HE winter, with its terrible stress and fury, is over and past.

People sitting in blooming spring gardens or by widely-opened windows, talk comfortably, with lips no longer chapped, of the great snow-storm, and compare notes as to the amount of personal inconvenience and discomfort to which it had exposed them. Anecdotes of the awful night spent in snow-stopped trains have formed the convenient opening for many a dinner talk; the anxiety on the part of each interlocutor to prove that he or she had suffered more than the other, leading to intimacy before soup is well over. Of its ferocity and its devil-work few overt traces now remain,

And

except killed laurel bushes and rare thrushes. Out of how many sweet little throats full of music has it pinched the tender life! But over its wrecks the sea rolls; and in the bottomless sea of mothers' hearts its drowned sailors lie buried. does the analogy between the material and the spiritual world hold good? Does the sea of oblivion smoothly heave and largely sweep above the soul that went down on that dread night? Does no spar pierce the flood to show where that good ship foundered?

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It would be the opinion of outsiders, who have not visited Oxbridge-if they had formed an opinion at all upon the subject, and were asked for it-that the inhabitants of that university town dwell in grey and ancient houses, time-coloured, and with flavours of old learning still hanging about their massy roof-trees. In point of fact, their lives are passed for the most part in flippant spick and span villas

and villakins, each with its half acre of tennis-ground and double daisies, all so new that scarcely anyone has had time to die there, though numerous people have taken leave to be born there, and forming in their ensemble an ugly, irrelevant, healthy suburb, that would not disgrace a cotton city of to-day.

It is mid-May, and the hour is one of the afternoon ones; an hour at which luncheon is already forgotten, though tea still smiles not near. Along the shining river, a mile away, eight-oars, four-oars, skiffs are flashing. Scores of happy boys are tearing down the path alongside, keeping company with their boats, exhorting, admonishing, shouting themselves hoarse. But their noise, though strong are their young lungs, does not reach in faintest echoes to the quiet drawing-room, where the as quiet lady sits, head on lily hand, beside the window, staring out at her plot of forget-me-nots and the gold shower of her two laburnum trees.

Warm as the day is, a fire burns on the

hearth; a fire whose inconvenient heat Belinda is languidly trying to counteract by the agency of the fan, slowly waving in her unoccupied hand. It is too hot even for Slutty, who, shortly panting in her sleep, lies cast on her fat side in a cool corner. Upon Slutty's figure, an academic life, and the total absence of the thinning emotion of envy, and of the bad but emaciating passion of jealousy (an absence caused by the fact of her being sole dog of the establishment, and having no longer any cause for suffering from Punch's tinselly accomplishments) has begun to tell. She could not well look stouter or less intellectual if she were one of the old Fellows of St. Bridget's.

When last we saw Belinda, she was lying grovelling among cinders and fire-irons in a fender. Now she is sitting placid and upright on a window-seat. Is the change that has taken place in her soul's attitude as much to her advantage as that which has effected itself in her body's? Who can tell? She is past the age when a smeared

face, puckered lips and bawling cries mean grief; when ruddy cheeks and shouting laughter mean joy. She does not look particularly happy, perhaps, but which of us is conscious of looking specially radiant as he or she sits alone, with no one to summon to the surface of the skin that latent cheerfulness, of which few have enough to spend it on ourselves alone? And yet, at this moment, the thoughts passing through her mind are not disagreeable ones; scarcely thoughts indeed, lazy summer impressions rather, of the pleasantness of the tiny sky-coloured meadow that lies, all turquoise, under her eyes, and calls itself her forget-me-not bed; of the round motherswallow's head, peeping over the nest beneath the eaves. At some further thought or sensation, a slight but definite smile breaks up the severe lines of her young yet melancholy mouth. At the sound of the opening door, however, in one instant it is dead.

"I find you unoccupied !" says her husband, entering and advancing towards her,

VOL. II.

30