r eyes, and counter-charms to those heathenish invocations in which
the child put her sole faith and trust of salvation. And among other
things she gave her the Ten Commandments, very charmingly done.
Round each commandment were pictures, emblems, symbolic flowers, all
enclosed in fancy scroll-work of an elaborate kind. Really, it was a
very creditable piece of bastard art, and Mr. Dundas was moved almost
to tears by it. Madame did it herself--so she said with a tender
little smile--as her pleasant surprise for poor dear Leam on her
fifteenth birthday. And Leam was so far tamed in that she suffered
the Tables to be hung up in her bedroom, and even found pleasure in
looking at them. The pictures of Ruth and Naomi; of the thief running
away with the money-bags; of a woman lying prostrate with long hair,
and a broken lily at her side; of a murdered man prone in the snow,
and a frightened-looking bravo, half covering his face in his cloak,
fleeing away in the darkness, with a bowl marked "poison" and a dagger
dripping with blood in the margin,--all these pictures, which stood
against the commandments they illustrated, fascinated her greatly. The
colors and the gilding, the flowers and the emblems, pleased her,
and she took the texts sandwiched between as the jalap in the jam. At
first she thought it impious to have them there at all, because they
were in the Bible, and mamma used to say that good Christians never
read the Bible. It was a holy book which only priests might use, and
when those pigs of Protestants looked into it and read it, just as
they would read the newspaper, they profaned it. But by force of habit
she reconciled herself to the profanity, and by frequent looking at
the art got the literature into her head. And when it was there she
did not find anything in it to be afraid of or to condemn as too
mysteriously holy for her knowledge. All of which was so much to the
good; and Mr. Dundas had no words strong enough whereby to express his
gratitude to the fair woman who had saved his child from destruction
by giving her the Ten Commandments made pretty by adjuncts of bastard
art.

But had it not been for Alick Corfield, Madame la Marquise de Montfort
would not have made quite so much way. Alick and Leam used to meet
in Steel's Wood; and when Leam carried her perplexities to Alick, and
Alick told her that she ought to yield and gave her the reasons why,
after first fiercely combating him, telling him he was stupi