turbed in the very mysteries of her craft; her wash-tub was seething and frothing just behind her, but her manner civil and obliging, as she stepped, with her red arms akimbo, beyond her doorway, in order to point out, in answer to my inquiry for "Il Signor O'Kane," his domicile at the farther or front end of the passage. "Piu in la, signor," said she; and then slapping the door in my face, she retired to her own affairs, and left me to mine.

My preparations for this interview were as follows: My visiting-card, as an English clergyman, which I proposed to lay on the table in the first instance, not as my gage de bataille, but as my announcement that I was no fighting man," and mine no hostile mission. In my hand I held a slight, but tough, slip of Roman vine, in the shape of a walkingstick, upon the principle of Parson Adams, who "always carried a sermon about him, to be prepared for the worst ;" and lastly, in my waistcoat-pocket, the love-letter received that morning, which I was determined the enamoured writer should receive back, as the end of a folly, and put in the fire before my face, as a word retracted, and 66 tanquam non locutum."

As I stood before the indicated door I heard loud tones and stamping demonstrations within, such as sometimes issue from a "School of Defence," when the students are hotly engaged in their practices. In a little time I could, however, perceive that the inmate was engaged in soliloquy, that the stamping and noise were but his own gesticulations, giving force and emphasis to his own eloquence. I knocked sharply at the door, and it was at once opened by a tall young man, without coat or waistcoat, and with a thin crop of red whiskers, standing out at right angles from a very thin-visaged countenance. I knew my man at once for one of those raw young Irishmen who go out to Rome or elsewhere to seek a "vocation for the priesthood," but who occasionally find instead seducing invitations, which draw them, as their own merry poet has it, "the other way-the other way."

"Mr. O'Kane," said I, making a proffer to enter.

The response to this was a sudden pirouette, a precipitous dive behind a check curtain, which divided his garret into two compartments, beyond which I presently heard a vigorous brushing and bustling, as of a completing toilette; meanwhile I had made an unceremonious advance into the outer or sitting-room division of the domicile, and as I stood, card in hand, ready to announce myself, Mr. O'Kane made his reappearance, spruce and brushed up, obviously in his best; and yet that best had a shabby gentility about it, a mixture of pretension and poverty, which, with a lackadaisical visage, fully justified Ellen's mistake of the day before, when she mistook the enamoured swain for a genteel beggar.

“Mr. O'Kane,” I said, "I think it best to open this conference by handing you my card."

He took it in a swaggering manner, but evidently seemed to be taken aback, and unprepared for the announcement it made.

"I have come," I said, "to put an end to a folly, which cannot go further without disagreeable consequences. This is your letter."

"Oh, sir," gasped out the poor fellow, "if you knew the devoted feelings which agitate and excite me at this moment." (He was apparently as cool as a cucumber, and as pale as a tallow candle.)

"Nonsense, sir," I said. "You write a letter to my niece this morning, to whom you have never spoken in your life- (I could not bring myself to tell him for what he had been mistaken in the Pincian Gardens the day before.)

"Oh, sir," he repeated, "if I could but obtain an introduction-my zeal, my devotion, my"

"Come, come," I said, gaining courage as the interview went on, "this must have an end. Every young man has his dream; yours is a mere dream. Miss does not desire your acquaintance, nor can you make hers; differences in position, in religion-all forbid it. There is your letter; now, like a sensible fellow, put it with your own hand into the fire-let us have done with this folly."

He hung fire at this; he had no wish to have done with his folly-he wanted to argue.

"Mr. O'Kane," I said, "this must pass away. You have, I presume, other objects and pursuits in Rome with which I should be sorry to interfere, but if I take up this letter again, it will be to make my way from this room to Mr. Freeborn, the English consul, and through him to claim the protection of the police.

As I made this announcement he evidently quailed, and after a few minutes of hesitation, during which I pretended to look carelessly round his chamber, though really and painfully anxious for his next move, the poor man took up his letter, and, after looking at it with a sheepish air for a few moments, thrust it into the brazier, which stood with him as a fireplace.

"I believe, sir," he said, "I have been very foolish, but rely on me Miss need not fear any further annoyance from me."

"Now," said I, "that is well done and well spoken, and like the 'galant'uomo,' one from your country, might be expected to prove."

He bowed profoundly at the compliment, but, as I turned to take my departure, the poor fellow seemed disposed to open a fresh argument upon the sacrifice of feeling which the resignation of his absurd hopes involved; but when I cut him short by saying, "Such things will happen to young men of elevated sentiments, but the same elevation of sentiment enables them to overcome disappointment

"Faith, and I believe you are right, sir! I have been a regular ass these three months," was his mercurial reply.

I repressed the endorsement which rose to my lips of " a regular ass indeed," and substituted, "I have the honour to wish you good day, Mr. O'Kane."

"I wish you a very good morning, sir," was the

response.

I never saw, nor did we ever hear more of this "nate Irishman." I found my sister waiting the result of my interview in deep anxiety, which passed into amusement as I told it; and as for the object of this "burnt proposal," I doubt if to the hour in which she may read this article Ellen ever knew what a "catch" she had missed in Mister O'Kane. I never had the heart to quiz her on her conquest.

GRANVILLE DE VIGNE.

A TALE OF THE DAY.

PART THE FIFTH.

I.

HOW DE VIGNE COURTS IRON GYVES, AS THOUGH THEY WERE SOFTEST ROSE
CHAINS.

DE VIGNE and I consumed not a little cognac and Cavendish, swearing over our durance vile, when everybody, except unlucky dogs of militaires, had departed, and town was empty; shutters up in all the windows where we had wont to see delicate hothouse flowers, and as beautiful English faces; not a wiggy coachman nor a showy hack in Ring or Ride; not a lounger by the rails, nor a note of the Life Guards band; the club-rooms empty, newsless, and dreary, great markets of gossip without either scandalmongers or hearers, a forlorn wight or two sitting in them with the papers all to himself, but far from enjoying the monopoly-everything shut up, everything at a stand-still, even Paterfamilias of Russell-square and Bloomsbury had taken himself off to eat shrimps and admire the "hocean" at Margate; even Brown, Jones, and Robinson had got their fortnight from Coutts's or Barclay's, and were gone to shoot sparrows with their country cousins, or to Boulogne, under the impression that they should have done France;" all the sang pur was gone and a good deal of the canaille, and we were left in London, I thirsting to be stalking royals with Sabretasche up in his Inverness-shire moor, and De Vigne longing to be after a finer covey still. So, after six weeks' consummation of anathemas, soda water, and Latakia, sufficient to last a troop for a twelvemonth, he and I were delighted enough when we were at last swinging down in the express to Vigne on the 31st of August. I wondered in my mind he was not off to Kemp Town, but I was too glad to find the partridges outbalanced the Trefusis to make any comment upon it. Vigne was about sixty miles from London, and we were at the station in a couple of hours or so, where a drag waited for us with four blood bays, whose grooms glowed with repressed delight at sight of their master. De Vigne, though of somewhat imperious temper, and immeasurably haughty to people of pretentious rank, was cordially liked by his dependents; and I have always noticed that servants always like best those who, while they treat them well, never let them forget their difference of degree. Vigne was a pretty picturesque village, and nearly every rood of land belonged to him; and his park was almost as magnificent a sweep of land as Holcombe or Longleat. The De Vignes of Vigne went far back in English annals, farther than any in the peerage; and De Vigne would have no more accepted a title than a partnership in a brewery. He looked back on a pure ancestry-ambassadors, scholars, soldiers, chancellors, ministers, gentlemen always; and many a tale of daring and danger, many a record of high honour and chivalric deeds, were told to him as a child of those courtly men in hauberk and corslet, in velvet and point,

with their stern brows, and their perfumed love-locks, and their powdered wigs-men who had wooed and won in courts and camps, and made their names famous either through pen or sword.

It was with something warmer than pride that he looked across over his wide woodlands glowing in the August sunset, the great elm-trees throwing their wide cool shadows far over the rich pasture land beneath; the ferns, from the tiny feathery sprays up to the giant leaves, high as a man's elbow, waving in the fresh breezes, the deer trooping away into the deep green glades and the lengthened avenues, stretching off in aisles of burnished green and gold, like one of Creswick's rich English landscapes of chequered light and shadow. A mile and a half of one of those magnificent elm avenues brought us to the house, more like Hardwick Hall in exterior than any other place I know. It stood grandly, too, something as Hardwick does; but in interior, though the hall and other parts of it were mediæval enough, it was what Hardwick certainly is not-or was not, when last I saw it-luxurious and modern to the last degree, with every elegance and comfort that upholstery and science have taught the nineteenth century to look upon as absolute requirements.

De Vigne threw the ribbons to a groom, and sprang down, while the deep bay of the dogs in the kennels some way off gave him a welcome to his taste. In the hall he had another: his mother, Lady Flora, a soft, delicate woman, with eyes and voice of great beauty and sweetness, came out from a morning room to meet him, with both her hands outstretched, and a fond smile on her face. De Vigne loved his mother tenderly and reverentially. She had been a wise woman with him as a child, she stimulated his energies instead of repressing them, and, with strong selfcommand, let him risk a broken limb rather than teach him his first idea of fear, a thing of which De Vigne was as profoundly ignorant as little Nelson. As a boy, she entered into all his sports and amusements, listening to his tales of rounders, ponies, cricket, and boating, as if she really understood them. As a man, she never attempted to interfere with him. She knew that she had trained him in honour and truth, and was too skilled in human nature to seek to pry into a young man's life. The consequence was, that she kept all her son's affection, trust, and confidence, and, when she did speak, was always heard gently and respectfully; and he would often tell her as naturally of his errors and entanglements as he had, when a child, told her of his faults to his servant or his Shetland. The house was full, chiefly of men come down for the shooting, with one or two girls of the Ferrers family, Lady Flora's nieces, who would have liked very well to have caught their cousin Granville, for their father, though he was a Marquis, was as poor for a peer as a curate with six daughters and no chance of preferment. But their cousin Granville was not to be caught by their trolling, at least.

"I am delighted to see you, Mr. Chevasney," said Lady Flora, when I went down to the drawing-room after ablution and hot coffee. "You know you are always a favourite of mine, at first, ne vous en déplaise, because you were a friend of Granville's, and then for your own sake. There will be some people here to-morrow to amuse you, not but what you gentlemen never seem to me so happy as when you are without us. Shut you up in your smoking, or billiard, or card-room, and you want nothing more!"

"True enough!" laughed De Vigne. "It is an ungallant admission, but it is a fact, nevertheless. See men at college wines, in the jollity and merriment of a camp, in the sans gêne enjoyment of a man dinner! Deny it who will, we can be happy without the beau sexe, but the beau sexe cannot be happy without us!"

"How conceited you are, Granville !" cried Adelina Ferrers, a handsome blonde, who thought very well of herself. "I am quite sure we

can.

some

"Can you, Lina?" said De Vigne, leaning against the mantelpiece, and watching his mother's diamond rings flash in and out as she did bead-work. Why do we never hear of ladies' parties, then? Why, when we come in after dinner, do we invariably find you all bored to the last extent, and half asleep, till you revive under our kindly influence? Why, if you are as happy without us, do we never see you establish women clubs to drink tea, or eau de Cologne, or sal volatile, and read new novels and talk over dress ?"

"Because we are too kind. Our society improves you so much, that, through principle, we do not deprive you of it," answered Lady Lina, with a long glance of her large turquoise eyes.

"That's a pity, dear," smiled De Vigne, "because, if we thought you were comfortably employed, we could go off to the partridges to-morrow with much greater pleasure; whereas, to know, as we do, that you will all be victims of ennui till we come back again, naturally spoils sport to men like myself, of tender conscience and amiable disposition. You have 'The Princess' now in your hand, Lina; that will tell you how ladies who fancied they could be happy without us came to grief!"

"This is the fruit of Miss Trefusis's flattery, I suppose," sneered Blanche Ferrers, the other cousin, who could not appreciate fun, and who had made hard running after De Vigne a season ago.

"Miss Trefusis never flatters," said De Vigne, quietly.

"Indeed!" said Blanche. "I know nothing of her. I do not desire !"

The volumes expressed in those four last words were such as only women like Blanche Ferrers could possibly compress in one little sneering sentence. De Vigne felt all that was intended in it: his eyebrows contracted, his eyes flashed fire; he had too knightly a heart not to defend an absent woman, and a woman he loved, as dearly as he would his own honour.

"It would be to your advantage, Blanche, if you had that pleasure. Miss Trefusis would make any one proud to know her; even the Ladies Ferrers, though the world does say they are fond of imagining the sun created solely that it may have the honour of shining on them.

He spoke very quietly, but sarcastically. His mother looked up at him hastily, then bent over her work; Blanche coloured with annoyance, and smiled another sneer.

"Positively, Granville, you are quite chivalrous in her defence. I know it is the law at Vigne for nobody to disagree with you; nevertheless, I shall venture, for I must assure you, that far from esteeming it an honour to know Miss Trefusis, I should deem it rather a―dishonour!"

How like a lion fairly roused and longing to spring he looked. He kept cool, however, but his teeth were set hard.