It was not a banshee, but a forgotten fox-hound puppy, sitting mournfully on the gravel-walk beneath, staring at the clear ghastly moon.
She laughed and blushed--there was a rebuke in it.

She turned to go to rest; and as she knelt and prayed at her velvet faldstool, among all the nicknacks which now-a-days make a luxury of devotion, was it strange if, after she had prayed for the fate of nations and churches, and for those who, as she thought, were fighting at Oxford the cause of universal truth and reverend antiquity, she remembered in her petitions the poor godless youth, with his troubled and troubling eloquence?
But it was strange that she blushed when she mentioned his name--why should she not pray for him as she prayed for others?
Perhaps she felt that she did not pray for him as she prayed for others.
She left the AEolian harp in the window, as a luxury if she should wake, and coiled herself up among lace pillows and eider blemos; and the hound coiled himself up on the gravel-walk, after a solemn vesper-ceremony of three turns round in his own length, looking vainly for a 'soft stone.' The finest of us are animals after all, and live by eating and sleeping: and, taken as animals, not so badly off either--unless we happen to be Dorsetshire labourers--or Spitalfields weavers--or colliery children--or marching soldiers-- or, I am afraid, one half of English souls this day.
And Argemone dreamed;--that she was a fox, flying for her life through a churchyard--and Lancelot was a hound, yelling and leaping, in a red coat and white buckskins, close upon her--and she felt his hot breath, and saw his white teeth glare.

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