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the beautiful ring that once enclosed two lives; hence, I have ordered the diamonds reset in the form of a four-leaved clover, which will be sent to dear Kittie as an auspicious omen.
"With undiminished esteem, and unshaken confidence, and with a prayer for your happiness, which will always be dear to me, I remain,
"Your sincerely attached friend,
"LEO."
The majority of men, and a large class of women, bury their dead, and straightway begin assiduously the cultivation of all that promises oblivion; but Leo's nature was deeper, more intense; and while she made no audible moan, and shed no tears, she accepted the fact that earthly existence had lost its coveted crown, and that her aching heart was the dark grave of a beautiful hope that could know no resurrection. To-day she asked herself: "What shall I do with my life?"
Upon the warm air, sweet with the breath of lemon flowers, floated the peculiar, jeering, yet subdued and musical laughter, which told that Alma had flown straight at some luckless quarry. She held in one hand a cluster of crimson anemones, and purple stars of periwinkle, and walking between two English gentlemen, whose yacht, the "Albatross", lay anchored close to the "Cleopatra" in the harbor below, slowly approached Leo, saying:
"Don't stone your prophets. Especially one hedged about with the triple sanctity of Brasenose! 'Consider that thy marbles are but the earth's callosities, thy gold and silver its faeces; thy silken robe but a worm's bedding; and thy purple an unclean fish.' That is one sugar-coated pill that I administer to my humility now and then to keep it healthy. Hear him again;--'sitting on the marble bench of one of the exhedrea on the edge of the Appian Way, close to the fragrant borders of a rose farm': 'So it is, with the philosophers; all alike are in search of happiness, what kind of thing it is. It is pleasure, it is virtue; what not? All philosophers, so to speak, are but fighting about the ass' shadow. I saw one who poured water i