his arms, rubbed up his strategy, laid out his lines of defense.

There was only one thing in life that his mind had been very much made up to, but on this question he had never wavered he would get on, to the utmost, in his profession. It was a point on which it was perfectly lawful to be unamiable to others - to be vigilant, eager, suspicious, selfish. He had not, in fact, been unamiable to others, for his affairs had not required it: he had got on well enough without hardening his heart. Fortune had been kind to him, and he had passed so many competitors on the way that he could forswear jealousy and be generous. But he had always flattered himself that his hand would not falter on the day he should find it necessary to drop bitterness into his cup. This day would be sure to dawn, for no career was all smooth water to the end; and then the sacrifice would find him ready. His mind was familiar with the thought of a sacrifice: it is true that nothing could be clear in advance about the occasion, the object, the victim. All that was tolerably definite was that the propitiatory offering would have to be some cherished enjoyment. Very likely, indeed, this enjoyment would be associated with the charms of another persona probability pregnant with the idea that such charms would have to be dashed out of sight. At any rate, it never had occurred to Sherringham that he himself might be the sacrifice. You had to pay, to get on; but at least you borrowed from others to do it. When you could n't borrow you did n't get on: for what was the situation in life in which you met the whole requisition yourself?

Least of all had it occurred to our friend that the wrench might come through his interest in that branch of art on which Nick Dormer had rallied him. The beauty of a love of the theatre was precisely that it was a passion exercised on the easiest terms. This

was not the region of responsibility. It had the discredit of being sniffed at by the austere; but if it was not, as they said, a serious field, was not the compensation just that you could not be seriously entangled in it? Sherringham's great advantage, as he regarded the matter, was that he had always kept his taste for the drama quite in its place. His facetious cousin was free to pretend that it sprawled through his life; but this was nonsense, as any unprejudiced observer of that life would unhesitatingly attest. There had not been the least sprawling, and his fancy for the art of Garrick had never worn the proportions of an eccentricity. It had never drawn down from above anything approaching a reprimand, a remonstrance, a remark. Sherringham was positively proud of his discretion; for he was a little proud of what he did know about the stage. Trifling for trifling, there were plenty of his fellows who had in their lives private infatuations much sillier and less confessable. Had he not known men who collected old invitation-cards (hungry for those of the last century), and others who had a secret passion for shuffleboard? His little weaknesses were intellectual they were a part of the life of the mind. All the same, on the day they showed a symptom of interfering they should be plucked off with a turn of the wrist.

Sherringham scented interference now, and interference in rather an invidious form. It might be a bore, from the point of view of the profession, to find one's self, as a critic of the stage, in love with a coquine; but it was a much greater bore to find one's self in love with a young woman whose character remained to be estimated. Miriam Rooth was neither fish nor flesh: one had with her neither the guarantees of one's own class nor the immunities of hers.

What was hers, if one came to that? A certain puzzlement about this very point was part of the fascination which she had ended by throwing over

him. Poor Sherringham's scheme for getting on had contained no proviso against falling in love, but it had embodied an important clause on the subject of surprises. It was always a surprise to fall in love, especially if one were looking out for it; so this contingency had not been worth official paper. But it became a man who respected the service he had undertaken for the state to be on his guard against predicaments from which the only issue was the rigor of matrimony. An ambitious diplomatist would probably be wise to marry, but only with his eyes very much open. That was the fatal surprise- to be led to the altar in a dream. Sherringham's view of the proprieties attached to such a step was high and strict; and if he held that a man in his position was, especially as the position improved, essentially a representative of the greatness of his country, he considered that the wife of such a personage would exercise in her degree (for instance, at a foreign court) a function no less symbolic. She would always be, in short, a very important quantity, and the scene was strewn with illustrations of it. She might be such a help and she might be such a blight that common prudence imposed a sharp scrutiny. Sherringham had seen women, in the career, who were stupid or vulgar, make a mess of things it was enough to wring your heart. Then he had his positive idea of the perfect ambassadress, the full-blown lily of the future; and with this idea Miriam Rooth presented no analogy whatever.

The girl had described herself, with characteristic directness, as "all right;" and so she might be, so she assuredly was only all right for what? He had divined that she was not sentimental that whatever capacity she might have for responding to a devotion, or for desiring it, was, at any rate, not in the direction of vague philandering. For him certainly she had no sentiment. Sherringham was almost afraid to think

of this, lest it should beget in him a rage convertible mainly into caring for her more. Rage or no rage, it would be charming to be in love with her if there were no complications; but the complications were, in advance, just what was clearest in the business. He was perhaps cold-blooded to think of them; but it must be remembered that they were the particular thing which his training had equipped him for dealing with. He was, at all events, not too cold-blooded to have, for the two months of his holiday, very little inner vision of anything more abstract than Miriam's face. The desire to see it again was as pressing as thirst; but he tried to teach himself the endurance of the trayeler in the desert. He kept the Channel between them, but his spirit moved every day an inch nearer to her, until (and it was not long) there were no more inches left. The last thing he expected the future ambassadress to have been was a fille de théâtre. The answer to this objection was of course that Miriam was not yet so much of one but that he could easily head her off. Then came worrying retorts to that, chief among which was the sense that to his artistic conscience heading her off would be simple shallowness. The poor girl had a right to her chance, and he should not really alter anything by taking it away. from her; for was she not the artist to the tips of her tresses (the ambassadress never in the world), and would she not take it out in something else if one were to make her deviate? So certain was that irrepressible deviltry to insist ever on its own.

Besides, could one make her deviate? If she had no "sentiment" for him, what was his warrant for supposing that she could be corrupted into respectability? How could the career (his career) speak to a nature which had glimpses, as vivid as they were crude, of such a different range, and for which success meant quite another sauce to the dish?

Would the brilliancy of marrying Peter Sherringham be such a bribe to relinquishment? How could he think so without fatuity-how could he regard himself as a high prize? Relinquishment of the opportunity to exercise a rare talent was not, in the nature of things, an easy effort to a young lady who was conceited as well as ambitious. Besides, she might eat her cake and have it might make her fortune both on the stage and in the world. Success ful actresses had ended by marrying dukes, and was not that better than remaining obscure and marrying a commoner? There were moments when Sherringham tried to think that Miriam's talent was not a force to reckon with; there was so little to show for it as yet that the caprice of believing in it would perhaps suddenly leave her. But his suspicion that it was real was too uneasy to make such an experiment peaceful, and he came back, moreover, to his deepest impression that of her being of the turn of mind for which the only consistency is art. Had not Madame Carré said at the last that she could "do anything"? It was true that if Madame Carré had been mistaken in the first place she might also be mistaken in the second. But in this latter case she would be mistaken with him, and such an error would be too like a truth.

I ought possibly to hesitate to say how much Sherringham felt the discomfort, for him, of the advantage that Miriam had of him- the advantage of the advantage of her presenting herself in a light which rendered any passion that he might entertain an implication of duty as well as of pleasure. Why there should be this implication was more than he could say; sometimes he declared to himself that he was superstitious for seeing it. He did n't know, he could scarcely conceive, of another case, of the same general type, in which he would have seen it. In foreign countries there were very few ladies of Miss Rooth's intended pro

fession who would not have regarded it as a little too strong that, to console them for not being admitted into drawing-rooms, they should have no offset but the exercise of a virtue in which no one would believe. Because, in foreign countries, actresses were not admitted into drawing-rooms: that was a pure English drollery, ministering equally little to histrionics and to the tone of these resorts. Did the sanctity which, to his imagination, made it a burden to have to reckon with Miriam come from her being English? Sherringham could remember cases in which that privilege operated as little as possible as a restriction. It came a great deal from Mrs. Rooth, in whom he apprehended depths of calculation as to what she might achieve for her daughter by "working" the idea of a blameless life. Her romantic turn of mind would not in the least prevent her from regarding that idea as a substantial capital, to be laid out to the best worldly advantage. Miriam's essential irreverence was capable, on a pretext, of making mince-meat of it that he was sure of; for the only capital she recognized was the talent. which, some day, managers and agents would outbid each other in paying for. But she was a good-natured creature ; she was fond of her mother, would do anything to oblige (that might work in all sorts of ways), and would probably like the loose slippers of blamelessness quite as well as the high standards of the opposite camp.

Sherringham, I may add, had no desire that she should indulge a different preference; it was foreign to him to compute the probabilities of a young lady's misbehaving for his advantage (that seemed to him definitely base), and he would have thought himself a blackguard if, professing a tenderness for Miriam, he had not wished the thing that was best for her. The thing that was best for her would no doubt be to become the wife of the man to whose suit

she should incline her ear. That this would be the best thing for the gentleman in question was, however, a very different matter, and Sherringham's final conviction was that it would never do for him to turn into that hypothetic personage. He asked for no removal and no extension of leave, and he proved to himself how well he knew what he was about by never addressing a line, during his absence, to the Hôtel de la Mayenne. He would simply go straight, and inflict as little injury upon Peter Sherringham as upon any one else. He remained away to the last hour of his privilege, and continued to act lucidly in having nothing to do with the mother and daughter for several days after his return to Paris.

It was when this discipline came to an end, one afternoon, after a week had passed, that he felt most the force of the reference that has just been made to Mrs. Rooth's private reckonings. He found her at home, alone, writing a letter under the lamp, and as soon as he came in she cried out that he was the very person to whom the letter was addressed. She could bear it no longer; she had permitted herself to reproach him with his terrible silence to ask why he had quite forsaken them. It was an illustration of the way in which her visitor had come to regard her that he rather disbelieved than believed this description of the crumpled papers lying on the table. He was not sure even that he believed that Miriam had just gone out. He told her mother how busy he had been all the while he was away and how much time, in particular, he had had to give, in London, to seeing on her daughter's behalf the people connected with the theatres.

"Ah, if you pity me, tell me that you 've got her an engagement!" Mrs. Rooth cried, clasping her hands.

"I took a great deal of trouble; I wrote ever so many notes, sought introductions, talked with people- such im

possible people, some of them. In short I knocked at every door, I went into the question exhaustively." And he enumerated the things he had done, imparted some of the knowledge he had gathered. The difficulties were immense, and even with the influence he could command (such as it was) there was very little to be achieved in face of them. Still, he had gained ground: there were two or three fellows, men with small theatres, who had listened to him better than the others, and there was one in particular whom he had a hope he really might have interested. From him he had extracted certain benevolent assurances: he would see Miriam, he would listen to her, he would do for her what he could. The trouble was that no one would lift a finger for a girl unless she were known, and yet that she never could become known until innumerable fingers were lifted. You could n't go into the water unless you could swim, and you could n't swim until you had been in the water.

"But new women appear; they get theatres, they get audiences, they get notices in the newspapers," Mrs. Rooth objected. "I know of these things only what Miriam tells me. It's no knowledge that I was born to." "It's perfectly true; it's all done with money."

"And how do they come by money?" Mrs. Rooth asked, candidly. "People give it to them."

"Well, what people, now?"

"And what good would that do me?"

"Why, don't you delight in her genius? demanded Mrs. Rooth.

"I delight in her mother. You think me more disinterested than I am," Sherringham added, with a certain soreness of irritation.

"I know why you did n't write!” Mrs. Rooth declared, archly.

"You must go to London," Peter said, without heeding this remark.

"Ah, if we could only get there it would be a relief. I should draw a long breath. There, at least, I know where I am, and what people are. But here one lives in the midst of things!" And the poor lady gave a significant but unexplanatory sigh, as if these things were beyond all speech.

audible voice to the reflection "It's a great mistake, either way, for a man to be in love with an actress. Either it means nothing serious, and what's the use of that? or it means everything, and that's still more delusive." "Delusive?"

"Idle, unprofitable."

"Surely, honest love is never unprofitable," Mrs. Rooth rejoined, with soft reasonableness.

"In such a case how can it be honest?

"I thought you were talking of an English gentleman," said Mrs. Rooth.

"Oh, my own Miriam!" murmured Mrs. Rooth.

"On the other hand, fancy the complication if such a man marries a woman who is on the stage."

Mrs. Rooth regarded him. is n't on the stage yet."

"Miriam

"Go to London, and she soon will