on of the notes. The poor woman had swooned.

He rang the bell--Jane appeared.

"Look after her," said Mr. Charles, his eyes flaming, as they fell on
the unconscious figure of Mrs. Rowe. "But let me out, first."

"You'll kill me with fright, that you will. What have you done to your
own----"

"Mind your own business. A smell of salts'll put her right enough."

Mr. Charles was gone.

"And what a sweet gentleman he can be, when he likes," said Jane.

CHAPTER III.

MRS. ROWE'S COMPANY.

I must be permitted to tell the rambling stories that ran parallel
during my experiences of Mrs. Rowe's establishment in my own
manner--filling up with what I guessed, all I heard from Lucy, or saw
for myself. Mr. Charles was a visitor at intervals who always arrived
when the house was quiet; and after whose visits Mrs. Rowe regularly
took to her room for the day, leaving the accounts and the keys wholly
to Lucy, and the kitchen to Jane--with strict injunctions to look after
the Reverend Horace Mohun's tea and his round of toast if he called--and
let him see the _Times_ before it went up to the general sitting-room.
On these days Lucy looked pale; and Jane called her "poor child" to me,
and begged me to say a few words of comfort to her, for she would listen
to me.

What a fool Jane was!

Visitors came and went. The serious, who inspected Paris as Mr. Redgrave
inspects a factory, or as the late Mr. Braidwood inspected a fire on the
morrow; who did the Louvre and called for bread-and-butter and tea on
the Boulevards at five. The new-rich, who would not have breakfasted
with the general company to save their vulgar little souls, threw their
money to the fleecing shopkeepers (who knew their _monde_), and
misbehaved themselves in all the most expensive ways possible. The jolly
ignorant, who were loud and unabashed in the sincerity and heartiness of
their enjoyment, and had more litres of brandy in their bedrooms than
the rest of the house, as Jane had it, "put together." The frugal, who
counted the lumps of sugar, found fault with the dinners, lived with the
fixed and savage determination to eat well up to the rate at which they
were paying for their board, and stole in, in the evening, with their
brandy hidden about them. Somehow, although there never was a house in
which more differences of opinion were held on nearly every question of
human interest, there was a surprising harmony of ideas as to French
brandy. A Boulogn