And so that act of the play is finished: all the actors have strutted and fumed and fretted through their little parts, and now the curtain has fallen. When next it rises, the principal actress in this tragic drama is discovered lying full-dressed on her bed; her pretty face buried--eyes, nose, and mouth--in the tumbled pillow; her little neat-shod feet hanging over the bedside. She looks as if she had been thrown there, an inert, passive mass, by some spiteful giant. Six miles away, at Lord ----'s ball, the fiddles are squeaking, and the pink-and-green Chinese lanterns swinging to and fro among the orange boughs in the slight wind made by the rustling dresses and passing men and women. Sir Thomas, with his hands in their burst white gloves under his coat tails, and his blue-cloth back leaning against a marble mantel-piece, is talking sweetly, in his hard, rasping voice, of scab and foot-rot. Miladi is gone down to supper for the sixth time on the sixth devoted married man's arm; she is eating game pie, and drinking sherry and champagne and moselle in turns. Miss Blessington, sweeping about on the arm of a small white gentleman, whose estate is as large as his person is minute, is responding a little superciliously to a presumptuous younger son, who, annihilated by her Greek profile and Juno bust, has invited her to tread a measure with him. "No, tha--anks; I never da--ance round da--ances." Meanwhile Esther lies stretched upon the counterpane, while a gloomy pageant of all that she has lost passes before her eyes. Greedier than the dog in the fable, she had tried to keep shadow and substance: Gerard's love, Brandon's liking. Now, lo! both have fallen into the water. There are a few circles, a few rising bubbles; then all is over--gone, sunk to the bottom, to come up again never more. Vanished from her grasp is the great house--are the buhl and marqueterie cabinets--are the "Venus surprised by Satyrs" and the "Susanna and the Elders"--are the vineries, pineries, peacheries. Did they ever exist? or were they only a mirage, such as the sky presents to us sometimes--a mirage of ships shocking together, of armed men meeting in fight?