a sop, but spite would crave for more. Yes, that must be the explanation--she is feeding spite." If the old clergyman who had cried over Georgie Stanfield on her wedding-day, and uttered that futile blessing on the marriage which was so unblessed, could have heard her speak thus to her own heart, how utterly confounded and astonished that good but not "knowledgable" individual would have been! A few months in the great world to have turned Georgie into this woman, who seeks for motives, who reads character, who has all the dreary cunning in interpretation of the human heart which his life-long experience had failed to impart to him, though he had passed half a century in professional proclamation that "the heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." But it was not her short experience of the great world in any general sense which had so far forwarded her education in the science of life as to enable her thus to analyze conduct and motives,--she had had a surer, subtler teacher; she had loved, and been betrayed; she had hoped, and been deceived. She had dreamed a young girl's dream, and one by no means so exaggerated and exalted as most young girls indulge in; and the awakening had come, not only with such rudeness and bitterness as seldom accompany the inevitable disillusionment, but with such startling rapidity, that the lasting of her vision had borne no more proportion to the usual duration of "love's young dream," than the forty winks of an after-dinner nap bear to the dimensions of "a good night's rest." Experience had not tapped at the sleeper's door, and lingered softly near the couch, and insinuated a gently-remonstrative remark that really it was time to risk--tenderly letting in the garish light by tempered degrees the while--cheerfully impressing, without hurry or severity, the truth that a work-day world--busy, stirring, dutiful, and real--lay beyond the glorified realms of slumber, and awaited the passing of the foot going forth to the appointed task over the enchanted threshold. The summary process of awakening by which the sleeper has a basinful of cold water flung on his face, and is pulled out of bed by his feet, bears a stricter metaphorical analogy to that by which Lady Mitford had been roused from her delusion; and though she had reeled and staggered under it at first, the shock had effectually done its work. Georgie Mitford was a wiser woman than Georgie Stanfield could ever have been made by any more considerate process.