st love may be stronger than first love; and she would soon, alas,
enter on the still more melancholy tract when at least the vainer ones of
her sex shrink from receiving a male visitor otherwise than with their
backs to the window or the blinds half down. She reflected on Mrs.
Hooper's remark, and said no more about age.

Just then a telegram was brought up. It came from her husband, who had
gone down the Channel as far as Budmouth with his friends in the yacht,
and would not be able to get back till next day.

After her light dinner Ella idled about the shore with the children till
dusk, thinking of the yet uncovered photograph in her room, with a serene
sense of something ecstatic to come. For, with the subtle luxuriousness
of fancy in which this young woman was an adept, on learning that her
husband was to be absent that night she had refrained from incontinently
rushing upstairs and opening the picture-frame, preferring to reserve the
inspection till she could be alone, and a more romantic tinge be imparted
to the occasion by silence, candles, solemn sea and stars outside, than
was afforded by the garish afternoon sunlight.

The children had been sent to bed, and Ella soon followed, though it was
not yet ten o'clock. To gratify her passionate curiosity she now made
her preparations, first getting rid of superfluous garments and putting
on her dressing-gown, then arranging a chair in front of the table and
reading several pages of Trewe's tenderest utterances. Then she fetched
the portrait-frame to the light, opened the back, took out the likeness,
and set it up before her.

It was a striking countenance to look upon. The poet wore a luxuriant
black moustache and imperial, and a slouched hat which shaded the
forehead. The large dark eyes, described by the landlady, showed an
unlimited capacity for misery; they looked out from beneath well-shaped
brows as if they were reading the universe in the microcosm of the
confronter's face, and were not altogether overjoyed at what the
spectacle portended.

Ella murmured in her lowest, richest, tenderest tone: 'And it's you
who've so cruelly eclipsed me these many times!'

As she gazed long at the portrait she fell into thought, till her eyes
filled with tears, and she touched the cardboard with her lips. Then she
laughed with a nervous lightness, and wiped her eyes.

She thought how wicked she was, a woman having a husband and three
children, to let her mind st