The very next night but one after Lucio's strange interview with Mavis Clare, the thunderbolt destined to wreck my life and humiliate me to the dust, fell with appalling suddenness. No warning given!--it came at a moment when I had dared to deem myself happy. All that day,--the last day I was ever to know of pride or self-gratulation,--I had enjoyed life to the full; it was a day too in which Sibyl had seemed transformed to a sweeter, gentler woman than I had hitherto known her,--when all her attractions of beauty and manner were apparently put forth to captivate and enthrall me as though she were yet to be wooed and won. Or,--did she mean to bewitch and subjugate Lucio? Of this I never thought,--never dreamed:--I only saw in my wife an enchantress of the most voluptuous and delicate loveliness,--a woman whose very garments seemed to cling to her tenderly as though proud of clothing so exquisite a form,--a creature whose every glance was brilliant, whose every smile was a ravishment,--and whose voice, attuned to the softest and most caressing tones appeared in its every utterance to assure me of a deeper and more lasting love than I had yet enjoyed. The hours flew by on golden wings,--we all three,--Sibyl, myself and Lucio,--had attained, as I imagined, to a perfect unity of friendship and mutual understanding,--we had passed that last day together in the outlying woods of Willowsmere, under a gorgeous canopy of autumn leaves, through which the sun shed mellow beams of rose and gold,--we had had an _al fresco_ luncheon in the open air,--Lucio had sung for us wild old ballads and love-madrigals till the very foliage had seemed to tremble with joy at the sound of such entrancing melody,--and not a cloud had marred the perfect peace and pleasure of the time. Mavis Clare was not with us,--and I was glad. Somehow I felt that of late she had been more or less a discordant element whenever she had joined our party. I admired her,--in a sort of fraternal half-patronizing way I even loved her,--nevertheless I was conscious that her ways were not as our ways,--her thoughts not as our thoughts. I placed the fault on her of course; I concluded that it was because she had what I elected to call 'literary egoism,' instead of by its rightful name, the spirit of honourable independence. I never considered the inflated quality of my own egoism,--the poor pride of a 'cash and county' position, which is the pettiest sort of vain-glory anyone can indulge in,--and after turning the matter over in my mind, I decided that Mavis was a very charming young woman with great literary gifts, and an amazing pride, which made it totally impossible for her to associate with many 'great' people, so-called,--as she would never descend to the necessary level of flunkeyish servility which they expected, and which _I_ certainly demanded. I should almost have been inclined to relegate her to 'Grub Street,' had not a faint sense of