a handsome boy, and so down into self-
contempt and suicide?

She was conscious, I do believe, of no other reason than that she
gave; but consciousness is a dim candle--over a deep mine.

'After all,' she said pettishly, 'people will call it a mere
imitation of Shelley's Alastor. And what harm if it is? Is there
to be no female Alastor? Has not the woman as good a right as the
man to long after ideal beauty--to pine and die if she cannot find
it; and regenerate herself in its light?'

'Yo-hoo-oo-oo! Youp, youp! Oh-hooo!' arose doleful through the
echoing shrubbery.

Argemone started and looked out. It was not a banshee, but a
forgotten fox-hound puppy, sitting mournfully on the gravel-walk
beneath, staring at the clear ghastly moon.

She laughed and blushed--there was a rebuke in it. She turned to go
to rest; and as she knelt and prayed at her velvet faldstool, among
all the nicknacks which now-a-days make a luxury of devotion, was it
strange if, after she had prayed for the fate of nations and
churches, and for those who, as she thought, were fighting at Oxford
the cause of universal truth and reverend antiquity, she remembered
in her petitions the poor godless youth, with his troubled and
troubling eloquence? But it was strange that she blushed when she
mentioned his name--why should she not pray for him as she prayed
for others?

Perhaps she felt that she did not pray for him as she prayed for
others.

She left the AEolian harp in the window, as a luxury if she should
wake, and coiled herself up among lace pillows and eider blemos; and
the hound coiled himself up on the gravel-walk, after a solemn
vesper-ceremony of three turns round in his own length, looking
vainly for a 'soft stone.' The finest of us are animals after all,
and live by eating and sleeping: and, taken as animals, not so
badly off either--unless we happen to be Dorsetshire labourers--or
Spitalfields weavers--or colliery children--or marching soldiers--
or, I am afraid, one half of English souls this day.

And Argemone dreamed;--that she was a fox, flying for her life
through a churchyard--and Lancelot was a hound, yelling and leaping,
in a red coat and white buckskins, close upon her--and she felt his
hot breath, and saw his white teeth glare. . . . And then her
father was there: and he was an Italian boy, and played the organ--
and Lancelot was a dancing dog, and stood up and danced to the tune
o