That Mrs. Laudersdale was the technical magnificent woman, I need not reiterate.  I wish I knew some name gorgeous enough in sound and association for that given her at christening; but I don’t.  It is my opinion that she was born Mrs. Laudersdale, that her coral-and-bell was marked Mrs. Laudersdale, and that her name stands golden-lettered on the recording angel’s leaf simply as Mrs. Laudersdale.  It is naturally to be inferred, then, that there was a Mr. Laudersdale.  There was.  But not by any means a person of consequence, you assume?  Why, yes, of some,—­to one individual at least Mrs. Laudersdale was so weak as to regard him with complacency; she loved—­adored her husband.  Let me have the justice to say that no one suspected her of it.  Of course, then, Mr. Roger Raleigh had no business to fall in love with her.

Well,—­but he did.

At the time when Mrs. Laudersdale had become somewhat more than a reigning beauty, and held her sceptre with such apparent indifference that she seemed about abandoning it forever, she no longer dazzled with unventured combinations of colors and materials in dress.  She wore most frequently, at this epoch, black velvet that suppled about her well-asserted contours; and the very trail of her skirt was unlike another woman’s, for it coiled and bristled after her with a life and motion of its own, like a serpent.  Her hair, of too dead a black for gloss or glister, was always adorned with a nasturtium-vine, whose vivid flames seemed like some personal emanation, and whose odor, acrid and single, dispersed a character about her; and the only ornaments she condescended to assume were of Etruscan gold, severely simple in design, elaborately intricate in workmanship.  It is evident she was a poet in costume, and had at last en regle acquired a manner.  But thirteen years ago she apparelled herself otherwise, and thirteen years ago it was that Mr. Roger Raleigh fell in love with her.  This is how it was.

Among the many lakes in New Hampshire, there is one of extreme beauty,—­a broad, shadowy water, some nine miles in length, with steep, thickly wooded banks, and here and there, as if moored on its calm surface, an island fit for the Bower of Bliss.  At one spot along its shore was, and still is, an old country-house, formerly used as a hotel, but whose customers, always pleasure-seekers from the neighboring towns, had been drawn away by the erection of a more modern and satisfactory place of entertainment at the other extremity of the lake, and it had now been for many years closed.  There were no dwellings of any kind in its vicinity, so that it reigned over a solitude of a half-dozen miles in every direction.  Once in a while the gay visitors in the more prosperous regions stretched their sails and skimmed along till they saw its white porticos and piazzas gleaming faintly up among the trees; once in a while a belated traveller tied his horse at the gate, and sought admittance