se cheeks every
word, every look of her cavalier. How kindly he had spoken, yet how
deferentially; how he had looked, how he had smiled! At dinner she
supposed it was his business to talk to her. But afterwards, when she
was sitting, a little forlornly and apart from the noisy chatter of the
bright-plumaged house-party, how he had come straight over to her
directly the gentlemen came into the drawing-room! And she felt that she
had not been wanting to herself on so great an occasion.

"I _know_ I talked well. I'm certain he saw directly that I wasn't a
silly idiot."

She lay long awake, and, as the men trooped up the stairs, she tried to
fancy that she could already distinguish his footsteps.

The letter she wrote to her mother next day was, compared to those other
lying letters, as a lit chandelier to a stable-lantern. And the mother
knew the difference.

"Poor darling!" she thought. "She must have been very miserable all
this time. But she's happy now, God bless her!"

By the week's end, every thought, every dream, every hope of Maisie's
life was centred in the Honourable James; her tenderness, her ambition
turned towards him as flowers to the sun.

And her happiness lighted a thousand little candles all around her. No
one could see the candles, of course, but every one saw the radiant
illumination of her beauty. And the other men of the house-party saw it
too. Even Lord Yalding distinguished her by asking whether she had read
some horrid book about earthworms.

"You're making a fool of that girl, Jim," said Lady Yalding. "I really
think it's too bad."

"My good Fanny, don't be an adorable idiot! I'm only trying to give the
poor little duffer a good time. There's nothing else to do. The other
girls really are--now, you know they are, Fanny--between ourselves----"

"They're all duty people, of course," she said. "Well, only do be
careful."

He was careful. He subdued his impulses to tenderness and gentle
raillery. He talked seriously to little Miss Mouse, and presently he
found that she was seriously talking to him--telling him, for instance,
how she wrote poetry, and how she longed to show it to some one and ask
whether it really was so bad as she sometimes feared.

What could he do but beg her to show it to him? But there he pulled
himself up short.

"There's skating to-morrow. We're going to drive over to Dansent. Would
you like to come?"

Her grey eyes looked up quickly, and the long lashes drooped