course she agreed with me that we could neither correspond nor meet unless some favourable change in circumstances took place, for which she would always pray.

"I've never seen her or heard from her since; and though I know she's as true and constant as a rock, still, Donald, a fellow has his low fits when everything looks black; and for some time past I've been tremendously down on my luck--all from never hearing anything the least cheering, and having no communication with her; so that at last I began to persuade myself she had forgotten me altogether; and it was only when I heard she was wearing my locket that I felt, Perhaps it isn't all over with me yet!' There, Donald, that's my yarn -the confession of Adolphus Burridge. I imagine you're a sharp fellow. They say Scotchmen are clear-headed. Perhaps you may hit on a scheme. So keep thinking it over, like a good fellow, will you?"

I duly promised; and as the day was now getting on, we remounted and rode back to camp, Burridge much relieved by his confession, and I deeply meditating on the strange tale I had heard.

CHAPTER XI.

"We vow to weep seas, live in fire, eat rocks, tame tigers; thinking it harder for our mistress to devise imposition enough, than for us to undergo any difficulty imposed."-Troilus and Cressida.

FOR some time past, as I have said, my visits to the Hermitage had been almost daily; certainly two days never elapsed without seeing me on my way to the shrine of my worship.

A common taste and a common interest are grand allies of the tender passion-indeed, without one or other, it is difficult to see how affairs of the heart can progress; and when such tastes and interests are sincerely attached to objects which, like the fine arts, appeal principally to the imagina

tion and the heart, the force of the alliance can scarcely be over-estimated.

Identity of feeling in such matters is something more than a coincidence of convictions in other things-it is a genuine sympathy, begetting and disclosing other sympathies. Thus hearts that are tending towards each other have, with that common assistance, such safe and tentative methods of mutual approach, that an almost perfectly unconscious harmony may be established between them, and their relations may be said to be definitively settled before the thought of either has found vent in speech-speech that comes, at last, sudden, ungainly, and incoherent, like the startled exclamations of those who encounter in the dark.

Lady Rose and I had at least one taste in common- -a taste that was more than a taste, amounting, in my case at least, to a passion -and that was music; music, than which there is no more subtle minister of love, sup

plying to the lover an endless store of allegory and parable, wherein to wrap, as in a light and only half-concealing drapery, the supplicating form of his passion. I was unconscious of the part music was playing in the history of mine, unconscious that it was revealing her to me and interpreting me to her-conscious only that it yielded an increased delight, and was blended by a thousand associations with the idea of my divinity. Yet not the less was it lending to the Parcæ golden threads to weave the woof of our destiny withal.

But music was not the means of a merely inward, invisible, metaphysical rapport between us; it was also the basis, the ostensible ground, of much of our outward and visible communion.

I admired a song of hers perhaps. Probably it would suit a tenor; probably it would suit me. She would copy it for me; she would teach it to me. I was not a quick