Mr. Maynard and his family remained for three years in Europe, his stay having been prolonged by political excitement in his own State of South Carolina.  Commerce is apt to knock the insularity out of people; distance from one’s own distinctive locality gives a wider range to the vision, and the retired merchant foresaw ruin in his State’s politics, and from the viewpoint of all Europe beheld instead of the usual collection of individual States—­his whole country.  But the excitement increasing, he was finally impelled to return in a faint hope of doing something to allay it, taking his wife with him, but leaving his daughter at school in Paris.  At about this time, however, a single cannon shot fired at the national flag on Fort Sumter shook the whole country, reverberated even in Europe, sending some earnest hearts back to do battle for State or country, sending others less earnest into inglorious exile, but, saddest of all! knocking over the school bench of a girl at the Paris pensionnat.  For that shot had also sunk Maynard’s ships at the Charleston wharves, scattered his piled Cotton bales awaiting shipment at the quays, and drove him, a ruined man, into the “Home Guard” against his better judgment.  Helen Maynard, like a good girl, had implored her father to let her return and share his risks.  But the answer was “to wait” until this nine days’ madness of an uprising was over.  That madness lasted six years, outlived Maynard, whose gray, misdoubting head bit the dust at Ball’s Bluff; outlived his colorless widow, and left Kelly a penniless orphan.

Yet enough of her country was left in her to make her courageous and independent of her past.  They say that when she got the news she cried a little, and then laid the letter and what was left of her last monthly allowance in Madame Ablas’ lap.  Madame was devastated.  “But you, impoverished and desolated angel, what of you?” “I shall get some of it back,” said the desolated angel with ingenuous candor, “for I speak better French and English than the other girls, and I shall teach them until I can get into the Conservatoire, for I have a voice.  You yourself have told papa so.”  From such angelic directness there was no appeal.  Madame Ablas had a heart,—­more, she had a French manageress’s discriminating instinct.  The American schoolgirl was installed in a teacher’s desk; her bosom friends and fellow students became her pupils.  To some of the richest, and they were mainly of her own country, she sold her smartest, latest dresses, jewels, and trinkets at a very good figure, and put the money away against the Conservatoire in the future.  She worked hard, she endured patiently everything but commiseration.  “I’d have you know, Miss,” she said to Miss de Laine, daughter of the famous house of Musslin, de Laine & Co., of New York, “that whatever my position here may be, it is not one to be patronized by a tapeseller’s daughter.  My case is not such a very ‘sad one,’ thank