Daughter, on one of their pretty decorative evenings,
when they sat together at the fireside, while the scent of the climbing
roses, and the light of the climbing moon, came in at the window.

The immediate effect of the confession was--no wonder--to draw tears.
And how beautiful she looked in tears! Who would dive for pearls when
the pearl-fisheries of a woman's eyes are his to rifle?

Beautiful, beautiful tears, flow on--no dull, leaden rain, no mere
monotonous deluge, but a living, singing fountain, crowned with such
rainbows as hang roses and stars in the fine mist of samite waterfalls,
irradiated by gleaming shafts of lovely anger and scorn.

Like Northern Lights on autumn evenings, the maiden's eyes pierced
Narcissus through and through with many-coloured spears. There was
thunder, too; the earth shook--just a little: but soon Narcissus saw the
white dove of peace flying to him through the glancing showers. For all
her sorrow, his was the peace of confession. His little lie had been
acknowledged, his treason self-betrayed.

And it was this.

I have hinted that Narcissus, like the Catholic Church, worshipped many
saints. At this time, one of them, by a thrilling coincidence, chanced
to have her shrine at a boarding-school, some fifteen miles or so from
the mill-pond on whose banks the Miller's Daughter had drawn into her
lovely face so much of the beauty of the world. Alice Sunshine, shall we
call her, was perhaps more of a cherub than a saint; a rosy, laughing,
plump little arrangement of sunshiny pink and white flesh, with blue
eyes and golden hair. Alice was not overburdened with intellectuality,
and, like others of her sex, her heart was nothing like so soft as her
bosom. Narcissus had first been in love with her sister; but he and the
sister--a budding woman of the world--had soon agreed that they were not
born for each other, and Narcissus had made the transfer of his tragic
passion with inexpensive informality. As the late Anthony Trollope would
finish one novel to-night, and begin another to-morrow morning, so would
Narcissus be off with the old love this Sunday, and visibly on with the
new the next.

Dear little plump, vegetable-marrow Alice! Will Narcissus ever forget
that Sunday night when the church, having at last released its weary
worshippers, he stole, not as aforetime to the soft side of Emily, but
to the still softer side of the little bewildered Alice. For, though
Alice had worshipped him