[Illustration:  DIVERS DIVERSIONS.]

I peered through the crowds at this, right and left, with inexpressible emotion.  Perhaps this accidental sort of quest was that which destiny had arranged for the solution of my life-problem.  To light upon Mary Ashburleigh in these festal throngs, perhaps wanting assistance, perhaps calling upon my name even now through her velvet lips, was a chance the mere notion of which made my blood leap.

When Brussels gives herself over to holiday-making, she does it in a whole-souled and self-consistent way that has plenty of attractiveness.  The houses seemed to have turned themselves inside out to replenish the streets.  People in their best clothes, equipages, processions, bands, troops of children, filled the avenues.  Some conjecture that there might have been a mistake about the church took us to the cathedral of St. Gudule.  Here, amid the superb spectrums of the stained windows, we searched through the vari-colored throngs that covered the floor, but no familiar face looked upon us.  Strange to us as the old, impassive monumental dukes of Brabant who occupy the niches, the people made way to let us pass from the doorway between the lofty brace of towers to the high altar, which is a juggler’s apparatus, and has concealed machinery causing the sacred wafer to come down seemingly of its own accord at the moment when the priest is about to lift the Host.  All was unfamiliar and splendid, and we came away, feeling as if our own little wedding-group would have been lost in so magnificent a tabernacle.  The Grande Place, on which lay the wedge-like shadow of the high-towered Hotel de Ville, was perhaps as thronged a honeycomb of buzzing populace as when Alva looked out upon it to see the execution of Egmont and Horn.  Among all the good-natured Netherlandish countenances that paved the square there was none that responded to my own.

We drove vaguely through the principal streets, and then, baffled, made our way to the faubourg in which is situated the zoological garden, toward which a considerable portion of the inhabitants was going even as ourselves.  At the entrance our carriage encountered that of the bride and groom, and soon the whole party of the breakfast-table assembled by the gate, for the great coffee-rooms at which our meal was laid were close by the garden, and a promenade in this famous living museum was a premeditated part of the day’s enjoyment.  We entered the grounds in character, frankly putting forward our claims as a wedding-procession.  That is the delightful French custom among those who are brought up as Francine had been:  her father would have been heartbroken to have been denied the proud exhibition of his joy, and Fortnoye was too great a traveler, too cosmopolitan, to object to a little family pageant that he had seen equaled or exceeded in publicity in most of the Catholic countries on the globe.  Francine, her artisanne cap for ever lost, her gleaming dark hair set, like