on re-passing the door. "I should like to take the butterflies with me, but I have no home where I can take them. I suppose we shall have to sit in the street like the poor blind woman by Tottenham Chapel. Oh, how dreadful! But I must think of my mother, not myself, and aunt will think of Hortense. "Mamma," she said, re-entering the room and whispering in her mother's ear, who sat precisely as she had left her, "I have packed your wardrobe, though I do not know what we shall do with it in the street." She received no answer, and did not like to repeat her remark. It was already past their usual dinner hour, and Alice felt very hungry, but no one else suggested the necessity of food; she thought perhaps it was as well to get used to do without now-it would not seem so bad to-morrow.

Mr. Woodward was busy tearing up old letters as he stood at his private bureau, the doors of which, for the first time within recollection, were flung open. A little portmanteau, a hat, and cloak were deposited upon the dining table, and the master wore his walking boots, ready to make his exit by the back door whenever the sheriff's delegate should present himself at the front. There are certain peculiarities in all families which a stranger cannot understand; actions which would appear simple and natural to the uninitiated, to the members of a secluded family may be awful prognostics of impending events. Such an omen was the opening of Mr. Woodward's bureau, the display and destruction of his secret correspondence.

"To think that I should ever come to this!" Mrs. Woodward at length exclaimed, gaining courage from her husband's silence-"to sit here expecting a bailiff at the door to be cast adrift with my children, and their father flying by the back entrance! What will the Delmonts and the Templetons think of us now? Oh, Richard! you are a wicked man!"

"How dare you asperse my character, madam? This is your own work-your own work, I say! See to what a condition you have reduced your children; See to what a straight you have brought me! Bah! Don't quote your Delmonts and your Templetons; go and ask them for a home now."

"Oh! I wish I had never seen you, Richard; I danced with the Earl of Grizzlewig the very day I accepted you; I might have married him-and would a countess ever come to this? Go away, Alice-get away-go along with your father-you are all the same, and I wish I had never come amongst any of you." Mrs. Woodward's remarks were not always sensible or logical. "What, madam, will you add insult to injury? Will you prate to the man you have ruined of earls and Grisslewigs? What was your father? A contemptible baronet! Why did you not have a son, madam, to claim the title in abeyance ?"

"And to be turned out into the street whilst his father flies by the back door, and the bailiffs-I never heard such a word as bailiff before-Oh! Richard, you are a very wicked man!"

How much longer these recriminations would have continued is happily unknown, for a carriage driving up to the door deposited Hortense on the threshold of home, now likely to be home no longer. Alice rushed out to admit her sister, and fell weeping on her neck.

"Dear! dear!" ejaculated that young lady, extricating herself, "How rough you are, what is the matter?" And she passed disdainfully into the parlour. Hortense was exceedingly handsome, and must have borne considerable resemblance to her mother at the same age. A haughty elegance distinguished her manner; her brow was low, like that of an antique statue, and crowned with a mass of raven hir; her eyes, neither so large nor so eloquent as her sister's, were defiant in expression, and dark in hue; her lips were thin and compressed, but tinted with a beautiful red that enhanced the general brilliancy of her complexion. She was followed at this juncture by her aunt, Lady Timmes, who had necessarily been longer in descending from her yellow vehicle, though obsequiously assisted by Orpheus, her footman, in a sky-blue coat and orange-coloured plush. It was luxury, not nature, which had rendered her ladyship fat. In youth she had been remarkable for the gracefulness of her figure, though not possessed of such beauty as her sister, Mrs. Woodward, and therefore content to marry a rich baronet in her own station, as she remarked (her father being a very poor one), whilst Emmeline was flirting with the Earl of Grizzlewig. But, as it often happens, the plainest of the family settled the best, and when Miss Emmeline Melville, the belle of the season, married Mr. Woodward, the rich banker, her young friends knew not whether to envy or sneer. A golden bouquet holder, however, presented by the man of money to each of the bridesmaids decided the majority of the feminine world in his favour, who accordingly pronounced Miss Melville a fortunate girl. The young bride had a great weakness for display, and Mr. Woodward himself was not behindhand himself in ostentatious expenditure. A fine house, an elegant pair of ponies, and costly furniture, contributed to render the pretty woman still more attractive, and she found herself the centre of a somewhat brilliant circle. In the midst of her triumphs, and in the summer of her days, a fearful calamity, like an alpine avalanche or a southern earthquake, overwhelmed and engulphed them. The managing clerk absconded to Australia with the bulk of the capital; the bank broke; there was a commercial disgrace and a social annihilation; Mr. Woodward relinquished the country house, the furniture, and the ponies, and hid his diminished head and that of his wife, after a short continental seclu. sion, in a pretty little villa near the Regent's Park, whither their

children, still young, were conveyed, together with the plainest of the furniture reserved for the purpose. What money had been saved from the general wreck was unknown, but the rather high rent of their present abode seemed scarcely consistent with the state of penury Mr. Woodward constantly dwelt upon with so much irritable melancholy. They paid their way pretty handsomely, but how the master kept to himself. Yet the hour seemed to have come at last when the cloud so often prognosticated was about to fall, or rather had already burst, and would soon annihilate them in its deluge. Lady Timmes visited occasionally, since their first misfortune, in the character of a benevolent patroness. She expressed a decided aversion to the whims and eccentricities of Alice, and showed an equal partiality for the handsome Hortense, whose artifices succeeded in gaining some influence with her aunt. But Lady Timmes had other peculiarities besides a rotund figure, a florid face, a flaxen wig, and features whose outline was lost in substance. Left early a widow, she had been able to indulge all her oddities, the first of which was decidedly for the table, the second for pets-poodles, Cochin-China fowls, tall footmen, and little boys in buttons, not to mention her niece Hortense, who, thanks to tact, promised to outvie them all. But Lady Timmes was also sentimental, exceedingly romantic, and had an absurd passion for "sweet names," which she exercised by changing the appellations of all the servants she engaged and the dogs that she bought. With much difficulty and puffing, her ladyship waddled into the Woodward's hall-which was none of the widest, modern architecture having a daily increasing tendency to contract the vestibule-in a trailing, bright green dress, a scarlet Colleen Bawn, and a black and yellow bonnet. A long châtelaine, sparkling and noisy, distinguished her side and furnished an accompaniment to the music of her panting breath. A shaggy white dog clasped in a warm embrace finished the coup d'œil.

"What is the meaning of all this, and why am I summoned here in such a strange way ?" cried Hortense as she stepped quickly into the parlour before her aunt had alighted, and satisfied herself with a hasty glance that no one was dead.

"It is an hour of deep affliction; we are ruined," said Mr. Woodward, walking up and down the room in despondent agitation worthy of the great Phelps in public-" ruined! ruined!"

"We are going to be turned out into the streets," Alice explained. "Then why did you bring me here, Miss? How dare you send for me?" cried Hortense, turning to her fiercely.

"We are expecting bailiffs at the door," explained Mrs. Woodward. "Alice, for Heaven's sake keep it shut-"

Oh dear! oh dear!" panted Lady Timmes, entering; but the next moment ejaculating in tones of horror, "Oh lud!" she sunk into a

chair, dropped Dido, who yelped piteously, and fainted away. Upon Alice calling for cold water her aunt suddenly revived, and sat bolt upright. "Good gracious! what a house for me to come near! Mr. Woodward, how dare you send for us? Hortense, I must go. Pick up Dido and give her to Orpheus. Open the door, Alice; I do not want to have anything to do with you."

"You will not leave me in all my trouble?" sobbed Mrs. Woodward, "Nancy!" (Yes, that was Lady Timme's sweet pretty name; the suppliant had better have forgotten the disagreeable and incontrovertible fact just now.) It was breathed in touching accents, but smote the wrong chord, and the owner of the appellation, instead of opening her arms, flounced round to quit the room. "Oh! do not leave me with this wicked man; see what he has brought me to!" "Wicked man? You are a wicked man," Lady Timmes observed emphatically, pausing an instant and facing her brother-in-law-"avery wicked man to marry into our family and ruin yourself twice over. But I discard you all. Thank goodness, you have not the name of Timmes." And she prepared to quit the house. "Dido, Dido, come, sweety!"

"Here is Dido, aunt Nancy Timmes," cried Alice running after her; "and it's a pity you don't think more of your relations and less of your dogs."

The lady turned up her hands and eyes whilst Orpheus carried the favourite quadruped down to the carriage and deposited him beside his mistress. "Home! Kavanagh," cried she to the coachman, and her niece, standing at the door, wondered whether it was his real name. The voice of Hortense soon recalled her.

"Leave the house? I tell you I will not!" and the passionate speaker stamped her foot upon the ground. "You are blighting my

prospects-you are destroying my opportunities-"

"Everything is destroyed now."

"I repeat, it is the very moment when you ought to refurnish the place and get the outside painted; I want you to give a dinner party and two or three dances."

"Hortense, you are beside yourself."

"I am not; it is you who are mad-blind to the advantages I shall lose, ignorant of the acquaintances I am forming. I tell you, appearances must be kept up a little longer-they must.”

"It is too late—there is no stemming the torrent-no damming up the flood," cried her excited and angry father in heroics, as he bent his severe eyes upon her.

"But it shall be so-it shall it shall! I will not have my hopes thwarted," cried Hortense, flinging her elegant little bonnet and warm cloak-her aunt's gifts-upon the floor. "To balk me now! To bring me back to such a home-to scenes of misery and distress-at the very

moment of my triumph: worse than all, to drive my aunt away-to make an enemy of her-oh!" and Hortense burst into a violent fit of hysterical rage, laughing like a demoniac, and sometimes sobbing.

"Only this was necessary to complete the scene," remarked Mr. Woodward bitterly, suddenly adding, "Hark!" as a dull, heavy knock sounded, "they've come, clear the way for me!" and catching up hat and cloak, without waiting to attire himself in either, he rushed through the passage. Quickly as the fugitive moved, however, Alice was always before him with an open door to accelerate his flight; but when they came to the bottom of the garden, egress was barred and the key not there. Time was imperative and Alice trembled with a strange sensation of guilt as he scrambled up the high wall, paused an instant to catch the cloak and bag she flung towards him, and disappeared on the other side. Listening an instant, a cry, followed by a scuffle, smote upon her ears; she tried the door, forgetting it was locked, and ran in to fetch the key. The bolt was rusty, not being often used, and when Alice succeeded in opening it at last, and looked out into the street, she saw a man at the further end dragging another apparently insensible or dead, but the increasing twilight prevented her from recognising either of the figures, and the next moment they were lost in darkness

CHAPTER III.

LADY TIMMES' LITTLE SECRET, AND HER ROSE-COLOURED BOUDOIR. "HOME, Kavanagh," said Lady Timmes to the blue and orange coachman, who flourished his whip in obedient compliance to the word of command, and the yellow chariot was whirled by its white horses from the north-western suburbs to more aristocratic quarters. Belmontstreet was not far from Hyde Park Corner, and with what inward satisfaction its fair tenant reached her town abode may be conceived when it is known that she ascended the stairs into her boudoir without once pausing, notwithstanding her corpulency, pulled the bell violently, sunk into her own particular chair, and burst into heartrending hysterics. Thus it was that Alphonsine, her French maid, discovered her when she answered the somewhat ungentle summons. The boudoir was hung entirely with rose colour and white lace, and had the chairs and ottomans not been stuffed with yellow, nor the carpet variegated with scarlet and blue, doubtless the effect would have been charming; as it happened, incongruity of colour in furniture otherwise handsome rendered Lady T's boudoir a chamber of horrors, nor was that term less appropriate when the pictures which literally covered its walls were taken into consideration; the owner intended them to display her taste, and so they did. At the present moment she was making a personal display of another kind.