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on the table with her teaspoon, and took her hand up as if to say good-bye.

“There’s one way out of it, Miss Lauder. Give it up, and take me instead. I haven’t very much to offer you, but it’s better than going to a miserable little theatre—And you have no one to take care of you,” he added, in a very gentle tone.

There are some moments in life—moments few and far between, but never to be forgotten in their swift, sudden thrill of mingled joy and pain—when the world does actually seem to stand still, not in a figure of speech, but in a strange reality; moments of vision when we see other skies, other constellations, and gaze on them bewildered, till, before one can say, “It lightens!” the horizon reels back again, and our old familiar earth wheels away as of old in her star-lighted voyage round the sun. Perhaps it is our own hearts that stand still, and not the solid earth-fields and the immemorial horizon, but the strangeness of the sensation could not be much more perplexing in either case.

Such a momentary experience came to Alice Lauder at these commonplace words, dividing asunder one part of her life from all that had gone before. She was pale and remained standing, silent and immovable, her blue eyes fixed