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name, papa? The name I always forget "

"Princess Zaraikine," he says. He has answered the same question many times. before, but no doubt the queer syllables slip out of the child's little brain.

"Princess Zaraikine," she repeats, “I like Princess Ersilia best-my beautiful cousin. Why have you

Princess and
and cousin.

never finished the picture, papa ?"

"It was not I who began it, Fanny," he answers, "it was painted by my master, a far greater artist than I, who did not live to complete it. He died many years ago."

"185-" she says, spelling out a date in the corner of the picture, "why that is

let me see-that is more than twenty years ago. But I know whom you mean, papa, the gentleman who used to live in this room, and made those funny sketches on the wall. You have never finished those either; why don't you, papa? You

can paint very nicely too," and then, without waiting for an answer, Fanny skips off to the window, and peeps through the shutter to look down into the street below, a Paris street, where she can see the winter sun shining on white houses and porte-cochères, soldiers passing, ladies walking, carriages rattling by-it is more amusing to Fanny than all the pictures in the world.

Presently her bonne knocks at the door, "It is time for Mademoiselle to come for her walk." Mademoiselle jumps up joyfully from the window and runs to get ready. She climbs a chair that she may put her arms round her father's neck, and kiss him before she goes out. She pulls his grizzled beard, and the locks that are getting white on his temples and thin on the top of his head; she dives into his pockets to find sous wherewith to buy cakes in the Champs Elysées. Fanny and her father are very fond of each other, for

they are almost alone in the world, and the little maiden still wears a black frock for the mother who died scarcely a year ago. But they have not much to say to each other nevertheless, and he sometimes thinks that the child is happier with her dolls, and her rags, and her nurse, than during the dutiful half-hour she spends in the studio where there are a hundred things her busy fingers may not touch, and where a grim, silent papa sits and stands painting all the day long. She skips gleefully away now, the sound of her chatter and laughter dying in the distance. Presently will be heard the clatter of little feet as she returns from her walk, but no more will be seen of her till she comes in her little blue dressing-gown to wish her father good night, and to roast chestnuts on the stove. It is Fanny's winter treat, and the one moment in the day, perhaps, when she thinks a papa is good for something. She will know better a few years

hence, when she will come to him for ball-dresses, trinkets, opera-tickets, what not already he foresees the time when she will plait up her pretty hair, put jewels in her ears, and satin slippers on her feet, and be content with nothing less than two balls a night.

Fanny then runs joyfully away; but though the child is gone, her careless questions, her heedless words still echo in her father's ears; and presently, as it grows dusk, he lays aside his brushes, he lights his pipe, and sitting down by the fire, he begins to think with tenderness and melancholy of a time five-and-twenty years ago. And as he thinks, the little parable that is written above comes into his head, for it is a time that has in it a glow as of red morning-clouds, the glow of a boy's first love.

This lonely man who sits smoking and dreaming over the fire, had a passionate love-story in his youth; but a sudden

darkness fell on it, and out of it he has saved no token such as some men cherish and forget-no flower, or knot of faded ribbon, or lock of hair. The shining eyes, at whose light he worshipped, never brightened nor fell at his approach; the fair, kind hand that frankly met his own never trembled at his touch, and it is less of himself than of another, whose name passed into silence years ago, that he thinks, looking back upon a past in which his own share was too often one of youthful passion, error, folly.

Out of that past he himself alone survives and remembers; for a fate, relentless to death, swept across his path, and he found himself alone among alien lives that had no conscience of his past. In this very studio, sacred to him through the memories that make the pathos of familiar rooms, where in the course of years many have come and gone and one life alone remains-in this very room,

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