He had knocked down Tom Dupuy. That was a good thing as far as it went! For that at least, if for nothing else, Nora was duly grateful to him. But had she gone too far in thanking him? Would he accept it as a proof that she meant him to reopen the closed question between them? Nora hoped not, for that—that at anyrate was now finally settled. She could never, never, never marry a brown man! And yet, how much nicer and bolder he was than all the other men she saw around her! Nora liked him even for his faults. That proud, frank, passionate Noel temperament of his, which many girls would have regarded with some fear and no little misgiving, exactly suited her West Indian prejudices and her West Indian ideal. His faults were the faults of a proud aristocracy; and it was entirely as a member of a proud aristocracy herself that Nora Dupuy lived and moved and had her being. A man like Edward Hawthorn she could like and respect; but a man like Harry Noel she could admire and love—if, ah if, he were only not a brown man! What a terrible cross-arrangement of fate that the one man who seemed otherwise exactly to suit her girlish ideal, should happen to belong remotely to the one race between which and her own there existed in her mind for ever and ever an absolutely fixed and irremovable barrier! So Nora, too, lay awake all night; and all night long she thought but of one thing and one person—the solitary man she could never, never, never conceivably marry. And Harry, for his part, thinking to himself, on his tumbled pillow, at Savannah Garden, said to his own heart over and over and over again: ‘I shall love her for ever; I can never while I live leave off loving her. But after what occurred yesterday and last night, I mustn’t dream for worlds of asking her a third time. I know now what it was she meant when she spoke about the barrier between us. Poor girl! how very wild of her! How strange that she should think in her own soul a Dupuy of Trinidad superior in position to one of the ancient Lincolnshire Noels!’ For pride always sees everything from its own point of view alone, and never for a moment succeeds in admitting to itself the pride of others as being equally reasonable and natural with its own. SOME PET LIZARDS. BY CATHERINE C. HOPLEY.