I suspect--I feel all but convinced--that N.F.could not help himself; the misfortune is that his fatal turn for moneymaking did not show itself earlier, and so warn you away.

I don't know whether I dare send you a paragraph I have cut from yesterday's _Echo_.

Yet I will--it will serve to show you that--as you used to write from Egypt--all this is Kismet." The newspaper cutting showed an item of news interesting alike to the fashionable and the artistic world.

Mr.Norbert Franks, the young painter whose Academy picture had been so much discussed, was about to paint the portrait of Lady Rockett, recently espoused wife of Sir Samuel Rockett, the Australian millionaire.

As every one knew, Lady Rockett had made a brilliant figure in the now closing Season, and her image had been in all the society journals.