The young men had sat talking a few minutes, waiting for Muriel, when Mrs. Eastman and Emily came in, and they rose again to make their salutations. Emily was in her most sumptuous mood, and smiled serenely as she entered and curtseyed down into a chair. Mrs. Eastman gave her hand to the young men, whom she loved as much as if they were her own sons, and standing near Harrington, with her arm in his, affectionately asked for his health. “You are looking pale, John,” she said, with motherly solicitude. “Too much study I’m afraid.” “Not at all, mother,” said Harrington, gaily—he always called Mrs. Eastman “mother.” “Celestial pale, the student’s proper hue, you know; and spite of my paleness, I’m strong and well.” “Nevertheless, I wish you had some of Richard’s roses,” she said playfully. “My roses, indeed!” rattled Wentworth. “Why, Mrs. Eastman, I’m so much in love with Harrington’s intellectual pallor that I’m thinking of trying some of Jules Hauel’s lily-white cosmetic to get my face of the same tint. For what is—hurrah! Here comes the fairy prince!” he cried, breaking off, as the door of a chamber adjoining the studio opened, and a beautiful and brilliant figure came forward into the room. It was Muriel, transformed by the vivid and gorgeous dress of a fairy prince—such a dress as the artists of fairy books give to Percinet or Valentine; and in it she was courtly and noble as Shakspeare’s Rosalind, when Rosalind wore “man’s apparel” in the gay greenwood of Arden. A year before when she had resolved to take fencing lessons of Harrington, she had devised this dress, and with a woman’s natural disposition to ornamentation, and with her own special wish to throw festal grace and the hues of romance even on her hours of exercise, she had brought to the fashioning of her attire all the richness of her lavish fancy. To wear anything that was ugly even at her gymnastics, or to make her exercise a sober business and not a poetic pleasure, was quite impossible for Muriel. She must clothe her muscularities with beauty, as Harmodius wreathed his sword with myrtle. So she gilded her foils and masks, and fashioned her garb in fairy magnificence. The dress was a cymar of vivid crimson silk, loosely belted at the waist, and adorned with broidered arabesques of gold. The bodice, cut loose to the form, with large sleeves, ruffled with lace at the wrists, had a frilled ruffle of lace emerging from the bosom, and rising in a sort of fraise around the neck, in exquisite keeping with the refined beauty of the countenance which bloomed above it. A little crimson cap, with a thick, swailing, white plume, rested lightly on the head, and the glorious amber hair was arranged to lie on the back of the neck like the locks of a page. The skirt of the dress, also of crimson silk, broidered with golden arabesques, and deeply bordered with heavy, gold fringe, fell in graceful folds, ending just above the knee, and white silk hose, with crimson