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1 88 BY ORDER OF THE CZAR.

living entity. As he thought in this wise his mind began to take a cynical view of what had happened ; " she kissed me for someone else, kissed me because I reminded her of someone she had known when a girl, or that some other girl had known ; " Let me kiss him for his mother" . the song ran through his brain with a laugh, as if the thought had been bracketed with the word Laughter, as the re- porters put it in their chronicles of funny speeches. Indeed Philip felt himself in a very bewildered state of mind, inclined at one moment to make fun of himself and his aspirations, then to fall under the influence of the pale face and the red-gold hair, and finally to stretch out men- tal and physical arms towards Dolly and Duty. The alliteration of the words struck him, Dolly and Duty, and he smiled. He was mentally intoxicated. He hated him- self for having behaved inconsiderately to Dolly, who had been so deliciously kind to him only two nights previously, and to whom he had pledged a life's devotion. He felt that he had deserved all that Mrs. Milbanke had said in his disparagement, and all indeed she had not said, but had hinted at ; and sitting by her side with her sensuous perfume still clinging about him, the consciousness of her pretty dresses and in her soothingly luxurious atmosphere, and remembering that Dolly was almost ten years younger and ten times prettier, and with soft round arms and pout- ing red lips, and hak like the richest yellow silk, he tried to snap his fingers .at the poetic, intellectual, Oriental beauty of the strange foreign woman who for a few hours had threatened to fill his very soul with her violet eyes and her stately figure and her red-gold hair.

It is quite questionable after all if Dick Chetwynd was right in advising Philip to get married. And it was equally questionable whether Dolly Norcott was the woman for such an erratic and unstable nature as Philip's seemed to be. Philip's was an emotional nature, liable to fall under