He knew well the difficulty that would be before him should he once dare to accept, and then undertake to alter. She would be as a tigress to him,--as a tigress fighting for her young. That work of altering is so ungracious, so precarious, so incapable of success in its performance! The long-winded, far-fetched, high-stilted, unintelligible sentence which you elide with so much confidence in your judgment, has been the very apple of your author’s eye. In it she has intended to convey to the world the fruits of her best meditation for the last twelve months. Thinking much over many things in her solitude, she has at last invented a truth, and there it lies. That wise men may adopt it, and candid women admire it, is the hope, the solace, and at last almost the certainty of her existence. She repeats the words to herself, and finds that they will form a choice quotation to be used in coming books. It is for the sake of that one newly-invented truth,--so she tells herself, though not quite truly,--that she desires publication. You come,--and with a dash of your pen you annihilate the precious gem! Is it in human nature that you should be forgiven? Mr. Brown had had his experiences, and understood all this well. Nevertheless he loved dearly to please a pretty woman. And it must be acknowledged that the letters of Josephine were such as to make him sure that there might be an adventure if he chose to risk the pages of his magazine. The novel had taken him four long evenings to read, and at the end of the fourth he sat thinking of it for an hour. Fortune either favoured him or the reverse,--as the reader may choose to regard the question,--in this, that there was room for the story in his periodical if he chose to take it. He wanted a novel,--but then he did not want feminine metaphysics. He sat thinking of it, wondering in his mind how that little smiling, soft creature with the gray eyes, and the dimples, and the pretty walking-dress, could have written those interminable pages as to the questionable criminality of crime; whether a card-sharper might not be a hero; whether a murderer might not sacrifice his all, even the secret of his murder, for the woman he loved; whether devil might not be saint, and saint devil. At the end of the hour he got up from his chair, stretched himself, with his hands in his trousers-pockets, and said aloud, though alone, that he’d be d---- if he would. It was an act of great self-denial, a triumph of principle over passion. But though he had thus decided, he was not minded to throw over altogether either Josephine or her novel. He might still, perhaps, do something for her if he could find her amenable to reason. Thinking kindly of her, very anxious to know her personally, and still desirous of seeing the adventure to the end, he wrote the following note to her that evening:-- ‘Cross Bank, St. John’s Wood, “Saturday Night. “MY DEAR MISS DE MONTMORENCI,