Mr. Tredethlyn did not trouble himself to wonder what the piece had been about. He saw somebody killed--a villain it was to be supposed, since the crowd set up a well-organized yell of rejoicing; then there was a reconciliation, an embrace, a young lady in short-waisted white muslin clasped to the breast of a young man in a long-tailed blue coat and low top-boots, adorned with many-coloured bunches of riband. Then the band broke into the stately measure of the “Marseillaise Hymn,” the crowd clamoured a shrill chorus, and the curtain fell. It was while the curtain was descending very slowly to that triumphant music that Francis Tredethlyn saw something which startled him like the sight of a ghost. It was a face--a woman’s face in a high Normandy cap, looking out of the many faces in the crowd, a thin, worn, melancholy countenance, very sad to look upon, among all those other faces fronting the audience with a stereotyped smile. “My God!” cried Mr. Tredethlyn, clasping his two hands upon his hot forehead, and pushing back the rumpled hair, “who is it? What’s the matter with me? I feel as if I’d seen a ghost!” There was a little piece after the melodrama, a slender little production, popularly known as a “screaming” farce. It was not the most strikingly original dramatic invention, and its chief point consisted in one gentleman in tartan trousers being perpetually mistaken for another gentleman in tartan trousers, whole both gentlemen were alternately sitting upon bonnet-boxes and dropping trays of crockery. There was certainly not very much in the farce, but the audience laughed uproariously, and Francis Tredethlyn’s party joined in the laughter. He found himself laughing, too, as loudly as the rest of them; but amidst all that confusion and clamour, the wan, sad face, with two inartistic patches of rouge upon its hollow cheeks, kept surging up ever and anon out of the chaos of his brain, and haunting him like the face of a ghost. Who was it? What was it? Was it some accidental likeness? Was it a face that he had seen and known in the past? Alas for the steady, clear-headed soldier, who had been so prompt to obey military orders, so strict in the performance of duty! Francis Tredethlyn’s muddled senses refused to help him to-night. The author of “What will he do with it?” tells us that light wines are the most treacherous of liquors; “they inflame the brain like fire, while melting on the palate like ice.” Mr. Tredethlyn had been drinking a mixture of divers champagnes and Moselles all day long, and he tried in vain to fix the vague image which floated amidst the confusion of his brain.