looked, and the young man’s eyes were touched as by Ithuriel’s spear. No man had yet seen in her what, all at once, Frank Renton saw. She was to him no child, but a woman. He got up off his chair stumbling, confused. And Laurie was sitting calmly there talking to the mother with this fairy princess coming to them! It seemed incredible. And, in fact, Laurie scarcely looked at Alice even as he shook hands with her. He gave her a kind, half-paternal smile, and went on talking, which was to Frank such a mystery as no explanation could clear away. Then she sat down and took her work with the quiet of a child, totally unaware of young Frank’s reverential admiration. Fortunately he knew a little about music. ‘Was that so-and-so that you were playing?’ he said, when he had sat for some minutes looking at her work and listening to Laurie’s interminable talk with the padrona. The young soldier had a certain contempt for them as they sat and chattered--talking nonsense about any stupid subject that came into their heads, when they might have been talking to Alice, or listening to her music. ‘You must practise a great deal,’ then said the young man, in the safe obscurity into which his silence had thrown him--for, though the padrona had received him very graciously as Laurie’s brother, what was she to find that could be said to a speechless young Guardsman who probably had not an idea in his head? Frank, however, had several ideas; but he was discomposed, as most people are when brought suddenly into the company of familiar friends who know all each other’s ways of thinking and habits of mind. He could not strike into the full stream of their conversation, and it was natural that he should draw towards Alice, who was also left out of it. ‘You must practise a great deal or you could not play so well,’ he repeated, taking a little courage. And nobody paid any great heed to the two sitting apart, as it were, in the shade. ‘I am very fond of music,’ said Alice; ‘I like it better than anything;’ and then there was a long pause, and the conversation on the other side of the table thrust itself into prominence again, and became offensively audible. There was talk chiefly about pictures of which Frank did not know very much, and about people of whom he knew nothing--not the kind of people talked of in society whom he would have known. Laurie had always had strange friends; but how odd it was to find him in the midst of a new world like this, and a world so entirely apart and separate from the known hemisphere! But yet Frank did not find it disagreeable to sit silent against the wall now that Alice was at the table with her work. After ten minutes more he made another attempt at conversation. ‘Have you heard Madame Schumann play that?’ he said; and Alice glanced up at him and softly shook her curls. ‘I have not heard much music,’ she said. ‘We never go out. It bores mamma going out in the evening. I shall when I am older, perhaps; but not now.’