time when I saw her lying in her wet clothes on the quay; and it's a dire bad history. I don't know how much you know about Paris."

"As much as a steady-going Englishman who spends an occasional week at the Hôtel Meurice is likely to know."

"Ah, that means you know the respectable side of Paris. A good thing for you, sir, you don't know the other side. It may spare you a heart-ache. There are not many Englishmen who do know what we call subterranean Paris; but in my calling we have to know these things. Half our lives is spent burrowing underground, groping along the dark passages where vice hides and riots, out of ken and out of reach of the police-places where no police-officer's life is worth five minutes' purchase. That poor young woman has been underground, sir. If you knew the kind of gutter she has been dragged through, you wouldn't wonder that she tried to drown herself, and that her reason has given way."

Jackman spoke with a suppressed vehemence that showed strong feeling.

"I've a daughter about her age, sir," he said, as if in apology for his unprofessional emotion-"a daughter I've tried to bring up without the knowledge of sin, just as you say Miss Berry has been reared."

"What motive could he have had ?" exclaimed Arden. "He was sure of his victim. Wasn't that enough?”

"No, sir, that wasn't enough. He wanted to make her like himself. He wanted to plunge her into the pande monium which is his only idea of pleasure. He has run the gamut of ordinary wickedness. Nothing less than underground Paris would satisfy him-the eccentric, the diabolical, men and women who have educated themselves in all the arts and devices of hell."

"She has spoken a name in her delirium-La Poulpe. I am told it is the name of a monster of impurity."

"La Poulpe! Yes, it was in that woman's hellish crew he flung the unhappy girl. He wanted to make her like. them. Her simplicity soon palled upon him, no doubt. I traced his movements from his arrival in Paris with Miss Berry. I had the police to help me, you see, sir. Colonel Manville is known to the police, and they keep an eye upon

him, though up to now he has never dropped into their net. They live in hopes. From them I found that he took Miss Berry straight to a small house on the outskirts of the forest near Marly le Roi-a cut-throat place, with no neighbours within a quarter of a mile. The house has been kept shut up for the last three years, mostly empty. There was no woman-servant, no one but his valet, a Russian, who goes everywhere with him. Three days later he was seen with the girl driving in a cab on the Boulevard Sebastopol, and she was seen afterwards in the house where Madame Loriston, alias La Poulpe, carries on her orgies; but what happened there, or how long she stayed, I have not been able to find out. I know nothing more of her till the morning she threw herself into the river."

"And you say the laws of France and England have no penalty for such a crime as his?"

"No; she is a woman, and a free agent. If she had got away from Madame Loriston's den and appealed to the police, she might have extricated herself sooner from that abominable crew, perhaps―"

"How should she know what to do, a girl of nineteen, who had never been called on to act for herself?"

"Ah, there's the pity of it! What could my girl do in the same circumstances? She would be lost as this girl has been. But there are not many such men as Manville, thank God. The world is not peopled with them. I've a fancy that sometimes the devil gets tired of hell, and puts himself into a human shape, and goes about the earth seeking whom he may devour, as he did in the time of Job. If we believe in Job, we're bound to believe in that sort of malicious devil."

"And you think this Manville is one of the devil's incarnations?" said Arden.

"That's about the size of it, sir," said Jackman, employing a favourite locution; "at least, to my fancy."

Arden remembered his dream of the hyperborean world peopled with devils and witches, a vision that was as vivid and seeming real in his mind now as it had been when he awoke and heard the church clock that measured the length of his slumber-so short a span, in which he had seemed to live through ages.

He paid the detective handsomely for his labours. There was nothing more that Jackman could do to help him. If retribution were possible, it must be the work of a private hand, secret and unaided.

Arden had written to Mrs. Berry telling her that he would take her daughter home as soon as she could bear the journey; and, the opinion of the specialist on his second visit being favourable to removal, it was arranged that Lisbeth and the nurse should leave Paris on the following morning, in charge of Arden. The patient's bodily strength had been considerably restored by sleep and scientific feeding, and the wild vehemence of the first two days had been followed by a kind of apathy which promised ill for the future, but which was easier to deal with in the present.

It was sad to see the delicate young face, upon which time had cast no shadow of the passing years, robbed of all beauty by the loss of expression, an ivory mask out of which gazed pale unseeing eyes, a drooping lip that looked as if it would never speak again. Arden watched her with a heavy heart as he sat opposite her in the railway carriage between Paris and Calais. She did not speak once during the journey, and submitted to the nurse's cares and attentions with a stony indifference, as if hardly conscious of her own existence, and quite unconscious of the world around her.

"It's like taking home a corpse," the nurse said to Arden, as they were nearing London.

He had prepared Mrs. Berry for the worst, but had added words of comfort and hope. Indeed, he could not resign himself to consider the case hopeless, in spite of the French physician's despondent views.

"She lives," he wrote, "and has a long life before her. You will need much patience, hopefulness, and love; and I know that all the rest of your life will be given to her as freely as you have given her your care and your love in the years that are gone. A mother's love can work a miracle sometimes; and I do not despair of seeing you both happy together in the days to come. All I would implore of you now is to be brave and hopeful."

This letter had had a good effect; and Mrs. Berry received

her daughter with a sublime gentleness and patience. She uttered no word of surprise or grief. She took Lisbeth to the little parlour where their two lives had moved along the years in placid monotony. She placed her in the armchair by the fireside, and with trembling hands arranged the cushion that supported her head and the light eider-down coverlet over her knees.

Lisbeth looked at the room with a kind of vacant wonder. "Have I ever been here before?" she asked, speaking for the first time since they left Paris.

"Oh, dearest, dearest, it is your own parlour-with your piano, and your books, and all the things you love."

The girl's eyes turned slowly towards her mother. "I don't know who you are," she said.

"Oh, Mr. Arden, I didn't think it would be as bad as this. I thought she would know me, even if her mind was gone," said Mrs. Berry, in a low voice.

"My dear soul, you must have patience.

pray."

Hope and

"Pray! Ah, sir, you don't know how I have prayed for her since she was lost-the lost sheep-the lost sheep that is dearer than all the ninety and nine that have never gone astray."

VI.

ARDEN gave himself a night's rest in his comfortable rooms, among the books he loved, and in the peaceful atmosphere of familiar things, and went back to Paris next day. He had more than one reason for returning without loss of time. In a New York Herald which he had bought at the station when he was leaving Paris, he had seen an announcement that concerned him in the fashionable intelligence

"Mr. and Lady Mary Selby are staying at the Hôtel Bristol after their winter at Cannes."

Before leaving Paris, Mr. Jackman had introduced Arden to a member of the police, a man of the highest grade, whose tact and experience would be equal to any difficulty. The detective had made this introduction at his client's earnest desire, but reluctantly.

"I hope you don't contemplate bringing Colonel Manville to book for his wickedness," Jackman said earnestly. "Take my word for it, sir, there's nothing to be done in that line; and in any encounter with him you'd get the worst of it. There's no net you can spread that's strong enough to hold a cloven hoof."

Arden had his views, but they were vague at present. In any encounter of that kind a man's acts are shaped by Fate, or Providence, or the chapter of accidents, whichever the man himself pleases to call the hand on the tiller. man who calls it Fate is the most reckless; the man who calls it Providence is the strongest; the brainless man calls it accident.

The

He drove to the Bristol, and asked for Lady Mary Selby. Her ladyship had gone to Saint Germain for the day Had