present, but prescient,-who knows?—with yet dormant greatness in a dim railway-to-bedeveloped future. At all events, the Hôtel de l'Europe looked down crushingly upon its opposite neighbour, the closed shop, very much as a newly made peeress might upon a humble school-fellow, destined to be dropped. Between the two, upon the square space intervening, were to be seen a couple of odd vehicles resting on their shafts; one the halfdrag, half-fourgon like equipage of a commercial traveller, the sole lodger in Europe's hotel; the other, the lumbering, tumble-down conveyance, destined for the transport of travellers to and from Blois, the master of the European resting-place exercising the right of furnishing the relays to the coach, which still, in default of a local railroad, served as about the only means of conveyance between two or three provincial towns. Yes; the flaunting house of cheer might well look down upon the gloomy house over the way, with its sealed entrances; for behind those closed-up channels of light and life there had passed a miserable series of woful scenes, which would only have been a shade more woful still, had the poor, hard-striving, utterly helpless, and, at last, despairing Widow Raynal, Grocer and Vintner, lived to witness them. The Widow Raynal had not always been alone and a widow. Her history was that of many of the women of her class, and none the less sorrowful for that. Some thirty years ago, Claude Raynal, the son of the land-steward of a wealthy proprietor near Chartres, started in life with what was called a good education, very little money, but the protection of his father's employer; and this very protection ruined him. Though his school-gains amounted to what might be deemed little enough, Claude proved, for his particular character, to have too much education and too little money. He was always thinking of enjoyment without labour, and grew to be so convinced that mere protection could and ought to secure for him all he desired, that when protection either could or would not do what he expected, he regarded himself as an injured man. In the beginning protection acted in his favour, and helped him to his first lift in life, by placing him as unpaid clerk in the Receveur-particuliers office; but Claude disliked work and no pay, and refusing the work which was to lead to pay, the pay never came, and protection refused to help him who did not choose to help himself. Well, Claude Raynal tried many things, always with the [July 4, 1868. same object in view-of obtaining more than he paid for-the most marked feature in the dishonesty of our age-and one day, when he was somewhere about five-and-twenty, his father announced to him that he had found a wife for him. The girl was the only child of a well-to-do peasant near Blois, was well brought up, not pretty, and would at her father's death inherit sundry strips and morsels of land-du bien! as the people of that class in France call it. They married and went to live with the peasant father near Blois. They had two or three children, and, in course of time, the two fathers both died, and Claude Raynal and his wife came into the enjoyment of whatever they were to be possessed of. The bits of land ruined them utterly, as land in such conditions ruins many thousands of petty proprietors in France. Claude fancied he had some aptitude for agriculture, and not having land enough to test these aptitudes upon, he borrowed money to buy a bit or two more, and a very short time saw him beggared of almost everything he possessed. When the irretrievable ruin had set in, then, as invariably happens in such cases, began the martyrdom of the wife. This endured fifteen years, the one great marvel being how the poor wretched woman contrived to keep all their heads above water for such a long lapse of time. But she did so. Some little resources were left to her, and when she had once seen clearly into her husband's nature, she thought herself justified in concealing them from him. To these she added the produce of her own hard labour, and now and then persuaded Claude into accepting odd jobs, which, by dint of entreaty, and the esteem people had for her industry, she obtained for him. But this was rare. Claude Raynal looked upon his wife as especially appointed by Providence to take care of him. She occupied the place Protection refused to fill in his early days, and upon her he persistently, ruthlessly, leant until the day when it pleased the Almighty to remove him from this earth. Luckily, about two years before the period at which our story opens, Claude Raynal died, and-his wife regretted him! Yes! Claude had been weak, lazy, ungrateful, useless-he had deliberately drained to the very dregs every resource which his helpmate had to dispose of, and had never thanked her; he had made her entire existence one long succession of various and unceasing toil, whilst he indulged in all the debauchery he could practise without falling under the clutch of the law; he had come across the path of this poor, striving, honest, woman, and doomed her to incurable misery, and the only child that was left them—a girl-to total destitution. All this, and even more, had Claude Raynal done, but he had been the means of raising this woman's self-esteem to the highest point it could attain in so humble a sphere as hers, and she was tender of him for the superiority he gave her. People in this position know nothing of moral or mental processes, but dimly feel results. "Claude's unenlightened, struggling wife had no consciousness of what was passing within her, but she strove and suffered for her wretched husband with a brave maternal tenderness; and when he lay dead before her-dead, at last, from drunkenness-she felt that the chief cause of her great | worth, of her womanly worth, had departed, and she grieved. Besides all this, too, the man's illness had cost money, for it had lasted long after repeated attacks of delirium tremens had enfeebled him; and his burial, which the widow resolved should be a decent one, cost something more, and her own strength momentarily shattered, was insufficient for the increased work demanded of it, and so the widow Raynal had to sell the last of her small belongings, a cottage with its kitchen-garden, a source till now of gain. When all was settled a small sum remained; it was very small, but it would vanish if not utilized. And accordingly the Widow Raynal decided upon purchasing the goodwill of the grocer's business belonging to the corner shop we have described in the village of St. Martin. To do this, she had to borrow five hundred francs, her own meagre resources not sufficing, so she began her new business with her future profits already, to a certain degree, pledged. However, the old activity re-awoke, and, at the end of a year, the widow was straining through her hardships and had paid half her debt. She had added to her grocery, and oddsand-ends trade (all things generally from woollen stuffs, writing-paper, and fireworks down to marbles) a manner of wineshop, and in a side room there were two or three tables at which the wine of the country could be drunk, pipes smoked, and the Siècle read. But one day, the progress of our age asserted itself, and the house with a balcony, and three stories, and a bright blue sign, rose up over the way, and the Hôtel de l'Europe overwhelmed the miserable drinking-shop opposite. The Hôtel de l'Europe opened a café where absinthe was to be had, and wherein a counter of shining zinc mirrored itself in a glass with a gold frame, and the days of the wineshop were numbered. The widow struggled still, for it was in her nature to do her utmost: but she struggled feebly, for, in the first place, the flesh was not equal to the will, and, in the next, she knew herself vanquished. The spirit of the time had beaten her, and she despaired without knowing why. She stared stupidly at the big house rising up before her, was ignorant of its connection with railways and progress, but bowed down before the grandeur of the zinc counter. That, she knew, she could not resist. A month before our tale opens, the Widow Raynal had died. By the side of the woman, whose life had been one long sacrifice, stood a girl of seventeen, utterly unknowing what the immediate future of life would be to her. Madeleine Raynal was familiar with hardship. From the time she could receive impression the difficulty of living had impressed itself upon her. All the children born before her had died; she alone remained, healthy as far as mere health went, not active, and not possessed of any attraction—a tall, pale girl, with a muddy skin, on which the fair hair made no contrast, and what the other mothers of the place called an unpleasant look about the eyes. Her own mother loved her dearly. Not at first, however, for, when she was born, trouble already sat at the hearth of the Raynals, and the wife's energies were absorbed in taking charge of her husband. HE was really her child; and to her he deferred and submitted. With all his faults, he never, even when stupid with drink, had spoken to his wife an angry word; and, for this, she requited him: mourning inwardly for his loss-mourning too all the more that she did not dare let her grief appear. She would have been sneered at, and blamed-this, she knew. But when the grown-up infant was gone, the mother turned to the girl; and though there was no sentimentality between them--(there never is among such poor hard workers as these)-they clung to each other closely as human creatures do upon a raft after a shipwreck. Life was a shipwreck to them, and a day lived through was a gain. Madeleine was brought up as best she could be; sent to the salle d'asile from the age of two to that of seven, and to the communal school till she was fourteen. She could read, write, sew, and cast up accounts tolerably, but she was decreed to be a dull child, and so, indeed, she looked; and she was never anybody's pet or favourite. The Sisters never petted her, nor M. le Curé either, nor any of the ladies in the châteaux roundabout; and Madeleine grew up an unnoticed, uninteresting girl. The Widow Raynal was beginning to think of what she could do with her daughter, when she died-died suddenly; inasmuch as long years of toil and a few months of despair | had annihilated all power of resistance, when disease came in the form of bilious fever, she was at once struck down. At her mother's death Madeleine learnt what it is to be destitute. She had only known privation hitherto, and though cold and hunger had approached her more than once, she did not know what it was to shiver and be without one log of wood or even warm ashes for the foot-pan, or to crave and be without one crust to still the craving. This it was which she learnt when the Widow Raynal died. As the half-yearly rent for the shop had been over-due more than a month, the proprietor took his precedence of other creditors, and seized. As the poor wooden coffin, borne on one man's shoulder, was carried out of the shop, the bailiff walked into it, and took possession of all it contained, except one bed. When Madeleine came home from seeing her mother's remains put into the common grave of paupers, she found the men of law at their grim work; which was soon ended, there was so little to sieze. The proprietor was not a bad man, and he said the girl might stay a few days. She tried to do so; and, for two days, continued to eat the small remains of food she could find. She thought that grief for her mother's loss possessed her; so it did till the animal wants came. But the cold (it was a sharp November) pinched her, and hunger gnawed at her, and the darkness and solitude frightened her, and, on the fourth day, she ran out, leaving the door open behind her, and, darting over the threshold of a neighbouring dwelling (the little sabot-maker's shop by the church across the road), she caught at the figure of a woman who was bending over a pot upon the fire, and, joining her hands, exclaimed, "Oh, Madame Perrot!" and burst into a fit of convulsive sobbing. The sabot-maker's mother, a widow also, and also very poor, took the unfortunate girl to her heart, warmed her, fed her, soothed her; and, with a charity which rarely fails women of the poorer classes in France, pre vented Madeleine Raynal from being crushed out of reason or life by the overwhelming sense of utter loneliness. A CHAPTER II.-THE APPEAL. MONTH went by, and the keen winds of the plains made the frosts of December more biting. Madeleine Raynal had been warmed and fed, and there was a low straw chair by the side of the fire in the sabotmaker's abode where the girl might be seen, day after day, cowering over the carefully covered embers. She did nothing; but, her terror and her physical wants allayed, she seemed to accept naturally the fact of support given to her by another almost as poor as herself. All the dullness of her nature had returned to her, and the truest mode of describing her parasite existence would be to say that she hung about. Those who remembered Claude Raynal, shrugged their shoulders contemptuously, and opined that the father's lazy, dependent character was fast coming out in the girl. Poor Madame Perrot said nothing, uttered no reproach, went on dividing her humble cheer with her guest, and sought vainly to find some employment by which Madeleine might earn her livelihood. She found nothing. But there was in the sabot-maker's dwelling some one who looked grudgingly on the portion of existence which was subtracted from the little household by Madeleine, and this was the sabot-maker himself. Denis Perrot. was ten years older than Madeleine, and had once or twice, as a boy, taken notice of her; nay, almost taken her part against others, and the consequence had been a kindlier feeling between these two than had perhaps existed between anyone else and the uninteresting child of the unlucky Raynals. But Denis had met with an accident to his hip, in the early autumn; an abscess had ensued, he had had to take to his bed, and, for the last three weeks, had been incapable of any work at all. Nothing in the domain of sentiment, no childish memories, had they been ever so strong, could endure against the animal selfishness of the sick workman. As he lay in his bed, in the small room on the ground-floor, which was kitchen, shop, bed-room, everything, you might see him casting glances of fierce envy at Madeleine, as she took from his mother her bowlful of the soup, into which it cost so dear to put even pork, let alone a bone of beef with any flesh upon it. The doctor had said that the invalid's strength must be kept up, and here was this stranger sapping this strength by her unconscientious appetite. She was devouring what was to be the marrow of his bones. He hated her: one day he told her so. They were alone; and the hard words and bitter reproaches that issued suddenly from the lair, on which she thought Denis was sleeping, stung Madeleine to the quick, and roused whatever was dormant in her sluggish nature. Perhaps some spark of her mother's energy lay under the ashes after all. "You have no right to stay here," said, at last, the sick man, in a querulous tone. "You are eating my mother's substance; you should go away." "Go where ?" retorted Madeleine. "I'm sure I can't tell," was the reply; "but somewhere - anywhere. You ought to do something." "Do what?" asked the girl. "Well, I'll tell you what," and Denis raised himself on his elbow with a sudden inspiration; "go up to the château yonder. This very morning, the gardener, Jean Louis, was down here about his sabots, and told how the ladies have as good as lost their maid, who has got the typhus fever. They're going up to Paris next week; go and get 'em to take you as their maid. Go that would be a rare fine thing." The girl had risen to her feet, and was standing looking intently into the fire. "A chambermaid?" she repeated, gloomily. "A servant?-a drudge !" "Yes," growled the sabot-maker; "you'd rather beg than work: rather eat my food than work for your own!" She walked quick, and reached the house before the clocks struck four. With some little trouble she obtained admittance to the countess's presence, and began to recount the sad story of her life, and her mother's trials, before asking for anything definite; for it became apparent, even to her dull perceptions, that there was a terrible gulf between her own wretchedly clad person and the meanest domestic of this well-appointed household. She felt she must first interest her hearers; she tried to do so,—and failed. Madame de Clavreuil's reputation for charity stood firm and lofty in the neighbourhood of St. Martin. There was no school, no asylum, no refuge, no foundation of any kind, within twenty miles, that did not count her among its patronesses. She was active and large-handed, and still fair to look upon, and all good Christians blessed her. In the room into which Madeleine Raynal was shown everything breathed comfort and peaceful happiness. There was warmth and the perfume of sweet flowers, and pure women ; and no goodlier sight could be well imagined than Madame de Clavreuil bending over her embroidery frame, on which glowed a magnificent priestly stole, and her young daughter Claire, who was reading aloud to her the life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary. When Madeleine entered, the countess looked up from her embroidery, her daughter laid down her book upon the table. Both ladies looked at the unattractive, meanlydressed girl, and she felt that all courage, and nearly all coherence of thought had departed There was a suppressed savageness in his from her. She told her story lamely. tone that overawed Madeleine. "I will go and try, Denis," said she, submissively; and she put on her shawl and her sabots, and went her way to the château. The Château de Clavreuil was about a mile off, in a straight line. You went down the road from Blois to Tours, crossing the road from Tours to Chartres, and, on the other side, at the end of a long, straight, lime avenue, stood a massive building, in the style of Louis XIII., the habitation of the Comte Réné de Clavreuil, one of the four or five large landowners of the province, who lived there with his wife and only daughter during seven or eight months of the year. It was past three when Madeleine set out on her errand; it would take her nearly an hour to get to Clavreuil, so she had to make haste, for the day was a lowering one, with dark clouds upon the horizon, and night falls early in December. “Why did M. le Curé never speak to me of your mother, my poor child?" inquired Madame de Clavreuil, with a gentleness of tone and look that ought to have encouraged the petitioner, but did not do so. "We scarcely knew him," was the reply; "he never came to us." "You should have gone to him," rejoined the lady. "Mother had no time. It was all work at home. There were days when she was up at two o'clock in the morning, and there were nights when she never got to bed at all.” And Sundays when you never went to church," interposed Madame de Clavreuil, not severely, but as though it pained her to say it. The girl hung her head. "Madame la Comtesse," murmured she, "let alone the work, mother had not always clothes in which she could go to mass. had been better off, and was ashamed." She Madame de Clavreuil shook her head. "Ashamed!" she echoed, with a sigh"ashamed to go to the house of God! I am afraid, Madeleine, that what has been said to me more than once was too true; that your poor mother relied too much upon herself, and not enough upon the only support that avails. It is a grievous fault; but we will hope it is forgiven her. She died, having received all the sacraments, did she not?" 66 All," answered Madeleine; adding naïvely, "M. le Curé said all was quite in order; but I never saw him again since the funeral," "You have lived since then at Mother Perrot's," observed the countess; "M. le Curé | could not go there. Denis Perrot is a noted scoffer, and his mother performs few or none of her religious duties." "I was dying of want, and had not a crust to eat when Mother Perrot took me in," objected Madeleine; "if she had not given me food, I must have starved in the street." A casual spectator who should have witnessed this interview between Madame de Clavreuil and Madeleine Raynal would have been inclined to suppose that the dauntless energy and self-reliance of the poor dead widow had left to her child an inheritance of distrust. She was evidently distrusted because her mother had committed the impiety of overtrust in herself. All this time Claire de Clav-| reuil never took her eyes from Madeleine's face, but gazed at her with an intent and curious gaze. After a short pause in the conversation :"What can I do to help you?" said the countess, compassionately; "what was it you came to ask of me?" she continued, emboldened, and coming nearer to the countess, "take me as your maid in place of Mademoiselle Céleste, who is so ill." The difficulty was surmounted, the worst was done; she had made the request, and now she would struggle hard to obtain it. Madame de Clâvreuil's first impression had been evidently one of blank surprise, and she instantly repressed it. It was succeeded by a look of pain and pity. "The place of lady's maid in Paris (and we shall be there next week) requires experience, which you have not,” observed she, gently; "it would be impossible for you to fulfil its duties." At the word impossible, the whole sense of her destitute position rushed back upon Madeleine, and lent her an energy which was not in her every-day nature. 66 "Oh! madame," she cried, desperately, try me. I can do more than you think, and I must starve if you do not take me." Madame de Clavreuil made an imperceptible sign to her daughter, who left the room. "Madeleine," said she, rising, and coming close to the petitioner, "your inexperience and incapacity are not the real reasons for my being unable to give you a situation in my house. The real reason is-" she hesitated— "the real reason is, that it would be giving a bad example." The girl fixed her eyes upon her in speechless bewilderment. "My poor child," continued Madame de Clavreuil, with real compassion, and taking the girl's hand in hers, "you and your unfortunate mother have never set a good example. I do not accuse you of unbelief-God forbid ! but you never showed any piety; you have not been well-noted in your classes, my poor Madeleine. I do not speak of laziness, doggedness, hardness of disposition; those are human defects-but you have shown no love for our divine religion. You have set a bad example, Madeleine; it was remarked that Madeleine stared in amazement for the original object of her visit had been driven momentarily out of her head, and the consciousness of her fearful needs brought it back to her with a shock. She blushed, and then turned pale, and, clasping her hands together, "Oh, Madame la Comtesse," stammered she, you passed through your first communion with "take me into your service." Madame de Clavreuil put away her embroidery frame, and turned her chair half round, so as fully to front the supplicant, "Take you into my service?" she said, kindly; "but, my poor girl, what can you do?" At this question, Madeleine revived as at the contact of a vague hope. "What can I do?" she repeated, almost briskly; "I can read and write well, and do anything in the way of work. Oh! madame," indifference, and for two years you have not been to confession. My poor girl, if I took you into my house I should be flying in the face of my duty, and doing an injustice. I have a daughter; my maid attends upon her. I could not allow "Madame la Comtesse," burst forth the girl, with sudden fire, "no one living can say any harm of me." "In a certain sense, none, Madeleine," was the reply; "but I should be rewarding a manifest neglect of religious duties if I engaged | |