from her icy trance; but,
alas! what had wakened her?

The summer was passing. Every day the garden-scenes of Watteau became
vivid and real; every evening Venice was made possible, when shadowy
barks slipped down dusk tides, freighted with song and laughter, and
snatches of guitar-tinkling; and when some sudden torch, that for an
instant had summoned with its red fire all fierce lights and strong
glooms, dipped, hissed, and quenched below, and, a fantastic flotilla,
they passed on into the broad brilliance of a rising moon, all
Middle-Age mythology rose and wafted them back into the obscurity. It
was a life too fine for every day, fare too rich for health; they must
be exotics who did not wither in such hot-house air. It was rapidly
becoming unnatural. They performed in the daylight stray clarified bits
from Fletcher or Moliere, drama of an era over-ripe; they sang only from
an old book of madrigals; their very reading was fragmentary,--now an
emasculated Boccaccio, then a curdling phantasm of Poe's, and after some
such scenic horror as the "Red Death" Helen Heath dashed off the Pesther
Waltzes.

If, finally, on one of the last August-nights, we had passed,
Asmodeus-like, over the roofs, looking down, we should have seen three
things. First, that Mrs. Laudersdale slept like any innocent dreamer,
and, wrapped with white moonlight, in her long and flowing outline, in
her imperceptible breath, resembling some perfect statue that we fancy
to be instinct with suspended life. Next, that Mr. Raleigh did not sleep
at all, but absorbed himself, to the entire disturbance of Capua's
slumbers, in the rapture of reproducing as he could the turbulent
passion and joy of souls larger than his own. And, lastly, that Mrs.
McLean woke with visions of burglars before her eyes, to find her pillow
deserted and her husband sitting at a writing-table.

"How startled I was!" she exclaimed. "What are you doing, dear?"

"Writing to Laudersdale," he said, in reply.

"Why, what for?--what can you be writing to him for?"

"I think it best he should come and take his wife off my hands."

"How absurd! how contemptible! how all you husbands band together like a
parcel of slaveholders, and hunt down each other's runaways!"

Mr. McLean laughed.

"Now, John, you're not making mischief?"

"No, child, I am preventing it." And therewith the worthy man, dropping
the wax on the envelope, imprinted it with a Scotch crest, and put out
the light "Tha