table nevertheless. "No one will make the wheels like us again," he said with a sigh.

The four men, oddly assorted as they were, gathered round the fire once more. There was but little conversation now. They gazed into the glowing heart of coals and wood-blocks, each busily occupied with his own troubled thoughts.

Basil Gregory, warmed and comfortable as he was in body, felt very low in spirits. One of those moments had come to him when life seems a spoilt and futile thing. The future stretched before him in imagination like some great Essex marshland at evening, when the colour fades out of everything, the leaden tides creep inwards from the sea, and the curlews pipe to each other with melancholy voices, like souls sick for love. There was nothing, nothing! A dreary round of ill-paid mechanical duties, a long engagement which would probably never end in marriage, one of the most epoch-making inventions the world could ever know, locked up in his mind and that of his friend, Emile Deschamps.

Thus the thoughts of the poor Englishman, Basil Gregory, as he gazed into the rose-pink and amethyst heart of the fire.

The two old men were sadly remembering the recent loss of the bright-faced boy that had meant everything in their narrow, patient lives.

Sadness lay like a veil upon the faces of all three.

But Emile Deschamps' face was not sad. It was set and rigid. Not a feature of it moved. The brow was wrinkled and knotted with thoughts. There was a fixed and smouldering fire in the eyes. Once Basil looked at his friend and wondered what intense and concentrated thought was burning and glowing in the great executive brain of the Southerner. Had he known, had an inkling of it reached him, he would have leapt to his feet in the wildest excitement he had ever known.

For, indeed, the fickle Goddess of Chance was abroad this night, and had led their footsteps to this secluded workshop. Unseen, unfelt by any save only Emile Deschamps, she was hovering in the room where the wheels of her votaries were made.

About dawn a low wind arose and wailed around the quarter of the wood-turners. The deep mist vanished as grey light began to filter in through the glass roof of the workshop. With many thanks the two young men bade their hosts farewell, and went out into the chill morning air.

A pressing invitation to come again whenever they liked, piped in unison by Brother Charles and Brother Edouard, was the last sound they heard as their feet echoed up the deserted street towards the great main thoroughfares of Paris.

CHAPTER III

The next day was cold, but bright and sunny. From ten o'clock in the morning until déjeuner at twelve o'clock, Ethel McMahon endeavoured to instil some rudimentary knowledge of English into the minds of the fifteen-year-old daughters of prosperous tradesmen of the Luxembourg district at the academy for young ladies of the Demoiselles de Custine-Seraphin, two elderly ladies in whom parsimony and the proprieties struggled for mastery.

With many a sigh and shrug of disgust her demure charges had struggled with the intricacies of our language, had conjugated the verb "to love" in unexpected fashions, had laboriously assimilated the information that "ze weadder is going to be ver' fin to-day," and so forth.

At twelve, together with her fellow-teachers, Mademoiselle Marie and Mademoiselle Augustine de Custine-Seraphin, Ethel had taken the second breakfast of thin soup, pallid mutton, and stale tartines au confiture. At one she was free—free till nine o'clock in the evening. And as she came downstairs from her room dressed to go out, her face was so radiant and changed in expression that Mademoiselle Marie de Custine-Seraphin tossed her head as the girl passed, and gave it as her undoubted opinion to her sister that la jeune anglaise was certainly going to do more than spend a quiet afternoon and evening with her invalid mother.

"Figure to yourself, Augustine; her face was of the most beaming, her eye had sparkle, her cheeks were colour of rose. Ca fait un amant, n'est-ce pas?"

"A la jeunesse, comme à la jeunesse," her sister replied with a shrug, and went on making up the account of Mademoiselle Hortense Dubois, the well-to-do butcher's daughter who was leaving school that quarter.

Ethel McMahon hurried out of the quiet street in which the school was situated, walking towards the Luxembourg.

She was a typically Irish girl in feature, with those dark-blue eyes, like hot Venetian water, that hair black as a bog-oak root, that complexion of cream and roses that is hardly seen anywhere outside the Isle of Unrest. She was tall and walked with a swing, as she threaded her way among the chic and mincing Parisiennes towards her mother's tiny flat in the Rue Paczensky.

Dull as the girl's life was, hard as she worked all day, her youth and vitality were stronger than the power of circumstances. Vivid and impulsive in all she did, a constant spring of hope welled up within her, and she was certain that sooner or later—she believed very soon—everything in her life would come right. Dear Basil would get some lucrative appointment, the great invention would be financed by some kindly millionaire who would appear in the nick of time. They would get married, her mother would be able to live in the far healthier air of the Alps, as the doctor had ordered. Day in and day out Ethel was convinced that all would be well, and whenever she saw her lover she comforted and inspirited him as if they were indeed husband and wife.

Mrs. McMahon's flat of two rooms and a kitchen was high up in the great drab block of buildings, and, small as it was, the rent, as is the case with all flats in Paris, was proportionately high.

As she entered the hallway Ethel was handed a bundle of letters by the concierge. She did not examine them at the moment, but ran lightly up the stairs to the flat.

Mrs. McMahon was seated by the window of the sitting-room. A lace pillow with its pins and reels of thread was upon the table before her, and her thin hands were moving quickly and deftly over it hither and thither.

It was Mrs. McMahon's specialty to copy old Valenciennes lace, which she did for a firm in the Rue de Rivoli. The labour was intense, the process wearingly long, but the few hundred francs earned during the year by this means helped to pay the rent.

She was a tall, faded woman. The hair, which had once been as black as her daughter's, was now scanty and iron-grey. All the light had faded from the blue eyes, and she was painfully thin. She returned her daughter's caresses without much animation, and sat back in her old-fashioned chair with her hands lying idly in her lap, gazing at the girl in a lack-lustre way as she moved quickly about the room, taking off her hat and stole of cheap fur, giving a touch to the furniture here and there, and putting a little bunch of dark-red asters, which she had bought, into a vase upon the dining-table.

"Well, Ethel, I suppose you have no news? I hope those old cats"—Mrs. McMahon was accustomed to refer to the Demoiselles de Custine-Seraphin in this way—"I hope those old cats have been behaving themselves better. I cannot think why you stay with them. Surely a girl with your knowledge of French as well as English, and with your appearance, could get something better to do. The salary they pay you is disgraceful."

Ethel shook her head brightly; this was an old ground of debate between herself and the querulous invalid. "My dear mother," she said, "I