THE KEYS OF HEAVEN.

The Prelude.

I

Miss Antonia Mc Govern, Principal of the Young Ladies' Academy of Sloebridge, Massachusetts, laid down the letter she had been reading, removed the horn-rimmed spectacles put on for its perusal, and looked out thoughtfully over the lawn shadowed by elms and purple beeches that sloped in graceful undulations to the under river at the foot of the property.

The news contained in the letter was unprecedented.

"The young lady," she said, to her younger sister, Arazelia, "appears to be actually here."

Miss Arazelia started, and her start communicated a sympathetic tremor to the eight little sausage curls of the bright auburn front which framed her round astonished face.

"Here — under this very roof?"

Miss Mc Govern frowned: she had jutting black brows, magnificently formed for frowning. "Don't be a fool, Zelia — not more than you can help, that is. Mlle de Lassy is in Sloebridge: she is boarding at Mrs. Tuckerson's."

"Mrs. Tuckerson's little boy has the most beautiful white rabbits. Signor Aldobrandi brought him a pair from Albany last March, and — "

Miss Mc Govern's brows drew together again, and her nose

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drooped disapprovingly above narrowed lips, as it did when she smelt
drains or foresaw the approach of any indelicate allusion. It would
be just like Arazelia's innocence to say that the Tuckerson rabbits
had multiplied — she was even capable of blurting it out in class
before the young ladies! Miss Mc Govern shuddered. But the matter in
hand was even more serious. She took up the letter again, resumed her
spectacles, and slowly read aloud: "Paris, March 5th, 1849 —

Paris! Her fancy paused caressingly on the name. With a
parenthetic smile she remarked: "I do not suppose that many residents
of Sloebridge receive letters from Paris."

Miss Arazelia, as usual, made the wrong answer. "But after
all it's only from cousin Eliza Morton," she said.

Miss Mc Govern glanced at her over lowered spectacles. "Did
you suppose it was from the King of the French?" She continued to
read aloud, addressed herself to an imaginary audience of a higher
level of intelligence than poor Arazelia's. "' Paris, March 5th, 1849.
Dear Cousin Antonia, the young lady who will have the pleasure of
handing you this on her arrival' — on her *arrival*. So she must have
arrived, she must be actually in Sloebridge at this moment," Miss Mc
Govern concluded, with an uncontrollable inward flutter. For if she
felt large and powerful and omniscient when she had to deal with Araz-
lia, or the young ladies, or the servants, it was a different matter
when she read, in black and white, that a young lady from Paris was
actually in Sloebridge, and already awaiting her good pleasure.

"Mademoiselle Laure de Lassy," she read on. "Mad'maselle...
Well, happily her Christian name is easier to pronounce." Miss Mc
Govern was mistress of the Italian tongue; but her familiarity with
French did not extend to any clear notion of the sounds to be produced
in speaking it. "We shall call her Laura," she decided, *she* preferred.

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"But we can't call her by her Christian name — at least,
not yet!" Arazelia protested. "Not before we've even been introduced
to her!"

Miss Mc Govern was paying no attention. She read on, but
now to herself. "A series of unfortunate events... in no wise to
blame... For six years governess in one of the highest families in
the land... Awful tragedy... poor girl completely exonerated...sympathy
and protection of prominent ladies of the French aristocracy... no
hesitation in begging you... highly accomplished... accept any salary...
will herself tell you all details of melancholy story..."

No — decidedly it would be as well not to go on reading
the letter aloud. Arazelia would never be able to assimilate so much
information, and some of it of such disturbing nature. Even Miss
McGovern was brought to a pause; she had a definite aversion to being
mixed up in the kind of situation euphuistically described (by the
people who — we unload the victim on one) as a "melancholy story".
It was partly owing to her stern determination to keep the human
predicament at arm's length that the Young Ladies' Academy had attained
its unrivalled reputation, and continued annually to add to a waiting-
list on which every name was a guaranty of social selectness. Miss Mc
Govern had written poetry in her youth; a volume of "Maiden Meditations
(by a Young Lady)", bound in red cloth with Gothic tooling, and with
A. Mc G.'s autograph on the fly-leaf, was one of the prizes most fre-
quently offered to departing pupils who had deserved well of the
Academy. One of the poems, entitled: "Invocation to Winter", ended
with the stanza:

O snows upon my native heath,

Ice on my native streams,

No purer be your candid wreath

Than my unblemished dreams —

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a sentiment exactly embodying the author's idea of what the atmosphere
of a Young Ladies' Academy ought to be. No, decidedly, she would say
nothing farther to Arazelia till there had been time to examine the
question of Mlle de Lassy in all its bearings.

"I will see the young lady, of course," Miss Mc Govern
briefly concluded, folding up the letter, removing her spectacles, and
slipping both objects into her ample reticule.

"It seems a wonderful opportunity," Miss Arazelia murmured.

"For her, yes; I agree. It only remains to see if she is
deserving of it," Miss Mc Govern rejoined; and left her sister
marvelling at her invariable way of assuming that to form part of
the professional staff of the Sloebridge Academy was the secret
ambition of rising teachers in all parts of the world. ("When she
knows," Miss Arazelia mused, "that Hannah Sloomb, who'd been a year
in Canada, is the nearest we've ever got to a French teacher.")

It was true: the lack of idiomatic French, as spoken in
the salons of the Faubourg St Germain, was the one flaw in the
Academy's curriculum. No one was more aware of this deficiency than
Miss Mc Govern; no one suffered from it more acutely. The unhappy
conditions in Italy (which she was the first to deplore) had provided
Miss Mc Govern with a series of accomplished Italian masters (to one
of whom she owed her own proficiency in the language of Petrarch), and
with a brilliant teacher of drawing; but France had hitherto supplied
no political refugees; and here was one — at least a moral one —
at last. The opportunity was quite as great as Arazelia said — but
the danger? What of the danger? Miss Mc Govern dismissed her sister
with a gesture, and raising her tall and massive frame from her desk-
chair, grasped an ebony cane and limped upon the lawn. She walked

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across it with her powerful halting stride, reached the bottom of
the slope, and looked across the alder-fringed river which bounded
the Academy grounds. Beyond the river, surmounting what had once been
a lawn but had long since relapsed into a neglected pasture, stood a
shabby rambling white house, half-smothered in unkempt trees. A broken
shuttersaw from their hinges, and wild tendrils of the travellers'花
lay before her.

Miss Mc Govern looked at the crumbling wooden columns of the porch, and a trellis-
work arbour at the end of a grass-grown path had fallen down on the
stone table it had been designed to shelter. Miss Mc Govern stood on
the bank, and filled her eyes with the sight. "How nearly she had
me beaten!" she thought.

The house opposite had also been an educational establish-
ment for young ladies: "Juniper Grove" its name. And Juniper Grove,
directed by Miss van Sinderen, a lady as accomplished as Miss Mc
Govern, with a particularly strong backing among the old Dutch families
of New York and Albany, had been a redoubtable rival to the already
established Academy. For ten years the struggle had continued; during
the first few, Juniper Grove had pushed slowly but steadily forward;
for the last two, the rival schools had been neck-and-neck, and Miss
Mc Govern was already trembling for her supremacy. But in the eleventh
year there had been an Elopement.—

Miss Mc Govern looked across the river at the deserted
house, and smiled. For though Juniper Grove was an awful warning, it
was also an intimate satisfaction. Only the week before, Miss Mc
Govern had sent her annual donation of five dollars to the committee
of ladies whose charitable zeal alone kept Miss van Sinderen from
the work-house...

Well, at any rate, Miss Mc Govern would see Mlle de Lassy,
and have a talk with her.
It could do no harm, though it would probably lead to no results. And

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deep in the recesses of Miss Mc Govern's iron soul there lurked the secret, the unacknowledged yearning to see what sort of lace collars were being worn that year in Paris. The experience of a long if irreproachable life had taught Miss Mc Govern that young women who have been connected with "melancholy stories" may usually be counted on to have the most perfect taste in dress.

"And she will accept any salary," she murmured.

Miss Mc Govern's first surprise was to find that Mlle de Lassy spoke English perfectly. She had an accent, of course — that lovely French accent which seems to befeather and embroider the sober English words as they were uttered; but she expressed herself with a correctness and elegance that none of Miss Mc Govern's Italian masters had achieved. The discovery, at once restored to her the sense of authority and superiority, and perilously increased the temptation to engage on the spot a young lady it was so easy to converse with.

As for her lace collar — well, it was decidedly elegant, and differed in shape from any that Miss Mc Govern had seen; yet it was neither showy, nor over-elegant, but somehow exactly the collar which a young lady still under the cloud of a melancholy story could with propriety wear. Such also was the slate-coloured cashmere dress, which it suited: a dress so stamped with "suitability" that Miss Mc Govern (in that secret soul of hers) marvelled how it managed to be so becoming.

"Perhaps it's her deportment," Miss Mc Govern thought.

For there again Mlle de Lassy was irreproachable. She carried herself like a lily, but a lily which has been daily strapped for the

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initials L.L. were skilfully interwoven. She examined its quality,
and the nature of the needle-work, ~~then~~ *She* raised the handkerchief
to her nose, which drooped toward it as suspiciously as though it
had given out a mephitic odour.

"Scent?" murmured Miss Mc Govern. "Scent?" She sniffed
again. It would be a pity... But no! She raised her head, reassured.
"The finest quality of soap — French soap, no doubt." The inference
was simple: Lille de Lassy evidently washed her handkerchiefs her-
self — a good sign! But the soap she used was too expensive. "No,
"teulessen perhaps," Miss Mc Govern reflected, "it's a cake left over from the
kind supplied to her in that unhappy household — where money, I
saat her infer, was no consideration."

Miss Mc Govern anchored her mind firmly to this conviction; for it was her earnest desire that there should be no obstacle in the way of her engaging Miss de Lassy's services (at half price), and scent would have been such an obstacle — especially the Parisian kind.

Miss Mc Govern limped stiffly up the slippery staircase
to her private study. The room faced south, with windows opening on
the lawn and the river-bank, so that she could keep a discreet watch
on the young ladies who might be strolling in the garden during the
recreation-hour, and could also, in moments of discouragement, feast
her eyes by looking across the river at the crumbling remains of
Juniper Grove. That woman had had victory in her hands, — and she had
not been able to prevent an elopement!

Miss Mc Govern gazed out of the window in deep meditation.
At this moment she thought of Miss van Sinderen, her rival, less
as a subject for secret triumph than as an awful warning. For one
day Juniper Grove had been a calm and orderly seat of learning —

II.

importance, and gave an arresting air to a place otherwise featureless, save for its natural setting.

Laure de Lassy, as the scene grew more familiar to her, and others, which had once filled her life, faded into deeper remoteness and unreality, came to understand, and even to share, the admiration of the Sloebridgians for their white-and-green village shaded by venerable trees and enclosed in the softest of hills. Even when, on the day after her arrival, she issued forth from the doors of Miss Mc Govern's Academy, and passed under that long vaulting of ethereal gold, she said to herself vaguely: "Certainly these trees are beautiful"; but trees had never occupied much place in her mind, or her eyes, and for the moment the remoteness and unreality were not in the memories of her too-recent past, but in the scene before her. And that was literally undecipherable.

She had never seen a place like Sloebridge: a place, as she put it to herself, so apparently unassociated with human emotions and struggles, with hate, love, activity and violence, with all, in fact, that constitutes being alive, as the term was understood by her. Certainly she had not imagined that any place in America could be as placid and untroubled. It seemed set in an immovable calm, in midway between the extremes of the human state; for Sloebridge she saw no misery, but she saw no luxury. In any French village of its size she would have found both, the one in the sordid houses of the villagers, the other in the château about which they were grouped — a place of possession, in a luxury embodied in high walls and gates, terraces, stables, an orangery, a pigeon-house, a gilt weather-cock, all perhaps sadly the worse for wear, neglected and dilapidated even, yet signifying a rank a standard, a conception of life apparently unknown by the dwellers in the trim and almost uniform white houses behind the elms.

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cousin Agénor, how amiable, how altogether charming of you!" Yes, that was how they received visitors at Salverte — and at hundreds of other châteaux scattered over the lovely French country, and in Paris, behind the tall carven doors of the Faubourg St Germain and the Faubourg St Honore...

Slowly, with a painful effort, Laure de Lassy opened her eyes again on the main street of Sloebridge. She had now traversed about half its distance, and a carriage was approaching her from the opposite direction — not the C-spring barouche she had just seen driving up to the cour d'honneur of Salverte, but a creaking two-wheeled vehicle dinly resembling what the young bloods of Paris called a "boghey". In it sat a middle-aged man with a long lantern-jawed face and well-to-do rustic looking clothes. A straw drooped from one corner of his mouth, and his head nodded slightly in time with the rocking gait, of his old unkempt white horse. Lille de Lassy noticed him only because he and his horse were the sole living beings in sight down the whole length of the golden avenue of elms. Later, she came to know him well as the leading lawyer of Sloebridge and the surrounding district — now she merely said to herself: "How badly the farmers here keep their horses —" and walked on again, dragging one listless foot after another.

Now and then her eyes rested on one of the houses she was passing: small compact white houses, built of wood (everything in this country was incredible), with open-work balustrades above their cornices, symmetrically disposed windows with green shutters, and doors set in traceried fan-lights. The afternoon sun illuminated the highly polished brass plates and knockers on the doors, and played in opalescent shimmers on the small square window-panes which gave glimpses of geraniums and flowers in pots, and occasionally of