eturn 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 you, and I prefer
not to be spok