ont married Madame
de Merville?"

"No," said Liancourt somewhat sadly, "it was not so decreed; for
Vaudemont, with a feeling which belongs to a gentleman, and which I
honour, while deeply and gratefully attached to Madame de Merville,
desired that he might first win for himself some honourable distinction
before he claimed a hand to which men of fortunes so much higher had
aspired in vain. I am not ashamed," he added, after a slight pause, "to
say that I had been one of the rejected suitors, and that I still revere
the memory of Eugenie de Merville. The young man, therefore, was to have
entered my regiment. Before, however, he had joined it, and while yet
in the full flush of a young man's love for a woman formed to excite the
strongest attachment, she--she---" The Frenchman's voice trembled, and
he resumed with affected composure: "Madame de Merville, who had the
best and kindest heart that ever beat in a human breast, learned one day
that there was a poor widow in the garret of the hotel she inhabited who
was dangerously ill--without medicine and without food--having lost
her only friend and supporter in her husband some time before. In
the impulse of the moment, Madame de Merville herself attended this
widow--caught the fever that preyed upon her--was confined to her bed
ten days--and died as she had lived, in serving others and forgetting
self.--And so much, sir, for the scandal you spoke of!"

"A warning," observed Lord Lilburne, "against trifling with one's health
by that vanity of parading a kind heart, which is called charity. If
charity, mon cher, begins at home, it is in the drawing-room, not the
garret!"

The Frenchman looked at his host in some disdain, bit his lip, and was
silent.

"But still," resumed Lord Lilburne, "still it is so probable that your
old vicomte had a son; and I can so perfectly understand why he did not
wish to be embarrassed with him as long as he could help it, that I
do not understand why there should be any doubt of the younger De
Vaudemont's parentage."

"Because," said the Frenchman who had first commenced the
narrative,--"because the young man refused to take the legal steps
to proclaim his birth and naturalise himself a Frenchman; because, no
sooner was Madame de Merville dead than he forsook the father he had so
newly discovered--forsook France, and entered with some other officers,
under the brave, in the service of one of the native princes of India."

"But perhaps he w