minutes, on the way to the utter bad.  When I remembered our conversation about Daker, his light, airy, unconcerned manner, and the consummate deceit which effectually conveyed to me the idea that he had never heard the name of Daker, I was inclined to turn upon him, and let him know I was not altogether in the dark.  Again, at the ball, he had carried off the introduction to Mrs. Trefoil with masterly coolness, making me a second time his dupe.  Had we met much we should have quarrelled desperately; for I recollected the innocent English face I had first seen on the Boulogne boat, and the unhappy woman who had implored me not to speak her name to him.  The days follow one another and have no resemblance, says the proverb.  I passed away from Baden, and Bertram passed out of my mind.  I had not seen him again when I spent those eventful few days at Boulogne with Hanger.

Another year had gone, and I had often thought over the death scene of Daker, and Sharp’s trudges about Paris in search of his niece.  I could not help him, for I was homeward bound at the time, and shortly afterwards was despatched to St. Petersburg.  But I gave him letters.  There was one hope that lingered in the gloom of this miserable story; perhaps Mrs. Daker had won the love of some honest man, and, emancipated by Daker’s deceit and death, might yet spend some happy days.  And then the figure of Cosmo Bertram would rise before me—­and I knew he was not the man to atone a fault or sin by a sacrifice.

I was in Paris again at the end of 1866.  I heard nothing, save that Sharp had returned home, having tried in vain to find the child to whom he had been a father since the death of his brother.  He had identified her as Mrs. Trefoil; he had discovered that shame had come upon her and him; and he had made out the nature of the relations between his niece and Captain Cosmo Bertram.  But Captain Bertram was not in Paris; Mrs. Trefoil had disappeared and left no sign.  So many exciting stories float about Paris in the course of a season, that such an event as the appearance of a Kentish farmer in search of Mrs. Daker, afterwards Mrs. Trefoil, and the connexion of Captain Bertram with her name, is food for a few days only.  This is a very quiet humdrum story, when it is compared with the dramas of society, provincial and Parisian, which the Gazette des Tribunaux is constantly presenting to its readers.

When I reached Paris it was forgotten.  Miss Tayleure had moved off to Tours—­for economy some said; to break new ground, according to others.  There had been diplomatic changes.  The English society had received many accessions, and suffered many secessions.  I went to my old haunts and found new faces.  I was met with a burst of passionate tears by Lucy Rowe, end honest Jane, the servant.  Mrs. Rowe was lying, with all her secrets and plots, in Pere Lachaise—­to the grief, among others, of the Reverend Horace Mohun, who would hardly be comforted by Lucy’s handsome continuance of the buttered toast and first look at the Times.  Lucy, bright and good Lucy, had become queen and mistress of the boarding-house—­albeit she had not a thimbleful of the blood of the Whytes of Battersea in her veins.  But of the Rue Millevoye presently.