r to-day, nor for this year, but--for ever?"

"No!" It was a very different "No" this time.

"Will you forgive me, then, my darling?"

Her fingers clasped his hand closely, and Geraldine looked at him from
under her hat; her eyes, so like an April day, with their tears, and
their tender and mischievous smile, were so irresistibly provocative
that Fairlie took his pardon for granted, and thanked her in the way
that seemed to him at once most eloquent and most satisfactory.

If you wish to know what became of Belle, he fled across the country to
the railway station, and spent his leave Heaven knows where--in
sackcloth and ashes, I suppose--meditating on his frightful sell. _We_
saw nothing more of him; he could hardly show in Norwich again with all
his laurels tumbled in the dust, and his trophies of conquest
laughing-stocks for all the troop. He exchanged into the Z Battery going
out to India, and I never saw or heard of him till a year or two ago,
when he landed at Portsmouth, a much wiser and pleasanter man. The
lesson, joined to the late campaign under Sir Colin, had done him a vast
amount of good; he had lost his conceit, his vanity, his affectation,
and was what Nature meant him to be--a sensible, good-hearted fellow. As
luck would have it, Pretty Face, who had joined the Eleventh, was there
too, and Fairlie and his wife as well, and Belle had the good sense to
laugh it over with them, assuring Geraldine, however, that no one had
eclipsed the G. V. whom he had once hoped had answered his memorable
advertisement. He has grown wiser, and makes a jest of it now; it may be
a sore point still, I cannot say--nobody sees it; but, whether or no, in
the old city of Norwich, and in our corps, from Cadets to Colonels,
nobody forgets THE LINE IN THE "DAILY:" WHO DID IT, AND WHO WAS DONE BY
IT.

HOLLY WREATHS AND ROSE CHAINS.

HOLLY WREATHS AND ROSE CHAINS.

I.

THE COLONEL OF THE "WHITE FAVORS" AND CECIL ST. AUBYN.

"What are you going to do with yourself this Christmas, old fellow?"
said Vivian, of the 60th Hussars: the White Favors we call them,
because, after Edgehill, Henriette Maria gave their Colonel a white
rosette off her own dress to hang to his sword-knot, and all the 60th
have like ribbons to this day. "If you've nothing better to do,"
continued their present Lieutenant-Colonel, "Come down with me to
Deerhurst. The governor'll be charmed to see you; my mother has always
some nice-looking girl