LITMIR.BIZ

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adieu when Frau Kranich's nephew arrived at Brussels, exceedingly dissatisfied with his American business in the bar-rooms of the grand duke of Mississippi. A sordid jealousy of Mademoiselle Joliet's claims upon his aunt took possession of this prudent spirit. He took up a watch-post at a university town on the Rhine. He began to whisper vague exaggerations of her coquetries and liveliness, which the Protestant circle that revolved about Madame Kranich did not fail to bear in to her. This lady admired her nephew, sure that his want of manners was the sign of a noble frankness. She wrote to Francine, bidding her come immediately from London. The girl not replying, the hopeful nephew was put upon her track. He went away. His letters from England reported that Francine was no longer in that country, but was probably come back to Belgium, "I know not in what suburb of Brussels our very independent miss may this instant be hiding," he wrote.

      About the same time, in the circle of French exiles at Brussels, a young romantique named Fortnoye was reported as weeping and lavishing statues over the grave of an unknown infant in the churchyard at Laaken. It was a delicious mystery. Kind meddlers approached the sexton, who said that all he knew of the babe's mother was that she was a beautiful lady from London. Kranich carried the story dutifully to his aunt, adding his own ingenious surmise: "Can Francine have become sufficiently Anglicised to contract secret marriages with roving revolutionists, and scamper about the country with ardent young Frenchmen in the style of Gretna Green?" In fact, it was really from London that Mrs. Ashburleigh was proceeding, for the purpose of taking care, in the Rhenish city where he was dying, of her handsome, dissipated, worthless husband. Taken suddenly ill at Brussels, she left her infant to the unequaled chill of a strange, unknown cemetery, hastening thence with tears and despair to the bedside where duty called her.

      Has my reader forgotten the dim, tear-swollen story which I heard—not at all improved in the telling—from my generous young friend Grandstone—how an impulsive Frenchman had laid to rest, in flowers and evergreens, the unnamed baby of a woman he had never seen? Jealous as I was of Fortnoye, I never could think without tenderness of this singular action. To make the tomb of this helpless Innocence the young man braved the curiosity of his comrades—despised the rumor, the obloquy, and, hardest of all, the jests. Well has the wise dramatist decided that Ophelia must needs be laid in Yorick's bed!

      Poor Francine, gay, frivolous, innocently vain of her little travesty of English behavior, found her accomplishments and graces received by her guardian's circle with incomprehensible coldness. Hurt and humiliated, she asked to pay a visit to her father. The honest rustic received her with a miserable confusion of doubt and severity, for her escapade to England had never pleased him, and her return from her godmother's home wore to him the air of a repudiation. At her father's house, however, she was discovered by Fortnoye, who had never heard the ingenious Kranich's theory of his own private wedding with Francine, and who thought to find in her the veiled unknown of the cemetery. He saw for the first time, in the flowery home at Noisy, that fresh ingenuous beauty, a little over-cast with disappointment. His generous nature was touched; and, with his talent for administration and planning, he conceived the idea of establishing Francine in the pretty bird's nest at Carlsruhe, distant alike from the strongholds of her calumniators, Belgium and France.

      Fortnoye now had an object in life. "There is a very young person in the cemetery of Laaken who is much in need of a chaperone," he said. The frank proofs of his own relations with this churchyard would not only do credit to his own reputation, but would gratify the best friends of Mademoiselle Joliet and at least one other lady. To attain these proofs he had to step over the coiling, writhing bodies of a whole nest of rumors. When he seized by the throat the especial slander that he himself was the husband of the babe's mother, he found written on its crest the signature of John Kranich. He sought the aunt. This lady gave him several interviews, the Lutheran prayer-book for ever in her hand. "Why does the dear girl not come to me?" she would say, weeping, but she refused to hear a word against her precious nephew, the personification of bluff frankness. As if to make crushing him impossible, young Kranich had now withdrawn to America, leaving his reputation in that best possible protection, the chivalry that is extended toward the absent. Fortnoye was baffled. "I will ask the baby at its tomb for its mother's and father's name," he cried. In the pretty God's Acre he found a fresh harvest of flowers and a new statue over the well-known grave. It was a pretty miniature of Thorwaldsen's Psyche, on which the proud copyist had inscribed his name. A respectful correspondence with Mrs. Ashburleigh, to whom he was guided by the sculptor, and who was now taking the waters at Wildbad, soon put the whole tangled story to rights. Fortnoye had the happiness of conducting Francine, by this time his affianced wife, to the good Frau Kranich, who, convinced that she had wrongly judged her, threw her arms ardently around her recovered jewel, letting the eternal little book fly from her hand like a projectile.

      "But the most singular part of the story," concluded Father Joliet, "is the letter which Fortnoye, after two or three quarrels, forced out of young Kranich when the latter had returned to Europe, full of triumph and debts, to take possession of his aunt for the rest of his life. Here it is," added the good man, opening a pocket-book. "The hand-writing is drunken, but the sense is clear as Seltzer-water. The scholars tell me in vino veritas est, but it appears to me that truth really comes out in the repentance and headache that follow."

      "MY DEAR AUNT" (ran the letter which Charles had seen forced from the alligator after his unlucky game of dominoes): "You have known me as the soul of candor. It is this happy quality which compels me to state (for I am something of a Rousseau) that if I ever playfully accused your pretty pet Francine of being a flirt, I knew nothing about it. The best proof is that she absolutely refused to join her expectations with mine, though I am something of an Adonis. If you believed that she and the wine-peddler had made a match, I pity your credulity and ignorance of human nature. I am certain that neither the peddler nor myself would touch the enterprise until you had shown exactly what you would (pecuniarily) do. For my part, I have acted throughout on the most exact and advanced scientific principles. Intending to modify the spirit-trade in America, and especially to introduce the exclusive agency of the Farina essences, I found that the sinew particularly needed for this leap was capital. Desiring to absorb your bounties toward Francine, I at first proposed matrimony. This offer was made without any enmity toward the girl, as my next move was without affection, though it seems to be resulting to her benefit. I became her accuser as coolly as I had been her lover. Passion has nothing to do with the combinations of strategic genius: I am something of a Washington. My theory of her clandestine marriage was one of the most masterly fictions of the age—a plot worthy of Thackeray. If I could have succeeded in mutilating the statue in the graveyard, I might have carried it, while you would have admired my act of iconoclasm with all your Puritan nature. In the momentary abandonment of my plans, owing to the machinations of my enemies, you will conceive that I am not very rich. My college-debts and other expenses I am obliged to leave for your kind attention. The main point of this letter, which M. Fortnoye has persuaded me to set down as distinctly as in my present feeble state I can, is that Francine is a pretty little maid who has never passed by Gretna Green. There! that is my credo, and I will subscribe to it,

      "Your loving nephew, JOHN.

      "P. S. Address, with such an enclosure as your generosity will prompt, JEAN K. FFARINA, sole representative and cosmetical chemist in America on behalf of the Farinas of Cologne, at New Orleans where I am going to beat my adversaries like Old HIC—"

      At this point the tipsy scrawl became illegible.

      "This is not a very handsome apology. Did Fortnoye accept it?" I asked, turning over the clammy and malodorous epistle. At this inquiry the crack of the door widened and Charles appeared, on fire with enthusiasm, and so possessed with self-importance that he forgot the betrayal of his indiscretion.

      "I can reply to that question," said Charles. "When M. Fortnoye received the paper from the duelist he read it over and said, 'You have meant to impose on me, monsieur, with an incomplete confession. But, in return for your imperfect restoration of Mademoiselle Joliet's portrait, you have unconsciously set down such a masterpiece of yourself that I am certain your aunt will see you as she never did before.'"

      Charles, having thus added himself to our cabal without rebuke, took a lively interest in what followed. The proud father continued: "My son-in-law, after some business preliminaries, wrote me a handsome letter demanding what he had already effectively

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