So much so that the consul, when he had followed the servant to his room, was impelled to draw aside the heavy window-curtains and look out again upon the bleak prospect it had half obliterated. The wing in which he was placed overhung a dark ravine or gully choked with shrubs and brambles that grew in a new luxuriance. As he gazed a large black bird floated upwards slowly from its depths, circled around the house with a few quick strokes of its wing, and then sped away--a black bolt--in one straight undeviating line towards the paling north. He still gazed into the abyss--half expecting another, even fancying he heard the occasional stir and flutter of obscure life below, and the melancholy call of nightfowl. A long-forgotten fragment of old English verse began to haunt him-- Hark! the raven flaps hys wing In the briered dell belowe, Hark! the dethe owl loude doth synge To the night maers as thaie goe. “Now, what put that stuff in my head?” he said as he turned impatiently from the window. “And why does this house, with all its interior luxury, hypocritically oppose such a forbidding front to its neighbors?” Then it occurred to him that perhaps the architect instinctively felt that a more opulent and elaborate exterior would only bring the poverty of surrounding nature into greater relief. But he was not in the habit of troubling himself with abstruse problems. A nearer recollection of the pretty frock he had seen on the staircase--in whose wearer he had just recognized his vivacious friend--turned his thoughts to her. He remembered how at their first meeting he had been interested in her bright audacity, unconventionality, and high spirits, which did not, however, amuse him as greatly as his later suspicion that she was playing a self-elected role, often with difficulty, opposition, and feverishness, rather than spontaneity. He remembered how he had watched her in the obtrusive assumption of a new fashion, in some reckless departure from an old one, or in some ostentatious disregard of certain hard and set rules of St. Kentigern; but that it never seemed to him that she was the happier for it. He even fancied that her mirth at such times had an undue nervousness; that her pluck--which was undoubted--had something of the defiance of despair, and that her persistence often had the grimness of duty rather than the thoughtlessness of pure amusement. What was she trying to do?--what was she trying to UNDO or forget? Her married life was apparently happy and even congenial. Her young husband was clever, complaisant, yet honestly devoted to her, even to the extension of a certain camaraderie to her admirers and a chivalrous protection by half-participation in her maddest freaks. Nor could he honestly say that her attitude towards his own sex--although marked by a freedom that often reached the verge of indiscretion--conveyed the least suggestion of passion or sentiment. The consul, more perceptive than