That still dream of Regent's Park in sunlight and snow he carried about with him as a vision--a picture--even amidst the blustering westerly winds, and the riven seas that sprung over the rocks and swelled and roared away into the caves of Gribun and Bourg. There was no snow as yet up here at Dare, but wild tempests shaking the house to its foundations, and brief gleams of stormy sunlight lighting up the gray spindrift as it was whirled shoreward from the breaking seas; and then days of slow and mournful rain, with Staffa, and Lunga, and the Dutchman become mere dull patches of blurred purple--when they were visible at all--on the leaden-hued and coldly rushing Atlantic. "I have passed through the gates of the Palace of Art," she wrote, two days later, from the calmer and sunnier South; "and I have entered its mysterious halls, and I have breathed for a time the hushed atmosphere of wonderland. Do you remember meeting a Mr. Lemuel at any time at Mrs. Ross's--a man with a strange, gray, tired face, and large, wan, blue eyes, and an air as if he were walking in a dream? Perhaps not; but, at all events, he is a great painter, who never exhibits to the vulgar crowd, but who is worshipped by a select circle of devotees; and his house is a temple dedicated to high art, and only profound believers are allowed to cross the threshold. Oh dear me! I am not a believer; but how can I help that? Mr. Lemuel is a friend of papa's, however; they have mysterious talks over milk-jugs of colored stone, and small pictures with gilt skies, and angels in red and blue. Well, yesterday he called on papa, and requested his permission to ask me to sit--or, rather, stand--for the heroine of his next great work, which is to be an allegorical one, taken from the 'Faery Queen' or the 'Morte d'Arthur,' or some such book. I protested; it was no use. 'Good gracious, papa,' I said, 'do you know what he will make of me? He will give me a dirty brown face, and I shall wear a dirty green dress; and no doubt I shall be standing beside a pool of dirty blue water, with a purple sky overhead, and a white moon in it. The chances are he will dislocate my neck, and give me gaunt cheeks like a corpse, with a serpent under my foot, or a flaming dragon stretching his jaws behind my back.' Papa was deeply shocked at my levity. Was it for me, an artist (bless the mark!), to baulk the high aims of art? Besides it was vaguely hinted that, to reward me, certain afternoon-parties were to be got up; and then, when I had got out of Merlin-land, and assured myself I was human by eating lunch, I was to meet a goodly company of distinguished folk--great poets, and one or two more mystic painters, a dilettante duke, and the nameless crowd of worshippers who would come to sit at the feet of all these, and sigh adoringly, and shake their heads over the Philistinism of English society. I don't care for ugly mediaeval maidens myself, nor for allegorical serpents, nor for bloodless men with hollow cheeks,