Then I found no difficulty at all in taking possession of him;
indeed he was delighted to have me brought back to his memory, he
positively gloated over me, and I grew apace.

Zaluski, in the seventh heaven of happiness, was playing with
Gertrude Morley, and his play was so good and so graceful that every
one was watching it with pleasure. His partner, too, played well;
she was a pretty, fair-haired girl, with soft grey eyes like the
eyes of a dove; she wore a white tennis dress and a white sailor
hat, and at her throat she had fastened a cluster of those beautiful
orange-coloured roses known by the prosaic name of 'William Allan
Richardson.'

If Mr. Blackthorne grew angry as he watched Sigismund Zaluski, he
grew doubly angry as he watched Gertrude Morley. He said to himself
that it was intolerable that such a girl should fall a prey to a
vain, shallow, unprincipled foreigner, and in a few minutes he had
painted such a dark picture of poor Sigismund that my strength
increased tenfold.

"Mr. Blackthorne," said Mrs. Courtenay, "would you take Mrs. Milton-
Cleave to have an ice?"

Now Mrs. Milton-Cleave had always been one of the curate's great
friends. She was a very pleasant, talkative woman of six-and-
thirty, and a general favourite. Her popularity was well deserved,
for she was always ready to do a kind action, and often went out of
her way to help people who had not the slightest claim upon her.
There was, however, no repose about Mrs. Milton-Cleave, and an acute
observer would have discovered that her universal readiness to help