proving conversation, it was at least to be expected that she should notice to herself

Both how the chair I sat in, and the room

Began to look when I had failed to come.

If she did not choose to notice, it was time I should make her :

Formosis levitas semper amica fuit.

I stayed away four whole days :-(and the days of Grosvenor Square are not imperceptible segments of time like those of some unincidental country parsonage!) I stayed away, I say, four whole days; and went and bored myself with listening to the debates, and the Magnificat after them at Bellamy's.-I even submitted to be slapped on the back and called old fellow at White's, by those so vulgarly familiar as to enquire what the deuce I was thinking of that I looked so blue.

It was not blue, however, that Lady Mereworth looked, when I saw her that night at the Opera;-no! nor red as when I had visited her

with Frank. She was now pale as ivory,exquisitely pale.--It was the first time I had ever seen her look pale. Hitherto, her life had been so peaceful!-I am convinced she had not slept the two preceding nights!—

I ought to have been sorry :-I never felt so happy in my life!

There is pity in many

Is there any in him?

No! ruth is a stranger

To Cecil the Grim !

quoth the old ballad.-Yet I ought to have been more merciful, if it be true, as the great trnth-teller of all asserts, that "Pity is akin to Love:"-for I now admitted myself to myself to be as decidedly in love as is compatible with the maturities of a 2, with a 4 preceding.

Luckily for me,—I was going to say luckily for us,-all the world was just then so vanity mad, that the fools of fashion had not a moment's leisure to recommend Lady Mereworth to consult Alexander concerning the weakness

which so often imparted a strange redness to her eyes. Every body was aloft in the air on the hobby of the Coronation.-Not a woman alive, saving old Lady Cork who figured in hanging sleeves at the Coronation of George III., had seen with her eyes the spectacle of the crowning of a Queen; and people were stark staring mad about coronets and robes of

estate.

It unluckily happened that Lady Brettingham, who, amid the universal irritability of the life of an intrigante, had rendered herself a sort of general agent for tickets for the Abbey, having exhausted all other sources in search after one more for the fifteenth cousin of some Liberal Irish member, attacked me; and chancing to meet Julia that day at dinner in Connaught Place, I mentioned my desire for a ticket for the Earl Marshal's box.

Next morning, as I was brooding in my dressing gown over my tender perplexities and my café au lait, in walked Herries with a piece

of green pasteboard in his hand, as a pretext for the visit,—for I was not cordial enough with my most official brother-in-law to encourage him to much intimacy.—

After thanking him for the ticket, which it seems was his per privilege of Treasury, (for he did not participate in Danby's abstinence from office,)—Herries suddenly launched out into a cut and dry oration, soulless, nerveless, heartless, as if an exposition of some Budget question to the House, upon the sinfulness of courting one's neighbour's wife, and the ungrateful injury of shattering the household gods of a friend with whom I had crossed t's and dotted i's at the F. O., in strictest confederacy, twenty years before.

I wonder I did not exterminate him on the spot! I contented myself however with blowing out the lamp of my coffee pot to hide my confusion; which operation affording some excuse for the inflammation of my complexion, I simply and Cecilianly asked him what the deuce he meant by talking such nonsense?—

Such was, I daresay, precisely the rejoinder that many an opposition member had often longed to make him.-O pestis! O labes!—To have a brother-in-law whom one dared not throw out of the window!

"But that Mereworth is the only one of my old colleagues who is so unfortunate as to be married," said I, "I should be at a loss to understand you. But considering the indifference you always saw me testify in the days to which you allude, towards Lady Votefilch's niece, it is somewhat curious you should fancy me enslaved, at seven and thirty, by a woman I did not think pretty at seventeen."

"I, my dear fellow ?-Be assured I have something else to do than think of any trash of the kind!"-cried Herries. And I saw him beginning to puff and blow and rotundify into the official ox, to a degree that made me apprehend the first person plural. It only needed for Herries to say "We have taken into consideration and seriously disapprove your