fancy and romance. It is a melancholy scene to men after
a certain age. It revives many of those lighter and more graceful images
connected with the wandering desires of youth,--shadows that crossed us,
and seemed love, but were not; having much of the grace and charm, but
none of the passion and the tragedy, of love. So many of our earliest
and gentlest recollections are connected with those chalked floors, and
that music painfully gay, and those quiet nooks and corners, where the
talk that hovers about the heart and does not touch it has been held.
Apart and unsympathizing in that austerer wisdom which comes to us after
deep passions have been excited, we see form after form chasing the
butterflies that dazzle us no longer among the flowers that have
evermore lost their fragrance.

Somehow or other, it is one of the scenes that remind us most forcibly
of the loss of youth! We are brought so closely in contact with the
young and with the short-lived pleasures that once pleased us, and have
forfeited all bloom. Happy the man who turns from "the tinkling cymbal"
and "the gallery of pictures," and can think of some watchful eye and
some kind heart _at home_; but those who have no home--and they are a
numerous tribe--never feel lonelier hermits or sadder moralists than in
such a crowd.

Maltravers leaned abstractedly against the wall, and some such
reflections, perhaps, passed within, as the plumes waved and the
diamonds glittered around him. Ever too proud to be vain, the _monstrari
digito_ had not flattered even in the commencement of his career. And
now he heeded not the eyes that sought his look, nor the admiring murmur
of lips anxious to be overheard. Affluent, well-born, unmarried, and
still in the prime of life,--in the small circles of a province, Ernest
Maltravers would in himself have been an object of interest to the
diplomacy of mothers and daughters; and the false glare of reputation
necessarily deepened curiosity, and widened the range of speculators and
observers.

Suddenly, however, a new object of attention excited new interest; new
whispers ran through the crowd, and these awakened Maltravers from his
revery. He looked up, and beheld all eyes fixed upon one form! His own
eyes encountered those of Evelyn Cameron!

It was the first time he had seen this beautiful young person in all the
_eclat_, pomp, and circumstance of her station, as the heiress of the
opulent Templeton,--the first time he had seen h