thing ludicrous, because he never could, to the last, understand the matter as it really happened, nor conceive how his proselytising, and above all, his political zeal, could have got me into such a scrape; he thinks to this hour he did his duty in trying to convert Mardonnet; what's more, he is convinced he did convert him, and he would act over again just as he acted before, if all were to recommence; but it was marvellous to see how for two years he always managed to get money whenever it was required."

"What! so the abbé furnished the means of stopping Mardonnet's mouth till you were of age?"

"Naturally. I was but nineteen; there were two years to run, so six or seven times we had to furnish instalments to Mardonnet."

"Well, I wonder the fellow didn't try to frighten your mother," propounded Dupont, stopping short in his lounge.

"No one would attempt that," rejoined Olivier. "Bless you, she's as well known as the white wolf; not only down in our country, but even here in Paris. You just go and ask anybody connected with affairs, or with the Bourse, any Jew, or any broker, about the Dowager Marquise de Beauvoisin, and see what they'll say. Frighten her? No one ever did that; besides, what stopped Mardonnet was, that he knew if she was applied to, he would lose his money."

"How do you mean that, Olivier?" exclaimed Henri. "You don't imagine, do you, that your mother would have refused to repay what you really had borrowed?"

"My mother refuse!" echoed the Marquis; "of course she would. I was a minor, and she could not only have refused, but have prosecuted Mardonnet for conspiracy, and I don't know what besides."

"But the disgrace to your name?" interrupted Dupont; "the shame, the scandal? she would have recoiled before all that?"

"Not she," affirmed her son: "and Mardonnet well knew that, and left her in peace. Refuse, indeed," he continued, "I should think she would have refused; and quite right too."

then put it back and drew a tremendous puff, then coughed from having half strangled himself. At last

"You take one's words so literally," stammered he, still coughing, and looking the very picture of embarrassment. "Of course, if I had really meant to be dishonest I could have been so easily: but, you see, I paid in the end. I only say what my mother would have done; my mother's a tough one. But you do catch one up so, Henri; one says things one don't mean."

"It's a bad practice, Olivier,” replied Dupont; "and there are things that ought never to be uttered even in joke."

They lounged on a few paces in silence.

"And so," resumed Count Dupont, "the abbé provided you with funds for two whole years?"

"Yes it didn't come to so very much after all. Twelve thousand francs about. But, Lord! he got it for the asking; old ladies gave it him, and thought they were buying eternal salvation by chapel building. He could get any sum in a given time."

"And I presume you repaid him?”

"I should think so: he took me ten per cent. interest, which he swore was for the poor."

"And what made Mardonnet marry Camille Leblond?" inquired Henri.

"Why, her money, to be sure," replied Olivier; "she has been a milch cow to him. She brought him no inconsiderable sum at once; and she got him the appointment of cashier to that bank that was founded somewhere in Moldavia or Wallachia, and where they went two or three years ago to live. Besides, to say the truth, I believe Mardonnet was in love with her."

And the Marquis indulged in a laugh that prevented him from seeing the expression of disgust upon his friend's countenance. "Were you?" asked Dupont. "Not I," was the rejoinder.

"Then all that money was spent, and all that scrape got into, without any sentimentality?" remarked Henri. "It was insanity with premeditation, was it?"

"Well, you see, Roger and Gaston both ran after the girl; and Gaston was rich, and could spend a good deal, and, of course, I couldn't be outdone by him ;-and Camille was immensely the fashion."

"So we note down then: item-no love," said Dupont.

"Well," retorted Olivier, "I don't think I'm exactly the sort of man to go falling in love; "

and he appeared to feel a proud satisfaction at being able to make this statement.

"We say item, no love," pursued Henri. "Tell me frankly, Olivier, was there any amusement?"

"I should say none in particular," was the answer; "on the whole, rather a bore,-as those kind of things always are."

"And yet it cost tolerably dear," resumed Count Dupont. "Well, my good fellow, I never knew the rights of the story before, and I used to regret that I had been absent when it all happened; but now I see I shouldn't have been of much use to you."

He went his way, and Olivier mounted the stairs leading to his splendid blue and silver furnished room.

He had scarcely been in it more than a few minutes, when his own confidential valet entered, and informed him that a lady was in M. le Marquis's ante-room, and requested to see him upon most urgent business.

"It is the second time she has been here this morning," said the man; "she came about an hour ago, and M. le Marquis had just gone down into the stable with M. le Comte Dupont, so she went away, and said she would come again."

"Is she young or old?" asked Olivier.

"It is hard to say, M. le Marquis," replied the valet, "she is so very thickly veiled; but from the voice I should say young, and from her dress it is easy to see that she is a great lady—the richest of everything she has on!"

"Well, Leroux, I suppose she must be let in," said M. de Beauvoisin, in a sort of halfvictimised tone, and rubbing the back of his head with an air of great perplexity. "I hope there's no family complication impending anywhere," he muttered, as his servant left the

room.

have you never come since the other day? You said you would come the next day, and I waited at home till evening-I said I was not well, and could not go out driving-but you never came; it was a week yesterday."

"But I have been," faltered Olivier, "I have been twice."

"Yes," she resumed, "at times when you knew there would be no one in; you came the day of the Matinée at the Pré Catelan, and on Sunday before the return from the races; you knew I should be forced to go to both."

Claudine was much altered during this week, far more beautiful than before, but of quite a different beauty. All the sleepy repose had

fled from her countenance, and the latent beauty that Henri Dupont had foreseen in her on that rainy night in the courtyard at Clavreuil, had sprung to life with strange, nay, terrible intensity. The lustrous eyes were full of flame, and their lids no longer heavily drooping over them, seemed drawn upwards by the action of the hard, sharp, relentless eyebrow (the Medusa-like feature of the face, as Henri Dupont had at once divined). Her lips, no longer like wet rubies, were dry and unequally red; the smooth satin of her skin was disturbed, and dark shadows lay upon it, and the hand she had laid upon M. de Beauvoisin's arm burned like an ember just snatched from a furnace.

Olivier, it must be avowed, felt uncomfortable and helpless, as he became, with one glance, aware of the sudden alteration in the Sphinx. The woman no longer lay dormant in Claudine. Was this anyone's fault; hers, or his, or whose? That was too much of an enigma for Olivier's faculties; but the whole affair, as he mentally styled it, was unpleasant.

What was he to do? Why, of course, get Claudine to go away as fast as possible; but how? He scarcely knew what to say to her, as she stood gazing at him with her terrible eyes, and still holding his arm with her burning fingers.

"

But as the lady advanced towards him, and still standing, took off her veil, the words died upon his tongue. He started and turned pale with unmistakeable alarm.

"You, Claudine!" he exclaimed; "you here! What can have made you commit such an act of madness?"

"You!" she replied, coming closer to him, and laying her hand upon his arm. "Why

"Tell me why you have never come?" she recommenced; "why did you break your pro

"My dear creature," stammered Olivier, "I must take care of-of your reputation;" and when she had released his arm, and was looking him through and through, he first perceived what a foolish speech, in his confusion, he had made.

"My reputation?" she repeated, in a tone of such bitterness that it frightened him. "What is that? Do not say things of that kind to me, or I shall kill myself." (Olivier

shuddered.) "Concealment is our only policy, and I will answer for nothing being found out, if I am not driven mad by doubt of you." She came nearer to him once more, and took his hand in hers: "I will be as gentle and obedient as a dog," murmured she, so long as you do not cease to love me; but if I fear to lose you, I shall go mad. I have not slept for a week, and, this morning, I resolved to tell your uncle everything;" (Olivier was stunned by this unexpected blow ;) "but then I thought it was best to try and see you first, and so I came. I was desperate, for I had not even the hope that you were ill! I heard indirectly of your goings and comings at the club."

"How did you contrive to get away alone?" inquired Olivier, anxious to know what was the measure of imprudence committed.

"I said I was going to church to hear a mass for my mother," she answered, naïvely. "I do go sometimes, and then I go alone; Aspasie only comes on Sundays and great feast days."

"Well, you must make haste back now," observed Olivier, "or we shall all be in danger of detection: in ten minutes the breakfast-bell will ring, and my mother breakfasts here today. When she is in the house, I am never safe, for she might come up here."

"I will go directly," responded Claudine, "and do whatever you bid me, so that I am sure of you. But you will not stay away any more? You will come as you used to do, every day?"

"Yes, dear," was the rejoinder of the vanquished lover.

All the menace and all the fierceness of disappointed passion had expired in the whole being of the Sphinx. She laid the scented waves of her fair hair under Olivier's chin, wound her arm about his neck, and spun her Dejanira web around him naturally, and not meaning any harm.

Olivier's fate was sealed. Claire de Clavreuil's husband, the man she had, unloving, espoused, and who loved not her, was imprisoned in the toils of a Traviata, to be extricated therefrom as it might please blind chance.

"Olivier?" whispered Claudine, as, halfdisengaged from his embrace, she still clung to him, with looks that seemed as though they would never loose their hold; "tell me now, why you did not come?"

He hesitated, passed his hand over his forehead, and then, looking at her, said,—

"Because I felt you were an awful danger

THE

pathy of which I desire to say a few words. This power of sympathy is the most mysterious in the human heart, the most potent in its influence on human education, the purest and the most constant source of human delight. Its causes, its processes, and its effects are not half enough studied. And the two errors in regard to it which I want to discuss are: first, that sympathy implies a gushing strength of feeling; secondly, that it is opposed to the critical temperament. In reality, they are but separate aspects of one and the same error; but it may be convenient to consider them as distinct.

Women are apt to fall into the first of these errors. Strong of feeling themselves, they reproach men for not being equally strong; and their reproaches take the form of saying, You have no sympathy. They claim to themselves the glory of being very sympathetic; and men have the discredit of being rather the reverse. Now the truth lies quite the other way, though in venturing on this opinion I daresay that I shall be supposed to maintain a paradox. If, however, there be a semblance of paradox in the opinion, it is only because people do not sufficiently attend to the force of words, and thus confound feeling with fellow. feeling. Women are full of feeling in their constitution there is a predominance of it. If it is not in them absolutely stronger than in men, at least it seems to be more frequently the rock of their strength. But then it must be remembered that feeling is not fellow-feeling, and that we may be strong in the one and yet not in the other. In point of fact, exceeding strength of the one generally implies considerable weakness of the other. Thus, sup

pose that you are engaged in a quarrel, the very force of the feeling with which you take your own side deprives you of power to sympathise with the other; whereas I, a mere spectator, who have no feeling of my own on the subject of the quarrel, can sympathise with both sides. Sympathy with both sides! That is what the people who talk most about sympathy never understand. They have failed to observe that sympathy does not simply mean emotion it means adaptability of emotion; the capacity which man or woman possesses of forgetting himself and becoming some one else.

My thesis, then, is that he who feels with only one side is deficient in sympathy. He is deficient in the power of adapting himself to either side; and I believe it will be found that women are, as a rule, more deficient than men in this power. It is far more difficult, for example, to convince a woman of error than a man. This is because she feels so strongly takes her own part so determinedly as to be unable to sympathise with the other side. A man is far more ready to admit that his adversary is in the right, or at least is not without excuse. It is the very nature of sympathy to see the other side and not only to rejoice with them that rejoice, but also to weep with them that weep. What is death to the frogs is laughter to the boys. I confess I am sorry for the frogs, but I hear one of them call me a brute, and declare that I fail of sympathy because I can also look at the transaction from the boys' point of view, and feel the pleasure which they (and grown men too) take in death-dealing sport. This is what women mean when they say that men fail of sympathy. Their own sympathy is nearly all of the onesided kind. And their complaint of men that they are wanting in sympathy really amounts to this that they are not such partisans as women. There is a tendency in womankind to make of every man either a god or a devil; they do not often sympathise with the latter. They seldom learn to agree with Thackeray in thinking that black is not so very black, and that white is not so very white. Thackeray got the name of a cynic because he could sympathise with bad characters as well as with good, and because he was oppressed with a sense of the likeness of men one to another. People do not like to be told of the smallness of the difference that separates the best of us from the worst. The chief of the apostles declared himself to be the chief of sinners; and it is the very key-note of Christianity that all human distinctions are as nought; that

the first shall be last, and that the last shall be first.

All things the world which fill

Of but one stuff are spun,
That we who rail are still

With that we rail at one.

Now see the point at issue. I am attempting to show that strength of sympathy does not imply great strength of feeling; that a nature which is very sympathetic, and which passes easily from one stage of feeling to its opposite, cannot be possessed very strongly by any one feeling. The most striking characteristic of sympathy is its mobility-its power of changing from one mood to another. But the very power of changing implies that no one mood is persistent; and why is it not persistent?

but for this very reason, that its domination is not despotic. There are thousands of people who feel in their own persons and feel strongly; but they have no power at all of feeling with persons who are in positions which they are never likely to reach. They can feel for and with the murdered man, for example; but they have no power whatever of feeling for and with the murderer. But this is not strictly speaking sympathy. Or at least the fellow-feeling which is at their command, is a fellow-feeling with conditions of life in which they can easily imagine themselves to be engaged. They scarcely get beyond the range of their own egotism. They enter strongly into parts which they imagine that they themselves might play. Now the power of sympathising with various parts may be more or less limited; but it seems to be clear that in proportion to its range the fellow-feeling excited must be more or less languid; and that what sympathy gains in range it loses in force. The point of points to be determined, however, is this -which is most characteristic of sympathy? that it should be limited to the range of your own egotism-your own interests, habits, pursuits, and parts; or that it should extend beyond the range of your own individual preferences and surroundings, and should in the very act of comprehending the whole of human nature become faint in its manifestations? A sympathy with our own particular preferences and habitudes as these are displayed in other people is indeed scarcely entitled to the name of sympathy; it is but a subtle form of egotism. Sympathy proper gives us a wide range of fellow-feeling with aims and motives and acts which are never likely to influence us personally. But if this be granted, I make out my case. The sympathy which women demand is intense but limited-it is partisanship—it

is a disguised form of egotism; the sympathy which men yield is various and comprehensive, and by reason of its susceptibility in a wide range of opposite sensations, it must be comparatively feeble in its grasp of any one. It does not follow that because A. and B. happen to be like each other and have many points of agreement, they are therefore to be described as sympathetic. They sympathise with one another, no doubt, because they are the double one of the other; but to all the world besides they may be unfeeling brutesin a word, unsympathetic.

But if this view of sympathy be accepted, it saves me very much from the further necessity of exposing the fallacy of the other notion on which I proposed to remark-that sympathy is not critical. If criticism means the art of finding fault, it would, of course, be absurd to identify it with sympathy; but if it means perfect understanding and just judgment, then it is impossible for it to exist save in sympathy. So long as your idea of sympathy is that it is partial-taking wholly to one person in a crowd, to one side in a quarrel, to one phase of feeling-of course you cannot see in it even an approach to criticism. But see clearly the mobility of sympathy, that is, its power of adapting itself to opposite sentiments, and of comprehending opposite sides, hate as well as love, laughter as well as tears, hope not less than fear-and does not such a conception imply that it must contain within itself more than any other faculty of mind the power of just judgment?

Nor let it be supposed that I am broaching any new doctrine of sympathy when I say that it is thus nearly allied to justice. The doctrine is not much accepted because we are all more or less egotists, and in practice we account those only as sympathisers who sympathise with and reflect ourselves. If you sympathise with my neighbour to my hurt, I shall not call that sympathy; I at once give it a bad nameit is the partiality of blind love. But though the doctrine is not accepted in current modes of speech, it should be remembered that he who of all in this country studied most carefully the nature of sympathy, has been so struck with the justice of it that he has seen in this one faculty the arbiter of human conduct, and on it has based the whole system of moral philosophy. All I have ventured to say is that sympathy is compatible with the critical temperament and that criticism without it is void But Adam Smith says that it is to be identified with conscience and with the sense of propriety. All the proprieties of human life, he

says, and says truly, are determined by our power of sympathising with them; and then he goes on to say the same thing of virtue -that our notion of it is determined by sympathy. Whether he be right or wrong in this matter, yet at least he has a good deal to say for himself. Thus it may be wrong to give way to anger, or to return blow for blow; yet as a matter of fact we are disposed to sympathise with retaliation when it is not excessive, and our notions of the virtue of concession are so far limited. And if Adam Smith be supposed to go too far in his theory of moral sentiments, when he makes sympathy the groundwork of all our ideas of morality, at least I cannot be much wrong in setting it up as the foundation of justice. It is impossible to be just save in connection with the power of sympathising more or less with the culprit. You quarrel with your servant for some trivial mistake, and scold him; you think yourself sympathetic because you are hot-tempered, and you think me unsympathetic because I do not take your part. If you were really sympathetic, you would be able to make allowances for your servant's mistake, and would not get into such a fury about a nothing.

A friend to whom I have urged these views, turns upon me with the remark, that it comes to a question of head or heart; that I make sympathy too much of the head; and that he thinks it is more of the heart. The fact is, that sympathy is an affair of the heart, but it does not flourish except in combination with a quick intelligence. A man may have strong feelings without much intelligence, but he cannot have mobility of feeling-he cannot be quick to sympathise with you unless he is also quick to understand you. There is an understanding of the heart; and, when we seek for sympathy, we seek less for approbation than to be understood. Differ with a man as much as you please; it will not hurt him; but, at least, take care to understand him. Perfect sympathy is thus an offshoot of culture and civilisation. It does not exist in ignorance and barbarism. You, the civilised man, can sympathise with the savage far more than he can sympathise with you; and it is an utter fallacy to suppose that emotion ceases to be emotion because it comes of knowledge. There is a case in point which is perfectly well understood. It is notorious that men often do cruel things merely from want of thought. They are not unkind, but they are inconsiderate. And so of sympathy it does not cease to be of the heart because it implies consideration, and because the craving for it culminates in heightened intelligence.