“What would you have me say, dear?  Is not that word a very comprehensive one?  The lady above-stairs is indeed magnificent; but, Miriam, where is Bertie?” and he laughed.

“Ah!  I understand; you find her artificial.”

“She is too fine an actress for that, Miriam; only transfigured.”

“Yes, I see what you mean” (sadly).  “Bertie is wholly changed.  Whom does she resemble, Wardour?  What queen, bethink you, whose likeness you have seen?  Not Mary Queen of Scots—­not Elizabeth—­”

“No, surely not; but she is, now that you draw my attention to it, strikingly like Marie Antoinette.”

“She said she would be, and she has succeeded!” and I mused on the wonderful transition.

Four years more, and we heard of Bertie in England, as the rarely-gifted and beautiful American reader, “Lavinia La Vigne.”  Out of the repertoire of her family names she had fished up this alliteration, and “Bertie” was reserved for those behind the scenes.

It was declared also in the public sheets, what great and distinguished men were in her train; how wits bowed to her wit, and authors to her criticisms!  But, when she wrote to me, she said nothing of all this, only telling of her visit to Mrs. Shelley, who had received her kindly, and to the tomb of Shakespeare, whose painted effigy she especially derided.  “It looks indeed like a man who would cut his wife off with an old feather-bed and a teakettle,” was one of her characteristic remarks, I remember; but there was a little postscript that told the whole story of her life, on a separate scrap of paper meant only for my eye I clearly saw, and committed instantly to the flames after perusal: 

“Ah, Miriam, this is all a magic lantern!  The people are phantoms, the realities are shadows, and I a wretched humbug, duller than all!  Two men have lived and breathed for me on the face of this earth—­two only.  One was my much-offending and deeply-suffering father.  The other—­O, Miriam, to think of him is crime; but in his life, and that alone, I live.  I send you Praed’s last beautiful little song—­’Tell him I love him yet.’  It will tell you every thing.  An answer I have scribbled to it as if written by a man.  Keep both, and when I am dead, should you survive me, dear, lay them if you can in my coffin, close, close to my heart!”

Three years more, and Bertie is in Rome, independent, at last, through her own exertions, and able to gratify her tastes.  I receive thence statues, and pictures, and cameos, all exquisite of their kind, her princely gifts, her legacies.  Then comes a long silence.  She knew what faith was mine when she last abode beneath my roof and made herself a little impertinently merry at my expense in consequence of this new order of things.

Now comes a letter (a paper envelope accompanying it)—­Bertie La Vigne has entered the Catholic Church, through baptism and confirmation, so briefly states the letter written in her own hand and of date some months back, retained, no doubt, through forgetfullness, until reminded.  The paper, of recent issue, tells of the ceremony at St. Peter’s, which admitted to the novitiate several noble ladies, native and foreign, and among the rest an artist of merit, Miss Lavinia La Vigne, of Georgia, United States of America.