is! So that Loyd is booked for a pleasant journey, and
I start to-morrow, to ensure him all the happiness in my
power to confer. For the present, it would be as well to
tell all anxious and inquiring friends, into which category
come tailors, bootmakers, jewellers, &c., that it will be a
postal economy not to address Mr. Harry Calvert in any
European capital, and to let the 'bills lie on the table,'
and be read this day six years, but add that if properly
treated by fortune, I mean to acquit my debts to them one of
these days.

"That I 'wish they may get it' is, therefore, no scornful
or derisive hope of your friend,

"H. Calvert.

"If--not a likely matter--anything occurs worth mention, you
shall have a line from me from Venice."

"When he had concluded his letter, he extinguished his candles, and sat
down at the open window. The moon had gone down, and, though star-lit,
the night was dark. The window in the other wing of the villa, at which
he had seen the figure through the curtain, was now thrown open, and
he could see that Florence, with a shawl wrapped round her, was leaning
out, and talking to some one in the garden underneath.

"It is the first time," said a voice he knew to Emily's, "that I ever
made a bouquet in the dark."

"Come up, Milly dearest; the dew is falling heavily. I feel it even
here."

"I'll just fasten this rose I have here in his hat; he saw it in my hair
to-night, and he'll remember it."

She left the garden, the window was closed. The light was put out, and
all was silent.

CHAPTER XV. SISTERS' CONFIDENCES.

THE day of Calvert's departure was a very sad one at the villa; so was
the next and the next! It is impossible to repeat the routine of a quiet
life when we have lost one whose pleasant companionship imparted to the
hours a something of his own identity, without feeling the dreary
blank his absence leaves, and, together with this, comes the not very
flattering conviction of how little of our enjoyment we owed to our own
efforts, and how much to his.

"I never thought we should have missed him so much," said Emily as she
sat with her sister beside the lake, where the oars lay along the
boats unused, and the fishing-net hung to dry from the branches of the
mulberry-tree.

"Of course we miss him," said Florence peevishly. "You don't live in
daily, hourly intercourse with a person withou