er! I will write
instantly and propose to the peasant girl, Carille--_she_ will be proud
to be called La Contesse de Beaumont.

VIC.--_Will_ you do so? Oh, you darling cousin! I shall love you dearly
when you are once married! And, cousin, I don't believe she'll live till
doomsday, do you? Don't forget that I'm to be your second--on doomsday
morning, cousin. (_Exit Count in a rage._) I am so happy--and Carille
will be so happy too--I am sure she will! I know if I were a village
girl I should be dying to be a lady--for now I am a lady I am dying to
be a village girl--heigh-ho. (_Exit._)

A STORY WITHOUT A NAME.[G]

WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MONTHLY MAGAZINE

BY G. P. R. JAMES, ESQ.

_Continued from page 57._

CHAPTER XXII.

In a very gaudily furnished parlor, and in a very gaudy dress, sat a
lady of some eight or nine and thirty years of age, with many traces of
beauty still to be perceived in a face of no very intellectual
expression. Few persons perhaps would have recognized in her the fair
and faulty girl whom we have depicted weeping bitterly over the fate of
Sir Philip Hastings' elder brother, and over the terrible situation in
which he left her. Her features had much changed: the girlish
expression--the fresh bloom of youth was gone. The light graceful figure
was lost; but the mind had changed as greatly as the person, though,
like it, the heart yet retained some traces of the original. When first
she appeared before the reader's eyes, though weak and yielding, she was
by no means ill disposed. She had committed an error--a great and fatal
one; but at heart she was innocent and honest. She was, however, like
all weak people, of that plastic clay moulded easily by circumstances
into any form; and, in her, circumstances had shaped her gradually into
a much worse form than nature had originally given her. To defraud, to
cheat, to wrong, had at one time been most abhorrent to her nature. She
had taken no active part in her father's dealings with old Sir John
Hastings, and had she known all that he had said and sworn, would have
shrunk with horror from the deceit. But during her father's short life,
she had been often told by himself, and after his death had been often
assured by the old woman Danby, that she was rightly and truly the widow
of John Hastings, although because it would be difficult to prove, her
father had consented to take an annuity for himself and her son, rather
than enter into a