CHIMES.

'Whether in the world of mammalia, or in the world of animalculæ, the secret of success is the same: that the great devour the small.' . . . 'Love cannot be justly said to be all tomfoolery: there is a certain percentage of Life-Elixir discoverable therein.'-Opinions of the Pandit Chandra Prakásah.

I.

Great men and little men ;
Short men and tall;

Great men have great minds,
And small men, small;
Great minds rob little minds,

All to make a name:

So great minds get greatest minds—

And this is FAME.

II.

Rich men and poor men;

Rags at Riches' door;

Rich men have rich friends,

And poor men, poor;
Rich men live by poverty;
Poor men live by stealth:
So rich men get richest men-

And this is WEALTH.

III.

Pretty maids and plain maids;

Maidens altogether;

Pretty maids have pretty ways

To keep mankind in tether.

For maids are weak, and men are strong,

Till Cupid flits above:

Then men are weak, and maids are strong

And this is LOVE.

THE AMIABILITY OF LADY WINKFIELD.

Of winter and of discontent all mortals are doomed to take their share. Winter, of course, may be escaped by those who have the means and the inclination to betake themselves to the tropics; but there is a winter in Nice, as the Countess Radna found out when the mistral began to blow and when the impossibility of obtaining dry firewood for love or money was brought home to her; while discontent, as everybody knows, will spring up and flourish in any climate. Now, to be discontented was nothing new to her. From her earliest childhood she had never been anything else—unless, indeed, it might have been during that too brief period when she had deluded herself into the belief that Douglas Colborne was the lord and master for whom she had longed, to whom she could render implicit obedience, and whose partial mission it was to reduce her chaotic notions, emotions and aspirations to something resembling a coherent and definite standpoint. But Douglas had been found wanting and had been cast aside; she was once more at sea, without rudder or compass; she knew not what port to make for, nor, had she been in possession of that desirable knowledge, would she have had the slightest idea how to utilise it. The sorrows of spoilt children of Fortune have served so often as a theme for moralists that the paradox has lost all its freshness; yet they are quite as genuine, quite as common and quite as much entitled to sympathy as the sorrows of the poor, the sick and the maimed. Many a lazy beggar, stretching out his bare legs in the sunshine and the dust at her gates, was a more enviable being than the wealthy Countess who day after day aired her incurable weariness in the well-kept gardens above his head.

Such being her condition of mind, it may seem natural enough to assume that the gossips of Nice were not very far out

in forming the conclusions which they did not fail to form when they noted that the Marchese di Leonforte's afternoon drive took him, fully nine times out of every ten, to the villa occupied by the Countess Radna. But the gossips, whose conclusions are so frequently correct, and who in this instance had more plausible reasons than they were aware of for drawing the conclusions at which they had arrived, were mistaken. They would have been bitterly disappointed if they could have overheard the prolonged conversations which took place between the Countess and her Italian admirer, for in them there was little or no question of love, nor were the limits of propriety overstepped for a single moment. The Marchese, it is true, was an admirer and an ardent one; his admiration, or rather adoration, was so thinly veiled that, for all practical purposes, it might as well have been openly avowed; but he was debarred from openly avowing it by the precepts of a religion in which he firmly believed and which he recognised as binding upon him; while she, on her side, was protected by the dictates of a system of morality which governed her actions, although she could have given no lucid explanation of it. Christianity might be a superstition; marriage might be a contract of neither greater nor less validity than the lease of a house; but-whatever might be the real meaning of them— there were such things as right and wrong, self-respect and selfcontempt, and if she had felt inclined to respond in any degree to Leonforte's passion she would, doubtless, have dismissed him instantly and unhesitatingly.

Her code of morality did not, however, render it incumbent upon her to dismiss him for his own sake. Scores of men had been desperately in love with her before him; she had watched the waxing and the waning of their affections; she was convinced that fidelity is a form of strength or weakness which belongs exclusively to the female sex, and she did not believe that the sufferings to which he obviously imagined himself to be a prey would do him any sort of harm. Meanwhile, he always interested and sometimes diverted her. He was, as the men of his nation not unfrequently are, a strange and scarcely comprehensible compound. In some respects he seemed to be a mere child; in others he exhibited himself as a full-grown man, who half frightened her by his terrible earnestness. He had moods of dignified self-control, alternating oddly with fits of excitement, during which it was necessary to ignore two-thirds of the in

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discreet sayings which escaped his lips. His indiscretions, however, did not take the shape which they might have been expected to take; he never forgot that his companion was a married woman, nor did he ever attempt to address her as one who had shaken off the trammels of wedded existence; but he was evidently unable to conceive that both she and her husband might be in the right, and, since he had decided that she had right on her side, he occasionally spoke of Douglas Colborne in terms which, had they been reported to the mother of that comparatively innocent gentleman, would have caused her some justifiable alarm.

The Countess, as has been said, ignored such outbreaks and did not trouble herself to take up the cudgels on behalf of the absent offender. By her way of thinking, Douglas was an unpardonable offender, and it would have been rather too tedious a process to explain to this primitive Marchese how and why he was not a downright monster. Besides, he was absent-a circumstance which not only rendered it superfluous to undertake his defence, but also preserved him from the risk of being eaten up, body and bones, by an impetuous Sicilian. Not for one instant would she have admitted that his absence was just what caused her to regard him as unpardonable; she was very far indeed from imagining that she was furious with him for having neither pursued her nor written to her. Only she deemed that her skin-deep cynicism and scepticism received all the support, that was required to keep them alive from the ascertained fact that a man who, not so very long ago, had professed to love her more than anything and everything in the world, could resign himself with scarcely the semblance of a struggle to being deserted by her, and could go on leading his own life as composedly as though she had never been born to interrupt the even tenor of it. Thus it was that Mrs. Colborne's letter, describing the distinction acquired by Douglas in the legislative assembly of his native land, produced an effect altogether different from that which the ingenuous writer had hoped for. The Countess, after perusing her mother-in-law's artless composition, was so vexed and irritated that she could not deny herself the satisfaction of imparting its contents to Leonforte.

'Would one not say,' she exclaimed, that these good people expected me to join in their infantine exultation? Yet they might surely have guessed how absolutely it is the same thing to

me whether Mr. Brown or Mr. Jones has a majority in the English House of Commons, and how very little it is any affair of mine whether my husband supports Mr. Jones or annihilates him!'

The Marchese ground his teeth and answered: 'I should like to make it my affair to remind that husband of yours that he is your husband!'

'You are too kind; that is the very last thing of which I am anxious to remind him. I ask nothing better than that he should forget it as indeed he seems to have done. The only annoying part of the business is that civilisation has not yet advanced far enough to make a practical divorce a legal one.'

The Marchese looked grave. When civilisation reaches that point,' said he in his deep, deliberate voice, and with that dragging Italian accent of his which somehow lent a certain solemnity to his words, it will be upon the verge of falling back into barbarism. I grant you that, in your case, divorce might be permissible, because you have no family; but one must consider the result of divorce in general. The family is sacred, and God knew what he was about when He ordained that it should be so.'

He raised his hat as he pronounced the words 'Le bone Diou,' and that simple action atoned for a colloquial method of expressing himself which bordered upon irreverence.

But the Countess, who had never really recovered from the sorrow which had fallen upon her at the time of her baby's death, and who may have been dimly aware that she would never have left her husband if her baby had lived, turned upon him with a gesture of exasperation.

'Do you know,' said she, 'that there are moments when you are insupportable? There is a crying lack of good taste about you which displays itself in your habit of wearing bright blue neckties and in fifty other ways. Try to cure yourself of it. I admit that you waste your time by aping the fin de siècle manner which you sometimes attempt to borrow from your Parisian friends; but you might at least recognise how grotesquely incongruous it is for a man who has the air of an ennobled brigand to talk like a village curé.

'Since I have the misfortune to displease you, madame, I will withdraw,' answered Leonforte, rising at once and suiting the action to the word. They had these little disagreements from time to time-disagreements which were invariably followed by a