ew a little moist under her spectacles. She
wished Richard could have seen the girls dressed, 'just once.' But Rose
treated the cards with no sort of tenderness. 'If one could but put them
up to auction,' she said flippantly, holding them up, 'how many German
opera tickets I should get for nothing! I don't know what Agnes feels.
As for me, I have neither nerve enough for the people, nor money enough
for the toilette.'

However, with eleven o'clock Lady Helen ran in, a fresh vision of blue
and white, to suggest certain dresses for the sisters which had occurred
to her in the visions of the night, 'original, adorable,--cost, a mere
nothing!'

'My harpy,' she remarked, alluding to her dressmaker,'would ruin you
over them, of course. Your maid'--the Leyburns possessed a remarkably
clever one--'will make them divinely for twopence-halfpenny. Listen.'

Rose listened; her eye kindled; the maid was summoned; and the
invitation accepted in Agnes's neatest hand. Even Catherine was roused
during the following ten days to a smiling indulgent interest in the
concerns of the workroom.

The evening came, and Lady Helen fetched the sisters in her carriage.
The ball was a magnificent affair. The house was one of historical
interest and importance, and all that the ingenuity of the present could
do to give fresh life and gaiety to the pillared rooms, the carved
galleries and stately staircases of the past, had been done. The
ball-room, lined with Vandycks and Lelys, glowed softly with electric
light; the picture gallery had been banked with flowers and carpeted
with red, and the beautiful dresses of the women trailed up and down it,
challenging the satins of the Netschers and the Terburgs on the walls.

Rose's card was soon full to overflowing. The young men present were of
the smartest, and would not willingly have bowed the knee to a nobody,
however pretty. But Lady Helen's devotion, the girl's reputation as a
musician, and her little nonchalant disdainful ways, gave her a kind of
prestige, which made her, for the time being at any rate, the equal of
anybody. Petitioners came and went away empty. Royalty was introduced,
and smiled both upon the beauty and the beauty's delicate and becoming
dress; and still Rose, though a good deal more flushed and erect than
usual, and though flesh and blood could not resist the contagious
pleasure which glistened even in the eyes of that sage Agnes, was more
than half-inclined to say with the Pre