h she will look back with
pleasure when the excitement is over," he said to himself; "but if
Wilford is satisfied it is not for me to interfere. It is surely nothing
to me what Katy Cameron does," he kept repeating to himself; but as
often as he said it there came up before him a pale, anxious face,
shaded with Helen Lennox's bands of hair, and Helen Lennox's voice
whispered to him: "Save Katy, for my sake;" and so next day, when Mark
found himself alone with Katy, while most of the guests were at the
beach, he questioned her of her life at Saratoga and Newport, and
gradually, as he talked, there crept into Katy's heart a suspicion that
he was not altogether pleased with her account, or with what he had seen
of her since his arrival.

For a moment Katy was indignant, but when he said to her kindly: "Would
Helen he pleased?" her tears started at once, and she attempted an
excuse for her weak folly, accusing Sybil Grandon as the first cause of
the ambition for which she hated herself.

"She had been held up as my pattern," she said, half bitterly, and
forgetting to whom she was talking--"she the one whom I was to imitate;
and when I found that if I would I could go beyond her, I yielded to the
temptation, and exulted to see how far she was left behind. Besides
that," she continued, "is it no gratification, think you, to let
Wilford's proud mother and sister see the poor country girl, whom
ordinarily they would despise, stand where they cannot come, and even
dictate to them if she chooses so to do? I know it is wrong--I know it
is wicked--but I rather like the excitement, and so long as I am with
these people I shall never be any better. Mark Ray, you don't know what
it is to be surrounded by a set who care for nothing but fashion and
display, and how they may outdo each other. I hate New York society.
There is nothing there but husks."

Katy's tears had ceased, and on her white face there was a new look of
womanhood, as if in that outburst she had changed, and would never again
be just what she was before.

"Say," she continued, "do you like New York society?"

"Not always--not wholly," Mark answered; "and still you misjudge it
greatly, for all are not like the people you describe. Your husband's
family represent one extreme, while there are others equally high in the
social scale who do not make fashion the rule of their lives--sensible,
cultivated, intellectual people, of whose acquaintance one might be
glad--peop