y changing my age back again to thirty on the instant. Oh, be
merciful, dear romantic reader! I didn't strike the Major-General,
because, oh, because I AGREED WITH HIM!

I loved Nicolete, you must have felt that. She was sweet to me as the
bunch of white flowers that, in their frail Venetian vase, stand so
daintily on my old bureau as I write, doing their best to sweeten my
thoughts. Dear was she to me as the birds that out in the old garden
yonder sing and sing their best to lift up my leaden heart. She was
dear as the Spring itself, she was only less dear than Autumn.

Yes, black confession! after the first passion of her loss, the
immediate ache of her young beauty had passed, and I was able to
analyse what I really felt, I not only agreed with him, I thanked God
for the Major-General! He had saved me from playing the terrible part
of executioner. He had just come in time to behead the Lady Jane Grey
of our dreams.

I should have no qualms about tightening the rope round the neck of
some human monster, or sticking a neat dagger or bullet into a
dangerous, treacherous foe, but to kill a dream is a sickening
business. It goes on moaning in such a heart-breaking fashion, and you
never know when it is dead. All on a sudden some night it will come
wailing in the wind outside your window, and you must blacken your
heart and harden your face with another strangling grip of its slim
appealing throat, another blow upon its angel eyes. Even then it will
recover, and you will go on being a murderer, making for yourself day
by day a murderer's face, without the satisfaction of having really
murdered.

But what of Nicolete? do you exclaim. Have you no thought for her,
bleeding her heart away in solitude? Can you so soon forget those
appealing eyes? Yes, I have thought for her. Would God that I could
bear for her those growing pains of the heart! and I shall never forget
those farewell eyes. But then, you see, I had firmly realised this,
that she would sooner recover from our separation than from our
marriage; that her love for me, pretty and poignant and dramatic while
it lasted, was a book-born, book-fed dream, which must die soon or
late,--the sooner the better for the peace of the dreams that in the
course of nature would soon spring up to take its place.

But while I realised all this, and, with a veritable aching of the
heart at the loss of her, felt a curious satisfaction at the turn of
events, still my own