The beautiful brunette did not obey, but raised her proud patrician head from its drooping curve, and vaguely sighed. Muriel rose, lightly glided over to her, clasped her waist with both arms, and standing a little on one side and bending forward—a fresh and full-grown lily—a fair, gay woman, with the grace and glimmer of a bewitching child in her womanhood—looked with a naive and radiant, half-mocking, half-serious smile, into the face of her she had called the gorgeous queen-rose of Ispahan. Presently she began to lead her to the couch. Emily held back, but Muriel’s clasp tightened, and yielding to the firm, fairy strength with which, though strong, she was unable to cope, Emily suffered herself to be conducted to the seat. “Ah, stayaway,” blithely said Muriel, sitting beside her, and playfully shaking a finger at her in sportive reproach, “who is the stronger now? You are fairly captured, and I hold you my prisoner until peace is concluded.” Emily, amused by this pleasantry, showed the pearls of her red mouth in a brilliant laugh over her indolently folded arms. “And if you could only fence,” continued Muriel, in the same tone as before, “I would conquer a peace at the point of my rapier. Can’t I persuade you to learn, for that especial purpose?” “Indeed you can’t,” said Emily. “It’s not in the line of my accomplishments, though you have included it in yours. Bless me! Muriel, what will you be learning next? Dancing on the tight-rope, I suppose, or standing on one toe on the back of a galloping horse, like a circus girl.” “That would be fine, dear, wouldn’t it!” returned Muriel. “Decidedly, I never thought of the tight-rope or the circus horse before. It is really an idea! But let us cry truce to this nonsense, for indeed I have something to say to you.” Moving a little nearer to Emily as she spoke, her frolic manner vanished, and her face grew sweetly serious. “When you found me so entranced this morning,” she said, after a long pause, “I was thinking of you, dear Emily—in part of you. You know how much I love you. We grew up together from girlhood, and among all your friends there is none whose happiness is more closely entwined in yours than mine.” Emily’s heart beat fast, and the moisture gathered in her down-dropped eyes. She did not look up, but she felt that the clear eyes of Muriel were fixed on her face. “We have had many happy hours together, Emily,” murmured the low, sweet voice; “and when you came here two weeks ago, on this visit, it seemed that the happiest hours of all, both for you and me, were beginning. Happiest for me because I thought that what makes life sweetest to us all had come to you—here—in this house.” There was another pause, in which Emily bowed her head, with an inexpressible sense of passionate sorrow.