audience—but a seraph, standing between heaven and earth, lifting up the cry of the whole human race in a despairing plea for the strongest, the maddest, and the divinest passion that has ever wrecked a human heart. In the tumult and the confusion that follows-in the cries, the shouts, the deafening plaudits, which proclaim her success, and serve to establish the position she has aspired to-no one notices how a slight, dark-eyed girl, sitting in one of the back rows among the shilling seats, suddenly rises from her place, and presses her way through the crowd towards the door of the concert-room. Nobody notices that she is pale and trembling, and that her cheeks are wet and tear-stained. She works her way rapidly to the door, and flies swiftly out alone into the coldness and the darkness of the winter afternoon. Six weeks after that concert, Mary Brereton became Mrs. Fenton-Davis. CHAPTER VI. OUT OF THE WORLD. WHAT a pretty, poetical occupation is needle-work! How graceful a good-looking girl looks, bending over her embroidery, whilst her white hands fly deftly among her silks and cottons! What a restful, soothing thing it is to a man to see a woman at her work! What a sense of goodness and gentleness, and all other cardinal feminine virtues, it imparts to the mind of the fidgeting male being, who lounges idly in his armchair, with his eyes admiringly fixed upon the sweet, peaceful vision before him! So Penelope looked at her web-queenly Matilda among her maidens at her tapestry —and Marguerite, fair, if frail, at her spinning-wheel. In these latter days, when our women "rink," and play lawn-tennis-when they rush about incessantly to each other's houses to see and to hear some new thing -when they shop and gossip all day, and dance and flirt all night-when they live at twice the rate that their mothers did, and wear themselves into old women before they are middle-aged—there is a refreshment about a woman who can sit quietly indoors over her needle-work, as her grandmother did before her, which is not without a certain fascination to the masculine imagination. Such a charm had Ella Dallas in the old Cheriton days, when, with her bright head stooping under the lamp-light, and her swift fingers silently plying her needle, she had won Philip's honest heart; or, when under the shadow of the old walls, set in a framework of crimson roses, her downcast face and her ceaseless "stitchings" had driven Jack Ormsby half frantic with longings which every feeling of duty and honour ought to have taught him to stifle. To both of these men this peculiar faculty of needle-work had wrought with the same power of attraction. If she had been an ordinary laughing, flirting, croquet-playing young lady, who sometimes played the piano, sometimes read a novel, but mostly sat empty-handed and idle, there would not have been to either of them that subtle |