s and
strength for which she will look in vain in her own sex. According to
your jests, the world is one vast harem, of which all the doors are open
to every man, and whose fair inmates are all alike impressionable to the
charm of intrigue or to the chink of gold. But, in simple earnest and
reality, I have heard the wildest and most debonair amongst you--once
convinced of the honour and innocence looking from a woman's eyes--stand
up in defence of these when libelled in her absence, with a zeal and a
stanchness that did my heart good.

* * *

His simple creed, "the good faith of a gentleman," forbade him to injure
what lay defenceless at his mercy.

Ah! revile that old faith as you will, it has lasted longer than any
other cultus; and whilst altars have reeled, and idols been shattered,
and priests changed their teachings, and peoples altered their gods, the
old faith has lasted through all; and the simple instinct of the Greek
eupatrid and of the Roman patrician still moves the heart of the English
gentleman--the instinct of _Noblesse oblige_.

* * *

"The exception proves the rule," runs your proverb; but why, I wonder,
is it that you always only believe in the rule, and are always utterly
sceptical as to the existence of the exception?

* * *

The sun shone in over the roofs; the bird in its cage began a low
tremulous song; the murmur of all the crowded streets came up upon the
silence; and Nellie lay there dead;--the light upon her curly hair, and
on her mouth the smile that had come there at his touch.

"Ah, my dear!" said Fanfreluche, as she ceased her story, with a
half-soft and half-sardonic sadness, "she was but a little, ignorant,
common player, who made but three pounds a week, and who talked the
slang of the streets, and who thought shrimps and tea a meal for the
gods, and who made up her own dresses with her own hands, out of tinsel
and tarlatanes and trumperies, and who knew no better than to follow the
blind, dumb instincts of good that, self-sown and uncultured, lived in
her--God knows how!--as the harebells, with the dew on them, will live
amidst the rank, coarse grass of graveyards. She was but a poor little
player, who tried to be honest where all was corruption, who tried to
walk straightly where all ways were crooked. So she died to-day in a
garret, my dear."

* * *

If all men in whose hearts lives a dull, abid