nd prosperous.

They continue to reside under the same roof, and Bellevue awaits its
master. It will be empty, I think, if I understand George Gaston's
character, so long as Major Favraud is a wanderer on the face of the
Continent of Europe, and held, for his especial benefit and return, in
readiness.

Vernon and his sweet wife Marion spent the first season of their happy
married life under my lintel-tree, and are now our nearest neighbors in
our new land of sojourn. A slender iron fence divides our grounds from
theirs. A golden cord of affection binds our lives together. Our
interests, too, are the same.

Vernon is leagued with my husband in the great engineering projects
which have enriched them both--the capital to enlist in which sphere of
enterprise was furnished by the sale to a company of our "gold-gashed"
lands in Georgia--revealed to my knowledge, as it may be remembered, by
the inadvertence of Gregory.

The career of Bertie La Vigne had been a varied one, as might have been
foreseen perhaps from her early manifestations and proclivities.

She came to me, while still we dwelt in the city of my birth, when she
was approaching her seventeenth year, and remained a twelvemonth under
my roof, engaged in the study of Shakespeare with that accomplished
_artiste_ Mr. Mortimer. She intended to pursue what gift she had of
voice and histrionic talent as a means of livelihood, she told me from
the first, and to get rid of the ineffable weariness and monotony of her
life at Beauseincourt as well.

The two motives seemed to me to be worthy of all praise. There are,
indeed, abodes that kill the soul as well as the body, and this was one
of them in my estimation, yet I remembered as a seeming inconsistency
that, when, in her fourteenth year, it was proposed that Bertie should
come to me for the purpose of attending schools for the accomplishments,
she steadily refused to do so.

Her sense of duty might have been at the root of this firm and
persistent refusal to accept from my hand a gift richer far than "jewels
of the mine"--the power of varied occupation--but something had secretly
whispered to me that this was not all on which her apparent
self-abnegation was baaed, and I think that I was right in my
conjecture.

Have you seen a plant, scathed by frost, that has made a strong and
successful effort to live, and still in its struggling existence bears
the mark of the early blight on leaf and blossom?

Such was the