"AND THROUGH THY LIFE HAVE I NOT WRIT MY NAME?" Mid-Winter had come, and the pleasures and splendours of Paris were at their apogee. The city was at its gayest--that beautiful city, which we can never see again as we have seen it; which we lament, as some fair and radiant creature that has come to an untimely death. Paris the beautiful, Paris the beloved, imperial Paris, with her air of classic splendour, like the mistress of a Caesar, was in these days overshadowed by no threatening thundercloud, forerunner of the tempest and earthquake to come. The winter season had begun; and all those wanderers who had been basking through the autumn under the blue skies that roof the Pyrenees, or dawdling away existence in German gambling-saloons, or climbing Alpine peaks, or paddling down the Danube, flocked back to the central city of civilization in time to assist at Patti's reappearance in the Rue Lepelletier, or to applaud a new play of Sardou's at the Gymnase. Amongst this flock of returning pilgrims came George Fairfax, very much the worse for two or three months spent in restless meanderings between Baden and Hombourg, with the consciousness of a large income at his disposal, and a certain reckless indifference as to which way his life drifted, that had grown upon him of late years. He met Mr. and Mrs. Granger within twenty-four hours of his arrival in Paris, at a ball at the British embassy--the inaugural fete of the season, as it were, to which the master of Arden Court, by right of his wealth and weight in the North Riding, had been bidden. The ambassadorial card had ignored Miss Granger, much to the damsel's dissatisfaction.