as elsewhere, she pursued her favorite amusement remorselessly.
Fallowfield called it "her cutting-out expeditions." She used to watch
till a mother and daughter had, between them, secured a good matrimonial
prize, and then employ her fascinations on the captured one--seldom
without effect--so as to steal him out of their hands.

Do you remember Waterton's story of the osprey? The hard-working bird,
by dint of perseverance, has brought up a good fish. Just as it emerges
from the water, there is heard a flap and a whistle of mighty pinions,
and from his watch-tower on the cliff far above swoops down the great
sea-eagle. The poor osprey _a beau crier_, it must drop its booty, and
the strong marauder sails off with a slow and dignified flight, to
discuss it in the wood at his leisure. The only fault in the parallel
was that Flora always dropped the prey with the coolest disdain when it
was once fairly within her clutches. How the match-makers did hate her!
What vows for her discomfiture must have been breathed into bouquets
held up to conceal the angry flush of disappointment or the paleness of
despair!

I own this practice of hers did not raise her in my opinion. I can not
think so hardly as it is the fashion to do of the junior and working
members, at least, of the manoeuvring guild. It is not an elevating or
very creditable profession, certainly, but it seems such a disagreeable
one that none would take it up from choice. The chief fault, at all
events, lies with the trainers; the jockeys (poor little things!) only
ride to orders; and, by the way, I think they generally err in not
knowing how to _wait_, and in making the running too strong at first.

As I meet, year after year, one of these--to whom the seed sown in
London ball-rooms and German watering-places had produced nothing yet
but those tiresome garlands of the vestal--I look curiously to see how
she wears, thinking of the courtier's answer to Louis XIV. when the
latter asked if he was looking older: "Sire, I see some more victories
written on your forehead." It is more defeats that one can read so
plainly on poor Fanny Singleton's.

How many shipwrecks close to port; how many races lost by a head, how
many games by a point, she must have known before her silver laugh
became so hollow, and her pleasant smile so evidently theatrical and
lip-deep; before what once was chanceful became desperate, and she fell
back into the ranks of the forlorn hope--of the "Lost