When wild Kate Goring created universal scandal and some surprise by eloping with that hirsute riding-master, Cecil Hamersley was intensely disgusted at first, but did not nurse his griefs nor his wrath long; when the unlucky couple came to the grief which was inevitable, Kate's jilted lover pitied them from the bottom of his great honest heart, and seemed to think it the most natural thing in the world, that he should help them to the utmost of his power. It was entirely through Cecil, that Mr. Martingale was enabled to start in the horse-dealing business, which he has conducted with average honesty and fair success ever since. Take a converse example. Ivor Montressor, for the last year or more, has been laying his homage at the feet of Lady Blanche Pendragon, and it has been accepted, not ungraciously; at the end of last season, it was understood that it was nearly a settled thing. But the wooer has not displayed intense eagerness since in pressing on the preliminaries. There is a certain Annie Fern, whose duty it is to braid the somewhat scanty gold of Lady Blanche's tresses--the most captivating little witch imaginable, with the most provoking of smiles, that contrasts charmingly with her long, pensive, dark-grey Lancashire eyes. She is prettier a thousand-fold, and pleasanter, and really better educated, than the tall, frigid, indolent descendant of King Uther, whom she has the honour to serve; but that is no excuse, of course, for Ivor's infatuation. A dreadful whisper has got abroad, of late, that he admires the maid above the mistress. Lady Blanche is supposed to be not unconscious of all this; but, if she guessed it, she would not deign to notice it in any way, or even to discharge her fatally attractive handmaid. Let us hope that the vagrant knight will be recalled to a sense of his duty, and, remembering that he is a suitor nearly accepted, "act as such." However it may turn out, let us hope, for Annie's sake (she has been absolutely innocent of intriguing throughout), that it will never happen to her "to be brought low even to the ground, and her honour laid in the dust;"--in such a case, I know _who_ will be the first to set the heel of her slender brodequin on the poor child's neck, and keep it there, too. No; that conscious superiority does not help them at all. As it is now, so it was in the ancient days. Did it much avail Calypso, that in her realm there was wealth of earth's fairest fruits and flowers, while in Ithaca it was barren all--that ages passed over her own divine beauty, leaving no furrow on her brow, no line of silver in her hair, while with every year the colour faded from the cheek, and the fire dried out of the eyes of her mortal rival--if her guest still persisted in repining? Be sure she never felt more wretched and hapless than when, wreathing her swan's neck haughtily, she spoke those words of scorn: