Carruthers was quite right. One fellow at least had lost his head after the beauty of the season, and he was Cardonnel, of the--Lancers, as fine a fellow, as Philip said, as any in the Queen's, but a dreadful detrimental in the eyes of all chaperones, because he was but the fourth son of one of the poorest peers in the United Kingdom, a fact which gave him an ægis from all assaults matrimonial, and a freedom from all smiles and wiles, traps and gins, which Goodwood was accustomed to tell him he bitterly envied him, and on which Cardonnel had fervently congratulated himself, till he came under the fire of the Hon. Val's large luminous eyes one night, when he was levelling his glass from his stall at Lady Marabout's box, to take a look at the new belle, as advised to do by that most fastidious female critic, Vane Steinberg. Valencia Valletort's luminous eyes had gleamed that night under their lashes, and pierced through the lenses of his lorgnon. He saw her, and saw nothing but her afterwards, as men looking on the sun keep it on their retina to the damage and exclusion of all other objects. Physical beauty, even when it is a little bit soulless, is an admirable weapon for instantaneous slaughter, and the trained and pruned standard roses show a very effective mass of bloom; though, as Lady Marabout's floral tastes and experiences told her, they don't give one the lasting pleasure that a careless bough of wild rose will do, with its untutored grace and its natural fragrance. With the standard you see we keep in the artificial air of the horticultural tent, and are never touched out of it for a second; its perfume seems akin to a bouquet, and its destiny is, we are sure, to a parterre. The wild-rose fragrance breathes of the hill-side and the woodlands, and brings back to us soft touches of memory, of youth, of a fairer life and a purer air than that in which we are living now.