Thunder—crash—thunder—crash—drum—rattle—a confused, though eloquent, running backward and forward of sounds, the rings flashing like lightning! Another crash—louder—a great deal of crossing hands—violent strides from one end of the instrument to the other—prodigious displays of strength on the part of the fair performer—a terrific shake! “What desperate exertion!” thought the General; “and all to produce a soulless noise.” Then followed a fearful banditti of octaves—another crash, louder and more prolonged than the rest; and she looked up with a triumphant smile—a smile conveying the same idea as the pause of an opera-dancer after a most wonderful _pirouette_. “Do you keep a tuner in the house, my dear young lady?” inquired the General. If a look could have annihilated, he would have crumbled into ashes; but he only returned it with admiration, thinking, “How astonishingly like her aunt, when she refused me the second time!” “And that is fashionable music, Miss Montford? I have lived so long out of England, only hearing the music of Beethoven, and Mozart, and Mendelssohn, I was not aware that noise was substituted for power, and that execution had banished expression. Dear me!—why, the piano is vibrating at this moment! Poor thing! How long does a piano last you, Miss Montford?” Isabel was losing her temper, when fortunately her aunt—still Miss Vere—came to the rescue. The lovers of thirty years past, would have met any where else as strangers. The once rounded and queen-like form of the elder Isabel was shorn of its grace and beauty; of all her attributes, of all her attractions, dignity only remained; and it was that high-bred, innate dignity which can never be acquired, and is never forgotten. She had not lost the eighth of an inch of her height, and her gray hair was braided in full folds over her fair but wrinkled brow. Isabel Montford looked so exactly what Isabel Vere had been, that General Gordon was sorely perplexed; Isabel Vere, if truth must be told, had taken extra pains with her dress; her niece had met the General the night before, and her likeness to her aunt had so recalled the past, that his promised visit to his old sweetheart (as he still called her) had fluttered and agitated her more than she thought it possible an interview with _any man_ could do; she quarreled with her beautiful gray hair, she cast off her black velvet dress disdainfully, and put on a blue _Moire antique_. (She remembered how much the Captain—no, the General, once admired blue.) She was not a coquette; even gray hair at fifty-five does not cure coquetry where it has existed in all its strength; but, for the sake of her dear niece, she wished to look as well as possible. She wondered why she had so often refused “poor Gordon.” She had been all her life of too delicate a mind to be a husband-hunter, too well satisfied with her position to calculate how it could be improved, and yet, she did not hesitate to confess to herself