UNTYING GORDIAN KNOTS.
I.
LADY SACKVIL'S JOURNAL.
Venice, April 3d, 185-. Arrived this afternoon, and was received by Flora at the station in an embossed gondola with crimson awnings. Ah me! the delicious glow of a new sensation. By what blessed exception was Venice reserved to me for the thirty-first year of that stagnation we call life, and for the second year of dowagerhood? As we floated up to Beldoni Palace, the blood of nineteen flowed in my veins. But in the marble court, perfumed with orange-blossoms exhaling youth and hope, the twins rushed out upon me, crying, "Auntie!" Bah! I was again myself, smothered in crape and bombazine, with the heart of a jade-stone and the circulation of a crocodile.
As we stood beneath the fig-trees in the garden, Flora whispered, "Look at the middle window of the third story." I looked, and beheld a brown-haired woman, in a soft blue dress, pushing aside a mass of passion-vine, and watching us. A pretty picture enough, made warm and glowing in the last rays of sunset! "Who is it?" "Nicholas Vane's wife. I wrote you of his marriage two years ago. They have taken an apartment we do not use, and we are constantly together. You remember that George owes his success in life to Mr. Vane, and he has always been like an elder brother to Nicholas."
"She's rather pretty, is she not?"
"Not exactly pretty, but excessively nice. George respects her immensely."
"George, George, George!" the point of every moral and adornment of every tale. George does not respect me immensely; but I am not sure that I value his opinion less for that reason—heaven help me!
Well, if Nicholas Vane makes his wife half as wretched as he made me ten years ago, I pity her. I have always wished for an éclaircissement with him on the subject of my marriage with Sackvil. Perhaps it may come now.