SO

"She was young, and Mr. Percy old, when they married,

that she got into the way of going about alone a good deal, and papa didn't approve of it."

"I suppose, as old Percy is dead and she has no other natural protector, your father can hardly blame her for going about alone now," he said, dryly.

'Well, Ella, it would please me very much to get you down

to Marley; I won't press you any more, but I will only tell you that it would please

me."

He said no

"No, mamma; but I feel sure he loves me, and that is why he wants his uncle and aunt to know me; and do let me go-do, my own darling mother."

"I am afraid it is rather a perilous thing to do," she said, thoughtfully; "it is, in fact, a trial trip that they want you to go „upon. to go upon. If he were your avowed lover it would be different; but as it is'As it is!

Oh! mother, dear, my going will be the means of its coming right all the sooner," I pleaded. "But what reason can they give for inviting you ?” she urged. They know Lina Percy very well," I said, said, "and I am to be asked to go with her." And then mamma shook her

CATCHING AN ALLIGATOR,--SEE Page 489.

head, and said the subject required grave consideration.

Mrs. Percy called on us that day, and as she rarely came

near us more

than once in a twelvemonth, I naturally thought that she had come to speak about the topic that was uppermost in my mind. But when I asked her about it, she professed utter ignorance

of it, and laughed, and said it was very cool of Captain Turnour to try and use her as a cat's-paw.

"I didn't know till last night that he

knew you,
Lina," I said.
"In fact, un-
til he thought
he could make
me useful, he
forgot my ex-
istence," she
said, laughing
merrily. "Well,
dear, though
Marley is a dull

more about the plan then; but the longer I dwelt upon | hole, and the two old people are the prosiest of the prosy, it, the more feasible did it appear. Before the ball and look upon me as an imp of the evil one into the barwas over, I told Alf that I would use all my powers of gain, if they ask me, I'll go, for your sake. persuasion to induce my parents to let me do as he wished. And I was rewarded by his pressing my hand affectionately, and calling me his "dear little Ella."

The next morning, while I was sitting alone with mamma, I propounded our scheme to her. Captain Turnour tells me his people want to know me, mamma; I am to have an invitation to visit them at Marley from Lady Turnour." "My darling, I have never tried to force your confidence," she said, lovingly; "but I must ask you now, are you engaged to Captain Turnour ?"

“We should have asked you to Ella's birthday ball, Lina, if we had known where you were; but you were in Paris the last time we heard," ay mother said, half in reproach, and half in apology.

"Yes," Lina replied; "and went on to Marseilles, meaning to go to Jericho, but funds ran short, as usual. Oh, Ella, whatever you do, don't marry an old man who'll reward you for your devotion to him by dying and leaving you a wretched hundred and fifty a year to starve upon.'

“Poor child,” my mother said, softly; and, to my sur

prise, my lovely cousin, whom I had never known other, tion, I noticed a meaning glance interchanged between him and Lina. Before I had time to conjecture even what it might mean, she was speaking in that dulcet voice of hers, which was one of her most powerful attractions.

than the gayest of the gay, burst into a passion of tears, and ran and fell on her knees by mamma's side, and buried her brilliant face in mamma's lap, and sobbed as if her heart would break.

'What a wretch I am-what a wretch I am !" she moaned, and then she jumped up, and wiped her eyes, and said, “and what a fool I am to make so much ado about nothing," and laughed, and was herself again.

I can't stay to narrate every turn and involution of the affair. An invitation from Lady Turnour came in due course. She “hoped I would accompany my cousin, Mrs. Percy, on a visit to Marley." That was all. But Alf represented to me that his aunt was old and stiff, and that, therefore, that was enough.

My mother managed to put a hundred pounds in a handsome purse in Lina's hand a week before we left town, for the cry of poverty had touched her warm heart.

“Your uncle and I both feel that you are going on our child's account, and we wish you to go looking your best, my dear," she said. And Lina pleased them in this respect. She did go looking her best, and her best was very beautiful.

My heart palpitated strangely when I found myself at Marley-at the place of which I should surely be the mistress some day. Sir Lewis and Lady Turnour were both very kind to me in a hearty, cordial way, for which I was not prepared. They were kind to Lina, too, but after a stiffer fashion.

"You see,” she said to me, bitterly, “I faced something in coming here for your sake."

Captain Turnour followed us in a few days, and the morning after his arrival, Lady Turnour startled me by saying: I was very sorry, my dear, that your mamma could not come with you."

"She was not asked," I blurted out in my surprise, and Lady Turnour seemed disconcerted for a moment; but she recovered herself, and said:

"I suppose Alfred wanted to have you all to himself. Will you allow me to speak on that subject, dear, or do you indorse the embargo that Alfred has laid upon it?"

'Lady Turnour," I began, in an agony of embarrassment. "I don't quite know what I ought to say. Captain Turnour and I are only friends.

You are not engaged?" she said, kindly. "Well, dear, honestly, I am sorry for it, and the sooner you are, the better I shall be pleased. Delays are dangerous, especially when Lina Percy is in the way. My child, if I had suspected that the affair was still undecided between you and Alfred, I should not have allowed you to come here under her auspices."

I felt that I was in a perfect quagmire of misconceptions, and, as if to illustrate the text she had spoken, at this very moment I caught sight of the figures of Alf and Lina sauntering along a glade of the park.

Concealing my agitation as well as I could, I refrained from calling Lady Turnour's attention to the pair. But I was resolved to clear away as many of the mists as I could, and so I said:

"I have known Alf-Captain Turnour-for two years, and I never heard him mention my cousin till three weeks ago, when he proposed my coming here with her. Will you tell me how long they have beer intimate ?"

She shook her head.

"And as I am excluded by mutual consent from the ridingparty, will you let me drive you, Sir Lewis ?"

Sir Lewis fidgeted, looked pleased, glanced at his wife, and finally said:

"Oh! my dear Mrs. Percy, an old fellow like me mustn't monopolize you."

"Let me drive you, please do," she said, pleadingly.

"I thought you said you were going to have the carriage and make some calls, didn't you, my dear?" the baronet said, addressing his wife.

"Yes, and I thought Mrs. Percy would go with me; but if she prefers going with you in the pony-chaise

"Oh! I dread calls," Lina said, with a shudder; "down about here, too, where Mr. Percy was regarded with such pity for having married me. If Sir Lewis will not have me, I will ask leave to stay at home.”

But Sir Lewis was far too gallant to allow her to do it, after that speech, and so we went up-stairs to dress together.

I soon had my habit on, and then I went into her room. I went in without knocking, and I was horrified at seeing her down on her knees, her face buried in her hands.

She seemed in pain-mental pain I judged it to be, for, as
I came close to her, she was muttering:
"Heaven help me! it is a last chance."

Then I put my arm over her shoulder, and called:
Lina, Lina! what is the matter?"

She dropped her hands, and raised her white, scared face to mine.

"How you would pity me if I dared tell you the truth!" she said; "and how you would hate me, too!"

"Tell me the truth-tell it to me-try me; I shall never hate you!" I said, impetuously, though I felt my own heart swelling with some undefined evil,

But she shook her head, and got up slowly, saying: "No, not yet, Ella; go and have your ride, and-kiss me, Ella."

I kissed her, and felt her lips were icy cold, and again I begged her to tell her trouble to me as she would to a sister. But she would not.

'It was nothing," she said, "and would soon be over, one way or another."

And then, while I stood by, baffled and silent, she began to dress.

She had on one of those amber-colored Chinese silks, made like a Watteau sacque, trimmed with velvet of a darker shade. I thought as she put on a little Tuscan Tyrolean hat that matched it, and gloves of the same tint, that I had never seen that splendid, luminous, dark beauty of hers so becomingly arrayed before, and I told her so presently. "I'm glad of it," she said, simply. 'I need it all. Now don't question me, but go for your ride.”

Alf and I

So we parted, and went on our respectful ways. waited to see Sir Lewis and Mrs. Percy start in the ponycarriage, and as we watched them out of sight at the end of the avenue, he turned to put me up on my horse, with such a world of anxiety in his eyes, that I asked: Alf, what is it ?"

"A last chance-and if it fails! Ella, will you be my friend still, if, in the course of this day, I lose friends and fortune, as I may very possibly do ?”

'Your friend always and ever, Alf," I said, passionately, giving him my hand, as he looked up, after adjusting my foot in the stirrup.

He grasped it warmly for a moment, then mounted his horse, and we rode away.

Alf," I said, at last, after we had ridden a long way in, ominous silence, my Cousin Lina used the same words as you did just now-‘A last chance.' Tell me their meaning, will you ?"

"I have brought you out for that purpose,” he said. "Bad as I am, Ella, I am not bad enough to deceive you any longer

"Deceive me, Captain Turnour !" I interrupted, trying to speak with some sort of composure and diguity, and failing, failing miserably.

"Call me Alf still, Ella-you may, dear, for I am your cousin's husband. There, I've blurted out the truth, abruptly, after all," I heard him add, as my brain reeled in my head, and my body quivered in the saddle.

I controlled myself presently, sharply as I was suffering; but I saw that he was in bitter anxiety and need, and so, loving him as I did, what could I do but control myself for his sake? And as I grew calm, he told me the story-in order to be able to ask for my aid when it was told.

I knew Lina before her husband died,” he said, "and I was awfully taken with her from the very first. Fools said that we were more than friends while the old man was alive; but they lied, Ella-on my honor, they did.

"However, my uncle and aunt got hold of the report, and so, when Lina was left a widow, they set themselves against her, and so brought about all this mischief by their obstinacy.

"I was far too fond of her to trust her away from me unbound, and so at last I got her to agree to a private marriage. This was just a few days before I met you at the Sharams' party, two years ago.

"When I found that you were Lina's cousin, and that you had money, I behaved like a blackguard, I acknowledge it now. But what could I do? If I hadn't hinted to Sir Lewis and my aunt that I was thinking seriously of you, they would have bothered me about marrying some one else; and I always fancied that in time I might turn my intimacy with you to account for Lina."

"As you have done," I said, bitterly. "How could she do- Then I remembered that she was his wife, and I would not say hard things of her.

"Well," he went on, dejectedly, "she bore the secrecy and the misery and the degradation of it all gallantly, until the other day. Then she told me that, for her honor's sake, I must acknowledge her as my wife, whatever it cost me. And then we put our heads together, and came to the conclusion that if she could only get hold of Sir Lewis, she might fascinate him into forgiving her. She is so marvelously fascinating, you know, Ella, that she can make a fellow do anything almost.

"The only way to get her here was to get her invited as your cousin to get her here as your chaperon; and trouble enough I had about it, I can tell you. Lady Turnour was so absurdly punctilious, that she wanted to invite your mother, and I had to say that your mother never left her own home. Then, when I proposed that Mrs. Percy should be asked in your mother's place, they forthwith remembered all the scandal about our old flirtation; and I had to vow, before I could get her asked, that I would be discretion itself, and devote myself to-in fact, Ella, I couldn't stick at anything, things had come to such a pass

יין

“And-and-your wife is to tell this to Sir Lewis this afternoon," I said, gallantly, gulping down a very big sob. Then, I pitied them both so deeply, pitied them so heartily, both for having been guilty of this deception, and for the consequences that might ensue from it, that I mastered my own emotion, in order to be able to give him as much comfort as I might be granted the power to give him.

It was the hardest hour of my life-that hour that I rode with Alf Turnour, and heard from his own lips how false

|

False and cruel, and utterly and cruel he had been to me. regardless of me? And yet at the same moment that I knew him to have been these things, I felt that I could have died to serve him. When we got home, I tore up to my own bed-room at once, and threw myself down in a more bitter abandonment of woe and despair than can ever be my portion again.

But my first passion was over (I had loved him and believed in him for two years, remember). I recollected that there was one whose troubles would be heavier than mine, if this final appeal, this last chance, failed. If Sir Lewis proved inflexible, and Alf lost his inheritance, the woman he had married would have more bitter cause to rue her love for him than even I had.

My heart gentled toward her in the midst of my own misery. How she had been maligned, poor, pretty, loving creature! When we-her relatives-in our harsh, imaginary superior virtue, had been censuring her for some of her apparently flighty ways and unnecessary wanderings, possibly she had only been obeying a mandate of her husband's ! How ill she had looked this afternoon, too! In spite of the deception that had been practised on me by them both, I forgave them in that hour from the very bottom of my heart.

At length I heard the rumble of the wheels of the ponycarriage, and I got myself to the window in time to see them come up to the door-steps. She had surrendered the reins to Sir Lewis, and was sitting with her head bent down very low. It gave me a pang and a pleasure to see that her husThere was no word spoken by band was there to meet her. any one of the three, and they went in at once, and I waited in agony for the dénouement. That night a child was born at Marley, and, while the suffering, beautiful, rash young mother was hovering between life and death, the “old people” relented, and forgave the nephew, who was their heir. He had been weak, but she was so strangely lovely and charming, the old baronet allowed that there was no wonder in any man being weak.

"Alf had not been dishonorable." That was their great comfort.

He had not been dishonorable! No; he had only laid my life waste, and that fact being beyond their ken, they said nothing about it. Freely as I forgave them both, it did occur to me to think that they had a little undervalued me in using me so wholly and solely as a means to their end. He need not have made me love him so well! He might have spared me the crowning shame of bringing me away from home under false pretenses.

But the sting was taken out of this fact when I went back to "my own," for "my own" received me as if I were a glory to them still.

Ah! children who haven't needed it, yet, believe me, that the wound must be mortal that cannot be soothed by parental balm and oil. They never so much as adverted to the possibility of any other result having been anticipated than this one of Lina's being Alf's wife. They restored my self-respect, though they were powerless to restore my happiness.

It is ten years ago that I went down to Marley on that trial trip, which ended in my heart being wrecked, and though I am Ella Leyton still-though I have never tried the efficacy of a second love in removing all traces of a first still I am not objectless. first—still

The little child who was born on the night of the day when Lina tried her last chance, and won it, is my godson and my darling, and his mother is my friend, and his father is good enough to say that if he hadn't been so awfully fond of his wife, he believes he should have fallen in love with me, while he was pretending to do so.

He does not know that I am Ella Leyton still for his sake

and so often he expressed genuine sorrow that I should be | took three centuries more to complete. The rich portals, letting Time slip by so. "It will be awkward for you, dear Lina and I often say so-when you find your last chances gone,” he says, little knowing that my last chance was gone when he told me the truth about the two years, that day I rode with him at Marley.

the stained glass windows, and the beautiful choir shown in our illustration, elaborate in its workmanship, and adorned with valuable works of art, make this church one of the most magnificent in the world. Beneath the church is a crypt, said to be the Druids' cave, and in it is a labyrinth

THE CATHEDRAL OF CHARTRES.

THE city of Chartres, built on the site of the ancient capital of the Carnutes, retains trace of its Gaulish name. The great object of interest to a traveler is its cathedral, one of the finest in Europe, built over a cave where the Druids in ancient times performed their idolatrous rites, and paid, tradition says, honors to the Virgin who was to bear a Son. The present cathedral was begun in the eleventh and finished in the thirteenth century, except one spire, which

which has excited the interest of antiquaries, and led to long discussions.

An American traveler will be somewhat surprised to find, among the curious relics in this ancient fane, wampum belts sent two hundred years ago by the Huron and Abnaki Indians from our own land to lay before the shrine of Our Lady of Chartres.

The church as it now exists replaced a previous cathedral which was burned in 1020. The present structure was dedicated in 1260.