If I have mistaken the originator of so beautiful and touching an illustration, I humbly beg his pardon, but I think it is Alphonse Karr who teaches, in his remarks on the great idolatry of all times and nations, that it is well to sow plenty of flowers in that prolific soil which is fertilised by the heart’s sunshine and watered by its tears—plenty of flowers, the brighter, the sweeter, the more fragile, perhaps, the better. Winter may cut them down indeed to the cold earth, yet spring-time brings another crop as fair, as fresh, as fragile, and as easily replaced as those that bloomed before. But it is unwise to plant a tree; _because, if that tree be once torn up by the roots, the flowers will never grow over the barren place again_! The Marquise had not indeed planted the tree, but she had allowed it unwittingly to grow. Perhaps she would never have confessed its existence to herself had it not thus been forcibly torn away by roots that had for years twined deeper and deeper among all its gentlest and all its strongest feelings, till they had become as the very fibres of her heart. It is needless to say that the Marquise was a woman elevated both by disposition and education above the meaner and pettier weaknesses of her sex. If she was masculine in her physical courage and moral recklessness of consequences, she was masculine also in a certain generosity of spirit and noble disdain for anything like malice or foul-play. Jealousy with her—and, like all strong natures, she could feel jealousy very keenly—would never be visited on the object that had caused it. She would hate and punish herself under the torture; she might even be goaded to hate and punish the man at whose hands she was suffering; but she would never have injured the woman whom she preferred, and, indeed, supported by a scornful pride, would have taken a strange morbid pleasure in enhancing her own pain by ministering to that woman’s happiness. Therefore she was saved a keen pang now. A pang that might have rendered her agony too terrible to endure. She had not concealed from herself to-night that the thrill of delight she experienced from the arrival of succour was due rather to the person who brought it than to the assistance itself; but almost ere she had time to realise its charm the illusion had been dispelled, and she felt that, dream as it all was, she had been wakened ere she had time to dream it out. And now it seemed to her that nothing would be so good as the excitement of another skirmish, another struggle, and a sudden death, with the cheers of these brave Englishmen ringing in her ears. A death that Cerise would never forget had been encountered for her safety, that _he_ would sometimes remember, and remembering, accord a smile and a sigh to the beauty he had neglected, and the devotion he had never known till too late.