Mr. Ashford could not smile at the kind old Chevalier and his monomania. He went home very seriously to his dark little house, where no one had lighted his lamp. He was not so well served as the Signor. There was a faint light on the stairs, but none in his dark wainscoted library, where the three small deep windows were more than ever like three luminous yet dim pictures hanging upon a gloomy wall. When he had lighted his reading-lamp the pictures were put out, and the glimmering dim interior, with its dark reflections and the touches of gilding and faded brown of his books, came into prominence. He half smiled to think of himself as one of Lottie Despard’s knights; but outside of this calm and still place what a glimpse had been afforded him of the tumults and miseries of the common world, within yet outside all the calm precincts of ordered and regular life! The girl with whom he had been talking stood _aux prises_ with all these forces, while he, so much more able for that battle, was calm and sheltered. To see her struggling against the impassibility of a nature less noble than her own--to think of her all forlorn and solitary, piteous in her youth and helplessness, on the verge of so many miseries, wrung his heart with pity, with tenderness, with---- Was it something of envy too? All the powers of life were surging about Lottie, contending in her and around her; forces vulgar yet powerful, calling forth in that bit of a girl, in that slim creature, made, the man thought, for all the sweetness and protections of life, all its heroic qualities instead--while for such as he, thirty-five, and a man, fate held nothing but quiet, and mastery of all circumstances, Handel and the Abbey! What a travesty and interchange of all that was fit and natural!--for him ought to be the struggle, for her the peace; but Providence had not ordained it so.