From Blackwood's Magazine. CHAPTER I. additional touches here and there from time to time as their taste or fancy sug gested, but not materially altering or even modifying its aspect. They did not, of course, spend the whole year there, going away as a rule in early summer, and not returning until the fogs of November and December had given place to something like a semblance of spring. Even Janu enough, however, in Venice, and there were plenty of places where they would have been warmer and snugger than in that great gilded saloon of theirs, where such heat as was given out by the green earthenware stone seemed to make a duty of travelling straight upwards to the domed ceiling amongst the gods and god. desses sitting enthroned upon plump plaster clouds, from which exalted sphere it descended, too effectually chilled to administer much comfort to the inferior beings sitting benumbed and shivering below. A DAY of steady downpour at Venice is not one of the most cheerful things I know. It is worst, of course, in November and December, because of the bleakness then of everything; because of the bare trees in the sparsely scattered gar-ary, February, and March are cold dens, of the nakedness of the vine twigs, which in summer time make so delightful an awning at the traghetti and over the more fortunate of the balconies. Even in April and May, however, it is quite bad enough. From end to end of the Grand Canal a uniform soot color, whitish in the houses, pure soot in the water, inclining to blackness in the archways and under the shadows of the bridges; blue, red, green, and orange only where the flaming advertisements diversify the otherwise unalleviated gloom; funereal convoys of gondolas slipping by with a woeful air, propelled by gloomy figures in long black or white cloaks, despondent, like men weighed down with the consciousness of a destiny which it is heart-breaking to contemplate and hopeless to evade. Lady Frances Mowbray walked up and down the floor of her principal sitting-room at the Traghetto San Eustachio, now and then stopping to look out of one of the windows. There were no fewer than six windows in the room, not to mention some smaller ones in the lunettes under the ceiling, which were perfectly useless, of course, for the purpose of observation. The light from these six windows fell upon walls enlivened with much gilding and white plaster work, happily toned down by time and indifferent usage to a mild and mellow radiance; upon large canvasses, not any of them, indeed, of any very transcendent or inestimable value, still irradiated with that glow which lights up even the least distinguished members of an illustrious period; upon bronzes and carved woodwork; upon marble columns; upon a great deal of deliberately scrolled and intertwined ironwork around the windows. It was such a room, in short, as one commonly associates with royal or semi-royal residences in other towns, but in Venice it merely formed part of a suite of furnished lodgings-very good furnished lodgings, but nothing at all so extraordinary or out of the way. Lady Frances and her brother had occupied it off and on now for the last six or seven years, paying a rent of a few, very few, thousand francs a year, and putting in Lady Frances was very fond of her Venetian apartment, however, fonder than of any other abode which it would have been possible for her now to inhabit. She had become used too, and in her youth, to larger fluctuations of climate than any which even Venice can show, and was not therefore particularly sensitive on that score. The colonel her brother was of opinion indeed that there were many places in the world that would have been livelier to live in than the shores of the Adriatic. But then he was very fond of his sister; it was she who contributed the lion's share of their mutual housekeeping; she who took the whole trouble and responsibility of things in general off his hands ; and he was there. fore well content to follow her guidance, so long, that is, as she did not insist upon dragging him quite away from the dear face of humanity-a piece of selfimmolation of which he secretly believed her to be perfectly capable, and which he always held himself in readiness to combat should the occasion arise. Colonel Hal Mowbray was an exGuardsman, a man of London and of the clubs, social to the very tips of his fingers, a ci-devant dandy, and a bit of a bon viveur too, though the latter happily nowadays of the most exemplarily domesti cated type. He was an old bachelor, just as his sister was an old maid; and although no two people in the whole wide world could be found less alike, no two people upon the whole could have fitted better into each other's moods, or com bined to lead a more united, if in some governor-generalship meant more, at any respects also a divided, life. In their dis- rate upon the spot, than at present. Beunion, indeed, as in their affection, there fore that, again, he had been governor. was something quasi-matrimonial about general of Canada, and in both capacities them which was not a little diverting to his daughter Frances had been his main their numerous friends, and which seemed strength and support. Ever since she to be borne out by their very names- was seventeen, at which age she had had Colonel and Lady Frances Mowbray: the misfortune to lose her mother, whatcould anything be more absolutely sug. ever there had been to be done in the gestive of man and wife? Indeed in Ven- Mowbray family had, sooner or later, in ice rather famous for malicious stories, fact, come to be done by Lady Frances. and not always equally innocent ones — a It had been a large family in those early tale is told of a lady who, having been days, though there were not many of them introduced to the pair, was heard, upon left now. They had never been rich, their departure, calmly and audibly in- although they had always filled a conquiring of her hostess what family they siderable place in the world's estimation; had, and whether the daughters were as indeed, had they been rich Lord Lofts. excruciatingly ugly as their mother; a borough would in ali probability never piece of indiscreet inquisitiveness which have accepted the posts that were succeswas brought to a summary conclusion by sively offered him, for he was an indolent the subdued but irresistible titterings of man, with a distinct disinclination to take the assembled company. the initiative in anything. It was Frances Poor Lady Frances, if she had ever who worked him up to the point of doing heard the anecdote — which, perhaps, who so, not merely for the sake of the pay, knows, she may have done might fairly though that was acceptable enough, but have retorted that she had been more of still more for the sake of the work and the a mother than many mothers-only that position which, upon the whole, suited neither self-laudation nor repartee were at him admirably, despite many groans and all in her line. Standing there in the grey much unconquerable self-pity. His two light of that wet Venetian afternoon, there younger daughters were both married bewas no doubt that she was a very ugly fore this part of his career began, so that woman indeed - tall, grim, gaunt, stiff- although they and their husbands paid backed; her hair, which was a dark iron-occasional visits both to India and to grey, put tightly back from her face, showing a breadth but likewise a height of forehead which even the very loveliest of her sex would hardly in these days have the hardihood to expose. A very ugly woman undeniably, and an ill-dressed one to boot, without any graces or manners to speak of; and yet no one, I think, could have looked at her without feeling that there was more about her than met the eye. A good deal of past history was written in her face, not merely the narrow, feminine, individual history, but something larger, something of past achieve ment; of important decision arrived at, important councils shared. Women's faces are less malleable, as a rule, than men's, which makes their portraits (set ting aside the question of beauty) much the less interesting of the two. Lady Frances's face, however, was significant enough. It must have been a very stupid person indeed who failed to perceive at a glance that she had at some time or other filled a larger sphere than falls to the lot of most plain single women of fifty-four. So, in fact, it had been. Her father, John, fifth Earl of Loftsborough, had been a governor-general of India in days when a Canada, and tasted the sweets of viceregal life, and lent grace to its pasteboard pageants, it was upon his elder daughter Frances that the whole stress, the whole seriousness, and, internally, the whole responsibility, of both posts lay. It cannot be said, poor soul, that she had ever lent much grace to any pageants; and of this she had been always acutely conscious to the last quivering fibre of her ugly, ungainly person. She did not, be cause she could not, help to make of her father's court a very brilliant affair socially; but she did more, for it is doubtful whether without her at his elbow he would have been enabled to hold his own in it even a single day. In all things she was his secret adviser, his counsellor, his brains-carrier; there was not single detail of his administration but what she knew the ins and the outs of it immeasurably better than he did himself. It was not so much ability with which she was required to supply him he had plenty of his own when he cared to exert it, - it was mainly the power of coming to a decision, and of keeping, moreover, to that decision when it was made. Constitutionally and physically, Lord Loftsborough was a man incapable of making up his | ness, if she is ugly, becomes, from the mind, and to have to do so was to him at moment she is aware of it, the salient fact all times pain and grief unspeakable-an of her existence, the nucleus of discomidiosyncrasy which he shared with all his fort around which every other discomfort house, and had bequeathed, with one ex-turns. She sees it in every face she meets ception, to all his children. Just as she was the one ugly member of a singularly handsome race, so Lady Frances Mowbray was the one known member of that distinguished and historic house who had ever yet been born with that distinctly desirable and advantageous qualification a backbone. This lack of vertebral consistency among the others was, however, not by any means conspicuously evident. On the contrary, in few families was there more of dash and courage than amongst its men, more of social success and brilliancy than amongst its women; it was only upon the great occasions -the three or four crucial and all-decisive moments of life that this congenital limpness had come out. Then it was that Frances rose to the front. Ever since she was seventeen, she had always been the pilot-boat in the storm; the one rock in the midst of much sand; the being to whom instinctively the whole family, with one accord, turned in an emergency. Her very disadvantages helped her here. Few very capable women possess the additional capability of being able to efface themselves at the right time, but here Frances shone. The most tactless of women under ordinary circumstances, her tact in this respect was infallible, and that for the simple reason that it was not really tact at all. Her instincts, no less than her wishes, had always been to efface herself; to do the work, whatever it might be, and to let who would wear the crowns and the credit. This may sound like the acme and incarnation of mag. nanimity, but in reality there was nothing particularly magnanimous about it. She was a magnanimous woman, but her magnanimity was not shown here. To efface herself whenever such effacement was possible, was her one refuge, her one joy, her one solace. Poor soul, she was so ugly! Now a man, let him be never so ugly, never so ungainly, has always the comfortable consciousness that his ugliness is hardly, after all, the most salient fact about him; other qualities and qualifications outweigh it, and tend to throw it in the shade. As he grows older, the impression wears off. The fact remains regrettable, no doubt, but still not a fact of any very great consequence after all. With a woman it is otherwise. Her ugli as she walks about the streets; she reads it upon a hundred irreproachably polite lips; let her heroism, let her philosophy be what it may, no amount of heroism or of philosophy will avail entirely to root it out of her consciousness. In many respects Frances Mowbray — plain Frances Mowbray, as every one except her own nearest relations called her - had been infinitely better off than most equally ugly women. As long as he had lived, her father had seen to that. If she had eked out his flaccidity from her own reservoirs of strength, he, upon the other hand, had thrown the shelter of his own splendid presence, the prestige of his own social charm, around the ugly, unattractive woman who called him father. As far as man can shelter woman—which is not perhaps saying a very great deal after all Lady Frances Mowbray had been sheltered, not merely from anything like neg lect, but from those sharper because more insidious assaults which generally, it is to be feared, come to her from her own sex. Publicly or privately, no faintest intimation of that discomfort which even the kindliest of fathers or brothers will at times show, had ever looked at her out of his handsome eyes. Had she been the loveliest of women, the fairest, the most engaging, he could not have shown a warmer pride in her, or a keener desire to set her up in her pride of place, and to produce her to the world upon every occasion, suitable or unsuitable. Even this, poor soul, was part of her life's penance. She loved her father for it, but it added unspeakably to the difficulties of her life. The eternal, never-ending necessity of dressing up; making the best, so far as her indifferent lights enabled her, of the worst possible materials; continually presenting herself to fresh strangers; submitting to the scrutiny of new eyes; exercising the inevitable social genuflexions and politenesses, all this was a slow torture and a small martyrdom to the proud, capable, diffident woman, conscious of so much more than average abilities; of the kindliest intentions; of a thousand lofty and heroic impulses; but, above and beyond everything else, conscious of that cardinal fact of her own irredeemable ugliness, which, whether others forgot it or not, was never out of her own recollection for a single instant, and which had be come to her a sort of second skin, hardly | now. Colonel Mowbray - who shared less clinging, and certainly no less difficult to escape from, than the first. with his father the amiable quality of ig She All this that I have been recounting was old history now, poor Lady Frances's worst social troubles being over and done with a good many years back. Soon after leaving India-almost, in fact, before the reins of government dropped from his hands Lord Loftsborough's health had broken down rather suddenly, and the last six or seven years of his life had been spent quietly and uneventfully at his own estate in Suffolk, with occasional excursions to London or elsewhere, as the humor prompted him. When he died, an event which had occurred about eight years before this little tale opens, -almost everything that it was in his power to leave, exclusive of such possessions asing. Really it wasn't kind! ought, rightfully if not legally, to go to the head of the house, was left to Lady Frances, a disposition which, to their honor be it said, not a single member of the family had been found to cavil at. The sisters had both married rich men, while of the five brothers only two were now left, and of these one was the present earl, to whom all the more solid possessions of the family naturally accrued; and the other was Colonel Hal, who had already a small fortune of his own, left to him by an uncle, who had always been his father's aide-de-camp, and practically, therefore, his sister's also, who was her especial double and second self, so that it was well understood that whatever was hers was, as a matter of course, his also. There was no house to leave excepting one at Brighton, where Lord Loftsborough had spent a few months, and which he had taken into his head to buy, more as a speculation than as anything else. Lady Frances detested Brighton, and had, therefore, made haste to let the house, which for her held no associations or interests of any sort. Since that time she and the colonel had lived about the world together, generally and by preference in Italy, the instant and never-failing popularity of the brother balancing, and to some extent outweighing, the no less decided unpopularity of the sister, Not but what Lady Frances had her stout friends too, who would have gone to the stake in support of her excellences; but these trusty souls were scattered, and for the most part silent, and the general vote of society was distinctly adverse. She did not covet its suffrages much. She had done her duty in that respect in early days, and might fairly therefore, she held, claim exemption Whereat Lady Frances would smile and shake her head, looking at her brother the while a trifle sceptically out of those deepset, brown eyes of hers, which were the only approach to an attraction in her poor plain face. Yes, it was quite true, she was an orsa she admitted placidly; and being so, was it not better to let her remain behind, and growl quietly alone in her own den, instead of spoiling Comtesse B.'s or Principessa S.'s rooms by growl. ing about them? When people, women especially, had attained a certain age, she did not say when they were grotesquely ugly, for that she was aware by long experience awakened a storm of indignant protest,-it was better for them to remain quietly at home in their own shells, instead of taking up the room of those who were younger and brighter and, livelier than they. To these arguments, however frequently put forward, the colonel would invariably proffer indignant opposition, but in the end-finding that opposition produced no perceptible effect he would call for his gondola and disappear down some one or other of the many watery ways, while she would remain by the fire or the open window, as the case might be, or reading her book by the lamplight which left so many dark corners in the large, over large, room. She never wished that he would return to her sooner than he did. If she felt sleepy, she went to bed; if not, she sat up until he returned, and waited for his report of the evening. She took the liveliest interest in the sayings and doings of her neighbors, as is not unfrequently the case with people who shrink from confronting them much in their own persons. To sit at home and to receive her broth er's report upon his return, was to her per- | ception quite wild and hilarious festivity. The colonel, too, was a good raconteur, -not picturesque, but fairly vivid; a quality due partly to his indomitable fresh ness of enjoyment, which was a gift direct from the gods, partly to a long habit of retaining and retailing such items in his character of social purveyor. He knew everybody, and something about everybody, and if not endowed with any very remarkable degree of perspicuity, could still put two and two together in a sufficiently satisfactory fashion. Lady Frances would sit, and nod her head, and blink her eyes, and make her own deductions, not always quite in the same direction. She, too, could put two and two together, though with results different often from her brother's. In this way she gathered or guessed more about the people that surrounded her than half those who spent every night of their lives in their company. She exercised herself in these small matters, having, in truth, no larger ones now upon which she could exercise herself, and possessing a fund of human interests which craved employment. No doubt she often perceived a good deal more than there was to perceive endowing her neighbors with an array of qualities and intentions, which would considerably have astonished their worthy minds, had they been capable of seeing into hers; but at least it did nobody any very great harm. It was a fashion of composing fiction, more satisfactory, perhaps, upon the whole, than that of reducing it to pen and ink, for the substructure, at any rate, was bound to be solid, and if the edifice raised was loftier and of larger proportions than the facts warranted, why, then, so much the worse obviously for the latter, and the better for the imagination of the builder. One thing these sociological studies, carried on through the twofold medium of her brother and her Venetian neighbors, certainly did not do, and that was to embitter or make her cynical. She was not a single atom cynical, poor soul, or even cross, however libellously her face might sometimes report upon her in this respect. The enthusiasms of youth were combined to a great degree indeed in her with the tolerance of age, and a capacity for selfdetachment, rarer perhaps than either. But, then, as no human being (excepting, to a limited extent, her own family) ever gave her credit for anything of the sort, it is obvious that, for all practical purposes, it might nearly as well have been non-existent. She was waiting for her brother now, he having gone out three or four hours before to breakfast with a friend, and having not yet returned. She rather wished, on this occasion, that he would come back, as he was somewhat given to catching colds, through one of which she had already had to nurse him only that very spring. A gondola, it is true, is a good safe coach, and of course the gondola had its felze, or covering on. Still the rain, which had hardly begun when her brother had left, had now come on heavily, and threatened continuance, and had brought with it a chill wind, which was apt to find its way even through the best-fitted aper tures. The colonel, too, had a jaunty, young-mannish way of ignoring the very possibility of his catching cold, which added not a little to his sister's anxieties on his behalf. Yes, she really wished, she thought, that he would come. Finding that he did not do so, she went back after a while to her own particular seat in an angle between the fireplace and the window, and took up a book; but the book dropped presently on to her lap, and she took to thinking, dreaming rather, open-eyed, over scenes, bygone scenes, many of which seemed to her now very little more real than if they had lit erally happened in dreams. She got tired at last of this exercise also, as well as of sitting alone in that great white and gold sala of hers, surrounded by, and as it were embedded in, that peculiar Venetian silence which is unlike any other silence in the world, and which at present was broken only by a vague sound of dropping water, which might quite conceivably have come from the inside of one of the great Tintorettoish pictures upon the walls, so vague and so all-pervading was it. She got up accordingly again, and went into an anteroom, where there were two windows, one of which looked into a square space or court in the middle or the houses. Here there was nothing at all vague or indistinct in the sound of the water. The sides of the court were pierced all round by irregularly shaped windows, protected by iron gratings; and below, the court itself opened on the Mowbrays' side into a vaulted room, columned and glazed — a sort of glorified boat-house where the gondoliers sat and discussed high matters connected with their craft, and opposite to which was a broad ouside staircase leading to the main door of the apartment. A circular hole was visible in the centre of the flagging, and towards this a perfect cataract of rain-water was |