“How selfish you men are! You well know that I am not going abroad for my own pleasure, but that I am ordered to Italy to recruit my health.—Why, then, blame me for that which is inevitable?” “Blame _you_, Evelyn?” and the young heart throbbed, and the earnest eyes filled with a sorrowful indignation. The two walked on in silence—and never did mortal pair, since the days of our first parents, appear outwardly more suited to each other. Evelyn is still all that we have painted her in early life—though the varying blush of girlhood has given place to the fresh bloom of matured womanhood, and the figure once slight to a fault has acquired that voluptuous roundness, united with grace peculiar to the women of Andalusia—for Evelyn’s mother was of Spanish extraction. Col. Melville is the perfect type of an aristocratic Englishman—tall and muscular, yet slight; of a noble military bearing, and a face whose faultless regularity of feature might rival even with that of his fair companion; hair of a light brown, curling naturally like the locks of “the god of the etherial bow;” whiskers of the same shade; deep-set eyes, where sincerity sat enthroned—and a countenance expressive of goodness and feeling, still flushed with the glow of youth. Such is the description of the cavalier, leaning on whose manly arm, our heroine threaded her way through the crowded reception rooms of the Palace of St. James. “Mrs. Travers’ carriage stops the way,” cries a voice outside. The name is taken up, and re-echoed again and again, till it is given as “Travers’ carriage,” “Travers’ Brougham,” “Towers’ coming out.” Evelyn, hastily cloaking, has sprung into her Clarence, but not before a tender glance and a bewitching smile, accompanied by a hurried “you will dine with me to-morrow, my last evening,” has quite restored the young guardsman to equanimity. Let us leave our heroine to the society of her own thoughts, and look once more through memory’s glass into the long vista of the past. Many characters who have once figured in these pages, are now no longer living. Mrs. Dale has died, a heart-broken woman, most ungratefully treated by the husband for whom she had sacrificed her child, and her own, and much of her daughter’s fortune. The by no means disconsolate widower shortly after married one of the most devoted of his many female worshippers—and his present wife rivals, it is said, even that great saint in sanctity. The good old Squire has gone to his final account. Peace be with his ashes!—for his vices were born of circumstance, his virtues were his own.