t his handsome partner, and then gone home and
dreamed about her, which is always dangerous, and waked up thinking of
her still, and then begun to be deeply interested in her studies, and so
on, through the whole syllogism which ends in Nature's supreme quod erat
demonstrandum. What was there to distract him or disturb him? He did
not know,--but there was something. This sumptuous creature, this Eve
just within the gate of an untried Paradise, untutored in the ways of the
world, but on tiptoe to reach the fruit of the tree of knowledge,--alive
to the moist vitality of that warm atmosphere palpitating with voices and
music, as the flower of some dioecious plant which has grown in a lone
corner and suddenly unfolding its corolla on some hot-breathing June
evening, feels that the air is perfumed with strange odors and loaded
with golden dust wafted from those other blossoms with which its double
life is shared,--this almost over-womanized woman might well have
bewitched him, but that he had a vague sense of a counter-charm. It was,
perhaps, only the same consciousness that some one was looking at him
which he himself had just given occasion to in his partner. Presently, in
one of the turns of the dance, he felt his eyes drawn to a figure he had
not distinctly recognized, though he had dimly felt its presence, and saw
that Elsie Venner was looking at him as if she saw nothing else but him.
He was not a nervous person, like the poor lady-teacher, yet the glitter
of the diamond eyes affected him strangely. It seemed to disenchant the
air, so full a moment before of strange attractions. He became silent,
and dreamy, as it were. The round-limbed beauty at his side crushed her
gauzy draperies against him, as they trod the figure of the dance
together, but it was no more to him than if an old nurse had laid her
hand on his sleeve. The young girl chafed at his seeming neglect, and
her imperious blood mounted into her cheeks; but he appeared unconscious
of it.

"There is one of our young ladies I must speak to," he said,--and was
just leaving his partner's side.

"Four hands all round?" shouted the first violin,--and Mr. Bernard found
himself seized and whirled in a circle out of which he could not escape,
and then forced to "cross over," and then to "dozy do," as the maestro
had it,--and when, on getting back to his place, he looked for Elsie
Venner, she was gone.

The dancing went on briskly. Some of the old folks looke