ord March laughed.

"Yonder queer person is my gracious kinswoman, Katharine, Duchess of
Dover and Queensberry, at your service, Mr. Warrington. She was a beauty
price! She is changed now, isn't she? What an old Gorgon it is! She is a
great patroness of your book-men and when that old frump was young, they
actually made verses about her."

The Earl quitted his friends for a moment to make his bow to the old
Duchess, Jack Morris explaining to Mr. Warrington how, at the Duke's
death, my Lord of March and Ruglen would succeed to his cousin's
dukedoms.

"I suppose," says Harry, simply, "his lordship is here in attendance
upon the old lady?"

Jack burst into a loud laugh.

"Oh yes! very much! exactly!" says he. "Why, my dear fellow, you don't
mean to say you haven't heard about the little Opera-dancer?"

"I am but lately arrived in England, Mr. Morris," said Harry, with a
smile, "and in Virginia, I own, we have not heard much about the little
Opera-dancer."

Luckily for us, the secret about the little Opera-dancer never was
revealed, for the young men's conversation was interrupted by a lady in
a cardinal cape, and a hat by no means unlike those lovely headpieces
which have returned into vogue a hundred years after the date of our
present history, who made a profound curtsey to the two gentlemen and
received their salutation in return. She stopped opposite to Harry; she
held out her hand, rather to his wonderment:

"Have you so soon forgotten me, Mr. Warrington?" she said.

Off went Harry's hat in an instant. He started, blushed, stammered, and
called out Good Heavens! as if there had been any celestial wonder in
the circumstance! It was Lady Maria come out for a walk. He had not been
thinking about her. She was, to say truth, for the moment so utterly
out of the young gentleman's mind, that her sudden re-entry there and
appearance in the body startled Mr. Warrington's faculties, and caused
those guilty blushes to crowd into his cheeks.

No. He was not even thinking of her! A week ago--a year, a hundred years
ago it seemed--he would not have been surprised to meet her anywhere.
Appearing from amidst darkling shrubberies, gliding over green garden
terraces, loitering on stairs or corridors, hovering even in his dreams,
all day or all night, bodily or spiritually, he had been accustomed to
meet her. A week ago his heart used to beat. A week ago, and at the very
instant when he jumped out of his sleep, there was her