We value our powers to interest others most when we feel them leaving us, and it is not often that an old man's conversation can bring a flush or a tear to the cheek of youth and beauty. General Drysdale felt pleased as he marked the effect of his words. It recalled, who can say what associations with the time when he was a young man, and an object of more interest to the fair, and he became more and more warmed himself, out of sympathy, as he dwelt on the charities and the worth of Mary's parents. Julia, from her place across the table, remarked with surprise the General's unusual animation and loquacity, and his unwonted inattention to the high duty of the hour--dining. Mary's eyes were shining, and in her plain black dress with the roses, she bloomed a brighter flower than they, radiant in pure content. So, at least, it was evident that Kenneth thought. He sat at some distance from her, and had even to lean forward somewhat to see, but his eyes were ever travelling in that direction, and he appeared to answer the gentlemen on either side of him in so distraught and unsatisfactory a manner, that they soon ceased to disturb his musings by further talk. Julia had arrayed herself for conquest. She always dressed well and carefully, but on the present occasion her effort had risen into the region of art. Arrayed in some combination of white and green, which cured any tendency to yellowness in her complexion (and her shoulders at times were a trifle too suggestive of old waxwork), her pale eyes twinkled with quite an unwonted lustre, and there was positively a bloom on her cheeks and lips, while the falling ringlets were longer and more poetic than ever. When Briggs went into her room during the dressing hour, she had surprised her in the act of locking something very like a paint-box into her desk, and she had made a pretty sharp survey while she added the few pins that were all the office required of her; but, as she remarked subsequently, 'I could not take my oath of it, Mrs. Kipper; if she do, she manages uncommon clever.' Painting is a fine art, and Julia had studied it as well as all the others, and would have thought it but a paltry achievement to deceive the stupid eyes of poor Briggs.