, to please Rube, more than once with Jerome. It was
while the two were floating together in that delirious rapture of
conscious nearness, to which the conventional waltz gives pretext
and the stamp of propriety, and while their senses swayed to the
rhythmic measure of the sweetest music they had ever heard, that
Mell looked up meltingly into her partner's face--a face absorbed,
excited, yet darkly set with a certain sternness which Mell fully
understood--looked up and said to him: "Only wait until I get back
home." Simple words indeed, and holding little meaning for those
who heard; but they gave a new lease of life to Jerome. He answered
back in a whisper, certain words. And now it only remained for
Clara Rutland to accept the Honorable Archibald Pendergast and the
happiness of two loving hearts would be assured.

The ball is over, gone, past, never to come back again, with its waltz
melody, its ravishing rhyme without reason, its sweet smelling
flowers, its foam-crested wine, its outlying joy, its underlying
pathos, its hidden sweetness, and its secret pain. For, there never
was a ball yet which had its lights and not its shadows; which did not
have some heavy foot among its light fantastic toes; some heavy heart
among its gallant men and beautiful women.

Mell lives it over in the pale dawn. It made her blood curdle and her
flesh creep to think of those two men. What was she going to do with
them--Rube and Jerome? How was it all to end?

Horrible it would be to break off with Rube, more horrible still not
to do so. Fearful it would be to tell him the truth--the whole truth.
But that was what Jerome expected her to do, what she ought to do.

Those words of his were burned into her memory with fire. He wanted
her to become a good, true, useful woman, and be no longer a
butterfly.

He had called her 'my darling.' He had called her so twice. He loved
her just as much as ever. In fact, he loved her more; for the man is
not living who does not love a woman more when he finds out somebody
else loves her as well as he.

She was quite decided, and Jerome was undeniably right; there was but
one honorable course for her to follow. Even if Jerome married Clara,
and she herself never had another offer of marriage (she never would
have another such as Rube) how sweet it would be, even in a life of
loneliness, to be free, to be able to maintain the dignity and the
probity of her womanhood, to be able to throw aside the desp