let didn't quite relish.

She looked a little bit frightened up at him. The proud, brilliant
Tressillian was as pale and quiet as a little child after a good
scolding. But she soon rallied, and flashed up haughtier than ever.

"Major Telfer, you make one great error--one very common to your sex.
You drop us one day, and take us up the next, and then think that we
must be grateful to you for the supreme honor you do us. You are cold to
us, absolutely rude, as long as it pleases your lordly will, and then,
at the first word of courtesy and kindness, you expect us to rise and
make you a _reverence_ in the utmost humiliation and thanksgiving. You
men"--and Violet began destroying her bouquet with immense
energy--"treat us exactly as a cat will treat a mouse. You yourself, for
instance, in a moment's hasty judgment, construed all my actions by the
light of your own unjust suspicions, and believing everything, no matter
how unfounded, spoke against me to all your acquaintance, and treated me
with, as you must admit, but scanty courtesy, for one whom I have heard
piques himself on his high breeding. And now, when you discover that
your suspicions had no foundation, and your hatred no grounds, you
wonder that I find it difficult to be as grateful as you seem to think I
should be for your having so kindly misjudged me."

As the young lady gave all this forth with much vehemence and spirit,
Telfer's lips set, and the blood forced itself through the bronze of his
cheeks. He bent towards her till his moustache touched her hair.

"You have no mercy, Violet Tressillian," he said, between his teeth.
"Take care that no one is as pitiless to you in return."

She started, and her bouquet fell to the ground. Telfer gave it her back
without looking at her, and turned round to an Austrian with his usual
impassive air.

"Do you know where De Tintiniac is, Staumgaurn? In the roulette room?
All right. I am going there now."

He did go there, and I've a notion that the croupier of Pipesandbeersbad
made something that night out of the Major's preoccupation.

Violet, meanwhile, was waltzing with Staumgaurn and a dozen others, but
looked rather white--not using any rouge but what nature had given
her--and by the end of the evening her bouquet had utterly come to
grief. Days went on till a fortnight of our last month had gone, and
Telfer, to my sorrow (not surprise, for I always thought the Tressillian
was a dangerous foe, and that, like Ri