ich infected her. A haunting persuasion of the phantasmagoric
character of all sounds that saluted her ears, all sights that met her
eyes, possessed her. A vast uncertainty surrounded and pressed in on
her, while those questionings of appearances and actualities, of truth
and falsehood, right and wrong, justice and injustice, with which she
had played idly earlier in the evening, took on new and almost terrible
proportions, causing her intelligence, nay, her heart itself, to reach
out, as never before, in search of some sure rock and house of defense
against the disintegrating apprehension of universal instability and
illusion.

"Ah! it is all very difficult, difficult to the point of alarm!" she
exclaimed suddenly, turning to Lord Shotover and looking him straight
in the face, with an unself-consciousness and desire of support so
transparent, that that gentleman found himself at once delighted and
slightly abashed.

"Bless my soul, but Ludovic is a lucky devil!" he said to
himself.--"What's--what's so beastly difficult, Miss St. Quentin?" he
asked aloud. And the sound of his cheery voice recalled Honoria to the
normal aspects of existence with almost humorous velocity. She smiled
upon him.

"I really believe I don't quite know," she said. "Perhaps that the two
people, of whom we were speaking, really care for each other, and that
this engagement has come between them, and that you have chucked
discretion and given him his chance. Tell me, what sort of man is
he--strong enough to make the most of his chance when he's got it?"

But at that moment Lord Shotover stepped forward, adroitly planting
himself right in front of her and thus screening her from observation.

"By George!" he said under his breath, in tones of mingled amusement
and consternation, "he's making the most of his chance now Miss St.
Quentin, and that most uncommonly comprehensively, unless I'm very much
mistaken."

Her companion's tall person and the folds of a heavy curtain, while
screening Honoria from observation, also, in great measure, obscured
her view of the room. Yet not so completely but that she saw two
figures cross it, one black, one white, those of a man and a girl. They
were both speaking, the man apparently pleading, the girl protesting
and moving hurriedly, the while, as though in actual flight. She must
have been moving blindly, at random, for she stumbled against the
outstanding, gilded leg of a consol table, set against the furt