a recollection, or a sight coldly seen during the course of an orderly walk. Then the boys would have the best of it. They would go away among all their friends, with the delights of boating and cricket, whereas the little girls would relapse into blue sashes and a correct appearance at dessert, followed, alas, in no small time, by complete loneliness when mamma went to London, and everybody was away. “Don’t let us think about it,” said little Bell; “it will be bad enough when it comes. Oh, mamma, come and play the _Tempête_. Alice is going to teach us. Harry, you be my partner, you dance a great deal the best.” This produced a cry of indignant protestation from Mary, whom they all called Marie with a very decided emphasis on the last syllable. “I pulled Roland about all last night,” she said, “when he was thinking of something else all the time; it is my turn to have Harry now.” “Don’t you see,” said Alice, “that Roland is much more your size? It doesn’t do to have a little one and a big one in the _Tempête_. He mustn’t think of anything else. Don’t you know Rol, if you don’t take a little trouble you will never learn to dance, and then no one will ask you out when you grow up. I should not like, for my part, when all the others went out to be always left moping at home.” “Much I’d mind,” said Roland with a precocious scorn of society. But just then the music struck up, and the lesson began. Roland was generally thinking of something else, but Harry threw himself into the dance with all the simple devotion of a predestined guardsman. That was to be a great part of his duty in life, and he gave himself up to it dutifully. The drawing-room was very large, partially divided by two pillars, which supported a roof painted with clouds and goddesses in the taste of the seventeenth century. The outer half was but partially lighted, while in the inner part all was bright. In the right-hand corner, behind Lady Markham, was a third room at right angles to this, like the transept crossing a long nave, divided from the drawing-room by curtains half-drawn, and faintly lighted too by a silver lamp. Thus the brilliant interior where the children were dancing was thrown up by two dimnesses; the girls in their light frocks, the bright faces and curls, the abundant light which showed the pictures on the walls, and all the details of the furniture, were thus doubly gay and bright in consequence. The children moving back and forward, Alice now here, now there, with one side and another as necessity demanded, flitting among them in all her softer grace of young womanhood; and the beautiful mother, the most beautiful of all, smiling on them from the piano, turning round to criticise and encourage, while her hands flashed over the keys, made the prettiest picture. There was an _abandon_ of innocent gaiety in the scene, an absence of every harsh tone and suggestion which made it perfect. Was there really no evil and trouble in the place