buried her face in her delicate perfumed handkerchief. She said to herself fiercely, “Mamma likes to think so; she wants to get rid of us, and get back to those others,” and looked at her with eyes which shone hot and dry, with a flushed cheek and clenched hands. It was all she could do to restrain herself, to keep from saying something which good sense and good taste, and a lingering natural affection, alike made her feel that she must not say. Reine was one of those curious creatures in whom two races mingle. She had the Austin blue eyes, but with a light in them such as no Austin had before; but she had the dark-brown hair, smooth and silky, of her French mother, and something of the piquancy of feature, the little petulant nose, the mobile countenance of the more vivacious blood. Her figure was like a fairy’s, little and slight; her movements, both of mind and body, rapid as the stirrings of a bird; she went from one mood to another instantaneously, which was not the habit of her father’s deliberate race. Miss Susan thought her all French--Madame de Mirfleur all English; and indeed both with some reason--for when in England this perverse girl was full of enthusiasm for everything that belonged to her mother’s country, and when in France was the most prejudiced and narrow-minded of English women. Youth is always perverse, more or less, and there was a double share of its fanciful self-will and changeableness in Reine, whose circumstances were so peculiar and her temptations so many. She was so rent asunder by love and grief, by a kind of adoration for her dying brother, the only being in the world who belonged exclusively to herself, and jealous suspicion that he did not get his due from others, that her petulance was very comprehensible. She waited till Madame de Mirfleur came out of her handkerchief, still with hot and dry and glittering eyes. “You think it would be well if it were over,” said Reine; “that is what I have heard people say. It would be well--yes, in order to release his nurses and attendants, it would be well if it should come to an end. Ah, mamma, you think so too--you, his mother! You would not harm him nor shorten his life, but yet you think, as it is hopeless, it might be well: you want to go to your husband and your children!” “If I do, that is simple enough,” said Madame de Mirfleur. “Ciel! how unjust you are, Reine! because I tell you the result of a little rally like Herbert’s is often not happy. I want to go to my husband, and to your brothers and sisters, yes--I should be unnatural if I did not--but that my duty, which I will never neglect, calls upon me here.” “Oh, do not stay!” cried Reine vehemently--“do not stay! I can do all the duty. If it is only duty that keeps you, go, mamma, go! I would not have you, for that reason, stay another day.”