opportunities of knowledge or spiritual advancement so rare, that they justify a neglect of conventional rules of conduct, or permit the relegation of ordinary obligations—for a time at least—to the second place!

Thus did the young man argue—ambition, chivalry, and those hereditary tendencies towards a rather violent reduction of theory to practice against which he had so lately been warned, all conspiring to one result. And so, at last, his head erect, and—though he knew it not—that air of assured conquest about him which had sat so charmingly upon his namesake—perhaps his rival—the Laurence Rivers of the Cosway miniature, he swung down the still, crimson-carpeted corridor, pulled the stiff tapestry curtain forward, passed behind it, and entered the room beyond. He laughed a little to himself, he was all of a white heat, he would be as the Gods, working miracles, righting wrong, conquering death.

Sharp disappointment awaited him. The yellow drawing-room was brilliantly lighted. The atmosphere of it was fresh, almost to the point of chill. The miniatures lay side by side upon the escritoire, where he had placed them some four or five hours earlier; but his sweet fairy-lady was not there to receive him. The room was vacant of all human, all visible, presence save his own.

The hours which followed were among the most poignant that Laurence had ever experienced. He had made so certain that he needed but to open that door to regain the unreal world, yet world—as he believed—of profoundest reality, which enchanted, while it baffled and perplexed him. He found himself compelled to admit, moreover, not without a sense of humiliation, that his attitude was not exclusively pathological or scientific. A good deal of the natural man, and the natural man's affections and vanities, entered into it. He craved once again to see that slender, flitting figure, to feel the vibration of that otherwise impalpable hand, to read the trust and exquisite sympathy of those lovely eyes; he craved again to be aware of the fervour of his own eloquence, the rush and spring of his own thought. Moreover, he felt jealous, absurdly but increasingly jealous, of that other Laurence Rivers, of whom, for all his vitality and immediate consciousness of living energy and active will, he seemed to be but a second edition. The man had forestalled him in face and semblance, forestalled him too in the heart of the woman it would be—it was, he feared—only too easy for him to love.

And so he wandered aimlessly, restlessly about the bright, empty room, almost as his sweet rose-clad lady had wandered on the night he first met her, searching, 

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