"Oh, carnival of shams! She is 'pious' you say? Then, I'll swear my watch is not safe in my pocket, and I shall sleep with the key of my cameo cabinet tied around my neck. A Paris police would not insure your valuables or mine. The facts forbid that your pen-feathered saint should decamp with some of my costly travel-scrapings! 'Pious' indeed! 'Edna,' forsooth! No doubt her origin and morals are quite as apocryphal as her name. Don't talk to me about 'her being providentially thrown into your hands,' unless you desire to hear me say things which you have frequently taken occasion to inform me 'deeply grieved' you. I dare say the little vagrant whines in what she considers orthodox phraseology, that 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb!' and, like some other pious people whom I have heard canting, will saddle some Jewish prophet or fisherman with the dictum, thinking that it sounds like the Bible, whereas Sterne said it. Shorn lamb, forsooth! We, or rather you, madame, ma mere, will be shorn--thoroughly fleeced! Pious! Ha! ha! ha!" Here followed an earnest expostulation from Mrs. Murray, only a few words of which were audible, and once more the deep, strong, bitter tones rejoined: "Interfere! Pardon me, I am only too happy to stand aloof and watch the little wretch play out her game. Most certainly it is your own affair, but you will permit me to be amused, will you not? And with your accustomed suavity forgive me, if I chance inadvertently to whisper above my breath, 'Le jeu n'en vaut pas la chandelle?' What the deuce do you suppose I care about her 'faith?' She may run through the whole catalogue from the mustard-seed size up, as far as I am concerned, and you may make yourself easy on the score of my 'contaminating' the sanctified vagrant!" "St. Elmo! my son! promise me that you will not scoff and sneer at her religion; at least in her presence," pleaded the mother. A ringing, mirthless laugh was the only reply that reached the girl, as she put her fingers in her ears and hid her face on the window-sill. It was no longer possible to doubt the identity of the stranger; the initials on the fly-leaf meant St. Elmo Murray; and she knew that in the son of her friend and protectress, she had found the owner of her Dante and the man who had cursed her grandfather for his tardiness. If she had only known this one hour earlier, she would have declined the offer, which once accepted, she knew not how to reject, without acquainting Mrs. Murray with the fact that she had overheard the conversation; and yet she could not endure the prospect of living under the same roof with a man whom she loathed and feared. The memory of the blacksmith's aversion of this stranger intensified her own; and as she pondered in shame and indignation the scornful and opprobrious epithets which he had bestowed on herself, she muttered through her set teeth: