of his spirit-lamp. Then he rose and shook all his
mighty limbs--as the Danite Titan might have done before his locks were
shorn--and sat down again with a long-drawn sigh, as of relief. I longed
to interpose with a warning word, for in the handwriting I recognized
the _griffe_ of the fatal Delilah. But I knew how dangerous it was to
attempt interference with Guy; and besides, this time, I felt sure he
had escaped the toils. Yet my heart sank as I thought of the seductions
and temptations that the future might have in store. I could hardly
keep my temper that evening when I saw at the Opera Flora
Bellasys--triumphant, as if she could guess what the morning's work had
been--and then thought of the single, guileless heart whose happiness
she was plotting to overthrow.

She and Guy met constantly, for he still went every where, often
accompanied by his _fiancee_. They seemed to be on the most ordinary
footing of old acquaintances, though it was remarked that no one could
be said to have succeeded to the post of grand vizier at the Bellasys
court, vacated by Livingstone. I can not trace the threads of the web of
Circe. She concealed them well at the time; and since--between the
knowledge of them and me is drawn the veil of a terrible remorse, which
I have never tried to penetrate.

I can only tell the end, which came very speedily.

CHAPTER XX.

"'Tis good to be merry and wise;
'Tis good to be honest and true;
'Tis good to be off with the old love
Before you are on with the new."

There was a sound of revelry by night in Mrs. Wallace's villa at
Richmond, and fair women and brave men mustered there strong. Every one
liked those parties. The hostess was young and very charming, while her
husband, a bald, inoffensive, elderly man, was equally eminent in his
own department of the commissariat. His wines were things to dream of in
after years, when, like Curran, "confined to the Port" of a remote
country inn, one sacrifices one's self heroically on the altar of the
landlord for the good of the house.

The crowd was not so dense as at most London parties, and the
temperature consequently something below that of a vapor-bath or of the
_Piombi_, but the generality of the guests were either amusing, or
pretty, or otherwise eligible. To be sure, it was rather an expedition
and a question of passports to get down there, but the drive home
through the cool dewy morning made you amends.

Constan