the commencement of some festivity. Hazel is heartsick and footsore, and
these slight matters intensify her loneliness and sadness, till as she
enters her own dark, desolate room her swelling heart finds vent in a
stifled sob. There has been no scarcity of trouble in the
five-and-twenty years of Hazel Deane's life.

And now the trouble that weighs upon her this dreary night is the
rejection all round of the treasured writing, offered everywhere with
diffidence and hope, received back always with mortification and
despair. It is now finally flung aside. Then there is the trouble of
losing her friend--her one friend, Miss Bright--for Hazel's delicate
little body holds a resolute mind and strong will, and she is determined
her friend shall not forego the so long needed rest on her account.

The moon is looking in through the uncurtained window, looking into the
cold, bare room, where only two or three cinders glow a dull red in the
grate. Beside it Hazel leans back in her chair, musing bitterly on all
the gladness gone out of her life. "I am one of those who have none to
love them," she thinks, and the tears gather in her eyes again.

She is quoting from Mr. Ruskin's "Queen's Gardens," the book which
enabled her to bear patiently a long delay at one of the publishers she
had tried that day. She had found it lying upon the table beside her as
she waited, and picking it up, had become engrossed in it.

"And I am a woman, and I suppose, therefore, a queen--at least a
possible queen," she muses--"a pretty queen!"

(_To be concluded._)