Mary Cholmondeley

"The fact is, I have never loved any one well enough to put myself into a noose for them. It is a noose, you know."-George Eliot. IT was the middle of July. The season had reached the climax which precedes a collapse. The heat was intense. The pace had been too great to last. The rich sane were already on their way to Scotch moor or Norwegian river; the rich insane and the poor remained, and people with daughters-assiduously entertaining the dwindling numbers of the "uncertain, coy, and hard to please" jeunesse dor e of the present day. There were some great weddings fixed for the end of July, proving that marriage was not extinct, -prospective weddings which, like iron rivets, held the crumbling fabric of the season together.

"Le vent qui vient travers la montagne M'a rendu fou " Victor Hugo. Annette leaned against the low parapet and looked steadfastly at the water, so steadfastly that all the brilliant, newly-washed, tree-besprinkled city of Paris, lying spread before her, cleft by the wide river with its many bridges, was invisible to her. She saw nothing but the Seine, so tranquil yesterday, and to-day chafing beneath its bridges and licking ominously round their great stone supports-because there had been rain the day before.