ut forward, brought no comfort to my own conscience. I pleaded the
unerring devotion of my heart, the uprightness of my motives, and when
called on for the proofs,--alas! except the blue scarf I wore in memory of
another, and my absurd conduct at the villa, I had none. From the current
gossip of Lisbon, down to my own disgraceful folly, all, all was against
me.

Honesty of intention, rectitude of purpose, may be, doubtless they are,
admirable supports to a rightly constituted mind; but even then they must
come supported by such claims to probability as make the injured man feel
he has not lost the sympathy of all his fellows. Now, I had none of these,
had even my temperament, broken by sickness and harassed by unlucky
conjectures, permitted my appreciating them.

I endeavored to call my wounded pride to my aid, and thought over the
glance of haughty disdain she gave me as she passed on to her carriage; but
even this turned against me, and a humiliating sense of my own degraded
position sank deeply into my heart. "This impression at least," thought I,
"must be effaced. I cannot permit her to believe--"

"His Excellency is waiting dinner, sir," said a lackey, introducing a
finely powdered head gently within the door. I looked at my watch, it was
eight o'clock; so snatching my sabre, and shocked at my delay, I
hastily followed the servant down-stairs, and thus at once cut short my
deliberations.

The man must be but little observant or deeply sunk in his own reveries,
who, arriving half-an-hour too late for dinner, fails to detect in the
faces of the assembled and expectant guests a very palpable expression of
discontent and displeasure. It is truly a moment of awkwardness, and one
in which few are found to manage with success; the blushing, hesitating,
blundering apology of the absent man, is scarcely better than the
ill-affected surprise of the more practised offender. The bashfulness of
the one is as distasteful as the cool impertinence of the other; both are
so thoroughly out of place, for we are thinking of neither; our thoughts
are wandering to cold soups and rechauffed pates, and we neither care for
nor estimate the cause, but satisfy our spleen by cursing the offender.

Happily for me I was clad in a triple insensibility to such feelings,
and with an air of most perfect unconstraint and composure walked into
a drawing-room where about twenty persons were busily discussing what
peculiar amiability in my characte