repose and solitude, so I determined to go to Flityville and arrange my ideas, no longer alarmed at the confusion in which they were, but with the steadfast purpose of disentangling them quietly, as I would an interesting knot. Hitherto I had been tearing at it madly and making it worse; now I had got the end of the skein--"osseous matter"--and would soon unravel it. So I descended calmly to the drawing-room. I found it empty, but it occurred to me I had left my letter to Lady Ursula in the recess, and in the agitation attending my interview with Lady Broadhem, had forgotten to go back for it. I pushed back the _portière_, and saw seated at the writing-table Lady Ursula herself. She looked pale and nervous, while I felt overwhelmed with confusion and embarrassment. This was the more trying, as many years have elapsed since I have experienced any such sensations. "Oh, you don't happen to have seen a letter lying about anywhere, do you, Lady Ursula?" said I. "It ought to be under your hand, for I left it exactly on that spot." "No," she said; "I found mamma writing here when I came, and she took a packet of letters away with her; perhaps she put yours among them by mistake. She will be back from her drive almost immediately." "I hope so," said I. "I should be sorry to leave without seeing her." "To leave, Lord Frank! I thought you were going to stay till Monday." She looked up rather appealingly, I thought, as if my presence would have been a satisfaction to her under the circumstances; and I saw, as I returned her steady earnest gaze, that she little guessed the purport of the missing letter. At that moment my head began to swim, and the figures to dance about in my brain again. Chundango and Grandon seemed locked in a death-struggle, and Ursula, with dishevelled hair, trying to separate them, while Lady Broadhem, in the background, was clapping her hands and urging them on. I seemed spinning round the group with such rapidity that I was obliged to steady myself with one hand against the back of Lady Ursula's chair. "What's the matter? what's the matter, Lord Frank?" she exclaimed.