The Argosy — page 23: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

IO Lady Grace. “Do not mock me with pleasant visions, Lady Grace. I can have no possible interest with Lord Avon.” ‘You could marry then,” she softly said, in reference to the conversation at dinner, ‘‘and set the parish grumblers at defiance.” ‘‘ Marry? Yes, I should—I hope—do so,” was his reply. His voice was soft as her own; his speech hesitating ; he was thinking of Edith Dane. But how was Lady Grace to divine that? She, alas! gave altogether a different interpretation to the words ; and her heart beat with a tender throbbing, and her lips parted with love and hope, and she gazed after him until he disappeared in the shadows of the sweet summer night. SELAP TL BR, dd. A CURIOUS MISTAKE. THE Countess of Avon, persuaded into it by her daughter— badgered into it, her ladyship said—exacted a promise from her son that he would bestow the living of Great Whitton upon the Reverend Ryle Baumgarten. The Earl did not give an immediate consent ; in fact, he demurred to give it at all; and sundry letters passed to and fro between Avon House and Paris—for his lordship happened just then to have taken a run over to the French capital. Great Whitton was too good a thing to be thrown away upon young Baumgarten, who was nobody, he told his mother, and he should like to give it to Elliotsen; but Lady Avon, for peace sake at home, urged her petition strongly, and the Earl at length granted it and gave the promise. The morning the letter arrived containing the promise, and also the information that his lordship was back at his house in London, Lady Avon was feeling unusually ill, and did not get up. Her head was aching violently, and she bade her maid put the letter aside ; she would open it later. This she did in the afternoon, when she was sitting up in her dressing-room, and she then told Grace of the arrival of the unexpected promise. ‘Oh, let me see it!” exclaimed Grace, in her incautious excitement, holding out her hand for the letter. She read it hungrily, with flushing cheeks and trembling fingers. Lady Avon could but note this. It somewhat puzzled her. ‘* Grace,” she said, ‘I cannot think why you should be so eager. What does it signify to you who gets the living ?—whether Mr. Baumgarten or another ?” Grace read to the end and folded up the letter before answering. She was a model of calmness now. ‘““TIt would be very annoying to us, mamma, if some dolt of a man got it—and Henry, as you know, has no discrimination. Mr. Baum- ee ee CORnNIELOOKS.E© m