laughter at this encounter, and the
haughty damsel turned on her heel, nor did shoe vouchsafe another word
to her elderly lover.

'When recreant man Meets lady's wrath, &c. &c.'

So the story of the debut was complete! Was ever a lady more inexorable,
more ingenious, in her revenge? One can fancy the poor Antiguan going to
the Baronet's house next day with a bouquet of flowers and passionately
abasing himself, craving her forgiveness. One can fancy the wounded
vanity of the girl, her shame that people had mocked her for the
disobedience of her suitor. Revenge, as her letter shows, became her
one thought. She would strike him through his other love, the love of
Thespis. 'I have compelled you,' she wrote afterwards, in her bitter
triumph, 'to be a greater Fool than you made me.' She, then, it was that
drove him to his public absurdity, she who insisted that he should never
win her unless he sacrificed his dear longing for stage-laurels and
actually pilloried himself upon the stage. The wig, the pantaloons, the
snuff-box, the grin, were all conceived, I fancy, in her pitiless spite.
It is possible that she did but say: 'The more ridiculous you make
yourself, the more hope for you.' But I do not believe that Mr. Coates,
a man of no humour, conceived the means himself. They were surely hers.

It is terrible to think of the ambitious amateur in his bedroom,
secretly practising hideous antics or gazing at his absurd apparel
before a mirror. How loath must he have been to desecrate the lines he
loved so dearly and had longed to declaim in all their beauty and their
resonance! And then, what irony at the daily rehearsal! With how sad a
smile must he have received the compliments of Mr. Dimonds on his
fine performance, knowing how different it would all be 'on the night!
'Nothing could have steeled him to the ordeal but his great love. He
must have wavered, had not the exaltation of his love protected him. But
the jeers of the mob were music in his hearing, his wounds love-symbols.
Then came the girl's cruel contempt of his martyrdom.

Aphrodite, who has care of lovers, did not spare Miss Tylney Long. She
made her love, a few months after, one who married her for her fortune
and broke her heart. In years of misery the wayward girl worked out
the penance of her unpardonable sin, dying, at length, in poverty and
despair. Into the wounds of him who had so truly loved her was poured,
after a space of fourteen years, the balsam