to feel ill and faint, and so bitterly, bitterly cold. The sense of physical illness, conquering the vague overwhelming anguish of heart and mind, began to give her back some clearness of brain.

Who was she?-why was she there? She was Hester FoxWilton-no! Hester Meryon, who had escaped from a man who had called himself, for a few days at least, her husband; a man whom in scarcely more than a week she had come to loathe and fear; whose nature and character had revealed to her infamies of which she had never dreamed; who had claimed to be her master, and use her as he pleased, and from whom she had escaped by night after a scene of which she still bore the marks.

'You little wild-cat! You think you can defy me do you? And then her arms held-and her despairing eyes looking down into his mocking ones—and the helpless sense of indignity and wrong—and of her own utter and criminal folly.

And through her memory there ran, in an ugly dance, those things, those monstrous things he had said to her about the Scotch woman. It was not at all absolutely sure that she, Hester, was his wife. He had shown her those letters at St. Germains, of course, to reassure her; and the letters were perfectly genuine letters, written by the people they professed to be written by. Still Scotch marriage law was a damned business-one never knew. He hoped it was all right; but if she did hate him as poisonously as she said, if she did really want to get rid of him, he might perhaps be able to assist her.

Had he after all tricked and ruined her? Yet as her consciousness framed the question in the conventional phrases familiar to her through newspapers and novels, she hardly knew what they meant, this child of eighteen, who in three short weeks had been thrust through the fire of an experience on which she had never had time to reflect. Flattered vanity and excitement leading up almost from the first day to instinctive and fierce revolt-intervals of acquiescence, of wild determination to be happy, drowned in fresh rebellions of soul and sense-through these alternations the hours had rushed on, culminating in her furtive and sudden escape from the man of whom she was now in mad fear-her blind flight for home.'

The commonness of her case, the absence of any romantic or poetic element in it,-it was that which galled, which degraded her in her own eyes. Only three weeks, since she had felt that entire and arrogant belief in herself, in her power

over her own life and Philip's, on which she now looked back as merely ludicrous!-inexplicable in a girl of the most ordinary intelligence. What power had girls over men?-such men as Philip Meryon?

Her vanity was bleeding to death-and her life with it. Since the revelation of her birth she seemed to have been blindly struggling to regain her own footing in the world, the kind of footing she was determined to have. Power and excitement; not to be pitied, but to be followed, wooed, adored; not to be forced on the second and third bests of the world, but to have the chief seat,' the daintiest morsel, the beau rôle always, had not this been her instinctive, unvarying demand on life? And now? If she were indeed married she was tied to a man who neither loved her nor could bring her any position in the world; who was penniless and had only entrapped her that he might thereby get some money out of her relations; who, living or dead, would be a disgrace to her, standing irrevocably between her and any kind of honour or importance in society.

And if he had deceived her, and she were not his wife-she would be free indeed; but what would her freedom matter to her? What decent man would ever love her now-marry herset her at his side? At eighteen-eighteen !—all those chances were over for her. It was so strange that she could have laughed at her own thoughts; and yet at the same time it was so ghastly true! No need now to invent a half-sincere chatter about Fate.' She felt herself in miserable truth the mere feeble mouse wherewith the great cat Fate was playing.

And yet, after all, she herself had done it!-by her own sheer madness. She seemed to see Aunt Alice's plaintive face, the eyes that followed her, the lip that trembled when she said an unkind or wanton thing; she heard again the phrases of Uncle Richard's weekly letters-humorous, tender phrases, with here and there an occasional note of austerity or warning.

Oh yes-she had done it-she had ruined herself.

She felt the tears running over her cheeks, mingling with the snow as it pelted in her face. Suddenly she realised how cold she was, how soaked. She must-must go back to shelterto human faces-to kind hands. She put out her own, groping helplessly, and rose to her feet.

But the darkness was now much advanced, and the great snowstorm of the night had begun. She could not see the path below her at all, and only some twenty yards of its course

above her. In the whirling gloom and in the fury of the wind, although she turned to descend the path, her courage suddenly failed her. She remembered a stream she had crossed on a little footbridge with a rail; could she ever see to re-cross it again?-above the greedy tumult of the water? Peering upwards, it seemed to her that she saw something like walls in front of her perhaps another sheepfold? That would give her shelter for a little, and perhaps the snow would stop-perhaps it was only a shower. She struggled on and up and found indeed some fragments of walls beside the path, one of the many abandoned places among the Westmoreland fells that testify to the closer settlement of the dales in earlier centuries.

And just as she clambered within them, the clouds sweeping along the fell-side lifted and parted for the last time, and she caught a glimpse of a wide, featureless world, the desolate top of the fells, void of shelter or landmark, save that straight across it, from gloom to gloom, there ran a straight white thing-a ghostly and forsaken track. The Roman road, no doubt, of which the shepherd had spoken. And a vision sprang into her mind of Roman soldiers tramping along it, helmeted and speared, their heads bent against these northern stormsshivering like herself. She gazed and gazed, fascinated, till her bewildered eyes seemed to perceive shadows upon it, moving -moving towards her.

A panic fear seized her.

I must get home!-I must!-'

And sobbing, with the sudden word Mother!' on her lips, she ran out of the shelter she had found, taking as she supposed the path towards the valley. But, blinded with snow and mist, she lost it almost at once. She stumbled on over broken and rocky ground, wishing to descend, yet keeping instinctively upwards, and hearing on her right from time to time, as though from depths of chaos, the wild voices of the valley, the wind tearing the cliffs, the rushing of the stream. Soon all was darkness; she knew that she had lost herself and was alone with rock and storm. Still she moved; but nerve and strength ebbed; and at last there came a step into infinity-a sharp pain-and the flame of consciousness went out.

(To be concluded.)

THE TOMBS OF THE PLANTAGENET KINGS.

BY LA COMTESSE D'OILLIAMSON.

As I was reading the papers on a Spring morning, I heard a sharp ring at the front-door bell, and King, my valet, showed Marsan, the barrister, into my rooms in the Rue Pierre Charron, Paris. I thought my friend looked rather upset and excited, and before I had time to question him he cried out with his strong French accent- I say, I have come to carry you off to Fontevrault Abbey. You know my young friend, Durand, the camelot du Roi," who was tried last week for having caused a formidable disturbance at the Comédie Française on the occasion of Bernstein's play "Après Moi "—and who, by the way, succeeded in obtaining the suppression of the piece-well, the fellow has been sentenced to six months' imprisonment, and he wishes me to appeal and to plead for him. I must, therefore, run down to Fontevrault, where he is imprisoned, and have an interview with him; it occurred to me that you would not mind taking me down there in your 40 H.P. Napier. I am going to stay quite close to the Abbey with my mother-in-law, the Comtesse de Chassaing, at the Château du Grand-Thouars, where you will find any amount of interesting archives, and

Here I interrupted Marsan.

By all means. I am ready to motor you down there tomorrow, Tuesday, if that will suit you. I have read so much about Fontevrault Abbey that I have a great wish to see it for myself and get all the information I can about the bodies of the Plantagenet kings which were discovered there last autumn. In fact, I should have gone there alone then had I not been obliged to return in a hurry to England on account of one of my brothers having to undergo an operation.'

Eh bien, c'est entendu,' said Marsan.

will you be ready to start?'

At nine o'clock sharp,' I said.

We shook hands, and he left me.

'At what time

The next morning at nine we were on our way to Touraine. We lunched at Chinon, near the old and fine castle which

Richelieu purposely left to go to ruin, although it had played such an important part in French and English history at the time of the Norman kings. You must remember that it was from that castle that Henry II., tortured by fever, started to meet Philip of France between Azay and Tours? He had just strength enough to return afterwards to Chinon, where he died before the altar in the chapel of the castle, muttering: Shame, shame on a conquered king!' Then, robed as for coronation, with a crown of gold upon his head, a gold ring upon his finger, sandals upon his feet, and sceptre in his gloved right hand '(so says the Chronicle)-he was carried across the Pont-auxNonnains that he had built, to be laid in State in the Abbey Church of Fontevrault.

Following the banks of the Vienne, we passed Montsoreau, reminiscent of Bussy d'Amboise and his unfortunate Diana, the heroine of Alexandre Dumas' novel, a once magnificent castle, whose façade and towers pierced with loopholes are still imposing. I should have liked to stop there and sketch it from a fisherman's boat on the river-but Marsan was a man with a strong will. For some reason or other he had made up his mind to get to the Grand-Thouars some time before dinner, and I was entirely in his hands. Therefore we tore up the road and through the woods until we reached a hill, which we climbed at a moderate pace. Half-way up, the first glimpse of the Abbey of Fontevrault came in view, and we soon saw the whole of the building, with its numerous round towers, one of the masterpieces of Norman art in France.

As we entered the village we turned to the left, and found ourselves in the grounds of the Château du Grand-Thouars, where we were cordially welcomed, Marsan as the beloved son-inlaw, and I as his best friend. A cup of tea refreshed us after the fatigues of the day's journey, and presently we retired to change for dinner.

During the evening much was said, of course, about Fontevrault, but, rightly or wrongly, I always prefer to see a monument first without a guide-book or a history of the place, so as to gather my own impressions; therefore I begged my hostess to let me visit the Abbey before giving me any preliminary documents or archives to read.

The next morning, at ten o'clock, we were admitted to the Abbey, which the French Government has turned into a vast

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