kept by every race for engaging
aliens. Margaret's first sight of him was not under the shelter of
conventionalities. It happened that the countess' ferocious pet (and the
terror of the pension), a Great Dane, was trying to eat up a little
girl, but fortunately had begun with her petticoats. The court of the
house was the scene of the fray; a large, timid cook, the only witness,
was waving a copper kettle full of the meringue that she was beating, in
one hand, and the great wire whip in the other, while she shrieked
impartially on Heaven and the police. Margaret heard the din. She ran to
the spot. Being a New England woman, she didn't scream; one swift glance
went from the child's writhing body and the dog's horrible head to the
wailing cook. In two strides she caught the kettle out of a fat and
agitated German hand and hurled the whole sticky, white mass full at the
dog's eyes; then, as the blinded and astounded beast flung his head back
to howl, and spattered the world with meringue, she snatched up the
child and sent her flying into the door and the cook. The dog was
smeared with meringue, she was smeared, the child was smeared, the cook
was smeared; and now a beautiful white and gold officer, who bounded
over the wall and fell upon the dog with his saber and two heels, was
smeared the most lavishly of all! No wonder Frau Mueller (visible aloft,
in an artless German toilet of ease and without her teeth), the countess
(who was a gazing stock, for the same reason), and Augustine, her maid,
the three Russians on the second floor, and the three Americans on the
third, filled the windows with polyglot consternation! The consequence
of it all was that when the Count von Butler was formally presented to
Miss Wing that evening, she blushed. She was too pale and listless to be
pretty, but when she blushed she was enchanting. Remembering the
meringue, she smiled and ventured an upward glance; and, for the first
time in her life, met the admiration in the eyes of a man. At this time
Margaret was thirty years old and had never been asked in marriage. She
had spent most of the thirty years in a boarding-school, as pupil or as
teacher; and she had brought from her cloistered life a single vivid
feeling, a passionate friendship which death had ended. The sapphire
ring was her poor friend's last token.

To be thirty and never to have been sought like other girls, leaves a
chill in the heart. It may be lonely never to have loved, but