thought first and only of her; she thought of a great many other things, and then finally of him. Common consent allots this state of feeling to the man, but common consent is often wrong. It depends upon which of the two, man or woman, is the most deeply in earnest. “_L’un qui se laisse aimer_” is not always of the masculine gender, as a great many people know. Marjory came up to him with an eagerness and satisfaction which would have been--oh! how delightful--had there not been other causes for it. She held out her hand to him, and then took his arm as if he had been her--brother. Yes, a great deal too much as if he had been her brother; but let that pass; it was very pleasant all the same, and then she said, “How good of you to come! but I knew you would come. I felt myself safe in appealing to you.” She had thought then of appealing to some one else! This was not satisfactory; but Fanshawe was too happy at that moment to insist upon having everything his own way. “Could there be any question about that?” he said, smiling at her with that look of imbecile emotion which no woman can mistake. Marjory, however, was too deeply absorbed with her own private anxieties to pay much heed to his looks. She said nothing more that could give him an opening for the disclosure of any personal feeling; but rushed into her story at once, a proceeding which was flattering, yet unsatisfactory. It was with an effort that he brought himself to attend. Even though it was the voice which most interested him in the world which spoke, herself, her presence, the sensation of her vicinity, the glimpse of a new world about him--a world entirely identified with her, a new scene of which he knew nothing save through her, strange people passing who sent her greetings from over the way, smiles as she passed them--did so entirely occupy and bewilder the new-comer, that it cost him as serious an effort as he had ever made in his life to understand what Marjory was saying to him, or even to listen to what she said. She told him such a story as might have caught the ear of any man capable of listening, but yet somehow it did not catch Fanshawe’s. Her hand on his arm, her head bent forward, so much more eagerly than he had ever seen it before, even the fall of her dress, the very hanging sleeve that touched him, the veil that once fluttered across his face, all and every one of these things dissipated his mind. He had no intellect at all to speak of at that moment, and hers was in the liveliest action. By moments, a half comic sense of his incapacity to come up to her requirements seized upon him. He grew rueful and humble as he was compelled over and over again to ask for new explanations. “Forgive me, I did not quite catch what you said. Will you tell me that again, Miss Heriot? I am stupid. I did not quite make out--”