And this is all I can tell about the Dominica, which I recommend to all of you for refreshment and amusement.  We have nothing like it in New York or Boston,—­our salons of the same description having in them much more to eat and much less to see.  As I look back upon it, the place assumes a deeply Moorish aspect.  I see the fountain, the golden light, the dark faces, and intense black eyes, a little softened by the comforting distance.  Oh! to sit there for one hour, and help the garcon’s bad English, and be pestered by the beggar, and tormented by the ticket-vender, and support the battery of the wondering looks, which make it sin for you, a woman, to be abroad by day!  Is there any purgatory which does not grow lovely as you remember it?  Would not a man be hanged twice, if he could?

[To be continued.]

ZELMA’S VOW.

[Continued from the July Number.]

PART SECOND.

HOW IT WAS KEPT.

It was late when Zelma Burleigh returned to the Grange.  As she stole softly into the hall, she startled an Italian greyhound, which was lying asleep on a mat near the door.  As he sprang up, the little silver bells on his collar tinkled out his master’s secret;—­Sir Harry Willerton was still in the drawing-room with Bessie.

As Zelma passed up to her chamber, she said to herself bitterly,—­“Thus openly and fearlessly can the rich and well-born woo and be wooed, while such as we must steal away to happiness as to crime, and plight our vows under the chill and shadow of night!” But the next moment she felt that there was about her love a piquant sense of peril and lawlessness, a wild flavor infinitely more to her taste than would be any prudent, commendable affection grown in drawing-rooms, nourished by conventionalism, and propped by social fitness; and remembering the manly beauty and brilliant parts of her lover, she felt that she would not exchange him for the proudest noble of the realm.

After a time Bessie came stealing up from the drawing-room, and lay down by her cousin’s side, softly, for fear of waking her; and all night long Bessie’s secret curled about her smiling mouth, and quivered through the lids of her shut eyes, and overran her red lips in murmurs of happy dreams; but Zelma’s secret burned like slow fire in her deepest heart.  Bessie dreamed of merry games and quiet rambles and country fetes with the gay Sir Harry; but Zelma, when at last she slept, dreamed of wandering with her adventurous lover from province to province,—­then of playing Juliet to his Romeo before a vast metropolitan audience.