protestations of eternal fidelity; those allusions to the past; those hopes for the future; how much mischief have they not done in this world. We talk of women’s tongues; they might chatter to all eternity, and not bring one half the trouble in their train as their too ready pens create. Mr Portland, not being approved of by the admiral, had found his visits to the house not so welcome as they might have been, and so the lovers resorted to writing as a vent for their feelings, and perhaps wrote more that they really felt--certainly more than they cared to think about or look back upon. Nora positively shivered when she thought what might, or might not be, in those letters which Mr Portland had promised to deliver up to her as soon as he returned to town. Meanwhile, she was on tenterhooks and afraid to a degree of offending the man who held such a sword of Damocles over her head, and presumed on his power, to treat her exactly as he chose, with coldness or familiarity. But if she attempted to resent his conduct, Mr Portland could always give her a quiet hint on the sly, that she had better be very polite to him. So her life on first coming to her husband’s home was not one of roses. She could remember the time when she had believed she loved Jack Portland, but she wondered at herself for having done so now. Perhaps it was not entirely the alteration which had taken place in himself, but more likely that her taste had refined and become more exclusive with the passing years. At anyrate, his present conduct towards her, in its quiet insolence and presumption, made her loathe and hate him. She wondered sometimes that her husband did not perceive the aversion she had for his chosen friend, but Ilfracombe had been very subdued and melancholy since the day of their arrival. As Nora was so new to English society, and could not be presented at Court till the following spring, they had decided to pass their first Christmas very quietly, the Dowager Lady Ilfracombe, and the earl’s two sisters, Lady Laura and Lady Blanche Devenish, being, with the exception of the obnoxious Jack Portland, the only guests at Thistlemere. The Ladies Devenish were not disposed to make her life any easier than it needed to be to the youthful countess. In the first place, they were both considerably older than their brother, and resented Nora’s twenty years and her vivacity and independence as an affront to themselves. She ought to have been humbler in their opinion, and more alive to the honour that had been accorded her. To hear her talking to the earl on terms of the most perfect familiarity, and just as if he had been a commoner, like her own people, offended them. And then they considered that Ilfracombe should have married into the aristocracy, and chosen a woman as high born as himself. So they ‘held their heads high’ (as the servants would have said) in consequence, and elevated their eyebrows at Nora’s repartees, when she was conversing with gentlemen,