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contrary, went on an exactly opposite principle, one far more attractive to children, whom he unaffectedly loved. Shy with them in the presence of others, you came upon him in out-of-the-way corners, playing with them, for them, giving himself up to them, and, of course, thoroughly adored by them, and no wonder: children are so quick to discover those who really care for them, and soon manage to make their discoveries public, in a manner, perhaps, not overpleasant to their non-lovers. It is anything but safe to practise this sort of deception upon them, as Percival had before now discovered. Of course every one cannot be naturally fond of them; some people, and nice enough people too, seem really to dread them with much the same aversion they have to cats. It is not their fault; I believe they are born with the dislike; but if they are wise, they will pretend nothing but the truth about the matter, it is much the safest plan in the long-run. All the same, I maintain that those people are the nicest, and those men the most manly, who are honestly and unaffectedly fond of children.

Norah handed Mr. Leicester his tea, for once abstaining from a snub, as, to tell the truth, she felt his appearance at this critical moment really opportune; for the children seemed determined to land them on dangerous tracts, and nurse having modestly retired while they took tea, the entrance of Percival had for once been hailed with pleasure by both Norah and Geoffrey.

'How awfully fond you must be of children, Miss Grant !' quoth the young gentleman, sipping his tea and contemplating his pretty feet with satisfaction. Of course they are nice little things, and amusing at times; but do you

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really prefer their society to that of reasonable beings?'

'It depends so much on what the children and the reasonable beings are like, you see,' responded Norah; meanly ready with any amount of rebuffs now he had helped her out of her difficulty.

To-day, for instance, I preferred the children. You see everything goes by comparison, Mr. Leicester; and I know children who could beat some reasonable people hollow. Don't I, Ted?'

'Course,' replied Ted, not understanding a word of the conversation, but wondering when his unwelcome guest would 'take himself off.'

He had to wait some time, poor boy, for Percival found his seat by the fire so comfortable, and the view so pleasant, that he imbibed cup after cup of tea; till Norah refused to pour out more, telling him it would make him nervous, and broke up the meeting by ringing for Mrs. Jones, much to his dissatisfaction.

Norah felt thankful to that tea on the whole; as Fanny had intended, it had placed her and Geoffrey on their former friendly footing. He also had felt bothered all day for his huffiness of the morning, and was only too happy to have matters so easily mended. He was more than usually friendly with Norah that evening; and as the ladies retired to bed, carried up her candle and workbox, and shook her hand warmly as he said 'Good-night.' Fanny had popped into the nursery for her nightly look at her darlings, so the coast was clear; and Norah, thinking now or never was her chance, held out her hand once more, saying sweetly, and blushing as she spoke,

'Mr. Lindsay, I was very rude this morning, I am afraid, and hardly thanked you for offering to teach me to sketch; forgive

my rudeness, please, and I shall be so glad if you will.'

Geoffrey took the little hand offered to him so kindly, and held it in his own big paws for a moment, saying eagerly,

'I assure you, Miss Grant, there was no question of rudeness on your part, and therefore there is nothing to forgive. Mine was the rudeness in pressing my assistance on you as I did; but if you really mean this, and are not only saying it out of kindness, nothing could give me greater pleasure than helping you all I can; and he shook her hand warmly as he once more wished her' Good-night.'

'What a dear little thing she is he thought, as Norah disappeared into her room, and he remembered how sweet she had looked, standing there in her pretty evening dress, glancing up half timidly with those beautiful

soft eyes, and blushing rosy-red as she spoke. 'I'd be well content to spend the rest of my life giving her sketching lessons, and die happily in the act. Bother the rest of the world! who are ready no doubt to do the same. It is such a pity that girls like that-one in a thousand- -so often throw themselves away on some duffer of a man perfectly unable to value the treasure he gets; and I suppose I have about as much chance of winning her as Carlo has, always supposing I am not just such a duffer myself, except in the matter of valuing a priceless treasure when I see it ;' and Geoffrey frowned as he marched down-stairs, and joined the other gentlemen over their cigars, leaving the conversation, however, almost entirely to them, and puffing away silently like a contemplative chimney out of temper.

(To be continued.)

LOVE IN A LIFT.

LOVE pervades everything. It is omnipresent. Places and conditions absolutely fatal to every other human experience do not affect la grande passion. There is printed record of love in a balloon; and the scientific gentleman at the Polytechnic Institution will bear credible witness that love has not been found impossible even in a diving-bell. Much sweet courtship has been conducted in railway carriages; and the present writer, who has never tasted the honeyed sweets of 'spooning' himself, once knew, however, an amiable gentleman who positively proposed, and was accepted, amid the awful gloom and roar of the Mont Cenis tunnel, and survived the strange sensation, and was married and happy ever afterwards, as the old story-books say. There is a farce, too, called Love in a Fix; but love in an hotel-elevator! Why, the same hotel actually advertised that identical lift in Bradshaw's Railway Guide as having been constructed upon an altogether improved principle, and furnished with a patent safety-break which rendered accidents quite impossible. But love has laughed at locksmiths and patent safety-breaks from the time of dangerous Helen and heroic Paris of Troy to that of Miss Blanche Whitney and Mr. Frank Fairlie, staying at the Cavendish Grand Hotel at Spaville the other day.

The Cavendish seemed altogether too immense and splendid for love, which demands, as you know, my dear madam, cosiness and freedom from the scrutiny of unsym

pathetic eyes. There Cupid was exposed to public observation in the greatest caravansary of a notoriously scandal-loving and fashionable sanatorium. Love seemed impossible in the grand drawingroom, where dowdy dowagers and highly-acidulated spinsters stabbed reputations with their knittingneedles; utterly impracticable in the noisy salle à manger, with the everlasting Yes, sah! of the German waiters. In the conservatory there were always some gouty old men, scandalously wealthy, talking about the virtues of the medicinal waters which they had come to Spaville to drink; too late, in many instances, to dilute the numerous bottles of rich Regina they imbibed years agone. Even the hall porter was a magnificent personage, with a marvellous expanse of shirt-front. He bore a semi-ecclesiastical, semi-aristocratic appearance. You hardly knew whether to regard him as a duke or a bishop. You felt constrained to address him respectfully as 'Sir,' and wondered, with great fear and trembling at the heart, whether such a superior being would not regard your modest honorarium of half-a-crown with lofty disdain. One lost one's name and became a numeral inside such an establishment. I never heard Miss Blanche Whitney's number, but Mr. Frank Fairlie was, I know, 'skied,' as they say at the Royal Academy, in No. 593.' The figures, however, do not affect the story.

If the stately interior and sense of general splendour of the Caven

dish was fatal to sentiment, not so Spaville itself. Spaville is the home of romance. The neighbourhood might have been specially invented for lovers. The shady pine-woods, which clothe the bold hills that close round the wateringplace, like investing lines on every side, have serpentine walks; and even such a stern political economist as Mr. John Ruskin has written in Fors Clavigera of the deep, secluded, stream-silvered valleys of Spaville that in them 'you might expect to catch sight of Pan, Apollo, and the Muses ;' while, in addition to all this, there are beautiful gardens, such as that emotional impostor, Claude Melnotte, might have painted to the confiding Pauline, and asked, 'Dost thou like the picture? together with a Dome musical with Mendelssohn's melodies and fragrant with flowers. So fatal, indeed, is the spirit of flirtation in these Hesperidean Gardens that the Dome grows its own orange-blossoms for the numerous betrothals that are here brought about each season.

Miss Blanche Whitney and Mr. Frank Fairlie did not escape these facilities for flirtation. The young people were thrown into each other's society at the Cavendish. He had come down from chambers in town to kill a few days with his uncle, a wealthy silk-spinner of Manchester, who rolled in riches and a bathchair, and whom Frank irreverently styled 'the Cocoon' when speaking of his avuncular relative to Miss Blanche. Her papa was having the racking pains of rheumatic gout washed out of him at the hot baths, for which Spaville has been famous ever since the Roman occupation, and he hoped to leave his crutches behind him as a practical testimonial of the healing qualities of the thermal springs. Frank Fairlie was a good-looking, athletic, clever young fellow, broad of

shoulder, blue of eye, blonde of beard, just a girl's ideal of a brave handsome Englishman. Blanche Whitney, although she had not, perhaps, what a painter would consider a single perfect feature in her face, set it off with such bonny brown wavy hair, such animated hazel eyes, such a vivacious little mouth, such a winsome charm of expression, that she became absolutely beautiful, especially when she smiled, and smiling she nearly always was. No wonder that Frank Fairlie-who had in his time run unscathed the gauntlet of much female fascination, and had declared himself to be invulnerable to attack-was mortally wounded in the heart by Blanche. It was altogether done by her indefinable, but irresistible, witchery of manner.

And now how leaden seemed the hours when they were separated; how fleet the time passed when they were together; how often they met 'quite by accident, you know;' what walks and talks they had in shady wooded ways; how they whispered sweet confessions and confidences in the sylvan solitude of the limestone dales, with only the silent and listening leaves to hear their story!

They had just returned to the Cavendish one evening from one of these romantic rambles, and were as loth to leave each other as lovers generally are, from when a certain young couple in Capulet's garden wished each other a thousand times good-night,' to these steam-engine degenerate days of breaches of promise and divorce courts. They promenaded the deserted corridor of the hotel. That, at least, was better than the frigid society of the drawing-room, the unappreciative atmosphere of the coffee-room.

Both our young people were in a merry mood. They were full of the light spirits and audacious confidence that belong

to youth and hope, and love and health. After a few turns along the carpeted passage, Frank remarked, in his happy careless manner, pausing at the bottom of the hydraulic elevator,

'I say, pet, shouldn't you like a ride on the lift? It's perfectly safe.'

'O yes,' she said, with a gay little laugh. 'It would be so awfully adventurous, don't you know.'

'Then we'll go up.'

They started, and between the third and fourth station or floor en route stopped.

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It has been the dream of my life-'What more he said we shall not report.

The elevator had paused hardly a minute when the night porter passed along the corridor. He noticed that the lift was not at the bottom as it should be. To prevent any possible accident, he fastened it safely and walked away. The occupants of the lift suspended in medio, like Mahomet's coffin, could move the machine neither one way nor the other. They could not alight on any landing. They were prisoners in a dark funnel. Perhaps they might remain in that terrible predicament all night. The situation, though excruciatingly farcical, did not present its humorous aspect to Blanche and Frank. The affair was somewhat compromising, too. Frank had placed Miss Whitney and himself in a pretty dilemma. Cool and collected as a rule, in this position he was utterly embarrassed. What could be done?

Ten minutes afterwards a Scotch gentleman, the director of a bank which was soon afterwards notorious as the scene of a terrible financial tragedy, when passing the lift, heard a piece of money fall. Perhaps it was his thrifty Caledonian love of the 'bawbee,' per

haps it was to avert the pecuniary danger impending, that he dropped on his knees and began to search the carpet diligently. He found the coin, and also one or two others which had doubtless fallen previously. They were two florins and a shilling. The bank director was rising from his devotional attitude when another florin fell down the hoist. Two half-crowns followed in swift succession, and were as quickly appropriated. Then lo! half a sovereign and a sovereign were dropped slowly; and he was greedily awaiting for more auriferous manna falling, when the manager of the Cavendish, a very little man for such a big building, put in an appearance.

'What is the matter, Mr. MacClosky? he inquired. I hope, sir, you are not unwell?

O no! I am just engaged in picking up some money which some one is kindly dropping down the well. It will help to pay my bill, so I am grateful for it,' he said, with a Scotch effort at 'wut.'

"Why, the lift is not in its place,' exclaimed the manager, startled at the discovery. 'Where's the night-porter? Robinson !'

'Here, sir!' said that functionary, turning up with prompt obedience.

'What about this lift, Robinson?'

'Well, sir, I knows nothing at all about it, and that's all I does know. I saw that the lift was not right, sir; so I scotches it, and meant to ask the day-porter about it when he comes in the morning, sir. I knows nothing, and that's all I does know.'

During these explanations the ladies and gentlemen issued forth from the coffee-room and drawingroom close by. A few, noticing the Scotch gentleman still on his knees, concluded that he had been seized with a sudden spasm of ill

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