been scores as
beautiful as that poor girl thrown into the plague-pit before now. I
wonder why the house has been deserted, and if she was really a bride.
The bridegroom could not have loved her much, I fancy, or not even the
pestilence could have scared him away."

"But, Ormiston, what an extraordinary thing it is that it should be
precisely the same face that the fortune-teller showed me. There she
was alive, and here she is dead; so I've lost all faith in La Masque for
ever."

Ormiston looked doubtful.

"Are you quite sure it is the same, Kingsley?"

"Quite sure?" said Sir Norman, indignantly. "Of course I am! Do you
think I could be mistaken is such a case? I tell you I would know that
face at Kamschatka or, the North Pole; for I don't believe there ever
was such another created."

"So be it, then! Your object, of course, in following that cart is, to
take a last look at her?"

"Precisely so. Don't talk; I feel in no mood for it just at present."

Ormiston smiled to himself, and did not talk, accordingly; and in
silence the two friends followed the gloomy dead-cart. A faint young
moon, pale and sickly, was struggling dimly through drifts of dark
clouds, and lighted the lonesome, dreary streets with a wan, watery
glimmer. For weeks, the weather had been brilliantly fine--the days all
sunshine, the nights all moonlight; but now Ormiston, looking up at the
troubled face of the sky, concluded mentally that the Lord Mayor had
selected an unpropitious night for the grand illumination. Sir Norman,
with his eyes on the pest-cart, and the long white figure therein, took
no heed of anything in the heaven above or in the earth beneath,
and strode along in dismal silence till they reached, at last, their
journey's end.

As the cart stopped the two young men approached the edge of the
plague-pit, and looked in with a shudder. Truly it was a horrible sight,
that heaving, putrid sea of corruption; for the bodies of the miserable
victims were thrown in in cartfuls, and only covered with a handful of
earth and quicklime. Here and there, through the cracking and sinking
surface, could be seen protruding a fair white arm, or a baby face,
mingled with the long, dark tresses of maidens, the golden curls of
children, and the white hairs of old age. The pestilential effluvia
arising from the dreadful mass was so overpowering that both shrank
back, faint and sick, after a moment's survey. It was indeed as Sir
Norman had, said, a