class="stanza">"'A Temple to Friendship,' said Laura, enchanted,
'I'll build in this garden—the thought is divine!'
Her temple was built, and she now only wanted
An image of Friendship to place on the shrine.
She flew to a sculptor who sat down before her
A Friendship the fairest his art could invent;
But so cold and so dull that the youthful adorer
Saw plainly this was not the idol she meant.

He shut the book and laughed, for he had the satisfaction of seeing a warm flush mount to the temples of the young journalist, but the girl, so young, so ignorant, so strangely beautiful, looked at him unabashed. Evidently she knew no more of love than she did of friendship. They were alike meaningless terms to her uncultured mind. Frowning impatiently, she said:

"Carmontelle, why did you intrude upon us here? I wanted to talk to Monsieur Van Zandt."

"And I, ma'amselle, wanted to talk to you. Madame Lorraine was very angry with you for racing Selim to-day. What did she do to you?"

The large eyes brightened angrily, and a hot rose-flush broke through the creamy pallor of her oval cheek.

"Beat me!" she said, bitterly.

"No!" from both men in a shocked tone.

"But yes," she replied, with a sudden return of sullenness. With a swift movement she drew the mass of hair from her white shoulders, which she pushed up out of her low dress with a childish movement.

"Look at the marks on my back," she said.

They did look, and shuddered at the sight. The thick tresses of hair had hidden the long, livid marks of a cruel lash on the white flesh. There were a dozen or so of stripes, and the flesh was cut in some places till the blood had oozed through.

The girl's eyes flashed, and she clinched her little hands tightly.

"I hate that woman!" she muttered, fiercely. "Oh, it is cruel, cruel, to be nobody, to have no one but her, to be nothing but a pretty plaything, as she calls me, like her Spitz and her cat, her parrot and monkey! I mean to run away. It was for that I rode to-day—to win the gold—but—"

"But—what?" said Van Zandt, huskily.

She answered with passionate pride:

"When she beat me—when she flung my poverty in my face—when she said I should be starving but for her bread—I flung the purse of gold down at her feet—to—to—pay!"

The hard glitter of the dark eyes dissolved in quick tears. She dropped the golden tresses back on her lacerated shoulders, flung her arms before her face, and hard, choking sobs shook the slight, young form. The two men gazed on her, pale, moved, speechless.

Eliot Van Zandt thought of his fair, young sisters, scarcely older than this girl, on whose lovely frames the winds of heaven were scarce permitted to blow roughly. Why, if any one had struck Maud or Edith such a blow, he should have sent a bullet through his heart, so fierce would be his anger.

He looked at Carmontelle.

"Monsieur Lorraine—does he permit this?" he asked, indignantly.

"Lorraine had been in a mad-house fourteen years—sent there by the madness of jealousy," was the unexpected reply.

Madame's gay, shrill laugh rang out from the salon where she was winning golden eagles from her friends. The journalist shuddered and wondered if the brilliant woman ever remembered the man gone insane for her sake.

Ma'amselle's hard, bitter sobs ceased suddenly as they had begun. She dashed the tears from her eyes, and said, with bitter resignation:

"N'importe! It is not the first time—perhaps it may not be the last. But, mon Dieu, it is better to be only her plaything, petted one moment, whipped the next, as she does her mischievous monkey and snarling puppy. She says she should make me live in the kitchen if I were ugly instead of being so pretty. She wants everything about her to be pretty. But, say nothing of all this, you two," lifting a warning taper finger. "It could do no good—she would only beat me more."

"Too true!" assented Pierre Carmontelle, sadly.

CHAPTER IV.

They returned to the salon, and Mme. Lorraine flung down her cards and arose.

"Messieurs, I will give you your revenge another time. Now I must give some attention to my Northern friend. Come, Monsieur Van Zandt, let me show you my garden by moonlight."

She slipped her hand through his arm and led him through a side-door and out into a tropical garden bathed in a full flood of summer moonlight. Carmontelle drew Little Nobody out by the hand. Markham and Remond followed.

To Van Zandt's unaccustomed eyes the scene was full of weird, delicious splendor. Fountains sparkled in the moonlight, watering the stems of tall, graceful palm-trees and massive live-oaks, whose gigantic branches were draped in wide, trailing banners of funereal-gray moss. Immense green ferns bordered the basins of the fountains, white lilies nodded on tall, leafy stems, roses vied with orange-blossoms in filling the air with fragrance, and passion-flowers climbed tall trellies and flung their large flowers lavishly to the breeze. Madame, with her jeweled hand clinging to Van Zandt's arm, her jewels gleaming, walked along the graveled paths in advance of the rest, talking to him in her gay fashion that was odd and enchanting from its pretty mixture of broken French and English, interlarded here and there with a Spanish phrase. She was bent on subduing the heart of the young journalist, his coldness and indifference having roused her to a fatal pique and interest—fatal because her love was like the poisonous upas-tree, blighting all that it touched.

She had brought him out here for a purpose. In the soft, delusive moonlight she looked fair and young as a woman of twenty, and here she could weave her Circean spells the best. She became soft and sentimental with her light badinage. Bits of poetry flowed over the crimson lips, the dark eyes were raised to his often, coyly and sweetly, the jeweled hand slipped until her throbbing wrist rested lightly on his. Every gracious, cunning art of coquetry was employed, and the victim seemed very willing indeed to be won.

But when they bantered him next day he laughed with the rest.

"Ad nauseam!" he replied, boldly.

But he went again that night to Esplanade Street, drawn by an indefinable power to the presence of the cruel, beautiful woman and her fawn-like, lovely dependent.

"Madame Lorraine was engaged, but she would come to him soon," said the sleek page who admitted him to the salon, which a quick glance showed him was quite deserted.

He waited awhile, then grew weary of the stillness and silence, and went out through the open side-door into the charming garden.

The quiet walks gave back no echo of his firm tread as he paused and threw himself upon a rustic bench beside a tinkling fountain, but presently from beyond the