marketable value; listening to soft compliments; seeing her wishes, ever so slightly hinted, obeyed with alacrity; breathing once more that atmosphere in which she was reared, but from which she seemed to have been long estranged,--Barbara felt more and more like Barbara Lexden, while Barbara Churchill faded hazily away. The dull, dull street,--the dead, dead life,--the poverty which prescribed constant care in the household management,--the dowdy dresses and second-hand manners of the inhabitants of the quarter,--the daily vexations and cares and wrong-way rubbings, seemed all to belong to some hideous dream, while the real existence passed into the former life with a pleasant addition in the person of Frank. The pleasure was brief enough, and she woke to all the horrors rendered doubly bitter by the short renewal of bygone joys. The clock had struck twelve, the ballroom had vanished, and she was again Cinderella with haunting memory for her glass-slipper. The prince remained, certainly; but he was no longer a prince; he had bad tempers, and was peevish and jealous, and thoroughly mortal. She had returned to the dust and dreariness of Great Adullam Street, and the rattling cabs, and Mrs. Churchill in her old black-silk dress, and the Hebrews opposite smoking their cigars at the open windows in the hot summer evenings. She could scarcely fancy that there was a world where people dressed in full muslin, and pink-crape bonnets, or bewitching hats; where business was unknown, and work never heard of; where there were perpetual croquet-parties and picnics and horticultural fêtes; where there were night-drives homeward in open carriages after Richmond dinners; and where the men talked of something else than when Brown was going to bring out his poems, or what a slating Smith's novel had had in the _Scourge_. In that brief respite from her weary life, she had heard those around her talking of their plans to be carried out on the then occurring break-up of the season; she had heard girls talk with rapture of their approaching visits to German Spas and Italian lakes; she had heard arrangements made for meeting in English country-houses, where she had formerly been an eagerly sought-for guest; or at fashionable seaboards, where she had been the reigning belle. And she came back with the full knowledge that a fortnight's run to some cockney watering-place, handy of access to London, where she could live in cheap lodgings and play, a very undistinguished part, would be all the relaxation she could possibly hope for. And all this sunk into her soul, and made her wretched and discontented, and formed the wandering isles of night which dashed the very source and fount of her day.