and, as he said, he had lived long enough with Messrs. Conrade and Co. to acknowledge the wisdom of the message.  But Rose had not long been at leisure to look out for him before he made his appearance, and walked in by right, as one at home; and sitting down in his yesterday’s place, took the little maiden on his knee, and began to talk to her about the lessons he had been told to wait for.  What would she have done without them?  He knew some people who never could leave the house quiet enough to hear one’s-self speak if they were deprived of lessons.  Was that the way with her?  Rose laughed like a creature, her aunt said, “to whom the notion of noise at play was something strange and ridiculous; necessity has reduced her to Jacqueline Pascal’s system with her pensionnaires, who were allowed to play one by one without any noise.”

“But I don’t play all alone,” said Rose; “I play with you, Aunt Ermine, and with Violetta.”

And Violetta speedily had the honour of an introduction, very solemnly gone through, in due form; Ermine, in the languid sportiveness of enjoyment of his presence and his kindness to the child, inciting Rose to present Miss Violetta Williams to Colonel Keith, an introduction that he returned with a grand military salute, at the same time as he shook the doll’s inseparable fingers.  “Well, Miss Violetta, and Miss Rose, when you come to live with me, I shall hope for the pleasure of teaching you to make a noise.”

“What does he mean?” said Rose, turning round amazed upon her aunt.

“I am afraid he does not quite know,” said Ermine, sadly.

“Nay, Ermine,” said he, turning from the child, and bending over her, “you are the last who should say that.  Have I not told you that there is nothing now in our way—­no one with a right to object, and means enough for all we should wish, including her—?  What is the matter?” he added, startled by her look.

“Ah, Colin!  I thought you knew—­”

“Knew what, Ermine?” with his brows drawn together.

“Knew—­what I am,” she said; “knew the impossibility.  What, they have not told you?  I thought I was the invalid, the cripple, with every one.”

“I knew you had suffered cruelly; I knew you were lame,” he said, breathlessly; “but—­what—­”

“It is more than lame,” she said.  “I should be better off if the fiction of the Queens of Spain were truth with me.  I could not move from this chair without help.  Oh, Colin! poor Colin! it was very cruel not to have prepared you for this!” she added, as he gazed at her in grief and dismay, and made a vain attempt to find the voice that would not come.  “Yes, indeed it is so,” she said; “the explosion, rather than the fire, did mischief below the knee that poor nature could not repair, and I can but just stand, and cannot walk at all.”

“Has anything been done—­advice?” he murmured.

“Advice upon advice, so that I felt at the last almost a compensation to be out of the way of the doctors.  No, nothing more can be done; and now that one is used to it, the snail is very comfortable in its shell.  But I wish you could have known it sooner!” she added, seeing him shade his brow with his hand, overwhelmed.