V.

WITHIN three hours after the receipt of the detective's telegram, Walter Arden was on his way to Paris. He told Mrs. Berry that her daughter was found, and begged her to hope for the best. The unhappy mother wanted to go with him, or at least to follow him next morning; but he succeeded in convincing her that it was best for him to be alone, and free to act as the circumstances of the hour might require. There might be difficulties in the way which would be increased by a woman's presence.

"If it is in me to do this thing, I will bring her back to you," he said, with intense earnestness. "All you have to do is to open your arms to her, and to forgive. And in God's own time you may both be able to forget."

"Oh, sir, I can never do that! I can never forget what she was to her father and me, and how proud we were of her. She has humbled me to the dust for the rest of my life-unless-unless he would marry her and make a lady of her."

"My poor friend, he won't do that. And if he would, she might be a miserable woman for the rest of her life."

"But she would be an honest woman. We shouldn't be ashamed to look in each other's faces, as we shall be if she comes home a ruined girl."

The poor creature broke into a flood of tears. She had borne up bravely in her daily drudgery since the night of the elopement, but the thought of the return crushed her.

Mr. Jackman was waiting in the stony greyness of the terminus, the grey light of a bleak March morning. The traveller had only a Gladstone bag and a hat-box, which had been passed through the customs at Calais. He and

Jackman were sitting side by side in a coupé driving towards the Rue de Rivoli, five minutes after the arrival of the train "I'm very glad you've come, sir. It's the only chance." "Where is she?"

"In a respectable hotel on the other side of the river." "Alone?

"No. She has a nurse with her-a Sister of Charity." "And where is Manville? How did you get her away from him?"

"There was no difficulty about that. He has cast her off, I suppose."

"Cast her off-in Paris-a helpless girl? What an incarnate fiend!"

"I believe that's about the size of it, sir."

"You suppose!--you believe! But you must know what he has done."

"No, I don't, sir. No more will you for some time to come. The poor young lady is off her head. She won't be able to give much of an account of herself. It's a sad story." "Where did you find her?"

"On the quay, by the flower-market, in the midst of a crowd, about this time yesterday morning, when I was starting for my day's business in the Rue Royale. My diggings are on that side of the river, in the Rue Matamore, near the boul. Mich, as they call it-the students' boulevard, you know, sir."

"Yes, yes; I know."

"There was a crowd of flower-girls and bargemen, and a rag-picker or two, and I found that one of the bargemen had just picked a girl out of the river. She had thrown herself from the bridge right in the middle of the stream; and the man had been precious quick jumping off his barge, or he would not have saved her. She was lying on the ground, with her head in a woman's lap; and directly I saw the long red hair and the small pale face, I knew she was the girl that was wanted. She was very bad, but she had been got out of the water in time. We carried her into a chemist's shop on the quay, and a doctor came and looked after her, and presently she was able to speak, and said a few words in a rambling light-headed way; and when I heard her talk English, I was all the more sure of her.

"It's all right, Miss Lisbeth,' I said, not wanting to give away her surname; and she started at the sound of her name, and looked at me with a ray of sense in her eyes. The doctor saw that I knew her name, and supposed that I was a friend; so he made no difficulty about my taking charge of her, especially as I asked him to recommend a quiet hotel where I could take her, and to find me a hospital-nurse to look after her. He said that she was very bad, and would need a great deal of care. He thought she must have been in a bad way before she threw herself into the river, for, considering how short a time she had been in the water, the shock and the immersion were not enough to account for her state. He asked me if she was right in her mind, and I told him that, to the best of my belief, she was in possession of her reason when she left London, a fortnight ago."

"She was mad enough to rush headlong to destruction,” said Arden, gloomily.

"The doctor said she must have gone through some terrible experience in the mean time to account for her present condition. We put her in a cab and took her to the hotel he recommended, where I was able to get a couple of rooms on the third floor, looking into a courtyard, and very quiet; and then the doctor went off to get a nurse. He is a young man, but he seems to know what he is about. He looks poor, and practises in a poor quarter; but I think he is the right sort of man for the case, in the interests of the young lady and her friends."

"Have you seen her since yesterday morning?" Arden asked.

"I saw her late last night. There was no change. She had taken no food, and had had no sleep, and had been talking in a wild way, the nursing-sister said."

"You are sure she is Lisbeth Berry?"

"I don't think there's room for doubt. She agrees in every particular with the description I wrote down from your dictation, and I found a handkerchief marked L.B." "Had she any money about her ?"

"Half a sovereign and a little English silver, in a netted silk purse."

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Ought I to send for her mother?"

"You may think yourself bound to do so if she doesn't get better soon; but in her present condition there wouldn't be much use in the mother coming, and it would be very painful for her. I'm afraid the doctor thinks the girl may end her days in a lunatic asylum."

"God grant he may be mistaken. And how is Manville to be brought to answer for his crime? What can the law do to him?"

"I'm afraid the law can't touch him. I think you said that Miss Berry is nineteen years of age."

"She was nineteen on the tenth of January."

"Then she is of an age to answer for her own actions, in the eye of the law. It is not a case of abduction.”

"And he might tempt her away from her home, slay her soul and body, reduce her to madness, and throw her out in the streets of a foreign city-a girl who had never left her mother's care, till this wretch lured her away—and there is nothing in all that sum of infamy for which he can be made answerable to the law?”

"No; when a woman makes up her mind to run away with a man, it is the fortune of war. He may treat her as vilely as he pleases. She has no resource except to leave him; for the streets or the river, if she has nowhere else to go. It is to this young woman's credit that she chose the river."

"She was a pure-minded girl, innocent as a child, before that devil hunted her down.'

They had crossed the Seine, had driven by the quay and the Rue des Saints Pères, and were now in a quiet street within the shadow of St. Sulpice, where the cab stopped in front of the Hôtel Loyola, an old-fashioned house, without any of the flashy splendours of the modern hotel. Jackman led the way through a square hall, with windows opening on a courtyard, up a circular staircase to the third floor, where he knocked at a door in a narrow corridor. All was curiously sombre and quiet; and they had come so far without seeing any sign of life.

"Entrez," said a voice; and they went into a small lowceiled room, furnished as a salon, but with a bed in an alcove. A nursing-sister, in black robe and hood, was standing on the threshold of an inner room as they entered; and Arden

heard a low, piteous murmuring in a voice that he knew for Lisbeth's, a murmur that was like a moan of pain.

"No better, sister?" asked Jackman.

"Hélas, no, monsieur. She has not closed an eye all the night, and I have had to feed her by force, poor thing! She would take nothing of her free will. And she is so wasted for want of nourishment. It is pitiful to see her."

The change was pitiful indeed to the eyes of Walter Arden, when he stood at the bedside and looked at the spectral face on the pillow, the wild wide-open eyes, with a look of unspeakable horror in them. Could this wasted wreck of womanhood be Lisbeth, the girl who had looked at him in the autumn starlight with eyes aflame, defying him, strong in her love for the wretch who was to be her destroyer?

Words of unreason came from the white lips, inconsecutive fragments of speech, and whatever scrap of meaning it was possible to extract from that delirious babble was significant of horror and loathing.

"Well, sir," said the detective, when Arden went back to him in the outer room, "I suppose there has been no mistake. This is the person you want."

"Yes-this is my landlady's daughter. A sad sight for the mother, if I send for her; and yet I think she ought to come-and without delay."

"You are the best judge of that, sir. I should give the young lady a few days first. She may come round a bit with good nursing. And now, I suppose you have no further need for my services ?"

"Yes, I have-great need. You say you know Paris well?"

"Yes, I know Paris-the best and the worst of it."

"Good. Then I want you to find out where this girl has been-how she has been treated-what cruelty has brought her to the state in which you found her."

"Very well, sir. I'll do my best. Give me forty-eight hours. I'll meet you here, the day after to-morrow-at twelve o'clock."

"That will do."

Arden sat by Lisbeth's bed for an hour, while the sister went about her work, making beef-tea and lemonade, dusting the furniture, in the silence and gloom of rooms looking

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