“Very well, then, Harry.  You know your room.  Will you put out the lamp when you have lit your candle?”

So she went, and the young man was left alone in no very enviable frame of mind.  He sat and smoked while the clock on the mantelpiece swung its gilded boy and struck the hours and half hours with unheeded regularity.  He lit a second cigar, and a third; he forgot the wine.  It seemed to him that he was looking on all the roads of life that lay before him, and they were lit up by as strange and new a light as that which was beginning to shine over the world outside.  New fancies seemed to awake with the new dawn.  For himself to ask Wenna Rosewarne to be his wife!  Could he but win the tender and shy regard of her eyes he would fall at her feet and bathe them with his tears.  And if this wonderful thing were possible—­if she could put her hand in his and trust to him for safety in all the coming years they might live together—­what man of woman born would dare to interfere?  There was a blue light coming in through the shutters.  He went to the window:  the topmost leaves of the trees were quivering in the cold air far up there in the clearing skies, where the stars were fading out one by one, and he could hear the sound of the sea on the distant beach, and he knew that across the gray plain of waters the dawn was breaking, and that over the sleeping world another day was rising that seemed to him the first day of a new and tremulous life, full of joy and courage and hope.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

ON THE VIA SAN BASILIO.

In Rome, 1851; a cold, dreary day in December—­one of those days in which a man’s ambition seems to desert him entirely, leaving only its grinning skeleton to mock him.  Depressing as was the weather to a man who had cheerfulness as a companion by which to repel its blustering attacks, and raise his mind above the despondency it was calculated to produce, how much more so to one whose hope had gone out as a flickering lamp in a sudden gust of wind, and the sharp steel of whose ambition had turned to pierce his own heart!

Such a man, on the day mentioned, was walking along the Via San Basilio.  He was small in stature, poorly clad, and so thin, and even cadaverous, that the casual observer might have been under apprehension lest a gust of wind a little stronger than the average might blow him entirely away; yet his air and manner were proud and haughty, and what little evidences of feeling peered through the signs of dissipation too apparent on his naturally attractive face were those of genuine refinement.  He was accompanied by a cicerone, or servant, as villainous-looking a fellow as one often meets, even in Italy, where an evil expression is so often seen stamped on handsome features.