She is very fond of Francis. Last week, preparing for him, she looked quite a different woman; quite young and rosy again; and though it did not last, though after he was really come, she grew sharp and cross often,--to us, never to him, of course;--she much enjoys his being here. They do not make so much fuss over one another as they did ten years ago, which indeed would be ridiculous in lovers over thirty. Still, I should hardly like my lover, at any age, to sit reading a novel half the evening, and spend the other half in the sweet company of his cigar. Not that he need be always hankering after me, and "paying me attention." I should hate that. For what is the good of people being fond of one another, if they can't be content simply in one another's company, or, without it even, in one another's love? letting each go on their own several ways and do their several work, in the best manner they can. Good sooth! I should be the most convenient and least troublesome sweetheart that ever a young man was ever blessed with; for I am sure I should sit all evening quite happy--he at one end of the room, and I at the other, if only I knew he was happy, and caught now and then a look and a smile--provided the look and the smile were my own personal property, nobody else's. What nonsense am I writing? And not a word about the dinner-party. Has it left so little impression on my mind? No wonder! It was just the usual thing. Papa as host, grave, clerical, and slightly wearying of it all. Penelope hostess. Francis playing "friend of the family," as handsome and well-dressed as ever--what an exquisitely embroidered shirt-front, and what an aërial cambric kerehief! which must have taken him half an hour to tie! Lisabel--but I have told about her; and myself. Everybody else looking as everybody hereabouts always does look at dinner-parties--_ex uno disce omnes_--to muster a bit of the Latin for which, in old times, Francis used to call me "a juvenile prig." Was there, in the whole evening, anything worth remembering? Yes, thanks to his fit of jealousy, I did get a little sensible conversation out of Captain Treherne. He looked so dull, so annoyed, that I felt sorry for the youth, and tried to make him talk; so, lighting on the first subject at hand, asked him if he had seen his friend, Doctor Urquhart, lately? "Eh--who? I beg your pardon." His eyes had wandered where Lisabel, with one of her white elbows on the table, sat coquetting with a bunch of grapes, listening with downcast eyes to "my Colin." "Doctor Urquhart, whom I met at the Cedars last week. You said he was a friend of yours." "So he is; the best I ever had," and it was refreshing to see how the young fellow brightened up. "He saved my life. But for him I should assuredly be lying with a cross over my head, inside that melancholy stone wall round the top of Cathcart's Hill." "You mean the cemetery there.--What sort of a place is it?"