courtship; and promise to end in the same catastrophe — marriage.”

“And do you like that monotonous theme?”

“Positively, I don’t care about it: it is nothing to me.”

“Nothing to you? When a lady, young and full of life and health, charming with beauty and endowed with the gifts of rank and fortune, sits and smiles in the eyes of a gentleman you — ”

“I what?”

“You know — and perhaps think well of.”

“I don’t know the gentlemen here.

I have scarcely interchanged a syllable with one of them; and as to thinking well of