stress; indeed,
distress is too weak a word--of acute and utter pain.

"What makes you talk like this _now_, to-night?" he asks, earnestly. "I
have been deceiving myself with the hope that you were having _one_
happy evening, as I watched you dancing--did you see me? I dare say
not--of course you were not thinking of me. You looked like the old
light-hearted Nancy that lately I have been thinking was gone forever!"

"Did I?" say I, dejectedly, slowly drawing my hands from his, and wiping
my wet eyes with my pocket-handkerchief.

"_Any one_ would have said that you were enjoying yourself," he pursues,
eagerly--"_were_ not you?"

"Yes," say I, ruefully, "I was very much." Then, with a sudden change of
tone to that sneering key which so utterly--so unnaturally misbecomes
me--"And _you_?"

"_I!_" He laughs slightly. "I am a little past the age when one derives
any very vivid satisfaction from a ball; and yet," with a softening of
eye and voice, "I liked looking at you too!"

"And it was pleasant in the billiard-room, was not it?" say I, with a
stiff and coldly ironical smile--"so quiet and shady."

"_In the billiard room?_"

"Do you mean to say," cry I, my factitious smile vanishing, and flashing
out into honest, open passion, "that you mean to deny that you were
there?"

"Deny it!" he echoes, in a tone of the deepest and most displeased
astonishment; "of course not! Why should I? What would be the object?
And if there _were_ one--have _I_ ever told _you_ a lie?" with a
reproachful accent on the pronouns. "I was there half an hour, I should
think."

"And why were you?" cry I, losing all command over myself. "What
business had you? Were not there plenty of other rooms--rooms where
there were lights and people?"

"Plenty!" he replies, coldly, still with that look of heavy displeasure;
"and for my part I had far rather have staid there. I went into the
billiard-room because Mrs. Huntley asked me to take her. She said she
was afraid of the draughts anywhere else."

"Was it the _draughts_ that were making her cry so bitterly, pray?" say
I, my eyes--dry now, achingly dry--flashing a wretched hostility back
into his. "I have heard of their making people's eyes run indeed, but I
never heard of their causing them to sob and moan."

He has begun again to tramp up and down, and utters an exclamation of
weary impatience.

"How could I help her crying?" he asks, with a tired irritation in his
tone. "Do you think I _en