lattice-panes. "Dolores!" he
cried aloud; "Dolores! Dolores!" It was the name of none there.

"My God! What woman is it he calls?" his wife asked in her torture. But
none ever knew. Through half the night his faint pulse beat, his faint
breath came and went; but consciousness never more returned, and for
ever he muttered only that one name, that name which was not her own.
And when they laid the dead body in its shroud, they found on the left
arm above the elbow the word "Dolores" marked on the skin, as sailors
stamp letters in their flesh. But whose it was, or what woe or passion
it recorded, none ever knew--not even his wife, who had believed she
shared his every thought. And to his grave his dead and secret love went
with him.

This man was but a gay, frank, high-spirited gentleman, of no great
knowledge, and of no great attainments, riding fearlessly, laughing
joyously, living liberally; not a man, one would have said, to know any
deep passions, to treasure any bitter memories--and yet he had loved one
woman so well that he had never spoken of her, and never forgotten her;
never--not even in his death-hour, when the poor, stunned, stifled brain
had forgotten all other things of earth.

And so it seems to me that it is very often with you, and that you bear
with you through your lifetime the brand of an unforgotten name, branded
deep in, in days of passion, that none around you ever wot of, and that
the wife who sleeps on your heart never knows.

It is dead--the old love--long dead. And yet, when your last hour shall
come, and your senses shall be dizzy with death, the pale loves of the
troth and the hearth will fade from you, and this love alone will abide.

* * *

"Modern painters do not owe you much, sir," said a youngster to him
once, writhing under the _Midas'_ ruthless flagellation of his first
Academy picture.

"On the contrary," said the great censor, taking his snuff; "they owe me
much, or might have owed me much. If they had only listened to me, they
would have saved every shilling that they have thrown away on canvas!"

* * *

In your clubs and your camps, in your mischievous moods and your
philosophic moods, always indeed theoretically, you consider all women
immoral (except just, of course, your own mothers); but practically,
when your good-feeling is awakened, or your honest faith honestly
appealed to, you will believe in a woman's honour with a heartines