advantages being that, once in love, any idiot
can write poetry, and when one has written a
hundred and thirty stanzas, and duly corrected
them, they can always be torn up and crammed
into the fire). Lily had no one to speak to,
and no one to write to, about her love. A
dim pervading consciousness came sometimes
over her, warning her that if anybody about
the place—the housekeeper, the old lacquey,
the priest, the baroness—knew aught of her
secret, the knowledge would be equivalent to
her condemnation to death. And so, nothing
short of the rack and the thumbscrew, or the
delirium of brain fever, would have made her
confess that terrible word of fatefulness.

What could the poor child do, then? Let
concealment, like a worm in the bud, prey on her
damask cheek? Not at all. Her love coveted
and courted concealment. It had been
engendered of a sudden, like a mushroom, and
grew best in a cellar. It was a modest, and a
timid and silent love. It would have died for
very shame, had it been dragged into the open
air. Its sequestration preyed by no means on
Lily's cheek. It made her happy. It was
company to her. Good and generous as the
simple folks were among whom she had been
mercifully thrown, Lily could but feel that they
were strangers to her. But now she had this
love, and she was no longer Quite Alone.

The love must have some vent, however, or
her heart-strings would have cracked. There was
an old harpsichord in the salon, playing on which
she had often lulled Madame de Kergolay to
sleep. She was no brilliant performer, for her
music-lessons had been few and far between, and
her practice had been furtively snatched from the
menial occupations, and the hours of confinement
and punishment, at the Pension Marcassin. But
Lily had a quick ear, an adroit finger, and a
pretty taste. There was a pile of old pigtail
music on a cabinet by the harpsichord—madrigals
and canzonets, ballads and complaintes—from
*' Vive Henri Quatre" to " La Belle Gabrielle,"
from "Charmante bergère, m'aimeras-tu?" to
"J'ai vu Dorinde; elle me sourit." Lily had
learnt to play these fusty charming productions
—to know, even, something of Gluck, and
Rameau, and Grétry. And sometimes even she
ventured to sing in a low tender voice some
ballad, English or French, that Madame de
Kergolay loved. She found herself now, drifting
from the decorous stream of graven music into
a turbid ocean of voluntaries and capriccios. It
was her love. Love was streaming from her
heart, and down her rounded arms, and from
her fingers on to the ebony and ivory of the keys.
The baroness told her that she was fast becoming
a brilliant player. The baroness sighed that
she could not afford to buy her a pianoforte. She
declared that she would hire one. The Abbé
Chatain suggested a seraphine. None of them
knew that it was Love who was the music-master.

And then, in the privacy of her little chamber
she would strive to draw and delineate the
features of the beautiful Fetish. Her fingers
were unused to the pencil, and she gave up
the attempt disconsolately. But in a bunch
of flowers she could see his likeness; his face
came forth among the crackling embers on the
hearth; his profile undulated in the pattern of
the wall-paper; it curled in the smoke from the
house-tops. It was wreathed in the fleeciness of
the summer clouds.

Once or twice, in the Luxembourg Gardens,
she detected herself tracing the letter E with
her parasol in the powdery gravel. But
Prudence being with her, she hastened to efface
the letter and make diagrams of monstrous
creatures with impossible noses and
preternatural cocked-hats. Yet it seemed as if the letter
E could never be rubbed out. Do all she could,
it was indelible as the blood at Holyrood.

At home she was less cautious. Poetry, indeed,
she eschewed, and, as has been said, she had no one
to write to about him. But she found herself
scribbling his name one day all over a blotting-pad.
It was "Edgar Greyfaunt," "Monsieur
Edgar Greyfaunt," " Captain Greyfaunt," " Le
Chevalier Edgar de Greyfaunt," "Monsieur le
Baron de Greyfaunt- Kergolay." Then she
stopped; but why not have gone on to prince,
or king, or kaiser? Had Edgar seen the blotting-pad,
his enormous vanity would have had stomach
for them all.

This is the way in which girls go on. Poor Lily
indeed.

            YOU MUST DRINK!

THERE is no help for it—if you enter a
public-house in England, you must drink. The
whole system of licensed victualling has been
carefully designed and elaborately built up, to
compel people to drink and to prevent them
from doing anything else. It is a mere mockery
to call it victualling. Victuals have nothing to
do with it, unless you are willing to dignify
with that name, cold sausages, heart-cakes, and
Abernethy biscuits. It was different in the old
days, when innkeepers wrote over their doors,
"Entertainment for Man and Beast."
Entertainment for beast, may still mean a cozy stall,
a feed of corn, and clean straw; but entertainment
for man at all houses not hotels, now means,
drink, wholly drink, and nothing but drink.

See how, in these days, the publican is
constantly leading the human horse (and ass) to
the gin-and-water, and compelling him to drink,
whether he will or no. He plants his house at
a corner with swing-doors on all sides, like so
many man-traps; while he blazons his walls
with golden legends, which tell of all that is
fine, and pure, and double diamond, and old
crusted, and over-proof, in drink. He sits like
a syren in shirt-sleeves on this gilded rock, and
regards all mankind as having one appetite—
thirst; and one organ—throat. Enter this
glittering temple of the one sense, and you
leave all liberty of action behind. Suppose you
are weary, and seat yourself on an empty barrel