mounted the paved slope leading towards the hotel. The
street-lamps were neither many nor bright--but from the glazed gallery
of the restaurant, a broad, cheerful illumination streamed upon the
passers-by. They stepped within its bounds. And at the moment, a
woman who had just crossed to the opposite side of the street stopped
abruptly to look at them. They paused a few minutes in the entrance,
still chatting; the woman opposite made a movement as though to
re-cross the street, then shook her head, laughed, and walked away.
Fenwick went into the restaurant and Eugenie hurried through the
courtyard to the door of the Findon's apartment.

But in her reflexions of the night, Eugenie came to the conclusion
that the situation, as it then stood at Versailles, was not one to be
prolonged.

Next day she proposed to her father and sister a change of plan.
On the whole, she said, she was anxious to get back to London; the
holiday was overspreading its due limits; and she urged pressing on
and home. Lord Findon was puzzled, but submissive; the bookish sister
Theresa, now a woman of thirty, welcomed anything that would bring her
back to the London Library and the British Museum. But suddenly, just
as the maids had been warned, and Lord Findon's man had been sent to
look out trains, his master caught a chill, going obstinately, and in
a mocking spirit, to see what 'Faust' might be like, as given at
the Municipal Theatre of Versailles. There was fever, and a touch of
bronchitis; nothing serious; but the doctor who had been summoned
from Paris would not hear of travelling. Lord Findon hoarsely preached
'chewing' to him, through the greater part of his visits; he revenged
himself by keeping a tight hold on his patient, in all that was not
his tongue. Eugenie yielded, with what appeared to Theresa a strange
amount of reluctance; and they settled down for a week or two.

In the middle of the convalescence, the elder son, Marmaduke, came
over to see his father. He was a talkative Evangelical, like his
mother; a partner in the brewery owned by his mother's kindred; and
recently married to a Lady Louisa.

After spending three days at the hotel, he suddenly said to Lord
Findon, as he was mounting guard one night, while Eugenie wrote some
letters:

'I say, pater, do you want Eugenie to marry that fellow Fenwick?'

Lord Findon turned uneasily in his bed.

'What makes you say that?'

'Well, he's dreadfully gone on her--never happy