elf and all around her, and removed her
from this sphere of suffering.

Whither? Alas! the impotence of that question! Are there not beings who
seem, indeed, to lack the great essential for salvation--a soul to be
saved? How far are such responsible?

Claude Bainrothe is married again, and not to Ada Greene, who, outcast
and poor, came some years since as an adventuress to California, and
signalized herself later, in the _demi-monde_, as a leader of great
audacity, beauty, and reckless extravagance. The lady of his choice (or
heart?) was a fat baroness, about twenty years his senior, who lets
apartments, and maintains the externes of her rank in a saloon fifteen
feet square, furnished with red velveteen, and accessible by means of an
antechamber paved with tiles!

He has grown stout, drinks beer, and smokes a meerschaum, but is still
known on the principal promenade, and in the casino of the German town
in which he resides, as "the handsome American." He is said, however, to
have spells of melancholy.

The "Chevalier Bainrothan," and the "Lady Charlotte Fremont," his
step-daughter, for as such she passes, for some quaint or wicked reason
unrevealed to society, with their respectable and hideous house-keeper,
Madame Clayton, dwell under the same roof, and enjoy the privilege of
access to the _salon_, of the baroness, and a weekly game of _ecarte_ at
her _soirees_, usually profitable to the chevalier in a small way.

All this did Major Favraud, in his own merry mood, communicate to us on
the occasion of his memorable visit to San Francisco, when he remained
our delighted guest during one long delicious summer season. Of Gregory,
we never heard.

"I had hoped to hear of your marriage long before this," I said to him
one day. "Tell me why you have not wedded some fair lady before this
time. Now tell me frankly as you can."

"Simply because you did not wait for me."

"Nonsense! the truth. I want no _badinage_."

"Because, then--because I never could forget Celia--never love any one
else."

"She was one of Swedenborg's angels, Major Favraud--no real wife of
yours. She never was married"--and I shook my head--"only united to a
being of the earth with whom she had no real affinity. Choose yours
elsewhere."

"I believe you are half right," he said, sadly. "She never seemed to
belong to me by right--only a bird I had caught and caged, that loved me
well, yet was eager to escape."

"Such was the state of the case,