--BYRON'S CHILDE HAROLD. To Bruce Conway the months of slow and tardy convalescence seemed like dead weights on his impatient, restless soul; to Grace Winans, in her splendid but strangely silent home, where but few guests were received, and which she rarely left, time passed as it did to Mariana in the Moated Grange. But for all that, the summer passed like a painful dream, and the "melancholy days" had come; "time does not stop for tears." Mrs. Conway had prevailed on Bruce to compromise his intention of going abroad again by spending the winter with her amid the gayeties of Washington--the "Paris of America." How far a pretty face had influenced him in making this decision it is impossible to say; but Mrs. Conway, in her gratitude to the Clendenons for their kindness to her idol, had fairly worried them into consenting to let Lulu pass the winter with her in the gay capital city. For Lulu it may be said that no persuasion was needed to obtain her consent, and how far her fancy for a handsome face had influenced _her_, we will not undertake to say either. However this may be, the Washington newspapers duly chronicled for the benefit of fashionable society the interesting intelligence that the elegant Mr. Bruce Conway, the hero of the much talked of Norfolk duel, and his still brilliant aunt, Mrs. Conway--both so well known in Washington circles--had taken a handsome suite of rooms at Willard's Hotel for the winter. And the newspapers--which will flatter any woman in society, be she fair or homely--added the information that Mrs. Conway had one of the belles of Norfolk for her guest--the lovely Miss C.--concluding with the stereotyped compliment that her marvelous beauty and varied accomplishments would create a stir in fashionable society; and thus was Lulu Clendenon launched on the sea of social dissipation. A deep flush of shame and annoyance tinged the girl's dimpled cheeks, as leaning back in a great sleepy hollow of a chair in their private parlor, skimming lightly over the "society news," she came upon this paragraph about a week after their arrival. Bruce Conway, lounging idly in an opposite chair, marked that sudden rose-flush under his half-closed lids, and wondered thereat. On her pallid cheek and forehead came a color and a light. "As I have seen the rosy red flushing in the Northern night," he spouted, in his old non-commital fashion of quoting Tennyson to pretty girls. She glanced across at him, her color brightening, "all the spirit deeply dawning in the dusk of hazel eyes," but she uttered no word. "Well, Brownie, what is it?" he queried, giving her the name he often called her for her nut-brown hair and eyes. "This." She folded down the paragraph and tossed it across to him, with a willful pout of her red lips, and watched with solicitude for the sympathetic indignation she expected to read in his eyes. He finished it, and laughed.