regard her in such light, because that chance has come to pass. She
can therefore give him her hand without trepidation, and talk with
him for half an hour, when called on to do so, as calmly as she
might do with his sister.

Such a one was Isa Heine at the time of which I am writing. We
English, in our passion for daily excitement, might call her
phlegmatic, but we should call her so unjustly. Life to her was a
serious matter, of which the daily duties and daily wants were
sufficient to occupy her thoughts. She was her mother's companion,
the instructress of both her brother and her sister, and the charm
of her father's vacant hours. With such calls upon her time, and so
many realities around her, her imagination did not teach her to look
for joys beyond those of her present life and home. When love and
marriage should come to her, as come they probably might, she would
endeavour to attune herself to a new happiness and a new sphere of
duties. In the meantime she was contented to keep her mother's
accounts, and look after her brother and sister up two pair of
stairs in the Ludwigs Strasse. But change would certainly come, we
may prophesy; for Isa Heine was a beautiful girl, tall and graceful,
comely to the eye, and fit in every way to be loved and cherished as
the partner of a man's home.

I have said that an English clerk made a part of that small
establishment in the dingy banking-office in the Schrannen Platz,
and I must say a word or two of Herbert Onslow. In his early career
he had not been fortunate. His father, with means sufficiently
moderate, and with a family more than sufficiently large, had sent
him to a public school at which he had been very idle, and then to
one of the universities, at which he had run into debt, and had