cares which poor aunty, weeping, was giving to the dead. The dead! Was that his wife? Amanda! She whom he had wooed and worshipped; who had given him rapture, misery, disgust, all mingled together; who had been the one prize he had won in his life, and the one great blight which had fallen upon that life? Was it she who was now called by that dismal title? who lay there now, rigid and silent, taking no note of what was done about her, finding no fault? Frederick stood in the moonlight, and looked up at her window with a sense of unreality, impossibility, which could not be put into words; but a few hours before he had been there, with his little cousin, glad to escape from the surroundings he hated, from Batty’s odious companionship, from Amanda’s termagant fits. He had felt it a halcyon moment, a little gentle oasis which refreshed him in the midst of the desert which by his own folly his life had become. And now--good heavens! was it true?--in a moment this desert was past, the consequences of his folly over, his life his own again to do something better with it. The world and the garden, and the broad lines of the moonlight, seemed to turn round with him as he stood and gazed at the house and tried to understand what had come upon him. It may be thought strange that this should have been the first sensation which roused him out of the dull and stupefying pain of the shock he had just received. Frederick was not a man of high mould to begin with, but he was proud and sensitive to all that went against his self-love, his sense of importance, his consciousness of personal and family superiority--and he had the tastes of an educated man, and clung to the graces and refinements of life, except at those moments which no one knew of, when he preferred pleasure, so-called, to everything, moments of indulgence which had nothing to do with his revealed and visible existence. He had been wounded in the very points at which he was most susceptible, by Amanda and her belongings. She, herself, had been an offence to him even in the first moments of his passion, and, as his passion waned and disappeared altogether, what had he not been compelled to bear? He had brought it upon himself, he was aware, and he had believed that he would have to bear it all his life, or most of his life. And now, in a moment, he was free! But Frederick was not unnatural in exultation over his deliverance. The shock of seeing her lying dead upon that bed, the strange, pitiful, remorseful sense, which every nature not wholly deadened feels at sight of that sudden blow which has spared him and struck another--that sudden deprivation of the “sweet light,” the air, the movement of existence which we still enjoy, but which the other has lost--affected him with that subduing solemnity of feeling which often does duty for grief. How could any imagination follow Amanda into the realms of spiritual existence? Her life had been