easons for employing, under
certain special circumstances, his or her particular manner of
salute, could scarcely forbear smiling at the effect they all
together produced in his own unpretending study.

"Your welcome visit," said the author, addressing his guests
with all the geniality of which he was master (for they
seemed somewhat stiff and ill-at-ease), "gives me peculiar
gratification. I regret not having asked some of my friends, the
critics, up here to make your acquaintance. I am sure you would
all come to the best possible understanding directly."

"They cannot fathom _me_," exclaimed a strikingly handsome young
man, with pale lofty brow, and dark clustering locks, who was
leaning with proud grace against the mantel-piece. "They may
take my life, but they cannot read my soul." And he laughed,
scornfully, as he always did.

[Illustration: THE NOONING.--AFTER DARLEY.]

This was a passage from that famous ante-mortem soliloquy in
which the hero of the romance indulges in the last chapter but
one. The author, while, of course, he could not deny that the
elegance of the diction was only equaled by the originality of
the sentiment, yet felt a slight uneasiness that his hero should
adopt so defiant a tone with those who were indeed to be the
arbiters of his existence.

"I'm afraid there's not enough perception of the _comme il faut_
in him to suit the every-day world," muttered he. "To be sure,
he was not constructed for ordinary ends. Do you find yourself
at home in this life, madame?" he continued aloud, turning to a
young lady of matchless beauty, whose brief career of passionate
love and romantic misery the author had described in thrilling
chapters. She raised her luminous eyes to his, and murmured
reproachfully: "Why speak to me of Life? if it be not Love, it is
Life no longer!"

It was very beautiful, and the author recollected having thought,
at the time he wrote it down, that it was about the most forcible
sentence in that most powerful passage of his book. But it
was rather an exaggerated tone to adopt in the face of such
common-place surroundings. Had this exquisite creature, after
all, no better sense of the appropriate?

"No one can know better than I, my dear Constance," said the
author, in a fatherly tone, "what a beautiful, tender, and lofty
soul yours is; but would it not be well, once in a while, to
veil its lustre--to subdue it to a tint more in keeping with the
unvariegated hue of com