Countess, Lady Mary, and Doctor Chord moved slowly on through the
throng, and I followed. The great question now was whether Lady Mary
would look back. If she looked back, I would feel that I was making
grand way with her. If she did not look back, I would know myself as a
lost man. One can imagine how eagerly I watched her. For a long time
it was plain that she had no intention whatever of looking back. I
lugubriously arranged my complete downfall. Then, at the very moment
of my despair, she gazed studiously off to her extreme left for a
certain time, and then suddenly cast one short glance behind her. Only
heaven knows what value I placed upon this brief look. It appeared for
the moment to me that I had won her, won everything. I bravely forged
ahead until I was quite insistently under the eye of Lady Mary, and
then she again looked toward me, but it was a look so repelling and
frigid that it went through me as if I had been a paper ring in the
circus. I slunk away through the crowd, my thoughts busy with trying
to find out what had happened to me.

For three minutes I was a miserable human being. At the end of that
time I took heart again. I decided that Lady Mary had frowned at me
because she was afraid that she had been too good to me with her look
and smile. You know what I mean. I have seen a young girl give a young
man a flower, and at the very next moment be seemingly willing to give
her heart's blood to get that flower back, overcome with panic terror
that she had passed--in his opinion, mind you--beyond the lines of
best behaviour. Well I said to myself that Lady Mary had given me the
hard look for similar reasons. It was rational to make this judgment,
for certainly she had no cause for an active dislike. I had never been
even so much as a nuisance to her.

Fortified with these philosophic decisions, I again followed the trio,
and I was just in time to find Chord handing them into a splendid
chariot. I stood out boldly, for I knew if I could not get one more
look from Lady Mary I would die.

Seated beside her mother, her eye wandered eagerly over the crowd. I
was right, by the saints! She was looking for me.

And now here come the stupid laws of convention. Could I yell? Could I
even throw my hat in the air to guide her eye aright? No! I was doomed
to stand there as still as a bottle on a shelf.

But she saw me! It was at the very last moment. There was no time for
coquetry. She allowed her glance to li