nse was quick and
universal. Hilda accepted their nods and becks and waving glasses with a
slow movement of her beautiful eyes and a quiet smile. In the subsidence
of sound Mr. Stanhope's voice was heard again: "We can hardly expect a
speech from Miss Howe, but perhaps Mr. Hamilton Bradley, whose
international reputation need hardly be referred to, will kindly say a
few words on her behalf."

Then, with deliberate grace, Hilda rose from her chair, a tall figure
among them, looking down with a hint of compassionateness on the little
man at her left. She stood for an instant without speaking, as if the
flushed silence, the expectation, the warm magnetism that drew all their
eyes to her were enough. Then out of something like reverie she came to
the matter. She threw up her beautiful face with one of the supreme
gestures which belonged to her. "I think," she said, with a little
smiling bow in his direction, "that I will not trouble my friend Mr.
Bradley. He has rendered me so many kind services already that I am sure
I might count upon him again, but this is a thing I should like to do
for myself. I would not have my thanks chilled by even the passage from
my heart to his." There was something like bravado in the glance that
rested lightly on Bradley with this. One would have said that parley of
hearts between them was not a thing that as a rule she courted. "I can
only offer you my thanks, poor things to which we can give neither life
nor substance, yet I beg that you will somehow take them and remember
them. It is to me, and will always be, a kind of crowning satisfaction
that you were pleased to come together to-night to tell me I had done
well. You know yourselves, and I know, how much too flattering your
kindness is, but perhaps it will hurt nobody if to-night I take it as it
is generously offered, and let it make me as happy as you intend me to
be. At all events, no one could disturb me in believing that in
obtaining your praise and your good wishes I have done well enough."

For a few seconds she stopped speaking, but she held them with her eyes
from the mistake of supposing she had done. Lindsay, who was watching
her closely and hanging with keen pleasure on the sweetness and
precision of what she found to say, noted a swift constriction pass upon
her face, and was ready to swear to himself in astonishment that tears
were in her eyes. There was a half-tone of difference, too, in her voice
when she raised it again,