It was a simple action, but Mary broke down under it. Throwing her arms around her life-long friend, she pressed her convulsively to her bosom, and hiding her face in her pillow, wept in silence. After a while they began to talk, and they talked all night, as I am told that sex and age not unfrequently do. Alice arose next morning with a fixed determination to unravel the mystery that was giving her friend so much pain. Mr. Frobisher could make things plain, if he would. But would he? At any rate, she would try; for she was a plucky little soul. And so, when Charley had offered her his arm, that day, after dinner, for a promenade on the piazza, she felt that she had her opportunity. But it would appear that Charley had been looking for an opportunity himself; and so, the other day, when I asked this couple to let me have an account of the matter, with a view to the forty-sixth chapter of the Symphonic Monograph, it leaked out that Master Charles had, on this occasion, taken up Alice’s time not in telling her whom the Don loved, but whom Charles adored. This discovery, coming upon me so suddenly, upset my determination to exclude the loves of Charley and Alice from our story, and I called for an account of the courtship. For I felt assured that an authentic account of the first and only love-making of Charles The Silent would be the most delicious morsel in the whole Monograph. But at the merest allusion to such a thing, Alice blushed in the most becoming way; and when Charley, clearing his throat and putting on a bold look, made as though he were about to begin, her face became as scarlet; and rising from her seat she gave him the most dignified look that I have ever seen in those merry-glancing hazel eyes. Thereupon Charley and I laughed so heartily that Alice saw that she had been taken in by her husband’s serious face. “I thought not!” said she, laughing in turn. But the idea of a chapter given to the amours of Charles The Silent and Alice The Merry had seized upon my mind with so strong a fascination that I could not shake it off; and, as soon as I reached my bachelor quarters that night, I seized my pen. My eyes were soon in a fine phrensy rolling, I presume; for in the forty-sixth, or _Galaxy_ Chapter, as I call it, from the numerous stars with which it is bespangled, distinct traces of Genius may be detected by the practised eye (with my assistance).