Having looked at the stars, and profited by their quiet teaching, Harry went in a sadder and a wiser man, resolved, ere he slept that night, to confess his fault, and, if it might be so, obtain Alice’s forgiveness. But Alice, tired and unhappy, had gone to bed, and cried herself to sleep like a weary child; and when Harry entered her room, he found her lying with her head pillowed on her arm, and the tear-drops scarcely dried upon her long silken eyelashes, as soundly asleep as though care, and sin, and sorrow, were evils of which her philosophy had never dreamed--so Coverdale could only invoke a silent blessing upon her, and hasten to follow her example by going to bed and to sleep himself. Thus an opportunity was lost of regaining the “high estate” in his wife’s affections, from which he had fallen by reason of his inconsiderate selfishness, and hasty and impetuous temper; and it is a fact equally true and trying, that an opportunity once lost never returns, even an advertisement in the _Times_ would fail to regain it. One of the strangest and least comprehensive of psychological phenomena is the total change produced in our thoughts, feelings, opinions, hopes, fears, sympathies, antipathies, and all the other component parts which make up that wonderful spiritual steam-engine, the mind of man, by a good night’s sleep. We go to bed desperately in love with some charming girl we have flirted with half the evening, despising her cruel old male parent, who _would_ come and disturb our _tête-à-tête_, and take her away at least an hour sooner than anybody not utterly callous to all the finer feelings of human nature would have dreamed of doing; and having with unchristian malignity her tall cousin in the Blues, who, having known her from her cradle upwards, dared to call her “Gussie” to our very face--we sleep soundly, our mind lies fallow for some six hours, and lo! a change has come o’er us; our goddess has stepped down from her pedestal, and appears a very average specimen of white muslined femininity and flirtation, whom her father has improved into quite an amiable model _paterfamilias_, at whose patient benignity in remaining, to please his daughter, at an evening party till half-past three a.m. we actually marvel; and as to that fine young fellow her cousin, we are really shocked when we recall our unchristian feelings towards him, and, as some slight compensation, mentally book him for an invite to that dinner at Blackwall which we propose bestowing upon a dozen of our very particular friends, in the unlikely event of our exchequer holding out till the white-bait season. Thus, by the next morning, Coverdale had slept off the sharp edge of his penitence, and when Alice began by a great effort to refer to the events of the previous day, with the intention of confessing herself in the wrong, and asking forgiveness, Harry, dreading a scene with a degree of horror equally masculine and