revelry; the life they led was sylvan; at their fetes the sun assisted.  The summer held to her lips a glass whose rosy effervescence, whose fleeting foam, whose tingling spirit exhaled a subtile madness of joy,—­a draught whose lees were despair.  So nearly had she been destitute of emotion hitherto that she had scarcely a right to be classed with humanity; now, indeed, she would win that right.  Not only her character, but her beauty, became another thing under all this largess; one remembered the very Persian rose, in looking at her, and thought of gardens amid whose clouds of rich perfume the nightingales sang all night long; her manner, too, became strangely gracious, and a sweetness lingered after her presence, delicate and fine as the drop of honey in some flower’s nectary.  So she woke from her icy trance; but, alas! what had wakened her?

The summer was passing.  Every day the garden-scenes of Watteau became vivid and real; every evening Venice was made possible, when shadowy barks slipped down dusk tides, freighted with song and laughter, and snatches of guitar-tinkling; and when some sudden torch, that for an instant had summoned with its red fire all fierce lights and strong glooms, dipped, hissed, and quenched below, and, a fantastic flotilla, they passed on into the broad brilliance of a rising moon, all Middle-Age mythology rose and wafted them back into the obscurity.  It was a life too fine for every day, fare too rich for health; they must be exotics who did not wither in such hot-house air.  It was rapidly becoming unnatural.  They performed in the daylight stray clarified bits from Fletcher or Moliere, drama of an era over-ripe; they sang only from an old book of madrigals; their very reading was fragmentary,—­now an emasculated Boccaccio, then a curdling phantasm of Poe’s, and after some such scenic horror as the “Red Death” Helen Heath dashed off the Pesther Waltzes.

If, finally, on one of the last August-nights, we had passed, Asmodeus-like, over the roofs, looking down, we should have seen three things.  First, that Mrs. Laudersdale slept like any innocent dreamer, and, wrapped with white moonlight, in her long and flowing outline, in her imperceptible breath, resembling some perfect statue that we fancy to be instinct with suspended life.  Next, that Mr. Raleigh did not sleep at all, but absorbed himself, to the entire disturbance of Capua’s slumbers, in the rapture of reproducing as he could the turbulent passion and joy of souls larger than his own.  And, lastly, that Mrs. McLean woke with visions of burglars before her eyes, to find her pillow deserted and her husband sitting at a writing-table.

“How startled I was!” she exclaimed.  “What are you doing, dear?”

“Writing to Laudersdale,” he said, in reply.

“Why, what for?—­what can you be writing to him for?”

“I think it best he should come and take his wife off my hands.”

“How absurd! how contemptible! how all you husbands band together like a parcel of slaveholders, and hunt down each other’s runaways!”