must needs support his mother. Much good it will do her to have him lying in the churchyard. He is making his way

there as fast as he can, for he is like the steward in the Gospel: he cannot work, and to beg he is ashamed. But whither are you hurrying, Mistress Geneviève Claes? Let me hold an umbrella over your head, and escort you home. Is it true that your father has invited to Antwerp Master von Daxis of Haarlem, and that he is to exhibit in the town. hall his great picture of the Raising of Lazarus? Oh, you are not going straight home! You have a call to make on your way! It is a wet evening for young damsels to be visiting about the town. Perhaps I may look in on your father in an hour or two, when the rain has abated."

Geneviève had glided out of sight whilst her companion was still speaking. With hurried steps she hastened down a narrow little street at the back of the forge. Gretchen, her maid, had great trouble to keep up with her. beating against their faces; but there were

The rain was

tears as well

The words of

as drops of rain on the young girl's cheeks. the old man had deeply affected her. The mother of the blacksmith had been her nurse, and the little low house behind the forge the home of her childhood. Her father, Hans Claes, a painter of some reputation, who had risen by means of his talents from an obscure station in life, was noted in his native town of Antwerp as well for his eccentricities as for his passionate devotion to his art. He had lost his wife soon after the birth of his little girl, and had consigned the latter to the care of Madame Matsys, the blacksmith's wife, whilst, through great hardships and poverty, he had pursued his studies at Rome and at Bologna.

Quintin Matsys was the foster-brother of Geneviève

Claes. They had been playmates in infancy, and companions in childhood. The forge had been a kind of fairy world to the two children, and Geneviève, who since her father's return from Italy had dwelt under his roof, often timidly made her way to the favourite haunt of her earlier days—and still thought the sparks very beautiful as they flew upward in fiery spangles-and the sound of the hammer as it fell on the anvil pleasant music to the ears-and the face of Quintin Matsys, her old play fellow, with his fair hair and ruddy complexion besooted and begrimed by the labours of the forge, the handsomest she had ever set eyes on.

They had

She never shook off those old impressions. become part and parcel of her nature. She had for some time suspected that those she so dearly loved were in poverty. Old Matsys, Quintin's father, had been dead about a year, and since then, his son had had to work far harder than he had ever done before. Indeed, he worked hard for the first time in his life, for he had always been of a delicate constitution, and his strong and loving father was wont to take the hammer out of his hands on hot summer days, and to send him to walk in the green fields on the margin of the Scheld, where he often met Geneviève and her maid Gretchen, and watched by her side the bright red sunset-clouds fading away into the grey hues of twilight, and the barges gliding lazily along the sluggish stream-even as they had been used when children to watch the sparks dying in the embers, or the panting of the ever-sounding, ever-restless bellows.

He had never known what it is to toil with aching limbs, to labour with sinking strength, until that tender, fatherly heart had ceased to beat in the strong frame, and the hands which had so long worked for others were mouldering in the

grave. But if Quintin was weak in body he was not fainthearted. Patiently and manfully he strove to make up by energy of will for the physical strength which he lacked. Day after day he worked at the anvil in that forge where he had been so happy as a child, till the light seemed to grow lurid in his eyes, and the sound of the hammer's strokes reverberated through his brain with a maddening force.

At last his shrunken, wasted arm sought in vain to wield. the heavy sledge; the hectic spot on his cheeks assumed a deeper hue, and he fainted away at his work as the old man had told Geneviève. Now with his eyes mournfully closed he was lying on a low trestle bed in his mother's little chamber, and a feeling of despair was creeping into his heart, as when the first chill of an ague fit invades a sick man's frame. Poverty was staring him in the face; no, not poverty, that he had always known, and never dreaded; but want and starvation in their sternest form.

Geneviève had suspected that it was even so, and pondered deeply on the means of relieving, without wounding, those she was so devotedly attached to. Her father was a parsimonious man, and though he furnished her with whatever was necessary for her support and proper appearance amongst those in her own rank of life, she had seldom any money at her own disposal. If she wanted to buy a new kirtle, or to give an alms, she had to make her request at a well-chosen moment; when, for instance, Hans Claes had just put the finishing touch to a picture purchased by the Town Councillors, or received an order for an altar-piece in his favourite style.

She had now hoarded a small sum out of her own expenditure, and had been watching for an opportunity of giving it to Quintin for his mother's use. She thought it would be easier

to make him accept it in this way, and had gone to the forge in the hope of seeing him privately, and making her little offering in such a manner as would insure his not refusing it. But having been disappointed in her expectation, she resolved, at all events, to satisfy herself by a visit at their house, that he and his mother were not actually in want, and, if possible, to press upon one of them, for the sake of the other, the small purse which she held tightly grasped in her hand.

When she had knocked at the door, and Madame Matsys had opened it, and exclaimed, "Here is Geneviève Claes!" her son started up and held out his hand to her with an attempt at a smile. "You are ill," she said, placing her cold hand, wet with the rain, in his burning one. "What ails you, Quintin?"

99

"I believe the work is too hard for me just at present,' he answered; "but in a short time I dare say I shall be stronger."

"The truth is—” began Madame Matsys

"Don't talk nonsense, mother," interrupted her son.

"How do you know what I was going to say? The truth

is, that—”

"No, it is not the truth."

"The fact is, Genevière

"No, it is not the fset"

"Geneviève knows as we∞ 1

“She knows nothing at £7 abad **

“He is breaking is dout Gerencia decause he has not strength we go on working so de vega, ani dat de Versees I shall have to go w „de Encloure. *

fresh air; there, now I breathe easier. I thought you never meant to come and see us again, Geneviève. My mother has been fretting sadly at your staying away."

"But, Quintin, you know you said—”

66

Ay, I know what you are going to say. The day you told me of your father's writing in his Missal that he would never give you in marriage to any one but a painter, I was so vexed, so angry, that I was fool enough to exclaim that if that was true we had better not meet again, as I could not bear to see you, and think that I was never to be your husband. Well, I have found out since that there is something still more difficult to bear-never to see you at all; not for days together to hear the sound of your voice. I am afraid it makes me hate your father when I think of this cruel fancy of his."

"Oh, that is dreadful, Quintin! I shall not love you any more if you hate my father."

"But it is very wrong of him to have written such words as those in a book, and a holy book too."

66

"Yes; in the beautiful Missal painted by the monks of Bruges, which he values as the apple of his eye; that is what makes me so afraid that he will never change his mind."

"That book ought to be burnt, pictures and all."

"I should like very much to throw it into the fire, only it would be a sin; and then, you know, it would not prevent him keeping to his resolution."

People have no business to make such resolutions."

"Well, I don't think they should. It is very hard upon a girl who does not care at all for pictures to be obliged to marry a painter; but, Quintin, you must not hate my father for all that. Promise me not to hate him."

"Geneviève, as long as I thought I might have married