The curtain fell—the page raised her hand to his lips and passionately kissed it. A faint flush came up to the cheek of the girl, and a half-mocking smile flitted across her crimson lip. “You forget, young sir, that we are only _acting_. One would suppose from your manner that you are really in earnest.” The tone jarred on the highly excited feelings of the youth, and he sprang to his feet, the warm blood mantling his fine features with its sunny glow. “Your pardon, Miss Selwyn,—I forgot that we were acquaintances of but a day’s standing: yet if you could read the dreamer’s heart, you would not wear that smile which seems to mock my enthusiasm. You see before you a boy in years, but if the age of man may be measured by the wild aspirations—the burning hopes of a heart whose reveries are as passionate realities, I am not a mere youth. Oh beautiful,”—he continued, again kneeling before her, “my soul bows before the incarnation of a lovely spirit, in a form fitted to enshrine it. I feel that it is so, for _He_ who made you so gloriously lovely, would not place a cold or selfish heart in so exquisite a casket. My fancy has pictured such forms among the angels of heaven, and my unskillful hand has essayed to sketch them, but ever without success. When we met, my heart at once went forth to greet its predestined idol, and I felt that my dreams had found a reality.” The girl who listened to this wild rhapsody with a little fear and more surprise, was one who had been reared amid the artificial refinements of life, and it was probably the first genuine burst of feeling which had ever met her ear. The daughter of a man of wealth, and a mother devoted to fashion, her education had been carefully intended to model the character of the future belle. The parents looked on her unrivaled beauty with pride, and the vain mother anticipated the renewal of her own triumphs in the person of her daughter. Flattered and spoiled from childhood, it was quite wonderful that one natural trait should still have remained in her vain little heart; but nature sometimes asserts her power where art has done most to arrest and deface her beauties. Thus it was with Julia Selwyn. Sincere feeling even to the world-hardened ever finds an echo in the breast, and the mocking smile died from her lips as she felt the deep charm of the young stranger’s singular avowal. The two had met that morning for the first time. Arthur Mervin was the son of one of Mr. Selwyn’s early friends, who had that day arrived in Philadelphia, with a letter of introduction from his father, containing a request that Mr. Selwyn would aid the youth in obtaining admittance into the studio of a distinguished painter, as his pupil.