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BY ORDER OF THE CZAR. 141 sketches — and his wardrobe full of costumes, the sketch on his easel covered with a piece of silk, the door opening into one of his retiring rooms, with its cartoons in the little passage way, his small collection of plastic ware scattered here and there, and his statuettes of a Russian peasant, and a baked clay model of a Polish patriot.

All these things he looked at but did not see; his mind was occupied with other images, with other thoughts; it was not altogether absent from the studio, but it was making curious and strange journeys outside the porter's lodge, and busy with thoughts that went out far away, and with strange day-dreams.

Did he love the girl to whom last night he had engaged himself in a lifelong bond?

Or in what he had said was he pledged to that serious compact of marriage?

If Love was that absorbing passion he had dreamed of, was he in love with Dolly?

Was not his last night's engagement a sudden impulse, in which there was a good deal of passion and very little love? Was Dolly the ideal of womanhood he had dreamt of as an artist, and read of in the poets? Was she not rather a pretty, clever, little woman of the world, her heart in the studio of the milliner rather than in the studio of the painter?

Did she really care for Art?

Was beauty without the refining grace of culture and sentiment really Beauty?

Would any man have been happy with the most perfect goddess of the Grecian sculptors?

Did Providence for that matter ever combine true physical beauty with intellectual grace?

Had not Dolly and her sister, and even Walter, seemed last night to enter into a charming conspiracy to get him to ask Dolly to be his wife? Had not Walter's genial