It was a long way across the park to the nearest point where they could get a cab, and although George half carried her for the greater part of the distance, she fell into his arms with a little exhausted, sobbing cry when at last they got into a hansom, and before they had driven half a mile she was fast asleep. He sat looking down at the red, parted lips, the soft young cheeks, the sweeping eyelashes that defined the voluptuous curve of her long eyelids, with the thoughtfulness of the guardian mingling with the yearning tenderness of the lover. During the long, bright day he had just spent with her it had begun to dawn upon him that some of his dreams of an ideal marriage with this fascinating, tiresome, irresponsible child-woman were very unsubstantial things. If her frivolity were to be improved away, it would take with it a great deal of her charm, if not of her beauty; while underneath all her light-hearted caprice and infectious gaiety, the strongest, stormiest passions would peep out sometimes for a moment and give strange warnings of the tyranny she might exercise over a nature that had not strength and suppleness enough to control hers. Yet for all this, he loved her more than before, while he dreaded the empire she would make a hard struggle to get over him. All the passion of his nature he was holding in leash, feeling that he scarcely yet knew its force, that it was gathering strength with every moment of restraint. Would he be this woman’s ruler and husband, or would he marry her only to be her slave? He tried to shake off these morbid thoughts, and to reassure himself by looking steadfastly on the beautiful little face that in a few days was to be his own: but he found no comfort there. Capacity for emotion, for passion, he read clearly enough, but of thought or higher feeling no trace. He grew hot, began to be haunted by Rahas’s horrible words: “The women of the East have no souls,” until in a passion of indignation with himself and almost with her he woke her up by a hastily snatched kiss, which, tired as she was, she received with her usual demonstrative responsiveness: and then she insisted on entertaining him with Indian love-songs in a native _patois_, taught her by Sundran, which she crooned in a low, unequal, but rather sweet voice close to his ear for the rest of the way to Miss Glass’s house, where he left her scarcely wide awake enough to bid him good night. This was his last day of suspense, for on the following morning George received a long letter forwarded by Messrs. Smith and Angelo, and dated simply from “Paris,” in the thin, pointed feminine handwriting of the last generation. This was the letter:-- “My dear Mr. Lauriston,