The place was in itself bewildering enough for the ordinary mind; without Miss Hillary--without Miss Hillary! But when Miss Hillary came sailing out of a drawing-room window, with diaphanous draperies of white and blue fluttering and spreading round her, and with all manner of yellow, gold, and purple enamel absurdities dangling at her wrists, and depending from the loveliest throat and the pinkest ears in Christendom,--the stranger who was not provided with forty thousand a year and a coronet, the which to lay at the feet of that adorable creature, was the weakest of fools if he did not take to his heels there and then, and fly from the Cedars, never to return thither. If he stayed, he fully deserved his fate. If, looking at Maude Hillary, and knowing that he could never hope to win her for his own, he did not straightway flee from that flowery paradise beside the sunlit river, all after-agonies endured by his luckless heart were only the natural consequence of his mad temerity. But then, unhappily, there are so many mad men in the world. Homburg and Baden-Baden are dangerous places, but there are crowds of deluded creatures who will haunt the dazzling halls of the Kursaal, and the elegant saloons of M. Benazet, so long as the fatal wheel revolves, and the croupier cries, “Make your game, gentlemen; the game is made.” What can be a more absurd spectacle than a big blundering moth whirling and fluttering about the flame of a candle? Yet the incineration of moth A will not be accepted as a warning by moth B, though he may be a witness of the sacrifice. Younger sons and briefless barristers, earning a fluctuating income by the exercise of their talents in light literature; artists; curates, hopeless of rich preferment,--came, and saw, and were conquered. The man who, being a bachelor and under thirty years of age, beheld Maude Hillary, and did _not_ fall in love with her, was made of sterner stuff than the rest of his race, and must have had in him the material for a Cromwell or a Robespierre. He must have been a stony, incorruptible, bilious creature, intended to hold iron sway over his fellow-men; he had no business in the paradise between Isleworth and Twickenham.