s most
womanly, wifely message. "She wants to see me. Oh, the dear one! Not
more than I want to see her. Fool, villain, that I am! I will go to her.
Katherine! Kate! My dear little Kate!" So he ejaculated as he paced his
narrow quarters, and tried to arrange his plans for a Christmas visit
to his wife and child.

First he went to his colonel's lodging, and easily obtained two weeks'
absence; then he dressed carefully, and went to his club for dinner. He
had determined to ask Lady Capel for a hundred pounds; and he thought it
would be the best plan to make his request when she was surrounded by
company, and under the pleasurable excitement of a winning rubber. And
if the circumstances proved adverse, then he could try his fortune in
the hours of her morning retirement.

The mansion in Berkeley Square was brilliantly lighted when he
approached it. Chairs and coaches were waiting in lines of three deep;
coachmen and footmen quarrelling, shouting, talking; link-boys running
here and there in search of lost articles or missing servants. But the
hubbub did not at that time make his blood run quicker, or give any
light of expectation to his countenance; for his heart and thoughts were
near a hundred miles away.

Sunday night was Lady Capel's great card-night, and the rooms were full
of tables surrounded by powdered and painted beauties intent upon the
game and the gold. The odour of musk was everywhere, and the sound of
the tapping of gold snuff-boxes, and the fluttering of fans, and the
sharp, technical calls of the gamesters, and the hollow laughter of
hollow hearts. There was a hired singing-girl with a lute at one end of
the room, babbling of Cupid and Daphne, and green meadow and larks. But
she was poorly dressed and indifferent looking; and she sang with a
sad, mechanical air, as if her thoughts were far off. Hyde would have
passed her without a glance; but, as he approached, she broke her
love-ditty in two, and began to sing, with a meaning look at him,--

"They say there is a happy land,
Where husbands never prove untrue;
Where lovely maids may give their hearts,
And never need the gift to rue;
Where men can make and keep a vow,
And wives are never in despair.
I'm very fond of seeing sights--
Pray tell me, how can I get there?"

The question seemed so directly addressed to Hyde