“I cannot sufficiently extol the genius with which De Hamal managed our flight. How clever in him to select the night of the fête, when madame (for he knows her habits), as he said, would infallibly be absent at the concert in the park. I suppose you must have gone with her. I watched you rise and leave the dormitory about eleven o’clock. How you returned alone and on foot I cannot conjecture. That surely was you we met in the narrow old Rue St. Jean? Did you see me wave my handkerchief from the carriage window?

“Adieu! Rejoice in my good luck; congratulate me on my supreme happiness, and believe me, dear cynic and misanthrope, yours, in the best of health and spirits,

“Ginevra Laura de Hamal, née Fanshawe.

“P.S.—Remember, I am a countess now. Papa, mamma, and the girls at home will be delighted to hear that. ‘My daughter, the countess! My sister, the countess! Bravo! Sounds rather better than Mrs. John Bretton, hein?”

In winding up Mistress Fanshawe’s memoirs, the reader will no doubt expect to hear that she came finally to bitter expiation of her youthful levities. Of course a large share of suffering lies in reserve for her future.

A few words will embody my further knowledge respecting her.

I saw her towards the close of her honeymoon. She called on Madame Beck, and sent for me into the salon. She rushed into my arms laughing. She looked very blooming and beautiful. Her curls were longer, her cheeks rosier than ever; her white bonnet and her Flanders veil, her orange flowers and her bride’s dress, became her mightily.

“I have got my portion!” she cried at once (Ginevra ever stuck to the substantial; I always thought there was a good trading element in her composition, much as she scorned the bourgeoisie), “and Uncle de Bassompierre is quite reconciled. I don’t mind his calling Alfred a ‘nincompoop’—that’s only his coarse Scotch breeding; and I believe Paulina envies me, and Dr. John is wild with jealousy—fit to blow his brains out—and I’m so happy! I really think I’ve hardly anything left to wish for, unless it be a carriage and a hôtel. And oh! I must introduce you to mon mari.—Alfred, come here!”

And Alfred appeared from the inner salon, where he was talking to Madame Beck, receiving the blended felicitations and reprimands of that lady. I was presented under my various names—the Dragon, Diogenes, and Timon. The young colonel was very polite. He made me a prettily-turned, neatly-worded apology about the ghost visits, etc., concluding with saying that “the best excuse for all his iniquities stood there,” pointing to his bride.

And then the bride sent him back to Madame Beck, and she took me to herself, and proceeded literally to suffocate me with her unrestrained spirits, her girlish, giddy, wild nonsense. She showed her ring exultingly; she called herself Madame la Comtesse de Hamal, and asked how it sounded, a score of times. I said very little. I gave her only the crust and rind of my nature. No matter. She expected of me nothing better; she knew me too well to look for compliments. My dry gibes pleased her well enough, and the more impassible and prosaic my mien the more merrily she laughed.

Soon after his marriage, M. de Hamal was persuaded to leave the army as the surest way of weaning him from certain unprofitable associates and habits; a post of attaché was procured for him, and he and his young wife went abroad. I thought she would forget me now, but she did not. For many years she kept up a capricious, fitful sort of correspondence. During the first year or two it was only of herself and Alfred she wrote; then Alfred faded in the background; herself and a certain new-comer prevailed; one Alfred Fanshawe de Bassompierre de Hamal began to reign in his father’s stead. There were great boastings about this personage, extravagant amplifications upon miracles of precocity, mixed with vehement objurgations against the phlegmatic incredulity with which I received them. I didn’t know “what it was to