In the midst of the merriment of the party after the dinner the subject was brought up. One of the guests proposed a hundred ounces. The value of a hundred ounces was something like two thousand dollars.

my face till the day when God calls me to himself. It is a solemn vow which I have taken, and no earthly consideration could induce me to break it. You can readily conceive, Sir, that for a lady to take a resolution to withdraw utterly from the world, and bury herself forever in such a solitude as this, there must have been reasons of a very imperious character. I am willing to tell you what my reasons were, to soften what might otherwise seem the ungracious

They asked him what amount he would be willing to stake.

He very gravely suggested five francs! This proposal was received with peals of laughter by all the company. The idea of a race of three thousand miles across a continent by land, against one of fifteen thousand around it by sea, for a stake of five francs, seemed so absurd that it was received with universal hilarity.

"Well," said Mr. Marcoy, still preserving the utmost gravity, "if you think that stake is too small, I will not object to add to it a small bundle of cigars!"

quest.

"The cause of my suffering was love. It was love of that kind that a woman can only feel once in her lifetime—that love which transforms two beings into onewhich blends and exalts two souls into one single angelic existence. This life of intoxication and ecstasy, in which each derives from the other, as from a living fountain, the joys and excitements of passion, to be communicated again to the other in turn, endured for three years. Why could it not endure forever? God only can answer this question. Perhaps I misunderstood my nature and my duty as a woman. A woman loves either too much or else too little. the first case she wearies her lover; in the second case she repels him. A woman's love is fated to suffer wreck on one or the other of these dangers.

In

"But it is useless to go particularly into details. It is enough to say that when I saw the one whom I had so loved, and for whom I had given up all that was dear to me, become indifferent, and finally abandon

And this was the engagement which Mr. Marcoy referred to in speaking of the urgent necessity that he was under to pursue his journey across the continent without any unnecessary delay.

But, being touched by the sad and disappointed tone in which the lady said "Then we will think no more about it," he replied, "Yes, sister, we will think about it. I was too hasty in my answer. Excuse and forgive me for refusing so bluntly. I will stay and make the picture, since you desire me to do so. I will begin the work to-morrow morning. And you, on your part-will you not do something for me?"

"What can I do for you?" asked the lady. "I wish you to do something for me which will be very little for you, and will be very easily done, but which will give me very great pleasure-and that is that you should raise the veil which conceals you for a few moments, so that I shall not have to go away without having seen the face of one to whose generous hospitality I owe so much."

"Ah, Sir," replied the lady, "that is impossible. Except the few persons who perVOL. XLIII.-No. 258.-56

I re

The world seemed dark and desolate. tired to this solitude, where I have lived for four years utterly alone, with nothing but the sad recollections of the past to console my sorrows.

"You will easily understand, Sir, from this statement of my case why I can not comply with the request you have made, however friendly and kind toward me may be the feelings on your part that dictated it. You will leave this region soon, never to return to it, and my secret will remain undisclosed.

"The brief stay that you will make here will soon be ended, and the recollection of the hacienda of Lechuza, and of the unhappy woman who has come to hide her life in it forever, will pass soon from your mind. But she will herself not forget you. She will always cherish a grateful remembrance of the kind sympathy which you felt for her in her desolation and grief. And now, after this statement of my unhappy case, do you think you can consent to render me the service I have asked of you?"

"To-morrow morning," said Mr. Marcoy, "I will set myself at the work."

"May God bless you, and reward you a hundredfold for the kindness you have shown to me. And so now, with a renewed assurance of my gratitude, and with my sincere prayers that you may have a pleasant and prosperous journey, I—"”

"But can not I have an opportunity of seeing and speaking to you once more before I go?"

"It would do no good," she replied. "You know now all that it is possible for me to tell you. To talk with you more about my sorrows would be only to renew the cruel sufferings that the recollection of them occasions me. So you must excuse me if I leave you now, and bid you a final farewell." So saying, the lady closed the bars of the blind again, and, shutting the window, disappeared from view.

After pausing a moment Mr. Marcoy slowly returned into the house, wondering at the strangeness of the adventure which had befallen him. To have met with so mysterious a person, under such extraordinary circumstances, and in such a scene--to have been made to such an extent the confidant of her secret sorrows, and then to have bid her a final farewell without even the possibility of ever meeting her again, and all without having seen her face or known her nameseemed passing strange. He thought that "if he should ever relate the tale, those who should hear it would find it very difficult to believe him. Of course, as he anticipated a certain degree of incredulity in those to whom the tale should be told, each reader is all the more completely at liberty to decide for himself, from internal evidence, whether this narrative is or is not historically true. He found, on returning into the house-as he went on to relate—that the man-servant, who seemed to act as a kind of major-domo, and his guide were awaiting him. They showed him a bed which had been made up for him in the salon, with a small table near it, which was elegantly set out with evening refreshments. When he was left to himself he retired to rest, and soon, as he expressed it, sank into the sweet slumbers that come from a good conscience, a downy bed, and sheets white, fresh, and spotlessly pure.

He awoke early in the morning. When he was dressed he first went out to take the morning air. The dew was upon the grass and flowers, and the rising sun began to glow upon the summits of the mountains. He returned soon into the house, and selected from his port-folio the best sheet of paper which it contained, and taking his box of colors, a goblet of water, and a plate for a palette, he went out into the garden and set himself at his work.

He sketched the form and appearance of the shrub, and with a few touches marked the places for five flowers, which were to represent the five gradations of color through

which the petals pass in the course of a day, though there was, in fact, only one flower, which had opened upon the shrub that morning. That was-as usual with the flower at its first blooming of a milk-white color. After two hours of work he had sketched the whole plant, and finished one branch with the milk-white flower upon it. Then it became necessary to wait some time for the flower to change its hue. At ten o'clock this was done. It had then become of a pale rose-color. This he represented upon another branch. At noon the flower had become of a deep rose-color; a representation of it in that guise was given upon another branch. At four o'clock another copy, of a bright carmine, was made upon a fourth branch; and at six another, of purple hue, completed the series.

When, at length, the painting had been retouched and finished, and a suitable inscription had been placed upon it, he gave it to the maid to carry to her mistress. In a few minutes the maid returned, bringing her mistress's very special thanks for the picture, which she said she greatly admired, and should preserve with the utmost care. She also brought a little sprig of a plant, which, from a certain withered appearance of the leaves naturally characteristic of it, has for its language the stricken heart, and gave it to the traveler from her mistress, to be kept as a souvenir of her and of his visit to her solitary retreat.

The traveler placed the souvenir between two sheets of absorbent paper, and deposited it in his port-folio.

The next morning, in good season, he resumed his journey, attended by his guide. After they left the house and had gone forward on their way till it had disappeared from view, the guide, who had been riding at some little distance behind, advanced to his master's side, his countenance expressing a peculiar animation and significance.

"Well, Miguel," said the traveler, “ you look as if you had something to tell me."

"Yes, Sir," said Miguel, "and something which you will be not a little surprised to hear."

"Well, what is it?"

"You recollect that you gave the majordomo some brandy to drink last evening?"

Among the refreshments which Mr. Marcoy had found upon the table in his room the evening before was some very choice and costly brandy. He took very little of it himself, but he poured out a more generous portion both for his guide and the majordomo, with a view of putting them into good-humor. It seems that, according to Miguel's account, the drink had the effect of putting the major-domo into more than good-humor.

"I rather think," said he, "that the glass you gave him may have held more than you

thought. At any rate, after he drank it he became very talkative and silly, and wanted to tell me all his secrets. He not only told me all about himself and the maid, but also gave me the history of his mistress."

"Do you know, then, who that lady is ?" "Oh yes, as well as if I had known her ten years. She was a sister in a convent somewhere, and she fell in love with a man and eloped with him from the convent. The man was a French physician. She lived with him for three years, and then he left her."

Mr. Marcoy says that he was almost stupefied with amazement at hearing this statement.

"I'll tell you how it all happened," continued Miguel, "according to what the major-domo told me."

So Miguel went on to repeat the story, which was to this effect. He gave the original baptismal name of the lady, and also her convent name, which was Sister Maria. While she was in the convent, he said, her health began to fail, and she seemed to be sinking into a decline. They sent for a physician to prescribe for her. He came to visit her regularly for some time, and she began gradually to improve in health. At length, one night, when the body of one of the nuns, who had died the day before from the effects of a malignant disease in one of her feet, was lying in the chapel ready for the funeral, which was to take place the next day, the convent took fire. The fire was extinguished, but not till after it had burned a considerable part of the convent, including a whole range of cells, in which that of Sister Maria was situated.

All the other nuns that occupied the range of cells, it seems, made their escape, but when they came the next morning to that of Sister Maria they found a charred and halfconsumed body lying in it, from which they at once inferred that Sister Maria herself had been hemmed in by the smoke and the flames, and had perished. They took up the blackened remains and conveyed them to the chapel, intending to inter both bodies together, but they found to their astonishment that the body which had been left in the chapel had disappeared. In the course of the investigations which were at once made to discover the meaning of this mystery they found that the half-burned body was not that of Sister Maria at all, but of the nun that had died. They identified it by the foot, which, notwithstanding the effects of the fire, still retained traces of the original disease.

It was finally ascertained that Sister Maria, in connection with the physician, who had become her lover, had planned an escape from the convent, and in order to conceal the fact of her flight, and thus to pre

clude all ideas of pursuit, she had contrived to remove the dead body to her own cell, in hopes that, being found there in a state too much disfigured to be recognized, it would be supposed that it was she herself that had perished. Having secretly made this arrangement she had then set the convent on fire, and fled with her lover.

"At first," said Miguel, when he came to the end of his story, "I did not believe a word of what the major-domo had been telling me. I thought it was all the nonsense of a tipsy man. But he showed me a card which he said he found in a drawer, and which he said had upon it the name of the physician. I did not care about the card, for I could not read it, but I thought that perhaps you might like to see it, and so I noticed where he put it, and, as he and I slept in the same chamber, I watched my chance in the night and slipped the card into my pocket; and here it is."

So saying, he handed to Mr. Marcoy an old card containing the name of a physician of Lima, and the street and number where he lived.

Mr. Marcoy remembered that he had heard, some years before, the story, when in Lima, of the abduction of a nun from a convent by a young physician under circumstances precisely similar in its details to those which the major-domo had given; and he was convinced that the mysterious person to whose lonely retreat the chances of travel had brought him was no other than this unhappy nun, who had been enticed from her duty by the intoxication of love, and who was now doomed, after a brief interval of feverish and guilty pleasure, to a life which must consist of days of bitter remorse and anguish and unceasing apprehension, and nights of sorrow and tears. He pitied her most sincerely, for he regarded the impulse which is the cause of the ruin in many cases, as in this, as, after all, more of the nature of madness than crime. Indeed, he was not very far wrong in this idea. The wise man of ancient days who said that anger was a brief insanity might well have said the same of love.

Our traveler reflected sadly upon the unhappy fate of his new acquaintance, as he went on his way. But what he had learned of her guilt did not destroy his interest in her welfare, nor lessen his sympathy and pity for her in her sorrows. When he reached his home he took the little sprig-emblematical of the stricken heart-which he had carefully protected from injury during the journey, and mounting it with delicate care, he inclosed it in a case made of white satin, with edges trimmed with lace, to be preserved as a perpetual memorial of this strange adventure in the valleys of the Andes.