a way that made my blood run cold when I considered that you were capable of trampling upon such a heart for the sake of a Scotch curate. However, I will say nothing,' concluded Mrs. Chevenix with heroism, after having said all she wanted to say.

In half-an-hour the two ladies were dressed, and on their way to Fulham; Elizabeth enveloped in a fleecy cloud of whiteness, with gleams of lustrous mauve here and there among her drapery, and a mauve feather in her white-chip hat, gloves faultless, parasol a gem : a toilet whose finishing touches had been furnished by the well-filled purse of Mrs. Chevenix. The matron herself was resplendent in gray silk, and an imposing blue bonnet. They had put on their richest armour for the encounter with Mrs. Cinqmars, a lady who spent her life in trying to dress-down her acquaintance.

CHAPTER II.

'Applause

Waits on success; the fickle multitude,

Like the light straw that floats along the stream,
Glide with the current still, and follow fortune.'

FULHAM is a neighbourhood of infinite capabilities. It is almost impossible to know the ultimate boundaries of a region to which nature seems to have hardly yet assigned any limit; from squalid streets of six-roomed houses, to splendid places surrounded by parklike grounds; from cemeteries and market-gardens-bare expanses of asparagus or turnips, where the atmosphere is rank with decaying garden stuffs-to arenas reserved for the competition of the fleetfooted and strong-armed of our modern youth, and to shady groves dedicated to the slaughter of the harmless pigeon; from newly-built terraces, rising gaunt and bare in their skeleton brickwork, to ancient red-brick mansions hiding themselves coyly within high walls, and darkened by the shade of immemorial cedars. Fulham has stomach for them all. Queer little lanes still lead the explorer to unknown (or at least to him unknown) tracts of inland country; and on that wild shore between the bridges of Putney and Hammersmith there are far-spreading gardens and green lawns which a worldly-minded person might long for as the paradise of his departed soul.

The Rancho was one of these places by the river; a house and grounds which, after belonging to a titled owner, had sunk to gradual decay under undistinguished and incapable tenants; and, at last, coming into the market for a larger price than speculators were inclined to give, had, after hanging on hand for a long time, been finally bought a dead bargain by Mr. Cinqmars.

This gentleman, being amply provided with funds-whether his own or other people's was, of course, a minor question-and being, moreover, blest with a wife who had a taste, set to work to remodel the house, which was old and not capacious, and altogether in that condition in which it is cheaper to pull down than to rebuild. Mr. Cinqmars, however, left the lower reception rooms, which were fine, almost untouched, only widening the windows in the drawing-room to the whole width of the room, and putting a glass roof to the billiard-room, which could be replaced by an awning in warm weather, or thrown open to the sky on starlit summer nights. On each side of these central rooms he built a commodious wing in rustic woodwork, after the model of a Mexican farmhouse in which he had once spent a week during his travels. All round the house he put a wooden verandah, ten feet wide, and paved with cool blue and creamcoloured tiles; and having done this he furnished all the rooms in the purest rustic fashion, with light woods, Indian matting, pastoral

chintzes scattered with violets and primroses; no draperies to the windows, which were amply shaded by Venetian blinds within and Spanish hoods without; very few carpets, but light oak floors polished to distraction, and Indian matting in the passages. It was a house that was built apparently for eternal summer, but was yet so contrived as to be extremely comfortable when March winds were howling round the verandah, or an April snowstorm drifting against the glass roof of the billiard-room. On a real summer's day it was distractingly delightful; and to return from its light and airy chambers to the dingy square rooms of a London house-a mere packing-case set upon end in a row of other packing-cases-was not conducive to the preservation of a contented mind.

But Mr. and Mrs. Cinqmars were people who could not have lived in a house that was not better than other people's. They were people who lived upon their surroundings; their surroundings were themselves, as it were. If anybody asked who Mr. Cinqmars was, his friends and admirers plunged at once into a glowing description of the Rancho, or demanded with an air of amazement how it came to pass you had not seen his horses in the park-high-stepping bays, with brass-mounted harness. There was a place in Scotland too, which Mr. Cinqmars spoke of somewhat vaguely, and which might be anything from half a county down to half-a-dozen acres. He was in the habit of promising his acquaintance good shooting in that ilk; but in the hurry and pressure of modern life these promises rarely came to anything. Every man's autumn is mortgaged before the spring is over; there is nothing safer than a liberal dealing out of general invitations in June or July.

Mrs. Cinqmars was at home every Tuesday throughout the London season, and to be at home with Mrs. Cinqmars meant a great deal. The grounds of the Rancho were simply perfect-ancient gardens, with broad lawns gently sloping to the water; lawns whose deep and tender herbage had been cultivated for ages; forest trees which shut out the world on every side except that noble curve of the river which made a shallow bay before the windows of the Rancho; cedars of Lebanon spreading their dusky branches wide above the shadowy sward. Mrs. Cinqmars did not to any great extent affect gaudy flower-beds-parallelograms of scarlet geranium and calceolaria, silver-gray leafage, and potting-out plants of the picklingcabbage order or ribbon bordering. Are not these things common to all the world? Instead of these, she had masses of rough stonework and young forests of fern in the shady corners of her grounds, and a regiment of century-old orange-trees in great green tubs, ranged along a broad walk leading down to the river. Her grounds were shady realms of greenery, rather than showy parterres. She had her hot-houses and forcing-pits somewhere in the background, and all her rooms were adorned to profusion with the choicest flowers;

but only in the rose season was there much display of colour in the gardens of the Rancho. Then, indeed, Mrs. Cinqmars' lawn was as some fertile valley in Cashmere, and the very atmosphere which Mrs. Cinqmars inhaled heavy with the odours of all the noblest and choicest families among the rose tribe-arcades of roses, roses climbing skyward upon iron rods, temples that looked like gigantic birdcages overrun with roses, roses everywhere-for a brief season of glory and delight, the season of fresh strawberry ices, and mature but not overgrown whitebait.

On these her days, Mrs. Cinqmars kept open house from five o'clock upwards. There was a great dinner later in the evening, but by no means a formal banquet, for the men who came in morning-dress to lounge remained to dine; mature matrons, whose bonnets were as things immovable, were permitted to dine in that kind of headgear; there was a general air of Bohemianism about the Rancho; billiards were played till the summer daylight; the sound of cabs and phaetons, dog-carts and single broughams, startled the slumbering echoes in the Fulham lanes between midnight and sunrise; the goddess of pleasure was worshipped in a thorough-going unqualified manner, as intense as the devotion which inspired human sacrifices on the shrine of moonéd Ashtaroth.

In fine weather, when the sun was bright and the air balmy, and only occasional shivers reminded happy idlers that an English climate is treacherous, Mrs. Cinqmars delighted to receive her friends in the garden. Innumerable arm-chairs of foreign basket-work were to be found in snug little corners of the grounds; tiny tables were ready for the accommodation of teacups or ice-plates. Champagne and claret-cups were as bounteously provided as if those beverages had been running streams, watering the velvet lawns and meandering through the groves of the Rancho. Wenham's clear ice was as plentiful as if the Thames had been one solid block from Thame to Nore. There was no croquet. In this, as in the flower-beds, Mrs. Cinqmars had been forestalled by all the world. But as a substitute for this universal recreation, Mrs. Cinqmars had imported all manner of curious games upon queer little tables with wiry mazes, and bells and balls, at which a good deal of money and a still larger amount of the manufacture of Piver or Jouvin were lost and won on that lady's Tuesdays. The châtelaine herself even was not insensible to the offerings of gloves; she had indeed an insatiable appetite for that commodity, and absorbed so many packets of apricot and lavender treble buttons from her numerous admirers, that it might be supposed that her husband, while lavishing upon her every other luxury, altogether denied her these emblems of civilisation. But as Mrs. Cinqmars was never seen in a glove which appeared to have been worn more than half-an-hour, it may be fairly imagined that her consumption of the article was large. Taking a moderate view of the