"Oh, well. Don't you know what Wallenstein said when he was besieging Stralsund and found it such a difficult task?" "I suppose he said too that it was beastly hard." "Oh, Letty--it was something about chains. Now do you remember?" "Chains?" repeated Letty, looking bored. "Do _you_ know, Leechy?" "Yes, I still remember that, though I confess that I have forgotten the greater part of what I heard." "Then what do you ask me for, when you know I don't know? What did he say about chains?" "He said that he'd take the city, if it were rivetted to heaven with chains of iron," said Miss Leech dramatically. "What a goat." "Oh, hush--don't say those horrible words. Where do you learn them? Not from me, certainly not from me," said Miss Leech, distressed. She had a profound horror of slang, and was bewildered by the way in which these weeds of rhetoric sprang up on all occasions in Letty's speech. "Well, and was it?" "Was it what, my dear?" "Chained to heaven?" "The city? Why, how can a city be chained to heaven, Letty?" "Then what did he say it for?" "He was using a metaphor." "Oh," said Letty, who did not know what a metaphor was, but supposed it must be something used in sieges, and preferred not to inquire too closely. "He was obliged to retire," said Miss Leech, "leaving enormous numbers of slain on the field." "Poor beasts. I say, Leechy," she whispered, "don't let's bother about history now. Go on with Mr. Jessup. You'd got to where he called you Amy for the first time." Mr. Jessup was the person already alluded to in these pages as the only man Miss Leech had ever loved, and his history was of absorbing interest to Letty, who never tired of hearing his first appearance on Miss Leech's horizon described, with his subsequent advances before the stage of open courting was reached, the courting itself, and its melancholy end; for Mr. Jessup, a clergyman of the Church of England, with a vicarage all ready to receive his wife, had suddenly become a prey to new convictions, and had gone over to the Church of Rome; whereupon Miss Leech's father, also a clergyman of the Church of England, had talked a great deal about the Scarlet Woman of Babylon, and had shut the door in Mr. Jessup's face when next he called to explain. This had happened when Miss Leech was twenty. Now, at thirty, an orphan resigned to the world's buffets, she found a gentle consolation in repeating the story of her ill-starred engagement to her keenly interested friend and pupil; and the oftener she repeated it the less did it grieve her, till at last she came actually to enjoy the remembrance of it, pleased to have played the principal part even in a drama that was hissed off her little stage, glad to find a sympathetic listener, dwelling much and fondly on every incident of that short period of importance and glory.