eart.

Involuntarily he shrank back into the depths of his chair, and mutely
questioned as on the previous night, "Where have I heard that voice
before?"

With some difficulty he recovered himself, and said hastily:

"Will you forgive me if I tell you frankly, that ever since I saw you
last night I have been tantalized by a vague yet very precious
consciousness that somewhere you and I have met before? When or
where, I cannot conjecture, but of one thing I am painfully certain,
we can never be strangers henceforth. Some charm in your voice, in
the expression of your eyes when as 'Amy Robsart' the loving woman
you looked so fondly into your 'Leicester's' face, awoke dim memories
that will never sleep again. Happy--enviable indeed--that Leicester
who really rules the empire of your love."

Tightening the clasp of her palms which enclosed the little gold
locket containing the image of their child, a wintry smile broke over
her white face, lending it that mournful glimmer which fading
moonlight sheds on some silent cenotaph in a cemetery.

"If my stage tricks of glance or tone, my carefully studied and
practised attitudes and modulations, recall some neglected memories
of your sunny past, let me hope that Mr. Laurance links me with the
holy associations that cluster about a mother's or a sister's sacred
features; reviving the earlier years, when he offered at the shrine
of friendship, of honour, and of genius, tributes too sincere to
admit the glozing varnish of fulsome, fashionable adulation, which
degrades alike the lips that utter and the ears that listen. If at
some period in the mysterious future, you, whom--because my
countryman--I reluctantly consented to receive, should really
discover a noble lovely woman before whose worth and beauty that
fickle heart you call your own utterly surrenders, and whom winning
as wife, and cherishing as only husbands can the darlings they
worship, you were finally torn away from--by inexorable death--the
only power that can part husbands and wives, then think you, Mr.
Laurance, that the universe holds a grave deep enough to keep you
quiet in your coffin--if vain heartless men profaned her sacred
widowhood by such utterances as you presume to offer me? The stage is
the arena, where in gladiatorial combat I wage my battle with the
beasts of Poverty and Want: there I receive the swelling acclamations
of triumph, or the pelting hisses of defeat; there before the
footlights where I t