Blanche Enville sat on the terrace, on a warm September afternoon, with a half-finished square of wool-work in her hand, into which she was putting a few stitches every now and then. She chose to imagine herself hard at work; but it would have fatigued nobody to count the number of rows which she had accomplished since she came upon the terrace. The work which Blanche was really attending to was the staple occupation of her life,--building castles in the air. At various times she had played all manner of parts, from a captive queen, a persecuted princess, or a duchess in disguise, down to a fisherman's daughter saving a vessel in danger by the light in her cottage window. No one who knows how to erect the elegant edifices above referred to, will require to be told that whatever might be her temporary position, Blanche always acquitted herself to perfection: and that any of the airy _dramatis personae_ who failed to detect her consummate superiority was either compassionately undeceived, or summarily crushed, at the close of the drama. Are not these fantasies one of the many indications that all along life's pathway, the old serpent is ever whispering to us his first lie,--"Ye shall be as gods?" At the close of a particularly sensational scene, when Blanche had just succeeded in escaping from a convent prison wherein the wicked. Queen her sister had confined her, the idea suddenly flashed upon the oppressed Princess that Aunt Rachel would hardly be satisfied with the state of the kettle-holder; and coming down in an instant from air to earth, she determinately and compunctiously set to work again. The second row of stitches was growing under her hands when, by that subtle psychological process which makes us aware of the presence of another person, though we may have heard and seen nothing, Blanche became conscious that she was no longer alone. She looked up quickly, into the face of a stranger; but no great penetration was needed to guess that the young man before her was the shipwrecked Spaniard. Blanche's first idea on seeing him, was a feeling of wonder that her father should have thought him otherwise than "well-favoured." He was handsome enough, she thought, to be the hero of any number of dramas.