opening the door she lets him in. The dog walks solemnly up to her as she resumes her seat by the fire, and sits down in front of her with his nose thrust into her hand, and his loving, faithful dog's eyes turned up to her, while his tail gives slow thuds of contentment on the rug.

"Oh, Milly, how can you have that horrid dog in here ?" And Milly answers smiling,

"I know how to appreciate a true friend." "It's time we were in bed," cries Laura; and the friends part with a kiss, and Faithful resumes his guard of honour on the mat outside.

But Milly does not go to bed just yet; she sits down again by the fire, and looks thoughtfully into the burning coals. I should like to describe her to you, but the task is more than difficult. I may well ink my pen and begin fifty different sheets of paper, in the endeavour to give any

adequate description of Milly Scarlett.

How can one be expected to reconcile paradoxes? To attempt to describe some people is like taking the bits of glass out a kaleidoscope. Leave them where they are, they present an harmonious whole take them to pieces, they are only so many bits of different sized and coloured glass, that put you at your wit's end to match. There are some women the very essence of whose nature is change-who cannot be, because they cannot feel, always the same -who have a thousand different moods, caprices, and feelings. To this class Mrs. Scarlett belonged. I think she had in her nearly all the attributes that go to make a good and bad woman.

What shall I say of her? First, then, she was intensely a woman; womanly in her instinct to side with what she loved rather than what was strictly just; woman

ly in her championship of the weak; womanly in her appreciation of the elegancies and refinements of polished life; womanly beyond all in her intense desire to please, her love of approbation, and the inordinate value she set on personal appearance and manner in both sexes. A brilliant imagination, a ready wit, a charming manner to those she liked, a very frigid and haughty one to those who displeased hera woman who inspired spontaneously either great liking or the reverse.

Milly was very bright and blithe sometimes, very bitter and disappointed at others. In one mood she would revel in life and excitement, in another she would rail at Fate and the world-would protest indignantly against the cruelty that gives blessings and saps all power of enjoyment out of them. At these times she suffered intensely from seeing how fair life might

be, and how rotten it is at the core. She had that intense, supreme longing after happiness that is the keenest torture of all large minds, because their disappointment is proportionate. "I have lived and loved -let me die !" had been her motto with Thekla once. She had set up to herself an idol, had hung it with the precious gifts of her love and faith and truth, as all these passionate-hearted women do, and it had been, after all, a poor clay figure, beautiful in no one's eyes but hers. She awoke from her delusion, but her own heart alone knew the exceeding bitterness of that tardy discovery. To learn to disbelieve where one's whole faith has centred—what sharper sting of all sore pains poor flesh is heir to?

"I have no heart," she had been used to say, with the passionate tears, themselves a contradiction, glistening in her eyes-"I don't believe in love, or truth, or happiness,

or anything else. We are born to be wretched and miserable, and to have everything we care for taken away from us.

"There is no help, for all these things are so,

And all the world is bitter as a tear.

And how these things are, though ye strove to show,
She would not know."

With which favourite quotation she would walk up and down the room with flashing eyes, and then, flinging herself into a chair, would launch a further tirade against the bitterness of life. And if any one, coming in a little later, would bring in some pitiful story of want, or sickness, or suffering, she would be filled with a bitter, contrite sense of her own ingratitude for all the blessings she enjoyed, and feel sorely ashamed of her petulant discontent, however reluctant she might be to own it. I don't think people with natures like Milly Scarlett's can ever be really happy or contented; they want too much