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seem the crime of a midnight robber. He scattered letters and papers on the floor, ransacked drawers and jewel-cases, until his pockets were heavy with their plunder. It was at the last moment that he stooped to pick up a letter which had fallen to the ground among the rest; a letter which attracted his eye because the superscription was in his dead friend Sir Talbot Treherne's handwriting. A curious superscription too:

'To my daughter Alice.

To be opened after my death.

TALBOT TREHERNE.'

Lord Deverill had no time to read the letter. He thrust it into his breast, and crept softly away from the room, where the servants might come at any moment to inquire for their mistress's final orders before retiring for the night.

In the gallery and on the staircase all was still. My lord resumed his mask before going downstairs, and looked cautiously over the banisters. There was no one in the hall. He went softly down, unfastened the heavy bolts and chains of the great door, and let himself out into the rain and darkness, reckless of the storm.

He went on foot to the City, in spite of the rain, which never ceased in all that weary walk. He spent the night at that hostelry of which he had spoken to his secretary, and where he had sent his luggage on arriving from France. He spent the brief summer night at this Green Dragon; a hideous sleepless night, in which his wife's dead face was always before his eyes.

Was he sorry for what he had done? No, not sorry. He loved his wife as passionately as ever, and regretted her with a desperate anguish. But he did not repent. Had the deed been to do again, he would have done it, deeming the blood of those two guilty ones the sole possible atonement for his wrong.

At daybreak he was on board the Antwerp packet; a fair summer morning, unspeakably serene and tranquil after the tempest. What a lovely calm without, what a fierce tumult within, as George Deverill stood upon the deck, watching the towers and steeples of the great city melt into the cloudless blue of that summer heaven!

It was not till the vessel had passed the Kentish hills and was out in the open sea, that my lord remembered that letter in his breast-pocket, and took it out to read with a half listless curiosity. What could its contents signify to him? They could not make his dead wife an honest woman, or restore to him one of those lost hopes which had brightened his life a little while ago.

The letter ran thus:

'The secret I am about to confide in you, Alice, is one that I have guarded jealously for five-and-twenty years of my life; and I charge you, as you value your soul, to keep it as jealously to your

dying day; ay, even from your husband, should you marry, as it is but likely you will ere long.

'That Edward Harmer, whom you have called cousin, and loved with a cousinly, nay indeed, a sisterly affection, which it has pleased me well to see, is no distant kinsman, orphan son of a poor and humble relation, as I have taught you to believe. He is something nearer and dearer, Alice; he is your half-brother; my son, born out of wedlock some four years before my marriage with your mother; my son, by a lady of such exalted rank, that the revelation of this secret would be death to more than one. My boy's mother still lives, and holds a lofty station at the court, having many years ago married a gentleman, her equal in rank and fortune. Edward knows this, and is willing that his own existence should be an obscure one, spent in a foreign land, rather than cause the shadow of danger to the mother whose voice he has never heard, whose lips have never kissed him. Of my sin I need not speak here. It is a sin that ever comes back to the wrongdoer, and it has been a source of bitterness to me for many weary years; but, alas, the burden weighs most heavily on the innocent.

'You, Alice, when I am gone, will be my son's only friend; or, at least, the sole being with whom he may claim the tender tie of kindred. Be kind to him, my beloved daughter; and should Fate raise you to a position of wealth or power, do him whatever service you can. You know that he has a brave and noble spirit, and has loved you fondly from his boyhood. Be kind to him for my sake; and think that, in the unknown country to which I go, your father's ghost looks back upon you with fond regretful eyes, and blesses you.

'Farewell, dear child; I have but this single request to make to one who has been ever dutiful and affectionate, and whom Heaven will surely reward in the days to come.'

letter in his hand, Then, after a long

This was all. George Deverill sat with the like a man spellbound by some strange dream. interval of this strange stillness, he rose and slowly paced the deck, thinking of the useless murder that he had done. His wife was innocent; the woman he had loved was pure and spotless after all. There was a rapture in that thought, which even the memory of his crime could scarcely lessen. She was dead, lost to him for ever; but she was not a liar, gone to burning hell.' She was an angelic victim, for whom he could weep without shame.

There was clamour and confusion in the house by the river when Alice Deverill's untimely fate was known. The crime was attributed at once to some common robber, who had discovered by some means how my lady kept her jewels in that chamber, and had laid his plans accordingly. Algernon Mildmay, who was present at all the inves

tigations and discussions that followed the discovery of the murder, took pains to press this view of the case; though he had his own thoughts upon the subject, and those pointed to that secret guest who had spent a night hidden in one of the unused chambers on the third story. But this gentleman knew that, if his patron suffered as a felon, his patron's fortune would be forfeit to the Crown; and he was very anxious to spare my Lord Deverill the shame of a public trial for murder, to be followed by the scaffold.

The fact that on the night of Lady Deverill's murder a man, stabbed to death, had been found drifting down the Thames in an open boat, attracted little notice. Midnight assassinations were common enough in that golden age, and no one thought of connecting these two crimes.

Lord Deverill lived abroad for ten years, wandering from city to city, and leading a life of wild riot and dissipation, which would have exhausted even a larger fortune than his own. At the end of that time he came suddenly home-a haggard-looking man, with white hair-and gave himself up to the law as a double murderer.

The preliminary examinations proceeded slowly; for magistrates and lawyers were inclined to think this self-accused man a monomaniac. He had as much difficulty in proving his guilt as he could have had in demonstrating his innocence; and he was remanded from time to time, while there was an attempt made to procure independent evidence.

He was never brought to trial. They found him dead in his prison one morning, sitting at a table with a lighted candle still burning before him, and his wife's miniature in his hand. He died penniless. There was nothing-neither house nor land—for Algernon Mildmay to inherit. That gentleman prospered in life, nevertheless, and rose to a distinguished position in diplomacy.

ON YOUNG LADIES' SCHOOLS

BY GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA

MR. TOM ROBERTSON, I humbly beg your pardon. I am poaching on your manor and trespassing on your croft. I am stealing your thunder. But are there not schools and schools, from Rafaelle's School of Athens in the Vatican, down to an industrial school for little ragamuffins in our own Whitechapel? Be tolerant, Mr. Tom Robertson, and, remembering what Pope has written, show to others that mercy which you would wish shown to yourself. Although you have evolved from the fancied adventures of the pupils in a ladies' seminary one of the most charming comedies that has graced our English stage in modern times-never mind the spiteful people who insinuate that you have stolen your plot from the Aschenbrödel of Herr Benedix, for in that you may have been no more a plagiarist than Sheridan was when he went to Marivaux or Crébillon for the first inception of the Rivals or the School for Scandal-although you have established a well-nigh freehold tenure in School, you will forgive me, I trust, if I borrow your title for a while, and elect for the nonce to be scholastic. Do not be afraid. My Cinderella will be no match for yours; my examination' will be weak and colourless by the side of yours; and, as for the flirtation-well, I should much like to know whether there ever has been, since the earliest ages of authentic record, any proven instance of schoolgirls indulging in flirtation, or conjugating the verb 'to flirt' in its every mood, tense, number, and person. All schoolmistresses will bear me out, I am sure, in denying the existence of scholastic flirting; but if the schoolmistresses and I are wrong, well, flirtation there has been, and is, and will be evermore, and it can't be helped. C'est la faute de Rousseau. C'est la faute de Voltaire-especially of Rousseau. The bookseller would be mad who reprinted La Nouvelle Héloïse; yet there are thousands of young ladies who know Jean Jacques by heart without ever having read a line of him.

If you are an attentive and regular student of the advertisements in the Times newspaper, notably of those columns devoted to educational announcements, you will scarcely fail to remark, especially towards the seasons of Easter, Midsummer, Michaelmas, and Christmas, the extremely-genteel and elegantly-worded paragraph in which Madame Hopkins von Seebach intimates her readiness to receive, and to impart a truly refined education, based on the soundest Protestant principles, to a limited number of young ladies, at the vast and commodious residence known as Schloss Belveder, at Dummelshausen

on the Rhine (Prussia). Masters, Madame Hopkins von Seebach proceeds to remark, attend for every accomplishment; drawing and painting are taught in strict accordance with the received traditions of the neighbouring Düsseldorf school; instruction on the pianoforte is imparted by pupils of Liszt and Chopin; and French, Italian, and German governesses are resident on the premises. Latin and mathematics can be taught if desired. Madame von Seebach, herself a native of old England (advertisement), watches sedulously over the health, comfort, and morals of the young ladies intrusted to her charge; and, while using her best endeavours to instil into her pupils all the graces which the best continental training can afford, never loses sight of the probability that their ultimate destiny is to adorn and confer happiness on English homes. Homes, in the plural, is a stroke of genius. Don't you see the delicate inference, that the young ladies, after leaving the parental home, will find another and a matrimonial one? Madame von Seebach's terms are moderate and inclusive, and vacations are left at the option of the parents of pupils. References, by kind permission, can be made to Herr Professor Königliches-Museum Curator, Dr. Dioscorides Puffersdogstein, Woll Strasse, Dummelshausen; to the Rev. Hugh Hango Hollowpenny, A.M., Chaplain to H.B.M. Legation, Saxe-Schweinhundbraten; and in England, to the Rev. Chrysostom Dobby, D.D., Rector of St. Pongo, Horsleydown; and to Messrs. Deskworm and Pewtercup, scholastic booksellers, Wilhelmina-row, South Belgravia. Finally, the reader is informed that Madame Hopkins von Seebach will be in London for a week from the eighteenth proximo, and can be communicated with, care of Messrs Deskworm and Pewtercup as above, or may be seen every day between two and four P.M. at Coldhash's private hotel, Salisbury-street, Strand.

Well, you may happen to have a dear little daughter, say fourteen or fifteen years of age, and you fancy that twelve months' or two years' training in a good foreign school would be of inestimable. benefit to her. With this impression on your mind, you will probably fall into the habit of running your eye every morning over the column of advertisements to which I have alluded, and the eye itself will soon become so educated as to light instanter on the corners in which nestle the foreign-school announcements. Of course no parent with a well-regulated mind would think of sending his child to receive her finishing' in Spain, or Italy, or Russia-although perhaps some of the best boarding-schools for girls in Europe are to be found in St. Petersburg and Moscow. But the dark, treacherous, and essentially immoral character of Spaniards and Italians would be at once an insuperable bar to the consignment of a daughter of Albion to the care of an instructress at Seville or Florence. The choice of Paterfamilias is thus narrowed to three countries-to

France, Belgium, and Germany. France? Ah! there is a great

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