ind, has ideas of his
own on some matters.

'Hang your swell hotels,' says Papa Leland; 'I always stop at the
Westminster, It's near the House, and quite convenient enough for
anywhere.'

It was thus that Lilian found herself under the same roof with Thecla
Perzio, who lived there with a sore and frightened heart, waiting for
that shallow lover who had caught her in love's toils, and broken up her
life for her, and who now left her poor appeal unanswered.

Poor indiscreet little Thecla had a suite of rooms on the first floor,
and lived alone within them with her Greek maid, and agonised. She was
for ever peering furtively through the door when any manly step sounded
in the corridor, but she never saw the form she waited for. But it
chanced, the morning after the ball, that she opened her door and looked
out upon the corridor at the sound of Papa Leland's footstep. Papa
Leland went by briskly; but Lilian caught sight of her and knew her in a
moment, and stayed to speak. The two girls had been too closely engaged
with their respective love-makings to form any very close acquaintance
with each other; but during a week's imprisonment on board ship the
friendships of women, and especially of young and gentle-hearted women,
advance very rapidly. They had parted with a great deal of mutual
liking, and met again now with mutual pleasure. In a minute Lilian was
seated in the poor little Greek's big and dreary parlour. She was a
proud creature was little Thecla, and would not chatter with her maid.
She had given nobody her confidence; and now, having once confessed that
she was unhappy, she broke out, with her pretty head on Lilian's lap,
and had a grand, refreshing, honest cry. That over, she set forth her
story. She told how Demetri was madly, foolishly jealous; how he had
tried to murder the gentleman of whom he was jealous; and how at last,
finding herself alone in the world, and being afraid of Demetri, she
had sought an asylum in England. She did not say of whom Demetri was
jealous, and Lilian had not the remotest notion of the truth. It very
soon came out, however; and then Lihan was sore afraid for Thecla
Perzio's happiness. She had no great belief in her brother. She loved
him very much; but she was dimly afraid that James was an impracticable
and unmarriable man, a person who could set all the wiles and all the
tenderness of the sex at calm defiance--a born bachelor. And, besides
that, being, in spite of her many cha