the ball?"
inquired Adelaide, in an icy kind of voice.

"Yes, I do," almost shouted Sir Peter. Adelaide could, despite the whip
and rein with which he held her, exasperate and irritate him--by no
means more thoroughly than by pretending that she did not understand
his grandiloquent allusions, and the vague grandness of the commands
which he sometimes gave. "I mean you to go, and your little sister here,
and Arkwright too. I don't know about myself. Now, I am going to ride.
Good-morning."

As Sir Peter went out, von Francius came in. Sir Peter greeted him with
a grin and exaggerated expressions of affability at which von Francius
looked silently scornful. Sir Peter added:

"Those two ladies are puzzled to know what they shall wear at the
Carnival Ball. Perhaps you can give them your assistance."

Then he went away. It was as if a half-muzzled wolf had left the room.

Von Francius had come to give me my lesson, which was now generally
taken at my sister's house and in her presence, and after which von
Francius usually remained some half hour or so in conversation with one
or both of us. He had become an _intime_ of the house. I was glad of
this, and that without him nothing seemed complete, no party rounded,
scarcely an evening finished.

When he was not with us in the evening, we were somewhere where he was;
either at a concert or a probe, or at the theater or opera, or one of
the fashionable lectures which were then in season.

It could hardly be said that von Francius was a more frequent visitor
than some other men at the house, but from the first his attitude with
regard to Adelaide had been different. Some of those other men were, or
professed to be, desperately in love with the beautiful English woman;
there was always a half gallantry in their behavior, a homage which
might not be very earnest, but which was homage all the same, to a
beautiful woman. With von Francius it had never been thus, but there had
been a gravity and depth about their intercourse which pleased me. I had
never had the least apprehension with regard to those other people; she
might amuse herself with them; it would only be amusement, and some
contempt.

But von Francius was a man of another mettle. It had struck me almost
from the first that there might be some danger, and I was unfeignedly
thankful to see that as time went on and his visits grew more and more
frequent and the intimacy deeper, not a look, not a sign occurred to
hint