Alice, and you may take her if you can, and without a pang." I was accustomed to these little dramas, but this was too much for me. "What do you mean?" I said. "Well," she said, "I never was more fully persuaded as to the depth of folly, of incapacity, one may find in a man." "You are enigmatical." smile a little, Alice. I found him too stupid for belief. I turn him over to you. Half an hour have I spent in trying to make him understand just the simplest thing conceivable. You may be more fortunate, or-well, more clever." And she was gone. I could have pinched her. "And the problem, Dr. North ?" said Miss Leigh. "It was purely personal." "And troublesome? Mrs. Vincent has left "Am I indeed? May I show that letter to me heir to the talk." Alice?" I interrupted: "Yes, very." "What! You must indeed think me a fool." "I shall not answer you according to your folly. And people say you are a student of character and see through women! It is past belief; but trust a woman's insight for once. Ah, certainly I am at home. Show Miss Leigh up. Here comes the answer to my enigma.' "O Mrs. Vincent! This is one of your little-" "Hush! Isn't this joyous?" And she struck the keys again until the glad notes of the lovesong rang through my brain." My dear Alice, how good of you to come!" shecried. "You must have left your dinner-party early. Why, it is only ten. Dr. North has just chanced in, and now we shall have a quiet talk. You have not seen Dr. North since he came back. My room is en fête to welcome him." "When you give me a chance I shall tell him how glad all his friends are to see him safe back again." Her words were quite formally spoken. "It was worth the price, such as it was," I said, "to come home and find one has been thought about." Her formality affected me, and I struck automatically the same note in reply. "And now tell us about it," said Mrs. Vincent. "You were detained by Dr. Roy's illness?" "Yes; I had to be nurse and physician." "Well, I want to hear it all—everything; but pardon me a moment, and talk of something else. I must answer Susan Primrose and two invitations for Fred." Upon which she retired to a desk in the corner, and we fell into talk. At last I said, "I did not keep my engagement. To-day month, I said when we parted, and now it is-" "Nearly two," she replied. "Oh, quite two," ejaculated our lady manager from the corner, rising with notes in her hand. "Excuse me, I so want to hear that I cannot write; I have made two horrid blunders, and I must ask Fred if he will dine with the Carltons. I shall be back in ten minutes," and she was gone. Then I began to understand the drama, and was instantly on guard. At the door she turned back. "Do make that man "I am sorry, and you look so tired. I can understand that one might suffer long in mind and body after what you have been through. Seriously, I do not suppose Anne Vincent would have spoken so lightly about anything that I might not talk of. You once said that we were friends. Perhaps you do not know by this time that I take life gravely, even its friendships. Can I help you as a friend ?" "No," I said, grimly. "Then pardon me. I did not mean to be indiscreet, or―or— "You are not. You are only and always kind. But Mrs. Vincent is sometimes carried away by her moods." "And you think we should always be responsible for our moods? I wish I were. It is so pleasant to coddle them, and I do try not to." Then her eyes fell on the crimson and gold embroidery. "Have you heard from St. Clair? He is very apropos of moods, is n't he?" "Yes; I had a letter to-day. He is in Paris." "I wish I had his sense of irresponsibility," she returned. "It must be so nice to have a heart and no conscience. You must miss him, or you will, I am sure. Every one must." Yes, I shall. I am fond of him." "Anne says he will return in the autumn." "I do not know." "Do you think he knows?" "I have been wanting so much to see you to talk again of my plans. Do you not think-" "I don't think," I said. " I prefer not to discuss the matter. Ask some one else. I am useless." "How short you are with me. Don't you know friends are for use?" "I suppose so. Mine fail me at times." Now, do you mean?" "Yes." "Well, I must turn you over to Anne Vincent. I don't wonder she considers you difficult." "You are certainly the last person to whom I should go." The situation was fast getting out of my control. "Your mama is quite right," I said. "Friends should be kept in their right places, and that is not always easy. They take liberties. They suppose I were to ask you an impertinent question ?" "I don't like the word-the adjective." "Well, un-pertinent." "That is better. I should try to answer it." But she glanced uneasily at the door. "Do you care for Mr. St. Clair ?" "Care?" "No. Love him?" All this was said with unusual rapidity of speech, and she rose as she spoke. "One moment," I said. "Not one," she said with a nervous laugh, taking up the bud I had left on the table and plucking it to pieces leaf by leaf. “Oh, not a minute," she repeated. "Please to ring." "Alice Leigh," I said, and, speaking, caught her wrist, and felt as I did so the slight start of troubled maidenhood, "let the poor rose alone. Try to think it is my life you are busy with. What will you do with it—with me?" As I spoke, she regarded me a moment with large eyes, and then sat down as if suddenly weak, her fan falling on the floor. Some strong emotion was troubling the pure lines of her face. What was it? Pity or love? Then, looking down, she said, as if to herself, "And is this "Of what?" I said faintly. "Of me, of my life, of it. Why did you speak? Am I wrong? Am I right? Why were you so cruel as to speak-to speak now? You might have seen; you might have known. I have duties before me; I have a life. I— I am not fit for-for anything else. I mean to be. Oh, I "I would rather you said no more. I beg wish I were not a woman. Then, then I should of you to say no more." "I cannot pause here. I must speak. If you love him, I have been false to him. I have misunderstood. I have trodden roughly on sacred ground. What I thought it right to say to him I said without seeing where I stood." "But now," she said, "I must understand all this. I confess I do not. You ask me if I - love Mr. St. Clair, your friend." "That was what I said." "And it was more, so much more, than you ought to have said. But now I will answer you. I do not think many women would — I will. I do not. You have gone to the limit of friendship, and perhaps beyond. And now please to ask Mrs. Vincent to come; I must go away. I had only a few minutes." know how to do what is best, what is right." And upon this, to my bewilderment, she burst into tears and sobbed like a child. "Alice," I said, "I love you." "I know, I know," she cried. "And the worst of it is I-I-O Owen North, be very good to me. I meant to have done so much.' "Are you sorry?" “Yes. No; a thousand times no.” My dear child," said that matron, "your fan is in a dozen bits." "And so is everything else, Anne Vincenteverything. Let me go." And she ran out of the room, and left me to tell the end of this story to my friend and hers. S. Weir Mitchell. THE END. "WHEN ON THE MARGE OF EVENING." WHEN on the marge of evening the last blue light is broken, And winds of dreamy odor are loosened from afar ; Or when my lattice opens before the lark has spoken, I think of thee (O mine the more if other eyes be sleeping!) The late and early twilight alone and sweet for me! Louise Imogen Guiney. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. BY EMILIO CASTELAR. III. WINNING THE FAVOR OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. THE HE many journeys of Columbus since quitting Portugal, and the little advantage that followed his negotiations in Seville and Puerto Santa Maria, had aggravated his poverty, and he went about so ill clad that he was named the "Stranger with the Threadbare Cloak." In this straitened condition he presented himself before the royal pair. In Ferdinand political sagacity predominated; in Isabella the moral nature. The pious king believed, notwithstanding his piety, in the efficacy of works, and professed the dogma of aiding to execute the divine will, which he generally found favorable to his undertakings; Isabella, with her enthusiasm, trusted in her hopes and in prayer. The queen was all spontaneity, the king all reflection. She trod the paths of good in order to attain to good, but he scrupled little to resort to dissimulation, deceit, and, in case of necessity, crime. Valiant and warlike, Ferdinand joined the strength of the lion to the instincts of the fox. Perchance in all history there has not been his equal in energy and craftiness. He was distrustful above all else; she, above all, was confiding. He was all mind; she all heart. Isabella took pleasure in increasing the number of her vassals, that she might possess a dominion over human souls, whereby to swell the ranks of true believers upon earth and of the elect in heaven; Ferdinand took pleasure likewise in the growth of the Church and of Christianity, but above such religious gratification he set the satisfaction born of domination and conquest. Daughter of a learned king, and of an English mother who died bereft of reason, Isabella had a clear perception of ideas and lived in a ceaseless state of exaltation. Son of that quarrelsome and wily king John II. of Aragon, and of a mother of masculine and ambitious nature, Ferdinand inherited on the paternal side a mixture of political and warlike temperaments, and on the maternal that incredible ambition which led him to add to his royal house and to his native country by conquest and by marriage. The two founded the Inquisition; Ferdinand for political reasons, Isabella for religious ends. Both were conquerors; Isabella gained Granada for her Castile, and Ferdinand, Navarre for his Aragon. The conquest of Granada reads like some book of chivalry, the conquest of Navarre like a chapter of Machiavelli. By the one achievement Isabella expelled the Moors; and by the other Ferdinand drove the French from our peninsula. As a natural consequence of their different temperaments, Isabella and Ferdinand each dealt with Columbus as their several natures prompted; the queen ever enthusiastic, the king, as usual, cautious, guarded, crafty, and reserved. He computed the cost of the enterprise, and the returns it might yield; she thought only of spreading the dominions of her idolized Castile and winning souls to Christianity. Besides all this, the sea had its temptations for the queen of Castile, for all her enterprises and conquests tended oceanward, just as her great rivers, the Tagus, the Duero, the Guadalquivir, and the Miño, flowed toward the main. With Ferdinand it was quite the other way; his conquests trended like the Ebro, the Llobregat, and the Turia toward the waters of the Mediterranean. The Canaries were the island domain of Isabella; the insular possessions of Ferdinand stretched from the Balearic Islands to Sicily. Ferdinand dreamed only of Italy; Isabella of Africa. Hence, the one looked toward the past, the other toward the future. But both were great with a measureless greatness, for they assumed the stature of a great idea, and obeyed, by ways and deeds, as much in contrast as their characters, the quickening spirit and the transcendent impulses of the creative era in which they lived. The unity of the state, of the territory, of the laws was imposed upon them by the age, and to the attainment of such unity were all their efforts consecrated; so that, besides winning for themselves renown, they did good service to their nation and their time. The sovereigns heard Columbus after their respective natures, Isabella with enthusiasm and Ferdinand with reserve. But the king's reserve and the queen's enthusiasm tended to like results, and made delay inevitable. The reconquest of Granada admitted of no rival undertaking. It was impossible to divert the royal minds from that paramount purpose. So they referred the matter to the queen's confessor, Fray Hernando de Talavera. Accustomed as we are to modern ideas and customs, it is hard to comprehend the genuine father-confessor of the fifteenth century, the supreme counselor of the sovereigns in virtue of his office and in the confidence of the confessional. Fray Hernando de Talavera, first prior of the monastery of El Prado in Valladolid, later bishop of Avila and lastly archbishop of Granada, when seated in the confessional, deemed his seat higher than the throne, and held himself to be the dispenser of the earthly and eternal salvation of the sovereigns. Even in his first confession he had an altercation with the queen; for when Isabella desired to confess either standing or sitting, he replied that she should do neither, but kneel at his feet. He was as rightly able to call himself Minister of State as of the Treasury, and as well Minister of the Treasury as of Instruction and the Fine Arts, without question as to the ministry of Good Behavior; and so Isabella confided to his zeal the management of the debt equally with the choice of her daily reading in the royal library, and asked his counsel alike concerning the most important decrees and the most ordinary household affairs. The good Talavera's acts were governed by no monkish scruples; he reprimanded with the severity of the patriarch, and even with the rod of the pedagogue, the foremost and most saintly queen of Christendom. He had but one certain, fixed, continuous and abiding idea-the conquest of Granada. At a time when all his thoughts were absorbed in this one idea, and all his powers devoted to it with that force of concentration and of will which he was universally admitted to possess, Columbus came, with his tremendous schemes, distracting the reverend scholastic from his traditional convictions, and from his purpose to regain Granada. The aversion with which Talavera regarded the Indian project was therefore natural and inevitable. To him it was an innovation fraught with peril to the general beliefs, and a criminal malversation of the public resources in behalf of an object that in truth seemed sacrilegious beside the completion of the seven-century epic of endeavor by the reconquest of that sultana among the cities of Ishmael, and beside the triumph of the Cross that he adored with fervid and ceaseless worship. When the queen on many occasions, before the conquest, promised Talavera an archbishopric, his answer always was: "Either will I be archbishop in Granada, or archbishop nowhere!" Such was Talavera. The sovereigns could hardly have intrusted to a person more unsuited for so high a duty the decision of this arduous problem. Talavera was assisted by a man of competence and brains, the royal counselor, Maldonado; who, however, believed the less in the scheme the more he heard of it from the eloquent lips of its author, and went about arguing the impossibility of the thing imagined and proposed by Columbus. The primary ground of his disbelief lay in the assumption that the theory of Columbus rested indispensably upon the spherical shape of the earth, which was from every point of view inadmissible, because the Psalms described the heavens as a stretched-out curtain, and because St. Augustine treated as a heresy the existence of antipodes in another hemisphere, with their feet turned toward our feet and their heads downward. In that age, doubtless, when religious objections prevailed above all others, needs must that the discoverer should study holy writ and theological problems together, and acquaint himself with the mystical ideas of his own and older times. To make clear all these vague imaginings that environed his purpose, and to meet the theological scruples that opposed his arguments, he steadfastly searched the Scriptures, and found therein confirmation, not only of his personal mission to redeem Zion from her chains, but to redeem our blind and erring race in Christ. For him there was scarce a psalm or a prophecy but lamented the manifold transgressions of Israel that had brought captivity upon Zion, and foretold a liberator who, in truth, could be none other than himself, Columbus. The book of Kings, the Psalms, the prophecies, the book of Job, all predicted the redemption of Jerusalem by such a man as he, divinely chosen and predestined to providential ends. At times, in the confusion of his mystical conceptions, he added that not only was he personally called by the Lord to such an achievement, but that Joaquin de Flora in his writings had designated Spain by name, and the Bible, too, pointed out the furthest nations of the west with singular clearness. He steadily claimed that this resto |