Mademoiselle Dumarques took him into her den; or the laboratory in which she concocted those costumes which were to ravish the Parc Monceau or the Champs Elysées on a Sunday afternoon. It was a small and stifling apartment behind the saloon in which mademoiselle received her customers—a box of a room ten feet by nine, smelling of coffee, garlic, and a suspicion of cognac, and crowded with breadths of stuff and silk, lining, pincushions, yard measures, paper patterns, and all the appliances of the mantuamaker’s art. Here the shrill-voiced young apprentice stitched steadily with a little clicking noise, while Mademoiselle Dumarques opened a brass-inlaid desk, and produced therefrom a small packet of papers. Lucius seated himself at a little table by the single window, and opened this packet. There were about a dozen letters, some of them love-letters, written to a person of humbler station than the writer. Vague at first, and expressing only a young man’s passion for a lovely and attractive girl; then plainly and distinctly proposing marriage ‘since my Félicie is inexorable on this point,’ said the writer, ‘but our marriage must be kept a secret for years to come. You must tell my aunt that you are summoned home by your father, and leave abruptly, not giving her or my uncle time for any inquiries. You can let a servant accompany you to the station, taking your luggage with you, and you can leave by the eight-o’clock train for Newhaven before that servant’s eyes. At Croydon I will meet you, get your luggage out of the van, and bring you back to London in time for our marriage to take place at the church in Piccadilly by half-past eleven that morning. We are both residents in the parish, so there will be no difficulty about the license, only to avoid all questioning I shall have to describe you as an Englishwoman, and of age. I have heard of a cottage near Sidmouth, in Devonshire, which I think will suit us delightfully for our home; an out-of-the-way quiet nook, from which I can run up to London when absolutely necessary. My uncle is anxious that I should take my degree, as you know. So I may have to spend some months of the next two years at Oxford; but even that necessity needn’t part us, as I can get a place somewhere on the river, at Nuneham, for instance, for you. Reading for honours will be a good excuse for continued and close retirement, and will, I think, completely satisfy the dear old uncle—whom, even apart from all considerations about the future, I would not for worlds offend. Would that he could see things with my eyes, dearest; but you know I did once sound him as to a marriage with one in all things my superior except in worldly position, and he met me with a severity that appalled me. Good as he is in many ways, he is full of prejudice, and believes the Glenlynes are a little more exalted than the Guelphs or the Ghibelines. So we must fain wait, not impatiently but resignedly, till inevitable death cuts the knot of our