Mr. Le Marchant has been gone more than a week, and February has come wetly in, with rain wildly weeping against the easements, and angry-handed rain boxing the unlucky orange-trees' ears. It has rained for forty-eight hours without a break. The Grand Hotel is at the end of its resources. Uncle Toby, his struggle ended, lies vanquished in the widow's net; and there is murder in the lurid eye which Miss Strutt turns on the votary of Whiteley. Jim alone, outdoor man as he habitually is, looking upon a house merely in the light of a necessary shelter, has no quarrel either with the absent sun or the present deluge? for are not they the cause of his having spent two whole afternoons in the company of Elizabeth and her mother? To-day has not Elizabeth been singing to him, and cutting him orange-flower bread-and-butter, when Fritz brought in the afternoon tea, and set the real English kettle fizzing over its spirit-lamp? And, in return, has not he now, after dinner, been helping her to weed out her own and her mother's photograph-books? As he does so the idea strikes him of how very meagre her own collection of acquaintances seems to be. From that weeding have they not, by an easy transition, at her suggestion, passed to the more playful and ingenious occupation of amputating the heads of some of the rejected friends and applying them to the bodies of others? Each armed with a pair of scissors, and with Mrs. Le Marchant for umpire, they have been vying with each other as to who can produce the most startling results by this clever process. The palm has just been awarded to Elizabeth for a combination which presents the head of an elderly lady, in a widow's cap, mounted upon the cuirass and long boots of a Life Guardsman. Jim's application of the cornet's discarded head to the body of a baby in long clothes, although allowed to be a pretty conceit, commands but little real admiration--an instance of nepotism which he does not allow to pass without protest. Elizabeth, elated by her triumph, has flown out of the room to examine her private stores for fresh material, and Jim and her mother--for the first time, as it happens, since that early meeting, when her anxious eye had so plainly implored him to leave Algiers--are _tête-à-tête_. Her changed aspect towards him as she sits, with a lingering laugh still on her face, beside the wood fire--which, after having twice gone out, as it almost always does, the souches being invariably wet, burns bright and crackly--strikes him with such a feeling of warm pleasure that he says in a voice of undisguised triumph: "What spirits she is in, is not she?" "Yes; is not she?" assents the mother eagerly. "Oh, I cannot say how grateful I am to you for having cheered her up as you have done! Oh," with a low sigh that seems to bear away on its slow wings the last echoes of her late mirth, "if it could only last!" "Why should not it last?" "If nothing fresh would happen!" "Why should anything fresh happen?"