ot to be one if you will give me a chance."

"Oh, no, indeed; you promise to be one of the most charming young
ladies I ever met."

"I don't promise anything of the kind," she replied, with a laugh that
was chiefly the expression of her intense nervous tension. It jarred
upon his feelings, and confirmed him in the belief that their long
separation had broken up their old relations completely, and that she,
in the new career which her beauty opened before her, wished for no
embarrassing relations of any kind.

"Well," he said, with an answering laugh, "I suppose I must take you
for what you are and propose to be--that is, if I ever find out."

In a few moments more, after some light badinage, he left her with
Mr. and Mrs. Muir on the piazza, and went to claim his waltz with Miss
Wildmere.

CHAPTER XI

"I FEAR I SHALL FAIL"

The band had been discoursing lively strains for some time, and Miss
Wildmere had at last dragged her mother down for a chaperon--the only
available one as yet. The anxious mother was eager to return to her
fretting child, and her daughter was much inclined to resent Graydon's
prolonged absence. "If it were politic, and I had other acquaintances,
I would punish him," she thought. It was a new experience for her to
sit in a corner of the parlor, apparently neglected, while others were
dancing. There were plenty who looked wistfully toward her; but
there was no one to introduce her, and Graydon's absence left the ice
unbroken.

She ignored the inevitable isolation of a new-comer, however, and when
he appeared shook her finger at him as she said, "Here I am, constancy
itself, waiting to give you my first dance, as I promised."

"I shall try to prove worthy," he said, earnestly. "You must remember,
in extenuation, that I have not seen the ladies of our family for a
long time."

"You use the plural, and are Dot at all singular in your prolonged
absence with the charming Miss Alden. You certainly cannot look upon
her as an invalid any longer, however else you may regard her," she
added, with an arch look.

"You shall now have my entire regard as long as you will permit it."

"That will depend a little upon yourself. Mamma is tired, and I'm of
no account compared with that infant upstairs; therefore I can't keep
her as a chaperon this evening, and I will go to my room as soon as
you are tired of me."

"Not till then?"

"Not unless I go before."

"At some time in the indefinite fu