She got into the cab and sat down by Mairi, and then took the girl’s hand.  “I am sorry to take you away, Mairi,” she said; but she was apparently not thinking of Mairi, nor of the house she was leaving, nor yet of the vehicle in which she was so strangely placed.  Was she thinking of a certain wild and wet day in the far Hebrides, when a young bride stood on the decks of a great vessel and saw the home of her childhood and the friends of her youth fade back into the desolate waste of the sea?  Perhaps there may have been some unconscious influence in this picture to direct her movements at this moment, for of definite resolves she had none.  When Mairi told her that the cabman wanted to know whither he was to drive, she merely answered, “Oh yes, Mairi, we will go to the station;” and Mairi added, addressing the man, “It was the Euston Station.”  Then they drove away.

“Are you going home?” said the young girl, looking up with a strange foreboding and sinking of the heart to the pale face and distant eyes—­“Are you going home, Miss Sheila?”

“Oh yes, we are going home, Mairi,” was the answer she got, but the tone in which it was uttered filled her mind with doubt, and something like despair.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

* * * * *

THE LAST OF THE IDYLLS.

“Ended at last
Those wondrous dreams, so beautifully told! 
It seems that I have through enchantment passed,
And lived and loved in that fair court of old.

“Yes, yes, I know—­
The old Greek idylls about which you rave,
Theocritus and his melodious flow
Of verse, and all that Moschus sang o’er Bion’s grave.

“You’ve shown me oft
How far superior all that they have said—­
That Tennyson has learned to soar aloft
By seeking inspiration from the greater dead.

“And yet in me
A pulse is never stirred by what they sing: 
The reason I know not, unless it be
Their idylls are not Idylls of the King.

“You smile:  no doubt
You think I’ve never learned to criticise. 
Perhaps so, yet I feel that which I speak about. 
And Enim is the last!  Well, no more sighs;

“For spring is here: 
I have no time to waste in dreamings vain.
After our marriage—­nay, you need not sneer—­
We will read all the idylls through again.”

“So shall it be
So long as lives the love which poets sing. 
The harp is still, yet is begun for thee
A lifelong dream—­the idyll of thy king.”

F.F.  ELMS.

* * * * *

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

AN EVENING IN CALCUTTA.

About six o’clock every evening the beau monde of Calcutta begins to take the air on the Course, a very pleasant drive which runs along the bank of the river.  It is usually crowded with carriages, but it must be confessed that none of them would be likely to excite the envy of an owner of a fashionable turn-out at home, unless indeed it might be now and then for the sake of the occupants.