hands in hers. "We should have been so unhappy about you, knowing you were amongst foreigners, and not knowing what might have come to you. You must come to the fire and get warm, and tell us all about it, and, Essie, there is some supper to be brought in-is there not?" She had begun in her eager way—always so anxious to set people at ease and at home-speaking English; now, remembering, she checked herself, and added, in French : "You do speak English-don't you? a little, we understood. We do not know much of your language-my sister and I." "A little," the other answered shyly, still in her own tongue. She looked more nervous than ever, and she shivered as she spoke. Mary almost pushed me aside, noticing it, to make way for her to the fire. "You are very good, madame-I am not cold," she said; then, in English, with a strong accent, and speaking very deliberately, as one who had to frame her sentences before uttering them: "I am only very tired, and would like to go to bed." "But we cannot let you do that until you have had something," I said. "You must have had a great shock. Was the accident a serious one?" She was afraid very; there had been a considerable loss of life, so she had been told; indeed, she had seen as much for herself. She could not bear to talk of it or think of it. "But the carriage you were in escaped? You sustained no injury?" hot wine-and-water, which we made her drink, and which brought a little colour back into her cheeks and lips. Her cloak she would not remove, but she took off her hat and the little spotted veil, worn like a half-mask across her face, and I could feel the mingled surprise and admiration in my sister's countenance reflected in my own. We had had governesses of all sorts and sizes at Inglewood House, but this was the first time we had enlisted the services of one who might have posed for public admiration as a professional beauty. She was so much too striking-looking that I slept little all that night thinking of it. I was always more or less afraid of a pretty pupil; one never knew the complications that might be involved, and a pretty governess was worse still. I should never have engaged Mary had she been offered to me in the latter capacity-I always told her so. If she shared my misgivings on the present occasion, she would not allow it. She was a great lover of beauty, and from that first night she took Madame Laure under her wing, and did all she could to help her in her work, and to prepossess me in her favour. I was not predisposed in it, though I could have given no good reason for my own feeling. Her good looks worried me, I confess, and, being so handsome, I could have wished her older; it was difficult to believe that she reckoned anything like the thirty years she professed, but that was not all. She had, to my mind, neither method enough in her work, nor interest enough in her pupils' progress. Half her time she seemed to be wool-gathering, and she did not appear to understand being found fault with. She was not rude, and she did not retaliate, but she had a way of looking at me to which I was not accustomed, and which made me uncomfortable. I am tall myself, but she was taller, and I never felt myself so much mistress with her as with her predecessors. I liked to be looked up to in both senses by my governesses, and there was none of this looking up in the case of Madame Laure, She hesitated before answering me, as so far as I was concerned. It was to Mary if she was not sure of the question, and I-Mary, who never exacted any deference repeated it in that laboured French, which from anybody-that she deferred. I should have liked to feel sure was as good as her English, measured and unmistakably foreign as it was. "I was thrown from one end to the other of it, and I was a little bruised;" she pulled off her glove, and showed us her left arm slightly grazed and contused, and gave a light significant touch to both elbow and shoulder; "but that was all. I was very fortunate." "And your fellow-passengers ? Was there nobody else in the compartment with you?" "No," she said then; "nobody." She had been made to sit down by this time in one of the easy-chairs, and Mary had mixed her, with her own hands, some It was no matter of wonder to me that my sister should attract love and veneration. There were generally three or four girls in the school who would have done anything, gone anywhere for her; but the French governess was no girl, nor would she have struck one as so likely to pay homage as to expect it. It was not, I imagine, so much the other's kindness to her individually as the charm of her simple goodness. Whatever else madame might forget-whatever duty she might neglect she never forgot her little attentions to "Miss Mary. However dull she might be looking, she had always a smile ready for her. My sister must, I felt, see it, and be touched by it; and, in spite of myself, a petty jealousy I was ashamed of added to my prejudice against the Frenchwoman. Mary admired her so much, and in me-I became so foolish as that, I who had never allowed my plain face to distress me before —there was nothing to admire. When one gives way to a mean feeling of that sort, one never knows what it may lead one into, and, conscious of it in myself, I tried to shut my eyes to sundry smaller things which were not to my taste in our new inmate. In the first place, she was not commonly neat in her dress. I did not expect her to present a fashionable appearance, or even to have very good clothes, but her rusty black garments might surely have been a trifle less short and scanty, and have made some sort of pretence at fitting her. But for her beauty and her bearing she would not have been fit to be seen. "Cheap, ready-made mourning, no doubt," Mary said with a sigh. "How grateful we ought to be that we can afford to have things done properly and as we like!" I was not reconciled to it, however, and I should have spoken to Madame Laure myself on the subject had she not asked me on the first half-holiday to excuse her from accompanying the pupils to South Kensington on that very account. She really had nothing to wear, she said. Her black dresses had got so shabby, and she had not dared to spend her little money until she was earning more. Might she have the afternoon to herself to make some purchases? I was only too glad to give her leave, though it necessitated my going with the girls myself. Mary, who had to stay at home, came up to the bedroom after me. "I suppose, dear, it would not do to let the poor thing have a pound or two in advance, would it?" she asked timidly. something to fall back upon, to judge from what she said just now.' My sister made no further remark. She went to the wardrobe, and got out my bonnet and cloak for me, but she did not wait, I remember, as she sometimes would, to help me put them on, but went through to the dressing-room, which was more particularly her own. She had a little cabinet in there, in which she kept her dressmoney-we were always most particular to keep our private accounts apart from those of the school-and I knew the click of the key in the lock quite well. It was idle to say anything. I knew that too. By-and-by I heard her rustling softly downstairs, and before I set out myself I saw Madame Laure, waterproofed and veiled as she had been on the night of her arrival, let herself out at the garden-gate, and start at a brisk pace in the direction of the shops. II. We were twenty minutes' walk from the station at Inglewood House. If I have not yet mentioned that we lived in the suburbs, I must be permitted to repair that omission now-in which suburb never mind. It was described in the prospectus as the pleasantest about town, and the healthiest, being upon gravel soil and lying high, but I do not care to particularise it here. We walked faster than usual that afternoonthe girls-about a dozen of them-Miss Crispin, the English governess, and myself The air was clear and bright-the kind of day on which it is easy to step out: this, for one thing; for another, we were rather late. I should think Madame Laure had been gone about a quarter of an hour. Just before you came to the station, at that time, there was a big blank wall, covered with posting bills; and as we arrived at it that day, or, rather, as our advance-guard did, they found quite a crowd collected round somebody who had been taken ill, and was being put into a cab. The road was blocked up partially, not entirely. There was room for the girls to pass, and I could not understand their stopping. The breach of discipline was explained when I got up to them. The lady who was being packed off home, having just recovered herself sufficiently to give her address, was Madame Laure. Elsie Tanner, one of the two in front, had caught sight of her face, and been too much startled and too sympathetic to go on. "Oh, Miss Mary, you can't think what she looked like! She looked like death," the girl said afterwards, describing it to my sister. I made them all stand on one side and wait, whilst I went up to the cab-door and spoke to her; the policeman, who had come to her assistance, assuring me, as I did so, that it was a wonder she had not been run over, as they had found her swooning, half on the pavement, half on the road. The only person who had seen her fall was a child of twelve or thirteen, who said she was not walking at the moment, but standing looking at the coloured pictures and reading, and that suddenly she had given a little cry and fallen backwards. There had been nobody else on the spot, apparently, five minutes before; but now there was the inevitable crowd, pushing and pressing, and craning their necks for a look at the sufferer, as though they had never seen a sick woman before. No wonder she looked scared as well as ill. I was hesitating whether to send Miss Crispin back with her-she assured me the faintness was nearly over, and that she was liable to attacks of it, and soon got the better of them-when Elsie put in an eager request that I would entrust her with the charge; and, seeing that the girl really wished it, and that the distance was so short, I consented. It was well somebody should be sorry for the poor thing and ready to help her, and I was ashamed of myself for the irritation which possessed me with her for having made a scene in the street. I seemed to have neither heart nor conscience where Madame Laure was concerned; but there would be no lack of pity when once she got home to Mary. So I let Elsie get in with her, and watched them driven off together, not altogether happy or satisfied in my own mind either with myself or her. The people who had gathered about her, and who had been watching, open-eyed, all that was going on, began to disperse; and I was once more setting my party in motion, when one of the bystanders ran after me with a brown-paper parcel. The lady had dropped it. So said the child, who had been the only witness of her sudden seizure. "Yes, Miss Moffatt, it does belong to madame," one of the girls said as I hesitated about taking it; "I noticed her with it when she was coming downstairs; it was too big to fit comfortably under her arm. Should you like me to take it for you, or could not we leave it somewhere?" Decidedly I agreed it would be better to leave it somewhere, and we did leave it accordingly at the little linendraper's opposite the station, where they not only took it in, but volunteered to send it up to the house for us, and then at last we really succeeded in taking our tickets and getting off. I was flurried and put out, and the people who were in the compartment I myself got into with two or three of the elder ones-we had had to content ourselves with what places we could get― seemed to see as much, and to be, in a quiet way, amused at it. There are some lucky individuals who don't know what it means to be shaken out of their serenity by any little contretemps that may befall them; the lady who sat smiling in the far corner of the carriage, quietly taking us in from head to foot, was, I should say, one of them. She was a fair, fashionable-looking woman, with a slow, soft voice, and a drawl, and her companion, putting his sex on one side, was much after the same style. I noticed them particularly, because of the little laugh there seemed to be between them at my expense, and presently she seemed to see I was aware of it, for she suddenly straightened herself and looked away, and did not look back again. "There was nothing in the paper," she broke the silence by saying. "Nothing," he replied, "that you would call anything. Enough and to spare in certain columns that you don't understand the money-market, for instance. Nothing in the way of a sensation; neither tragedy nor elopement, nor breach of promise, as far as I could see. I tell you what, though-the police are moving in that matter of the Wyvenhoe murder. There is a hundred pounds reward offered, with a full description of the woman. I saw one of the posters in the City this morning." "That was that dreadful business down in Essex-wasn't it?" she enquired languidly. "One reads of so many horrors that one gets confused about them. People who had been living in some out-of-theway place, and whom nobody knew anything about, and the man was found dead, and the woman nowhere to be found. That was it—was it not?" "Yes; that was it," he replied. "There was mystery enough about the antecedents and belongings, and the life they led generally; but I should be afraid there is little enough about the murder. The woman did it to a certainty." "Then why should you be afraid at all about it? She is pretty, I suppose, and you are sorry for her?" She said it with a laugh, in which he joined. It might have been nothing at all-a mere jest-this ghastly crime they were talking about. The man was sorry for the miserable wretch who had committed it because she was pretty, that was all. "I think she must have had a very hard time of it," he said. "The old woman who gave evidence, and who was the only person in the house with them, said as much. Her sympathies all went with her mistress, it was evident, and she made the case against the dead man so strong that every word she said will have helped to tighten the cord round his wife's neck, if ever they catch her, which I hope they won't. She seems to have been nothing short of a slave and a prisoner. The man must have been half mad, I should imagine, and he watched her so closely, she could not get away from him." "And at last? I forget the particulars." "Oh, well, there was a big row overnight, you know. The old woman heard it, as she was undressing for bed, but she appears to have gone to sleep in spite of it-too well used to the kind of thing, I suppose and in the morning she was not up over early herself, and does not seem to have troubled about anybody else until the breakfast-hour was long past. Then she found the one room empty and the other locked, and you know the rest-all the harrowing details, as the leaders call them. The poor wretch had had a fight for his life. The fact of that, and of the door being locked on the inside, would have told in the woman's favour, if she had had the pluck to stay and see it out. But that is just where it is presence of mind always fails people in these cases. She not only does for herself by running away, but being, according to all accounts, a good-looking woman to begin with, and remarkable enough on that score, she makes herself still more remarkable by arraying herself in a shot-silk gown. Shot-silk! only conceive it! In these days, when every other woman one meets is in black Why, it was simply suicidal! The only wonder is they have not identified her by it before this." "It was only the other day, surely?" she asked. She did not look greatly interested, not so much so as I was, for we had read about it at the time-Mary and Ihad been reading about it, in fact, that very night when we were kept up watching and waiting for Madame Laure, and I could have answered her question more definitely than he did, for madame had been with us now little more than a fortnight. I was interested myself, but I was sorry to see the girls taking it all in so eagerly. We encouraged no morbid taste for horrors at Inglewood House. "I knew I read all about it whilst I was waiting," Milly Danvers said afterwards in her consequential little way. wonder you did not see it, all of you. There was 'Murder' at the top of it in big enough letters, goodness knows!" When we reached home in the evening, Madame Laure was in bed, having so far followed my sister's advice. "I did want her to have a doctor at first," Mary said. "But she objected so strongly, and I doubt whether it would have been of any use. I think she wants rest and quiet more than anything." "I think you want it yourself," I said. I did not know when I had seen her look so tired and troubled; I thought at times she must feel other people's pains and aches as though they were her own, and I felt sure now she had been letting Madame Laure worry her beyond her strength. "I won't have you going up to her any more to-night," I said. "I shall go and see for myself how she is getting on, and if there is any need for a doctor, a doctor she shall have." She did not say "Yes," or " No," but smiled faintly at the parlour boarders, who were accustomed to the occasional assertion of my authority, and began pouring out the tea, whilst I entertained the little party (the schoolroom tea was a separate affair, under the presidency of Miss Crispin) with a recapitulation of the conversation in the railway-carriage. "It was the dress," I said, "which he had made up his mind was to bring her to justice-the shot-silk dress. My dear Mary, what on earth are you thinking of 1" I exclaimed in the same breath, for the urn had replenished the teapot to overflowing, and was flooding the tray, and my sister sat looking across it at me in a sort of stupor, never seeing or heeding it. "Miss Mary was thinking no more of the tea than the rest of us," somebody said, good-naturedly coming to the rescue, and then there was a little commotion and mopping up, consequent on the catastrophe, and Mary made her apologies, and went on with her work; but she did it nervously and badly, as if it were an effort to her, and I was glad when it was over. I scarcely knew why myself, but I was always in an agony if she had so much as a fingerache. True, she was the one dear thing I had in the world; there was that to be said. She would not allow that there was anything the matter with her, however, and she would go upstairs. I had rarely seen her so positive; as a rule, she gave way to me in everything connected with the school; I was so much cleverer than she, she used to say, and had a head for business, which she had not; and in the management of the governesses she never interfered. It was a mistake having two mistresses; we should never get anyone to work under us if we attempted it. But, somehow, from the first she seemed to have taken Madame Laure under her protection, and she would not let her go. "She had such a lovely face, and she seemed out of her element and not happy; and she was so grateful for a very little kindness"—that was all the reason Mary could ever give for the attraction in the first instance. As we took our separate ways, she to the top of the house, I to the schoolroom, I remembered the parcel madame had dropped, and which had been restored, and called up after her to know whether it had been sent home. Yes, she answered, it had. And it was quite right? Quite. She was half-way up the stairs as she spoke, and she stopped, with a little catch in her voice, as she uttered the monosyllable, as if to rest. I ran up after her and put my arm round her. "Mary," I said, "you are not well. Something has upset you, and I have a right to know what it is. I can't have you beginning to keep your own counsel, after all these years. I will have no Madame Laures coming between you and me, and working upon your feelings until they make you ill." But she assured me that she was not ill, that I was mistaken-finally, with that quiet assumption of dignity with which, when she liked, she seemed able to reverse our relative positions, that such a jealousy as mine was unworthy both of me and of her, and not to be entertained for a moment. Then she went on her way, and was closeted with the Frenchwoman for more than two hours, in the chill and dusk of the September evening, coming down at last, white and shivering, to take her part in the prayers. Her own were long enough that night; I thought she would never come to bed, and when at last she did come, nestling gently in, so as not to disturb me, I allowed her to think I was asleep, and for the first time for years, I should suppose, let her go without her "good-night." III. Madame Laure was at her post the following morning, and things went on as usual for the next few days. She excused herself from church on the Sunday, however, both morning and evening, and although she looked quite ill enough to justify her in staying at home, I could not get rid of an uncomfortable feeling that there was something in the background, and that we should never come to a proper understanding until it was cleared up. At the same time I saw in her a greater effort to concentrate her attention on her work, and whilst she spoke French with the girls more exclusively than any of her predecessors, never, indeed, expressing herself in English to anyone unless she was compelled, her knowledge of music far exceeded my anticipations. By what seemed an unspoken mutual consent, Mary and I said little or nothing about her after that night; but the kind of devotion I had already noticed on madame's part was unaltered, and that my sister made little opportunities of seeing her in private I was better aware than she supposed. That she was trying to do her good in some way, which she was too delicate to confess to a third person, was, after all, I thought, the conclusion most in accordance with all my former experience. We heard nothing of the Sunday's indisposition on the Monday, and that day, for the first time, she had a visitor. The lady, in the first instance, asked for me, and I was pleased not only with her, but with the object of her visit, which betokened a kindliness and consideration not often to be met with in this selfish world. Had the French governess, who was on her way to us three weeks before, she wished to know, reached us safely? The fact was, she said, her husband had travelled in the same compartment with her in the tidaltrain, until it was within a station or two of the spot at which the collision occurred, |