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16& Y ORDER OF THE CZAR.

if they were the new-born leaves of some remote wood far away from city smoke and fog. The first swallows of the year twittered as they floated overhead, and blackbirds were making late breakfasts upon the green sward which they investigated with hurried and flashing beaks.

Philip in a dull kind of way was conscious of all this : it came as an accompaniment to his thoughts of other things, more particularly to his meeting with the Countess Stravensky, and to the object of his early and delightful walk to his studio. He went swinging along through the Park and out into Albert Road, quite in the spirit of the time. He recalled in a dreamy fashion, that was, however, somewhat out of harmony with it, every word and every look of the mysterious beautiful woman of Mrs. Chetwynd's reception. He saw her eyes looking into his with tender interest, he heard her say she might be his friend. The soft tone of her voice when she said she was interested in him came back to him. He comprehended in one long reflection the memory of her "lovely form, her red-gold hair, her becoming dress, her distinguished manner, the fascinating melancholy of her face when it was in repose, the depth of her eloquent eyes when she turned their violet light upon his. He might have been walking on air every now then, so unconscious was he of his surroundings, and yet he found the influence of the buds and blossoms, the wooing breeze, the perfume of flowers, and the drowsy plash of the first water cart of the season, that laid the dust after the first swallow had skimmed along the road, not in very wantonness of the gaiety and pleasures of life, as the poets think, but as earnestly bent upon the practical sustenance thereof as the blackbirds in the park.

The aspiring artist did not pause to ask himself what sort of absorbed interest this was he was taking in the Countess Stravensky : whether it was the absorption of the painter in a great subject, or the pulsations of the romantic