ross the frostbitten lawns, and late birds twitter
their good-night notes, and a few sleepy rooks caw coldly to each
other.

She hears none of this, is as self-absorbed a being as ever lived--one
whose whole solitude is full to overflowing with the thought of
another. But at last there breaks in upon Hyacinthe's still dream a
shriek, and then wild tumult, noises and excited speech, and the girl
springs to her feet, and in a flash is out in the wide hall in the
very midst of it all.

He lies there quite, quite dead. For ever flown the breath that made
of this beautiful clay a living man. Lady Florence has him halfway in
her arms as she kneels on the floor beside the body of her lover, and
between her sobs cries out to them to "Go for the surgeons!" for whom
long since Sir Harry sent. Hyacinthe put her hands behind her and
leaned heavily against the column that by good chance she found there.
When the crowd parted from him a little she leaned over a bit and
stared: that was all.

"Do not _you_ touch him!" cried the English maiden, maddened by her
grief, as she glanced up at the fair face.

"No, I will not: I do not wish to," returns the other softly,
straightening herself; and leaning there in her close gown, she is as
tearless as some caryatid.

When the surgeons have come on their useless mission, and gone, when
Florence Ffolliott stands weeping and wringing her hands, Hyacinthe
ventures over a pace nearer to the two.

"You see, Lady Florence," she says very gently, and with that curious
sorrowful look on her face that made it so like to the Ariadne's--"you
see, he was not meant for any woman: he was a Saxon god."

A year later Lady Florence Ffolliott's engagement to her cousin, the
little lovelorn viscount, was announced.

Sir Henry Leighton told me last week that he had been called in
consultation with regard to Hyacinthe King, and that there were not
three months of life in her. "She cannot act," said the great medical
man: "she plays her parts, it is true, but the power to portray has
gone out of her. She is going back to Rome for a while, and, I can
assure you, she will never return."

MARGUERITE F. AYMAR.

MUSICAL NOTATION.

Why is it that the knowledge of music is not more common?--that is,
why is it that there are so few people in this and every other country
who are able to read and write music as they read and write their
mother-tongue? Is it that the musical ear is a rare gift? Evidentl