t on filling her
reception-rooms with celebrities and titled persons, was charmed to have
collected so many distinguished men around her.

Hermione appeared bewildered, uncomfortable and restless, like a
spectator on the edge of a great crowd. "There are too many strangers
here to-night," she said: "mamma and I do not know one half of them.
They have been brought here by their friends. To have a salon is mamma's
ambition, but this is not my idea of it. I feel as if we were out of
place among these men, who talk to each other and hardly notice us at
all."

We sat together and exchanged our thoughts in whispers. It was one of
those crowds that create a solitude for lovers. Not that we talked
sentiment or that we were lovers. We conversed about the excitements of
the day--of the Leste affair, in which the king and the king's ministry
were accused of protecting dishonesty; of the Beauvallon and
D'Equivilley duel and the Praslin murder, in connection with both of
which the royal family and the ministry were popularly accused of
protecting criminals--and at last the conversation strayed away from
France to Hermione's own girlhood. She told me of her happy country home
in Maryland with her grandmother, and sighed. I asked her if she was
going to the English ball to be given on Wednesday night at the
beautiful Jardin d'Hiver in the Champs Elysees.

"I suppose so," she replied, "but I don't care for large assemblies: I
feel afraid of the men I meet. I wish your mother could chaperon me: it
would be much nicer to be with her than with my own. Mamma understands
nothing about looking after me; she wants to have a good time herself,
and I am only in her way. Do you know, Mr. Farquhar, I have a theory
that when women have missed anything they ought to have enjoyed in early
life, they always want to go back and pick it up. Mamma had no pleasures
in her youth, no attentions, no gayety. If I am to be chaperoned, I like
the real thing. If I were at home in Maryland, where my father came
from, I should need no one to protect me: _you_ could take me to the
ball."

"I, Miss Hermione?"

"Yes, you. You would call for me, and wait till I was ready to come
down. Then you and I would go _alone_," she added, enjoying my look of
incredulity. "It is the custom: no harm could come of it," she added.
"We would walk to our ball."

"No harm in the case that you have supposed, but in some other cases--"

"You suppose a good deal," she interrupt