“No.  You really must keep within bounds.  Because I have my eye upon you.  I can’t let you cheat that good soul, who brought you here, to her damage.”

The princess gasped and whitened as though a cold calm hand was laid on her miserable sham of a body.

“Do you know who I am?” stiffening herself into her idea of regal bearing.

“Not exactly.  It does not matter in the least, either.  I took your means of earning a living from you once, you told me, and I don’t wish to do it again.  I will not interfere as long as you hurt nobody.”

The princess stared at her and burst into an hysteric laugh:  “I believe, in my soul, you mean just what you say!  You are the shrewdest or stupidest woman I ever saw!  Do you sympathize with me?  Do you feel for me?” tragically, “or are you trying to worm my secret from me?”

“Neither one nor the other,” coolly.  “I know your secret.  You are no spirit and no princess.  I shall pity you perhaps when you go to some honest work.  Why,” with sudden interest, “I can find steady work for you at once.  A staymaker in the village told me the other day—­”

“I make stays!”

They both laughed.  Jane’s chief thought probably was how bony and sickly this poor woman was:  her own solid white limbs seemed selfish to her for the instant.  She took the twitching, ringed fingers in her hand.

“Play out your own play,” she said good-humoredly.  “You will not hurt anybody very seriously, I fancy.”

They walked in silence to the house.

The princess bent forward in the carriage-window as they drove away to look back at her.  “I wish my son knew such women as that!” she cried.

“Son?” said the startled Mrs. Wilde.  “You have not spoken before to me of your son, madame.”

“I have always kept him under tutors—­at Leipsic.”

She leaned back as they drove through the sunshine, her filmy handkerchief to her painted eyes, seeing nothing but an ugly, honest-faced boy hard at work in a bare Presbyterian chapel.  He would never know nor guess the life of shame which his mother led!  Her tears were real now.

She even had wild, visionary thoughts of a confession, of staymaking, of so many dollars a week regularly.  But she remembered the time when some fussy, good women had put her in charge of a fashionable Kindergarten.  There was a fat salary!  The house was luxurious:  the teachers did the work.  But one night she had broken the finical apparatus to pieces, left a heap of bonbons for the children, scrawled a verse of good-bye with chalk on the blackboard, and taken to the road again without a penny.

REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

ALFRED DE MUSSET.