They continue to reside under the same roof, and Bellevue awaits its master.  It will be empty, I think, if I understand George Gaston’s character, so long as Major Favraud is a wanderer on the face of the Continent of Europe, and held, for his especial benefit and return, in readiness.

Vernon and his sweet wife Marion spent the first season of their happy married life under my lintel-tree, and are now our nearest neighbors in our new land of sojourn.  A slender iron fence divides our grounds from theirs.  A golden cord of affection binds our lives together.  Our interests, too, are the same.

Vernon is leagued with my husband in the great engineering projects which have enriched them both—­the capital to enlist in which sphere of enterprise was furnished by the sale to a company of our “gold-gashed” lands in Georgia—­revealed to my knowledge, as it may be remembered, by the inadvertence of Gregory.

The career of Bertie La Vigne had been a varied one, as might have been foreseen perhaps from her early manifestations and proclivities.

She came to me, while still we dwelt in the city of my birth, when she was approaching her seventeenth year, and remained a twelvemonth under my roof, engaged in the study of Shakespeare with that accomplished artiste Mr. Mortimer.  She intended to pursue what gift she had of voice and histrionic talent as a means of livelihood, she told me from the first, and to get rid of the ineffable weariness and monotony of her life at Beauseincourt as well.

The two motives seemed to me to be worthy of all praise.  There are, indeed, abodes that kill the soul as well as the body, and this was one of them in my estimation, yet I remembered as a seeming inconsistency that, when, in her sixteenth year, it was proposed that Bertie should come to me for the purpose of attending schools for the accomplishments, she steadily refused to do so.

Her sense of duty might have been at the root of this firm and persistent refusal to accept from my hand a gift richer far than “jewels of the mine”—­the power of varied occupation—­but something had secretly whispered to me that this was not all on which her apparent self-abnegation was based, and I think that I was right in my conjecture.

Have you seen a plant, scathed by frost, that has made a strong and successful effort to live, and still in its struggling existence bears the mark of the early blight on leaf and blossom?

Such was the impression made on my mind by Bertie La Vigne after three years of separation, and yet she had grown into majestic stature and into comparative beauty since we parted at Beauseincourt.

Tall, slender, straight as a young palm-tree, with exquisite extremities, and a face of aristocratic if not Grecian proportions, there still was wanting in her step, her eye, her smile, that wonderful abandon that had formed her chief charm in her earlier years.