“We have settled all about the seats, and about the refreshments,” said Mr. Tottenham, with an air of content. “You great people will sit in front, and the members of the establishment who are non-performers, on the back seats; and the grandest flunkies that ever were seen shall serve the ices. Oh! John is nothing to them. They shall be divinely tall, and powdered to their eyebrows; in new silk stockings taken from our very best boxes, for that night only. Ah, children, you don’t know what is before you! Miss Jemima Robinson is to be Serjeant Buzfuz. She is sublime in her wig. She is out of the fancy department, and is the best of saleswomen. We are too busy, we have too much to do to spend time in improving our minds, like you and your young ladies, Mary; but you shall see how much native genius Tottenham’s can produce.” Harry Thornleigh kept very quiet during this talk. His head was still rather giddy, poor fellow; his balance was still disturbed by the face and the eyes and the look which had come to him like a revelation. It would be vain to say that he had never been in love before; he had been in love a dozen times, lightly, easily, without much trouble to himself or anyone else. But now he did not know what had happened to him. He kept thinking what she would be likely to like, what he could get for her--if, indeed, he ever was again admitted to her presence, and had that voiceless demand made upon him. Oh! what a fool he had been, Harry thought, to waste his means and forestall his allowance, and spend money for no good, when all the time there was existing in the world a being like that! I don’t know what his allowance had to do with it, and neither, I suppose, did Harry; but the thought went vaguely through his head amid a flood of other thoughts equally incoherent. He was glad of Edgar’s absence, though he could not have told why; and when Lady Mary began, in the drawing-room after dinner, to describe the new-comer to her husband, he sat listening with glaring eyes till she returned to that stale and contemptible joke about Mrs. Smith, upon which Harry retired in dudgeon, feeling deeply ashamed of her levity. He went to the smoking-room and lit his cigar, and then he strolled out, feeling a want of fresh air, and of something cool and fresh to calm him down. It was a lovely starlight night, very cold and keen. All the mists and heavy vapours had departed with the day, and the sky over Tottenham’s was ablaze with those silvery celestial lights, which woke I cannot tell how many unusual thoughts, and what vague inexplicable emotion and delicious sadness in Harry’s mind. Something was the matter with him; he could have cried, though nobody was less inclined to cry in general; the water kept coming to his eyes, and yet his soul was lost in a vague sense of happiness. How lovely the stars were; how stupid to sit indoors in a poky room, and listen to bad jokes and foolish laughter when it was