It was the card Batty had found in the Paris hotel, which was the first one that came to his hand. He knew it by a crease in the corner, and pushed it back again with a little shudder which he could not account for: for indeed the Batty episode had faded into unimportance already. The card, however, was given and accepted with a gracious smile and bow. That celestial address, the “Junior Minerva,” impressed Mrs. Drainham, as it had impressed Frederick’s less desirable acquaintance. A little conversation of the most amicable character ensued, winding up by an invitation to dinner for that evening. “And you will come too, my dear,” said the doctor’s wife; “though it is a thing you could not do in ordinary circumstances. Nobody could reflect upon you for departing from the usual rules in your position. I will ask no one to meet you. Mr. Eastwood will bring you to us at seven o’clock.” Innocent had listened to this conversation vaguely, in a kind of stupor, feeling as if they spoke a language of which she had never before heard a word. Greek would have been as intelligible to her. It even hurt her vaguely that they seemed to understand each other in the language which she could not understand. She had been thrust back upon herself, which is always painful--thrust back after, as she thought, a gleam of new life and a new world, into the old dreary world, much drearier than ever by the contrast, though it was but momentary. The visionary intensity of a mind living in its own sensations almost annihilates space and time; and though it was but half an hour since Frederick Eastwood came upon the scene at all, there was room enough in that half hour to make the girl feel the force of two revolutions--the one from her dreary solitude into a new sphere of brightness, tenderness, companionship, which was as a revelation of heaven to her; and the other, a dreary circle back again, out of the light, out of the society, out of the strange delightful newness which seemed to have changed her being all in a moment. The one was a sudden sun-rising, the other an equally sudden eclipse. She had been raised up to heaven and then suddenly tossed down again. The amount of emotion involved was quite excessive and extravagant, out of all keeping with the momentary character of the incidents; but Innocent was not aware of this, nor could have believed how utterly unimportant to the others was the half hour which subjected her to such vicissitudes of feeling as she had never before felt in her life. She made no reply to Mrs. Drainham’s invitation, which, indeed, she scarcely comprehended. She did not understand the civilities with which her two companions parted, Frederick accompanying Mrs. Drainham to the door. What she imagined was that he had thus gone away without taking any further notice of her, and that all was over, and the new hope to which she seemed to have a right, taken from her. She sat in a