e white arm, that gleams like snow in the
dark night, to wave him to one side.

"From henceforth remember, I am deaf when you address me!"

She sweeps past him into the house, without further glance or word,
leaving him, half mad with doubt and self-reproach, to pace the gardens
until far into the morning.

When he does re-enter the ball-room he finds it almost deserted. Nearly
all the guests have taken their departure. Dancing is growing
half-hearted; conversation is having greater sway with those that still
remain.

The first person he sees--with Philip beside her--is Molly, radiant,
sparkling, even more than usually gay. Two crimson spots burn upon
either cheek, making her large eyes seem larger, and bright as gleaming
stars.

Even as Luttrell, with concentrated bitterness, stands transfixed at
some little distance from her, realizing how small a thing to her is
this rupture between them, that is threatening to break his heart, she,
looking up, sees him.

Turning to her companion, she whispers something to him in a low tone,
and then she laughs,--a soft, rippling laugh, full of mirth and music.

"There go the chimes again," says Mr. Potts, who has just come up,
alluding to Molly's little cruel outburst of merriment. "I never saw
Miss Massereene in such good form as she is in to-night. Oh!"--with a
suppressed yawn--"'what a day we're 'aving!' I wish it were all to come
over again."

"Plantagenet, you grow daily more dissipated," says Cecil Stafford,
severely. "A little boy like you should be in your bed hours ago;
instead of which you have been allowed to sit up until half-past four,
and----"

"And still I am not 'appy?' How could I be when you did me out of that
solitary dance you promised me? I really believed, when I asked you
with such pathos in the early part of the evening to keep that one
green spot in your memory for me, you would have done so."

"Did I forget you?" remorsefully. "Well, don't blame me. Mr. Lowry
_would_ keep my card for me, and, as a natural consequence, it was
lost. After that, how was it possible for me to keep to my
engagements?"

"I think it was a delightful ball," Molly says, with perhaps a shade
too much _empressement_. "I never in all my life enjoyed myself so
well."

"Lucky you," says Cecil. "Had I been allowed I should perhaps have been
happy too; but"--with a glance at Stafford, who is looking the very
personification of languid indifference--"when people allow their