“I will send it to the principal morning papers,” she said, “and John shall pay for it. Listen! Will this do? “_ORIOLE.--On the 17th instant, very suddenly, at Mannheim, Robert, only son of the late William and Margaret Oriole, of Karachi, India. Age 31. Deeply lamented. No flowers._ ‘_We will grieve not, only find_ _Strength in what remains behind._’” That appeared next day, and I do not suppose that anybody lamented him more deeply than Mrs. Withers. She sent Agnes and me charming little notes of condolence and quoted from one of the Cologne sonnets, and asked if those touching lines in the notice of his death were by him. A week or two later, I sat next Mrs. Withers at dinner, and Mr. Chapel was on her other side. “Of course, you knew dear Robbie Oriole, Mr. Chapel,” she said. “What a loss to poetry. Are not those Cologne sonnets the finest in your opinion since Keats? I was privileged to have a copy of them. You agree with me, do you not, Mr. Goodenough? Do you remember that marvellous one beginning, ‘The clouds weep westwards under the scurrilous sky’?” I hugged myself over not asking who had given her that privilege and sadly assented. She proceeded to talk to both of us, as her manner was at the dinner-table, with an intuition wrong in itself, but so excruciatingly right in general direction that it made me catch my breath. “Yes, those sonnets,” she said. “How amazingly feminine they are, both in their tenderness and bitterness. Or, perhaps, all I mean is that women will always appreciate them more than men. When I say them over to myself, as I so often do, I seem to see Robbie reading them to Aggie Lockett. Certainly, I thought, when she first spoke to me about Robbie, that she was absolutely devoted to him. Indeed, it gave me a little shock when I saw to-day that she was to marry Jack Marrible.” This was almost incredibly wonderful, for Mr. Chapel was one of our most fervent Oriolists. It was as full of points as a hedgehog; I could not count them all---- Then he turned on me the usual look of gleeful solemnity, and I knew we both wondered who would be the first to tell Aggie. “Poor Robbie,” he said. “I never knew anybody the least like him. He will be a sacred memory to us, will he not?” Mrs. Withers shook her head, regretfully, smiling. “And the last time he called,” she said, “I was not at home. Of course, if he had only told me he was coming, I would have thrown over any engagement to be there, but, as you may not know, he would never use a telephone. It will always give me a little heartache to think that I was not there the last time.” Mr. Chapel let his eyes wander admirably before he caught mine again. “It is only human to feel that,” he observed in the best style. IN THE DARK