she had not a caprice she could not carry out, nor a wish she could not gratify. Her world, delirious with her fascination and ductile to her magic, let her place her foot on its neck and rule it as she would; she was censed with the purple incense of worship wherever she moved, and gave out life and death with her smile and her frown, with a soft whispered word, or a moue boudeuse. From a station of comparative obscurity, when her existence had threatened to pass away in insular monotony and colonial obscurity, her beauty had lifted her to a dazzling rank, and her tact had taught her to grace it, so that none could carp at, but all bowed before her; so that in a thorough-bred exclusive set she gave the law and made the fashion, and conquests unnumbered strewed her path "thick as the leaves in Vallambrosa."

On her first appearance as Lady Vavasour and Vaux, which had been made some six years before this at St. Petersburg, women had murmured at, and society been shy to receive, this exquisite creature, come none knew whence, born from no one knew whom, with whom the world in general conceived that my lord Marquis had made a wretched mésalliance; the Marquis being a man sans reproche as far as "blood" went, if upon some other score he was not quite so stainless as might have been. But the world in very brief time gave way before her: with the sceptre of a matchless loveliness, and the skill of a born tactician, she cleared all obstacles, overruled all opponents, bore down all hesitations, silenced all sneers. She created a furore, she became the mode; women might slander her as they would, they could do nothing against her; and in brief time, from her début by finesse, by witchery, by the double right of her own resistless fascination, and the dignity of her lord's name, Marion Marchioness of Vavasour and Vaux was a Power in the world of fashion, and an acknowledged leader in her own spheres of ton, pleasure, and coquetry. "Woman's wit" can do anything if it be given free run and free scope, and with that indescribable yet priceless quality of her sex she was richly endowed. How richly, you will conceive when I say that now, she had so effectually silenced and bewitched society, that in society (save here and there, where two or three very malicious grandes dames, whom she had outrivalled, were gathered together for spleen, slander, and Souchong) the question of her Origin was never now mooted. It would, indeed, have been as presumptuous to have debated such a question with her as for the Hours to have asked Aphrodite of her birth when the amber-dropping golden tresses and the snowy shoulders rose up from the white sea-foam. Lady Vavasour was Herself, and was all-sufficient for herself. Her delicate azure veins were her sangre azul, her fair white hands were her seize quartiers, her shining tresses were her bezants d'or, and her luminous eyes her blazonry. Garter King-at-Arms himself, looking on her, would have forgotten heraldry, flung the bare, lifeless skeleton of pedigree to the winds before the living beauty, and allowed that Venus needs no Pursuivant's marshalling.

She sat looking into the dressing-room fire, while the gleam of the waxlights was warm on her brow, and played in the depths of her dazzling eyes; a pleased smile lingered about her lovely lips, and her fingers idly played with the leaves of her novel-her thoughts were more amusing than its pages. She was thinking over the triumphs of the past night and day; of how she had wooed from the Marquis d'Arrelio, for pure in

souciant curiosity, state secrets that honour and prudence alike bade him withhold, but which he was powerless to deny before her magical witchery; of how Constantine of Lanaris had followed her from Athens, to lay at her feet the sworn homage of a Prince, and be rewarded with a tap of a fan painted by Watteau; of the imperial sables Duke Nicholas Tchemidoff had flung down à la Raleigh on a damp spot on the Terrace des Feuillans, where, otherwise, her dainty brodequins would have been set on some moist fallen leaves, as they had strolled there together; of the pieces of Henri Deux and Rose Berri ware, dearer to him than his life, which that king of connoisseurs, Lord Weiverden, had presented to her, sacrificing his Faïence for the sake of a smile; of the words which men had whispered to her in the perfumed demie-lumière of her violet-hung boudoir, while her eyes laughed and lured them softly and resistlessly to their doom; of all the triumphs of the past twelve hours, since the doors of her hotel in the Place Vendôme had first been opened at two o'clock in the day to her crowding court, to now, when she had quitted the bal masqué of her friend Louise de Luilhier, and was inhaling again in memory the incense on which she lived. For the belle Marquise was a finished coquette, never sated with conquest; and it was said, in certain circles antagonistic to her own, that neither her coquetries nor her conquests were wholly harmless. But every flower, even the fairest, has its shadow beneath it as it swings in the sunlight!

"He did not remember ME!" thought the Venus Aphrodite of the rose-hung dressing-room, looking with a smile into the flames of the fire, which it was her whim to have even in so warm a night as was this one. My voice should have told him; it is a terribly bad compliment! However, he shall pay for it! A woman who knows her power can always tax any negligence to her as heavily as she likes. How incom

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prehensibly silly those women must be who become their lovers' slaves, who hang on their words and seek their tenderness, and make themselves miserable at their infidelities. I cannot understand it; if there be a thing in the world easier to manage than another, it is a MAN! Weak, obsti nate, vain, wayward, loving what they cannot get, slighting what they hold in their hand, adoring what they have only on an insecure tenure, trampling on anything that lies at their mercy, always capricious to a constant mistress and constant to a capricious-men are all alike; there is nothing easier to keep in leading-strings when once you know their foibles! Those swift, silent Strathmores, they are very cold, they say, and love very rarely; but when they love, it must be imperiously, passionately, madly, tout au rien. I should like to see him roused. Shall I rouse him? Perhaps ! He could not resist me if I chose to wind him round my fingers. I should like to supplant his ambition, to break down his pride, to shatter his coldness, to bow him down to what he defies. Those facile conquests are no honour; those men who sigh at the first sight of one's eyebrow, and lose their heads at the shadow of a smile; I am tired of them-sick of them! Toujours perdrix! And the birds so easily shot! Shall I choose? Yes! No man living could defy menot even Lord Cecil Strathmore !"

And as she thought this last vainglorious but fully-warranted thought, Marion Lady Vavasour, lying back in her fauteuil, with her head resting negligently on her arm, that in its turn rested on the satin-cushions,

with that grace which was her peculiar charm, as the firelight shone on her loosened hair and the rose-leaf flush of her delicate cheeks, glanced at her own reflexion in a mirror standing near, on whose surface the whole matchless tableau was reproduced with its dainty and brilliant colouring, and smiled-a smile of calm security, of superb triumph. Could she not vanquish, whom and when and where she would?

That night, far across the sea, under the shadow of English woodlands that lay dark, and fresh, and still beneath the brooding summer skies, a woman stood within the shelter of a cottage-porch, looking down the forest-lane that stretched into the distance, with the moonbeams falling across its moss-grown road between the boles of the trees, and the silent country lying far beyond hushed, and dim, and shrouded in a white mist. She was young, and she had the light of youth-love-in her eyes as she gazed wistfully into the gloom, vainly seeking to pierce through the dense foliage of the boughs and the darkness of the night, and listened, thirstily and breathlessly, for a step beloved to break the undisturbed silence. The scarlet folds of a cloak fell off her shoulders, her head was uncovered, and the moon bathed her in its radiance where she stood, the branches above her, as the wind stirred amongst them, shaking silver drops of dew from their moistened leaves on her brow and into her bosom. She loved, and listened for that which she loved; listened patiently, yet eagerly and long, while the faint summer clouds swept over the dark azure heavens, the stars shining through their mist, and the distant chimes of a church clock from an old grey tower bosomed in the woods tolled out the quarters, one by one, as the hours of the night stole onward.

Suddenly she heard that for which she longed-heard ere other ears could have caught it—a step falling on the moss that covered the forest road, and coming towards her; then-she sprang forward in the darkness, the dew shaking from her hair, and the tears of a great gladness glancing in her eyes, as she twined her arms close about him whom she met, and clung to him as though no earthly power should sever them. "You are come at last! Ah, if you knew how bitter your absence is, if you knew how I grudge you to the cruel world that robs me so long, so often of you

He laughed, and looked down fondly on her where she clung to him, wreathing her arms about his neck.

Silly child! I am not worth your worship, still less worth the consecration of your life, when I repay it so little, recompense it so ill." She laid her hand upon his lips and gazed up into his eyes, clinging but the more closely to him, and laughing and weeping in her joy: "Hush, hush! Pay it ill? Have I not the highest,.best, most precious payment in your love? I care for no other, you know that so well."

He stroked her hair caressingly, perhaps repentantly (few men can meet the eyes of a woman who loves them purely and faithfully, after a long absence, without some pangs of conscience, without some contrast of the quality of her fidelity and their own), and kissed the lips uplifted to his own; the love that he read in her eyes, and that trembled in her voice, saddened him, he could not have told why, even whilst he recog nised it as something unpurchasable in the world he had quitted, where

its strength and its fidelity would have been but words of an unknown tongue, subjects of a jeer, objects of a jest.

"And you have seen none who have supplanted me since we parted; none of whom I need have jealousy or fear?" she whispered to him, with a certain tremulous, wistful anxiety-he was her all, she could not be robbed of him!-yet with a fond, sunny smile upon her face as it was raised to his in the faint sheen of the starlight, the smile of a love too deeply true, too truly trustful to harbour a dread that were doubt, a doubt that were disloyalty to the faith it received as to the faith it

gave.

He looked down into her eyes, and pressed closer against his own the heart that he knew beat solely, purely, wholly for himself.

"My precious one! you need be jealous of no living thing with me. None have twined themselves about my heart, none have rooted themselves into my life as you have done. Have no dread! No rival shall ever supplant you, I swear before God!"

He spoke the oath in all sincerity, in all faith, in all fervour, speaking it as many men have so spoken before him, not dreaming what the day will bring forth, not knowing how fate will make them unwitting perjurers, unconscious renegades to the bond of their word, as they are lured onwards, and driven downwards, powerless, almost one would say blameless, in the hands of chance.

And the woman that nestled in his arms and gazed up into his eyes sighed a low, long, tremulous sigh of too great gladness. He was her world; she knew of and needed no other!

Then he loosened her from his close embrace, and still looking down into the eyes that uttered a love which the women in the world he lived in neither knew nor guessed, and to which he came back as from the atmosphere of gas-lit salons one comes into the clear soft air of the dawn; he led her under the drooping branches of the trees that hung stirless and dew-laden in the warm air, into the house hidden in the profuse and tangled foliage. Their steps ceased to fall on the moss, their shadows to slant across the star-lit path, their whispered words to stir the silence; the woodland country lay beyond calm and still in the shade of the night, the fleecy clouds drifted slowly now and then across the bright radiance of the moon, the winds moved gently amongst the leaves; in the lattice casements shrouded in the trees the lights died out, and the church chimes struck faintly in the distance their hours one by one. On the hushed earth three angels brooded-Night, and Sleep, and Peace.

MEMOIRS OF VICTOR HUGO.*

ALTHOUGH the author of this work traces back the family of the Hugos to the year 1532, he does not enter into any details until he reaches the father of the poet, Joseph Leopold Sigisbert, who entered the army as cadet in 1788, when at the age of fourteen. He fought in the Vendée, which took him frequently to Nantes, where he formed the acquaintance of a shipbroker of the name of Trébuchet, whose daughter Sophia he eventually married. After fighting on the Rhine as brigadier, Hugo found himself father of three sons, of whom the youngest is the subject of the Memoir. As with most remarkable men, a curious

anecdote is connected with his birth:

A Victorine was expected, but a Victor arrived. But on seeing him, it might have been said that he knew he was not expected. He seemed to hesitate about coming: he had none of the good looks of his brothers: he was so small, delicate, and thin, that the accoucheur declared he would not live. I have frequently heard his mother describe his entrance into the world. She used to say that he was no longer than a knife. When he was swaddled he was laid in an easy-chair, and occupied so little room that a dozen like him could have been put there. His brothers were called to see him: he was so ugly, his mother said, and so little resembled a human being, that fat Eugène, who was only eighteen months of age, and could scarce speak, cried on perceiving him. Oh! la bebête!

Unfortunately for the father, he had been a protégé of Moreau, and it is insinuated that Bonaparte never forgave this. Hence he was constantly moved from one corps d'armée to the other, and though his faithful wife at first followed him everywhere, the fatigue at length became too great for her. Hence, when Major Hugo was ordered with his battalion from Bastia to join the army in Italy, his wife and family settled down in Paris, at No. 24, Rue de Clichy. Victor Hugo's earliest reminiscences are attached to this house: he remembers that there were a pump and a willow in the court-yard; how he was taken every morning to the bedroom of Mademoiselle Rose, the schoolmaster's daughter, whom he watched draw on her stockings; and, lastly, how he performed the child in "Geneviève de Brabant," dressed in tights and a sheepskin, to which a brass claw was attached. As the piece was tedious to him, he amused himself by digging this claw into the legs of the aforesaid Mademoiselle Rose at the most pathetic part of the performance. The audience were no little scandalised at hearing Geneviève say to him, "Will you be quiet, you little scamp?"

After putting down Fra Diavolo, for which he was made colonel of the Royal Corsican, Hugo settled down in Italy, and summoned his family to join him in 1807. The pleasant villegiatura, however, was broken up too soon for the children by Joseph being appointed King of Spain, and he would not leave his favourite colonel behind him. The three boys returned to Paris with their mother to pursue their studies, and were fortunate enough to have the use of a splendid garden belonging to the ex-convent of the Feuillantines, where they lodged. After

* Victor Hugo, Raconté par un Témoin de sa Vie. Brussels: Lacroix and Cie.