Anglicised to contract secret marriages with roving revolutionists, and scamper about the country with ardent young Frenchmen in the style of Gretna Green?” In fact, it was really from London that Mrs. Ashburleigh was proceeding, for the purpose of taking care, in the Rhenish city where he was dying, of her handsome, dissipated, worthless husband.  Taken suddenly ill at Brussels, she left her infant to the unequaled chill of a strange, unknown cemetery, hastening thence with tears and despair to the bedside where duty called her.

Has my reader forgotten the dim, tear-swollen story which I heard—­not at all improved in the telling—­from my generous young friend Grandstone—­how an impulsive Frenchman had laid to rest, in flowers and evergreens, the unnamed baby of a woman he had never seen?  Jealous as I was of Fortnoye, I never could think without tenderness of this singular action.  To make the tomb of this helpless Innocence the young man braved the curiosity of his comrades—­despised the rumor, the obloquy, and, hardest of all, the jests.  Well has the wise dramatist decided that Ophelia must needs be laid in Yorick’s bed!

Poor Francine, gay, frivolous, innocently vain of her little travesty of English behavior, found her accomplishments and graces received by her guardian’s circle with incomprehensible coldness.  Hurt and humiliated, she asked to pay a visit to her father.  The honest rustic received her with a miserable confusion of doubt and severity, for her escapade to England had never pleased him, and her return from her godmother’s home wore to him the air of a repudiation.  At her father’s house, however, she was discovered by Fortnoye, who had never heard the ingenious Kranich’s theory of his own private wedding with Francine, and who thought to find in her the veiled unknown of the cemetery.  He saw for the first time, in the flowery home at Noisy, that fresh ingenuous beauty, a little over-cast with disappointment.  His generous nature was touched; and, with his talent for administration and planning, he conceived the idea of establishing Francine in the pretty bird’s nest at Carlsruhe, distant alike from the strongholds of her calumniators, Belgium and France.

Fortnoye now had an object in life.  “There is a very young person in the cemetery of Laaken who is much in need of a chaperone,” he said.  The frank proofs of his own relations with this churchyard would not only do credit to his own reputation, but would gratify the best friends of Mademoiselle Joliet and at least one other lady.  To attain these proofs he had to step over the coiling, writhing bodies of a whole nest of rumors.  When he seized by the throat the especial slander that he himself was the husband of the babe’s mother, he found written on its crest the signature of John Kranich.  He sought the aunt.  This lady gave him several interviews, the Lutheran prayer-book for ever in her hand.  “Why does the dear girl not come to me?” she would say, weeping, but she refused to hear a word