'We are in apartments in the König-strasse-very comfortable and airy ones. Mamma likes it better than being in an hotel.'

'Yes,' said Phillis again.

'Do you like the place?' desperate determination.

pursued Miss Bellew, with

I mean what you have

seen of it? for you have not been here long.'

'We have only been here a week, and I like the place; at least, I do not dislike it, nor wish to be anywhere else.'

Her voice and manner agreed with her words in expressing utter indifference; and despairing of rousing her to interest in anything, Miss Bellew made a civil little commonplace speech about hoping to see more of her, and left her. Happening to look round as she walked away, she saw that the pale, impassive governess could be moved to some emotion, for she was speaking to her poor little crippled charge with a tender smile on her face that altered its whole expression, and made her, Miss Bellew thought, for the moment, look beautiful.

'So you have been cultivating the fine-lady governess?' was Lydia Cornish's greeting, as her new acquaintance joined her again. Could you make anything of her?'

'She seemed very depressed,' said Ella, rather evasively.

'Depressed! She's a living monument of woe. I don't know which looks the most wretched, she or

Emmie. The child is morbid enough already, and I'm sure it must be bad for her to have such a doleful person with her, to encourage her in gloominess.'

'Miss Maitland is not at all gloomy with Emmie; and the child takes to her wonderfully, and does not fret at all after Pelling, as I had feared,' said Mrs. Cornish, who seldom contradicted her elder daughter, except in defence of her younger one. And then, half apologetically to Miss Bellew: 'This is the first time my little girl has been separated from the nurse who has been with her always, and I have felt very anxious as to the experiment of having some one else with her; but Miss Maitland is so very nice with her.' And Mrs. Cornish went off to speak to her crippled child. Her elder daughter laughed rather unpleasantly.

'I see how it will be,' she said to her companion. 'Mamma will soon get infatuated by that girl, and spoil her with too much attention.'

'I should not think that Miss Maitland is likely to be upset in any way by too much attention,' was the dry reply. She seems to me to be too much crushed by trouble to care to speak to any one. Who is she in mourning for?'

'Her brother, I believe. He committed suicide, or something of the kind.'

Suicide' cried Ella Bellew in horror. 'Oh, poor thing! how can she bear it?'

'I forget the story. The wife of the clergyman of the parish wrote mamma a long rigmarole about this

girl's family misfortunes, and the disgrace attending her brother's end; the equivocal position in which it left the sister, and a lot more of the kind. I was very much bored by the whole matter, and I advised mamma not to have her; as governesses with family misfortunes always give themselves more airs than other governesses even. But mamma was so overjoyed to get hold of somebody who was a lady by birth—for you know that the governess has to act nurse to Emmie as well, and lots of people have been too grand for the situation in consequence-that she swallowed everything else, and took her at once.' Here Miss Cornish yawned, as if tired out with the subject. Shall we go back and hear the fag end of the band? At any rate, it will be more amusing than dawdling down here with no one to look at.'

And the two girls strolled away.

CHAPTER IX.

AT KREUZNACH.

AND this was how Phillis and her story were regarded by the family with whom her lot was for the present cast. She had been right in thinking that strangers would not (like Mrs. Rowley, and the other ladies in and about Hamsford) judge her for her family misfortunes, hold her responsible for the sins of others, and condemn her personally on account of the sad experiences of her past life. But she was equally mistaken when she had said to herself formerly that they would judge her by what she was.

Of herself-her own personality, her thoughts, tastes, individuality-they thought nothing; they judged her simply by the office she held-she was 'the governess,' and that was all. Of Miss Cornish I may safely say that she did not, that she could not look upon Phillis in the light of a girl (that is, in the sense in which she regarded herself and her contemporaries), hardly as a woman. If closely questioned, she might perhaps have unwillingly admitted that a governess was made of some sort of flesh and blood,

and had a heart for the purposes of circulation. Of course she must have a brain too, or she could not teach; but it must be a brain of an inferior order, for the imparting of knowledge, not for the reception of ideas, or the power of independent thought. A governess was a governess, and must run in the groove of her predecessors. If she were flighty or subdued, gay or melancholy, lively or stately, was dressed in bright hues or clad in crape-if, in short, she departed in any particular from the established precedent of governess demeanour or appearance, or was in any respect different to other people, she had. 'airs.'

Mrs. Cornish, in this as in many other things, was a modified, kinder-hearted edition of her daughter. She was a woman much wrapped up in her children and her family concerns, and (as was perhaps natural) seeing that Miss Maitland was a lady, and also made her little girl happy, she was content; and about the governess's own happiness troubled herself not at all.

Phillis met with no unkindness from any one; both Mrs. Cornish and her daughter were too well-bred and had lived too much in society, to do otherwise than treat a dependant with perfect civility. As far as eating and drinking, sitting in a railway carriage, or sleeping at an hotel were concerned, she was, as they would have expressed it, made one of the family; but as for the mother thinking that Miss Maitland could be knocked up by a journey, prostrated by