as, what we, in our wisdoms, considered a just penance for his having helped himself to one so much too young and too pretty for him.” During the comments which followed, Sir Archibald caught the sound of Henry’s voice, which had the exact tone of his father’s, particularly in a laugh. He glanced his eye in that direction, and now seemed to see young St. Aubin for the first time, though he was seated exactly opposite to him. Clouds gathered on Oswald’s brow, and he directed across the table looks so fierce and so portentous, that the whole company became alarmed. The ladies rose to retire, and Lord Arandale, during the move which their exit occasioned, gave Henry a hint to keep as much as possible out of Sir Archibald’s view. CHAPTER VIII. “Yes, once did resolution fail.” As it was still day-light some of the ladies walked to the gardens, others strolled about near the doors; Lady Susan disappeared without speaking to any one; Frances went to seek her; Julia flung herself on a sofa in the great drawing-room, which she found quite deserted. She lay so much absorbed by her own meditations, as to be unconscious of the lapse of time. It became quite dark. Every thing was still about her. At length she heard a very soft step approaching through the ante-room, and a figure in black appeared within the door, which was half open. It held in its hand a long white wand tipped with flame: it glided on with a step, now that it was on the deep Turkey carpet of the drawing-room, quite noiseless: it touched branches and candelabras with its magic wand, and left floods of light behind it: it proceeded through the glass doors of a green-house, at the further end of this spacious apartment, and continued crowning with radiance lustres that hung, at certain intervals, over the centre walk, till the whole long perspective became a dazzling maze of real and reflected illumination. Julia’s eyes admired and, mechanically, followed what they beheld long before her comprehension was aroused to any understanding of what was going forward: at length she smiled as she recollected that such had been her abstraction, that, for the first few moments after the entrance of the figure, she had viewed it and its operations with as much of almost superstitious astonishment as if she had never before seen a decent old butler, who was too well-bred to wear creaking shoes, light up a drawing-room. She arose from the sofa, passed the man on his return through the great room, entered the greenhouse, proceeded along the centre walk between rows of orange trees, and in a blaze of light, till the white marble footway, branching off in two directions, led round on both sides towards a kind of arbour of sweets, which was screened from the entrance and principal walk by the intervention of an immense circular stand, crowded from the marble floor to the glazed roof with numberless exotics. Here she seated herself.