Phantom Fortune

ake which was clouded over by a dense veil of rain and dull grey mist; such rain as one sees only in a lake district, a curtain of gloom which

e sheltered hollow of the hills more fitting for an eagle's nest than for the occupation of a young lady, trying to paint those ever-varying, unpaintable mountain peaks, which change their hues with

great painters in the past and present? She could not understand Mary's ardent desire to do the thing herself - to be able with her own pencil and her own brush to reproduce the lakes and valleys, the wild brown hills she loved so passionately. Lesbia did not care two straws for the lovely lake district amidst which she had been reared - every pike and force, every beck and gill whereof was distinctly dear to her younger sister. She thought it a very hard thing to have spent so much of her life at Fellside, a trial t

and society was beginning to talk about her: for Lady Maulevrier made up her mind five or six years ago that Lesbia should be the reigning beauty of her season. To this end she had educated and trained her, furnishing her with all those graces best calculated to please and astonish society. She was too clever a woman not to discover Lesbia's shallowness and lack of all great gifts, save that one peerless dower of perfect beauty. She knew exactly what Lesbia could be trained to do; and to this end Lesbia had been educated; and to this end Lady Maulevrier brought down to Fellside the most accomplished of Hanoverian governesses, who had learned French in Paris, and had toiled

over that Lady Lesbia was the apple of her grandmothe

any intellectual exercise than Lesbia. She learned the lessons that were given her at railroad speed, and rattled off her exercises with a slap-dash penmanship which horrified the neat and niggling

ss of expression, which served only in her present state of tutelage for the subjugation of old women and shepherd boys. Mary had been taught to believe that her chances of future promotion were of the smallest; that nobody would ever talk of her, or think of her by-an

pert little nose

t grand old lady at whose frown so many people shivered. 'If you don't think people will like me and admire me - a litt

at your word,' replied my lady, scowling at her; 'but I have

ned seventeen, 'then I am not

ake you as long to get rid of those odious freckles. And no d

f whom had any serious employment for her life, or any seriou

taught her, and which by assiduous training had become a second nature. Poor Mademoiselle, having finished her mission and taught Lesbia all she could teach

ch, like the sculptured marble it resembles, is unalterable by time. Lesbia was reading Keats. It was her habit to read the poets, carefully and deliberately, taking up one at a time, and duly laying a volume aside when she found herself mistress of its contents. She had no passion for poetry, but it was

ovels, travels, plays, poetry, and never dwelling long on any one theme. Perhaps if Mary had lived in the bosom of a particularly sympathetic family she might have been reckoned almost a genius, so muc

ething would happen - anything to stir us out of this statuesque, sleeping-beauty state of being. I verily be

ith a gentle elevation of pencilled

gold-tinted l

ober's fade

ut him in a th

! Is not that i

ion,' said Mary, with a touch of scorn. 'What could happen? Why a hundred things - an earthquake, flood, or fire. What

tness if he did,' answered Lesbia, coldly.

knack of losing,' said Mary, dubiously. 'I suppose i

mother says that a young man who goes on the turf is sure to be ruined sooner or later. And then Maulevrier's hab

awyer condescend to like me well enough to make me an offer. He might make me the offer without liking me, for the sake of hearing himsel

no reason why you should not make a really good marriage, if

ric,' murmured Mary, meekly, 'for I like so many things I ought

own a little before you are pres

t back to her book, a bulky volume of travels, and tried to lose herself in the sandy wastes of Africa, and to be deeply interested in the sources of the Congo, not, in her heart of hearts, caring a straw whether that far-away river comes from the mountains of the moon, or from the moon itself. To-day she could not pin her mind to pages which might have interested her at another time. H

, rode and drove with him, followed on her pony when he went otter hunting, and very often abandoned the pony to the care of some stray mountain youth in order to join the hunters, and go leaping from st

s which cost her brother more money than the Countess would have cared to know; for in the wide area of La

were spent in thinking about him and fulfilling the duties of her position as his representative in stable and kennel,

y larger than York; and their visits to that centre of dissipation had been of the briefest, a mere flash of mild gaiety, a horticultural show or an oratorio, and back by express train, closely guarded by governess and footmen, to Fellside. In the autumn, when the leaves were falling in the wooded grounds of Fellside, the youn

lared that she never felt the need of change of air. The sodden shrubberies, the falling leaves, did her no harm. Never within the memory of this generation had she left Fellside. Her love of this mountain retre

too strictly conservative a temper to think of pulling down an old house which had been in her husband's family for generations. She left the original cottage undisturbed, and built her new house at right angles with it, connecting the two with a wide passage below and a handsome corridor above, so that access should be perfect in the event of her requiring the a

ibrary with bedrooms over it, now a music room for Lady Lesbia and her grand piano - anon a billiard-room, as an agreeable surprise for Maulevrier when he came home after a tour in America. Thus the house had grown into a long low pile of Tud

hose craggy peaks and headlands, the mind forgot to despise them because they were not so lofty as Mont Blanc or the Matterhorn. The velvet sward of the hill sloped steeply downward from Lady Maulevrier's drawing-room windows to the road beside the lake, and this road was so hidden by the

whither he was going, till he came upon an opening in the wood, and the stately Italian garden in front of a massive stone porch, through which he entered a spacious oak-panelled hall, and ano

than would have been squandered by any pleasure-loving dowager, restlessly roving from Piccadilly to the Engadine, from Pontresina to Nice or Monaco, winding up with Easter in Paris, and then back to Piccadilly. Her ladyship's friends wondered that she could care to bury herself alive in Westmoreland, and expatiated on the eccentricity of such a life; nay, those who had never seen Fellside argued that Lady Maulevrier had taken in her old age to hoarding, and that she pigged at a cottage in the Lake district, in order to swell a fortune which young Maulevrier would set about squandering as soon as she was in her coffin. But here they were wrong. It was not in Lady Maulevrier's nature to lead a sordid life in order to save money. Yet in these qui

rained to the uttermost to obtain the title for Lesbia's offspring. Why should she not be Countess of Maulevrier in her own right? But in order to make this future possible the most important factor in the sum was yet to be found in the person of a husband for Lady Lesbia - a husband worthy of peerless beauty and exceptional wealth, a husband whose own fortune should be so important a

her ruling passion. As she had been ambitious for her husband in the days that were gone, she was now ambitious for her granddaughter. Time had intensified the keen eagerness of her mind. She had been disappointed, cruelly

iends, and her close study of the fashionable newspapers, thoroughly acquainted with the characters and exploits, the dispositions and antecedents, of those half-dozen elder sons, among whom she hoped to find Lesbia's lord and master. She knew her peerage by heart, and she knew the family history of every house recorded therein; the sins and weaknesses, the follies and losses of bygone years; the taints, mental and physical; the lateral branches and intermarriages

re fairly eligible. But this young man was the Achilles in the rank and file

families had agreed that marriage between paupers was an impudent flying in the face of Providence, which must be put down with an iron hand. Lord Hartfield sent his son to Turkey in the diplomatic service; and the old dowager Lady Carrisbrook whisked her niece off to

marrying family, said society. But six or seven years after his return to England Lord Hartfield married Lady Florence Ilmington, a beauty in her first season, and a very sweet but somewhat prudish young person. The marriage resulted in the birth of an heir, whose appearance upon this mortal stage was followed within a year by his father's exit. Hence the Hartfield property, always a fine estate, had been nursed and fattened during a long minority, and the present

h whom she corresponded on terms of perfect confidence, were among the best people in London - not the circulators of club-house canards, the pickers

ormed in advance, had deferred Lesbia's presentation till next season, when she was told Lord Hartfield would certainly re-appear. His plans had been made for return before Christmas; and it would seem that his scheme of life was laid down with as much precision as if he had been a prince of the blood royal. Thus it happened, to Lesbia's intense disgust, that her début was d

a, petulantly; 'and I shall be like a wild woman of the woods; f

and known a great deal too much,' answered the dowager; and as her granddaughter knew

Lesbia, who had grand, but not sordid views about matrimony. She thought it her mission to appear and to conquer. A crowd of suitors would sigh around her, like the loves and graces round that fair Belinda whose story she had

e her by the hand and lead her to a higher seat on the dais, and place upon her head, or at least upon her letter-paper and the panels of her carriage, a coronet in which the strawberry leaves should stan

at this beauty wore on such an occasion, and how that other beauty looked on another occasion - and she felt as she read like a spell-bound princess in a fairy tale, mewed up in a battlemented tower, and deprived of her legitimate share in all the pleasures of earth. She had no patience wi

ain streamlets - gills, as they were called in this particular world - almost as gaily as the shadows of fleecy cloudlets dancing up yonder in the windy sky. Molly spent half her days among th

ours on the grassy margin of the deep still water, or to row round and round the mountain lake in a rotten boat. It was here, or in some kindred spot, that Molly got through most of her reading - here that she read Shakespeare, Byron, and Shelley, and Wordsworth - dwelling lingeringly and lovingly upon every line in which that good old man spoke of her native land. Sometimes she climbed to higher ground, and felt herself ever so much nearer heaven upon the crest of Silver Howe, or upon the rugged stony steep of Dolly Waggon pike, half way up the dark brow of Helvellyn; sometimes she disappeared for hours, and climbed to the summit of the hill, and wandered in perilous pat

er that rainy morning; and then came an event which, although commonplace enough in itsel

orld, her ladyship had never allowed her knowledge of public life and the bent of modern thought to fall into arrear. She took a keen interest in politics, in progress of all kinds. She was a staunch Conservative, and looked upon every Liberal politician as her personal enemy; but she took ca

any charm for her. She had had too much of them. Mary roamed about with a swifter footstep, looking at the roses, plucking off a dead leaf, or a cankered bud here and there. Presently she

Lesbia, with a languid shrug of her shoulder

t all; but anything was better than everlasting-contemplatio

rushed off like a mad woman?' inquired L

re quite beyond the limits of my comprehensio

ming of happiness. In such a moment she seemed to have wings. She became unconscious that she touched the earth; she went skimming bird-like over the lawn, and in and out, with fluttering muslin frock, among arb

handsomer of the two in Mary's eyes, since she thought him simply perfection, was fair-haired, blue-eyed, the typical Saxon. This was Lord Maulevrier

rier. 'There's Molly.

brother's return so filled her heart and mind that there was

or you. Why didn't you write to say you were comin

what I was going to be up to; beside

Mary; 'go up to the house as fast as ev

get us some dinner

, vanishing in the dark labyrinth of shrubs.

n, whom he had not taken the trouble to introduce t

lothes,' added the other; 'I hope that m

e can spend the evening

steps of the verandah - a picturesque Swiss verandah

excitement,' inquired her ladyship, a

er has co

la

s brought

our to inquire if his friend's visit w

evrier is looking so well. They will be her

tion; and Mary ran out and interviewed the butler, begging that all things might be made particularly c

her grandmother waited with perfect tranquillity, the dowager calmly continuing the perusal of her Times, while Lesbia sat at her piano

my very good friend and Canadian travelling compa

tone so purely conventional that it might mean anything. 'Ha

'I spring from a race of nobodies, of whose existence y