e long day of sunshine? Oh, why ask! you know I can never
repay you for the happiness of my life."

"Rather can I never repay you," said Vaughan, looking down into her
eyes, "for the faith that made you brave calumny and opposition, and
cling to my side despite all. I was heart-sick of the world, and you
called me back to life. I was weary of the fools who misjudged me, and I
let them think me what they might."

"Ah, how happy you make me!" cried Nina. "I should have been little
worthy of your love if I had suffered slander to warp me against you, or
if any revelations you cared enough for me to make of your past life,
had parted us:

Love is not love
That alters where it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.

There, monsieur!" she said, throwing her arms round him with a laugh,
while happy tears stood in her eyes--"there is a grand quotation for
you. Mind and take care, Ernest, that you never realise the Ruskinstone
predictions, and make me repent having caught and caged such a terrible
thing as a hunted PARIS LION!"

SIR GALAHAD'S RAID.

SIR GALAHAD'S RAID.

AN ADVENTURE ON THE SWEET WATERS.

For the punishment of my sins may the gods never again send me to Pera!
That I might have plenty on my shoulders I am frankly willing to
concede; all I protest is, that when one submissively acknowledges the
justice of ones future terminating in Tophet, it comes a little hard to
get purgatory in this world into the bargain. Purgatory lies _perdu_ for
one all over the earth. I have had fifty times more than my share
already, and the gout still remains an untried experience, a Gehenna
grimly waiting to avenge every morsel of white truffle and every glass
of comet claret with which I innocently solace my frail mortality.
Purgatory!--I have been chained in it fifty times; _et vous_?

When you rush to a Chancellerie, with the English Arms gorgeous above
its doorway, on the spur of a frightfully mysterious and autocratic
telegram, that makes it life or death to catch the train for England in
ten minutes, and have time enough to smoke about two dozen very big
cheroots, cooling your heels in the bureau, and then hear (when properly
tortured into the due amount of frantic agony for the intelligence to be
fully appreciated) that his Excellency is gone snipe-shooting to ----,
and that the First Secretary is in his bath, and has given orders not to
be disturbed; your informant languidly pricki