inutes to the moment of the train's departure.

A man may still afford to dwell on the charms and merits of his heart's
mistress while he has ten minutes to spare. The dropping minutes,
however, detract one by one from her individuality and threaten to sink
her in her sex entirely. It is the inexorable clock that says she is as
other women. Dacier began to chafe. He was unaccustomed to the part
he was performing:--and if she failed him? She would not. She would be
late, though. No, she was in time! His long legs crossed the platform to
overtake a tall lady veiled and dressed in black. He lifted his hat; he
heard an alarmed little cry and retired. The clock said, Five minutes:
a secret chiromancy in addition indicating on its face the word Fool.
An odd word to be cast at him! It rocked the icy pillar of pride in the
background of his nature. Certainly standing solos at the hour of eight
P.M., he would stand for a fool. Hitherto he had never allowed a woman
to chance to posture him in that character. He strode out, returned,
scanned every lady's shape, and for a distraction watched the veiled
lady whom he had accosted. Her figure suggested pleasant features.
Either she was disappointed or she was an adept. At the shutting of the
gates she glided through, not without a fearful look around and at
him. She disappeared. Dacier shrugged. His novel assimilation to
the rat-rabble of amatory intriguers tapped him on the shoulder
unpleasantly. A luckless member of the fraternity too! The bell, the
clock and the train gave him his title. 'And I was ready to fling down
everything for the woman!' The trial of a superb London gentleman's
resources in the love-passion could not have been much keener. No sign
of her.

He who stands ready to defy the world, and is baffled by the absence of
his fair assistant, is the fool doubled, so completely the fool that
he heads the universal shout; he does not spare himself. The sole
consolation he has is to revile the sex. Women! women! Whom have they
not made a fool of! His uncle as much as any--and professing to know
them. Him also! the man proud of escaping their wiles. 'For this
woman...!' he went on saying after he had lost sight of her in her sex's
trickeries. The nearest he could get to her was to conceive that the
arrant coquette was now laughing at her utter subjugation and befooling
of the man popularly supposed invincible. If it were known of him! The
idea of his being a puppet fixed fo