odd
evening, I have to get to my dissection. I went shares the other day in
a beautiful subject----"

"I don't think you need tell me of that, Jan," interrupted Lady Mary,
keeping her countenance.

"I wonder you talk to him, Mary," observed Lady Verner, feeling
thoroughly ashamed of Jan, and believing that everybody else did. "You
hear how he repays you. He means it for good breeding, perhaps."

"I don't mean it for rudeness, at any rate," returned Jan. "Lady Mary
knows that. Don't you?" he added, turning to her.

A strangely thrilling expression in her eyes as she looked at him was
her only answer. "I would rather have that sort of rudeness from you,
Jan," said she, "than the world's hollow politeness. There is so much of
false----"

Mary Elmsley's sentence was never concluded. What was it that had broken
in upon them? What object was that, gliding into the room like a ghost,
on whom all eyes were strained with a terrible fascination? _Was_ it a
ghost? It appeared ghastly enough for one. Was it one of Jan's
"subjects" come after him to the ball? Was it a corpse? It looked more
like that than anything else. A corpse bedizened with jewels.

"She's mad!" exclaimed Jan, who was the first to recover his speech.

"What is it?" ejaculated Sir Edmund, gazing with something very like
fear, as the spectre bore down towards him.

"It is my brother's wife," explained Jan. "You may see how fit she is to
come."

There was no time for more. Sibylla had her hand held out to Sir Edmund,
a wan smile on her ghastly face. His hesitation, his evident
discomposure, as he took it, were not lost upon her.

"You have forgotten me, Sir Edmund; but I should have known you
anywhere. Your face is bronzed, and it is the only change. Am _I_ so
much changed?"

"Yes, you are; greatly changed," was his involuntary acknowledgment in
his surprise. "I should not have recognised you for the Sibylla West of
those old days."

"I was at an age to change," she said. "I----"

The words were stopped by a fit of coughing. Not the ordinary cough,
more or less violent, that we hear in every-day intercourse; but the
dreadful cough that tells its tale of the hopeless state within. She had
discarded her opera-cloak, and stood there, her shoulders, back, neck,
all bare and naked; _tres decolletee_, as the French would say;
shivering palpably; imparting the idea of a skeleton with rattling
bones. Sir Edmund Hautley, quitting Decima, took her hand
compa