Not giving his friend’s change of deportment a thought, Julius hastened to his room, where the flowers had arrived before him, and folded his poetical billet-doux to send with them. How to direct it was the next question, and determining that it would be disrespectful, without his having an introduction, to address it to “Miss Lawrenson,” he substituted, in place of her name, to “The Blue Velvet Mantilla.” He then rang the bell, and giving the waiter who appeared, a liberal douceur to carry it across the street, and leave it for Miss Lawrenson, with the bouquet, he watched at the window until he saw it delivered to a servant at the door. The other boarders having left the parlors, he took possession of one of the front windows with a newspaper in his hand, and watched every movement across the way. In a short time the tall brunette emerged from the doorway, but her companion of the sunny ringlets did not appear. After dinner she really did present herself,—he was on the watch again;—and he noticed that, before she reached the steps, she glanced across with apparent curiosity, from which he conjectured that she had discovered, by means of the servant, whence the offering had come. And then, when she turned to look again, after she had pulled the bell, he was confident that she recognised his figure at the window. Towards evening he tore himself from his loadstone long enough to saunter out with the object of paying his respects to his uncle, but the old gentleman not being in the house, he did not enter, and returning to his room, he busied himself, as the evening before, in writing verses for a future occasion. Thus ended one day of folly, and the next was spent in a similar manner, except that he sent a costly English annual, as his second tribute, and, to his surprise and ecstasy, received, in return, by his messenger, a geranium leaf, enclosed in a sheet of rose-colored note-paper, in which was inscribed, in a dainty female hand, the single line,—“From the Blue Velvet Mantilla.”