walked, till her walk became a dance, like the ghost of the dance she had first learned delightedly on Killeevy, and afterwards danced many times in gaiety, fear, sorrow, and expectation, while scanning the crowd for a face that never appeared, amidst the hurry and excitement of the gipsies' tent. Captain Rupert watched her while he talked, noticed her singing and dancing like a person doing the same in a dream, where the voice is kept from soaring and the limbs from moving by an unaccountable something that is struggling against the will. Her feet beat the time, though with a fettered movement; her hand was sometimes raised to shake the tambourine, or she snapped her fingers softly, with a whisper of the rattle of castanets. After some time she danced herself gradually away out of sight of her companions, and they heard her fantastic song break out gleefully in the distance, as if in the solitude of nature the spell had been broken and the wild music set free from her heart.

The signora and Captain Rupert stood still, and looked at one another while their conversation flagged and died on their lips.

"It is piercing sweet," said the signora, "but I do not like it. That song always seems to me the expression of something wild in her nature that is warring against our efforts to train her for her fitting career. Whether it is the wild Irish strain that is in her blood, or whether it is that she is inoculated with gipsy's magic, I do not know." "There is certainly more of the bird in that soul than of the cantatrice," was the answer.

"I cannot bear it," said the signora, with a look of passionate pain on her worn face, and putting her fingers impatiently in her ears. Her anguish sprang from a variety of causes, all converging curiously like little knife-points towards her heart. The notes of the gipsy song always beat upon certain old, unused, and rusty strings within her, like "sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh," making a claim for some truths which she was unwilling to grant. Its round, rolling sweetness, its wayward whims and changes, its purring contentment, and utter freedom from all rules and constraints, seemed to her always to sing of the genius that is rather suggestive than creative or interpretative, and will rather work through love and gladness in dewy byways than come forth with any message of its own to the listening world. That Fan should live to be a mere cricket chirping on any mortal's hearthstone was an idea that the signora could not tolerate. There was no creature in the universe noble enough to absorb her music into his life. That such a state of things even ought to be she was unwilling to admit. And yet she knew too well that the rusty chord within her which would vibrate so agonizedly to Fan's bird-like, loveladen minstrelsy, was the mainspring of almost every woman's heart; and that in Fan's it was strung with gold, and throbbing mellowly in

tune.

Captain Rupert looked on her emotion with surprise. "Strange," he said, "that music so enchanting should give you nothing but pain. And you who are a musician, signora."

"I have told you the reason partly," replied she. "This wildwood singing makes me tremble for her perseverance in the utterance and interpretation of more noble strains. My own life, sir, has been given to art, offered as a handful of roses that shrivelled into dust in the giver's hand; and now my failure has been made a pedestal for her success. She shall not turn into a mere thrush in the hedgerows; she, who was born for, and has been trained to give expression to the soul of multitudes!"

Captain Wilderspin listened to her impassioned words disapprovingly. "There," he said to himself, "is the kind of person who would steal the posies from a woman's life in order that the dried leaves of fame may rustle on her brow!" But he did not quite understand the sigArt was the god of her enthusiasm, and not fame. The latter she looked on as but the accidental accompaniment of the success that is witness to the truth.

nora.

In the pause that followed the signora's speech which Captain Wilderspin found so unlovely, Fan's song wound, curled, and dived through the upper air with a wilfulness that seemed resolved to escape out of reach of the thought of both listeners.

"Another reason why I do not like it," said the signora, "is that it is the twin-song of another which is a link between the child and the home which, I trust, she may never see again. A return to that lowly and uncivilized home could only result in the loss of her peace of mind." "I agree with you there," said Captain Wilderspin. "What is that other song you speak of ?”

"A hymn, which is in itself very beautiful, forming a contrast the most complete to the gipsy song. She sings it in her native Irish, and I own that listening to it my heart has been softened towards a people whose peasantry could treasure and enjoy such a gem of religious melody and thought. But when I hear Fan sing the 'Hymn of the Virgin Triumphant' I feel as if she were stealing away out of my restraining arms into a region where the world can never follow her!" "Have I heard her sing it?"

"No; of late she has given it up, having seen that it gives me pain; and only sings it in a crooning way to herself, generally, when she thinks she is alone. I believe she sings it as a sort of incantation to bring the spirits of her people around her, to call up the scenes of her childhood, and the voices of those she has lost. When I hear her crooning so, it makes me weep. So strange a thing is the human heart, Captain Wilderspin; so sad a thing is life."

Captain Rupert reflected that the worn-faced little lady was rather flighty and inconsistent; and he felt angry with her. She would place

this creature so cherished on a public stage, under the gaze of all the eyes of a vulgar world. "And she is fit for something higher," he insisted with himself. "Is she fit to be a peeress ?" thought Captain Rupert.

At this moment Fan, whose song had ceased, appeared at some distance, in a hollow among the trees, flitting across the opening, with a bright look over her shoulder in the direction of her friends. The brilliant face shone, the white dress glimmered, and she was gone again, hidden behind the greenery.

"Is she fit to be a peeress?" thought Captain Wilderspin, and then made a movement as if shaking himself awake, shocked at coming suddenly upon so strange a thought.

"There is a bewitchment over this place," he said to himself, "which is beginning to tell upon me also. It is time Lord Wilderspin should come home. What? this girl out of a cabin, with her pagan gipsy song, and the Christian superstition of her 'Virgin's Hymn ?' What a likely bride for the heir of all the Wilderspins!"

Again Fan was seen still farther away, wandering on the upland, in the blue ether of what seemed another and more delicately and deeply-coloured world.

"Fool!" thought Captain Rupert, watching her, "to be so jealous of a dignity which could add nothing to her grace. My coronet would, perhaps, be of as little value to her as was the jewel to the bird in the fable."

CHAPTER VII.

GATHER YE ROSES!

THE signora had, during the late years of ease and peace that had passed over her head, been striving to catch back at the lost purpose of a life, and had tried to gather up with one hand some of the broken threads that youth had spun and time had snapped, with the hope of weaving them into something beautiful that should yet glorify the close of her existence. The spirit of resignation which made her content to stand and wait while others served, which had kept her from feeling her fate intolerable, and at times would rise from her heart in language which startled the listener with its sanctity, and in thoughts which lifted her own feet over too difficult places, this spirit of imagination was not always with her. When it went at intervals, feverish desires made havoc in her soul, and she dreamed again that hers might be among the hands that are carvers of the corner-stones of the palace of imperishable art.

In the room that she had furnished with the furniture of her old lodging, trying to make it look, in the midst of splendour, like the

meagre home in which she had struggled so long, and where poverty had seemed to baffle her most passionate efforts, she had set up her old easel, stained and worn as it was with the patient labour of many years— an easel on which had been perfected many a delicate copy of the old masters, and some lovely bits of original work that had gone forth to the world to be loved and admired; but to make no lasting name for their creator. Upon it had also been angrily destroyed, by the hand of the artist, more than one ambitious effort, begun in a fever of hope that perhaps this, at least, might prove, at its completion, to be one of those works which are the glory of all time. But the moment of completion had never been attained; the star of hope had set in the feverish brain that conceived such pictures long before the work had approached its maturity, and destruction had followed swiftly on the first foreshadowing of failure. The canvas intended as the groundwork for a structure of imperishable beauty had turned into an instrument of torture for the too presumptuous soul; and like one who had invoked an angel and been confronted by fiend, the half-crazed dreamer had turned and fled from even the memory of the once holy labour of her hands.

Grown meek through failure, and persuaded by her higher nature to be satisfied with the perfection of what others had achieved, she had thought to fling herself entirely into the life of another, and for a long time Fanchea's love, and Fanchea's future, had been sufficient to absorb the action of all the fire within her. But as the years moved on the old passion revived, and the longing that only death would ever extinguish returned upon her, in her more self-forgetting existence, to do battle with the peace that had been gradually gaining sway over her soul,

The old easel was set forth into the light, and the old frown reappeared on the signora's brow. Again she refused to believe that it was a demon this spirit that whispered to her of a glorious crown of fruition which should yet descend out of the heavens to give signal meaning to her bleak and barren life.

"Dear Mamzelle," said Fan, sorry to see the absent, unsatisfied look growing in the eyes of her little friend, and the spasm of pain contracting her furrowed mouth, "why do you not paint the wild flowers as you did last year? You made them look like living things, and they gave you delight. This new undertaking is wearing you away."

"I would not work for mere delight, my darling; not for mere pleasure to myself. The greater the work the more exhausting to the mortal frame, no doubt; but there is something here that will excel the mere loveliness of flowers; a message, perhaps, worth giving to mankind. Raphael did not grudge his headaches, or his wakeful nights."

"I cannot imagine that he had either," said Fanchea, gaily. "I always fancy that genius like his is happy, and gives out its beauties as the birds pour forth their song."

"There has been radiant, seraph-like genius of that order," said the signora, agitatedly, "but the rule is for the reverse."

"And dear Mamzelle," said Fan, laying her warm cheek caressingly on the little woman's silver head, "is it not better to keep looking happily at Raphael's Madonna than to sit here sorrowfully, trying to invent a Madonna of one's own? One can hardly expect to compete with Raphael. Men do not think of wrestling with the angels."

The signora bowed her head. She could not say, "But I have dreamed that I, too, might be an angel." The very boldness of the girl's playful words convinced her that Fan did not guess at the deep ambition of her restless heart, for Fan's was not the finger to probe a wound. And as hope was still within call, ready to hold the lamp by which she might finish this work, she was able to recover herself, and say smiling:

"You unkind girl. You make little of my picture!"

"No," said Fan; "your work is always good. It is you, and not I, that are dissatisfied with it. Come out into the sunshine and be happy!"

"I cannot at this moment: but run away, my love, and enjoy the morning. Herr Harfenspieler will be here in the afternoon."

Fan went, with a shadow still lingering on her face, feeling that a cloud had come over her friend, which all her tenderness was powerless to remove; but before she had reached the fairyland of the great gardens the reflection of a trouble was gone from her brow, and all her natural joyousness had returned. Despite her love for, and gratitude to, the signora, it was sometimes unconsciously a relief to her to escape from the tragic intensity of the little artist's manner of dealing with life.

"If she would only come out here, and be perfectly happy for one hour!" thought the girl, her eyes flashing with delight as they roved over the rich banks of colour, the prim, trim, brilliant scrolls of bloom, the old gray walls with their green and purple and scarlet draperies, the clusters of ripe roses, from pale gold to crimson, that stood aloft above the sward, as if they were the picked and choicest jewels to be offered to heaven out of this treasury of sweets; and then rested on the background of sombre, almost blackened foliage, fringed with grey, that gave value to all the warmth of the interior.

"If she would only drink in this delicious air," thought Fan, "without giving it back again in sighs. If she would but let the exhilaration of it get into her head, and the perfume get into her heart and stay there! With Raphael in her memory, and her hands full of