And he passed on; we followed, somewhat subdued and silenced, though one of my lordling friends sniggered idiotically. "You paid dearly for that blessing, Rimânez!" he said--"You gave her three sovereigns;--by Jove! I'd have had something more than a blessing if I had been you." "No doubt!" returned Rimânez--"You deserve more,--much more! I hope you will get it! A blessing would be of no advantage whatever to _you_;--it is, to _me_." How often I have thought of this incident since! I was too dense to attach either meaning or importance to it then,--self-absorbed as I was, I paid no attention to circumstances which seemed to have no connection with my own life and affairs. And in all my dissipations and so-called amusements, a perpetual restlessness consumed me,--I obtained no real satisfaction out of anything except my slow and somewhat tantalizing courtship of Lady Sibyl. She was a strange girl; she knew my intentions towards her well enough; yet she affected not to know. Each time I ventured to treat her with more than the usual deference, and to infuse something of the ardour of a lover into my looks or manner, she feigned surprise. I wonder why it is that some women are so fond of playing the hypocrite in love? Their own instinct teaches them when men are amorous; but unless they can run the fox to earth, or in other words, reduce their suitors to the lowest pitch of grovelling appeal, and force them to such abasement that the poor passion-driven fools are ready to fling away life, and even honour, dearer than life, for their sakes, their vanity is not sufficiently gratified. But who, or what am I that I should judge of vanity,--I whose egregious and flagrant self-approbation was of such a character that it blinded me to the perception and comprehension of everything in which my own Ego was not represented! And yet,--with all the morbid interest I took in myself, my surroundings, my comfort, my social advancement, there was one thing which soon became a torture to me,--a veritable despair and loathing,--and this, strange to say, was the very triumph I had most looked forward to as the crown and summit of all my ambitious dreams. My book,--the book I had presumed to consider a work of genius,--when it was launched on the tide of publicity and criticism, resolved itself into a sort of literary monster that haunted my days and nights with its hateful presence; the thick, black-lettered, lying advertisements scattered broadcast by my publisher, flared at me with an offensive insistence in every paper I casually opened. And the praise of the reviewers! ... the exaggerated, preposterous, fraudulent 'boom'! Good God!--how sickening it was!--how fulsome! Every epithet of flattery bestowed upon me filled me with disgust, and one day when I took up a leading magazine and saw a long article upon the 'extraordinary brilliancy and promise' of my book, comparing me to a new Æschylus and Shakespeare combined, with the