down to face its realities, to sow a sort of girlish wild oats, to have a good time,' to 'see life.' . . And now, how much of life would she see before the dark curtain fell ?

It is difficult to say how long this mood might have lasted; but in this mood it chanced that she met Golightly.

It was a mild and balmy afternoon, the occasion of her first outing after the influenza.

The local doctor, mildly surprised by her exultation at his successful treatment, did not enlarge to her upon the assistance contributed by the forces of Nature, bribed as they had been now and then by a gentle opiate to ignore the troubles of her mind. The disturbing element he could not understand, and in so short & case it was scarcely worth while to inquire. The patient's temperature had run briskly up to the superficially alarming degree often registered in this complaint; but there was not the slightest necessity for calling in the London physician, whose presence had attracted attention to a case not otherwise remarkable. This, again, was the doctor's view-not Miss Houldsworth's. When she spoke to him of an appalling sense of feebleness, he had smiled half comically, as if all his patients felt what she felt. Ah! he did not know.

The prediction had not lost its force, although it weighed less heavily upon her. It made the giddy world seem a degree or two further off—but somehow the giddy world seemed, quite apart from this, to attract her less.

Golightly, as it happened, was precisely the kind of man she felt she would most care to meet; and there he was, striding down the lime avenue, with his head bent forward. They had not met for half a year; and he could not have sought the meeting now. His face was pale and careworn. His glance, as it turned upon her, was that of a strong man wounded, and his voice surprised her by an accent of tenderness which she could not at first understand.

When she said simply, 'I am going home,' he turned, entranced with delight, to accompany her.

Conversation, so long suspended, felt its way back to intimacy, struggling to forget the misery of their last interview. They were passing through a secluded corner of the college grounds.

'You are better again ?' he said awkwardly, but in the same softened tone. “Oh, much better; quite well,' she said.

I am so thankful,' he answered. 'I was afraid ... I had heard ...

The words slipped out before he had quite framed such an inquiry about her general health as might, without giving pain, allay his own deep anxiety.

The fact was that upon the sick-bed Ida had confided her secret, with the indistinctness which is a spur of alarm to some minds, to a solitary confidante.

The sensational news-gossip of the kind travels quickly in college society—had been dropped by some ignorant or thoughtless person into Golightly's ears in the following form :—*That tall Miss Houldsworth's awfully bad, too. There's no judging by appearances. Sir Douglas Penrose says she can't live another

year.'

6

In an instant, watching his haggard face, she divined that something of this kind might have happened. She did not exactly realise how. What was ever present to her own mind might, she fancied, be almost patent to the world.

Oddly enough, too, she was struck by the contrast between this meeting and--the last. On that occasion she, who had everything, as it seemed, to give, when asked to devote it all to one who might turn out to be an invalid for life—he had made no secret of that—had been thinking only of herself. Now, with this secret fear consuming her, she was only lost in pity for him. With tender gentleness, as if he and not herself were the sufferer, she asked: "What have you heard ?'

Ida,' he stammered, 'dearest Ida,' and stopped, leaning one hand, as if for support, on the back of a garden seat that stood by the side of the path, and looking full into the lovely face turned towards him.

Its complexion beneath the wavy brown hair was of that perfect and delicate purity that is from its very perfection ambiguous in significance, the hue of untroubled childhood waking from a first sleep, or—the sign-manual of the wasting fiend that preys on youth and beauty.

He could not answer, and was relieved when she continued quietly, 'I will tell you myself. Shall we sit down here for a minute? ... No; it will do me no harm.' In fact, she was glad to rest. This appalling inability and indisposition to walk threequarters of a mile must, she reflecter, be the merciful preparation of Providence for a day when he would no longer care to live.

'It is nothing,' she said, 'to be very miserable about'—a gleam of the old brightness flashed over her face-but I know now that I have not long to... to live.'

Was it possible that the words seemed infinitely more terrible to the man sitting by her side than to herself, Ida Houldsworth, who had but repeated aloud what she had been long repeating to herself as her destiny-a thing she was firmly prepared to face? Was it possible that the repetition of them aloud in the open air, with the spring sun shining and the birds singing about her, made the words seem suddenly an outrage upon Nature and common sense, a hideous unbearable impossibility?

She was sure of nothing but that Golightly had seized her hand and covered it with kisses.

'Darling,' he cried to her, 'it can't be true.

O Ida, Ida, if it be but a day live it with me.'

an hour

For a full minute-regardless of time, eternity, and the possibility of catching cold-the learned Golightly and the magnificent Ida Houldsworth sat side by side on the secluded garden seat, holding each other's hands in blissful silence.

Then the pent-up tide of confidences within him began to trickle through the broken barrier. 'Darling,' he said, if you only knew what the last seven months have been to me!'

'O Phil,' she said, clasping his hand as one clasps a sufferer's, 'I have been very wicked. I know . . . I knew.'

...

...

.. ·

'Lavergne told you-something?' he said. 'Dearest, he went on, you didn't take offence at what he said? You know we were great friends years ago? We met one "Long" in the Alps, and I stayed with him three or four summers . . . till at last we had . . . well, a sort of quarrel.' His eyes were fixed on the ground, and he could not see her face of blank inquiring wonder. It was my fault, really. I suppose I couldn't believe in him-in his wonderful powers, I mean-not at first. He was always an eccentric man'-Golightly finished excavating a stone with the toe of his boot-and I thought he was deceiving himself in some pious way. . . Before that we used to correspond ... oh! about everything . . . And then, when he had seen you by chance with Lady Aubrey, he wrote me . . . oh, such a good letter... about you. So I thought

...

"

As he turned his face towards her, Ida Houldsworth's pale cheeks were suffused with colour

'Darling, you have forgiven him for . . . for pleading my cause? I can tell you all myself now. You must forgive him, for he has saved my life-(Do you know, he said he would pay me out for my infidelity ?)-saved it for you. . . And you, my darling Ida-you will live . . . for me. . . I see it-I know it. Oh, you couldn't leave me now.' His hot tears rained upon the hand clasped in his, but she scarcely heard one word of his impassioned utterance.

'Ida,' he hurried on, 'you will not die. Tell me what they ... the doctors what Sir Douglas Penrose said. I'm sure

it cannot mean

'What he said,' she interposed, in the voice of one slowly waking from a strange dream. It was not he.' (Golightly had a moment of that rapid guesswork so familiar to the practised examiner and examinee.) He only said-he's rather a pompous old thing, you know, Phil'—she smiled faintly. 'He only said there was "no immediate danger," but "I must take great care." Doctors seldom tell one the truth.'

"

"

'No?' he answered in puzzled abstraction. But Lavergne did. It was his advice . . .'

'You mean his advice to me?' she asked quickly.

'No, darling. He didn't lecture you, did he? How could he dare to? He didn't know you, darling. He thought you were given up to the world. But he had no right to tell you such a thing. From his letter I could only guess what he really said.'

'O Phil,' she burst in, with a new radiance in her eyes, and in a voice recalling the vigorous Ida of years past, what did he write?'

6

THE HUMOURS OF MUSICAL LIFE.

We are all of us familiar with the phrase 'There are two points of view to everything,' for it happens to be one of those time-hallowed and maddening commonplaces of which some one is invariably delivered, no matter what the subject under discussion.

I once heard a woman say, 'I like Mr. Brown. Of course, no one quite knows what became of his wife, and there certainly were odd stories, very odd stories about the way he made his money; but I like Mr. Brown.' This last in a tone of voice that in some subtle way conveyed to you that to differ from her was equivalent to labelling yourself an idiot pure and simple. I believe that on that occasion I also remarked that there were 'two points of view to everything.' For who am I that I should rise superior to the rest of humanity?

It is certainly a stock phrase with the musical publisher, as every composer knows who has been barefaced enough to try and persuade him that a composition in six flats is quite as likely to sell as well as, if not a great deal better than, one in which there are no flats at all. In fact, in the composer's humble opinion, those six flats are the cream of the whole thing, and he suggests as politely as possible that the publisher is a Goth for daring to insinuate that anything could possibly improve his manuscript. He assures him (if the composition be a song) that to change the signature from G flat into G natural will bring down upon him the anathema of Mr. Plunket Greene, for whom it has been specially composed, and whose high D flat, as every one must allow (here a slightly defiant tone colours the composer's voice he has very decided opinions of his own!), is a dream of beauty-he is sorry for the publisher if he does not think so too! He nervously turns over the pages and draws attention to ten bars which would stagger Paderewski himself, but during which the singer has a splendid innings on his best note, the celebrated D flat in question. He tries to impress upon the publisher's mind that spontaneous combustion will be the inevitable result if the unfortunate gentleman is condemned to sing for such a length of time on any note higher than the one originally written. And at