ove of revenge, in visiting Lillie; sometimes professing
for days an exclusive devotion to her, in which there was a little too
much reality on both sides to be at all safe or innocent; and then,
when he had wound her up to the point where even her involuntary looks
and words and actions towards him must have compromised her in the
eyes of others, he would suddenly recede for days, and devote himself
exclusively to Rose; driving ostentatiously with her in the park,
where he would meet Lillie face to face, and bow triumphantly to her
in passing. All these proceedings, talked over with Mrs. Follingsbee,
seemed to give promise of the most impassioned French romance
possible.

Rose walked through all her part in this little drama, wrapped in a
veil of sacred ignorance. Had she known the whole, the probability
is that she would have refused Harry's acquaintance; but, like many
another nice girl, she tripped gayly near to pitfalls and chasms of
which she had not the remotest conception.

Lillie's want of self-control, and imprudent conduct, had laid her
open to reports in certain circles where such reports find easy
credence; but these were circles with which the Van Astrachans never
mingled. The only accidental point of contact was the intimacy of Rose
with the Seymour family; and Rose was the last person to understand
an allusion if she heard it. The reading of Rose had been carefully
selected by her father, and had not embraced any novels of the French
romantic school; neither had she, like some modern young ladies,
made her mind a highway for the tramping of every kind of possible
fictitious character which a novelist might choose to draw, nor taken
an interest in the dissections of morbid anatomy. In fact, she was
old-fashioned enough to like Scott's novels; and though she was just
the kind of girl Thackeray would have loved, she never could bring her
fresh young heart to enjoy his pictures of world-worn and decaying
natures.

The idea of sentimental flirtations and love-making on the part of a
married woman was one so beyond her conception of possibilities that
it would have been very difficult to make her understand or believe
it.

On the occasion of the Follingsbee party, therefore, Rose accepted
Harry as an escort in simple good faith. She was by no means so wise
as not to have a deal of curiosity about it, and not a little of dazed
and dazzled sense of enjoyment in prospect of the perfect labyrinth of
fairy-la