It was the dearest and most delicate little nose that ever inhaled the odours of a costly bouquet in a box on the grand tier, or buried itself between the flossy ears of a Maltese terrier. It was an aristocratic nose, and could be as imperiously disdainful as the stateliest Roman; but whatever it was, its delicate outline was engraved on Philip Foley's heart too deeply for his worldly welfare or his bosom's peace. She was as far away from him as the young June moon that glimmered pale in the daylight above the Lady's Mile. And yet she was only a painter's daughter; but then there was all the distance that divides the topmost pinnacle of Fame's mighty mountain from the lowest depths of obscurity, between William Crawford, R.A., of the Fountains, Kensington, and Philip Foley, of Adelgisa Crescent, Highbury. That he was clever, every body who knew any thing about the art he loved was ready to acknowledge; that he had something in him that was of a grander and sterner stuff than cleverness, Philip Foley himself knew very well. If he had been only clever, success would have been a much easier thing for him; and he knew this too. Owen Meredith has very nobly said that "genius does what it must, and talent does what it can." And Philip Foley obeyed the ungovernable impulse within him, and flung gloom, and darkness, and meteoric skies, and raging seas, and all manner of Titanic grandeur upon his canvases, when he should have been painting inevitable rustic maidens in scarlet cloaks, trotting meekly across the wooden bridges that span placid mill-streams, or fishermen's white-sailed craft bobbing up and down upon bright blue-and-opal seas. If it had not been for the patronage of two or three north-country magnates, whose boyhood had been spent on the bleak shores of the German Ocean, and who bought Philip's rugged cliffs and darksome seas for love of their own vanished youth, the young painter would have found life's battle a sore and difficult fight; but with a little income of his own, the grace of these rich patrons, and the help of considerable employment from Mr. Crawford, for whom he sometimes painted backgrounds, Philip Foley was rich enough to have leisure to declaim about his poverty,--and your real poverty has no time for declamation. He was rich enough to live without care, to entertain his friends with unlimited bitter-beer from the nearest tavern, and to keep an unfailing supply of mild tobacco in the French china jar that adorned his mantelpiece. He could afford to dress like a gentleman, and to waste a good deal of his life in haunting the places where Florence Crawford was likely to be met; and, good year or bad year, he never failed to carry a rich silk dress, or a handsome shawl, or a wonderfully-inlaid casket, or workbox, or portfolio, or tea-caddy, to a maiden lady in a sleepy little village deep down in a pastoral valley some ten or twelve miles from Burkesfield, Bucks,--a valley that