“There is no harm in my answering you,” said Amelius. “The dream really had something to do with her trusting me. You may not think quite so unfavourably of her conduct now you know that.” “It doesn’t matter what I think,” Regina replied constrainedly. “If my aunt’s secrets have interested you--what right have I to object? I am sure I shall say nothing. Though I am not in my aunt’s confidence, nor in your confidence, you will find I can keep a secret.” She folded up her gloves for the twentieth time at least, and gave Amelius his opportunity of retiring by rising from her chair. He made a last effort to recover the ground that he had lost, without betraying Mrs. Farnaby’s trust in him. “I am sure you can keep a secret,” he said. “I should like to give you one of my secrets to keep--only I mustn’t take the liberty, I suppose, just yet?” She new perfectly well what he wanted to say. Her heart began to quicken its beat; she was at a loss how to answer. After an awkward silence, she made an attempt to dismiss him. “Don’t let me detain you,” she said, “if you have any engagement.” Amelius silently looked round him for his hat. On a table behind him a monthly magazine lay open, exhibiting one of those melancholy modern “illustrations” which present the English art of our day in its laziest and lowest state of degradation. A vacuous young giant, in flowing trousers, stood in a garden, and stared at a plump young giantess with enormous eyes and rotund hips, vacantly boring holes in the grass with the point of her parasol. Perfectly incapable of explaining itself, this imbecile production put its trust in the printer, whose charitable types helped it, at the bottom of the page, with the title of “Love at First Sight.” On those remarkable words Amelius seized, with the desperation of the drowning man, catching at the proverbial straw. They offered him a chance of pleading his cause, this time, with a happy indirectness of allusion at which not even a young lady’s susceptibility could take offence. “Do you believe in that?” he said, pointing to the illustration. Regina declined to understand him. “In what?” she asked. “In love at first sight.” It would be speaking with inexcusable rudeness to say plainly that she told him a lie. Let the milder form of expression be, that she modestly concealed the truth. “I don’t know anything about it,” she said. _“I_ do,” Amelius remarked smartly. She persisted in looking at the illustration. Was there an infection of imbecility in that fatal work? She was too simple to understand him, even yet! “You do--what?” she inquired innocently. “I know what love at first sight is,” Amelius burst out. Regina turned over the leaves of the magazine. “Ah,” she said, “you have read the story.” “I haven’t read the story,” Amelius answered. “I know what I felt myself--on being introduced to a young lady.” She looked up at him with a sly smile. “A young lady in America?” she asked.