“Excuse me writing,” “fine hot summer,” “croquet,” she quoted mentally.  “After all that has passed between us!  If he had really cared for me, and anything had separated us, he would have had the common honesty and manliness to say so.  No; he thinks me another Liverpool girl, ‘hard hit.’  He is running away from me.”  At this cruel idea, so abhorrent to her vanity, pride, affection, and general womanhood, the poor girl sank down on her bed overwhelmed, and did not leave her room for three days,—­or rather eternities,—­at the end of which time she met Mr. Ramsay by accident on the high-road and cut him dead.

“I must pull myself together and get away out of this,” said Mr. Ramsay to Mr. Ketchum that evening.  “I have bought of Albert Brown his ranch in Colorado, near Taylorsville, and I leave in the morning.”

“WHAT!” cried Mr. Ketchum.  “Has he sold you that tumble-down claim on a burnt prairie, miles from any wood or water?  I know the place.”

“I haven’t examined the property; but he assures me it is a fine one.  And, anyway, it is settled, I am going.  A thousand thanks for all your kindness, Ketchum.  An Englishman that I met in New York wants me to go huntin’ with him, and I shall join him at St. Louis and go on out from there.”

“Why, I thought you had all promised to go to Niagara as my guests in a few days.  Do change your mind and stay, won’t you?” urged Mr. Ketchum.

But Mr. Ramsay was obdurate, and took himself and a car-load of property off in the direction of the setting sun by the mid-day train next morning.

“Ramsay, I want you to promise me one thing.  If, owing to that skunk Brown, you are disappointed out there, or don’t get on, write or telegraph me, and I’ll stand by you to the tune of ten thousand or so.  Good-by, old fellow.  Remember, I’m your friend,” said generous Job, at the station.  And as he went home he stopped and presented Mr. Albert Brown with a piece of his mind that any other man would only have taken in exchange for a flogging, delivered.

“How very nice and kind of the dear duke to give Mr. Ramsay an invite to join him!” said Mrs. Sykes, with emotion, at dinner that day.

F.C.  BAYLOR.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

* * * * *

A TEMPLE PILGRIMAGE

Sauntering down the southerly side of Fleet Street, toward the historic spot where once stood Temple Bar, crested with its ghastly array of pike-pierced traitors’ heads, the curious itinerant comes to an arched gate-way of Elizabethan architecture.  The narrow lane which it guards is known as Inner Temple Street, and cleaves the Temple enclosure into unequal parts, ending at the river.  Standing in the shady archway, with the roar and rattle, the glare and glitter, of Fleet Street at our backs, we instinctively feel that we are about to enter a new and strange locality, the quiet atmosphere and the cloister-like walks of which seem redolent of books and the pursuits of bookish men.