ne to see, would have been esteemed boons of great
price; what delight, then, was it to meet those with whom she could
converse of "bygone times" and other lands!--"that dear Kate," whom she
really liked as well as it was in her nature to love anything, from whom
she now anticipated so much of that gossip, technically called "news,"
and into whose confiding heart she longed to pour out her own private
woes!

The meeting was indeed affectionate on both sides; and, as Lady Hester
was in her most gracious of moods, Frank thought her the very type of
amiability, and the old Count pronounced her manners fit for the high
ordeal of Vienna itself. Perhaps our reader will be grateful if we leave
to his imagination all the changeful moods of grief and joy, surprise,
regret, and ecstasy, with which her Ladyship questioned and listened
to Kate Dalton's stories; throwing out, from time to time, little
reflections of her own, as though incidentally, to show how much wiser
years had made her. There are people who ever regard the misfortunes of
others as mere key-notes to elicit their own sufferings; and thus, when
Kate spoke of Russia, Lady Hester quoted Ireland. Frank's sufferings
reminded her of her own "nerves;" and poor Nelly's unknown fate was
precisely "the condition of obscurity to which Sir Stafford's cruel will
had consigned herself."

Kate's mind was very far from being at ease, and yet it was with no mean
pleasure she found herself seated beside Lady Hester, talking over the
past with all that varying emotion which themes of pleasure and sadness
call up. Who has not enjoyed the delight of such moments, when, living
again bygone days, we laugh or sigh over incidents wherein once as
actors we had moved and felt? If time has dimmed our perceptions of
pleasure, it has also softened down resentments and allayed asperities.
We can afford to forgive so much, and we feel, also, so confident of
others' forgiveness, and if regrets do steal over us that these things
have passed away forever, there yet lurks the flattering thought that we
have grown wiser than we then were. So is it the autobiographies of the
fireside are pleasant histories, whose vanities are all pardonable, and
whose trifling is never ungraceful! Memory throws such a softened light
on the picture, that even bores become sufferable, and we extract a
passing laugh from the most tiresome of our quondam "afflictives."

Had her Ladyship been less occupied with herself a