st an old friend?" asked he, abruptly.

"Yes; how so?"

"Then," answered he, while his features lighted up with a happy
inspiration--"then you will appreciate my situation. I fondly cherished
my old picture of you in my memory. Now I have lost it, and I can not
help regretting the loss. I do not mean, however, to imply that this new
acquaintance--this second edition of yourself, so to speak--will prove
less interesting."

She again sent him a grave, questioning look, and began to gaze intently
upon the stone in her bracelet.

"I suppose you will laugh at me," began she, while a sudden blush
flitted over her countenance. "But this is my first ball, and I feel
as if I had rushed into a whirlpool, from which I have, since the first
rash plunge was made, been vainly trying to escape. I feel so dreadfully
forlorn. I hardly know anybody here except my cousin, who invited me,
and I hardly think I know him either."

"Well, since you are irredeemably committed," replied Ralph, as the
music, after some prefatory flourishes, broke into the delicious rhythm
of a Strauss waltz, "then it is no use struggling against fate. Come,
let us make the plunge together. Misery loves company."

He offered her his arm, and she rose, somewhat hesitatingly, and
followed.

"I am afraid," she whispered, as they fell into line with the procession
that was moving down the long hall, "that you have asked me to dance
merely because I said I felt forlorn. If that is the case, I should
prefer to be led back to my seat."

"What a base imputation!" cried Ralph.

There was something so charmingly _naive_ in this
self-depreciation--something so altogether novel in his experience, and,
he could not help adding, just a little bit countrified. His spirits
rose; he began to relish keenly his position as an experienced man
of the world, and, in the agreeable glow of patronage and conscious
superiority, chatted with hearty _abandon_ with his little rustic
beauty.

"If your dancing is as perfect as your German exercises were," said she,
laughing, as they swung out upon the floor, "then I promise myself a
good deal of pleasure from our meeting."

"Never fear," answered he, quickly reversing his step, and whirling with
many a capricious turn away among the thronging couples.

When Ralph drove home in his carriage toward morning he briefly summed
up his impressions of Bertha in the following adjectives: intelligent,
delightfully unsophisticated, a littl