torious couple, and a melancholy reference to implacable obstacles
in the principles of each. The pair were offending the amatory corner in
the generous good sense of Nataly and Victor; they were not to be hotly
protected, though they were well enough liked for their qualities,
except by Lady Grace, who revelled in the horrifying and scandalizing of
Miss Graves. Such a specimen of the Puritan middle English as Priscilla
Graves, was eastwind on her skin, nausea to her gorge. She wondered
at having drifted into the neighbourhood of a person resembling in her
repellent formal chill virtuousness a windy belfry tower, down among
those districts of suburban London or appalling provincial towns passed
now and then with a shudder, where the funereal square bricks-up the
Church, that Arctic hen-mother sits on the square, and the moving dead
are summoned to their round of penitential exercise by a monosyllabic
tribulation-bell. Fenellan's graphic sketch of the teetotaller woman
seeing her admirer pursued by Eumenides flagons--abominations of
emptiness--to the banks of the black river of suicides, where the
one most wretched light is Inebriation's nose; and of the vegetarian
violoncello's horror at his vision of the long procession of the
flocks and herds into his lady's melodious Ark of a mouth, excited and
delighted her antipathy. She was amused to transports at the station, on
hearing Mr. Barmby, in a voice all ophicleide, remark: 'No, I carry no
instrument.' The habitation of it at the bottom of his trunk, was not
forgotten when it sounded.

Reclining in warmth on the deck of the vessel at night, she said, just
under Victor's ear: 'Where are those two?'

'Bid me select the couple,' said he.

She rejoined: 'Silly man'; and sleepily gave him her hand for good
night, and so paralyzed his arm, that he had to cover the continued
junction by saying more than he intended: 'If they come to an
understanding!'

'Plain enough on one side.'

'You think it suitable?'

'Perfection; and well-planned to let them discover it.' 'This is really
my favourite route; I love the saltwater and the night on deck.'

'Go on.'

'How?'

'Number your loves. It would tax your arithmetic.'

'I can hate.'

'Not me?'

Positively the contrary, an impulsive squeeze of fingers declared it;
and they broke the link, neither of them sensibly hurt; though a leaf
or two of the ingenuities, which were her thoughts, turned over in the
phantasies of the