She added a number of profound reflections on the vanity of life, ending with a brilliant epigram. It had scarcely died upon her lips when Armitage arrived upon the tapis and took in the situation at a glance. Striding hastily forward, he bowed gracefully and signified a desire to know the cause of her abstraction. She burst into tears and complied with his wish. Then she flung herself about his neck and accorded full expression to her grief, which he delicately professed not to observe; for this noble figure had been educated in the best schools of European gentility. _From “But a Single Thought.”_ Seeing her proceeding away from him, perhaps forever, Auvergne intercepted her with an expression of regret for his rudeness, coupled with a plea for pardon. For a breathless instant she stayed her progress as if uncertain as to the degree of his offense, then resumed her pace till she reached the river’s brim. With an unconscious prayer she sprang swooning into the breakers and was with difficulty prevented from meeting a watery grave. _From “A Belle of Castile.”_ Josephina had progressed but a brief distance into the garden when some inner sense proclaimed that she was followed: the crunching of a gentleman’s heel upon the gravel was indisputable. Partially terrified, she sought concealment in the shrubbery that bordered the path on the one side and the other. It passed by her there in the moonlight, that dreadful sound, yet no one visible! It went on and on, growing fainter and fainter, like herself, and was lost to hearing. Then she remembered the tradition of the Invisible Knight and her heart smote her for the absence of faith with which she had so often greeted it. “I am fitly punished,” she conceded, “for my sceptical attitude. Henceforth, so far as the constitution of my mind will permit, I will be more hospitable to the convictions of the simple.” How she adhered to this expiational resolution we shall behold. _From “The Queen’s Chaperon.”_ The duke stepped from his carriage to a neighboring hill and cast his eye athwart his ancestral domain. “All this,” he mused, “I must renounce if I comply with the queen’s royal suggestion to fly with her to Rome. Is she worth the privation? I must have time to consider a transaction of such great importance.” Hastily entering his carriage, he haughtily bade the coachman drive him to some expensive hotel, whence he dispatched a delicately perfumed note to her Majesty, saying that he should be detained a few days by affairs of state, but assuring her of his uncommon fidelity. Then he retired to his couch and thought it all over in Italian. The next day he arose and fled rapidly. _From “The Uplifting of Lennox.”_ On hearing the terrible news Myra fell supine to earth without delay! “Is it nothing?” inquired Lennox. “Is it only a temporary indisposition?—will it soon pass?”