"Go back to your pigstye!" said the magic fish to Ilsabil, the fisherman's wife, when she modestly requested to be made lord of the sun and moon. "Go back to your pigstye!" cries Fate to Esther. At any other time the subsiding from the prospect of being rather a great lady into the certainty of being a very small one would have caused considerable annoyance to Esther's aspiring soul. _Now_, the _things_ she has lost merge and lose themselves in the _person_ she has lost. But is he lost necessarily, irrecoverably? Despite the forlorn attitude, the tear-swollen face, trying to suffocate itself in down, Hope is busy whispering, "You will see him again to-morrow: men in real life are not like men in novels--changeless of purpose, hard as iron or adamant. What they are one half-hour, they are the exact reverse of the next; what they swear to-night they will unswear to-morrow." As Hope, the deceiver, thus murmurs, there comes to her ear the sound of wheels briskly rolling to the door. "Is the ball over so early? are they come back already? or----?" She does not give herself time to speculate on any other hypothesis, but, springing from the bed, runs to the window, draws aside curtain and blind, and looks out. The hall-door is open; a vehicle stands before it. The moonlight and the light shed from the hanging-lamp in the portico are fighting together, struggling for possession of a horse and dog-cart, of two footmen's floured heads, and of a portmanteau and hat-box that they are carrying out. "Thud! thud!" she hears the portmanteau go in at the back of the cart. Then a man comes out--a man in hat and overcoat--drawing on dogskin gloves, and saying, "John, go and look for my box of cigar-lights; I left it on the smoking-room table." It is St. John, speaking in much his usual voice. He is going away! going away! and he can think of his cigar-lights! Her heart stops pulsing for a second, then sets off galloping at the rate of a hundred and twenty a minute. Going without making any sign! She leans further out of the window, and rests her white arms, that look whiter than any lilies in the moonlight, on the sill. He is so close beneath her, if the servants were not there, she might call to him; as it is, he will never know that she has watched his departure. A sudden impulse prompts her to throw up the window higher, to rustle her dress, to cough, in order to attract his attention. At the unexpected noise John and Thomas turn their heads and look up, but their master does not. He gives a slight start, but, instantly recovering himself, walks steadily to the cart and gets in. Then she knows that he knows that she is looking at him--knows that he is resolute to part from her-- "taking no farewell--" as Lancelot took none of Elaine.