"A very excellent sentiment, my dear," says St. John, a little mockingly, "worthy of being copied by little boys and girls after they have mastered straight strokes and pothooks; but to-night I must request the aged to humour my whim, and my whim is to absent myself from this symposium. I have got a splitting headache, and am altogether pretty nearly dead-beat. I have hardly a leg to stand upon: if you won't take it as a personal insult, I have a good mind to turn in at once. I have not been in bed, for any time worth speaking of, for the last ten days." "Indeed!" replies Constance, freezing up, and looking as though tortures should not wring from her any question as to what had been the vicious pursuits that had detained her lover from balmy slumbers. "You will please yourself of course." "If every one pleased themselves, and no one else, this would be a much more passable world to live in," retorts St. John, with a little misanthropy; "for then each person would get their fair share of attention neither more nor less, which is what they do not now." But the last half of his sentence is addressed to himself, as his madonna has retired again within her shrine. Meanwhile, for the first time since her brother's death, the "companion"--the nice, quiet, young ladylike person, whose only fault is being over-sensitive--is, like Constance, making a toilette. Since Jack's death she has daily put on her clothes, as a necessary preliminary to the day's work; but it has been a task full of weariness--devoid of pleasure. To-night, like Constance, she makes a toilette, and like Constance, it is for the benefit of the young man who does not know gingham from "gaze de Chambéry." It is not, however, with any faintest hope that her Sunday frock, any more than her work-a-day one, will bring back her lost lover to her side, that she puts the former on. The very strength of her faith in his honour hinders the possibility of his turning away from the woman he has promised to marry to any other woman from entering her head. Only, seeing, as plainly as if it were another's and not her own, the ruin of the face that meets her, daily and nightly, in the dim oval of the old glass in its tarnished frame, she wishes that that ruin might be revealed slowly, and by degrees (not _all at once_), to him that had once thought her so fair. For this one night, she would fain look like her old self--would fain be pretty plump Esther Craven, whose face, dimpled and _débonnaire_, men used to turn round in the street to look after--instead of the thin depressed "companion," whom if men looked at at all, it was only to pity her sunken white cheeks and sombre mourning weeds. Her Sunday frock is a lugubrious combination of cheap black silk and crape, against which her artistic eye has been revolting ever since she heard of St. John's coming. A little white tucker will not make her any the less mindful of Jack. And so she has been devoting most of