"Save me!" a voice whispered. I clasped a figure in my arms, and, with a strange dis-ease, bore it down the shaking stairs and out into safety. It was Mildred. I knew _that_ directly I clasped her. "Stand back," cried the crowd. "Every one's safe," cried a fireman. The flames leaped from every window. The sky grew redder and redder. I sprang from the hands that would have held me. I leaped up the steps. I crawled up the stairs. Suddenly the whole horror of the situation came on me. "_As long as my picture remains in the ebony frame._" What if picture and frame perished together? I fought with the fire, and with my own choking inability to fight with it. I pushed on. I must save my picture. I reached the drawing-room. As I sprang in I saw my lady--I swear it--through the smoke and the flames, hold out her arms to me--to me--who came too late to save her, and to save my own life's joy. I never saw her again. Before I could reach her, or cry out to her, I felt the floor yield beneath my feet, and I fell into the fiery hell below. * * * * * How did they save me? What does that matter? They saved me somehow--curse them. Every stick of my aunt's furniture was destroyed. My friends pointed out that, as the furniture was heavily insured, the carelessness of a nightly-studious housemaid had done me no harm. No harm! That was how I won and lost my only love. I deny, with all my soul in the denial, that it was a dream. There are no such dreams. Dreams of longing and pain there are in plenty, but dreams of complete, of unspeakable happiness--ah, no--it is the rest of life that is the dream. But if I think that, why have I married Mildred, and grown stout and dull and prosperous? I tell you it is all _this_ that is the dream; my dear lady only is the reality. And what does it matter what one does in a dream? JOHN CHARRINGTON'S WEDDING. No one ever thought that May Forster would marry John Charrington; but he thought differently, and things which John Charrington intended had a queer way of coming to pass. He asked her to marry him before he went up to Oxford. She laughed and refused him. He asked her again next time he came home. Again she laughed, tossed her dainty blonde head, and again refused. A third time he asked her; she said it was becoming a confirmed bad habit, and laughed at him more than ever. John was not the only man who wanted to marry her: she was the belle of our village _coterie,_ and we were all in love with her more or less; it was a sort of fashion, like heliotrope ties or Inverness capes. Therefore we were as much annoyed as surprised when John Charrington walked into our little local Club--we held it in a loft over the saddler's, I remember--and invited us all to his wedding. "Your wedding?" "You don't mean it?" "Who's the happy fair? When's it to be?" John Charrington filled his pipe and lighted it before he replied. Then he said--