It was some time after he had gone to bed that sleep came. Yes; Nature, the dear mother, had spoken, and who could gainsay her? A clean, bright, healthy English lad, and a clean, bright, healthy English girl had read truth in each other's eyes. It was one of the sweet things in the world, for which we who live in the world should be thankful. The dimly seen white curtains of his bed became gossamer veils that enveloped him with beauty. Now, on either side, his inner life was touched by the magic of romance: the fair dream of these two children, and the love of the other betrothed pair. It was on happy eyelids that sleep settled at last. And Aline, too, lay awake, her young cheeks burning at the delicious yet frightening memory of a kiss in the little churchyard, and her heart swelling at the thought of the infinite goodness of Jimmie. Meanwhile, unconscious of these idyllic happenings and romantic speculations, Norma was enjoying herself in her worldly way at Lord Monzie's place in Scotland. Lord Monzie, a dissipated young man who had lately come into the title, had married a well-to-do young woman in very smart society. Consequently there was no lack of modern entertainment in the house. So modern was everything that the host had got down Mr. Joseph Ascherberg, the financier, to hold a roulette bank every night against all comers; but he took care that he himself, or his own confidential man, turned the wheel and spun the marble. Most of the people had unimaginative nicknames, the extremes of the Submerged Tenth and the Upper Ten thus curiously meeting. Lord Monzie was called “Muggins;” his bosom friend, and, as some whispered, his _âme damnée_, Sir Calthrop Boyle, was alluded to as “The Boiler;” and Ascherberg responded to the appellation of “Freddy.” There were also modern conveniences for the gratification of caprices or predilections that need not be insisted upon. In fact the atmosphere was surcharged with modernity; so much so that Norma, who would have walked about the Suburra of Imperial Rome with cynical indifference, gasped a little when she entered it. One or two things actually shocked her, at which she wondered greatly. She regarded Mr. Ascherberg with extreme disfavour, and winced at the women's conversation when they were cosily free from men. For the first day or two she held herself somewhat apart, preferring solitude on sequestered bits of terrace, where she could read a novel, or look at the grey hills that met the stretch of purple moorland. But gradually the sweeter tone of mind which she had brought with her lost its flavour, and having won sixty pounds from Ascherberg, and having told the feminine coterie what she knew of the Wyniard affair, she began to breathe the atmosphere without much difficulty. Yet occasionally she had spasms of revolt. In a corner of the drawing-room stood a marble copy of the little Laughing Faun in the Louvre, put there by the late baron, and every time her eye fell upon it, the picture of