es, tricks, incompetencies, in what
lay in his heart, and the words that would come to his tongue. He felt
like a man haunted.

So deeply did he feel the blow, that people asked how it was that he
could be so foolish as to dance about assisting Lady Camper in her
efforts to make him ridiculous; he acted the parts of publisher and
agent for the fearful caricaturist. In truth, there was a strangely
double reason for his conduct; he danced about for sympathy, he had the
intensest craving for sympathy, but more than this, or quite as much, he
desired to have the powers of his enemy widely appreciated; in the first
place, that he might be excused to himself for wincing under them, and
secondly, because an awful admiration of her, that should be deepened
by a corresponding sentiment around him, helped him to enjoy luxurious
recollections of an hour when he was near making her his own--his own,
in the holy abstract contemplation of marriage, without realizing their
probable relative conditions after the ceremony.

'I say, that is the very image of her ladyship's hand,' he was
especially fond of remarking, 'I say it is a beautiful hand.'

He carried the letter in his pocket-book; and beginning to fancy that
she had done her worst, for he could not imagine an inventive malignity
capable of pursuing the theme, he spoke of her treatment of him with
compassionate regret, not badly assumed from being partly sincere.

Two letters dated in France, the one Dijon, the other Fontainebleau,
arrived together; and as the General knew Lady Camper to be returning to
England, he expected that she was anxious to excuse herself to him. His
fingers were not so confident, for he tore one of the letters to open
it.

The City of Wilsonople was recognizable immediately. So likewise was the
sole inhabitant.

General Ople's petty bitter laugh recurred, like a weak-chested
patient's cough in the shifting of our winds eastward.

A faceless woman's shadow kneels on the ground near the sentry-box,
weeping. A faceless shadow of a young man on horseback is beheld
galloping toward a gulf. The sole inhabitant contemplates his largely
substantial full fleshed face and figure in a glass.

Next, we see the standard of Great Britain furled; next, unfurled and
borne by a troop of shadows to the sentry-box. The officer within
says, 'I say I should be very happy to carry it, but I cannot quit this
gentlemanly residence.'

Next, the standard is shown assail