ready gone into the supper-room, and she had no other
recourse than to follow with the stranger.

As they entered the supper-room she removed her little visor, and she
felt, rather than saw, the mask put up his hand and lift away his own:
he turned his head, and looked down upon her with the face of a man she
had never seen before.

"Ah, you are there!" she heard the princess's voice calling to her from
one of the tables. "How tired you look! Here--here! I will make you
drink this glass of wine."

The officer who brought her the wine gave her his arm and led her to the
princess, and the late mask mixed with the two-score other tall blond
officers.

The night which stretched so far into the day ended at last, and she
followed Hoskins down to their gondola. He entered the boat first, to
give her his hand in stepping from the _riva_; at the same moment she
involuntarily turned at the closing of the door behind her, and found
at her side the tall blond mask, or one of the masks, if there were two
who had danced with her. He caught her hand suddenly to his lips, and
kissed it.

"Adieu--forgive!" he murmured in English, and then vanished indoors
again.

"Owen," said Mrs. Elmore dramatically at the end of her narration, "who
do you think it could have been?"

"I have no doubt as to who it was, Celia," replied Elmore, with a heat
evidently quite unexpected to his wife, "and if Lily has not been
seriously annoyed by the matter, I am glad that it has happened. I have
had my regrets--my doubts--whether I did not dismiss that man's
pretensions too curtly, too unkindly. But I am convinced now that we did
exactly right, and that she was wise never to bestow another thought
upon him. A man capable of contriving a petty persecution of this
sort--of pursuing a young girl who had rejected him in this shameless
fashion,--is no gentleman."

"It _was_ a persecution," said Mrs. Elmore, with a dazed air, as if this
view of the case had not occurred to her.

"A miserable, unworthy persecution!" repeated her husband.

"Yes."

"And we are well rid of him. He has relieved _me_ by this last
performance, immensely; and I trust that if Lily had any secret
lingering regrets, he has given her a final lesson. Though I must say,
in justice to her, poor girl, she didn't seem to need it."

Mrs. Elmore listened with a strange abeyance; she looked beaten and
bewildered, while he vehemently uttered these words. She could not meet
his eyes,